History of the Girondists Part 11

This magnificent harangue only sounded as the voice of remorse in the bosom of the a.s.sembly. It was listened to with impatience, and then forgotten with all speed. M. de La Fayette opposed, in a short speech, the proposition of M. Dandre, who desired to adjourn for thirty years the revision of the const.i.tution. The a.s.sembly neither adopted the advice of Dandre nor of La Fayette, but contented itself with inviting the nation not to make use for twenty-five years of its right to modify the const.i.tution. "Behold us, then," said Robespierre, "arrived at the end of our long and painful career: it only remains for us to give it stability and duration. Why are we asked to submit to the acceptance of the king? The fate of the const.i.tution is independent of the will of Louis XVI. I do not doubt he will accept it with delight. An empire for patrimony, all the attributes of the executive power, forty millions for his personal pleasures,--such is our offer! Do not let us wait, before we offer it, until he be away from the capital and environed by ill advisers. Let us offer it to him in Paris. Let us say to him, Behold the most powerful throne in the universe--will you accept it? Suspected gatherings, the system of weakening your frontiers, threats of your enemies without, manoeuvres of your enemies within,--all warns you to hasten the establishment of an order of things which a.s.sures and fortifies the citizens. If we deliberate, when we should swear, if our const.i.tution may be again attacked, after having been already twice a.s.sailed, what remains for us to do? Either to resume our arms or our fetters. We have been empowered," he added, looking towards the seats of Barnave and the Lameths, "to const.i.tute the nation, and not to raise the fortunes of certain individuals, in order to favour the coalition of court intriguers, and to a.s.sure to them the price of their complaisance or their treason."

XIII.

The const.i.tutional act was presented to the king on the 3d of September, 1791. Thouret reported to the National a.s.sembly in these words the result of the solemn interview between the conquered will of the monarch and the victorious will of his people:--"At nine o'clock in the evening our deputation quitted this chamber, proceeding to the chateau escorted by a guard of honour, consisting of various detachments of the national guard and _gendarmerie_. It was invariably accompanied by the applauses of the people. It was received in the council-chamber, where the king was attended by his ministers and a great number of his servants. I said to the king, 'Sire, the representatives of the nation come to present to your majesty the const.i.tutional act, which consecrates the indefeasible rights of the French people--which gives to the throne its true dignity, and regenerates the government of the empire.' The king received the const.i.tutional act, and thus replied: 'I receive the const.i.tution presented to me by the National a.s.sembly. I will convey to it my resolution after the shortest possible delay which the examination of so important an act must require. I have resolved on remaining in Paris. I will give orders to the commandant of the national Parisian guard for the duties of my guard.' The king, during the whole time, presented an aspect of satisfaction; and from all we saw and heard we antic.i.p.ate that the completion of the Const.i.tution will be also the termination of the Revolution." The a.s.sembly and the tribunes applauded several times. It was one of those days of public hope, when faction retreats into the shade, to allow the serenity of good citizens to shine forth.

La Fayette removed the degrading _consignes_, which made the Tuileries a jail to the royal family. The king ceased to be the hostage of the nation, in order to become its ostensible head. He gave some days to the apparent examination which he was supposed to bestow upon the Const.i.tution. On the 13th he addressed to the a.s.sembly, by the minister of justice, a message concerted with Barnave, thus conceived:--"I have examined the const.i.tutional act. I accept it, and will have it carried into execution. I ought to make known the motives of my resolution. From the commencement of my reign I have desired the reform of abuses, and in all my acts I have taken for rule public opinion. I have conceived the project of a.s.suring the happiness of the people on permanent bases, and of subjecting my own authority to settled rules. From these intentions I have never varied. I have favoured the establishment of trials of your work before it was even finished. I have done so in all sincerity; and, if the disorders which have attended almost every epoch of the Revolution have frequently affected my heart, I hoped that the law would resume its force, and that on reaching the term of your labours, every day would restore to it that respect, without which the people can have no liberty, and a king no happiness. I have long entertained that hope; and my resolution has only changed at the moment when I could hope no longer. Remember the moment when I quitted Paris: disorder was at its height--the licence of the press and the insolence of parties knew no bounds. Then, I avow, if you had offered to me the const.i.tution, I should not have thought it my duty to accept it.

