band of ruffians from the capital made a determined attack, and were
with difficulty beaten off. At last, Lefebvre, the future Marshal Duke
of Dantzick, met them with a company of grenadiers. As there was
danger in the narrow streets of Paris, Lafayette took them round
through the Champs Elysees. Word had been passed that not a sign of
hatred or of honour should be given, and a horseman rode in front,
commanding silence. The order was sullenly obeyed. The day before this
funereal scene the Prussian envoy wrote home that the king might be
spared, from motives of policy, but that nothing could save the queen.
They had reached the terrace of the Tuileries when there was a rush
and a struggle, in which Dumas lost his hat and his belt and his
scabbard, and nearly had his clothes torn from his back. A group of
deputies came to his assistance, and no blood was shed. A carriage
came after, with Drouet conspicuous on high and triumphant. He
received a grant of L1200, and was elected to the Convention in the
following year. Taken prisoner by the Prussians, he impressed Goethe
by his coolness in adversity. The Austrians took him at the siege of
Maubeuge, and he was exchanged for the king's daughter. In the
communistic conspiracy of Babeuf he nearly lost his life, and for a
time he lived in a cavern, underground. Napoleon gave him the Legion
of Honour, made him subprefect of St. Menehould, and was his guest
when he visited Valmy. In the Hundred Days Drouet was again a deputy,
and then vanished from sight and changed his name. When he died, in
1824, his neighbours learned with surprise that they had lived with
the sinister contriver of the tremendous tragedy.
XIII
THE FEUILLANTS AND THE WAR
Tuesday, June 21, the day on which the departure of the king became
known, was the greatest day in the history of the Assembly. The
deputies were so quick to meet the dangers of the situation, they were
so calm, their measures were so comprehensive, that they at once
restored public confidence. By the middle of the day the tumult in the
streets was appeased, and the ambassadors were astonished at the
tranquillity of Paris. They wrote home that all parties put aside
their quarrels, and combined in a sincere endeavour to save the State.
That was the appearance of things on the surface and for the moment.
But the Right took no share in acts which they deemed a usurpation of
powers calculated to supersede monarchy, and to make the crisis serve
as the transition to a Republic. To the number of almost 300 they
signed a protest, declaring that they would take no further part in
the deliberations. Their leader, Cazales, went away to Coblenz, and
was coldly received as a man who had yielded too much to parliamentary
opinions, whose services had been unavailing, and who repented too
late.
The king's flight, while it broke up the Conservative party, called
the Republican party into existence. For Lewis had left behind him a
manifesto, meditated during many months, urging the defects of the
Constitution, and denouncing all that had been effected since he had
suffered violence at Versailles. Many others besides Lewis were aware
of the defects, and desired their amendment. But the renunciation of
so much that he had sanctioned, so much that he had solemnly and
repeatedly approved, exposed him to the reproach of duplicity and
falsehood. He not only underwent the ignominy of capture and exposure;
he was regarded henceforth as a detected perjurer. If the king could
never be trusted again, the prospects of monarchy were hopeless. The
Orleans party offered no substitute, for their candidate was
discredited. Men began to say that it was better that what was
inevitable should be recognised at once than that it should be
established later on by violence, after a struggle in which more than
monarchy would be imperilled, and which would bring to the front the
most inhuman of the populace. To us, who know what the next year was
to bring, the force and genuineness of the argument is apparent; but
it failed to impress the National Assembly. Scarcely thirty members
shared those opinions, and neither Barere nor Robespierre was among
them. The stronghold of the new movement was the Club of the
Cordeliers. The great body of the constitutional party remained true
to the cause, and drew closer together. Lameth and Lafayette appeared
at the Jacobins arm in arm; and when the general was attacked for
negligence in guarding the Tuileries, Barnave effectually defended
him. This was the origin of the Feuillants, the last organisation for
the maintenance of monarchy. They were resolved to save the
Constitution by amending it in the direction of a strengthened
executive, and for their purpose it was necessary to restore the king.
If his flight had succeeded, it was proposed to open negotiations with
him, for he would have it in his power to plunge France into foreign
and domestic war. He was more formidable on the frontier than in the
capital. Malouet, the most sensible and the most respected of the
royalists, was to have been sent to treat, in the name of the
Assembly, that, by moderating counsels, bloodshed might be averted,
and the essentials of the Revolution assured. But, on the second
evening, a tired horseman drew rein at the entrance, and the joyous
uproar outside informed the deputies before he could dismount that he
came with news of the king. He was the Varennes doctor, and he had
been sent at daybreak to learn what the town was to do with its
prisoners.
