but he had the power of grasping a principle. He felt at last that the
ground beneath his feet was firm. He would drift no longer, sought no
counsel, and admitted no disturbing inquiries. If he fell, he would
fall in the cause of religion and for the rights of conscience. The
proper name for the rights of conscience is liberty, and therefore he
was true to himself, and was about to end as he had begun, in the
character of a liberal and reforming king. When the morning came,
there was a moment of hesitation. The pacific rioters asked what would
happen if the guards fired upon them. Santerre, who was at their head,
replied, "March on, and don't be afraid; Petion will be there." They
presented their petition, defiled before the Assembly, and made their
way to the palace. It was not to be thought of that, after they had
been admitted by the representatives of the nation, an inferior power
should deny them access. One barrier after another yielded, and they
poured into the room where the king awaited them, in the recess of a
window, with four or five guards in front of him. They shielded him
well, for although there were men in the crowd who struck at him with
sword and pike, he was untouched. Their cry was that he should restore
Roland and revoke his veto, for this was the point in common between
the Girondins and their violent associates. Legendre read an insulting
address, in which he called the king a traitor. The scene lasted more
than two hours. Vergniaud and Isnard appeared after some time, and
their presence was a protection. At last Petion came in, borne aloft
on the shoulders of grenadiers. He assured the mob that the king would
execute the will of the people, when the country had shown that it
agreed with the capital; he told them that they had done their duty,
and then, with lenient arts, turned them out.
That trying humiliation marks the loftiest moment in the reign of
Lewis XVI. He had stood there, with the red cap of liberty on his
powdered head, not only fearless, but cheerful and serene. He had been
in the power of his enemies and had patiently defied them. He made no
surrender and no concession while his life was threatened. The
Girondins were not recalled, and the movement failed. For the moment
the effect was injurious to the revolutionary party, and useful to the
king. It was clear that menace and outrage would not move him, and
that more was wanted than the half-hearted measures of the Gironde.
The outrage of June 20 was a contumelious reply to Lafayette's letter
of the 16th, and the time had come for more than the writing of
letters. His letter had been well received, and the Assembly had
ordered it to be printed. The Girondins, by pretending that it could
not be authentic, had prevented a vote on the question of sending it
to the departments. He could count on the Feuillant majority, on the
ministry composed of his partisans, on his popularity with the
National Guard. As he was at the head of an army, his advice to the
king to adopt a policy of resistance implied that he would support him
in it. He now wrote once more, that he could never maintain his ground
against the Prussians unless there was a change in the state of things
in the capital. On the morning of June 28, immediately after his
letter, he appeared in the Assembly, and denounced the sowers of
disorder who were disorganising the State. Having obtained a vote of
approval, by 339 to 234, he appealed to the National Guard to stand by
him against his Jacobins. He summoned a meeting of his friends, but
the influence of the Court caused it to fail, and he was compelled to
return to his camp, having accomplished nothing. He imagined one
chance more. He now put forward his colleague, General Luckner, who
was incompetent but, not being a politician, was not distrusted, and
they were jointly to rescue the king, and bring him to a city of
refuge.
The revolutionists could now lay their plans without fear of the army.
They summoned _federes_ from the departments for the anniversary of
July 14, and it was arranged that sturdy men should be sent from Brest
and Marseilles to be at their orders when they struck the final blow.
Paris could not be relied on. The failure there had been complete. On
June 21, and on the 25th, the Cordeliers attempted to renew, with
better effect, the attack which had been baffled by a divided purpose
on the 20th. But their men would not move. The minister, Montciel,
gave orders that the departments should not send _federes_ to Paris,
and he succeeded in stopping all but a couple of thousand. Nothing
could be done until the contingents from the seaports arrived. The
crisis was postponed, and some weeks of July were spent in
parliamentary warfare. Here the Girondins had the lead; but the
Feuillants were the majority in the Assembly, while the Jacobins were
supreme in Paris. The Girondins were driven into a policy both
tortuous and weak. The Republic would give power to one of their
enemies as the Monarchy gave it to the other. All they could do was to
increase hostile pressure on the king, in the hope of bringing him to
terms with them. They oscillated between open attack and secret
negotiation and offers of defence.
