History of the Girondists Part 18

VIII.

But, they say with Barnave, France is monarchical by its geography as by its character, and the contest arises in minds directly between the monarchy and the republic. Let us make ourselves understood:--

Geography is of no party; Rome and Carthage had no frontiers; Genoa and Venice had no territories. It is not the soil which determines the nature of the const.i.tutions of people, it is time. The geographical objection of Barnave fell to the ground a year afterwards, before the prodigies in France in 1792. It proved that if a republic fails in unity and centralisation, it is unable to defend a continental nationality.

Waves and mountains are the frontiers of the weak--men are the frontiers of a people. Let us then have done with geography. It is not geometricians but statesmen who form social const.i.tutions.

Nations have two great interests which reveal to them the form they should take, according to the hour of the national life which they have attained--the instinct of their conservation, and the instinct of their growth. To act, or be idle, to walk, or sit down, are two acts wholly different, which compel men to a.s.sume att.i.tudes wholly diverse. It is the same with nations. The monarchy or the republic correspond exactly amongst a people to the necessities of these two opposite conditions of society--repose or action. We here understand two words; these two words, repose and action, in their most absolute acceptation; for there is repose in republics, as there is action in monarchies.

Is it a question of preservation, of reproduction, of development in that kind of slow and insensible growth which people have like vast vegetables? Is it a question of keeping in harmony with the European balance of preserving its laws and manners; of maintaining its traditions, perpetuating opinions and worship, of guaranteeing properties and right conduct, of preventing troubles, agitation, factions? The monarchy is evidently more proper for this than any other state of society. It protects in lower cla.s.ses that security which it desires for its own elevated condition. It is order in essence and selfishness: order is its life--tradition its dogma, the nation is its heritage, religion its ally, aristocracies are its barrier against the invasions of the people. It must preserve all this or perish. It is the government of prudence, because it is also that of great responsibility.

An empire is the stake of a monarch--the throne is everywhere a guarantee of immobility. When we are placed on high we fear every shake, for we have but to lose or to fall.

When then a nation is placed in a sufficing territory, with settled laws, fixed interests, sacred creeds, its worship in full force, its social cla.s.ses graduated, its administration organised, it is monarchical in spite of seas, rivers, or mountains. It abdicates and empowers the monarchy to foresee, to will, to act for it. It is the most perfect of governments for such functions. It calls itself by the two names of society itself, _unity_ and _hereditary right_.

IX.

If a people, on the contrary, is at one of those epochs when it is necessary to act with all the intensity of its strength in order to operate within and without one of those organic transformations which are as necessary to people as is a current to waves or explosion to compressed powers--a republic is the obligatory and fated form of a nation at such a moment.

For a sudden, irresistible, convulsive action of the social body, the arm and will of all is needed; the people become a mob, and rush headlong to danger. It can alone suffice to its own danger. What other arm but that of the whole people could stir what it has to stir?--displace what it has to displace?--install what it desires to found? The monarch would break his sceptre into fragments on it. There must be a lever capable of raising thirty millions of wills--this lever the nation alone possesses. It is in itself the moving power, the fulcrum and the lever.

X.

We cannot ask of the law to act against the law, of tradition to act against tradition, of established order to act against established order. It would be to require strength from weakness, life from suicide; and, besides, we should ask in vain of the monarchical power to accomplish these changes, in which very often all perish, and the king foremost. Such a course would be the contradiction to the monarchy: how could it attempt it?

To ask a king to destroy the empire of a religion which consecrates him; to despoil of their riches a clergy who has them by the same divine t.i.tle as that by which he has tenure of his kingdom; to degrade an aristocracy which is the first step of his throne; to throw down social hierarchies of which he is the head and crown; to undermine laws of which he is the highest,--is to ask of the vaults of an edifice to sap the foundation. The king could not do so, and would not. In thus overthrowing all that serves him for support, he feels that he would be rendered wholly dest.i.tute. He would be playing with his throne and dynasty. He is responsible for his race. He is prudent by nature, and a temporiser from necessity. He must soothe, please, manage, and be on terms with all const.i.tuted interests. He is the king of the worship, aristocracy, laws, manners, abuses, and falsehoods of the empire. Even the vices of the const.i.tution form a portion of his strength. To threaten them is to destroy himself. He may hate them: he dares not to attack them.

XI.

