Lectures on the French Revolution
by Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton Acton · English · Gutenberg #27488 · 795,486 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Lectures on the French Revolution
Author: Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton Acton
Editor: John Neville Figgis
Reginald Vere Laurence
Release date: December 10, 2008 [eBook #27488]
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LECTURES ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION ***
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LECTURES
ON THE
FRENCH REVOLUTION
MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited
LONDON . BOMBAY . CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK . BOSTON . CHICAGO
ATLANTA . SAN FRANCISCO
THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.
TORONTO
LECTURES
ON THE
FRENCH REVOLUTION
BY
JOHN EMERICH EDWARD DALBERG-ACTON
First Baron ACTON
D.C.L., LL.D., ETC. ETC.
REGIUS PROFESSOR OF MODERN HISTORY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
EDITED BY
JOHN NEVILLE FIGGIS, C.R., Litt.D.
HONORARY FELLOW OF ST. CATHARINE'S COLLEGE
AND
REGINALD VERE LAURENCE, M.A.
FELLOW AND TUTOR OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON
1910
PREFATORY NOTE
The following Lectures were delivered by Lord Acton as Regius
Professor of Modern History at Cambridge in the academical years
1895-96, 1896-97, 1897-98, 1898-99. The French Revolution, 1789-95,
was in those years one of the special subjects set for the Historical
Tripos, and this determined the scope of the course. In addition some
discussion of the literature of the Revolution generally took place
either in a conversation class or as an additional lecture. Such
connected fragments of these as remain have been printed as an
appendix. For the titles of the Lectures the editors are responsible.
J. N. F.
R. V. L.
_August 10, 1910_
CONTENTS
LECT. PAGE
I. The Heralds of the Revolution 1
II. The Influence of America 20
III. The Summons of the States-General 39
IV. The Meeting of the States-General 57
V. The Tennis-Court Oath 68
VI. The Fall of the Bastille 77
VII. The Fourth of August 94
VIII. The Constitutional Debates 109
IX. The March to Versailles 126
X. Mirabeau 141
XI. Sieyes and the Constitution Civile 159
XII. The Flight to Varennes 174
XIII. The Feuillants and the War 193
XIV. Dumouriez 210
XV. The Catastrophe of Monarchy 224
XVI. The Execution of the King 240
XVII. The Fall of the Gironde 256
XVIII. The Reign of Terror 269
XIX. Robespierre 284
XX. La Vendee 301
XXI. The European War 317
XXII. After the Terror 331
Appendix: The Literature of the Revolution 345
Index 375
I
THE HERALDS OF THE REVOLUTION
The revenue of France was near twenty millions when Lewis XVI.,
finding it inadequate, called upon the nation for supply. In a single
lifetime it rose to far more than one hundred millions, while the
national income grew still more rapidly; and this increase was wrought
by a class to whom the ancient monarchy denied its best rewards, and
whom it deprived of power in the country they enriched. As their
industry effected change in the distribution of property, and wealth
ceased to be the prerogative of a few, the excluded majority perceived
that their disabilities rested on no foundation of right and justice,
and were unsupported by reasons of State. They proposed that the
prizes in the Government, the Army, and the Church should be given to
merit among the active and necessary portion of the people, and that
no privilege injurious to them should be reserved for the unprofitable
minority. Being nearly an hundred to one, they deemed that they were
virtually the substance of the nation, and they claimed to govern
themselves with a power proportioned to their numbers. They demanded
that the State should be reformed, that the ruler should be their
agent, not their master.
That is the French Revolution. To see that it is not a meteor from the
unknown, but the product of historic influences which, by their union
were efficient to destroy, and by their division powerless to
construct, we must follow for a moment the procession of ideas that
went before, and bind it to the law of continuity and the operation
of constant forces.
If France failed where other nations have succeeded, and if the
passage from the feudal and aristocratic forms of society to the
industrial and democratic was attended by convulsions, the cause was
not in the men of that day, but in the ground on which they stood. As
long as the despotic kings were victorious abroad, they were accepted
at home. The first signals of revolutionary thinking lurk dimly among
the oppressed minorities during intervals of disaster. The Jansenists
were loyal and patient; but their famous jurist Domat was a
philosopher, and is remembered as the writer who restored the
supremacy of reason in the chaotic jurisprudence of the time. He had
learnt from St. Thomas, a great name in the school he belonged to,
that legislation ought to be for the people and by the people, that
the cashiering of bad kings may be not only a right but a duty. He
insisted that law shall proceed from common sense, not from custom,
and shall draw its precepts from an eternal code. The principle of the
higher law signifies Revolution. No government founded on positive
enactments only can stand before it, and it points the way to that
system of primitive, universal, and indefeasible rights which the
lawyers of the Assembly, descending from Domat, prefixed to their
constitution.
Under the edict of Nantes the Protestants were decided royalists; so
that, even after the Revocation, Bayle, the apostle of Toleration,
retained his loyalty in exile at Rotterdam. His enemy, Jurieu, though
intolerant as a divine, was liberal in his politics, and contracted in
the neighbourhood of William of Orange the temper of a continental
Whig. He taught that sovereignty comes from the people and reverts to
the people. The Crown forfeits powers it has made ill use of. The
rights of the nation cannot be forfeited. The people alone possess an
authority which is legitimate without conditions, and their acts are
valid even when they are wrong. The most telling of Jurieu's seditious
propositions, preserved in the transparent amber of Bossuet's reply,
shared the immortality of a classic, and in time contributed to the
doctrine that the democracy is irresponsible and must have its way.
Maultrot, the best ecclesiastical lawyer of the day, published three
volumes in 1790 on the power of the people over kings, in which, with
accurate research among sources very familiar to him and to nobody
else, he explained how the Canon Law approves the principles of 1688
and rejects the modern invention of divine right. His book explains
still better the attitude of the clergy in the Revolution, and their
brief season of popularity.
The true originator of the opposition in literature was Fenelon. He
was neither an innovating reformer nor a discoverer of new truth; but
as a singularly independent and most intelligent witness, he was the
first who saw through the majestic hypocrisy of the court, and knew
that France was on the road to ruin. The revolt of conscience began
with him before the glory of the monarchy was clouded over. His views
grew from an extraordinary perspicacity and refinement in the estimate
of men. He learnt to refer the problem of government, like the conduct
of private life, to the mere standard of morals, and extended further
than any one the plain but hazardous practice of deciding all things
by the exclusive precepts of enlightened virtue. If he did not know
all about policy and international science, he could always tell what
would be expected of a hypothetically perfect man. Fenelon feels like
a citizen of Christian Europe, but he pursues his thoughts apart from
his country or his church, and his deepest utterances are in the mouth
of pagans. He desired to be alike true to his own beliefs, and
gracious towards those who dispute them. He approved neither the
deposing power nor the punishment of error, and declared that the
highest need of the Church was not victory but liberty. Through his
friends, Fleury and Chevreuse, he favoured the recall of the
Protestants, and he advised a general toleration. He would have the
secular power kept aloof from ecclesiastical concerns, because
protection leads to religious servitude and persecution to religious
hypocrisy. There were moments when his steps seemed to approach the
border of the undiscovered land where Church and State are parted.
He has written that a historian ought to be neutral between other
countries and his own, and he expected the same discipline in
politicians, as patriotism cannot absolve a man from his duty to
mankind. Therefore no war can be just, unless a war to which we are
compelled in the sole cause of freedom. Fenelon wished that France
should surrender the ill-gotten conquests of which she was so proud,
and especially that she should withdraw from Spain. He declared that
the Spaniards were degenerate and imbecile, but that nothing could
make that right which was contrary to the balance of power and the
security of nations. Holland seemed to him the hope of Europe, and he
thought the allies justified in excluding the French dynasty from
Spain for the same reason that no claim of law could have made it
right that Philip II. should occupy England. He hoped that his country
would be thoroughly humbled, for he dreaded the effects of success on
the temperament of the victorious French. He deemed it only fair that
Lewis should be compelled to dethrone his grandson with his own guilty
hand.
In the judgment of Fenelon, power is poison; and as kings are nearly
always bad, they ought not to govern, but only to execute the law. For
it is the mark of barbarians to obey precedent and custom. Civilised
society must be regulated by a solid code. Nothing but a constitution
can avert arbitrary power. The despotism of Lewis XIV. renders him
odious and contemptible, and is the cause of all the evils which the
country suffers. If the governing power which rightfully belonged to
the nation was restored, it would save itself by its own exertion; but
absolute authority irreparably saps its foundations, and is bringing
on a revolution by which it will not be moderated, but utterly
destroyed. Although Fenelon has no wish to sacrifice either the
monarchy or the aristocracy, he betrays sympathy with several
tendencies of the movement which he foresaw with so much alarm. He
admits the state of nature, and thinks civil society not the primitive
condition of man, but a result of the passage from savage life to
husbandry. He would transfer the duties of government to local and
central assemblies; and he demands entire freedom of trade, and
education provided by law, because children belong to the State first
and to the family afterwards. He does not resign the hope of making
men good by act of parliament, and his belief in public institutions
as a means of moulding individual character brings him nearly into
touch with a distant future.
He is the Platonic founder of revolutionary thinking. Whilst his real
views were little known, he became a popular memory; but some
complained that his force was centrifugal, and that a church can no
more be preserved by suavity and distinction than a state by liberty
and justice. Lewis XVI., we are often told, perished in expiation of
the sins of his forefathers. He perished, not because the power he
inherited from them had been carried to excess, but because it had
been discredited and undermined. One author of this discredit was
Fenelon. Until he came, the ablest men, Bossuet and even Bayle,
revered the monarchy. Fenelon struck it at the zenith, and treated
Lewis XIV. in all his grandeur more severely than the disciples of
Voltaire treated Lewis XV. in all his degradation. The season of scorn
and shame begins with him. The best of his later contemporaries
followed his example, and laid the basis of opposing criticism on
motives of religion. They were the men whom Cardinal Dubois describes
as dreamers of the same dreams as the chimerical archbishop of
Cambray. Their influence fades away before the great change that came
over France about the middle of the century.
From that time unbelief so far prevailed that even men who were not
professed assailants, as Montesquieu, Condillac, Turgot, were
estranged from Christianity. Politically, the consequence was this:
men who did not attribute any deep significance to church questions
never acquired definite notions on Church and State, never seriously
examined under what conditions religion may be established or
disestablished, endowed or disendowed, never even knew whether there
exists any general solution, or any principle by which problems of
that kind are decided. This defect of knowledge became a fact of
importance at a turning-point in the Revolution. The theory of the
relations between states and churches is bound up with the theory of
Toleration, and on that subject the eighteenth century scarcely rose
above an intermittent, embarrassed, and unscientific view. For
religious liberty is composed of the properties both of religion and
of liberty, and one of its factors never became an object of
disinterested observation among actual leaders of opinion. They
preferred the argument of doubt to the argument of certitude, and
sought to defeat intolerance by casting out revelation as they had
defeated the persecution of witches by casting out the devil. There
remained a flaw in their liberalism, for liberty apart from belief is
liberty with a good deal of the substance taken out of it. The problem
is less complicated and the solution less radical and less profound.
Already, then, there were writers who held somewhat superficially the
conviction, which Tocqueville made a corner-stone, that nations that
have not the self-governing force of religion within them are
unprepared for freedom.
The early notions of reform moved on French lines, striving to utilise
the existing form of society, to employ the parliamentary aristocracy,
to revive the States-General and the provincial assemblies. But the
scheme of standing on the ancient ways, and raising a new France on
the substructure of the old, brought out the fact that whatever growth
of institutions there once had been had been stunted and stood still.
If the mediaeval polity had been fitted to prosper, its fruit must be
gathered from other countries, where the early notions had been
pursued far ahead. The first thing to do was to cultivate the foreign
example; and with that what we call the eighteenth century began. The
English superiority, proclaimed first by Voltaire, was further
demonstrated by Montesquieu. For England had recently created a
government which was stronger than the institutions that had stood on
antiquity. Founded upon fraud and treason, it had yet established the
security of law more firmly than it had ever existed under the system
of legitimacy, of prolonged inheritance, and of religious sanction. It
flourished on the unaccustomed belief that theological dissensions
need not detract from the power of the State, while political
dissensions are the very secret of its prosperity. The men of
questionable character who accomplished the change and had governed
for the better part of sixty years, had successfully maintained public
order, in spite of conspiracy and rebellion; they had built up an
enormous system of national credit, and had been victorious in
continental war. The Jacobite doctrine, which was the basis of
European monarchy, had been backed by the arms of France, and had
failed to shake the newly planted throne. A great experiment had been
crowned by a great discovery. A novelty that defied the wisdom of
centuries had made good its footing, and revolution had become a
principle of stability more sure than tradition.
Montesquieu undertook to make the disturbing fact avail in political
science. He valued it because it reconciled him with monarchy. He had
started with the belief that kings are an evil, and not a necessary
evil, and that their time was running short. His visit to Walpolean
England taught him a plan by which they might be reprieved. He still
confessed that a republic is the reign of virtue; and by virtue he
meant love of equality and renunciation of self. But he had seen a
monarchy that throve by corruption. He said that the distinctive
principle of monarchy is not virtue but honour, which he once
described as a contrivance to enable men of the world to commit almost
every offence with impunity. The praise of England was made less
injurious to French patriotism by the famous theory that explains
institutions and character by the barometer and the latitude.
Montesquieu looked about him, and abroad, but not far ahead. His
admirable skill in supplying reason for every positive fact sometimes
confounds the cause which produces with the argument that defends. He
knows so many pleas for privilege that he almost overlooks the class
that has none; and having no friendship for the clergy, he approves
their immunities. He thinks that aristocracy alone can preserve
monarchies, and makes England more free than any commonwealth. He lays
down the great conservative maxim, that success generally depends on
knowing the time it will take; and the most purely Whig maxim in his
works, that the duty of a citizen is a crime when it obscures the duty
of man, is Fenelon's. His liberty is of a Gothic type, and not
insatiable. But the motto of his work, _Prolem sine matre creatam_,
was intended to signify that the one thing wanting was liberty; and he
had views on taxation, equality, and the division of powers that gave
him a momentary influence in 1789. His warning that a legislature may
be more dangerous than the executive remained unheard. The _Esprit des
lois_ had lost ground in 1767, during the ascendancy of Rousseau. The
mind of the author moved within the conditions of society familiar to
him, and he did not heed the coming democracy. He assured Hume that
there would be no revolution, because the nobles were without civic
courage.
There was more divination in d'Argenson, who was Minister of Foreign
Affairs in 1745, and knew politics from the inside. Less acquiescent
than his brilliant contemporary, he was perpetually contriving schemes
of fundamental change, and is the earliest writer from whom we can
extract the system of 1789. Others before him had perceived the
impending revolution; but d'Argenson foretold that it would open with
the slaughter of priests in the streets of Paris. Thirty-eight years
later these words came true at the gate of St. Germain's Abbey. As the
supporter of the Pretender he was quite uninfluenced by admiration for
England, and imputed, not to the English Deists and Whigs but to the
Church and her divisions and intolerance, the unbelieving spirit that
threatened both Church and State. It was conventionally understood on
the Continent that 1688 had been an uprising of Nonconformists, and a
Whig was assumed to be a Presbyterian down to the death of Anne. It
was easy to infer that a more violent theological conflict would lead
to a more violent convulsion. As early as 1743 his terrible foresight
discerns that the State is going to pieces, and its doom was so
certain that he began to think of a refuge under other masters. He
would have deposed the noble, the priest, and the lawyer, and given
their power to the masses. Although the science of politics was in its
infancy, he relied on the dawning enlightenment to establish rational
liberty, and the equality between classes and religions which is the
perfection of politics. The world ought to be governed not by
parchment and vested rights, but by plain reason, which proceeds from
the complex to the simple, and will sweep away all that interposes
between the State and the democracy, giving to each part of the nation
the management of its own affairs. He is eager to change everything,
except the monarchy which alone can change all else. A deliberative
assembly does not rise above the level of its average members. It is
neither very foolish nor very wise. All might be well if the king made
himself the irresistible instrument of philosophy and justice, and
wrought the reform. But his king was Lewis XV. D'Argenson saw so
little that was worthy to be preserved that he did not shrink from
sweeping judgments and abstract propositions. By his rationalism, and
his indifference to the prejudice of custom and the claim of
possession; by his maxim that every man may be presumed to understand
the things in which his own interest and responsibility are involved;
by his zeal for democracy, equality, and simplicity, and his dislike
of intermediate authorities, he belongs to a generation later than his
own. He heralded events without preparing them, for the best of all he
wrote only became known in our time.
Whilst Montesquieu, at the height of his fame as the foremost of
living writers, was content to contemplate the past, there was a
student in the Paris seminary who taught men to fix hope and
endeavour on the future, and led the world at twenty-three. Turgot,
when he proclaimed that upward growth and progress is the law of human
life, was studying to become a priest. To us, in an age of science, it
has become difficult to imagine Christianity without the attribute of
development and the faculty of improving society as well as souls. But
the idea was acquired slowly. Under the burden of sin, men accustomed
themselves to the consciousness of degeneracy; each generation
confessed that they were unworthy children of their parents, and
awaited with impatience the approaching end. From Lucretius and Seneca
to Pascal and Leibniz we encounter a few dispersed and unsupported
passages, suggesting advance towards perfection, and the flame that
brightens as it moves from hand to hand; but they were without mastery
or radiance. Turgot at once made the idea habitual and familiar, and
it became a pervading force in thoughtful minds, whilst the new
sciences arose to confirm it. He imparted a deeper significance to
history, giving it unity of tendency and direction, constancy where
there had been motion, and development instead of change. The progress
he meant was moral as much as intellectual; and as he professed to
think that the rogues of his day would have seemed sanctified models
to an earlier century, he made his calculations without counting the
wickedness of men. His analysis left unfathomed depths for future
explorers, for Lessing and still more for Hegel; but he taught mankind
to expect that the future would be unlike the past, that it would be
better, and that the experience of ages may instruct and warn, but
cannot guide or control. He is eminently a benefactor to historical
study; but he forged a weapon charged with power to abolish the
product of history and the existing order. By the hypothesis of
progress, the new is always gaining on the old; history is the
embodiment of imperfection, and escape from history became the
watchword of the coming day. Condorcet, the master's pupil, thought
that the world might be emancipated by burning its records.