Lewis was inclined to accept a scheme for his deliverance which was
arranged by his ministers in conjunction with the generals. He was to
have been taken to Compiegne, within reach of the army. But the army
meant Lafayette, and Lafayette would only consent to restore the king
as the hereditary chief of a commonwealth, who should reign, but
should not govern. The queen refused to reign under such conditions,
or to be saved by such hands. The security for her was in power, not
in limitations to power. The sacred thing was the ancient Crown, not
the new Constitution. Lally Tollendal came over from England,
conferred with Malouet and Clermont Tonnerre, and exhorted her to
consent. Morris, whose ready pen had put the American Constitution
into final shape five years before, aided them in drawing up an
amended scheme of government to be proclaimed when they should be
free. But the strong will and stronger passion of the queen prevailed.
When all was accurately combined, and the Swiss troops were on the
march to the rendezvous, the king revoked his orders, and on July 10
the Feuillant ministry resigned, and the Girondins saw power once more
within their grasp. They had vehemently denounced the king as the
cause of all the troubles of the State, and on July 6 the assault had
been interrupted for a moment by a scene of emotion, when the bishop
of Lyons obtained a manifestation of unanimous feeling in the presence
of the enemy.
On July 11 the Assembly passed a vote declaring the country in
danger, and on the 22nd it was proclaimed, to the sound of cannon. It
was a call to arms, and placed dictatorial power in the hands of
government. Different plans were proposed to keep that power distinct
from the executive, and the idea which afterwards developed into the
Committee of Public Safety now began to be familiar. On July 14 the
anniversary of the Bastille and of the Federation of 1790 was
celebrated on the Champ de Mars; the king went up to the altar, where
he swore fidelity to the Constitution, with a heavy heart; and the
people saw him in public for the last time until they saw him on the
scaffold. It was near the end of July when the Girondins saw that the
king would not take them back, and that the risk of a Jacobin
insurrection, as much against them as against the throne, was fast
approaching. Their last card was a regency, to be directed by them in
the name of the Dauphin. Vergniaud suggested that the king should
summon four conspicuous members of the Constituent Assembly to his
Council, without office, to make up for the obscurity of his new
ministers. At that moment Brunswick's declaration became known, some
of the forty-eight sections in which the people of Paris deliberated
demanded the dethronement of the king, and the Marseillais, arriving
on the 30th, five or six hundred strong, made it possible to
accomplish it.
These events, coinciding almost to a day, conveyed power from the
Assembly to the municipality, and from the Girondins to the Jacobins,
who had the municipality in their hands, and held the machinery that
worked the sections. In a letter written to be laid before the king,
Vergniaud affirmed that it was impossible to dissociate him from the
allies who were in arms for his sake, and whose success would be so
favourable to his authority. That was the argument to which no
royalist could reply. The country was in danger, and the cause of the
danger was the king. The Constitution had broken down on June 20. The
king could not devote himself to the maintenance of a system which
exposed him to such treatment, and enabled his adversaries to dispose
of all forces in a way that left him at the mercy of the most
insolent and the most infamous of the rabble. He had not the instincts
of a despot, and would easily have been made content with reasonable
amendments. But the limit of the changes he sought was unknown,
unsettled, unexplained, and he was identified simply with the reversal
of the Constitution he was bound by oath to carry out.
The queen, a more important person than her husband, was more openly
committed to reaction. The failure of the great experiment drove her
back to absolutism. As she repudiated the _emigres_ in 1791, so she
now repudiated the constitutionalists, and chose rather to perish than
to owe her salvation to their detested aid. She looked for deliverance
only to the foreigners slowly converging on the Moselle. Her agents
had excluded a saving allusion to constitutional liberty in the
manifesto of the Powers; and she had dictated the threats of vengeance
on the inhabitants of Paris.
