believed that this plan would ensure the success of the Revolution,
and would prevent the collapse that was already threatening. Necker,
for a moment, was fascinated. But his wife reminded him that this
compact would establish Catholicism for ever as the State Church in
France, and he broke off the conference. Talleyrand's motion was
altered and reproduced in a mitigated form; and on November 26, 1789,
568 votes to 346 decided that the possessions of the clergy were at
the disposal of the nation. On December 19 it was resolved that the
sum of 16 millions should be raised by the sale of the new national
property, to be the basis for an issue of paper money. That was the
beginning of the _assignats_ that rendered signal service at first,
and fell rapidly after two years. It was made apparent that more was
at work below the surface than the financial purpose. There was the
desire to break up a powerful organisation, to disarm the aristocratic
episcopate, and to bind the individual priest to the Revolution.
Therefore Malouet made no impression when he urged that they were
taking on themselves the maintenance not only of the priesthood, but
of the poor; and that no surplus would be available as long as there
was a Frenchman starving.
In August, 1789, a committee on Church questions had been appointed,
and in February, as it did not agree, its numbers were increased, and
the minority was swamped. Thereupon they reported against the
religious orders. Monasticism for some time had been declining, and
the monks fell, in a few years, from 26,000 to 17,000. Nine religious
orders disappeared in the course of twelve years. On February 13,
1790, the principle that the civil law supported the rule against the
monk was abandoned. Members of monastic orders were to depart freely
if they liked, and to remain if they liked. Those who elected to leave
were to receive a pension. The position of those who remained was
regulated in a series of decrees, adverse to the system, but
favourable to the inmate. It was not until after the fall of the
throne that all monastic orders were dissolved, and all their
buildings were seized.
When the property of the Church became the property of the State, the
committee drew up a scheme of distribution. They called it the Civil
Constitution of the Clergy, meaning the regulation of relations
between Church and State under the new Constitution.
The debate began on May 29, and the final vote was taken on July 12.
The first object was to save money. The bishops were rich, they were
numerous, and they were not popular. Those among them who had been
chosen by the Church itself for its supreme reward, the Cardinal's
hat--Rohan, Lomenie de Brienne, Bernis, Montmorency and
Talleyrand--were men notoriously of evil repute. Here then the
Committee proposed to economise, reducing the number by fifty, and
their income to a thousand a year. Each of the departments, just
created, was to become a diocese. There were no archbishops. This was
not economy, but theory. By putting all bishops on the same level,
they lowered the papacy. For the Jansenists influenced the Assembly,
and the Jansenists had, for a century, borne persecution, and had
learnt to look with aversion both on papacy and prelacy, under which
they had suffered, and they had grown less averse to presbyterianism.
As they took away the patronage from the king, and did not transfer it
to the Pope who was a more absolute sovereign than the king, and
besides was a foreigner, they met the difficulty by the principle of
election, which had been upheld by high authorities, and had played a
great part in earlier times. The bishop was to be chosen by the
departmental electors, the parish priest by the district electors; and
this was to be done in the Church after Mass. It was assumed, but not
ordained, that electors of other denominations would thereby be
excluded. But at Strasburg a bishop was elected by a Protestant
majority. In conformity with the opinion of Bossuet, the right of
institution was taken away from Rome.
It was the office of the king to negotiate with the Pope, and he
might have saved the Revolution, the limited monarchy, and his own
life, if he had negotiated wisely. The new dioceses, the new revenues,
were afterwards accepted. The denial of papal institution was in the
spirit of Gallicanism; and the principle of election had a great
tradition in its favour, and needed safeguards. Several bishops
favoured conciliation, and wished the measure to be discussed in a
National Council. Others exhorted the Pope to make no concession.
Lewis barely requested him to yield something; and when it became
clear that Rome wished to gain time, on August 24 he gave his
sanction. At the same time he resolved on flight, relying on
provincial discontent and clerical agitation to restore his throne.
