THE CATASTROPHE OF MONARCHY The calculations of the Girondins were justified by the event. Four months after the declaration of war the throne had fallen, and the king was in prison. Next to Dumouriez the principal members of the new ministry were the Genevese ClaviÈre, one of Mirabeau's advisers, and the promoter of the assignats, Servan, a meritorious officer, better known to us as a meritorious military historian; and Roland, whose wife shared, on a lower scale, the social influence and intellectual celebrity of Madame de StaËl. Dumouriez, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, is one of the great figures of the Revolution. He was excessively clever rather than great, agreeable, and abounding in resource, not only cool in danger, as a commander should be, but steadfast and cheerful when hope seemed lost, and ready to meet the veterans of Frederic with undisciplined volunteers, and officers who were the remnant of the royal army. Without principle or conviction or even scruple, he had none of the inhumanity of dogmatic revolutionists. To the king, whom he despised, he said, "I shall often displease you, but I shall never deceive you." He was not an accomplice of the conspiracy to compromise him and to ruin him by war, and would have saved him if the merit and the reward had been his own. He did not begin well, in the arts either of war or peace. He employed all his diplomacy, all his secret service money, in the endeavour to make Prussia neutral. Nothing availed against the indignation of the Prussians at French policy, and their Dumouriez's credit was shaken, and the Girondin leaders, who could not rely on him to make the coming campaign turn towards the execution of their schemes, revived the question of the clergy. On May 27 Vergniaud carried a decree placing nonjurors at the mercy of local authorities, and threatening them with arbitrary expulsion as public enemies in time of national peril. If the king sanctioned, he would be isolated and humiliated. If the king vetoed, they would have the means of raising Paris against him, without waiting for the vicissitudes of war or the co-operation of Dumouriez. Madame Roland wrote a letter to the king, and her husband signed it, on June 10, representing that it was for the safety of the priests themselves that they should be sent out of the way of danger. Roland, proud of the composition, sent it to the papers. The Girondin ministry was at once dismissed. Dumouriez remained, attempted to form an administration without the Girondin colleagues, but could not overcome the king's resistance to the act of banishment. On June 15 he resigned office, and took a command on the frontier. The majority in the Assembly was still faithful to the Constitution of 1791, and opposed to further change; but the rejection of their decree against the royalist clergy alienated them at the critical moment. Lewis had lost ground with his friends; he had angered the Girondins; and he had lost the services of the last man who was strong enough to save him. On June 15 a high official in the administration of the department was at Maubeuge, on a visit to Lafayette. His name was Roederer, and we shall meet him again. He rose high under Napoleon, and is one of those to whom we owe our knowledge of the Emperor's character, as well as of the events I am about to relate. His interview With Danton and his following we reach the lowest stage of what can still be called the conflict of opinion, and come to bare cupidity and vengeance, to brutal instinct and hideous passion. All these elements were very near the surface in former phases of the Revolution. At this point they are about to prevail, and the man of action puts himself forward in the place of contending theorists. Robespierre and Brissot were politicians who did not shrink from crime, but it was in the service of some form of the democratic system. Even Marat, the most ghastly of them all, who demanded not only slaughter but torture, and whose ferocity was revolting and grotesque, even Marat was obedient to a logic of his own. He adopted simply the state of nature and the primitive contract, in which thousands of his contemporaries believed. The poor had agreed to renounce the rights of savage life and the prerogative of force, in return for the benefits of civilisation; but finding the compact broken on the other side, finding that the upper classes governed in their own interest, and left them to misery and ignorance, they resumed the conditions of barbaric existence before society, and were free to take When Lewis dismissed his ministers, Danton exclaimed that the time had come to strike terror, and on June 20 he fulfilled his threat. It was the anniversary of the Tennis Court. A monster demonstration was organised, to plant a tree of liberty or to present a petition—in reality to overawe the Assembly and the king. There was an expectation that the king would perish in the tumult, but nothing definite was settled, and no assassin was designated. It was enough that he should give way, abandon his priests, and receive his ministers from the populace. That was all the Girondins required, and they would assent to no more. The king would have to choose between them and their temporary confederates, the Cordeliers. If he gave way, he would be spared; if he resisted, he would be slain. It was not to be apprehended that he would resist and would yet come out alive. The