The king himself had called in the invaders. His envoy, concealed in
the uniform of a Prussian major, rode by the side of Brunswick. His
brothers were entering France with the heavy baggage of the enemies,
and Breteuil, the agent whom he trusted more than his brothers, was
preparing to govern, and did in September govern, the provinces they
occupied, under the shelter of their bayonets. For him the blow was
about to fall--not for his safety, but for his plenary authority. The
purpose of the allied sovereigns, and of the _emigres_ who prompted
them, stood confessed. They were fighting for unconditional
restoration, and both as invaders and as absolutists the king was
their accomplice. The country could not make war with confidence, if
the military power was in the hands of traitors. The king could
protect them from the horrors with which they were threatened on his
account, not as the head of the executive, but as a hostage. He was a
danger in his palace; he would be a security in prison. All this was
obvious at the time, and the effect it had was to disable and disarm
the friends of the constitutional king, so that no resistance was
offered when the attack came, although it was the act of a very small
part of the population. The Girondins no longer displayed a distinct
policy, and scarcely differed from their former associates, of June,
except by their wish to suspend the king, and not to dethrone him. The
final question, as to monarchy, regency, or republic, was to be left
to the Convention that was to follow. Petion was persuaded that he
would soon be the Regent of France. He received a large sum of money
from the Court; and it was in reliance on him, and on some less
conspicuous men, that the king and queen remained obstinately in
Paris. At the last moment Liancourt offered them a haven in Normandy;
but Liancourt was a Liberal of the Constituante, and therefore
unforgiven. Marie Antoinette preferred to trust to Petion and
Santerre.
Early in August the most revolutionary section of Paris decided that
the king should be deposed. The Assembly rescinded the vote. Then the
people of that section and some others made known that they would
execute their own decree, unless the Assembly itself made it
unnecessary and accomplished legally what would otherwise be done by
the act of the sovereign people, superseding all powers and standing
above law. Time was to be allowed until August 9. If the king was
still on the throne upon the evening of that day, the people of Paris
would sound the tocsin against him.
On August 8 the Assembly came to a vote on the conduct of Lafayette,
in abandoning his army in time of war to threaten his enemies at home.
He was justified by 406 votes to 224. It was the last appearance of
the Liberal party. Four hundred deputies, a majority of the entire
body, kept out of the way in the moment of danger, and allowed the
Girondin and republican remnant to proceed without them. The
absolution of Lafayette proclaimed the resolve not to dethrone the
king. The Gironde had no constitutional remedy for its anxieties. The
next step would be taken by the democracy of Paris, and their victory
would be a grave danger to the Gironde and a triumph for the extreme
revolutionary faction. Up to this time they had struggled for mastery;
they would now have to struggle for existence. They accepted what was
inevitable. After the flight of the Feuillants, the Gironde, now
supreme in the legislature, capitulated to the revolution which they
dreaded, and appeared without initiative or policy.
On August 9 the Jacobin leaders settled their plan of action. Their
partisans in each section were to elect three commissaries to act with
the Commune for the public good, and to strengthen, and, if necessary,
eventually to supersede, the existing municipality. About one-half of
Paris sent them, and they assembled in the course of the night at the
Hotel de Ville, apart from the legal body. In the political science of
the day the constituency suspended the constituted authorities and
resumed all delegated powers. The revolutionary town-councillors, who
now came to the front, are the authors of the atrocities that
afflicted France during the next two years. They were creatures of
Danton. And as we now enter the company of malefactors and the Chamber
of Horrors, we must bear this in mind, that our own laws punish the
slightest step towards absolute government with the same supreme
penalty as murder; so that morally the difference between the two
extremes is not serious. The agents are ferocious ruffians, and the
leaders are no better; but they are at the same time influenced by
republican convictions, as respectable as those of the _emigres_. The
function of this supplementary Commune was not to lead the
insurrection or direct the attack, but to disable the defence; for the
commander of the National Guard received his orders from the Hotel de
Ville, and he was a loyal soldier.
