were abolished. The country was about to be governed by new
principles, new forms, and new men. All the assistance that order
derives from habit and tradition, from local connection and personal
credit, was lost. Society had to pass through a dangerous and chaotic
interval, during which the supreme need was a vigorous administration.
That is the statesmanlike idea which held possession of Mirabeau, and
guided him consistently through the very tortuous and adventurous
course of his last days. He had no jealousy of the Executive.
Ministers ought to be chosen in the Assembly, ought to lead the
Assembly, and to be controlled by it; and then there would be no
motive to fear them and to restrict their action. That was an idea not
to be learnt from Montesquieu, and generally repudiated by theorists
of the separation of powers. It was familiar to Mirabeau from his
experience of England, where, in 1784, he had seen the country come to
the support of the king against the parliament. Thence he gathered the
conception of a patriot king, of a king the true delegate and
mandatory of the nation, in fact of an incipient Emperor. If his
schemes had come to anything, it is likely that his democratic monarch
might have become as dangerous as any arbitrary potentate could be,
and that his administration would have proved as great an obstacle to
parliamentary government as French administration has always been
since Napoleon. But his purpose at the time was sincerely politic and
legitimate, and he undertook alone the defence of constitutional
principles. During the month of September Mirabeau raised the question
of a parliamentary Ministry, both in the press and in the Assembly. He
prepared a list of eminent men for the several offices, assigning to
himself a seat in the Cabinet without a portfolio. It was a plan to
make him and Talleyrand masters of the Government. The Ministers of
the day did not trust him, and had no wish to make way for him, and
when, on November 6, he proposed that Ministers be heard in the
National Assembly, the Archbishop of Bordeaux instigated Montlosier
and Lanjuinais to oppose him. Both were men of high character, and
both had some attainments; and in their aversion for him, and for his
evident self-seeking, they carried a motion forbidding deputies to
take office. By this vote, of November 7, which permanently excluded
Mirabeau from the councils of the king, the executive was deprived of
authority. It is one of the decisive acts of the Constituent Assembly,
for it ruined the constitutional monarchy.
Mirabeau was compelled to rely on a dissolution as the only prospect
of better things. He knew that the vote was due as much to his own bad
name as to a deliberate dislike of the English practice. The question
for him now was whether he could accomplish through the Court what was
impossible through the Assembly. He at once drew up a paper, exhorting
the king to place himself at the head of the Revolution, as its
moderator and guide. The Count of Provence refused to submit his plans
to the king, but recommended him for the part of a secret adviser.
Just then an event occurred, which is mysterious to this day, but
which had the effect of bringing Mirabeau into closer relations with
the king's brother. At Christmas, the Marquis de Favras was arrested,
and it was discovered that he was a confidential agent of the Prince,
who had employed him to raise a loan for a purpose that was never
divulged--some said, to carry off the king to a frontier fortress,
others suspected a scheme of counter-revolution. For the electoral law
excluded the ignorant and the indigent from the franchise, limiting
the rights of active citizenship to those who paid a very moderate sum
in taxes. It was obvious that this exclusion, by confining power to
property, created the raw material for Socialism in the future. Some
day a dexterous hand might be laid on the excluded multitude
congregated at Paris, to overthrow the government of the middle class.
The Constituent Assembly was in danger of being overtrumped, and was
necessarily suspicious.
By Mirabeau's advice, the Count of Provence at once made a public
declaration of sound revolutionary sentiments, and disavowed Favras.
His speech, delivered at the Hotel de Ville, was well received and he
rose in popular favour. Meantime, his unhappy confederate was tried
for treason against the nation, and found guilty. Favras asked
whether, on a full and explicit confession, his life would be spared.
He was told that nothing could save him. The judge exhorted him to die
in silence, like a brave man. The priest who assisted him afterwards
professed that he had saved the life of the Count of Provence. Favras
underwent his fate with fortitude, keeping his secret to the end. The
evidence which would have compromised the prince was taken away, and
no historian has seen it. The fatal documents were restored to him
when he became king by the daughter of the man who had concealed them.