Turgot was too discreet for such an excess, and he looked to history
for the demonstration of his law. He had come upon it in his
theological studies. He renounced them soon after, saying that he
could not wear a mask. When Guizot called Lamennais a malefactor,
because he threw off his cassock and became a freethinker, Scherer,
whose course had been some way parallel, observed: "He little knows
how much it costs." The abrupt transition seems to have been
accomplished by Turgot without a struggle. The _Encyclopaedia_, which
was the largest undertaking since the invention of printing, came out
at that time, and Turgot wrote for it. But he broke off, refusing to
be connected with a party professedly hostile to revealed religion;
and he rejected the declamatory paradoxes of Diderot and Raynal. He
found his home among the Physiocrats, of all the groups the one that
possessed the most compact body of consistent views, and who already
knew most of the accepted doctrines of political economy, although
they ended by making way for Adam Smith. They are of supreme
importance to us, because they founded political science on the
economic science which was coming into existence. Harrington, a
century before, had seen that the art of government can be reduced to
system; but the French economists precede all men in this, that
holding a vast collection of combined and verified truths on matters
contiguous to politics and belonging to their domain, they extended it
to the whole, and governed the constitution by the same fixed
principles that governed the purse. They said: A man's most sacred
property is his labour. It is anterior even to the right of property,
for it is the possession of those who own nothing else. Therefore he
must be free to make the best use of it he can. The interference of
one man with another, of society with its members, of the state with
the subject, must be brought down to the lowest dimension. Power
intervenes only to restrict intervention, to guard the individual from
oppression, that is from regulation in an interest not his own. Free
labour and its derivative free trade are the first conditions of
legitimate government. Let things fall into their natural order, let
society govern itself, and the sovereign function of the State will be
to protect nature in the execution of her own law. Government must not
be arbitrary, but it must be powerful enough to repress arbitrary
action in others. If the supreme power is needlessly limited, the
secondary powers will run riot and oppress. Its supremacy will bear no
check. The problem is to enlighten the ruler, not to restrain him; and
one man is more easily enlightened than many. Government by
opposition, by balance and control, is contrary to principle; whereas
absolutism might be requisite to the attainment of their higher
purpose. Nothing less than concentrated power could overcome the
obstacles to such beneficent reforms as they meditated. Men who sought
only the general good must wound every distinct and separate interest
of class, and would be mad to break up the only force that they could
count upon, and thus to throw away the means of preventing the evils
that must follow if things were left to the working of opinion and the
feeling of masses. They had no love for absolute power in itself, but
they computed that, if they had the use of it for five years, France
would be free. They distinguished an arbitrary monarch and the
irresistible but impersonal state.
It was the era of repentant monarchy. Kings had become the first of
public servants, executing, for the good of the people, what the
people were unable to do for themselves; and there was a reforming
movement on foot which led to many instances of prosperous and
intelligent administration. To men who knew what unutterable suffering
and wrong was inflicted by bad laws, and who lived in terror of the
uneducated and inorganic masses, the idea of reform from above seemed
preferable to parliamentary government managed by Newcastle and North,
in the interest of the British landlord. The economists are outwardly
and avowedly less liberal than Montesquieu, because they are
incomparably more impressed by the evils of the time, and the need of
immense and fundamental changes. They prepared to undo the work of
absolutism by the hand of absolutism. They were not its opponents,
but its advisers, and hoped to convert it by their advice. The
indispensable liberties are those which constitute the wealth of
nations; the rest will follow. The disease had lasted too long for the
sufferer to heal himself: the relief must come from the author of his
sufferings. The power that had done the wrong was still efficient to
undo the wrong. Transformation, infinitely more difficult in itself
than preservation, was not more formidable to the economists because
it consisted mainly in revoking the godless work of a darker age. They
deemed it their mission not to devise new laws, for that is a task
which God has not committed to man, but only to declare the inherent
laws of the existence of society and enable them to prevail.
The defects of the social and political organisation were as
distinctly pointed out by the economists as by the electors of the
National Assembly, twenty years later, and in nearly all things they
proposed the remedy. But they were persuaded that the only thing to
regenerate France was a convulsion which the national character would
make a dreadful one. They desired a large scheme of popular education,
because commands take no root in soil that is not prepared. Political
truths can be made so evident that the opinion of an instructed public
will be invincible, and will banish the abuse of power. To resist
oppression is to make a league with heaven, and all things are
oppressive that resist the natural order of freedom. For society
secures rights; it neither bestows nor restricts them. They are the
direct consequence of duties. As truth can only convince by the
exposure of errors and the defeat of objections, liberty is the
essential guard of truth. Society is founded, not on the will of man,
but on the nature of man and the will of God; and conformity to the
divinely appointed order is followed by inevitable reward. Relief of
those who suffer is the duty of all men, and the affair of all.
Such was the spirit of that remarkable group of men, especially of
Mercier de la Riviere, of whom Diderot said that he alone possessed
the true and everlasting secret of the security and the happiness of
empires. Turgot indeed had failed in office; but his reputation was
not diminished, and the power of his name exceeded all others at the
outbreak of the Revolution. His policy of employing the Crown to
reform the State was at once rejected in favour of other counsels; but
his influence may be traced in many acts of the Assembly, and on two
very memorable occasions it was not auspicious. It was a central dogma
of the party that land is the true source of wealth, or, as Asgill
said, that man deals in nothing but earth. When a great part of France
became national property, men were the more easily persuaded that land
can serve as the basis of public credit and of unlimited assignats.
According to a weighty opinion which we shall have to consider before
long, the parting of the ways in the Revolution was on the day when,
rejecting the example both of England and America, the French resolved
to institute a single undivided legislature. It was the Pennsylvanian
model and Voltaire had pronounced Pennsylvania the best government in
the world. Franklin gave the sanction of an oracle to the constitution
of his state, and Turgot was its vehement protagonist in Europe.
A king ruling over a level democracy, and a democracy ruling itself
through the agency of a king, were long contending notions in the
first Assembly. One was monarchy according to Turgot, the other was
monarchy adapted to Rousseau; and the latter, for a time, prevailed.
Rousseau was the citizen of a small republic, consisting of a single
town, and he professed to have applied its example to the government
of the world. It was Geneva, not as he saw it, but as he extracted its
essential principle, and as it has since become, Geneva illustrated by
the Forest Cantons and the Landesgemeinde more than by its own
charters. The idea was that the grown men met in the market-place,
like the peasants of Glarus under their trees, to manage their
affairs, making and unmaking officials, conferring and revoking
powers. They were equal, because every man had exactly the same right
to defend his interest by the guarantee of his vote. The welfare of
all was safe in the hands of all, for they had not the separate
interests that are bred by the egotism of wealth, nor the exclusive
views that come from a distorted education. All being equal in power
and similar in purpose, there can be no just cause why some should
move apart and break into minorities. There is an implied contract
that no part shall ever be preferred to the whole, and minorities
shall always obey. Clever men are not wanted for the making of laws,
because clever men and their laws are at the root of all mischief.
Nature is a better guide than civilisation, because nature comes from
God, and His works are good; culture from man, whose works are bad in
proportion as he is remoter from natural innocence, as his desires
increase upon him, as he seeks more refined pleasures, and stores up
more superfluity. It promotes inequality, selfishness, and the ruin of
public spirit.
By plausible and easy stages the social ideas latent in parts of
Switzerland produced the theory that men come innocent from the hands
of the Creator, that they are originally equal, that progress from
equality to civilisation is the passage from virtue to vice and from
freedom to tyranny, that the people are sovereign, and govern by
powers given and taken away; that an individual or a class may be
mistaken and may desert the common cause and the general interest, but
the people, necessarily sincere, and true, and incorrupt, cannot go
wrong; that there is a right of resistance to all governments that are
fallible, because they are partial, but none against government of the
people by the people, because it has no master and no judge, and
decides in the last instance and alone; that insurrection is the law
of all unpopular societies founded on a false principle and a broken
contract, and submission that of the only legitimate societies, based
on the popular will; that there is no privilege against the law of
nature, and no right against the power of all. By this chain of
reasoning, with little infusion of other ingredients, Rousseau applied
the sequence of the ideas of pure democracy to the government of
nations.
Now the most glaring and familiar fact in history shows that the
direct self-government of a town cannot be extended over an empire. It
is a plan that scarcely reaches beyond the next parish. Either one
district will be governed by another, or both by somebody else chosen
for the purpose. Either plan contradicts first principles. Subjection
is the direct negation of democracy; representation is the indirect.
So that an Englishman underwent bondage to parliament as much as
Lausanne to Berne or as America to England if it had submitted to
taxation, and by law recovered his liberty but once in seven years.
Consequently Rousseau, still faithful to Swiss precedent as well as to
the logic of his own theory, was a federalist. In Switzerland, when
one half of a canton disagrees with the other, or the country with the
town, it is deemed natural that they should break into two, that the
general will may not oppress minorities. This multiplication of
self-governing communities was admitted by Rousseau as a preservative
of unanimity on one hand, and of liberty on the other. Helvetius came
to his support with the idea that men are not only equal by nature but
alike, and that society is the cause of variation; from which it would
follow that everything may be done by laws and by education.
Rousseau is the author of the strongest political theory that had
appeared amongst men. We cannot say that he reasons well, but he knew
how to make his argument seem convincing, satisfying, inevitable, and
he wrote with an eloquence and a fervour that had never been seen in
prose, even in Bolingbroke or Milton. His books gave the first signal
of a universal subversion, and were as fatal to the Republic as to the
Monarchy. Although he lives by the social contract and the law of
resistance, and owes his influence to what was extreme and systematic,
his later writings are loaded with sound political wisdom. He owes
nothing to the novelty or the originality of his thoughts. Taken
jointly or severally, they are old friends, and you will find them in
the school of Wolf that just preceded, in the dogmatists of the Great
Rebellion and the Jesuit casuists who were dear to Algernon Sidney, in
their Protestant opponents, Duplessis Mornay, and the Scots who had
heard the last of our schoolmen, Major of St. Andrews, renew the
speculations of the time of schism, which decomposed and dissected the
Church and rebuilt it on a model very propitious to political
revolution, and even in the early interpreters of the Aristotelian
Politics which appeared just at the era of the first parliament.
Rousseau's most advanced point was the doctrine that the people are
infallible. Jurieu had taught that they can do no wrong: Rousseau
added that they are positively in the right. The idea, like most
others, was not new, and goes back to the Middle Ages. When the
question arose what security there is for the preservation of
traditional truth if the episcopate was divided and the papacy vacant,
it was answered that the faith would be safely retained by the masses.
The maxim that the voice of the people is the voice of God is as old
as Alcuin; it was renewed by some of the greatest writers anterior to
democracy, by Hooker and Bossuet, and it was employed in our day by
Newman to prop his theory of development. Rousseau applied it to the
State.
The sovereignty of public opinion was just then coming in through the
rise of national debts and the increasing importance of the public
creditor. It meant more than the noble savage and the blameless South
Sea islander, and distinguished the instinct that guides large masses
of men from the calculating wisdom of the few. It was destined to
prove the most serious of all obstacles to representative government.
Equality of power readily suggests equality of property; but the
movement of Socialism began earlier, and was not assisted by Rousseau.
There were solemn theorists, such as Mably and Morelly, who were
sometimes quoted in the Revolution, but the change in the distribution
of property was independent of them.
A more effective influence was imported from Italy; for the Italians,
through Vico, Giannone, Genovesi, had an eighteenth century of their
own. Sardinia preceded France in solving the problem of feudalism.
Arthur Young affirms that the measures of the Grand Duke Leopold had,
in ten years, doubled the produce of Tuscany; at Milan, Count Firmian
was accounted one of the best administrators in Europe. It was a
Milanese, Beccaria, who, by his reform of criminal law, became a
leader of French opinion. Continental jurisprudence had long been
overshadowed by two ideas: that torture is the surest method of
discovering truth, and that punishment deters not by its justice, its
celerity, or its certainty, but in proportion to its severity. Even in
the eighteenth century the penal system of Maria Theresa and Joseph
II. was barbarous. Therefore no attack was more surely aimed at the
heart of established usage than that which dealt with courts of
justice. It forced men to conclude that authority was odiously stupid
and still more odiously ferocious, that existing governments were
accursed, that the guardians and ministers of law, divine and human,
were more guilty than their culprits. The past was branded as the
reign of infernal powers, and charged with long arrears of unpunished
wrong. As there was no sanctity left in law, there was no mercy for
its merciless defenders; and if they fell into avenging hands, their
doom would not exceed their desert. Men afterwards conspicuous by
their violence, Brissot and Marat, were engaged in this campaign of
humanity, which raised a demand for authorities that were not vitiated
by the accumulation of infamy, for new laws, new powers, a new
dynasty.
As religion was associated with cruelty, it is at this point that the
movement of new Ideas became a crusade against Christianity. A book by
the Cure Meslier, partially known at that time, but first printed by
Strauss in 1864, is the clarion of vindictive unbelief; and another
abbe, Raynal, hoped that the clergy would be crushed beneath the ruins
of their altars.
Thus the movement which began, in Fenelon's time, with warnings and
remonstrance and the zealous endeavour to preserve, which produced one
great scheme of change by the Crown and another at the expense of the
Crown, ended in the wild cry for vengeance and a passionate appeal to
fire and sword. So many lines of thought converging on destruction
explain the agreement that existed when the States-General began, and
the explosion that followed the reforms of '89, and the ruins of '93.
No conflict can be more irreconcilable than that between a
constitution and an enlightened absolutism, between abrogation of old
laws and multiplication of new, between representation and direct
democracy, the people controlling and the people governing, kings by
contract and kings by mandate.
Yet all these fractions of opinion were called Liberal: Montesquieu,
because he was an intelligent Tory; Voltaire, because he attacked the
clergy; Turgot, as a reformer; Rousseau, as a democrat; Diderot, as a
freethinker. The one thing common to them all is the disregard for
liberty.
II
THE INFLUENCE OF AMERICA
The several structures of political thought that arose in France, and
clashed in the process of revolution, were not directly responsible
for the outbreak. The doctrines hung like a cloud upon the heights,
and at critical moments in the reign of Lewis XV. men felt that a
catastrophe was impending. It befell when there was less provocation,
under his successor; and the spark that changed thought into action
was supplied by the Declaration of American Independence. It was the
system of an international extra-territorial universal Whig, far
transcending the English model by its simplicity and rigour. It
surpassed in force all the speculation of Paris and Geneva, for it had
undergone the test of experiment, and its triumph was the most
memorable thing that had been seen by men.
The expectation that the American colonies would separate was an old
one. A century before, Harrington had written: "They are yet babes,
that cannot live without sucking the breasts of their mother-cities;
but such as I mistake if, when they come of age, they do not wean
themselves; which causes me to wonder at princes that like to be
exhausted in that way." When, in 1759, the elder Mirabeau announced
it, he meant that the conquest of Canada involved the loss of America,
as the colonists would cling to England as long as the French were
behind them, and no longer. He came very near to the truth, for the
war in Canada gave the signal. The English colonies had meditated the
annexation of the French, and they resented that the king's government
undertook the expedition, to deprive them of the opportunity for
united action. Fifty years later President Adams said that the
treatment of American officers by the British made his blood boil.
The agitation began in 1761, and by the innovating ideas which it
flung abroad it is as important as the Declaration itself, or the
great constitutional debate. The colonies were more advanced than
Great Britain in the way of free institutions, and existed only that
they might escape the vices of the mother country. They had no
remnants of feudalism to cherish or resist. They possessed written
constitutions, some of them remarkably original, fit roots of an
immense development. George III. thought it strange that he should be
the sovereign of a democracy like Rhode Island, where all power
reverted annually to the people, and the authorities had to be elected
anew. Connecticut received from the Stuarts so liberal a charter, and
worked out so finished a scheme of local self-government, that it
served as a basis for the federal constitution. The Quakers had a plan
founded on equality of power, without oppression, or privilege, or
intolerance, or slavery. They declared that their holy experiment
would not have been worth attempting if it did not offer some very
real advantage over England. It was to enjoy freedom, liberty of
conscience, and the right to tax themselves, that they went into the
desert. There were points on which these men anticipated the doctrines
of a more unrestrained democracy, for they established their
government not on conventions, but on divine right, and they claimed
to be infallible. A Connecticut preacher said in 1638: "The choice of
public magistrates belongs unto the people, by God's own allowance.
They who have the power to appoint officers and magistrates, it is in
their power, also, to set the bounds and limitations of the power and
place unto which they call them." The following words, written in
1736, appear in the works of Franklin: "The judgment of a whole
people, especially of a free people, is looked upon to be infallible.
And this is universally true, while they remain in their proper
sphere, unbiassed by faction, undeluded by the tricks of designing
men. A body of people thus circumstanced cannot be supposed to judge
amiss on any essential points; for if they decide in favour of
themselves, which is extremely natural, their decision is just,
inasmuch as whatever contributes to their benefit is a general
benefit, and advances the real public good." A commentator adds that
this notion of the infallible perception by the people of their true
interest, and their unerring pursuit of it, was very prevalent in the
provinces, and for a time in the States after the establishment of
American independence.
In spite of their democratic spirit, these communities consented to
have their trade regulated and restricted, to their own detriment and
the advantage of English merchants. They had protested, but they had
ended by yielding. Now Adam Smith says that to prohibit a great people
from making all they can of every part of their own produce, or from
employing their stock and industry in the way that they judge most
advantageous for themselves, is a manifest violation of the most
sacred rights of mankind. There was a latent sense of injury which
broke out when, in addition to interference with the freedom of trade,
England exercised the right of taxation. An American lately wrote:
"The real foundation of the discontent which led to the Revolution was
the effort of Great Britain, beginning in 1750, to prevent diversity
of occupation, to attack the growth of manufactures and the mechanic
arts, and the final cause before the attempt to tax without
representation was the effort to enforce the navigation laws." When
England argued that the hardship of regulation might be greater than
the hardship of taxation, and that those who submitted to the one
submitted, in principle, to the other, Franklin replied that the
Americans had not taken that view, but that, when it was put before
them, they would be willing to reject both one and the other. He knew,
however, that the ground taken up by his countrymen was too narrow. He
wrote to the French economist, Morellet: "Nothing can be better
expressed than your sentiments are on this point, where you prefer
liberty of trading, cultivating, manufacturing, etc., even to civil
liberty, this being affected but rarely, the other every hour."
These early authors of American independence were generally
enthusiasts for the British Constitution, and preceded Burke in the
tendency to canonise it, and to magnify it as an ideal exemplar for
nations. John Adams said, in 1766: "Here lies the difference between
the British Constitution and other forms of government, namely, that
liberty is its end, its use, its designation, drift and scope, as much
as grinding corn is the use of a mill." Another celebrated Bostonian
identified the Constitution with the law of Nature, as Montesquieu
called the Civil Law, written Reason. He said: "It is the glory of the
British prince and the happiness of all his subjects, that their
constitution hath its foundation in the immutable laws of Nature; and
as the supreme legislative, as well as the supreme executive, derives
its authority from that constitution, it should seem that no laws can
be made or executed that are repugnant to any essential law in
Nature." The writer of these words, James Otis, is the founder of the
revolutionary doctrine. Describing one of his pamphlets, the second
President says: "Look over the declaration of rights and wrongs issued
by Congress in 1774; look into the declaration of independence in
1776; look into the writings of Dr. Price and Dr. Priestley; look into
all the French constitutions of government; and, to cap the climax,
look into Mr. Thomas Paine's _Common Sense_, _Crisis_, and _Rights of
Man_. What can you find that is not to be found in solid substance in
this 'Vindication of the House of Representatives'?" When these men
found that the appeal to the law and to the constitution did not avail
them, that the king, by bribing the people's representatives with the
people's money, was able to enforce his will, they sought a higher
tribunal, and turned from the law of England to the law of Nature, and
from the king of England to the King of kings. Otis, in 1762, 1764
and 1765, says: "Most governments are, in fact, arbitrary, and
consequently the curse and scandal of human nature; yet none are of
right arbitrary. By the laws of God and nature, government must not
raise taxes on the property of the people without the consent of the
people or their deputies. There can be no prescription old enough to
supersede the law of Nature and the grant of God Almighty, who has
given all men a right to be free. If a man has but little property to
protect and defend, yet his life and liberty are things of some
importance." About the same time Gadsden wrote: "A confirmation of our
essential and common rights as Englishmen may be pleaded from charters
clearly enough; but any further dependence on them may be fatal. We
should stand upon the broad common ground of those natural rights that
we all feel and know as men and as descendants of Englishmen."