A republic alone can suffice for such crises: nations know this, and cling to it as their sole hope of preservation. The will of the people becomes the ruling power. It drives from its presence the timid, seeks the bold and the determined, summons all men to aid in the great work, makes trial of, employs, and combines the force, the devotion, the heroism of every man. It is the populace that holds the helm of the vessel, on which the most prompt, or the most firm seizes, until it is again torn from him by a stronger hand. But every one governs in the common name. Private consideration, timidity of situation, difference of rank, all disappears. No one is responsible--to-day he rises to power--to-morrow he descends to exile or the scaffold--there is no _morrow_, all is _to-day_--resistance is crushed by the irresistible power of movement. All bends--all yields before the people. The resentments of castes--the abolished forms of worship--the decimation of property--the extirpated abuses--the humiliated aristocracies--all are lost in the thundering sound of the overthrow of ancient ideas and things. On whom can we demand revenge? The nation answers for all to all, and no man has aught to require from it. It does not survive itself, it braves recrimination and vengeance--it is absolute as an element--anonymous, as fatality--it completes its work, and when that is ended, says, "Let us rest; and let us a.s.sume monarchy."

XII.

Such a plan of action is the republic--the only one that befits the trying period of transformation. It is the government of pa.s.sion, the government of crises, the government of revolutions. So long as revolutions are unfinished, so long does the instinct of the people urge them to a republic; for they feel that every other hand is too feeble to give that onward and violent impulse necessary to the Revolution. The people (and they act wisely), will not trust an irresponsible, perpetual, and hereditary power to fulfil the commands of the epochs of creation--they will perform them themselves. Their dictatorship appears to them indispensable to save the nation; and what is a dictatorship but a republic? It cannot resign its power until every crisis be over, and the great work of revolution completed and consolidated. Then it can again resume the monarchy, and say, "Reign in the name of the ideas I have given thee!"

XIII.

The Const.i.tuent a.s.sembly was then blind and weak, not to create a republic as the natural instrument of the Revolution. Mirabeau, Bailly, La Fayette, Sieyes, Barnave, Talleyrand, and Lameth acted in this respect like philosophers, and not great politicians, as events have amply proved. They believed the Revolution finished as soon as it was written, and the monarchy converted as soon as it had sworn to preserve the const.i.tution. The Revolution was but begun, and the oath of royalty to the Revolution as futile as the oath of the Revolution to royalty.

These two elements could not mingle until after an interval of an age--this interval was the republic. A nation does not change in a day, or in fifty years, from revolutionary excitements to monarchical repose.

It is because we forgot it at the hour when we should have remembered it, that the crisis was so terrible, and that we yet feel its effects.

If the Revolution, which perpetually follows itself, had had its own natural and fitting government, the republic--this republic would have been less tumultuous and less perturbed than the five attempts we made for a monarchy. The nature of the age in which we live protests against the traditional forms of power: at an epoch of movement--a government of movement--such is the law.

XIV.

The National a.s.sembly, it is said, had not the right to act thus; for it had sworn allegiance to the monarchy and recognised Louis XVI., and could not dethrone him without a crime. The objection is puerile, if it originates in minds who do not believe in the possession of the people by dynasties. The a.s.sembly at its outset had proclaimed the inalienable right of the people; and the lawfulness of necessary insurrection, and the oath of the Tennis Court (_Serment du Jeu de Paume_), were nought but an oath of disobedience to the king and of fidelity to the nation.

The a.s.sembly had afterwards proclaimed Louis XVI. king of the French. If they possessed the power of proclaiming him king, they also possessed that of proclaiming him a simple citizen. Forfeiture for the national utility, and that of the human race, was evidently one of its principles, and yet how did it act? It leaves Louis XVI. king, or makes him king, not through respect for that inst.i.tution, but out of respect for his person, and pity for so great a downfall. Such was the truth; it feared sacrilege, and fell into anarchy. It was clement, n.o.ble, and generous. Louis XVI. had deserved well from his people; who well can dare to censure so magnanimous a condescension? Before the king's departure for Varennes, the absolute right of the nation was but an abstract fiction, the _summum jus_ of the a.s.sembly. The royalty of Louis XVI. was respectable and respected, once again it was established.

XV.

But a moment arrived, and this moment was when the king fled his kingdom, protesting against the will of the nation, and sought the a.s.sistance of the army, and the intervention of foreign powers, when the a.s.sembly legitimately possessed the rigorous right of disposing of the power, thus abandoned or betrayed. Three courses were open: to declare the downfall of the monarchy, and proclaim a republican revolution; the temporary suspension of the royalty, and govern in its name during its moral eclipse; and, lastly, to restore the monarchy.