The forces of the Revolution were not overwhelming. The men from
Marseilles and Brest were intent on fighting, and so were some from
the departments. But when the tocsin rang from the churches soon after
midnight, the Paris combatants assembled slowly, and the event might
be doubtful. Ammunition was supplied to the insurgent forces from the
Hotel de Ville, but not to the National Guard. It is extremely
dangerous, said Petion, to oppose one public force to another. At the
Tuileries there were less than a thousand Swiss mercenaries, who were
sure to do their duty; one or two hundred gentlemen, come to defend
the king; and several thousand National Guards of uncertain fidelity
and valour. Petion showed himself at the palace, and at the Assembly,
and then was seen no more. By a happy inspiration he induced Santerre
to place him under arrest, with a guard of four hundred men to protect
him from the dangers of responsibility. He himself tells the story,
and is mean enough to boast of his ingenuity. But if the mayor was a
traitor and a coward, the commanding general, Mandat, knew his duty,
and was resolved to do it. He prepared for the defence of the palace,
and there was great probability that his men would fight. If they did,
they were strong enough to repulse attack. Therefore, early in the
morning of August 10, Mandat was summoned by his lawful superiors to
the Hotel de Ville. He appeared before them, made his report, and was
then taken to the revolutionary committee sitting separately. He
declared that he had orders to repel force by force, and that it would
be done. They required him to sign an order removing half of the
National Guard from the place they were to defend. Mandat refused to
save his life by an act of treachery, and by Danton's order he was
shot dead. He was in flagrant insurrection against the people
themselves and abetting constituted authorities in resistance to their
master. By this first act of bloodshed the defence of the palace was
deprived of half its forces. The National Guards were without a
commander, and, left to themselves, it was uncertain how many would
fire on the people of Paris.
Having disposed of the general commanding, the new Commune appointed
Santerre to succeed him, and then took the place of the former
Commune. There was no obstacle now to the concentration and advance of
the insurgents, and they appeared in the space between the Louvre and
the Tuileries, which was crowded with private houses. It was between
seven and eight in the morning. All night long the royal family
expected to be attacked, and the king did nothing. Some thousands of
Swiss were within reach, at Courbevoie, and were not brought up in
time. At last, surrounded by his family, the king made a forlorn
attempt to rouse his guards to combat. It was an occasion memorable
for all time, for it was the last stand of the monarchy of Clovis. His
wife, his children, his sister were there, their lives depending on
the spirit which, by a word, by a glance, he might infuse into the
brave men before him. The king had nothing to say, and the soldiers
laughed in his face. When the queen came back, tears of rage were
bursting from her eyes. "He has been deplorable," she said, "and all
is lost." Others soon came to the same conclusion. Roederer went
amongst the men, and found them unwilling to fight in such a cause. He
was invested with authority as a high official; and although the
ministers were present, it was he who gave the law. The disappearance
of Mandat and the hesitation of the artillery convinced him that there
was no hope for the defenders.
There was a looker-on who lived to erect a throne in the place of the
one that fell that day, and to be the next sovereign who reigned at
the Tuileries. In 1813 Napoleon told Roederer that he had watched the
scene from a window on the Carrousel, and assured him that he had made
a fatal mistake. Many of the National Guard were staunch, and the
royal forces were superior to those with which he himself conquered in
Vendemiaire. He thought that the defence ought to have been
victorious. I do not suppose he seriously resented the blunder to
which he owed so much. Roederer was a clever man, and there is some
reason to doubt whether he was single-minded in desiring to prevent
the uncertain conflict. The queen was eager to fight, and spoke brave
words to every one. Afterwards, when she heard the cannonade from her
refuge in the reporter's box, she said to d'Hervilly: "Well, do you
think now that we were wrong to remain in Paris?" He answered, "God
grant, madam, that you may not repent of it!" Roederer had detected
what was passing in her mind. Defeat would be terrible, for nothing
could save the royal family. But victory would also be a perilous
thing for the revolution, for it would restore the monarchy in its
power, and the old nobles collected in the palace would gain too much
by it. They were indeed but a residue: 7000 had been expected to
appear at the supreme moment; there were scarcely 120. Charette, the
future hero of Vendee, was among them, unconscious yet of his
extraordinary gifts for war.