"All has changed. You have manifested the desire to re-establish order; you have revised many of the articles; the will of the people is no longer doubtful to me, and therefore I accept the const.i.tution under better auspices. I freely renounce the co-operation I had claimed in this work, and I declare that when I have renounced it no other but myself has any right to claim it. Unquestionably I still see certain points in the const.i.tution in which more perfection might be attained; but I agree to allow experience to be the judge. When I shall have fairly and loyally put in action the powers of government confided to me no reproach can be addressed to me, and the nation will make itself known by the means which the const.i.tution has reserved to it.

(Applause.) Let those who are restrained by the fear of persecutions and troubles out of their country return to it in safety. In order to extinguish hatreds let us consent to a mutual forgetfulness of the past.

(The tribunes and the left renewed their acclamations.) Let the accusations and the prosecutions which have sprung solely from the events of the const.i.tution be obliterated in a general reconciliation. I do not refer to those which have been caused by an attachment to me. Can you see any guilt in them? As to those who from excess, in which I can see personal insult, have drawn on themselves the visitation of the laws, I prove with respect to them that I am the king of all the French.

I will swear to the const.i.tution in the very place where it was drawn up, and I will present myself to-morrow at noon to the National a.s.sembly."

The a.s.sembly adopted unanimously, on the proposition of La Fayette, the general amnesty demanded by the king. A numerous deputation went to carry to him this resolution. The queen was present. "My wife and children, who are here," said the king to the deputation, "share my sentiments." The queen, who desired to reconcile herself to public opinion, advanced, and said, "Here are my children; we all agree to partic.i.p.ate in the sentiments of the king." These words reported to the a.s.sembly, prepared all hearts for the pardon which royalty was about to implore. Next day the king went to the a.s.sembly; he wore no decoration but the cross of Saint Louis, from deference to a recent decree suppressing the other orders of chivalry. He took his place beside the president, the a.s.sembly all standing.

"I come," said the king, "to consecrate solemnly here the acceptance I have given to the const.i.tutional act. I swear to be faithful to the nation and the law, and to employ all the power delegated to me for maintaining the const.i.tution, and carrying its decrees into effect. May this great and memorable epoch be that of the re-establishment of peace, and become the gage of the happiness of the people, and the prosperity of the empire." The unanimous applauses of the chamber, and the tribunes ardent for liberty, but kindly disposed towards the king, demonstrated that the nation entered with enthusiasm into this conquest of the const.i.tution.

"Old abuses," replied the president, "which had for a long time triumphed over the good intentions of the best of kings, oppressed France. The National a.s.sembly has re-established the basis of public prosperity. What it has desired the nation has willed. Your majesty no longer desires in vain the happiness of Frenchmen. The National a.s.sembly has nothing more to wish, now that on this day in its presence you consummate the const.i.tution by accepting it. The attachment of Frenchmen decrees to you the crown, and what a.s.sures it to you is the need that so great a nation must always have of an hereditary power. How sublime, sire, will be in the annals of history this regeneration, which gives citizens to France, to Frenchmen a country, to the king a fresh t.i.tle of greatness and glory, and a new source of happiness!"

The king then withdrew, being accompanied to the Tuileries by the entire a.s.sembly; the procession with difficulty making its way through the immense throng of people which rent the air with acclamations of joy.

Military music and repeated salvos of artillery taught France that the nation and the king, the throne and liberty, were reconciled in the const.i.tution, and that after three years of struggles, agitations, and shocks, the day of concord had dawned. These acclamations of the people in Paris spread throughout the empire. France had some days of delirium.

The hopes which softened men's hearts, brought back their old feelings for its king. The prince and his family were incessantly called to the windows of their palace to receive the applause of the crowds. They sought to make them feel how sweet is the love of a people.