For some weeks the Count of Provence was ambitious of power, and
allowed Mirabeau to put him forward as a kind of Prime Minister, or
for a position analogous to that of the Cardinal-nephew in
seventeenth-century Rome. He had ability, caution, and, for the
moment, popularity; but he was irresolute, indolent, and vain. If
anything could be made of him, it was clear that the active partner
would be Mirabeau. He was neither loved nor trusted by the king and
queen, and with such a confederate at his elbow he might become
formidable. Necker devised a plan by which his scheming was easily
frustrated. The king appeared before the Assembly, without
preliminaries, and delivered an unexpected statement of policy,
adopting the entire work of the Revolution, as far as it had gone, and
praising in particular the recent division of Provinces into
departments.
Every step, until that day, had been taken reluctantly, feebly, under
compulsion. Every concession had been a defeat and a surrender. On
February 4, under no immediate pressure, Lewis deliberately took the
lead of the movement. It was an act, not of weakness, but of policy,
not a wound received and acquiesced in, but a stroke delivered. The
Assembly responded by at once taking the civic oath to maintain the
Constitution. As that instrument did not yet exist, none could say
what the demonstration would involve. It was adopted for the sake of
committing the remnant of the privileged orders who yielded under
protest.
Mirabeau's aristocratic brother threw away his sword, saying that
there was nothing else for a gentleman to do, when the king abandoned
his sceptre. Mirabeau himself was indignant with what he called a
pantomime; for he said that Ministers had no right to screen their own
responsibility behind the inviolate throne. He saw that his patron was
ingeniously set aside and stranded, and he conceived that his own
profound calculations were baffled. Yet the perspicacity that he
seldom wanted failed him at that moment. For the reconciliation of
the people with the king, the executive triumphing in its popularity,
guiding the Revolution to its goal, was the exact reproduction of his
proposals, and was borrowed from his manifestoes.
The significance of this was at once felt by the foreign advisers of
the queen. Mercy Argenteau, who had been Austrian ambassador
throughout the reign, and who was a faithful and intelligent friend,
suggested that if they sincerely accepted the policy, they would do
well to take the politician with it, that the Count of Provence could
be best disabled by depriving him of his prompter, that the magic is
not in the wand but in the hand that waves it. The queen hesitated,
for Mirabeau had threatened her in the last days at Versailles, and it
was not yet proved that he was not concerned in the attempt to murder
her. She declared that nothing would induce her to see him, and she
wished for somebody who could undertake to manage him, and who would
be responsible for his conduct. Mercy, regardless of her scruples,
sent for La Marck, who was at his Belgian home, opposing the Emperor,
and fostering a Federal republic, and who in consequence was not in
favour with Marie Antoinette. La Marck was intimate with Mirabeau, and
kept him in pocket money. He undertook the negotiation, with little
hope of a profitable result; and at his house Mercy and Mirabeau had a
secret meeting. They parted, well pleased with each other. Mirabeau
advised that the king should leave Paris, and the advice bore fruit.
Mercy did not declare the intentions of the Court, and Mirabeau
continued to act in his own way, treating with Lafayette for money or
an embassy, and attacking the clergy, with whose cause Lewis was more
and more identified. To this interval belongs the famous scene where
he exclaimed that from the place where he stood he could see the
window from which a king of France fired on his Protestant subjects.
Maury, not perceiving the snare, bounded from his seat, and cried out,
"Nonsense! it is not visible from here."
When he made that speech it is clear that Mirabeau was not exerting
himself to secure confidence at Court; and for some weeks in spring
the negotiation hung fire. At length, La Marck convinced the queen
that his friend had been falsely accused of the crime of October, and
the king proposed that he should be asked to write down his views. He
peremptorily rejected La Marck's advice that the Ministers should be
admitted to the secret. He avowed to Mercy that he intended soon to
change them for men who could co-operate with Mirabeau; but he was
resolved not to place himself at once irrevocably in the power of a
man in whom he had no confidence, and who was only the subject of an
experiment. Consequently, Mirabeau's first object of attack was the
Ministry, and the king's forces were divided. The position was a false
one from end to end; but this hostility to Necker served to disguise
the reality. On the 10th of May, 1790, he drew up a paper which La
Marck carried to the queen, and which at once had the effect of making
the Court zealous to complete the bargain. La Marck asked Mirabeau
what were his conditions. He replied that he would be happy on L1000 a
year, if his debts could be paid; but he feared that they were too
heavy for him to expect it. On inquiry, it turned out that they were a
little over L8000. Lewis XVI. offered to clear them off, to give him
L3000 a year while the Assembly lasted, and a million francs down
whenever it came to an end.