On November 27 the Assembly determined to enforce acceptance of the
Civil Constitution. Every ecclesiastic holding preferment or
exercising public functions was required to take an oath of fidelity
to the Constitution of France, sanctioned by the king. The terms
implicitly included the measure regarding the Church, which was now
part of the Constitution, and which a large majority of the bishops
had rejected, but Rome had not. Letters had come from Rome which were
suppressed; and after the decree of November and its sanction by the
king on December 26, the Pope remained officially silent.
On the 4th of January 1791 the ecclesiastical deputies were summoned
to take the prescribed oath. No conditions or limitations were
allowed, Mirabeau specially urging rigour, in the hope of reaction.
When the Assembly refused to make a formal declaration that it meant
no interference with the exclusive domain of religion, the great
majority of clerical deputies declined the oath. About sixty took it
unconditionally, and the proportion out of doors was nearly the same.
In forty-five departments we know that there were 13,426 conforming
clergy. It would follow that there were about 23,000 in the whole of
France, or about one-third of the whole, and not enough for the
service of all the churches. The question now was whether the Church
of France was to be an episcopal or a presbyterian Church. Four
bishops took the prescribed oath; but only one of them continued to
act as the bishop of one of the new sees. Talleyrand refused his
election at Paris, and laid down his mitre and the ecclesiastical
habit. Before retiring, he consecrated two constitutional bishops, and
instituted Gobel at Paris. He said, afterwards, that but for him the
French constitutional Church would have become presbyterian, and
consequently democratic, and hostile to the monarchy.
Nobody could be more violently opposed to royalism than some of the
elected prelates, such as Fauchet, Bishop of Calvados, who acted with
the Girondins and perished with them, or Gregoire, the Bishop of
Blois, Gregoire was the most conspicuous, and is still the best known
of the constitutional clergy. He was a man of serious convictions, and
as much sincerity as is compatible with violence. With much general
information, he was an inaccurate writer, and in spite of the courage
which he manifested throughout the Reign of Terror, an unimpressive
speaker. He held fast to the doctrines of an elementary liberalism,
and after the fall of the Terrorists he was active in the restoration
of religion and the establishment of toleration. He was absent on a
mission, and did not vote for the death of the king; but he expressed
his approval, and dishonoured his later years by dissembling and
denying it. Gobel, the Bishop of Paris, was far inferior to Gregoire.
Hoping to save his life, he renounced his office under the Convention,
after having offered his retractation to the Pope for L12,000. For a
time it was believed that the clergy of the two churches could
co-exist amicably, and a moderate pension was granted to the
nonjurors. But there was disorder and bloodshed at Nimes, and in other
parts of France, and it was seen that the Assembly, by its
ecclesiastical legislation, had created the motive and the machinery
for civil war. The nonjuring clergy came to be regarded as traitors
and rebels, and the mob would not suffer them to celebrate mass in the
only church that remained to them at Paris. Bailly said that when the
law has spoken conscience must be silent. But Talleyrand and Sieyes
insisted on the principle of toleration, and succeeded in causing the
formula to be adopted by the Assembly. It was not observed, and was
entirely disregarded by the second legislature.