The primitive fathers of the United States began by preferring
abstract moral principle to the letter of the law and the spirit of
the Constitution. But they went farther. Not only was their grievance
difficult to substantiate at law, but it was trivial in extent. The
claim of England was not evidently disproved, and even if it was
unjust, the injustice practically was not hard to bear. The suffering
that would be caused by submission was immeasurably less than the
suffering that must follow resistance, and it was more uncertain and
remote. The utilitarian argument was loud in favour of obedience and
loyalty. But if interest was on one side, there was a manifest
principle on the other--a principle so sacred and so clear as
imperatively to demand the sacrifice of men's lives, of their families
and their fortune. They resolved to give up everything, not to escape
from actual oppression, but to honour a precept of unwritten law. That
was the transatlantic discovery in the theory of political duty, the
light that came over the ocean. It represented liberty not as a
comparative release from tyranny, but as a thing so divine that the
existence of society must be staked to prevent even the least
constructive infraction of its sovereign right. "A free people," said
Dickinson, "can never be too quick in observing nor too firm in
opposing the beginnings of alteration either in form or reality,
respecting institutions formed for their security. The first kind of
alteration leads to the last. As violations of the rights of the
governed are commonly not only specious, but small at the beginning,
they spread over the multitude in such a manner as to touch
individuals but slightly. Every free state should incessantly watch,
and instantly take alarm at any addition being made to the power
exercised over them." Who are a free people? Not those over whom
government is reasonably and equitably exercised; but those who live
under a government so constitutionally checked and controlled that
proper provision is made against its being otherwise exercised. The
contest was plainly a contest of principle, and was conducted entirely
on principle by both parties. "The amount of taxes proposed to be
raised," said Marshall, the greatest of constitutional lawyers, "was
too inconsiderable to interest the people of either country." I will
add the words of Daniel Webster, the great expounder of the
Constitution, who is the most eloquent of the Americans, and stands,
in politics, next to Burke: "The Parliament of Great Britain asserted
a right to tax the Colonies in all cases whatsoever; and it was
precisely on this question that they made the Revolution turn. The
amount of taxation was trifling, but the claim itself was inconsistent
with liberty, and that was in their eyes enough. It was against the
recital of an act of Parliament, rather than against any suffering
under its enactment, that they took up arms. They went to war against
a preamble. They fought seven years against a declaration. They saw in
the claim of the British Parliament a seminal principle of mischief,
the germ of unjust power."
The object of these men was liberty, not independence. Their feeling
was expressed by Jay in his address to the people of Great Britain:
"Permit us to be as free as yourselves, and we shall ever esteem a
union with you to be our greatest glory and our greatest happiness."
Before 1775 there was no question of separation. During all the
Revolution Adams declared that he would have given everything to
restore things as before with security; and both Jefferson and Madison
admitted in the presence of the English minister that a few seats in
both Houses would have set at rest the whole question.
In their appeal to the higher law the Americans professed the purest
Whiggism, and they claimed that their resistance to the House of
Commons and the jurisprudence of Westminster only carried forward the
eternal conflict between Whig and Tory. By their closer analysis, and
their fearlessness of logical consequences, they transformed the
doctrine and modified the party. The uprooted Whig, detached from his
parchments and precedents, his leading families and historic
conditions, exhibited new qualities; and the era of compromise made
way for an era of principle. Whilst French diplomacy traced the long
hand of the English opposition in the tea riots at Boston, Chatham and
Camden were feeling the influence of Dickinson and Otis, without
recognising the difference. It appears in a passage of one of
Chatham's speeches, in 1775: "This universal opposition to your
arbitrary system of taxation might have been foreseen. It was obvious
from the nature of things, and from the nature of man, and, above all,
from the confirmed habits of thinking, from the spirit of Whiggism
flourishing in America. The spirit which now pervades America is the
same which formerly opposed loans, benevolences, and ship-money in
this country, is the same spirit which roused all England to action at
the Revolution, and which established at a remote era your liberties,
on the basis of that grand fundamental maxim of the Constitution, that
no subject of England shall be taxed but by his own consent. To
maintain this principle is the common cause of the Whigs on the other
side of the Atlantic, and on this. It is the alliance of God and
Nature, immutable, eternal, fixed as the firmament of heaven.
Resistance to your acts was necessary as it was just; and your vain
declarations of the omnipotence of parliament, and your imperious
doctrines of the necessity of submission will be found equally
impotent to convince or enslave your fellow-subjects in America."
The most significant instance of the action of America on Europe is
Edmund Burke. We think of him as a man who, in early life, rejected
all generalities and abstract propositions, and who became the most
strenuous and violent of conservatives. But there is an interval when,
as the quarrel with the Colonies went on, Burke was as revolutionary
as Washington. The inconsistency is not as flagrant as it seems. He
had been brought forward by the party of measured propriety and
imperative moderation, of compromise and unfinished thought, who
claimed the right of taxing, but refused to employ it. When he urged
the differences in every situation and every problem, and shrank from
the common denominator and the underlying principle, he fell into step
with his friends. As an Irishman, who had married into an Irish
Catholic family, it was desirable that he should adopt no theories in
America which would unsettle Ireland. He had learnt to teach
government by party as an almost sacred dogma, and party forbids
revolt as a breach of the laws of the game. His scruples and his
protests, and his defiance of theory, were the policy and the
precaution of a man conscious of restraints, and not entirely free in
the exertion of powers that lifted him far above his tamer
surroundings. As the strife sharpened and the Americans made way,
Burke was carried along, and developed views which he never utterly
abandoned, but which are difficult to reconcile with much that he
wrote when the Revolution had spread to France.
In his address to the Colonists he says: "We do not know how to
qualify millions of our countrymen, contending with one heart for an
admission to privileges which we have ever thought our own happiness
and honour, by odious and unworthy names. On the contrary, we highly
revere the principles on which you act. We had much rather see you
totally independent of this crown and kingdom, than joined to it by so
unnatural a conjunction as that of freedom and servitude. We view the
establishment of the English Colonies on principles of liberty, as
that which is to render this kingdom venerable to future ages. In
comparison of this, we regard all the victories and conquests of our
warlike ancestors, or of our own times, as barbarous, vulgar
distinctions, in which many nations, whom we look upon with little
respect or value, have equalled, if not far exceeded us. Those who
have and who hold to that foundation of common liberty, whether on
this or on your side of the ocean, we consider as the true and the
only true Englishmen. Those who depart from it, whether there or here,
are attainted, corrupted in blood, and wholly fallen from their
original rank and value. They are the real rebels to the fair
constitution and just supremacy of England. A long course of war with
the administration of this country may be but a prelude to a series of
wars and contentions among yourselves, to end at length (as such
scenes have too often ended) in a species of humiliating repose, which
nothing but the preceding calamities would reconcile to the dispirited
few who survived them. We allow that even this evil is worth the risk
to men of honour when rational liberty is at stake, as in the present
case we confess and lament that it is."
At other times he spoke as follows:--"Nothing less than a convulsion
that will shake the globe to its centre can ever restore the European
nations to that liberty by which they were once so much distinguished.
The Western world was the seat of freedom until another, more Western,
was discovered; and that other will probably be its asylum when it is
hunted down in every other part. Happy it is that the worst of times
may have one refuge still left for humanity. If the Irish resisted
King William, they resisted him on the very same principle that the
English and Scotch resisted King James. The Irish Catholics must have
been the very worst and the most truly unnatural of rebels, if they
had not supported a prince whom they had seen attacked, not for any
designs against their religion or their liberties, but for an extreme
partiality for their sect. Princes otherwise meritorious have violated
the liberties of the people, and have been lawfully deposed for such
violation. I know no human being exempt from the law. I consider
Parliament as the proper judge of kings, and it is necessary that they
should be amenable to it. There is no such thing as governing the
whole body of the people contrary to their inclination. Whenever they
have a feeling they commonly are in the right. Christ appeared in
sympathy with the lowest of the people, and thereby made it a firm and
ruling principle that their welfare was the object of all government.
"In all forms of government the people is the true legislator. The
remote and efficient cause is the consent of the people, either actual
or implied, and such consent is absolutely essential to its validity.
Whiggism did not consist in the support of the power of Parliament or
of any other power, but of the rights of the people. If Parliament
should become an instrument in invading them, it was no better in any
respect, and much worse in some, than any other instrument of
arbitrary power. They who call upon you to belong wholly to the people
are those who wish you to belong to your proper home, to the sphere of
your duty, to the post of your honour. Let the Commons in Parliament
assembled be one and the same thing with the Commons at large. I see
no other way for the preservation of a decent attention to public
interest in the representatives, but the interposition of the body of
the people itself, whenever, it shall appear by some flagrant and
notorious act, by some capital innovation, that those representatives
are going to overleap the fences of the law and to introduce an
arbitrary power. This interposition is a most unpleasant remedy; but
if it be a legal remedy, it is intended on some occasion to be
used--to be used then only when it is evident that nothing else can
hold the Constitution to its true principles. It is not in Parliament
alone that the remedy for parliamentary disorders can be completed;
hardly, indeed, can it begin there. A popular origin cannot therefore
be the characteristic distinction of a popular representative. This
belongs equally to all parts of government, and in all forms. The
virtue, spirit, and essence of a House of Commons consists in its
being the express image of the feelings of the nation. It was not
instituted to be a control upon the people. It was designed as a
control for the people. Privilege of the crown and privilege of
Parliament are only privilege so long as they are exercised for the
benefit of the people. The voice of the people is a voice that is to
be heard, and not the votes and resolutions of the House of Commons.
He would preserve thoroughly every privilege of the people, because it
is a privilege known and written in the law of the land; and he would
support it, not against the crown or the aristocratic party only, but
against the representatives of the people themselves. This was not a
government of balances. It would be a strange thing if two hundred
peers should have it in their power to defeat by their negative what
had been done by the people of England. I have taken my part in
political connections and political quarrels for the purpose of
advancing justice and the dominion of reason, and I hope I shall never
prefer the means, or any feelings growing out of the use of those
means, to the great and substantial end itself. Legislators can do
what lawyers can not, for they have no other rules to bind them but
the great principles of reason and equity and the general sense of
mankind. All human laws are, properly speaking, only declaratory; they
may alter the mode and application, but have no power over the
substance, of original justice. A conservation and secure enjoyment of
our natural rights is the great and ultimate purpose of civil society.
"The great inlet by which a colour for oppression has entered into the
world is by one man's pretending to determine concerning the happiness
of another. I would give a full civil protection, in which I include
an immunity from all disturbance of their public religious worship,
and a power of teaching in schools as well as temples, to Jews,
Mahometans, and even Pagans. The Christian religion itself arose
without establishment, it arose even without toleration, and whilst
its own principles were not tolerated, it conquered all the powers of
darkness, it conquered all the powers of the world. The moment it
began to depart from these principles, it converted the establishment
into tyranny, it subverted its foundation from that very hour. It is
the power of government to prevent much evil; it can do very little
positive good in this, or perhaps in anything else. It is not only so
of the State and statesman, but of all the classes and descriptions of
the rich: they are the pensioners of the poor, and are maintained by
their superfluity. They are under an absolute, hereditary, and
indefeasible dependence on those who labour and are miscalled the
poor. That class of dependent pensioners called the rich is so
extremely small, that if all their throats were cut, and a
distribution made of all they consume in a year, it would not give a
bit of bread and cheese for one night's supper to those who labour,
and who in reality feed both the pensioners and themselves. It is not
in breaking the laws of commerce, which are the laws of nature and
consequently the laws of God, that we are to place our hope of
softening the divine displeasure. It is the law of nature, which is
the law of God."
I cannot resist the inference from these passages that Burke, after
1770, underwent other influences than those of his reputed masters,
the Whigs of 1688. And if we find that strain of unwonted thought in a
man who afterwards gilded the old order of things and wavered as to
toleration and the slave trade, we may expect that the same causes
would operate in France.
When the _Letters of a Pennsylvanian Farmer_ became known in Europe,
Diderot said that it was madness to allow Frenchmen to read such
things, as they could not do it without becoming intoxicated and
changed into different men. But France was impressed by the event more
than by the literature that accompanied it. America had made herself
independent under less provocation than had ever been a motive of
revolt, and the French Government had acknowledged that her cause was
righteous and had gone to war for it. If the king was right in
America, he was utterly wrong at home, and if the Americans acted
rightly, the argument was stronger, the cause was a hundredfold
better, in France itself. All that justified their independence
condemned the Government of their French allies. By the principle that
taxation without representation is robbery, there was no authority so
illegitimate as that of Lewis XVI. The force of that demonstration was
irresistible, and it produced its effect where the example of England
failed. The English doctrine was repelled at the very earliest stage
of the Revolution, and the American was adopted. What the French took
from the Americans was their theory of revolution, not their theory of
government--their cutting, not their sewing. Many French nobles served
in the war, and came home republicans and even democrats by
conviction. It was America that converted the aristocracy to the
reforming policy, and gave leaders to the Revolution. "The American
Revolution," says Washington, "or the peculiar light of the age, seems
to have opened the eyes of almost every nation in Europe, and a spirit
of equal liberty appears fast to be gaining ground everywhere." When
the French officers were leaving, Cooper, of Boston, addressed them in
the language of warning: "Do not let your hopes be inflamed by our
triumphs on this virgin soil. You will carry our sentiments with you,
but if you try to plant them in a country that has been corrupt for
centuries, you will encounter obstacles more formidable than ours. Our
liberty has been won with blood; you will have to shed it in torrents
before liberty can take root in the old world." Adams, after he had
been President of the United States, bitterly regretted the Revolution
which made them independent, because it had given the example to the
French; although he also believed that they had not a single principle
in common.
Nothing, on the contrary, is more certain than that American
principles profoundly influenced France, and determined the course of
the Revolution. It is from America that Lafayette derived the saying
that created a commotion at the time, that resistance is the most
sacred of duties. There also was the theory that political power comes
from those over whom it is exercised, and depends upon their will;
that every authority not so constituted is illegitimate and
precarious; that the past is more a warning than an example; that the
earth belongs to those who are upon it, not to those who are
underneath. These are characteristics common to both Revolutions.
At one time also the French adopted and acclaimed the American notion
that the end of government is liberty, not happiness, or prosperity,
or power, or the preservation of an historic inheritance, or the
adaptation of national law to national character, or the progress of
enlightenment and the promotion of virtue; that the private individual
should not feel the pressure of public authority, and should direct
his life by the influences that are within him, not around him.
And there was another political doctrine which the Americans
transmitted to the French. In old colonial days the executive and the
judicial powers were derived from a foreign source, and the common
purpose was to diminish them. The assemblies were popular in origin
and character, and everything that added to their power seemed to add
security to rights. James Wilson, one of the authors and commentators
of the constitution, informs us that "at the Revolution the same fond
predilection, and the same jealous dislike, existed and prevailed. The
executive, and the judicial as well as the legislative authority, was
now the child of the people, but to the two former the people behaved
like stepmothers. The legislature was still discriminated by excessive
partiality." This preference, historic but irrational, led up
naturally to a single chamber. The people of America and their
delegates in Congress were of opinion that a single Assembly was every
way adequate to the management of their federal concerns, and when the
Senate was invented, Franklin strongly objected. "As to the two
chambers," he wrote, "I am of your opinion that one alone would be
better; but, my dear friend, nothing in human affairs and schemes is
perfect, and perhaps this is the case of our opinions."
Alexander Hamilton was the ablest as well as the most conservative of
the American statesmen. He longed for monarchy, and he desired to
establish a national government and to annihilate state rights. The
American spirit, as it penetrated France, cannot well be described
better than it was by him: "I consider civil liberty, in a genuine,
unadulterated sense, as the greatest of terrestrial blessings. I am
convinced that the whole human race is entitled to it, and that it can
be wrested from no part of them without the blackest and most
aggravated guilt. The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged
for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a
sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the
Divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power."
But when we speak in the gross of the American Revolution we combine
different and discordant things. From the first agitation in 1761 to
the Declaration of Independence, and then to the end of the war in
1782, the Americans were aggressive, violent in their language, fond
of abstractions, prolific of doctrines universally applicable and
universally destructive. It is the ideas of those earlier days that
roused the attention of France, and were imported by Lafayette,
Noailles, Lameth, and the leaders of the future revolution who had
beheld the lowering of the British flag at Yorktown. The America of
their experience was the America of James Otis, of Jefferson, of _The
Rights of Man_.
A change followed in 1787, when the Convention drew up the
Constitution. It was a period of construction, and every effort was
made, every scheme was invented, to curb the inevitable democracy. The
members of that assembly were, on the whole, eminently cautious and
sensible men. They were not men of extraordinary parts, and the genius
of Hamilton failed absolutely to impress them. Some of their most
memorable contrivances proceeded from no design, but were merely half
measures and mutual concessions. Seward has pointed out this
distinction between the revolutionary epoch and the constituent epoch
that succeeded: "The rights asserted by our forefathers were not
peculiar to themselves. They were the common rights or mankind. The
basis of the Constitution was laid broader by far than the
superstructure which the conflicting interests and prejudices of the
day suffered to be erected. The Constitution and laws of the Federal
Government did not practically extend those principles throughout the
new system of government; but they were plainly promulgated in the
Declaration of Independence."
Now, although France was deeply touched by the American Revolution, it
was not affected by the American Constitution. It underwent the
disturbing influence, not the conservative.
The Constitution, framed in the summer of 1787, came into operation in
March 1789, and nobody knew how it worked, when the crisis came in
France. The debates, which explain every intention and combination,
remained long hidden from the world. Moreover, the Constitution has
become something more than the original printed paper. Besides
amendments, it has been interpreted by the courts, modified by
opinion, developed in some directions, and tacitly altered in others.
Some of its most valued provisions have been acquired in this way, and
were not yet visible when the French so greatly needed the guiding
lessons of other men's experience. Some of the restrictions on the
governing power were not fully established at first.
The most important of these is the action of the Supreme Court in
annulling unconstitutional laws. The Duke of Wellington said to Bunsen
that by this institution alone the United States made up for all the
defects of their government. Since Chief Justice Marshall, the
judiciary undoubtedly obtained immense authority, which Jefferson, and
others besides, believed to be unconstitutional; for the Constitution
itself gives no such power. The idea had grown up in the States,
chiefly, I think, in Virginia. At Richmond, in 1782, Judge Wythe
said: "Tyranny has been sapped, the departments kept within their own
spheres, the citizens protected, and general liberty promoted. But
this beneficial result attains to higher perfection when, those who
hold the purse and the sword differing as to the powers which each may
exercise, the tribunals, who hold neither, are called upon to declare
the law impartially between them, if the whole legislature--an event
to be deprecated--should attempt to overleap the boundaries prescribed
to them by the people, I, in administering the justice of the country,
will meet the united powers at my seat in this tribunal, and, pointing
to the Constitution, will say to them: 'Here is the limit of your
authority; hither shall you go, but no further.'" The Virginian
legislature gave way, and repealed the act.