The proclamation of the const.i.tution on the 18th had the character of a religious fete. The Champ-de-Mars was covered with battalions of the national guard. Bailly, mayor of Paris, the munic.i.p.al authorities, the department, public functionaries, and all the people betook themselves thither. One hundred and one cannon shots hailed the reading of the const.i.tutional act, made to the nation from the top of the altar of the country. One cry of _Vive la Nation!_ uttered by 300,000 voices, was the acceptation by the people. The citizens embraced, as members of one family. Balloons, bearing patriotic inscriptions, rose in the evening in the Champs Elysees, as if to bear to the skies the testimony of the joy of a regenerated people. Those who went up in them threw out copies of the book of the const.i.tution. The night was splendid with illuminations.

Garlands of flames, running from tree to tree, formed, from the Arc de l'Etoile to the Tuileries, a sparkling avenue, crowded with the population of Paris. At intervals, orchestras filled with musicians sounded forth the pealing notes of glory and public joy. M. de La Fayette rode on horseback at the head of his staff. His presence seemed to place the oaths of the people and the king under the guard of the armed citizens. The king, the queen, and their children appeared in their carriage at eleven o'clock in the evening. The immense crowd that surrounded them as if in one popular embrace,--the cries of _Vive le Roi! Vive la Reine! Vive le Dauphin!_--hats flung in the air, the gestures of enthusiasm and respect, made for them a triumph on the very spot over which they had pa.s.sed two months previously in the midst of the outrages of the mult.i.tude, and deep murmuring of the excited populace. The nation seemed desirous of redeeming these threatening days, and to prove to the king how easy it was to appease the people, and how sweet to it was the reign of liberty! The national acceptance of the laws of the Const.i.tuent a.s.sembly was the counterproof of its work.

It had not the legality, but it had really the value, of an individual acceptance by primary a.s.semblies. It proved that the will of the public mind was satisfied. The nation voted by acclamation, what the wisdom of its a.s.sembly had voted on reflection. Nothing but security was wanting to the public feeling. It seemed as if it desired to intoxicate itself by the delirium of its happiness; and that it compensated, by the very excess of its manifestations of joy, for what it lacked in solidity and duration.

The king sincerely partic.i.p.ated in this general joyous feeling. Placed between the recollections of all he had suffered for three years, and the lowering storms he foresaw in the future, he endeavoured to delude himself, and to feel persuaded of his good fortune. He said to himself, that perhaps he had mistaken the popular opinion; and that having at least surrendered himself unconditionally to the mercy of his people--that people would respect in him his own power and his own will: he swore in his honest and good heart fidelity to the const.i.tution and love to the nation he really loved.

The queen herself returned to the palace with more national thoughts: she said to the king, "They are no longer the same people;" and, taking her son in her arms, she presented him to the crowd who thronged the terrace of the chateau, and seemed thus to invest herself in the eyes of the people with the innocence of age and the interest of maternity.

The king gave, some days afterwards, a fete to the people of Paris, and distributed abundant alms to the indigent. He desired that even the miserable should have his day of content, at the commencement of that era of joy, which his reconciliation with his people promised to his reign. The _Te Deum_ was sung in the cathedral of Paris, as on a day of victory, to bless the cradle of the French const.i.tution. On the 30th of September, the king closed the Const.i.tuent a.s.sembly. Before he entered the chamber, Bailly, in the name of the munic.i.p.ality; Pastoret, in the name of the departments, congratulated the a.s.sembly on the conclusion of its work:--"Legislators," said Bailly, "you have been armed with the greatest power that men can require. To-morrow you will be nothing. It is not, therefore interest or flattery which praises you--it is your works. We announce to you the benedictions of posterity, which commence for you from to-day!" "Liberty," said Pastoret, "had fled beyond the seas, or taken refuge in the mountains,--you have raised her fallen throne. Despotism had effaced every page of the book of nature; you have re-established the decalogue of freemen!"

XIV.