The king, ceasing to be a danger, became an embarrassment. He could
not at once be replaced on the throne. Without prejudging the future,
it was resolved that he be detained at the Tuileries until the
Constitution, completed and revised, was submitted to him for his free
assent. Thus, for ten weeks, he was suspended. The Assembly governed
and legislated, without reference to his sanction; and the interregnum
was so prolonged that the monarchy could never recover. When, in
September, Lewis resumed his royal function, he was no longer an
integral element in the State, but an innovation and an experiment. On
the day when, standing uncovered before the legislators, he promised
fidelity to their Constitution, it seemed natural to them, in the
presence of tarnished and diminished majesty, to sit down and put
their hats on. The triumvirs, who had foiled Mirabeau, began
immediately after his death to sustain the royal cause in secret.
Montmorin called on Lameth before he was up, and began the
negotiation. Barnave frequented the house of Montmorin, but took care
always to come accompanied, in order to prevent a bribe. His two days'
journey in the royal company confirmed him in his design. Having
reduced the prerogative when it was excessive, they revived it when it
had become too weak, and the king could no longer inspire alarm. They
undertook to devise props for the damaged throne. "If not Lewis XVI.,"
said Lafayette, "then Lewis XVII." "If not this king," said Sieyes,
"find us another." This was the predominant feeling.
When an attack was made on the king at the Jacobins, all the deputies
present, excepting six, seceded in a body, and founded a new club at
the Feuillants. On July 15, in a speech which was considered the
finest heard in France since Mirabeau, Barnave carried an overwhelming
vote in favour of monarchy. He said that the revolutionary movement
could go no farther without carrying away property. He dreaded the
government of the poor over the rich; for Barnave's political
philosophy consisted in middle-class sovereignty--government by that
kind of property which depends on constant labour, integrity,
foresight, and self-denial, excluding poverty and opulence. Defeated
at the Jacobins and in the Assembly, the republicans prepared a
demonstration on the Champ de Mars, where a petition was signed for
the dethronement of the king. The Assembly, fearing a renewal of the
scenes at Versailles, commissioned Bailly and Lafayette to disperse
the meeting. On July 17 a collision ensued, shots were fired, and
several petitioners were killed. The Jacobins, for the moment, were
crushed. Robespierre, Marat, even Danton, effaced themselves, and
expected that the Feuillants would follow up their victory. It seemed
impossible that men who had the resolution to shoot down their
masters, the people of Paris, and were able to give the law, should be
so weak in spirit, or so short of sight, as to throw away their
advantage, and resume a contest on equal terms with conquered and
injured adversaries.
The Feuillants were thenceforward predominant and held their ground
until the Girondins overthrew them on March 18. It was the rule at
their club to admit none but active citizens, paying taxes and
possessing the franchise. The masses were thus given over to the
Jacobins. By their energy at the Champ de Mars, July 17, Lafayette and
his new friends had aroused the resentment of a vindictive party; and
when they took no advantage of the terror they inspired, the terror
departed, and the resentment remained. It was agreed that Malouet
should move amendments to the Constitution. The Feuillants were to
oppose, and then to play into his hands. But Malouet was deserted by
his friends, the agreement was not carried out, and the revision
failed in the Assembly. The Committees proposed that the famous decree
of November 7, by which no deputy could accept office, should be
revoked. The exclusion was maintained, but ministers were allowed to
appear and answer for their departments. No other important amendment
was carried, and no serious attempt was made to adjust and harmonise
the clauses voted during two hurried years. Various reforms were
vainly brought forward; and they indicate, as well as the sudden
understanding between Malouet and Barnave, that the deputies had
little faith in the work they had accomplished. They were tired of it.
They were no longer on the crest of the wave, and their power had
passed to the clubs and to the press. They were about to disappear. By
an unholy alliance between Robespierre and Cazales the members of the
National Assembly were ineligible to the Legislature that was to
follow. None of those who drew up the Constitution were to have a
share in applying it. The actual rulers of France were condemned to
political extinction. Therefore the power which the Feuillants
acquired by their very dexterous management of the situation produced
by the king's flight could not last; their radical opponents had time
on their side, and they had logic.
Lewis, after his degradation, was an impossible king. And the
republicans had a future majority in reserve, whenever the excluded
class was restored to the right of voting which it had enjoyed in 1789
before equality was a fundamental law, and which the Rights of Man
enabled them to claim. And now the incident of Varennes supplied the
enemies of the throne with a new argument. The wretched incompetence
of Lewis had become evident to all, and to the queen herself. She did
not hesitate to take his place, and when people spoke of the Court, it
was the queen they meant. The flight, and the policy that led to it,
and that was renewed by the failure, was the policy of relying on
foreign aid, especially that of the emperor. The queen was the
connecting link, and the chief negotiator. And the object she pursued
was to constrain the French people, by means of the emperor's
influence on the Powers, either by the humiliating parade of power at
a congress, or by invasion. That is what she was believed to be
contriving, and the sense of national independence was added to the
motive of political liberty to make the Court unpopular. People
denounced the Austrian cabal, and the queen as its centre. It was
believed that she wished to govern not only through the royal
authority restored, but through the royal authority restored by
foreign oppressors. The Revolution was confronted with Europe. It had
begun its work by insurrection, and it had to complete its work by
war. The beginning of European complications was the flight to
Varennes.