The Civil Constitution injured the Revolution not only by creating a
strong current of hostile feeling in the country, but by driving the
king to seek protection from Europe against his people. The scheme of
negotiation which led to the general war in 1792, having been delayed
by disunion among the powers and the extreme caution of the Emperor
Leopold, began in the midst of the religious crisis in the autumn of
1790. The problem for us is to discover why the National Assembly, and
the committee that guided it, did not recognise that its laws were
making a breach in the established system of the Church, whether
Gallican or Roman, that they were in flagrant contradiction with the
first principles of the Revolution; and why, in that immense explosion
of liberal sentiment, there was no room for religious freedom. They
believed that there was nothing in the scheme to which the Pope would
not be able to consent, to avoid greater evils, if the diplomacy of
the king was conducted wisely. What was conceded by Pius VII. to
Bonaparte might have been conceded by Pius VI. to Lewis XVI. The
judgment of Italian divines was in many instances favourable to the
decree of the National Assembly, and the College of Cardinals was not
unanimous against it. Their opinions found their way to Paris, and
were bought up by Roman agents. When the Concordat of 1801 was
concluded, Consalvi rejoiced that he had done so well, for he was
empowered, if necessary, to make still greater concessions. The
revolutionary canonists were persuaded that the Pope, if he rejected
the king's overtures, would be acting as the instrument of the
aristocratic party, and would be governed by calculated advantage, not
by conscience. Chenier's tragedy of Charles IX. was being played, and
revived the worst scenes of fanatical intolerance. The hatred it
roused was not allayed by the language of Pius VI. in the spring of
1791, when, too late to influence events, he condemned the Civil
Constitution. For he condemned liberty and toleration; and the
revolutionists were able to say that there could be no peace between
them, and that Rome was the irreconcilable adversary of the first
principles on which they stood. The annexation of the papal dominions
in France was proposed, in May 1791, when the rejection of the Civil
Constitution became known. It was thrown out at first, and adopted
September 14. We shall see, later on, that the conflict thus
instituted between the Revolution and the Church hastened the fall of
the throne, and persecution, and civil war.
I have repeatedly pointed to the jealousy of the executive as a source
of fatal mischief. This is the greatest instance of the harm it did.
That the patronage could not be left in the hands of the king
absolutely, as it was by the Concordat of Leo X., was obvious; but if
it had been given to the king acting through responsible ministers,
then much of the difficulty and the danger would have been overcome,
and the arrangement that grew out of the Concordat of Napoleon would
have been anticipated. That idea was consistently rejected, and,
stranger still, the idea of disestablishment and separation was almost
unperceived. A whole generation later, under the influence of American
and Irish examples, a school of Liberals arose among French Catholics
who were as distinct from the Gallicans as from the Ultramontanes, and
possessed the solution for the perpetual rivalry of Church and State.
For us, the great fact is that the Revolution produced nothing of the
sort, and went to ruin by its failure in dealing with the problem.
XII
THE FLIGHT TO VARENNES
The direct consequence of the ecclesiastical laws was the flight of
the king. From the time of his removal to Paris, in October 1789, men
began to study the means by which he might be rescued, and his
ministers were ready with the necessary passports. During the summer
of 1790, which he spent at St. Cloud, various plans were proposed, and
constantly rejected. The queen was opposed to them, for she said:
"What can the king do, away from Paris, without insight, or spirit, or
ascendancy? Say no more about it." But a change came over them on
August 24, when the Civil Constitution was sanctioned. As soon as it
was voted in July, Mirabeau informed Lewis that he undertook to convey
him, publicly, to Rouen, or Beauvais, or Compiegne, where he would be
out of reach, and could dissolve the Assembly and proclaim a better
system of constitutional laws. Civil war would inevitably follow; but
Mirabeau believed that civil war would lead to the restoration of
authority, if the king put himself in the hands of the Marquis de
Bouille, the general commanding at Metz. Bouille had acquired a high
reputation by his success against the English in the West Indies, and
he increased it at this moment by the energy with which he suppressed
a mutiny in the garrison of Nancy. _For_ the service thereby rendered
to the State and the cause of order, he received, under pressure from
Mirabeau, the thanks of the Assembly. The king begged him to nurse his
popularity as he was reserved for greater things. This is the first
intimation of the secret; and it is confirmed by the Princess
Elizabeth, within a week of the sanction given to the Civil
Constitution. But although, in that month of September, Lewis began to
meditate departure from Paris, and accepted the general proposed to
him, he did not adopt the rest of the scheme which would have made him
dependent on Mirabeau. At that moment his strongest motive was the
desire to be released from the religious entanglement; and he hoped to
restore the Church to its lost position on condition of buying up the
_assignats_ with the property of the suppressed orders. It had been
computed that the Church would be able to save the public credit by a
sacrifice of forty millions, or to ruin the revolutionary investor by
refusing it. Therefore the king would not entertain the proposals of
Mirabeau, who was not the man to execute a policy favourable to the
influence of the priesthood. It was committed to a different
politician.