After the Federal Constitution was drawn up, Hamilton, in the
seventy-eighth number of the _Federalist_, argued that the power
belonged to the judiciary; but it was not constitutionally recognised
until 1801. "This," said Madison, "makes the judiciary department
paramount, in fact, to the legislature, which was never intended, and
can never be proper. In a government whose vital principle is
responsibility, it never will be allowed that the legislative and
executive departments should be completely subjected to the judiciary,
in which that characteristic feature is so faintly seen." Wilson, on
the other hand, justified the practice on the principle of the higher
law: "Parliament may, unquestionably, be controlled by natural or
revealed law, proceeding from divine authority. Is not this superior
authority binding upon the courts of justice? When the courts of
justice obey the superior authority, it cannot be said with propriety
that they control the inferior one; they only declare, as it is their
duty to declare, that this inferior one is controlled by the other,
which is superior. They do not repeal an act of Parliament; they
pronounce it void, because contrary to an overruling law." Thus the
function of the judiciary to be a barrier against democracy, which,
according to Tocqueville, it is destined to be, was not apparent. In
the same manner religious liberty, which has become so much identified
with the United States, is a thing which grew by degrees, and was not
to be found imposed by the letter of the law.
The true natural check on absolute democracy is the federal system,
which limits the central government by the powers reserved, and the
state governments by the powers they have ceded. It is the one
immortal tribute of America to political science, for state rights are
at the same time the consummation and the guard of democracy. So much
so that an officer wrote, a few months before Bull Run: "The people in
the south are evidently unanimous in the opinion that slavery is
endangered by the current of events, and it is useless to attempt to
alter that opinion. As our government is founded on the will of the
people, when that will is fixed our government is powerless." Those
are the words of Sherman, the man who, by his march through Georgia,
cut the Confederacy into two. Lincoln himself wrote, at the same time:
"I declare that the maintenance inviolate of the rights of the states,
and especially the right of each state to order and control its own
domestic institutions according to its own judgment exclusively, is
essential to that balance of powers on which the perfection and
endurance of our political fabric depend." Such was the force with
which state rights held the minds of abolitionists on the eve of the
war that bore them down.
At the Revolution there were many Frenchmen who saw in federalism the
only way to reconcile liberty and democracy, to establish government
on contract, and to rescue the country from the crushing preponderance
of Paris and the Parisian populace. I do not mean the Girondins, but
men of opinions different from theirs, and, above all, Mirabeau. He
planned to save the throne by detaching the provinces from the frenzy
of the capital, and he declared that the federal system is alone
capable of preserving freedom in any great empire. The idea did not
grow up under American influence; for no man was more opposed to it
than Lafayette; and the American witness of the Revolution, Morris,
denounced federalism as a danger to France.
Apart from the Constitution, the political thought of America
influenced the French next to their own. And it was not all
speculation, but a system for which men died, which had proved
entirely practical, and strong enough to conquer all resistance, with
the sanction and encouragement of Europe. It displayed to France a
finished model of revolution, both in thought and action, and showed
that what seemed extreme and subversive in the old world, was
compatible with good and wise government, with respect for social
order, and the preservation of national character and custom. The
ideas which captured and convulsed the French people were mostly
ready-made for them, and much that is familiar to you now, much of
that which I have put before you from other than French sources, will
meet us again next week with the old faces, when we come to the
States-General.
III
THE SUMMONS OF THE STATES-GENERAL
The condition of France alone did not bring about the overthrow of the
monarchy and the convulsion that ensued. For the sufferings of the
people were not greater than they had been before; the misgovernment
and oppression were less, and a successful war with England had
largely wiped out the humiliations inflicted by Chatham.
But the confluence of French theory with American example caused the
Revolution to break out, not in an excess of irritation and despair,
but in a moment of better feeling between the nation and the king. The
French were not mere reckless innovators; they were confiding
followers, and many of the ideas with which they made their venture
were those in which Burke agreed with Hamilton, and with his own
illustrious countrymen, Adam Smith and Sir William Jones. When he said
that, compared to England, the government of France was slavery, and
that nothing but a revolution could restore European liberty,
Frenchmen, saying the same thing, and acting upon it, were unconscious
of extravagance, and might well believe that they were obeying
precepts stored in the past by high and venerable authority. Beyond
that common ground, they fell back on native opinion in which there
was wide divergence, and an irrepressible conflict arose. We have to
deal with no unlikely motives, with no unheard of theories, and, on
the whole, with convinced and average men.
The States-General were convoked because there was no other way of
obtaining money for the public need. The deficit was a record of bad
government, and the first practical object was the readjustment of
taxes. From the king's accession, the revival of the old and neglected
institution had been kept before the country as a remedy, not for
financial straits only, but for all the ills of France.
The imposing corporation of the judiciary had constantly opposed the
Crown, and claimed to subject its acts to the judgment of the law. The
higher clergy had raised objections to Turgot, to Necker, to the
emancipation of Protestants; and the nobles became the most active of
all the parties of reform. But the great body of the people had borne
their trouble in patience. They possessed no recognised means of
expressing sentiments. There was no right of public meeting, no
liberty for the periodical press; and the privileged newspapers were
so tightly swaddled in their official character that they had nothing
to say even of an event like the oath in the Tennis Court. The
feelings that stirred the multitude did not appear, unless they
appeared in the shape of disorder. Without it France remained an
unknown quantity. The king felt the resistance of the privileged and
interested classes which was the source of his necessity, but he was
not apprehensive of a national opposition. He was prepared to rely on
the Third Estate with hopefulness, if not with confidence, and to pay
a very high price for their support. In a certain measure their
interest was the same. The penury of the State came from the fact that
more than half the property of France was not taxed in its proportion,
and it was essential for the government to abolish the exception, and
to bring nobles and clergy to surrender their privilege, and pay like
the rest. To that extent the object of the king was to do away with
privilege and to introduce equality before the law. So far the Commons
went along with him. They would be relieved of a heavy burden if they
ceased to pay the share of those who were exempt, and rejected the
time-honoured custom that the poor should bear taxation for the rich.
An alliance, therefore, was indicated and natural. But the extinction
of privilege, which for monarchy and democracy alike meant fiscal
equality, meant for the democracy a great deal more. Besides the money
which they were required to pay in behalf of the upper class and for
their benefit and solace, money had to be paid to them. Apart from
rent for house or land, there were payments due to them proceeding
from the time, the obscure and distant time, when power went with
land, and the focal landholder was the local government, the ruler and
protector of the people, and was paid accordingly. And there was
another category of claims, proceeding indirectly from the same
historic source, consisting of commutation and compensation for
ancient rights, and having therefore a legal character, founded upon
contract, not upon force.
Every thinking politician knew that the first of these categories, the
beneficial rights that were superfluous and oppressive, could not be
maintained, and that the nobles would be made to give up not only that
form of privilege which consisted in exemption from particular taxes,
but that composed of superannuated demands in return for work no
longer done, or value given. Those, on the other hand, which were not
simply mediaeval, but based upon contract, would be treated as lawful
property, and would have to be redeemed. Privilege, in the eyes of the
state, was the right of evading taxes. To the politician it meant,
furthermore, the right of imposing taxes. For the rural democracy it
had a wider significance. To them, all these privileges were products
of the same principle, ruins of the same fabric. They were relics and
remnants of feudalism, and feudalism meant power given to land and
denied to capital and industry. It meant class government, the
negation of the very idea of the state and of the nation; it meant
conquest and subjugation by a foreign invader. None denied that many
great families had won their spurs in the service of their country;
everybody indeed knew that the noblest of all, Montmorency, bore the
arms of France because, at the victory of Bouvines, where their
ancestor was desperately wounded, the king laid his finger on the
wound and drew with his blood the lilies upon his shield. When we
come, presently, to the Abbe Sieyes, we shall see how firmly men
believed that the nobles were, in the mass, Franks, Teutonic tyrants,
and spoilers of the Celtic native. They intended that feudalism should
not be trimmed but uprooted, as the cause of much that was infinitely
odious, and as a thing absolutely incompatible with public policy,
social interests, and right reason. That men should be made to bear
suffering for the sake of what could only be explained by very early
history and very yellow parchments was simply irrational to a
generation which received its notion of life from Turgot, Adam Smith,
or Franklin.
Although there were three interpretations of feudal privilege, and
consequently a dangerous problem in the near future, the first step
was an easy one, and consisted in the appeal by the Crown to the
Commons for aid in regenerating the State. Like other princes of his
time, Lewis XVI. was a reforming monarch. At his accession, his first
choice of a minister was Machault, known to have entertained a vast
scheme of change, to be attempted whenever the throne should be
occupied by a serious prince. Later, he appointed Turgot, the most
profound and thorough reformer of the century. He appointed
Malesherbes, one of the weakest but one of the most enlightened of
public men; and after having, at the Coronation, taken an oath to
persecute, he gave office to Necker, a Protestant, an alien, and a
republican. When he had begun, through Malesherbes, to remove
religious disabilities, he said to him, "Now you have been a
Protestant, and I declare you a Jew"; and began to prepare a measure
for the relief of Jews, who, wherever they went, were forced to pay
the same toll as a pig. He carried out a large and complicated scheme
of law reform; and he achieved the independence of revolted America.
In later days the Elector of Cologne complained to an _emigre_ that
his king's policy had been deplorable, and that, having promoted
resistance to authority in the Colonies, in Holland, and in Brabant,
he had no claim on the support of European monarchs.
But the impulse in the direction of liberal improvement was
intermittent, and was checked by a natural diffidence and infirmity of
purpose. The messenger who was to summon Machault was recalled as he
mounted his horse. Turgot was sacrificed to gratify the queen.
Necker's second administration would have begun a year and a half
earlier, but, at the last moment, his enemies intervened. The war
minister, Saint Germain, was agreeable to the king, and he wished to
keep him. "But what can I do?" he wrote; "his enemies are bent on his
dismissal, and I must yield to the majority." Maurepas, at his death,
left a paper on which were the names of four men whom he entreated his
master not to employ. Lewis bestowed the highest offices upon them
all. He regarded England with the aversion with which Chatham, and at
that time even Fox, looked upon France, and he went to war in the just
hope of avenging the disgrace of the Seven Years' War, but from no
sympathy with the American cause. When he was required to retrench his
personal expenditure, he objected, and insisted that much of the loss
should be made to fall on his pensioners. The liberal concessions
which he allowed were in many cases made at the expense, not of the
Crown, but of powers that were obstructing the Crown. By the abolition
of torture he incurred no loss, but curbed the resources of opposing
magistrates. When he emancipated the Protestants and made a Swiss
Calvinist his principal adviser, he displeased the clergy; but he
cared little for clerical displeasure. The bishops, finding that he
took no notice of them, disappeared from his _levee_. He objected to
the appointment of French cardinals. English travellers at Versailles,
Romilly and Valpy, observed that he was inattentive at mass, and
talked and laughed before all the court. At the Council he would fall
asleep, and when the discussion was distasteful, he used to snore
louder than when he slept. He said to Necker that he desired the
States-General because he wanted a guide. When, in 1788, after
skirmishing with magistrates and prelates, he took the memorable
resolution to call in the outer people, to compel a compromise with
the class that filled his court, that constituted society, that ruled
opinion, it was the act of a man destitute of energy, and gifted with
an uncertain and indistinct enlightenment. And Necker said, "You may
lend a man your ideas, you cannot lend him your strength of will."
The enterprise was far beyond the power and quality of his mind, but
the lesson of his time was not lost upon him, and he had learnt
something since the days when he spoke the unchanging language of
absolutism. He showed another spirit when he emancipated the serfs of
the Crown, when he introduced provincial and village councils, when he
pronounced that to confine local government to landowners was to
offend a still larger class, when he invited assistance in reforming
the criminal code in order that the result might be the work, not of
experts only, but of the public. All this was genuine conviction. He
was determined that the upper class should lose its fiscal privileges
with as little further detriment as possible. And, to accomplish this
necessary and deliberate purpose, he offered terms to the Commons of
France such as no monarch ever proposed to his subjects. He declared
in later days, and had a right to declare, that it was he who had
taken the first step to concert with the French people a permanent
constitution, the abolition of arbitrary power, of pecuniary
privilege, of promotion apart from merit, of taxation without consent.
When he heard that the Notables had given only one vote in favour of
increased representation of the Third Estate, he said, "You can add
mine." Malouet, the most high-minded and sagacious statesman of the
Revolution, testifies to his sincerity, and declares that the king
fully shared his opinions.
The tributary elements of a free constitution which were granted by
Lewis XVI., not in consultation with deputies, not even always with
public support, included religious toleration, Habeas Corpus, equal
incidence of taxes, abolition of torture, decentralisation and local
self-government, freedom of the press, universal suffrage, election
without official candidates or influence, periodical convocation of
parliament, right of voting supplies, of initiating legislation, of
revising the constitution, responsibility of ministers, double
representation of the Commons at the States-General. All these
concessions were acts of the Crown, yielding to dictates of policy
more than to popular demand. It is said that power is an object of
such ardent desire to man, that the voluntary surrender of it is
absurd in psychology and unknown in history. Lewis XVI. no doubt
calculated the probabilities of loss and gain, and persuaded himself
that his action was politic even more than generous. The Prussian
envoy rightly described him in a despatch of July 31, 1789. He says
that the king was willing to weaken the executive at home, in order to
strengthen it abroad; if the ministers lost by a better regulated
administration, the nation would gain by it in resource, and a limited
authority in a more powerful state seemed preferable to absolute
authority which was helpless from its unpopularity and the irreparable
disorder of finance. He was resolved to submit the arbitrary
_government of his ancestors to the rising forces of the_ day. The
royal initiative was pushed so far on the way to established freedom
that it was exhausted, and the rest was left to the nation. As the
elections were not influenced, as the instructions were not inspired,
the deliberations were not guided or controlled. The king abdicated
before the States-General. He assigned so much authority to the new
legislature that none remained with the Crown, and its powers, thus
practically suspended, were never recovered. The rival classes, that
only the king could have reconciled and restrained, were abandoned to
the fatal issue of a trial of strength.
In 1786 the annual deficit amounted to between four and five millions,
and the season for heroic remedies had evidently come. The artful and
evasive confusion of accounts that shrouded the secret could not be
maintained, and the minister of finance, Calonne, convoked the
Notables for February 1787. The Notables were a selection of important
personages, chiefly of the upper order, without legal powers or
initiative. It was hoped that they would strengthen the hands of the
government, and that what they agreed to would be accepted by the
class to which they belonged. It was an experiment to avert the evil
day of the States-General. For the States-General, which had not been
seen for one hundred and seventy-five years, were the features of a
bygone stage of political life, and could neither be revived as they
once had been, nor adapted to modern society. If they imposed taxes,
they would impose conditions, and they were an auxiliary who might
become a master. The Notables were soon found inadequate to the
purpose, and the minister, having failed to control them, was
dismissed. Necker, his rival and obvious successor, was sent out of
the way, and the Archbishop of Toulouse, afterwards of Sens, who was
appointed in his place, got rid of the Assembly. There was nothing
left to fall back upon but the dreaded States-General. Lafayette had
demanded them at the meeting of the Notables, and the demand was now
repeated far and wide.
On August 8, 1788, the king summoned the States-General for the
following year, to the end, as he proclaimed, that the nation might
settle its own government in perpetuity. The words signified that the
absolute monarchy of 1788 would make way for a representative monarchy
in 1789. In what way this was to be done, and how the States would be
constituted, was unknown. The public were invited to offer
suggestions, and the press was practically made free for publications
that were not periodical. Necker, the inevitable minister of the new
order of things, was immediately nominated to succeed the Archbishop,
and the funds rose 30 per cent in one day. He was a foreigner,
independent of French tradition and ways of thought, who not only
stood aloof from the Catholics, as a Genevese, but also from the
prevailing freethinkers, for Priestley describes him as nearly the
only believer in religion whom he found in intellectual society at
Paris. He was the earliest foreign statesman who studied and
understood the modern force of opinion; and he identified public
opinion with credit, as we should say, with the city. He took the
views of capitalists as the most sensitive record of public
confidence; and as Paris was the headquarters of business, he
contributed, in spite of his declared federalism, to that predominance
of the centre which became fatal to liberty and order.
Necker was familiar with the working of republican institutions, and
he was an admirer of the British model; but the king would not hear of
going to school to the people whom he had so recently defeated, and
who owed their disgrace as much to political as to military
incapacity. Consequently Necker repressed his zeal in politics, and
was not eager for the States-General. They would never have been
wanted, he said, if he had been called to succeed Calonne, and had had
the managing of the Notables. He was glad now that they should serve
to bring the entire property of the country, on equal terms, under the
tax-gatherer, and if that could have been effected at once, by an
overwhelming pressure of public feeling, his practical spirit would
not have hungered for further changes.
The _Third_ Estate was _Invoked_ for a _great fiscal_ operation. If it
brought the upper class to the necessary sense of their own
obligations and the national claims, that was enough for the keeper of
the purse, and he would have deprecated the intrusion of other
formidable and absorbing objects, detrimental to his own. Beyond that
was danger, but the course was clear towards obtaining from the
greater assembly what he would have extracted from the less if he had
held office in 1787. That is the secret of Necker's unforeseen
weakness in the midst of so much power, and of his sterility when the
crisis broke and it was discovered that the force which had been
calculated equal to the carrying of a modest and obvious reform was as
the rush of Niagara, and that France was in the resistless rapids.
Everything depended on the manner in which the government decided that
the States should be composed, elected, and conducted. To pronounce on
this, Necker caused the Notables to be convoked again, exposed the
problem, and desired their opinion. The nobles had been lately active
on the side of liberal reforms, and it seemed possible that their
reply might relieve him of a dreaded responsibility and prevent a
conflict. The Notables gave their advice. They resolved that the
Commons should be elected, virtually, by universal suffrage without
conditions of eligibility; that the parish priests should be electors
and eligible; that the lesser class of nobles should be represented
like the greater. They extended the franchise to the unlettered
multitude, because the danger which they apprehended came from the
middle class, not from the lower. But they voted, by three to one,
that each order should be equal in numbers. The Count of Provence, the
king's next brother, went with the minority, and voted that the
deputies of the Commons should be as numerous as those of the two
other orders together. This became the burning question. If the
Commons did not predominate, there was no security that the other
orders would give way. On the other hand, by the important innovation
of admitting the parish clergy, and those whom we should call
provincial gentry, a great concession was made to the popular element.
The antagonism between the two branches of the clergy, and between the
two branches of the _noblesse_, was greater than that between the
inferior portion of each and the Third Estate, and promised a
contingent to the liberal cause. It turned out, at the proper time,
that the two strongest leaders of the democracy were, one, an ancient
noble; the other, a canon of the cathedral of Chartres. The Notables
concluded their acceptable labours on December 12. On the 5th the
magistrates who formed the parliament of Paris, after solemnly
enumerating the great constitutional principles, entreated the king to
establish them as the basis of all future legislation. The position of
the government was immensely simplified. The walls of the city had
fallen, and it was doubtful where any serious resistance would come
from.