In this way both parties were secure. Mirabeau could not play false,
without losing, not only his income, but an eventual sum of L40,000.
The king could not cast him off without wasting the considerable sum
paid to his creditors. The Archbishop of Toulouse undertook the
delicate task of dealing with them; and meeting his debtor constantly,
a strange intimacy arose between the two men.
Mirabeau, wild with the joy of his deliverance, forgot all prudence
and precaution. He took a town house and a country house; he bought
books and pictures, carriages and horses, and gave dinner-parties at
which six servants waited on his guests. After a few months he wanted
money, and more was given without question. The Government proposed at
last to buy him an annuity, with one-fourth of the capital which was
to fall due at the dissolution; but the intention was not carried out.
The entire sum that Mirabeau received, up to his death, from the king
amounted to about L12,000. In return, between June 1 and February 16
he wrote fifty-one notes for the Court discussing the events of the
day, and exposing by degrees vast schemes of policy. When they came to
be known, half a century ago, they added immeasurably to his fame, and
there are people who compare his precepts and prescriptions with the
last ten years of Mazarin and the beginning of the Consulate, with the
first six years of Metternich or the first eight of Bismarck, or, on a
different plane, with the early administration of Chatham.
Mirabeau himself was proud of his new position, and relied on this
correspondence to redeem his good name. He was paid to be of his own
opinion. The king had gone over to him; he had changed nothing in his
views to meet the wishes of the king. His purpose throughout had been
the consolidation of representative monarchy on the ruins of
absolutism. To the king in league with privilege he was implacably
opposed. To the king divested of that complicity he was a convinced
and ardent friend.
The opportunity of proving his faith was supplied by Captain Cook. In
his last voyage the navigator visited the island since named after his
lieutenant Vancouver, and sailed into Nootka Sound, to which, in his
report, he drew the attention of the Government. Three or four years
before, the Spaniards had been there, and had taken formal possession;
and the Russians, spreading southward along the coast, acknowledged
their right, and withdrew. But the place was far north of the regions
they actually occupied; and English adventurers, with the sanction of
the Government, settled there, and opened a trade in peltry with
China. After a year or two, the Spaniards came in force, and carried
them off, with their ships and their cargoes; and claiming the entire
Pacific seaboard from Cape Horn to Alaska, they called on the English
Ministers to punish their intruding countrymen. They also equipped a
fleet of forty sail of the line, assuring the British _charge
d'affaires_ that it was only to protect themselves against the
Revolution. Pitt was not lulled by these assurances, or by the
delivery of the confiscated ships. He had authorised the proceedings
of the traders with the intention of resisting the Spanish claim
beyond the limits of effective occupation. He now demanded reparation,
and fitted out a fleet superior to that with which Nelson crushed the
combined navies of France and Spain. Under the treaty of 1761 Spain
demanded the support of France. If the French armed, as the Spaniards
were arming, there was reason to hope that England, in so very dubious
a question, would listen to terms; and if France refused to stand by a
manifest engagement, Spain would be free to seek new friends. The
Emperor sustained the appeal. It would be well for him if England was
diverted from the concerns of Eastern Europe, and if France was
occupied in the West. The French Ministers admitted their obligation
and began to arm.
On May 14, just after the first negotiation between Mirabeau and the
Court, the matter came before the Assembly. It was a common belief
that war would strengthen the executive. The democratic leaders
repudiated the Family Compact, and resented an alliance which was not
national but dynastic and of the essence of those things which they
were sweeping away. They sent pacific messages to the British embassy,
and claimed for the representative assembly the right of pronouncing
on peace and war.