The king, surrounded by his ministers, entered the a.s.sembly at three o'clock: lengthened cries of _Vive le roi_ for a moment checked his speaking. "Gentlemen," said Louis XVI., "after the completion of the const.i.tution, you have resolved on to-day terminating your labours. It would have been desirable, perhaps, that your session should have been prolonged in order that you, yourselves, should prove your work. But you have wished, no doubt, to mark by this the difference which should exist between the functions of a const.i.tuent body and ordinary legislators. I will exercise all the power you have confided to me in a.s.suring to the const.i.tution the respect and obedience due to it. For you, gentlemen, who, during a long and painful career, have evinced an indefatigable zeal in your labours, there remains a last duty to fulfil when you are scattered over the face of the empire; it is to enlighten your fellow citizens as to the spirit of the laws you have made; to purify and unite opinions by the example you will give to the love of order and submission to the laws. Be, on your return to your homes, the interpreters of my sentiments to your fellow-citizens; tell them that the king will always be their first and most faithful friend--that he desires to be loved by them, and can only be happy with them and by them."

The president replied to the king:--"The National a.s.sembly having arrived at the termination of its career, enjoys, at this moment, the first fruit of its labours. Convinced that the government best suited to France is that which reconciles the respected prerogatives of the throne with the inalienable rights of the people, it has given to the state a const.i.tution which equally guarantees royalty and liberty. Our successors, charged with the onerous burden of the safety of the empire, will not misunderstand their rights, nor the limits of the const.i.tution: and you, sire, you have almost completed every thing--by accepting the Const.i.tution, you have consummated the Revolution."

The king departed amidst loud acclamations. It appeared that the National a.s.sembly was in haste to lay down the responsibility of events which it no longer felt itself capable of controlling. "The National a.s.sembly declares," says Target, its president, "that its mission is finished, and that, at this moment, it terminates its sittings."

The people, who crowded round the Manege, and saw with pain the Revolution abdicated into the hands of the king, insulted, as it recognised them, the members of the Right--even Barnave. They experienced even on the first day the ingrat.i.tude they had so often fomented. They separated in sorrow and in discouragement.

When Robespierre and Petion went out, the people crowned them with oaken chaplets, and took the horses off their carriage in order to drag them home in triumph. The power of these two men already proved the weakness of the const.i.tution, and presaged its fall. An amnestied king returned powerless to his palace. Timid legislators abdicated in trouble. Two triumphant tribunes were elevated by the people. In this was all the future. The Const.i.tuent a.s.sembly, begun in an insurrection of principles, ended as a sedition. Was it the error of those principles--was it the fault of the Const.i.tuent a.s.sembly? We will examine the question at the end of the last book of this volume, in casting a retrospect over the acts of the Const.i.tuent a.s.sembly; till then we will delay this judgment, in order not to interfere with the progress of the recital.

BOOK V.

I.

Whilst an instant's breathing time was permitted to France between two convulsive efforts, and the Revolution as yet knew not whether it should maintain the const.i.tution it had gained, or employ it as a weapon to obtain a republic, Europe began to arouse itself; egotistical and improvident, she merely beheld in the first movement in France a comedy played at Paris on the stage of the States General and the const.i.tuent a.s.sembly--between popular genius, represented by Mirabeau, and the vanquished genius of the aristocracy, personified in Louis XVI. and the clergy. This grand spectacle had been in the eyes of the sovereigns and their ministers merely the continuation of the struggle (in which they had taken so much interest, and showed so much secret favour) between Voltaire and Jean Jacques Rousseau on one side, and the old aristocratical and religious system on the other. To them the Revolution was the philosophy of the eighteenth century, which had migrated from the _salons_ into the public streets, and from books to speeches. This earthquake in the moral world, and these shocks at Paris, the presages of some unknown change in European destinies, attracted far more than they affrighted them. They had not as yet learned that inst.i.tutions are but ideas, and that those ideas, when overthrown, involve in their fall thrones and nations. Whatsoever the spirit of G.o.d wills, that also do all mankind will, and are to accomplish, unperceived even by themselves.