Meantime, the agitation in the provinces, and the explosion of pent-up
feeling that followed the unlicensed printing of political tracts,
showed that public opinion moved faster than that of the two great
conservative bodies. It became urgent that the Government should come
to an early and resolute decision, and should occupy ground that might
be held against the surging democracy. Necker judged that the position
would be impregnable if he stood upon the lines drawn by the Notables,
and he decided that the Commons should be equal to either order
singly, and not jointly to the two. In consultation with a
statesmanlike prelate, the Archbishop of Bordeaux, he drew up and
printed a report, refusing the desired increase. But as he sat
anxiously watching the winds and the tide, he began to doubt; and when
letters came, warning him that the nobles would be butchered if the
decision went in their favour, he took alarm. He said to his friends,
"If we do not multiply the Commons by two, they will multiply
themselves by ten." When the Archbishop saw him again at Christmas,
Necker assured him that the Government was no longer strong enough to
resist the popular demand. But he was also determined that the three
houses should vote separately, that the Commons should enjoy no
advantage from their numbers in any discussion where privilege was at
stake, or the interest of classes was not identical. He hoped that the
nobles would submit to equal taxation of their own accord, and that he
would stand between them and any exorbitant claim of equal political
power.
On December 27 Necker's scheme was adopted by the Council. There was
some division of opinion; but the king overruled it, and the queen,
who was present, showed, without speaking, that she was there to
support the measure. By this momentous act Lewis XVI., without being
conscious of its significance, went over to the democracy. He said, in
plain terms, to the French people: "Afford me the aid I require, so
far as we have a common interest, and for that definite and
appropriated assistance you shall have a princely reward. For you
shall at once have a constitution of your own making, which shall
limit the power of the Crown, leaving untouched the power and the
dignity and the property of the upper classes, beyond what is
involved in an equal share of taxation." But in effect he said; "Let
us combine to deprive the aristocracy of those privileges which are
injurious to the Crown, whilst we retain those which are offensive
only to the people." It was a tacit compact, of which the terms and
limits were not defined; and where one thought of immunities, the
other was thinking of oppression. The organisation of society required
to be altered and remodelled from end to end to sustain a constitution
founded on the principle of liberty. It was no arduous problem to
adjust relations between the people and the king. The deeper question
was between the people and the aristocracy. Behind a political reform
there was a social revolution, for the only liberty that could avail
was liberty founded on equality. Malouet, who was at this moment
Necker's best adviser, said to him: "You have made the Commons equal
in influence to the other orders. Another revolution has to follow,
and it is for you to accomplish it--the levelling of onerous
privilege." Necker had no ambition of the kind, and he distinctly
guarded privilege in all matters but taxation.
The resolution of the king in Council was received with loud applause;
and the public believed that everything they had demanded was now
obtained, or was at least within reach. The doubling of the Commons
was illusory if they were to have no opportunity of making their
numbers tell. The Count of Provence, afterwards Lewis XVIII., had
expressly argued that the old States-General were useless because the
Third Estate was not suffered to prevail in them. Therefore he urged
that the three orders should deliberate and vote as one, and that the
Commons should possess the majority. It was universally felt that this
was the real meaning of the double representation, and that there was
a logic in it which could not be resisted. The actual power vested in
the Commons by the great concession exceeded their literal and legal
power, and it was accepted and employed accordingly.
The mode of election was regulated on January 24. There were to be
three hundred deputies for the clergy, three hundred for the nobles,
six hundred for the Commons. There were to be no restrictions and no
exclusions; but whereas the greater personages voted directly, the
vote of the lower classes was indirect; and the rule for the Commons
was that one hundred primary voters chose an elector. Besides the
deputy, there was the deputy's deputy, held in reserve, ready in case
of vacancy to take his place. It was on this peculiar device of
eventual representatives that the Commons relied, if their numbers had
not been doubled. They would have called up their substitutes. The
rights and charters of the several provinces were superseded, and all
were placed on the same level.
A more sincere and genuine election has never been held. And on the
whole it was orderly. The clergy were uneasy, and the nobles more
openly alarmed. But the country in general had confidence in what was
coming; and some of the most liberal and advanced and outspoken
manifestations proceeded from aristocratic and ecclesiastical
constituencies. On February 9 the Venetian envoy reports that the
clergy and nobles are ready to accept the principle of equality in
taxation. The elections were going on for more than two months, from
February to the beginning of May.
In accordance with ancient custom, when a deputy was a plenipotentiary
more than a representative, it was ordained that the preliminary of
every election was the drawing up of instructions. Every corner of
France was swept and searched for its ideas. The village gave them to
its elector, and they were compared and consolidated by the electors
in the process of choosing their member. These instructions, the
characteristic bequest to its successors of a society at the point of
death, were often the work of conspicuous public men, such as Malouet,
Lanjuinais, Dupont, the friend of Turgot and originator of the
commercial treaty of 1786; and one paper, drawn up by Sieyes, was
circulated all over France by the duke of Orleans.
In this way, by the lead which was taken by eminent and experienced
men, there is an appearance of unanimity. All France desired the
essential institutions of limited monarchy, in the shape of
representation and the division of power, and foreshadowed the charter
of 1814. There is scarcely a trace of the spirit of departing
absolutism; there is not a sign of the coming republic. It is agreed
that precedent is dead, and the world just going to begin. There are
no clear views on certain grave matters of detail, on an Upper House,
Church and State, and primary education. Free schools, progressive
taxation, the extinction of slavery, of poverty, of ignorance, are
among the things advised. The privileged orders are prepared for a
vast surrender in regard to taxes, and nobody seems to associate the
right of being represented in future parliaments with the possession
of property. On nine-tenths of all that is material to a constitution
there is a general agreement. The one broad division is that the
Commons wish that the States-General shall form a single united
Assembly, and the other orders wish for three. But on this supreme
issue the Commons are all agreed, and the others are not. An ominous
rift appears, and we already perceive the minority of nobles and
priests, who, in the hour of conflict, were to rule the fate of
European society. From all these papers, the mandate of united France,
it was the function of true statesmanship to distil the essence of a
sufficient freedom.
These instructions were intended to be imperative. Nine years before,
Burke, when he retired from the contest at Bristol, had defined the
constitutional doctrine on constituency and member; and Charles Sumner
said that he legislated when he made that speech. But the ancient
view, on which instructions are founded, made the deputy the agent of
the deputing power, and much French history turns on it. At first the
danger was unfelt; for the instructions were often compiled by the
deputy himself, who was to execute them. They were a pledge even more
than an order.
The nation had responded to the royal appeal, and there was agreement
between the offer and the demand. The upper classes had opposed and
resisted the Crown; the people were eager to support it, and it was
expected that the first steps would be taken together. The comparative
moderation and serenity of the Instructions disguised the unappeasable
conflict of opinion and the furious passion that raged below.
The very cream of the upper and middle class were elected; and the
Court, in its prosperous complacency, abandoned to their wisdom the
task of creating the new institutions and permanently settling the
financial trouble. It persisted in non-interference, and had no policy
but expectation. The initiative passed to every private member. The
members consisted of new men, without connection or party
organisation. They wanted time to feel their way, and missed a
moderator and a guide. The governing power ceased, for the moment, to
serve the supreme purpose of government; and monarchy transformed
itself into anarchy to see what would come of it, and to avoid
committing itself on either side against the class by which it was
always surrounded or the class which seemed ready with its alliance.
The Government renounced the advantage which the elections and the
temperate instructions gave them; and in the hope that the elect would
be at least as reasonable as the electors, they threw away their
greatest opportunity. There was a disposition to underrate dangers
that were not on the surface. Even Mirabeau, who, if not a deep
thinker, was a keen observer, imagined that the entire mission of the
States-General might have been accomplished in a week. Few men saw the
ambiguity hidden in the term Privilege, and the immense difference
that divided fiscal change from social change. In attacking feudalism,
which was the survival of barbarism, the middle class designed to
overthrow the condition of society which gave power as well as
property to a favoured minority. The assault on the restricted
distribution of power involved an assault on the concentration of
wealth. The connection of the two ideas is the secret motive of the
Revolution. At that time the law by which power follows property,
which has been called the most important discovery made by man since
the invention of printing, was not clearly known. But the underground
forces at work were recognised by the intelligent conservatives, and
they were assuming the defensive, in preparation for the hour when
they would be deserted by the king. It was therefore impossible that
the object for which the States-General were summoned should be
attained while they were divided into three. Either they must be
dissolved, or the thing which the middle-class deputies could not
accomplish by use of forms would be attempted by the lower class,
their masters and employers, by use of force.
Before the meeting Malouet once more approached the minister with
weighty counsel. He said: "You now know the wishes of France; you know
the instructions, you do not know the deputies. Do not leave all
things to the arbitrament of the unknown. Convert at once the demands
of the people into a constitution, and give them force of law. Act
while you have unfettered power of action. Act while your action will
be hailed as the most magnificent concession ever granted by a monarch
to a loyal and expectant nation. To-day you are supreme and safe. It
may be too late to-morrow."
In particular, Malouet advised that the Government should regulate the
verification of powers, leaving only contested returns to the judgment
of the representatives. Necker abided by his meditated neutrality, and
preferred that the problem should work itself out with entire freedom.
He would not take sides lest he should offend one party without being
sure of the other, and forfeit his chance of becoming the accepted
arbitrator. Whilst, by deciding nothing, he kept the enemy at bay, the
upper classes might yet reach the wise conclusion that, in the midst
of so much peril to royalty and to themselves, it was time to place
the interest of the state before their own, and to accept the duties
and the burdens of undistinguished men.
Neither party could yield. The Commons could not fail to see that time
was on their side, and that, by compelling the other orders to merge
with them, they secured the downfall of privilege and played the game
of the court. The two other orders were, by the imperative mandate of
many constituencies, prohibited from voting in common. Their
resistance was legitimate, and could only be overcome by the
intervention either of the Crown or the people. Their policy might
have been justified if they had at once made their surrender, and had
accomplished with deliberation in May what had to be done with tumult
in August. With these problems and these perils before them, the
States-General met on that memorable 5th of May. Necker, preferring
the abode of financiers, wished them to meet at Paris; and four or
five other places were proposed. At last the king, breaking silence,
said that it could be only at Versailles, on account of his hunting.
At the time he saw no cause for alarm in the proximity of the capital.
Since then, the disturbances in one or two places, and the open
language of some of the electors, had begun to make him swerve.
On the opening day the queen was received with offensive silence; but
she acknowledged a belated cheer with such evident gladness and with
such stately grace that applause followed her. The popular groups of
deputies were cheered as they passed--all but the Commons of Provence,
for they had Mirabeau among them. He alone was hissed. Two ladies who
watched the procession from the same window were the daughter of
Necker and the wife of the Foreign Minister, Montmorin. One thought
with admiration that she was a witness of the greatest scene in modern
history; and the other was sad with evil forebodings. Both were right;
but the feeling of confidence and enthusiasm pervaded the crowd. Near
relations of my own were at Rome in 1846, during the excitement at the
reforms of the new Pope, who, at that moment, was the most popular
sovereign in Europe. They asked an Italian lady who was with them why
all the demonstrations only made her more melancholy. She answered:
"Because I was at Versailles in 1789."
Barentin, the minister who had opposed Necker's plans and viewed the
States-General with apprehension and disgust, spoke after the king. He
was a French judge, with no heart for any form of government but the
ancient one enjoyed by France. Nevertheless he admitted that joint
deliberation was the reasonable solution. He added that it could only
be adopted by common consent; and he urged the two orders to sacrifice
their right of exemption. Necker perplexed his hearers by receding
from the ground which the Chancellor had taken. He assured the two
orders that they need not apprehend absorption in the third if, while
voting separately, they executed the promised surrender. He spoke as
their protector, on the condition that they submitted to the common
law, and paid their taxes in arithmetical proportion. He implied, but
did not say, that what they refused to the Crown would be taken by the
people. In his financial statement he under-estimated the deficit, and
he said nothing of the Constitution. The great day ended badly. The
deputies were directed to hand in their returns to the Master of
Ceremonies, an official of whom we shall soon see more. But the Master
of Ceremonies was not acceptable to the Commons, because he had
compelled them to withdraw, the day before, from their places in the
nave of the church. Therefore the injunction was disregarded; and the
verification of powers, which the Government might have regulated, was
left to the deputies themselves, and became the lever by which the
more numerous order overthrew the monarchy, and carried to an end, in
seven weeks, the greatest constitutional struggle that has ever been
fought out in the world by speech alone.
IV
THE MEETING OF THE STATES-GENERAL
The argument of the drama which opened on May 6, 1789, and closed on
June 27, is this:--The French people had been called to the enjoyment
of freedom by every voice they heard--by the king; by the notables,
who proposed unrestricted suffrage; by the supreme judiciary, who
proclaimed the future Constitution; by the clergy and the aristocracy,
in the most solemn pledges of the electoral period; by the British
example, celebrated by Montesquieu and Voltaire; by the more cogent
example of America; by the national classics, who declared, with a
hundred tongues, that all authority must be controlled, that the
masses must be rescued from degradation, and the individual from
constraint.
When the Commons appeared at Versailles, they were there to claim an
inheritance of which, by universal consent, they had been wrongfully
deprived. They were not arrayed against the king, who had been already
brought to submission by blows not dealt by them. They desired to make
terms with those to whom he was ostensibly opposed. There could be no
real freedom for them until they were as free on the side of the
nobles as on that of the Crown. The modern absolutism of the monarch
had surrendered; but the ancient owners of the soil remained, with
their exclusive position in the State, and a complicated system of
honours and exactions which humiliated the middle class and pauperised
the lower. The educated democracy, acting for themselves, might have
been content with the retrenchment of those privileges which put them
at a disadvantage. But the rural population were concerned with every
fragment of obsolete feudalism that added to the burden of their
lives.
The two classes were undivided. Together they had elected their
deputies, and the cleavage between the political and the social
democrat, which has become so great a fact in modern society, was
scarcely perceived. The same common principle, the same comprehensive
term, composed the policy of both. They demanded liberty, both in the
State and in society, and required that oppression should cease,
whether exercised in the name of the king or in the name of the
aristocracy. In a word, they required equality as well as liberty, and
sought deliverance from feudalism and from absolutism at the same
time. And equality was the most urgent and prominent claim of the two,
because the king, virtually, had given way, but the nobles had not.
The battle that remained to be fought, and at once commenced, was
between the Commons and the nobles; that is, between people doomed to
poverty by the operation of law, and people who were prosperous at
their expense. And as there were men who would perish from want while
the laws remained unchanged, and others who would be ruined by their
repeal, the strife was deadly.
The real object of assault was not the living landlord, but the
unburied past. It had little to do with socialism, or with high rents,
bad times, and rapacious proprietors. Apart from all this was the hope
of release from irrational and indefensible laws, such as that by
which a patrician's land paid three francs where the plebeian's paid
fourteen, because one was noble and the other was not, and it was an
elementary deduction from the motives of liberal desire.
The elections had made it unexpectedly evident that when one part of
territorial wealth had been taken by the State, another would be taken
by the people; and that a free community, making its own laws, would
not submit to exactions imposed of old by the governing class on a
defenceless population. When the notables advised that every man
should have a vote, this consequence was not clear to them. It was
perceived as things went on, and no provision for aristocratic
interests was included in the popular demands.
In the presence of imminent peril, the privileged classes closed their
ranks, and pressed the king to resist changes sure to be injurious to
them. They became a Conservative party. The court was on their side,
with the Count d'Artois at its head, and the queen and her immediate
circle.
The king remained firm in the belief that popularity is the best form
of authority, and he relied on the wholesome dread of democracy to
make the rich aristocrats yield to his wishes. As long as the Commons
exerted the inert pressure of delay, he watched the course of events.
When at the end of five tedious and unprofitable weeks they began
their attack, he was driven slowly, and without either confidence or
sympathy, to take his stand with the nobles, and to shrink from the
indefinite change that was impending.
When the Commons met to deliberate on the morning of the 6th of May,
the deputies were unknown to each other. It was necessary to proceed
with caution, and to occupy ground on which they could not be divided.
Their unanimity was out of danger so long as nothing more complex was
discussed than the verification of powers. The other orders resolved
at once that each should examine its own returns. But this vote, which
the nobles carried by a majority of 141, obtained in the clergy a
majority of only 19. It was evident at once that the party of
privilege was going asunder, and that the priests were nearly as well
inclined to the Commons as to the _noblesse_. It became advisable to
give them time, to discard violence until the arts of conciliation
were exhausted and the cause of united action had been pleaded in
vain. The policy of moderation was advocated by Malouet, a man of
practical insight and experience, who had grown grey in the service of
the State. It was said that he defended the slave trade; he attempted
to exclude the public from the debates; he even offered, in
unauthorised terms, to secure the claims, both real and formal, of the
upper classes. He soon lost the ear of the House. But he was a man of
great good sense, as free from ancient prejudice as from modern
theory, and he never lost sight of the public interest in favour of a
class. The most generous proposals on behalf of the poor afterwards
emanated from him, and parliamentary life in France began with his
motion for negotiation with the other orders.
He was supported by Mounier, one of the deepest minds of that day, and
the most popular of the deputies. He was a magistrate of Grenoble, and
had conducted the Estates of Dauphine with such consummate art and
wisdom that all ranks and all parties had worked in harmony. They had
demanded equal representation and the vote in common; they gave to
their deputies full powers instead of written instructions, only
requiring that they should obtain a free government to the best of
their ability; they resolved that the chartered rights of their
province should not be put in competition with the new and theoretic
rights of the nation. Under Mounier's controlling hand the prelate and
the noble united to declare that the essential liberties of men are
ensured to them by nature, and not by perishable title-deeds.
Travellers had initiated him in the working of English institutions,
and he represented the school of Montesquieu; but he was an
emancipated disciple and a discriminate admirer. He held Montesquieu
to be radically illiberal, and believed the famous theory which
divides powers without isolating them to be an old and a common
discovery. He thought that nations differ less in their character than
in their stage of progress, and that a Constitution like the
English applies not to a region, but to a time. He belonged to
that type of statesmanship which Washington had shown to be so
powerful--revolutionary doctrine in a conservative temper. In the
centre of affairs the powerful provincial betrayed a lack of sympathy
and attraction. He refused to meet Sieyes, and persistently denounced
and vilified Mirabeau. Influence and public esteem came to him at
once, and in the great constructive party he was a natural leader, and
predominated for a time. But at the encounter of defeat, his austere
and rigid character turned it into disaster; and as he possessed but
one line of defence, the failure of his tactics was the ruin of his
cause. Although he despaired prematurely, and was vociferously
repentant of his part in the great days of June, parading his
sackcloth before Europe, he never faltered in the conviction that the
interests of no class, of no family, of no man, can be preferred to
those of the nation. Napoleon once said with a sneer: "You are still
the man of 1789." Mounier replied: "Yes, sir. Principles are not
subject to the law of change."