Mirabeau, unlike many others, regarded a European war as a danger to
the throne. But he was preparing for civil war, and meant to secure
the army and navy on the royal side. He demanded for the king the
exclusive right of declaring war and making peace. That is the
principle under a constitution where the deputies make the Ministers.
In France, Ministers were excluded from parliament and the principle
did not apply. Barnave answered Mirabeau, and defeated him. On May 22,
in the most powerful constitutional argument he ever delivered,
Mirabeau insisted that, if the ultimate decision rested with the
Assembly, it could act only on the proposition of the Crown. In
legislation, the king had no initiative. Mirabeau established the
royal initiative in peace and war. It was the first-fruit of the
secret compact. The new ally had proved not only that he was capable
and strong, but that he was faithful. For by asking more than he could
obtain he had incurred, for the moment, a great loss of credit. The
excess of his unwonted royalism made him an object of suspicion from
that day. To recover the ground, he issued an amended version of his
first speech; but others printed the two texts in parallel columns,
and exposed the fraud. He had rendered an important service, and it
was done at serious cost to himself. The event cemented the alliance,
and secured his position with the king.
The Assembly voted a solemn declaration, that France would never make
war for conquest, or against freedom. After that, Spain had little to
hope for, and Pitt became defiant. Negotiations lasted till October.
The Assembly appointed a Committee on Foreign Affairs, in which
Mirabeau predominated, casting all his influence on the side of peace,
and earning the gratitude and the gold of England. At last, the
mutinous temper of the Brest fleet settled the question.
The great Bourbon alliance was dissolved, and Pitt owed a signal
triumph to the revolutionary spirit and the moderating influence of
Mirabeau. His defence of the prerogative deserved a reward, and he was
received in a secret audience by Marie Antoinette. The interview took
place at St. Cloud, July 3. The statesman did not trust his new
friends, and he instructed the nephew who drove him, in disguise, to
the back door, to fetch the police if he did not reappear in
three-quarters of an hour. The conversation was satisfactory, and
Mirabeau, as he kissed the queen's hand, declared with chivalrous
fervour that the monarchy was saved. He spoke sincerely. The comedian
and deceiver was not the wily and unscrupulous intriguer, but the
inexperienced daughter of the Empress-queen. She never believed in his
truth. When he continued to thunder against the Right, the king and
queen shook their heads, and repeated that he was incorrigible. The
last decision they came to in his lifetime was to reject his plans in
favour of that which brought them to Varennes. But as the year wore
on, they could not help seeing that the sophistical free-lance and
giver of despised advice was the most prodigious individual force in
the world, and that France had never seen his like. Everybody now
perceived it, for his talent and resource increased rapidly, since he
was steadied by a definite purpose, and a contract he could never
afford to break. The hostile press knew of his visit to St. Cloud
three days after it occurred, and pretended to know for how many
millions he had sold himself. They were too reckless to obtain belief,
but they were very near the truth; and the secret of his
correspondence was known or guessed by at least twenty persons.
With this sword hanging over him, with this rope round his neck, in
the autumn and winter of 1790, Mirabeau rose to an ascendancy in which
he outweighed all parties. He began his notes by an attempt to
undermine the two men who stood in his way. Lafayette was too strong
for him. On the first anniversary of the Bastille he received an
ovation. Forty thousand National Guards assembled from all parts of
France for the feast of Federation. At an altar erected in the Champ
de Mars, Talleyrand celebrated his last Mass, and France sanctioned
the doings of Paris. The king was present, but all the demonstration
was for the hero of two hemispheres, on his white charger. In November
a new Ministry took office, composed of his partisans. Mirabeau
attempted a coalition, but Lafayette did not feel the need of his
friendship. He said, "I have resisted the king of England in his
power, the king of France in his authority, the people in its rage; I
am not going to yield to Mirabeau."