Early in September the Constitution was presented to Lewis XVI. The
gates were thrown open. The guards who were his gaolers were
withdrawn. He was ostensibly a free man. If he decided to accept, his
acceptance would be voluntary. The Emperor, Kaunitz, Malesherbes,
advised him to accept. Malouet preferred, as usual, a judicious middle
course. Burke was for refusal. He said that assent meant destruction,
and he thought afterwards that he was right, for the king assented and
was destroyed. Burke was not listened to. He had become the adviser of
Coblenz, and great as his claims were upon the gratitude of both king
and queen, he was counted in the ranks of their enemies. Mercy, who
transmitted his letter, still extant in the archives of France, begged
that it might not influence the decision. After ten days of leisurely
reflection, but without real hesitation, for everything had been
arranged with Lameth and Barnave, the leaders of the majority, Lewis
gave his sanction to the Constitution of 1791, which was to last until
1792, and the National Assembly was dissolved. Political delinquents,
including the accomplices of Varennes, received an amnesty.
By right of the immense change they made in the world, by their energy
and sincerity, their fidelity to reason and their resistance to
custom, their superiority to the sordid craving for increase of
national power, their idealism and their ambition to declare the
eternal law, the States-General of 1789 are the most memorable of all
political assemblies. They cleared away the history of France, and
with 2500 decrees they laid down the plan of a new world for men who
were reared in the old. Their institutions perished, but their
influence has endured; and the problem of their history is to explain
why so genuine a striving for the highest of earthly goods so
deplorably failed. The errors that ruined their enterprise may be
reduced to one. Having put the nation in the place of the Crown, they
invested it with the same unlicensed power, raising no security and no
remedy against oppression from below, assuming, or believing, that a
government truly representing the people could do no wrong. They acted
as if authority, duly constituted, requires no check, and as if no
barriers are needed against the nation. The notion common among them,
that liberty consists in a good civil code, a notion shared by so
famous a Liberal as Madame de Stael, explains the facility with which
so many revolutionists went over to the Empire. But the dreadful
convulsion that ensued had a cause for which they were not
responsible. In the violent contradiction between the new order of
things in France and the inorganic world around it, conflict was
irrepressible. Between French principles and European practice there
could be neither conciliation nor confidence. Each was a constant
menace to the other, and the explosion of enmity could only be
restrained by unusual wisdom and policy.
The dissolution of the Whig party in England indicates what might be
expected in the continental monarchies where there were no Whigs. We
shall presently see that it was upon this rock, in the nature of
things, that the Revolution went to pieces. The wisest of the
statesmen who saw the evil days, Royer Collard, affirmed long after
that all parties in the Revolution were honest, except the Royalists.
He meant that the Right alone did wrong with premeditation and design.
In the surprising revulsion that followed the return from Varennes,
and developed the Feuillants, it was in the power of the Conservatives
to give life to constitutional monarchy. That was the moment of their
defection. They would have given much to save an absolute king: they
deliberately abandoned the constitutional king to his fate.
The 1150 men who had been the first choice of France now pass out of
our sight. The 720 deputies of the Legislative Assembly were new and
generally obscure names. Nobles, clergy, conservatives did not
reappear, and their place was taken by the Feuillants, who, in the
former Assembly, would have belonged to the Left. The centre of
gravity shifted far in the revolutionary direction. The Constitution
was made. The discussion of principles was over, and the dispute was
not for doctrines but for power. The speakers have not the same
originality or force; they are not inventors in political science;
they are not the pioneers of mankind. In literary faculty, if not in
political, they surpass their predecessors, and are remembered for
their eloquence if not for statecraft.
Reinhard, a German traveller who fell in with a group of the new
deputies on their way to Paris, fell under their charm, and resolved
to cast his lot with a country about to be governed by such men.
Whilst he rose to be an ambassador and minister of foreign affairs,
his friends were cut off in their prime, for they were the deputies
who came from Bordeaux, and gave the name of their department to the
party of the Gironde. By their parliamentary talents they quickly
obtained the lead of the new Assembly; and as they had few ideas and
no tactics, they allowed Sieyes to direct their course.