He desired to adopt the English model, which meant: representation of
property; an upper house founded upon merit, not upon descent; royal
veto and right of dissolution. This could only be secured by active
co-operation on the part of all the conservative elements. To obtain
his majority he required that the other orders should come over, not
vanquished and reluctant, but under the influence of persuasion.
Mirabeau and his friends only wished to put the nobles in the wrong,
to expose their obstinacy and arrogance, and then to proceed without
them. The plan of Mounier depended on a real conciliation.
The clergy were ready for a conference; and by their intervention the
nobles were induced to take part in it. There, on May 23, the
Archbishop of Vienne, who was in the confidence of Mounier, declared
that the clergy recognised the duty of sharing taxes in equal
proportion. The Duke of Luxemburg, speaking for the nobles, made the
same declaration. The intention, he said, was irrevocable; but he
added that it would not be executed until the problem of the
Constitution was solved. The nobles declined to abandon the mode of
separate verification which had been practised formerly. And when the
Commons objected that what was good in times of civil dissension was
inapplicable to the Arcadian tranquillity of 1789, the others were
not to blame if they treated the argument with contempt.
The failure of the conference was followed by an event which confirmed
Necker in the belief that he was not waiting in vain. He received
overtures from Mirabeau. Until that time Mirabeau had been notorious
for the obtrusive scandal of his life, and the books he had written
under pressure of need did not restore his good name. People avoided
him, not because he was brutal and vicious like other men of his rank,
but because he was reputed a liar and a thief. During one of his
imprisonments he had obtained from Dupont de Nemours communication of
an important memoir embodying Turgot's ideas on local government. He
copied the manuscript, presented it to the minister as his own work,
and sold another copy to the booksellers as the work of Turgot.
Afterwards he offered to suppress his letters from Prussia if the
Government would buy them at the price he could obtain by publishing
them. Montmorin paid what he asked for, on condition that he renounced
his candidature in Provence. Mirabeau agreed, spent the money on his
canvass, and made more by printing what he had sold to the king.
During the contest, by his coolness, audacity, and resource, he soon
acquired ascendency. The nobles who rejected him were made to feel his
power. When tumults broke out, he appeased them by his presence, and
he moved from Marseilles to Aix escorted by a retinue of 200
carriages. Elected in both places by the Third Estate, he came to
Versailles hoping to repair his fortune. There it was soon apparent
that he possessed powers of mind equal to the baseness of his conduct.
He is described by Malouet as the only man who perceived from the
first where the Revolution was tending; and his enemy Mounier avows
that he never met a more intelligent politician. He was always ready
to speak, and always vigorous and adroit. His renowned orations were
often borrowed, for he surrounded himself with able men, mostly
Genevese, versed in civil strife, who supplied him with facts,
mediated with the public, and helped him in the press. Rivarol said
that his head was a gigantic sponge, swelled out with other men's
ideas. As extempore speaking was a new art, and the ablest men read
their speeches, Mirabeau was at once an effective debater--probably
the best debater, though not the most perfect orator, that has
appeared in the splendid record of parliamentary life in France. His
father was one of the most conspicuous economists, and he inherited
their belief in a popular and active monarchy, and their preference
for a single chamber.
In 1784 he visited London, frequented the Whigs, and supplied Burke
with a quotation. He did not love England, but he thought it a
convincing proof of the efficacy of paper Constitutions, that a few
laws for the protection of personal liberty should be sufficient to
make a corrupt and ignorant people prosper.
His keynote was to abandon privilege and to retain the prerogative;
for he aspired to sway the monarchy, and would not destroy the power
he was to wield. The king, he said, is the State, and can do no wrong.
Therefore he was at times the most violent and indiscreet of men, and
at times unaccountably moderate and reserved; and both parts were
carefully prepared. As he had a fixed purpose before him, but neither
principle nor scruple, no emergency found him at a loss, or
embarrassed by a cargo of consistent maxims. Incalculable, and unfit
to trust in daily life, at a crisis he was the surest and most
available force. From the first moment he came to the front. On the
opening day he was ready with a plan for a consultation in common,
before deciding whether they should act jointly or separately. The
next day he started a newspaper, in the shape of a report to his
constituents, and when the Government attempted to suppress it, he
succeeded, May 19, in establishing the liberty of the press.
The first political club, afterwards that of the Jacobins, was
founded, at his instigation, by men who did not know the meaning of a
club. For, he said to them, ten men acting together can make a hundred
thousand tremble apart from each other. Mirabeau began with caution,
for his materials were new and he had no friends. He believed that
the king was really identified with the magnates, and that the Commons
were totally unprepared to confront either the court or the
approaching Revolution. He thought it hopeless to negotiate with his
own doomed order, and meant to detach the king from them. When the
scheme of conciliation failed, his opportunity came. He requested
Malouet to bring him into communication with ministers. He told him
that he was seriously alarmed, that the nobles meant to push
resistance to extremity, and that his reliance was on the Crown. He
promised, if the Government would admit him to their confidence, to
support their policy with all his might. Montmorin refused to see him.
Necker reluctantly consented. He had a way of pointing his nose at the
ceiling, which was not conciliatory, and he received the hated visitor
with a request to know what proposals he had to make. Mirabeau, purple
with rage at this frigid treatment by the man he had come to save,
replied that he proposed to wish him good morning. To Malouet he said,
"Your friend is a fool, and he will soon have news of me." Necker
lived to regret that he had thrown such a chance away. At the time,
the interview only helped to persuade him that the Commons knew their
weakness, and felt the need of his succour.
Just then the expected appeal reached him from the ecclesiastical
quarter. When it was seen that the nobles could not be constrained by
fair words, the Commons made one more experiment with the clergy. On
May 27 they sent a numerous and weighty deputation to adjure them, in
the name of the God of peace and of the national welfare, not to
abandon the cause of united action. The clergy this time invoked the
interposition of Government.
On the 30th conferences were once more opened, and the ministers were
present. The discussion was as inconclusive as before, and, on June 4,
Necker produced a plan of his own. He proposed, in substance, separate
verification, the crown to decide in last instance. It was a solution
favourable to the privileged orders, one of which had appealed to him.
He wanted their money, not their power. The clergy agreed. The
Commons were embarrassed what to do, but were quickly relieved; for
the nobles replied that they had already decided simply to try their
own cases. By this act, on June 9, negotiations were broken off.
The decision had been taken in the apartments of the Duchess of
Polignac, the queen's familiar friend, and it made a breach between
the court and the minister at the first step he had taken since the
Assembly met. Up to this point the aristocracy were intelligible and
consistent. They would make no beginning of surrender until they knew
how far it would lead them, or put themselves at the mercy of a
hostile majority without any assurance for private rights. Malouet
offered them a guarantee, but he was disavowed by his colleagues in a
way that warned the nobles not to be too trusting.
Nobody could say how far the edifice of privilege was condemned to
crumble, or what nucleus of feudal property, however secured by
contract and prescription, would be suffered to remain. The nobles
felt justified in defending things which were their own by law, by
centuries of unquestioned possession, by purchase and inheritance, by
sanction of government, by the express will of their constituents. In
upholding the interest, and the very existence, of the class they
represented, they might well believe that they acted in the spirit of
true liberty, which depends on the multiplicity of checking forces,
and that they were saving the throne. From the engagement to renounce
fiscal exemption, and submit to the equal burden of taxation, they did
not recede, and they claimed the support of the king. Montlosier, who
belonged to their order, pronounced that their case was good and their
argument bad. Twice they gave the enemy an advantage. When they saw
the clergy waver, they resolved, by their usual majority of 197 to 44,
that each order possessed the right of nullification; so that they
would no more yield to the separate vote of the three Estates than to
their united vote. Evidently the country would support those who
denied the veto and were ready to overrule it, against those who gave
no hope that anything would be done. Again, when they declined the
Government proposals, they isolated themselves, and became an
obstruction. They had lost the clergy. They now repulsed the minister.
Nothing was left them except their hopes of the king. They ruined him
as well as themselves. It did not follow that, because they supported
the monarchy, they were sure of the monarch. And it was a graver
miscalculation to think that a regular army is stronger than an
undisciplined mob, and that the turbulent Parisians, eight miles off,
could not protect the deputies against regiments of horse and foot,
commanded by the gallant gentlemen of France, accustomed for centuries
to pay the tax of blood, and fighting now in their own cause.
There was nothing more to be done. The arts of peace were exhausted. A
deliberate breach with legality could alone fulfil the national
decree. The country had grown tired of dilatory tactics and prolonged
inaction. Conciliation, tried by the Commons, by the clergy, and by
the Government, had been vain. The point was reached where it was
necessary to choose between compulsion and surrender, and the Commons
must either employ the means at their command to overcome resistance,
or go away confessing that the great movement had broken down in their
hands, and that the people had elected the wrong men. Inaction and
delay had not been a policy, but the preliminary of a policy. It was
reasonable to say that they would try every possible effort before
resorting to aggression; but it would have been unmeaning to say that
they would begin by doing nothing, and that afterwards they would
continue to do nothing. Their enemy had been beforehand with them in
making mistakes. They might hazard something with less danger now.
Victory indeed was assured by the defection among the nobles and the
clergy. Near fifty of the one, and certainly more than one hundred of
the others, were ready to come over. Instead of being equal, the
parties were now two to one. Six hundred Commons could not control the
same number of the deputies of privilege. But eight hundred deputies
were more than a match for four hundred. Therefore, on June 10, the
Commons opened the attack and summoned the garrison. Mirabeau gave
notice that one of the Paris deputies had an important motion to
submit. The mover was more important than the motion, for this was the
apparition of Sieyes, the most original of the revolutionary
statesmen, who, within a fortnight of this, his maiden speech, laid
low the ancient monarchy of France. He was a new member, for the Paris
elections had been delayed, the forty deputies took their seats three
weeks after the opening, and Sieyes was the last deputy chosen. He
objected to the existing stagnation, believing that there was no duty
to the nobles that outweighed the duty to France. He proposed that the
other orders be formally invited to join, and that the House should
proceed to constitute itself, and to act with them if they came,
without them if they stayed away. The returns were accordingly
verified, and Sieyes then moved that they should declare themselves
the National Assembly, the proper name for that which they claimed to
be.
In spite of Malouet, and even of Mirabeau, on June 17 this motion was
carried by 491 to 90. All taxes became dependent on the Assembly. The
broad principle on which Sieyes acted was that the Commons were really
the nation. The upper classes were not an essential part of it. They
were not even a natural and normal growth, but an offending
excrescence, a negative quantity, to be subtracted, not to be added
up. That which ought not to exist ought not to be represented. The
deputies of the Third Estate appeared for the whole. Alone they were
sufficient to govern it, for alone they were identified with the
common interest.
Sieyes was not solicitous that his invitation should be obeyed, for
the accession of the other orders might displace the majority. Those
who possessed the plenitude of power were bound to employ it. By
axiomatic simplicity more than by sustained argument Sieyes mastered
his hearers.
V
THE TENNIS-COURT OATH
We saw last week that much time was spent in fruitless negotiation
which ended in a deadlock--the Commons refusing to act except in
conjunction with the other orders, and the others insisting on the
separate action which had been prescribed by their instructions and by
the king.
The Commons altered their policy under the influence of Sieyes, who
advised that they should not wait for the others, but should proceed
in their absence. In his famous pamphlet he had argued that they were
really the nation, and had the right on their side. And his theory was
converted into practice, because it now appeared that they had not
only the right, but the power. They knew it, because the clergy were
wavering. Thursday, June 18, the day after the proclamation of the
National Assembly, was a festival. On Friday the clergy divided on the
question of joining. The proposal was negatived, but twelve of its
opponents stated that they would be on the other side if the vote in
common extended only to the verification of returns. The minority at
once accepted the condition, and so became the majority. Others
thereupon acceded, and by six o'clock in the evening 149 ecclesiastics
recorded their votes for the Commons. That 19th of June is a decisive
date, for then the priests went over to the Revolution. The Commons,
by a questionable and audacious act, had put themselves wrong with
everybody when the inferior clergy abandoned the cause of privilege
and came to their rescue.
The dauphin had lately died, and the royal family were living in
retirement at Marly. At ten o'clock in the evening of the vote, the
Archbishops of Paris and Rouen arrived there, described the event to
the king, and comforted him by saying that the prelates, all but four,
had remained true to their order. They were followed by a very
different visitor, whom it behoved the king to hear, for he was a man
destined to hold the highest offices of State under many governments,
to be the foremost minister of the republic, the empire, and the
monarchy, to predominate over European sovereigns at Vienna, over
European statesmen in London, and to be universally feared, and hated,
and admired, as the most sagacious politician in the world.
Talleyrand came to Marly at dead of night, and begged a secret
audience of the king. He was not a favourite at court. He had obtained
the see of Autun only at the request of the assembled clergy of
France, and when the pope selected him for a cardinal's hat, Lewis
prevented his nomination. He now refused to see him, and sent him to
his brother. The Count d'Artois was in bed, but the bishop was his
friend, and was admitted. He said it was necessary that the Government
should act with vigour. The conduct of the Assembly was illegal and
foolish, and would ruin the monarchy unless the States-General were
dissolved. Talleyrand would undertake, with his friends, some of whom
came with him and were waiting below, to form a new administration.
The Assembly, compromised and discredited by the recent outbreak,
would be dismissed, a new one would be elected on an altered
franchise, and a sufficient display of force would prevent resistance.
Talleyrand proposed to reverse the policy of Necker, which he thought
feeble and vacillating, and which had thrown France into the hands of
Sieyes. With a stronger grasp he meant to restore the royal
initiative, in order to carry out the constitutional changes which the
nation expected.
The count put on his clothes, and carried the matter to the king. He
detested Necker with his concessions, and welcomed the prospect of
getting rid of him for a minister of his own making taken from his own
circle. He came back with a positive refusal. Then Talleyrand,
convinced that it was henceforth vain to serve the king, gave notice
that every man must be allowed to shift for himself; and the count
admitted that he was right. They remembered that interview after
twenty-five years of separation, when one of the two held in his hands
the crown of France, which the other, in the name of Lewis XVIII.,
came to receive from him.
The king repulsed Talleyrand because he had just taken a momentous
resolution. The time had arrived which Necker had waited for, the time
to interpose with a Constitution so largely conceived, so exactly
defined, so faithfully adapted to the deliberate wishes of the people,
as to supersede and overshadow the Assembly, with its perilous tumult
and its prolonged sterility. He had proposed some such measure early
in May, when it was rejected, and he did not insist. But now the
policy unwisely postponed was clearly opportune. Secret advice came
from liberal public men, urging the danger of the crisis, and the
certainty that the Assembly would soon hurry to extremes. Mirabeau
himself deplored its action, and Malouet had reason to expect a
stouter resistance to the revolutionary argument and the sudden
ascendency of Sieyes. The queen in person, and influential men at
court, entreated Necker to modify his constitutional scheme; but he
was unshaken, and the king stood by him. It was decided that the
comprehensive measure intended to distance and annul the Assembly
should be proclaimed from the throne on the following Monday.
This was the rock that wrecked the Talleyrand ministry, and it
destroyed more solid structures than that unsubstantial phantom. The
plan was statesmanlike, and it marks the summit of Necker's career.
But he neglected to communicate with men whom he might well have
trusted, and the secret was fatal, for it was kept twelve hours too
long. As the princes had refused the use of their riding-school, there
were only three buildings dedicated to the States-General, instead of
four, and the Commons, by reason of their numbers, occupied the great
hall where the opening ceremony was held, and which had now to be made
ready for the royal sitting.
Very early in the morning of Saturday, June 20, the president of the
Assembly, the astronomer Bailly, received notice from the master of
ceremonies that the hall was wanted, in order to be prepared for
Monday, and that the meetings of the Commons were meanwhile suspended
for that day. Bailly was not taken by surprise, for a friend, who went
about with his eyes open, had warned him of what was going on. But the
Assembly had formally adjourned to that day, the members were
expecting the appointed meeting, and the message came too late. Bailly
deemed that it was a studied insult, the angry retort of Government,
and the penalty of the recent vote, and he inferred, most erroneously
as we know, that the coming speech from the throne would be hostile.
Therefore he gave all the solemnity he could to the famous scene that
ensued. Appearing at the head of the indignant deputies, he was denied
admission. The door was only opened that he might fetch his papers,
and the National Assembly that represented France found itself, by
royal command, standing outside on the pavement, at the hour fixed for
its deliberations.
At that instant the doubts and divisions provoked by the overriding
logic of Sieyes disappeared. Moderate and Revolutionist felt the same
resentment, and had the same sense of being opposed by a power that
was insane. There were some, and Sieyes among them, who proposed that
they should adjourn to Paris. But a home was found in the empty Tennis
Court hard by. There, with a view to baffle dangerous designs, and
also to retrieve his own waning influence, Mounier assumed the lead.
He moved that they should bind themselves by oath never to separate
until they had given a Constitution to France; and all the deputies
immediately swore it, save one, who added "Dissentient" to his name,
and who was hustled out by a backdoor, to save him from the fury of
his colleagues. This dramatic action added little to that which had
been done three days earlier. The deputies understood that a
Constituent Assembly must be single, that the legislative power had,
for the purpose, been transferred to them, and could not be restrained
or recalled. Their authority was not to be limited by an upper house,
for both upper houses were absorbed; nor by the king, for they
regarded neither his sanction nor his veto; nor by the nation itself,
for they refused, by their oath, to be dissolved.
The real event of the Tennis Court was to unite all parties against
the crown, and to make them adopt the new policy of radical and
indefinite change, outdoing what Sieyes himself had done. The
mismanagement of the court drove its friends into the van of the
movement. The last Royalist defender of safe measures had vanished
through the backdoor.
Malouet had tendered a clause saving the royal power; but it was
decided not to put it, lest it should be refused. Mirabeau, in whose
eyes the decree of the 17th portended civil war, now voted,
reluctantly, with the rest.
Whilst the Assembly held its improvised and informal meeting at
Versailles, the king sat in council at Marly on Necker's magnanimous
proposal. After a struggle, and with some damaging concessions, the
minister carried his main points. They were gathering their papers,
and making ready to disperse, when a private message was brought to
the king. He went out, desiring them to wait his return. Montmorin
turned to Necker and said, "It is the queen, and all is over." The
king came back, and adjourned the council to Monday at Versailles. And
it was in this way that the report of what had happened that morning
told upon the Government, and the enthusiasm of the Tennis Court
frustrated the pondered measures of the most liberal minister in
Europe. For it was, in truth, the queen, and in that brief interval it
was decreed that France, so near the goal in that month of June,
should wade to it through streams of blood during the twenty-five most
terrible years in the history of Christian nations.
The council of ministers, which was adjourned in consequence of the
meeting in the Tennis Court, went over to the _noblesse_, and restored
in their interest the principles of the old regime. It resolved that
the king should rescind the recent acts of the Assembly; should
maintain inviolate the division of orders, allowing the option of
debate in common only in cases where neither privilege nor the
Constitution were affected; that he should confirm feudal rights and
even fiscal immunities, unless voluntarily abandoned, and should deny
admission to public employment irrespective of class. Necker's
adversaries prevailed, and the ancient bulwarks were set up again, in
favour of the aristocracy.