Breteuil, the rival of Necker, was the man preferred to Mirabeau. He
was living at Soleure as the acknowledged head of the Royalists who
served the king, and who declined to follow the princes and the
_emigres_ and their chief intriguer Calonne. Breteuil was now
consulted. He advised the king to depart in secret and to take refuge
in a frontier fortress among faithful regiments, within reach of
Austrian supports. In this way Breteuil, not Mirabeau, would be
master, and the restoration would have been in favour of the old
_regime_, not of the constitutional monarchy. On one point only the
two advisers agreed: Breteuil, like Mirabeau, recommended Bouille as
the man of action. His reply was brought by the Bishop of Pamiers, an
eighteenth-century prelate of the worldly sort, who was afterwards
selected to be the minister of finance if Brunswick had conquered. On
October 23 the bishop was sent to Metz to initiate Bouille.
In point both of talent and renown, Bouille was the first man in the
army as the emigration had left it. He served reluctantly under the
new order, and thought of making himself a new career in Russia. But
he was ambitious, for he had been always successful, and the emissary
from the king and from Breteuil opened a tempting future. He proposed
three alternatives. The king was to choose between Valenciennes, which
would be the safest and swiftest journey; Besancon, within reach of
the friendly Swiss who were under agreement to supply a large force on
demand; and Montmedy, a small fortified town close to the frontier,
and not far from Luxemburg which was the strongest of the imperial
fortresses. All this meant plainly Montmedy. Besancon was so far that
there was time to be overtaken, and Valenciennes was not in Bouille's
territory. Nothing could be done before the spring, for the emperor
was not yet master of his revolted provinces; and a long
correspondence was carried on between the general at Metz, and Count
Fersen at Paris, who acted for Lewis XVI. and controlled the whole. At
Christmas, Bouille sent his eldest son to Paris to arrange details
with him.
During the first months of 1791, which were the last of his life, the
ascendancy of Mirabeau rose so rapidly that the king wavered between
him and Breteuil. In February, La Marck appeared at Metz, to lay
Mirabeau's bolder plan before the soldier on whose sword its execution
was to depend. Bouille at once preferred it to Breteuil's and was
ready to carry it out. But Fersen was so confident in pledging himself
to contrive the departure from Paris at night and in secret, he was so
resolute and cool, that he dispelled all doubts, and early in March he
announced that the king had finally decided for Montmedy. His
hesitation was over, and Mirabeau was rejected. Lewis could not have
taken his advice without surrendering his own main object, the
restoration of the Gallican Church. It was the essence of Mirabeau's
policy to sacrifice the priesthood. His last counsels were given on
February 23, five weeks before he died. He advised that the king, when
driving out, should be forced by the people to go home; or better
still, that a mob should be gathered in the court of the Tuileries to
prevent him from going out. He hoped that such an outrage would cause
the Assembly to secure greater liberty of movement, which would serve
his purpose at the proper time.
The opportunity was found on April 18, when it became known that the
royal family were moving to St. Cloud. Easter was at hand; and at
Easter, the king of France used to receive communion in public. But
Lewis could not receive communion. He was responsible for the Civil
Constitution which he had sanctioned, and for the schism that was
beginning. With that on his conscience he was required to abstain, as
people would otherwise infer that neither he nor the priest who
absolved him saw anything to regret in the rising storm. Therefore to
avoid scandal it was well to be out of the way at the time. The royal
family were stopped at their very door, as Mirabeau had desired. For
more than an hour they sat in the carriage, hooted and insulted by the
mob, Lafayette vainly striving to clear the way. As they returned to
the palace, the queen indiscreetly said to those about them: "You must
admit now, gentlemen, that we are not free." The case for flight was
strengthened by the events of that day, except in the eyes of some
who, knowing the suggestion of Mirabeau, suspected a comedy, and
wondered how much the king had paid that a howling mob might call him
a fat pig to his face.