The a.s.sembly chose the worst alternative of the three. It feared to be harsh, and was cruel; for by retaining the supreme rank for the king, it condemned him to the torture of the hatred and contempt of the people; it crowned him with suspicions and outrages; and nailed him to the throne, in order that the throne might prove the instrument of his torture and his death.

Of the two other courses, the first was the most logical, to proclaim the downfall of the monarchy and the formation of a republic.

The republic, had it been properly established by the a.s.sembly, would have been far different from the republic traitorously and atrociously extorted nine months after by the insurrection of the 10th of August. It would have doubtless suffered the commotion, inseparable from the birth of a new order of things. It would not have escaped the disorders of nature in a country where every thing was done by first impulse, and impa.s.sioned by the magnitude of its perils. But it would have originated in law and not in sedition--in right, and not in violence--in deliberation, and not in insurrection. This alone could have changed the sinister conditions of its birth and its future fate; it might become an agitating power, but it would remain pure and unsullied.

Only reflect for a moment how entirely its legal and premeditated proclamation would have altered the course of events. The 10th of August would not have taken place--the perfidy and tyranny of the commune of Paris--the ma.s.sacre of the guards--the a.s.sault on the palace--the flight of the king to the a.s.sembly--the outrages heaped on him there--and his imprisonment in the temple--would have never occurred.

The republic would not have killed a king, a queen, an innocent babe, and a virtuous princess; it would not have had the ma.s.sacres of September, those St. Bartholomews of the people--that have left an indelible stain on the whole robes of liberty. It would not have been baptized in the blood of three hundred thousand human beings--it would not have armed the revolutionary tribunal with the axe of the people, with which it immolated a generation to make way for an idea,--it would not have had the 31st of May. The Girondists arriving at the supreme power, unsullied by crime, would have possessed more force with which to combat the demagogues; and the republic calmly and deliberately inst.i.tuted, would have intimidated Europe far more than an _emeute_ legitimised by bloodshed and a.s.sa.s.sination. War might have been avoided, or, if it was inevitable, have been more unanimous and more triumphant; our generals would not have been ma.s.sacred by their soldiers amidst cries of treason. The spirit of the people would have combated with us, and the horror of our days of August, September, and January would not have alienated from our standards the nations attracted thither by our doctrines. Thus a single change in the origin of the republic changed the fate of the Revolution.

XVI.

But if this rigorous resolution was yet repugnant to the feelings of France, and if the a.s.sembly had feared they had given birth to a republic prematurely, the third course was yet open, to proclaim the temporary cessation of royalty during ten years, and govern in a republican form in its name until the const.i.tution was firmly and securely established. This course would have saved all the respect due to royalty; the life of the king--the life of the royal family--the rights of the people--the purity of the Revolution--it was at once firm and calm, efficacious and legitimate. It was such a dictatorship as the people had instinctively figured in the critical times of their existence. But instead of a short, fugitive, disturbed, and ambitious dictatorship of one man, it was the dictatorship of the nation, governing itself through its National a.s.sembly. The nation might have respectfully laid by royalty during ten years, in order itself to carry out a work above the power of the king. This accomplished, resentment extinguished, habits formed, the laws in operation, the frontiers protected, the clergy secularised, the aristocracy humbled, the dictatorship could terminate. The king or his dynasty could ascend without danger a throne from which all danger was now averted. This veritable republic would have thus resumed the name of a const.i.tutional monarchy, without changing any thing, and the statue of royalty would have been replaced on its pedestal when the base had been consolidated.

Such would have been the consulate of the people, far superior to that consulate of a man who was to finish by ravaging Europe, and by the double usurpation of a throne and a revolution.

Or, if at the expiration of this national dictatorship, the nation, well governed and guided, found it dangerous or useless to re-establish the throne, what prevented it from saying, I now a.s.sume as a definitive government that which I a.s.sumed as a dictatorship: I proclaim the French republic as the only government befitting the excitement and energy of a regenerative epoch; for the republic is a dictatorship perpetuated and const.i.tuted by the people. What avails a throne? I remain erect: it is the att.i.tude of a people in travail!