Still, a portion of the great scheme was preserved, and the
concessions on the part of the crown were such that some weeks earlier
they would have been hailed with enthusiasm, and the consistent logic
of free institutions exercises a coercive virtue that made many think
that the King's Speech of June 23 ought to have been accepted as the
greater charter of France. That was the opinion of Arthur Young; of
Gouverneur Morris, who had given the final touches to the American
Constitution; of Jefferson, the author of the _Declaration of
Independence_; and afterwards even of Sieyes himself.
On this account, Necker wavered to the last moment, and on the Tuesday
morning prepared to attend the king. His friends, his family, his
daughter, the wonder of the age, made him understand that he could not
sanction by his presence, at a solemn crisis, an act which reversed
one essential half of his policy. He dismissed his carriage, took off
his court suit, and left the vacant place to proclaim his fall. That
evening he sent in his resignation. His significant absence; the
peremptory language of the king; the abrogation of their decrees,
which was effectual and immediate, while the compensating promises
were eventual, and not yet equivalent to laws; the avowed resolve to
identify the Crown with the nobles, struck the Assembly with
consternation. The removal of the constitutional question to the list
of matters to be debated separately was, in the existing conditions
of antagonism, the end of free government. And indeed the position
occupied by the king was untenable, because the division of orders
into three Houses had already come to an end. For on Monday the 22nd,
in the Church of St. Lewis, 149 ecclesiastical deputies, the
Archbishops of Bordeaux and Vienne at their head, had joined the
Commons. It was a step which they were legally authorised and
competent to take, and the Revolution now had a majority not only of
individual votes, but of orders. It was a forlorn hope, therefore, to
separate them by compulsion.
Lewis XVI. ended by declaring that he was determined to accomplish the
happiness of his people, and that if the deputies refused to
co-operate he would accomplish it alone; and he charged them to
withdraw. The Commons were in their own House, and, with the majority
of the clergy, they resumed their seats, uncertain of the future.
Their uncertainty was all at once auspiciously relieved. Dreux Breze,
the master of ceremonies, reappeared, and as he brought a message from
the king he wore his plumed hat upon his head. With clamorous outcries
he was told to uncover, and he uttered a reply so insolent that his
son, describing the scene in public after many years, declined to
repeat his words. Therefore, when he asked whether they had heard the
king's order to depart, he received a memorable lesson. Mirabeau
exclaimed, "Yes, but if we are to be expelled, we shall yield only to
force." Breze answered, correctly, that he did not recognise Mirabeau
as the organ of the Assembly, and he turned to the president. But
Bailly rose above Mirabeau, and said, "The nation is assembled here,
and receives no orders." At these words the master of ceremonies, as
if suddenly aware of the presence of majesty, retired, walking
backwards to the door. It was at that moment that the old order
changed and made place for the new. For Sieyes, who possessed the good
gift of putting a keen edge to his thoughts, who had begun his career
in Parliament ten days before by saying, "It is time to cut the
cables," now spoke, and with superb simplicity thus defined the
position: "What you were yesterday you are now. Let us pass to the
order of the day." In this way the monarchy, as a force distinct from
a form, was not assailed, or abolished, or condemned, but passed over.
Assault, abolition, condemnation were to follow, and already there
were penetrating eyes that caught, in the distance, the first gleam of
the axe. "The king," said Mirabeau, "has taken the road to the
scaffold."
The abdication of prerogative, which the king offered on June 23, went
far; but the people demanded surrender in regard to privilege. The
Assembly, submitting to the geometrical reasoning of Sieyes and to the
surprise of the Tennis Court, had frightened him into an alliance with
the nobles, and he linked his cause to theirs. He elected to stand or
fall with interests not his own, with an order which was powerless to
help him, which could make no return for his sacrifice in their
behalf, which was unable for one hour to defend itself, and was about
to perish by its own hand. The failure of June 23 was immediately
apparent. The Assembly, having dismissed Dreux Breze, was not molested
further. Necker consented to resume office, with greatly increased
popularity. Under the influence of the royal declaration forty-seven
nobles, being a portion only of the Liberal minority, went over to the
Commons, and Talleyrand followed at the head of twenty-five prelates.
Then the king gave way. He instructed the resisting magnates to join
the National Assembly. In very sincere and solemn terms they warned
him that by such a surrender he was putting off his crown. The Count
d'Artois rejoined that the king's life would be in danger if they
persisted. There was one young nobleman rising rapidly to fame as a
gracious and impressive speaker, whom even this appeal to loyal hearts
failed to move. "Perish the monarch," cried Cazales, "but not the
monarchy!"
Lewis underwent the humiliation of revoking, on June 27, what he had
ceremoniously promulgated on the 23rd, because there was a fatal
secret. Paris was agitated, and the people promised the deputies to
stand by them at their need. But what could they effect at Versailles
against the master of so many legions? Just then a mutiny broke out in
the French guards, the most disciplined body of troops in the capital,
and betrayed the key to the hollow and unstable counsels of the
Government. The army could not be trusted. Necker suspected it as
early as February. In the last week of June, the English, Prussian,
and Venetian envoys report that the crown was disabled because it was
disarmed. The regiments at hand would not serve against the national
representatives. It was resolved to collect faithful bands of Swiss,
Alsatians, and Walloons. Ten foreign regiments, near 30,000 men in
all, were hurried to the scene. They were the last hope of royalism.
Trusty friends were informed that the surrender was only to last until
the frontier garrisons could be brought to Versailles. D'Artois
confided to one of them that many heads must fall. And he uttered the
sinister proverb which became historic in another tragedy: If you want
an omelette you must not be afraid of breaking eggs.
VI
THE FALL OF THE BASTILLE
After the dramatic intervention of the Marquis de Breze, the king's
speech of June 23 was never seriously considered by the Assembly. Yet
the concessions, which it made to the spirit of political progress,
satisfied philosophic observers, and there had been no time in English
history where changes so extensive, proceeding from the Crown, would
have failed to conciliate the people. It was a common belief in those
days, expressly sanctioned by the Economists, that secondary
liberties, carried far enough, are worth more than formal securities
for the principle of self-government. One is of daily use and
practical advantage; the other is of the domain of theory, dubiously
beneficial, and without assurance of enlightenment and justice. A
wise, honest, and intelligent administration gives more to men than
the established reign of uncertain opinion. These arguments had more
weight with philosophers than with the deputies, for it was already
decided that they must make the Constitution. All the king offered,
and a great deal more, they intended to take. Much that he insisted on
preserving they were resolved to destroy. The offer, at its best, was
vitiated by the alloy: for the most offensive privileges, immunities,
and emoluments of rank were to be perpetuated, and it was against
these that the fiercest force of the revolutionary movement was
beating. In order that they might be abolished, the nation tendered
its indefeasible support, its unconquerable power, to its
representatives.
If the Assembly, content with the advantage gained over the king, had
surrendered unconditionally to the nobles, and assented, for a few
political reforms, to the social degradation of the democracy, they
would have betrayed their constituents. On that consideration they
were compelled to act. They acted also on the principle, which was not
new, which came down indeed from mediaeval divines, but which was newly
invested with universal authority, that the law is not the will of the
sovereign that commands, but of the nation that obeys. It was the very
marrow of the doctrine that obstruction of liberty is crime, that
absolute authority is not a thing to be consulted, but a thing to be
removed, and that resistance to it is no affair of interest or
convenience, but of sacred obligation. Every drop of blood shed in the
American conflict was shed in a cause immeasurably inferior to theirs,
against a system more legitimate by far than that of June 23. Unless
Washington was an assassin, it was their duty to oppose, if it might
be, by policy, if it must be, by force, the mongrel measure of
concession and obstinacy which the Court had carried against the
proposals of Necker. That victory was reversed, and the success of the
Commons was complete. They had brought the three orders into one; they
had compelled the king to retract his declaration and to restore his
disgraced minister; they had exposed the weakness of their oppressors,
and they had the nation at their back.
On June 27, in the united Assembly, Mirabeau delivered an address of
mingled triumph and conciliation, which was his first act of
statesmanship. He said that the speech from the throne contained large
and generous views that proved the genuine liberality of the king. He
desired to receive them gratefully without the drawbacks imposed by
unthinking advisers, and to respect the just rights of the _noblesse_.
He took the good without the evil, extricating Lewis from his
entanglement, and tracing the line by which he might have advanced to
great results. "The past," he said, "has been the history of wild
beasts. We are inaugurating the history of men; for we have no weapon
but discussion, and no adversary but prejudice."
Their victory brought loss as well as gain to the Commons, and there
was reason to think that the counsel of Sieyes, to let the other
orders take their own separate course, was founded on wisdom. Their
opponents, joining under compulsion, had the means as well as the will
of doing them injury.
For the clergy there was a brief season of popular favour. The country
priests, sprung from the peasantry, and poorly off, shared many of
their feelings. The patronage of the State went to men of birth; and
one of these, the Archbishop of Aix, had proclaimed his belief that,
if anybody was to be exempt from taxation, it ought to be the
impoverished layman, not the wealthy ecclesiastic. When it chanced
that the Committee of Constitution was elected without any member of
the clergy upon it, the Commons raised a cry that they should be
introduced in their proportion. They, in a fraternal spirit, refused.
And the second Committee, the one that actually drew up the scheme,
was composed of three churchmen to five laymen. The nobles were not
reconciled, and refused to unite with men of English views in a Tory
party. To them, the separation of orders was a fundamental maxim of
security, which they had inherited, which they were bound to hand
down. They looked on debate in common as provisional, as an exception,
to be rectified as soon as might be. They kept up the practice of also
meeting separately. On July 3 there were one hundred and thirty-eight
present; and on the 11th there still were eighty. They refused to vote
in the divisions of the joint Assembly, because their instructions
forbade. The scruple was sincere, and was shared by Lafayette; but
others meant it as a protest that the Assembly was not lawfully
constituted. Therefore, July 7, Talleyrand moved to annul the
instructions. They could not be allowed to control the Assembly; they
ought not to influence individuals. The constituencies contribute to a
decision; they cannot resist it. Whatever the original wish of the
electors, the final act belonged to the legislature. The king himself,
on June 27, had declared the imperative mandates unconstitutional.
But the deputies, in declaring themselves permanent, had cut
themselves adrift from their constituents. The instructions had become
the sole security that the Constitution would remain within the limits
laid down by the nation, the sole assurance against indefinite change.
They alone determined the line of advance, and gave protection to
monarchy, property, religion, against the headlong rush of opinion,
and the exigencies of popular feeling.
Sieyes, who expected no good from the co-operation of the orders which
he condemned, and who thought a nobleman or prelate who did not vote
better than one who voted wrong, urged that the question did not
affect the Assembly, but the constituencies, and might be left to
them. He carried his amendment by seven hundred to twenty-eight.
Meantime the party that had prevailed on June 23 and had succumbed on
the 27th was at work to recover the lost position. Lewis had retained
the services of Necker, without dismissing the colleagues who baffled
him. He told him that he would not accept his resignation now, but
would choose the time for it. Necker had not the acuteness to
understand that he would be dismissed as soon as his enemies felt
strong enough to do without him. A king who deserted his friends and
reversed his accepted policy because there was no force he could
depend on, was a king with a short shrift before him. He became the
tool of men who did not love him, and who now despised him.
The resources wanting at the critical moment were, however, within
reach, and the scheme proposed to the Count d'Artois by the wily
bishop a few nights before was revived by less accomplished plotters.
On July 1 it became known that a camp of 25,000 men was to be formed
near Versailles under Marshal de Broglie, a veteran who gathered his
laurels in the Seven Years' War, and soon the Terrace was crowded with
officers from the north and east, who boasted that they had sharpened
their sabres, and meant to make short work of the ambitious lawyers,
the profligate noblemen, and unfrocked priests who were ruining the
country.
In adopting these measures the king did not regard himself as the
originator of violence. There had been disturbances in Paris, and at
Versailles the archbishop of Paris had been assaulted, and compelled
to promise that he would go over to the Assembly. The leader on the
other side, Champion de Cice, archbishop of Bordeaux, came to him, and
entreated him not to yield to faction, not to keep a promise extorted
by threats. He replied that he had given his word and meant to keep
it.
Forty years later Charles X. declared that his brother had mounted the
scaffold because, at this juncture, he would not mount his horse. In
truth Lewis believed that the deputies, cut off from Paris by visible
battalions, would be overawed, that the army of waverers would be
accessible to influence, to promises, remonstrances, and rewards, that
it would be safer to coerce the Assembly by intimidation than to
dissolve it. He had refused to listen to Talleyrand; he still rejected
the stronger part of his scheme. By judicious management he hoped that
the Assembly might be brought to undo its own usurping and unwarranted
work, and that he would be able to recover the position he had taken
up on June 23, the last day on which his policy had been that of a
free agent.
Necker knew no more than everybody else of the warlike array. On July
7 thirty regiments were concentrated; more were within a few days'
march, and the marshal, surrounded by an eager and hurried staff,
surveyed his maps of suburban Paris at his headquarters at Versailles.
The peril grew day by day, and it was time for the Assembly to act.
They were defenceless, but they relied on the people of Paris and on
the demoralisation of the army. Their friends had the command of
money, and large sums were spent in preparing the citizens for an
armed conflict. For the capitalists were on their side, looking to
them to prevent the national bankruptcy which the Court and the nobles
were bringing on. And the Palais Royal, the residence of the Duke of
Orleans, was the centre of an active organisation. Since the king had
proved himself incompetent, helpless, and insincere, men had looked to
the Duke as a popular prince of the Blood, who was also wealthy and
ambitious, and might avail to save the principle of monarchy, which
Lewis had discredited. His friends clung to the idea, and continued to
conspire in his interest after the rest of the world had been repelled
by the defects of his character. For a moment they thought of his son,
who was gifted for that dangerous part as perfectly as the father was
unfit, but his time was to be in a later generation.
The leading men in the Assembly knew their position with accuracy, and
did not exaggerate the danger they were in. On July 10 their shrewd
American adviser, Morris, wrote: "I think the crisis is past without
having been perceived; and now a free Constitution will be the certain
result." And yet there were 30,000 men, commanded by a marshal of
France, ready for action; and several regiments of Swiss, famed for
fidelity and valour, and destined, in the same cause, to become still
more famous, were massed in Paris itself under Besenval, the trusted
soldier of the Court.
On July 8, breaking through the order of debate, Mirabeau rose and the
action began--the action which changed the face of the world, and the
imperishable effects of which will be felt by every one of us, to the
last day of his life. He moved an address to the king, warning him
that, if he did not withdraw his troops, the streets of Paris would
run blood; and proposing that the preservation of order should be
committed to a civic guard. On the following day the Assembly voted
the address, and on the 10th the Count de Clermont Tonnerre, at the
head of a deputation, read it to the king. On the morning of Saturday,
11th, his reply was communicated to the Assembly. He had had three
days to hasten his military preparations. At Paris, the agitators and
organisers employed the time in arranging their counter measures.
The king refused to send away troops which there had been good reason
to collect, but he was ready to move, with the Assembly, to some town
at a distance from the turbid capital. The royal message was tipped
with irony, and the deputies, in spite of Mirabeau, resolved not to
discuss it. After this first thrust Lewis flung away the scabbard.
That day, at council, it was noticed that he was nervous and uneasy,
and disguised his restlessness by feigning sleep. At the end, taking
one of the ministers aside, he gave him a letter for Necker, who was
absent. The letter contained his dismissal, with an order for
banishment.
Necker, who for some days had known that it must come, was at dinner.
He said nothing to his company, and went out, as usual, for a drive.
Then he made for the frontier, and never stopped till he reached
Brussels. Two horsemen who had followed, keeping out of sight, had
orders to arrest him if he changed his course. He travelled up the
Rhine to his own country, on the way to his home by the lake of
Geneva. At the first Swiss hotel he found the Duchess de Polignac. He
had left her at Versailles, the Queen's best friend and the heart of
the intrigue against him; and she was now ruined and an exile, and the
forerunner of the emigration. From her, and from the letters that
quickly followed, forwarded by the Assembly, he learned the events
that had happened since his fall, learned that he was, for one
delirious moment, master of the king, of his enemies, and of the
country.
The astounding news that Necker heard at "The Three Kings" at Bale was
this. His friends had been disgraced with him, and the chief of the
new ministry was Breteuil, who had been the colleague of Calonne and
Vergennes, and had managed the affair of the Diamond Necklace. He had
directed the policy of those who opposed the National Assembly,
holding himself in the twilight, until strong measures and a strong
man were called for. He now came forward, and proposed that the nobles
should depart in a body, protesting against the methods by which the
States-General had been sunk in the National Assembly. In one day he
brought round twenty-six of the minority to his views. A few remained,
who would make a light day's work for a man of conviction and
resource. But resolute as Breteuil was, the Parisian democracy acted
with still greater quickness and decision, and with a not less certain
aim. On the 12th it became known that Necker had been sent out of the
country, and that the armaments were in the hands of men who meant to
employ them against the people. Paris was in disorder, but the middle
class provided a civic guard for its protection. There were encounters
with the troops, and some blood was shed.
New men began to appear who represented the rising classes: Camille
Desmoulins, a rhetorical journalist, with literary but not political
talent, harangued the people in the garden of the Palais Royal; and
one of the strong men of history, Danton, showed that he knew how to
manage and to direct the masses.
The 13th was a day wasted by Government, spent by Paris in busy
preparation. Men talked wildly of destroying the Bastille, as a sign
that would be understood. Early on July 14 a body of men made their
way to the Invalides, and seized 28,000 stand of arms and some cannon.
At the other extremity of Paris the ancient fortress of the Bastille
towered over the workmen's quarter and commanded the city. Whenever
the guns thundered from its lofty battlements, resistance would be
over, and the conquered arms would be unavailing.
The Bastille not only overshadowed the capital, but it darkened the
hearts of men, for it had been notorious for centuries as the
instrument and the emblem of tyranny. The captives behind its bars
were few and uninteresting; but the wide world knew the horror of its
history, the blighted lives, the ruined families, the three thousand
dishonoured graves within the precincts, and the common voice called
for its destruction as the sign of deliverance. At the elections both
nobles and commons demanded that it should be levelled with the
ground.
As early as the 4th of July Besenval received notice that it would be
attacked. He sent a detachment of Swiss, that raised the garrison to
one hundred and thirty-eight, and he did no more. During the morning
hours, while the invaders of the Invalides were distributing the
plundered arms and ammunition, emissaries penetrated into the
Bastille, under various pretexts, to observe the defences. One
fair-spoken visitor was taken to the top of the dreaded towers, where
he saw that the guns with which the embrasures had bristled, which
were beyond the range of marksmen, and had Paris at their mercy, were
dismantled and could not be fired.
About the middle of the day, when this was known, the attack began. It
was directed by the _Gardes Francaises_, who had been the first to
mutiny, and had been disbanded, and were now the backbone of the
people's army. The siege consisted in efforts to lower the drawbridge.
After several hours the massive walls were unshaken, and the place was
as safe as before the first discharge. But the defenders knew that
they were lost. Besenval was not the man to rescue them by fighting
his way through several miles of streets. They were not provisioned,
and the men urged the governor to make terms before he was compelled.