Europe bestowed attention, time, and astonishment on the commencement of the French Revolution, and that was all it needed to bring it to maturity. The spark not having been extinguished at its outbreak was fated to kindle and consume every thing before it. The moral and political state of Europe was eminently favourable to the contagion of new ideas. Time, men, and things, all lay at the mercy of France.

II.

A long period of peace had softened the minds, and deadened those hereditary hatreds that oppose the communication of feelings and the similarity of ideas between different nations. Europe, since the treaty of Westphalia, had become a republic of perfectly balanced powers, where the general equilibrium of power resulting from each formed a counterpoise to the other. One glance sufficed to show the solidity and unity of this European _building_, every beam of which, opposing an equal resistance to the others, afforded an equal support by the pressure of all the states.

Germany was a confederation presided over by Austria, the emperors were the chiefs only of this ancient feudalism of kings, dukes, and electors.

The house of Austria was more powerful through itself and its vast possessions than through the imperial dignity. The two crowns of Hungary and Bohemia, the Tyrol, Italy, and the Low Countries, gave it an ascendency, which the genius of Richelieu had been able to fetter, but not to destroy. Powerful to resist, but not to impel, Austria was more fitted to _sustain_ than to _act_; her force lies in her situation and immobility, for she is like a block in the middle of Germany,--her power is in her _weight_; she is the pivot of the balance of European power.

But the federative diet weakened and enervated its designs by those secret influences all federations naturally possess. Two new states, unperceived until the time of Louis XIV., had recently risen, out of reach of the power, and the long rivalry of the houses of Bourbon and Austria: the one in the north of Germany, Prussia; the other in the east, Russia. The policy of England had encouraged the rise of these two infant powers, in order to form the elements of political combinations that would admit of her interests obtaining a firm footing.

III.

A hundred years had hardly elapsed since an emperor of Austria had conferred the t.i.tle of king on a margrave of Prussia, a subordinate sovereign of two millions of men, and yet Prussia already balanced in Germany the influence of the house of Austria. The Machiavelian genius of Frederic the Great had become the genius of Prussia. His monarchy, composed of territories acquired by victory, required war to strengthen itself, still more of agitation and intrigue to legitimise itself.

Prussia was in a ferment of dissolution amidst the German states.

Scarcely had it risen into existence than it abdicated all German feeling by leaguing with England and Russia; and England, always on the watch to widen these breaches, had used Prussia as her lever in Germany.

Russia, whose two-fold ambition already had designs on Asia on the one hand, on Europe on the other, had made it an advanced guard on the west, and used it as an advanced camp on the borders of the Rhine. Thus Prussia was the point of the Russian sword in the very heart of France.

Military power was every thing; its government was only discipline, its people only an army. As for its ideas, its policy was to place itself at the head of the Protestant states, and offer protection, a.s.sistance, and revenge to all those whose interest or whose ambition was threatened by the house of Austria. Thus by its nature Prussia was a revolutionary power.

Russia, to whom nature had a.s.signed a sterile yet immense place on the globe, the ninth part of the habitable world, and a population of forty millions of men, all compelled by the savage genius of Peter the Great to unite themselves into one nation, seemed yet to waver between two roads, one of which led to Germany, the other to the Ottoman empire.

Catherine II. governed it: a woman endowed with wondrous beauty, pa.s.sion, genius, and crime,--such are necessary in the ruler of a barbarous nation, in order to add the _prestige_ of adoration to the terror inspired by the sceptre. Each step she took in Asia awakened an echo of surprise and admiration in Europe, and for her was revived the name of Semiramis. Russia, Prussia, and France, intimidated by her fame, applauded her victories over the Turks, and her conquests in the Black Sea, without apparently comprehending that she weighed down the European power, and that once mistress of Poland and Constantinople, nothing then would prevent her from carrying out her designs on Germany, and extending her arm over all the West.

IV.