In a word, the Const.i.tuent a.s.sembly, whose light illumined the globe--whose audacity in two years transformed an empire, had but one fault, that of coming to a close. It should have perpetuated itself: it abdicated. A nation that abdicates after a reign of two years, and on heaps of ruins, bequeaths the sceptre to anarchy. The king _could_ reign no longer, the nation _would not_. Thus faction reigned, and the Revolution perished; not because it had gone too far, but because it had not been sufficiently bold. So true is it that the timidity of nations is not less disastrous than the weakness of kings; and that a people who knows not how to seize and guard all that which pertains to it, falls at once into tyranny and anarchy. The a.s.sembly dared to do every thing save to reign: the reign of the Revolution was nought but a republic: and the a.s.sembly left this name to factions, and this form to terror. Such was its fault--it expiated it: and the expiation is not yet ended for France.

BOOK VIII.

I.

Whilst the king, isolated at the summit of the const.i.tution, sought support, sometimes by hazardous negotiations with foreigners, sometimes by rash attempts at corruption in the capital, a body, some Girondists and other Jacobins, but as yet confounded under the common denomination of patriots, began to unite and form the nucleus of a great republican idea: they were Petion, Robespierre, Brissot, Buzot, Vergniaud, Guadet, Gensonne, Carra, Louvet, Ducos, Fonfrede, Duperret, Sillery-Genlis, and many others, whose names have scarcely emerged from obscurity. The home of a young woman, daughter of an engraver of the Quai des Orfevres, was the meeting place of this union. It was there that the two great parties of the _Gironde_ and the _Montagne_ a.s.sembled, united, separated, and after having acquired power, and overturned the monarchy in company, tore the bosom of their country with their dissensions, and destroyed liberty whilst they destroyed each other. It was neither ambition, nor fortune, nor celebrity which had successively attracted these men to this woman's residence, then without credit, name, or comforts: it was conformity of opinion; it was that devoted worship which chosen spirits like to render in secret as in public to a new truth which promises happiness to mankind; it was the invisible attraction of a common faith, that communion of the first neophytes in the religion of philosophy, where the necessity for souls to unite before they a.s.sociate by deeds, is felt. So long as the thoughts common to political men have not reached that point where they become fruitful, and are organised by contact, nothing is accomplished. Revolutions are ideas, and it is this communion which creates parties.

The ardent and pure mind of a female was worthy of becoming the focus to which converged all the rays of the new truth, in order to become prolific in the warmth of the heart, and to light the pile of old inst.i.tutions. Men have the spirit of truth, women only its pa.s.sion.

There must be love in the essence of all creations; it would seem as though truth, like nature, has two s.e.xes. There is invariably a woman at the beginning of all great undertakings; one was requisite to the principle of the French Revolution.[12] We may say that philosophy found this woman in Madame Roland.

The historian, led away by the movement of the events which he retraces, should pause in the presence of this serious and touching figure, as pa.s.sengers stopped to contemplate her sublime features and white dress on the tumbril which conveyed thousands of victims to death. To understand her we must trace her career from the _atelier_ of her father to the scaffold. It is in a woman's heart that the germ of virtue lies; it is almost always in private life that the secret of public life is reposed.

II.

Young, lovely, radiant with genius, recently married to a man of serious mind, who was touching on old age, and but recently mother of her first child, Madame Roland was born in that intermediary condition in which families scarcely emanc.i.p.ated from manual labour are, it may be said, amphibious between the labourer and the tradesman, and retain in their manners the virtues and simplicity of the people, whilst they already partic.i.p.ate in the lights of society. The period in which aristocracies fall is that in which nations regenerate. The sap of the people is there. In this was born Jean Jacques Rousseau, the virile type of Madame Roland. A portrait of her when a child represents a young girl in her father's workshop, holding in one hand a book, and in the other an engraving tool. This picture is the symbolic definition of the social condition in which Madame Roland was born, and the precise moment between the labour of her hands and her mind.

Her father, Gratien Phlippon, was an engraver and painter in enamel. He joined to these two professions that of a trade in diamonds and jewels.

He was a man always aspiring higher than his abilities allowed, and a restless speculator, who incessantly destroyed his modest fortune in his efforts to extend it in proportion to his ambitious yearnings. He adored his daughter, and could not, for her sake, content himself with the perspective of the workshop. He gave her an education of the highest degree, and nature had conferred upon her a heart for the most elevated destinies. We need not say what dreams, misery, and misfortunes men with such characters invariably bring upon their honest families.