Robespierre, through the Jacobin Club, which now recovered much of the
ground it had lost in July, became the manager of the Extreme Left,
which gradually separated from Brissot and the Girondins. The ministry
was in the hands of the Feuillants, who were guided by Lameth, while
Barnave was the secret adviser of the queen. She followed his counsels
with aversion and distrust, looking upon him as an enemy, and longing
to throw off the mask, and show him how he had been deceived. As she
could not understand how the same men who had depressed monarchy
desired to sustain it, she played a double and ignoble part. The
tactics of the Feuillant advisers brought a revival of popular feeling
in favour of the Court, which seemed inconceivable at the epoch of the
arrest. King and queen were applauded in the streets, and at the
theatre the cry "Long live the king!" silenced the cry "Long live the
nation!" This was in October 1791, before the Legislative Assembly had
divided into parties, or found a policy.
When the Assembly summoned the _emigres_ to return by the month of
January, the king fully agreed with the policy though not with the
penalty. But when a Commission reported on the temper of the clergy,
and described the mischief that was brewing in the provinces between
the priests of the two sections, and severe measures of repression
were decreed against nonjurors, he interposed a veto. The First
Assembly had disendowed the clergy, leaving them a pension. The
Second, regarding them as agitators, resolved to proceed against them
as against the _emigres_. Lewis, in resisting persecution, was
supported by the Feuillants. But the Assembly was not Feuillant, and
the veto began its estrangement from the king. A new minister was
imposed on him. The Count Narbonne de Lara was the most brilliant
figure in the _noblesse_ of France, and he lived to captivate and
dazzle Napoleon. Talleyrand, who thought the situation under the
Constitution desperate, put forward his friend; and Madame de Stael,
the queen of constitutional society, obtained for him the ministry of
war. The appointment of Narbonne was a blow struck at the Feuillants,
who still desired to reform the institutions, and who were resolute in
favour of peace. At the same time, Lafayette laid down his command of
the National Guard, and stood as a candidate to succeed Bailly in the
office of mayor. But Lafayette had ordered the capture of the royal
family, and could not be forgiven. The queen obtained the election of
Petion instead of Lafayette; and behind Petion was Danton. What the
Feuillants lost was added to the Girondins, not yet distinct from the
Jacobins; and as the Feuillants were for two chambers, for peace, and
for an executive independent of the single Assembly and vetoing its
decrees, the policy of its opponents was to bring the king into
subjection to the Legislature, to put down the discontented clergy,
and to make the emigration a cause for war.
The new minister, Narbonne, was accepted as a war minister, while his
Feuillant colleague at the Foreign Office, Delessart, was obstinately
pacific. On December 14 Lewis came down to the Legislature, and
announced that he would insist that the _emigres_ should receive no
encouragement beyond the frontier. It was the first act of hostility
and defiance, and it showed that the king was parting with his
Feuillant friends. But Delessart spoilt the effect by keeping back the
note to the emperor for ten days, and communicating it then with
precautions.
* * * * *
Leopold II. was one of the shrewdest and most cautious of men. He knew
how to wait, and how to give way. He had no wish that his
brother-in-law should again be powerful, and he was not sorry that
France should be disabled by civil dissension. But he could not
abandon his sister without dishonour; and he was afraid of the
contagion of French principles in Belgium, which he had reconciled and
pacified with difficulty. Moreover, a common action in French affairs,
action which might eventually be warlike, was a means of closing the
long enmity with Prussia, and obtaining a substitute for the family
alliance with France, which had become futile. Therefore he was
prepared, if they had escaped, to risk war for their restoration, and
induced the Prussian agent to sign an undertaking which went beyond
his instructions.
When the disastrous news reached him from Varennes, Leopold appealed
to the Powers, drew up an alliance with Prussia, and joined in the
declaration of Pilnitz, by which France was threatened with the
combined action of all Europe unless the king was restored to a
position worthy of kings. The threat implied no danger, because it was
made conditional on the unanimity of the Powers. There was one Power
that was sure not to consent. England was waiting an opportunity to
profit by French troubles. It had already been seriously proposed by
Bouille, with the approval of Lewis, to purchase aid from George III.
by the surrender of all the colonies of France. Therefore Leopold
thought that he risked nothing by a demonstration which the _emigres_
made the most of to alarm and irritate the French people. But when the
king freely accepted the Constitution, the manifesto of Pilnitz fell
to the ground. If he was content with his position, it could not be
the duty of the Powers to waste blood and treasure in attempting to
alter it. The best thing was that things should settle down in France.
Then there would be no excitement spreading to Belgium, and no reason
why other princes should be less easily satisfied than Lewis himself.
"The king," said Kaunitz, "the king, good man, has helped us out of
our difficulty himself." Still more, when he obtained a revival of
popularity which seemed a marvel after the events of June, when he
freely vetoed acts which he disapproved, and appeared to be acting in
full agreement with a powerful and still dominant party, the imperial
government hoped that the crisis was over. And this was the state of
things in October and November.