Roederer, vigorously backed by his colleagues of the department,
informed the king of what he had seen and heard, assured him that the
Tuileries could not be defended with the forces present, and that
there was no safety except in the Assembly, the only authority that
was regarded. It was but two days since the deputies, by an immense
majority, had approved the act of Lafayette. He thought they might be
trusted to protect the king. As there was nothing left to fight for,
he affirmed that those who remained behind would be in no danger. He
would not allow the garrison to retire, and he left the Swiss, without
orders, to their fate. Marie Antoinette resisted vehemently, and Lewis
was not easy to convince. At last he said that there was nothing to be
done, and gave orders to set out. But the queen in a fury turned upon
him, and exclaimed: "Now I know you for what you are!" Lewis told his
valet to wait his return; but as they crossed the garden, where the
men were sweeping the gravel, he remarked: "The leaves are falling
early this year." Roederer heard, and understood.
A newspaper had said that the throne would not last to the fall of the
leaf; and it was by those trivial but significant words that the
fallen monarch acknowledged the pathetic solemnity of the moment, and
indicated that the footsteps which took him away from his palace would
never be retraced. A deputation met him at the door of the Assembly,
and he entered, saying that he came there to avert a great crime. The
Feuillants were absent. The Girondins predominated, and the president,
Vergniaud, received him with stately sentences. From his retreat in
the reporter's box he placidly watched the proceedings. Vergniaud also
moved that he be suspended, as he had been before, and that a
Convention should be convoked, to pronounce on the future government
of France. It was decided that the elections should be held without a
property qualification. Roland and the other Girondin ministers
returned to their former posts, and Danton was appointed Minister of
Justice by 222 votes. For Danton was the victor. While Petion kept out
of the way, it was he who issued commands from the Hotel de Ville, and
when Santerre faltered, it was Danton's friend Westermann who brought
up his men to the tryst at the Carrousel. After the king was gone they
made their way into the Tuileries, holding parley with the defenders.
If there had been anybody left to give orders, bloodshed might have
been averted. But the tension was extreme; the Swiss refused to
surrender their arms; a shot was fired, and then they lost patience
and fell upon the intruders. In ten minutes they cleared the palace
and the courtyard. But the king heard the fusillade, and sent orders
to cease firing. The bearer of the order was d'Hervilly; but he had
the heart of a soldier; and finding the position by no means
desperate, he did not at once produce it. When he did, it was too
late. The insurgents had penetrated by the long gallery of the Louvre,
near the river, and then there was no escape for the Swiss. They were
killed in the palace, and in the gardens, and their graves are under
the tall chestnuts. Of the women, some were taken to prison, and some
to their homes. The conquerors slaked their thirst in the king's wine,
and then flooded the cellars, lest some fugitive aristocrat should be
lurking underground. Their victims were between 700 and 800 men, and
about 140 of the assailants had fallen.
The royalists did not at first perceive that the monarchy was at an
end. They imagined that the king was again in the same condition as
after Varennes, only occupying the Luxembourg instead of the
Tuileries, and that he would be again restored, as the year before.
The majority of the Legislature was loyal, and it was hoped that
France would resent the action of the capital. But Paris, represented
by the intruding municipality, held its prey. The allowance promised
by the Assembly was suppressed, and the Temple was substituted for the
Luxembourg which was deemed unsafe because of the subterranean
galleries. A sum of L20,000 was voted for expenses, until the
Convention in September disposed of the king.