They had brought down above a hundred of their assailants, without
losing a man. But it was plain that the loss neither of a hundred nor
of a thousand would affect the stern determination of the crowd,
whilst it might increase their fury. Delauney, in his despair, seized
a match, and wanted to fire the magazine. His men remonstrated and
spoke of the dreadful devastation that must follow the explosion. The
man who stayed the hand of the despairing commander, and whose name
was Becard, deserved a better fate than he met that day, for he was
one of the four or five that were butchered. The men beat a parley,
hoisted the white flag, and obtained, on the honour of a French
officer, a verbal promise of safety.
Then the victors came pouring over the bridge, triumphant over a
handful of Swiss and invalids--triumphant too over thirteen centuries
of monarchy and the longest line of kings. Those who had served in
the regular army took charge of as many prisoners as they could
rescue, carried them to their quarters, and gave them their own beds
to sleep in. The officers who had conducted the unreal attack, and
received the piteous surrender, brought the governor to the Hotel de
Ville, fighting their way through a murderous crowd. For it was long
believed that Delauney had admitted the people into the first court,
and then had perfidiously shot them down. In his struggles he hurt a
bystander, who chanced to be a cook. The man, prompted, it seems, less
by animosity than by the pride of professional skill, drew a knife and
cut off his head. Flesselles, the chief of the old municipality,
appointed by the Crown, was shot soon after, under suspicion of having
encouraged Delauney to resist.
Dr. Rigby, an Englishman who was at the Palais Royal, has described
what he saw. First came an enormous multitude bearing aloft the keys
of the conquered citadel, with the inscription, "The Bastille is
taken." The joy was indescribable, and strangers shook his hand,
saying, "We too are free men, and there will never more be war between
our countries." Then came another procession, also shouting and
rejoicing; but the bystanders looked on with horror, for the trophies
carried by were the heads of murdered men. For the nation had become
sovereign, and the soldiers who fired upon it were reckoned rebels and
traitors. The foreign envoys were all impressed with the idea that the
vengeance wrought was out of all proportion with the immensity of the
thing achieved. At nightfall the marshal gave orders to evacuate
Paris. Besenval was already in full retreat, and the capital was no
longer in the possession of the king of France.
Meanwhile the National Assembly, aware of the strength of popular
feeling around them, were calm in the midst of danger. Theirs was a
diminished part, while, almost within sight and hearing, history was
being unmade and made by a power superior to their own. On the morning
of the 14th they elected the Committee of Eight who were to draw up
the Constitution. Mounier and the friends of the English model still
prevailed. By evening their chance had vanished, for the English model
includes a king.
Late in the day Noailles brought authentic news of what he had
witnessed; and the Assembly learned, in agitated silence, that the
head of the governor of the impregnable Bastille had been displayed on
a pike about the streets of Paris. Lafayette took the chair, while the
President hurried with Noailles to the palace. They made no impression
there. Lewis informed them that he had recalled his troops, and then
he went to bed, tranquil, and persistently ignoring what it was that
had been done, and what it was that had passed away.
But in the morning, when the Assembly met in disorder, and were about
to send one more deputation, it was found that a change had taken
place in the brief hours of that memorable night. At two o'clock the
king was roused from sleep by one of the great officers of the
household. The intruder, La Rochefoucauld, Duke de Liancourt, was not
a man of talent, but he was universally known as the most benevolent
and the most beneficent of the titled nobles of the realm. He made his
master understand the truth and its significance, and how, in the
capital that day, in every province on the morrow, the authority of
government was at an end. And when Lewis, gradually awaking,
exclaimed, "But this is a great revolt!" Liancourt replied, "No, sir,
it is a great Revolution!" With those historic words the faithful
courtier detached the monarch from his ministers, and obtained control
over him in the deciding days that were to follow. Guided by the duke,
and attended by his brothers, but without the ceremonious glories of
regality, Lewis XVI. went down to the Assembly and made his
submission. In the pathetic solemnity of the scene, the deputies
forgot for a moment their righteous anger and their more righteous
scorn, and the king returned to the palace on foot, in a sudden
procession of triumph, amnestied and escorted by the entire body.
The struggle was over, and the spell was broken; and the Assembly had
to govern France. To establish order a vast deputation repaired to the
Hotel de Ville, where Lally Tollendal delivered an oration thrilling
with brotherhood and gladness, and appeared, crowned with flowers,
before the people.
To cement the compact between Paris and Versailles, Bailly, the first
president, was placed at the head of the new elective municipality,
and the vice-president, Lafayette, became commander of the National
Guard. This was the first step towards that Commune which was to
exercise so vast an influence over the fortunes of France. It came
into existence of necessity, when the action of Government was
paralysed, and the space which it occupied was untenanted.
The National Guard was an invention of great import, for it was the
army of society distinct from the army of the state, opinion in arms
apart from authority. It was the middle class organised as a force,
against the force above and the force below; and it protected liberty
against the Crown, and property against the poor. It has been ever
since the defence of order and the ruin of governments; for, as it was
the nation itself, nobody was bold enough to fight it. Before the
altar of Notre Dame Lafayette took the oath of fidelity to the people,
and not to the king. He never displayed real capacity for peace or
war; but in the changes of a long life he was true to the early
convictions imbibed in Washington's camp.
On their return from Paris the great deputation reported that the
people demanded the recall of Necker. At last the king dismissed
Breteuil, and charged the Assembly to take charge of a letter to the
banished statesman. His banishment had lasted five days; it was now
the turn of his enemies. On the same night, July 16, the baffled
intriguers went into exile. Lewis himself sent his brother away, for
the safety of himself and of the dynasty. The others followed. The
queen was compelled to dismiss Madame de Polignac, whom she had too
confidently trusted, and she was left alone amongst her enemies. This
was the first emigration. The remaining nobles announced that they
abandoned resistance, and the Assembly was at last united. The fight
was lost and won, and the victor claimed the spoils.
But the Assembly was not the victor, and had contributed little to the
portentous change between the dismissal of Necker and the despatch of
the fleet messenger with his recall. Whilst the deputies served the
national cause by talking, there were plainer men at Paris who had
died for it. The force that risked life and conquered was not at
Versailles. It was Paris that held the fallen power, the power of
governing itself, the Assembly, and France. The predominance of the
capital was the new feature that enabled the monarchy to pass into a
Republic.
The king had become a servant of two masters. Having recanted before
his master at Versailles, it became necessary that he should submit
himself to the new and mysterious authority at the Hotel de Ville. He
had yielded to representative democracy. He had to pay the same
recognition to direct democracy. It was not safe to leave the Orleans
stronghold entirely in their hands. Between the ministry that was gone
and the ministry to come, Lewis acted by the advice of Liancourt.
Early on July 17 he made his will, heard mass, received communion, and
set out to visit his good city. The queen remained behind, with all
her carriages ready, in order that, at the first signal, she might fly
for her life. At the barrier the king's eye fell, for the first time,
on innumerable armed men, who lined the streets for miles, and wore
strange colours, and did not own him as their chief. Neither the
National Guard, nor the dense crowd behind them, uttered a sound of
welcome. Not a voice was raised, except for the nation and its
deputies.
The peace made between the king and the Assembly did not count here.
All men had to know that there was a distinct authority, to which a
further homage was due, even from the sovereign. At the Hotel de Ville
the homage was paid. There the king confirmed the new mayor, and
approved what had been done, and he showed himself to the people with
the new cockade, devised by Lafayette, to proclaim that the royal
power which had ruled France since the conversion of Clovis ruled
France no more. He made his way home amid acclamations, regulated by
the commander of the National Guard, like the gloomy and menacing
silence in which he had been received.
A new reign commenced. The head of the great house of Bourbon, the
heir of so much power and glory, on whom rested the tradition of Lewis
XIV., was unfit to exert, under jealous control, the narrow measure of
authority that remained. For the moment there was none. Anarchy in the
capital gave the signal for anarchy in the provinces, and anarchy at
that moment had a terrible meaning.
The deputies who came to Paris, to share the enthusiasm of the moment,
failed to notice the fact that the victorious army which gave liberty
to France and power to the Assembly was largely composed of assassins.
Their crimes disappeared in the blaze of their achievements. Their
support was still needed. It seemed too soon to insult the patriot and
the hero by telling him that he was also a ruffian. The mixed
multitude was thereby encouraged to believe that the slaughter of the
obnoxious was a necessity of critical times. The Russian envoy wrote
on the 19th that the French people displayed the same ferocity as two
centuries before.
On the 22nd, Foulon, one of the colleagues of Breteuil, and his
son-in-law Berthier, also a high official, were massacred by
premeditation in the streets. Neither Bailly, nor Lafayette with all
his cohorts, could protect the life of a doomed man; but a dragoon who
had paraded with the heart of Berthier was challenged, when he came
home to barracks, and cut down by a comrade.
Lally Tollendal brought the matter before the Assembly. His father
inherited the feelings of an exiled Jacobite against Hanoverian
England. He was at Falkirk with Charles Edward, and charged with the
Irish Brigade that broke the English column at Fontenoy. During the
Seven Years' War he commanded in India, and held Pondicherry for ten
months against Coote. Brought home a prisoner, he was released on
parole, that he might stand his trial. He was condemned to death; and
his son, who did not know who he was, was brought to the place of
execution, that they might meet once on earth. But Lally stabbed
himself, and lest justice should be defrauded, he was brought out to
die, with a gag in his mouth to silence protest, some hours before the
time.
The death of Lally is part of the long indictment against the French
judiciary, and his son strove for years to have the sentence reversed.
He came over to England, and understood our system better than any of
his countrymen. Therefore, when Mounier, who was no orator, brought
forward his Constitution, it was Lally who expounded it. By his
emotional and emphatic eloquence he earned a brief celebrity; and in
the Waterloo year he was a Minister of State, _in partibus_, at Ghent.
He became a peer of France, and when he died, in 1830, the name
disappeared. Not many years ago a miserable man, whom nobody knew and
who asked help from nobody, died of want in a London cellar. He was
the son of Lally Tollendal.
It is said that when, on July 22, he denounced the atrocities in
Paris, he overdid the occasion, speaking of himself, of his father, of
his feelings. Barnave, who was a man of honour, and already
conspicuous, was irritated to such a pitch that he exclaimed: "Was
this blood, that they have shed, so pure?"
Long before Barnave expiated his sin upon the scaffold he felt and
acknowledged its enormity. But it is by him and men like him, and not
by the scourings of the galleys, that we can get to understand the
spirit of the time. Two men, more eminent than Barnave, show it still
more clearly. The great chemist Lavoisier wrote to Priestley that if
there had been some excesses, they were committed for the love of
liberty, philosophy, and toleration, and that there was no danger of
such things being done in France for an inferior motive. And this is
the view of Jefferson on the massacres of September: "Many guilty
persons fell without the forms of trial, and with them some innocent.
These I deplore as much as anybody. But--it was necessary to use the
arm of the people, a machine not quite so blind as balls and bombs,
but blind to a certain degree--was ever such a prize won with so
little innocent blood?" There is a work in twelve stout volumes,
written to prove that it was all the outcome of the Classics, and due
to Harmodius, and Brutus, and Timoleon.
But you will find that murder, approved and acknowledged, is not an
epidemic peculiar to any time, or any country, or any opinion. We need
not include hot-blooded nations of the South in order to define it as
one characteristic of modern Monarchy. You may trace it in the Kings
of France, Francis I., Charles IX., Henry III., Lewis XIII., Lewis
XIV., in the Emperors Ferdinand I. and II., in Elizabeth Tudor and
Mary Stuart, in James and William. Still more if you consider a class
of men, not much worse, according to general estimate, than their
neighbours, that is, the historians. They have praise and hero-worship
for nearly every one of these anointed culprits. The strong man with
the dagger is followed by the weaker man with the sponge. First, the
criminal who slays; then the sophist who defends the slayer.
The royalists pursued the same tradition through the revolutionary
times. Cerutti advised that Mirabeau and Target should be removed by
poison; Chateaubriand wished to poniard Condorcet, and Malesherbes
admired him for it; the name of Georges Cadoudal was held in honour,
because his intended victim was Napoleon; La Rochejaquelein
entertained the same scheme, and made no secret of it to the general,
Segur. Adair found them indignant at Vienna because Fox had refused to
have the Emperor murdered, and warned him of the plot.
Those who judge morality by the intention have been less shocked at
the crimes of power, where the temptation is so strong and the danger
so slight, than at those committed by men resisting oppression.
Assuredly, the best things that are loved and sought by man are
religion and liberty--they, I mean, and not pleasure or prosperity,
not knowledge or power. Yet the paths of both are stained with
infinite blood; both have been often a plea for assassination, and the
worst of men have been among those who claimed to promote each sacred
cause.
Do not open your minds to the filtering of the fallacious doctrine
that it is less infamous to murder men for their politics than for
their religion or their money, or that the courage to execute the deed
is worse than the cowardice to excuse it. Let us not flinch from
condemning without respite or remission, not only Marat and Carrier,
but also Barnave. Because there may be hanging matter in the lives of
illustrious men, of William the Silent and Farnese, of Cromwell and
Napoleon, we are not to be turned from justice towards the actions,
and still more the thoughts, of those whom we are about to study.
Having said this, I shall endeavour, in that which is before us, to
spare you the spectacles that degrade, and the plaintive severity that
agitates and wearies. The judgment I call for is in the conscience,
not upon the lips, for ourselves, and not for display. "Man," says
Taine, "is a wild beast, carnivorous by nature, and delighting in
blood." That cruel speech is as much confirmed by the events that are
crowding upon us as it has ever been in royal or Christian history.
The Revolution will never be intelligibly known to us until we
discover its conformity to the common law, and recognise that it is
not utterly singular and exceptional, that other scenes have been as
horrible as these, and many men as bad.
VII
THE FOURTH OF AUGUST
We come to-day to the most decisive date in the Revolution, the fall
of the social system of historic France, and the substitution of the
Rights of Man.
When the Assembly was fully constituted, it had to regulate its
procedure. Sir Samuel Romilly, a friend of Dumont, and occasionally of
Mirabeau, sent over an account of the practice of the British
Parliament, with the cumbrous forms, the obstacles to prompt action,
the contrivances to favour a minority, and to make opposition nearly
equal to government. The French required more expeditious methods.
They had a single Assembly with a known and well-defined commission,
and the gravest danger of the hour was obstruction and delay. Every
member obtained the right of initiative, and could submit a motion in
writing. The Assembly might, after debate, refuse to consider it; but
if not arrested on the threshold, it might be discussed and voted and
passed in twenty-four hours. The security for deliberation was in the
Bureaux. The Assembly was divided into thirty groups or committees, of
nearly forty members each, who met separately, the Assembly in the
morning, the Bureaux in the evening. This plan ensured thorough and
sincere discussion, for men spoke their genuine thoughts, where there
was no formality, no reporter, no stranger in the gallery. The Bureaux
were disliked and suspected by the excluded public. The electorate,
experiencing for the first time the sensation of having deputies at
work to do their will, desired to watch them, and insisted on the
master's right to look after his man. Representation was new; and to
every reader of Rousseau, of Turgot, or of Mably, it was an object of
profound distrust. The desire to uphold the supremacy of the deputing
power over the deputed, of the constituent over his member, was
distinctly part of the great literary inheritance common to them all.
As the mandate was originally imperative, the giver of the mandate
claimed the right of seeing to its execution. The exercise of powers
that were defined and limited, that were temporary and revocable,
called for scrutiny and direct control.
The Bureaux did not last, and their disappearance was a disaster.
Party, as the term is used in the constitutional vocabulary, was not
yet developed; and no organisation possessed the alternate power of
presenting ministers to the Crown. The main lines that divided opinion
came to light in the debates of September, and the Assembly fell into
factions that were managed by their clubs. The President held office
for a fortnight, and each new election indicated the movement of
opinion, the position of parties, the rise of reputations. The united
Assembly did honour to the acceding orders. The first presidents were
prelates and men of rank. Out of six elections only one fell to a
commoner, until the end of September, when the leader of the Liberal
Conservatives, Mounier, was chosen, at what proved a moment of danger.
In the same way, the thirty chairmen of the Bureaux were, with
scarcely an exception, always taken from the clergy or the nobles.
As Mounier, with his friends, had dominated in the constitutional
committee of thirty, and was now paramount in the new committee of
eight, there was some prospect of a coalition, by which, in return for
their aid in carrying the English model, the nobles would obtain easy
terms in the liquidation of privilege. That is the parliamentary
situation. That is the starting-point of the transactions that we have
now to follow.
During the days spent in making terms between the king, the Assembly,
and the capital, the provinces were depending on Paris for news, for
opinions, and direction. They were informed that the Parisians had
made themselves masters of the royal fortress, and had expelled the
royal authority; that the king and the Assembly had accepted and
approved the action; that there was no executive ministry, either old
or new; and that the capital was providing for its own security and
administration. The towns soon had imitations of the disorders that
had been so successful, and quickly repressed them; for the towns were
the seat of the middle class, the natural protectors of acquired
property, and defenders of order and safety. In country districts the
process of disintegration was immediate, the spontaneous recovery was
slow. For the country was divided between the nobles who were rich,
and their dependents who were poor. And the poverty of one class was
ultimately due to innumerable devices for increasing the wealth of the
other. And now there was nobody in authority over them, nobody to keep
peace between them.
The first effect of the taking of the Bastille, the effacement of
royalty, the suspension of the ministerial office, was the rising of
the cottage against the castle, of the injured peasant against the
privileged landlord, who, apart from any fault of his own, by
immemorial process of history and by the actual letter of the law, was
his perpetual and inevitable enemy. The events of the week between
July 11 and 17 proclaimed that the authorised way to obtain what you
wanted was to employ the necessary violence. If it was thorough and
quick enough, there would be no present resistance, and no subsequent
complaint. And if there was some excess in the way of cruelty and
retribution, it was sure of amnesty on the ground of intolerable
provocation and of suffering endured too long. The king had accepted
his own humiliation as if it had been as good as due to him. He could
not do more for others than for himself. His brief alliance with the
aristocracy was dissolved. He was powerless for their defence, as they
were for their own. By their formal act of submission to the Assembly
on July 16, they acknowledged that their cause was lost with the
Bastille. They neglected to make terms with the enemy at their homes.
The appalling thing in the French Revolution is not the tumult but the
design. Through all the fire and smoke we perceive the evidence of
calculating organisation. The managers remain studiously concealed and
masked; but there is no doubt about their presence from the first.
They had been active in the riots of Paris, and they were again active
in the provincial rising. The remnant of the upper classes formed a
powerful minority at Versailles; and if they acted as powerful
minorities do, if they entered into compacts and combinations, they
could compound for the loss of fiscal immunity by the salvation of
social privilege. The people would continue to have masters--masters,
that is, not of their own making. They would be subject to powers
instituted formerly, whilst the Government itself obtained its
credentials for the day, and there would still be an intermediate body
between the nation and the sovereign. Wealth artificially constituted,
by means of laws favouring its accumulation in a class, and
discouraging its dispersion among all, would continue to predominate.
France might be transformed after the likeness of England; but the
very essence of the English system was liberty founded on inequality.
The essence of the French ideal was democracy, that is, as in America,
liberty founded on equality. Therefore it was the interest of the
democratic or revolutionary party that the next step should be taken
after the manner of the last, that compulsion, which had answered
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