Necker was less tenacious of office, and rather than consent to an
increased issue of _assignats_, resigned, much to his honour, and
retired obscurely. Mirabeau triumphed. He had opposed the _assignats_
at first, although Claviere defended them in his newspaper. He now
changed his attitude. He not only affirmed that the Church lands would
be adequate security for paper, making it equivalent to gold, but he
was willing that the purchase money should be paid in _assignats_,
doing away with bullion altogether. But the cloven hoof appeared when
he assured the king that the plan which he defended would fail, and
would involve France in ruin. He meant that it would ruin the
Assembly, and would enable the king to dissolve. The same
Machiavellian purpose guided him in Church questions. He was at heart
a Liberal in matters of conscience, and thought toleration too weak a
term for the rights inseparable from religion. But he wished the
constitutional oath to be imposed with rigour, and that the priests
should be encouraged to refuse it. He declined to give a pledge that
the Assembly would not interfere with doctrine, and he prepared to
raise the questions of celibacy and of divorce in order to aggravate
the irritation. He proposed to restore authority by civil war; and the
road to civil war was bankruptcy and persecution. Meantime, the court
of inquiry vindicated him from aspersions connected with the attack on
Versailles; as chairman of the Diplomatic Committee, he was the
arbiter of foreign policy. Necker and all his colleagues save one had
gone down before him; he was elected President of the Jacobins in
November, and when he asked for leave of absence, the Assembly, on the
motion of Barnave, requested him not to absent himself. Montmorin, the
only member of Necker's Ministry who remained at his post, made
overtures to him, and they came to an understanding. The most
remarkable of all the notes to the king is the one that records their
conversation. They agreed on a plan of united action. Mirabeau
thereupon drew up the 47th note, which is a treatise of constitutional
management and intrigue, and discloses his designs in their last phase
but one, at Christmas 1790.
Mirabeau never swerved from the fundamental convictions of 1789, and
he would have become a republican if Lewis had gone over to the
reactionary _emigres_. But he wished him to retire to some provincial
town, that he might not be in the power of the Assembly, and might be
able to disperse it, backed by the growing anger of the country.
Meantime, opinion was to be worked and roused by every device. He set
himself strenuously to form a central party out of the various groups
of deputies. Montmorin was in friendly touch with some of them, and he
had the command of money. Mirabeau laboured to gain over others. Late
one night he had a long conference with Malouet, whom he dazzled, and
who influenced a certain number of votes.
On the other hand, the action of Montmorin extended to Barnave. It
seemed reasonable to suppose that a combination which reached from
Barnave on the Left to Malouet on the Right would be strong enough
either to retrieve its errors, or to break it up, in conjunction with
the Court.
At the end of January, 1791, Mirabeau became President for the first
time, and he occupied the chair with unforeseen dignity and
distinction. He had attained the summit of his career. Just then, the
king's aunts announced their departure for Rome. There was much
discontent, because, if they could be detained, it would be more easy
to keep the king at Paris. Mirabeau made the Assembly feel that
interference with the princesses would be contemptible. Twice they
were stopped on their way, and twice released. Everybody saw what this
implied, and Paris was agitated. A tumult broke out in the Tuileries
garden, which Mirabeau, summoned from table, at once appeased. He was
confident in his strength, and when the Assembly discussed measures
against emigration, he swore that he would never obey a body guilty of
inquisitorial dictation. He quelled the murmurs of the Left by
exclaiming, "_Silence aux trente voix!_" This was the date of his
breach with the Democrats. It was February 28, and he was to dine with
the Duke d'Aiguillon. When he came, the door was shut in his face. By
La Marck's advice, he went that night to the Jacobins, hoping to
detach the club from the leaders. But he had shown his hand, and his
enemies knew how to employ their opportunity. Duport and Lameth
attacked him with extreme violence, aiming at his expulsion. The
discussion is not reported. But three of those who were present agree
that Mirabeau seemed to be disconcerted and appalled by the strength
of the case against him, and sat with the perspiration streaming down
his face. His reply was, as usual, an oratorical success; but he did
not carry his audience with him, and he went home disheartened. The
Jacobin array stood unbroken.