The emperor could no longer refuse aid to his sister without the
reproach of cruelty. He was now requested to move troops near enough
to the frontier to justify Bouille in forming a camp in front of
Montmedy, and collecting supplies sufficient for the nucleus of a
royal army. He was also asked to advance a sum of money for first
expenses. Leopold, who scarcely knew Marie Antoinette, showed extreme
reserve. His hands were not free in the East. He sympathised with much
of the work of the Revolution; and he was not sorry to see France
weakened, even by measures which he disapproved. His language was
discouraging throughout. He would promise nothing until they succeeded
in escaping; and he believed they could not escape. The queen resolved
to discover whether the gross indignity to which she had been
subjected had made some softening impression on her brother; and the
Count de Durfort was sent to seek him in his Italian dominions, with
ample credentials. The agent was not wisely chosen. He found Leopold
at Mantua, conferring with the Count d'Artois, and he fell into the
hands of Calonne. On his return he produced a paper in twenty-one
paragraphs, drawn up by Calonne, with the emperor's replies, showing
that Leopold would invade France in the summer, with 100,000 men, that
the royal family were to await his coming, and that, in effect, he had
accepted the programme of the _emigres_.
The queen was persuaded that she would be murdered if she remained at
Paris while her brother's forces entered France. She believed that the
_emigres_ detested her; that they were prepared to sacrifice her
husband and herself to their own cause; and that if their policy
triumphed, the new masters would be worse than the old. She wrote to
Mercy that it would become an intolerable slavery. She resolved to
incur the utmost risk rather than owe her deliverance to d'Artois and
his followers. Marie Antoinette was right in her estimate of feeling
in the _emigre_ camp. Gustavus III. spoke for many when he said, "The
king and queen, personally, may be in danger; but that is nothing to a
danger that threatens all crowned heads."
After their arrest at Varennes, Fersen was amazed at the indecent joy
of the French in Brussels, of whom many avowed their satisfaction that
the king and queen were captured. For the plan concerted with Bouille
was to serve monarchy, not aristocracy. In her passionate resistance
to the party of d'Artois, Conde, and Calonne, the queen felt herself
the champion of popular royalism. In the language of the day, she was
for a counter-constitution, they for a counter-revolution. There was a
personal question also. The queen relied on Breteuil to save her from
Calonne, whom she suspected of having tampered with the king's
confessor to learn Court secrets. When she saw the answer from Mantua,
she at once knew his hand. If that was her brother's policy, it was
time to make a rush for freedom. The Jacobin yoke could be borne, not
the yoke of the _emigres_. Breteuil warned them to lose no time, if
they would escape from thraldom to their friends. When Marie
Antoinette resolved that flight with the risk of capture would be
better than rescue by such hands, she knew but half the truth. The
document brought back from Mantua by Durfort was a forgery. It
governed history for 100 years; and the genuine text was not published
until 1894. And we know now that Calonne, behind the back of the Count
d'Artois, fabricated the reply which lured the king and queen to their
fate. On June 9 Mercy wrote that they were deceived. In their terror
and uncertainty, they fled. The first motive of Lewis had been the
horror of injuring a religion which was his own. When he signed the
decree imposing the oath on the clergy, which began the persecution,
he said, "At least, it is not for long."
The elections to the next Assembly were appointed for July 5. If the
first Assembly was allowed to accomplish its work, all that had been
done to discredit one party and to conciliate another, all the fruit
of Mirabeau's expensive intrigues, would be lost. The final
determination that sent them along the road to Varennes was the
treason hatched at Mantua. They ran the gauntlet to the Argonne in the
cause of limited monarchy, to evade revolution and reaction. That was
the spirit in which Mirabeau urged departure, and in which Bouille
came to the rescue; and it is that which made the queen odious to the
expatriated nobles. But it was not the policy of Breteuil. He refused
to contemplate anything but the restoration of the unbroken crown. The
position was ambiguous. Contrary forces were acting for the moment in
combination. Between the reactionary statesman and the constitutional
general, there was no security in the character of the king.