England, humiliated in her maritime pride by the brilliant rivalry of the French fleet in the Indian Seas, irritated by the a.s.sistance given by France to aid America in her struggle for independence, had secretly allied herself in 1788 with Prussia and Holland, to counterbalance the effect of the alliance of France with Austria, and to intimidate Russia in her invasion of Turkey. England at this moment relied on the genius of one man, Mr. Pitt, the greatest statesman of the age, son of Lord Chatham, the only political orator of modern ages who equalled (if he did not surpa.s.s) Demosthenes. Mr. Pitt, in a manner born in the council of kings, and brought up at the tribune of his country, at the age of twenty-three was launched in political life. At this age, when other men have scarcely emerged from childhood, he was already the most eminent of all that aristocracy that confided their cause to him as the most worthy to uphold it, and when almost a boy he acquired the government of his country from the admiration excited by his talents, and held it almost without interruption up to his death by his enlightened views of policy, and the energy of his resolution. He showed the House of Commons what a great statesman, supported by the opinion of the nation, can dare to attempt and accomplish, with the consent (and sometimes against it) of a parliament. He was the despot of the const.i.tution, if we may link together those two words that can alone express his lawful omnipotence.

The struggle against the French Revolution was the continual act of his twenty-five years of ministerial life; he became the antagonist of France, and died vanquished.

And yet it was not the Revolution that he hated, it was France, and in France it was not liberty he hated, for at heart he loved freedom; it was the destruction of this balance of Europe that, once destroyed, left England isolated in its ocean. At this moment, England, hostile towards America, at war with India, a coolness existing between itself and Spain, secretly hating Russia, had on the Continent nothing but Prussia and the Stadtholder; and observation and temporisation became a necessary part of its policy.

V.

Spain, enervated by the reign of Philip III. and Ferdinand VI., had recovered some degree of internal vitality and external dignity during the long reign of Charles III.; Campomanes, Florida Blanca, the Comte d'Aranda, his ministers, had struggled against superst.i.tion, that second nature of the Spaniards. A _coup d'etat_, meditated in silence, and executed like a conspiracy by the court, had driven out of the kingdom the Jesuits, who reigned under the name of the kings. The family agreement between Louis XV. and Charles III., in 1761, had guaranteed the thrones, and all the possessions of the different branches of the house of Bourbon. But this political compact had been unable to guarantee this many-branched dynasty against the decay of its root, and that degeneracy that gives effeminate and weak princes as successors to mighty kings. The Bourbons became satraps at Naples, and in Spain crowned monks, and the very palace of the Escurial had a.s.sumed the appearance and the gloom of a monastery.

The _monacal_ system devoured Spain, and yet this unfortunate country adored the evil that destroyed it. After having been subject to the caliphs, Spain became the conquest of the popes; and their authority reigned paramount there under every costume; whilst theocracy made its last efforts there. Never had the sacerdotal system more completely swayed a nation, and never had a nation been reduced to a more abject state of degradation. The Inquisition was its government,--the _auto-da-fes_ its triumphs,--bull-fights and processions its only diversions. Had the inquisitorial reign lasted a few years more, this people would have been no longer reckoned amongst the civilised inhabitants of Europe.

Charles III. had trembled at each new effort he made to emanc.i.p.ate his government; his good intentions had all been frustrated and checked, and he had been forced to sacrifice his ministers to the vengeance of superst.i.tion. Florida Blanca and d'Aranda died in exile, to which they had been condemned for the crime of having served their country. The weak Charles IV. had mounted the throne and reigned for several years, guided by a faithless wife, a confessor, and a favourite. The loves of G.o.doy and the queen formed the whole of the Spanish policy, and to the fortune of the favourite all the rest of the empire was sacrificed. What mattered it that the fleet rotted in the unfinished ports of Charles III.--that Spanish America a.s.serted its independence--that Italy bent beneath the yoke of Austria--that the house of Bourbon combated in vain in France the progress of a new system--that the Inquisition and the monks cast a gloom over and devoured the whole of the peninsula,--all this was nothing to the court, provided the queen were but loved and G.o.doy great. The palace of Aranjuez was like the walled tomb of Spain, into which the active spirit that now agitated Europe could no longer penetrate.

VI.