king understood the alternative before him, made his choice, and prepared to die. After putting his house in order, he wrote, on the 19th, that he had done with this world. Lewis XVI. had not ability to devise a policy or vigour to pursue it, but he had the power of grasping a principle. He felt at last that the ground beneath his feet was firm. He would drift no longer, sought no counsel, and admitted no disturbing inquiries. If he fell, he would fall in the cause of religion and for the rights of conscience. The proper name for the rights of conscience is liberty, and That trying humiliation marks the loftiest moment in the reign of Lewis XVI. He had stood there, with the red cap of liberty on his powdered head, not only fearless, but cheerful and serene. He had been in the power of his enemies and had patiently defied them. He made no surrender and no concession while his life was threatened. The Girondins were not recalled, and the movement failed. For the moment the effect was injurious to the revolutionary party, and useful to the king. It was clear that menace and outrage would not move him, and that more was wanted than the half-hearted measures of the Gironde. The outrage of June 20 was a contumelious reply to Lafayette's letter of the 16th, and the time had come for more than the writing of letters. His letter had been well received, and the Assembly had ordered it to be printed. The Girondins, by pretending that it could not be authentic, had prevented a vote on the question of sending it to the departments. He could count on the Feuillant majority, on the ministry composed of his partisans, on his popularity with the National Guard. As he was at the head of an army, his advice to the king to adopt a policy of resistance implied that he would support him in it. He now wrote once more, that he could never maintain his ground against the Prussians unless there was a change in the state of things in the capital. On the morning of June 28, immediately after his letter, he appeared in the Assembly, and denounced the sowers of disorder who were disorganising the State. Having obtained a vote of approval, by 339 to 234, he appealed to the National Guard to stand by him against his Jacobins. He summoned a meeting of his friends, but the influence of the Court caused it to fail, and he was compelled to return to his camp, having accomplished nothing. He imagined one chance more. He now put forward his colleague, General Luckner, who was incompetent but, not being a politician, was not distrusted, and they were jointly to rescue the king, and bring him to a city of refuge. The revolutionists could now lay their plans without fear of the army. They summoned fÉdÉrÉs from the departments for the anniversary of July 14, and it was arranged that sturdy men should be sent from Brest and Marseilles to be at their orders when they struck the final blow. Paris could not be relied on. The failure there had been complete. On June 21, and on the 25th, the Cordeliers attempted to renew, with better effect, the attack which had been baffled by a divided purpose on the 20th. But their men would not move. The minister, Montciel, gave orders that the departments should not send fÉdÉrÉs to Paris, and he succeeded in stopping all but a couple of thousand. Nothing could be done until the contingents Lewis was inclined to accept a scheme for his deliverance which was arranged by his ministers in conjunction with the generals. He was to have been taken to CompiÉgne, within reach of the army. But the army meant Lafayette, and Lafayette would only consent to restore the king as the hereditary chief of a commonwealth, who should reign, but should not govern. The queen refused to reign under such conditions, or to be saved by such hands. The security for her was in power, not in limitations to power. The sacred thing was the ancient Crown, not the new Constitution. Lally Tollendal came over from England, conferred with Malouet and Clermont Tonnerre, and exhorted her to consent. Morris, whose ready pen had put the American Constitution into final shape five years before, aided them in drawing up an amended scheme of government to be proclaimed when they should be free. But the strong will and stronger passion of the queen prevailed. When all was accurately combined, and the Swiss troops were on the march to the rendezvous, the king revoked his orders, and on July 10 the Feuillant ministry resigned, and the Girondins saw power once more within their grasp. They had vehemently denounced the king as the cause of all the troubles of the State, and on July 6 the assault had been interrupted for a moment by a scene of emotion, when the bishop of Lyons obtained a manifestation of unanimous feeling in the presence of the enemy. On July 11 the Assembly passed a vote declaring the These events, coinciding almost to a day, conveyed power from the Assembly to the municipality, and from the Girondins to the Jacobins, who had the municipality in their hands, and held the machinery that worked the sections. In a letter written to be laid before the king, Vergniaud affirmed that it was impossible to dissociate him from the allies who were in arms for his sake, and whose success would be so favourable to his authority. That was the argument to which no royalist could reply. The country was in danger, and the cause of the danger was the king. The Constitution had broken down on June 20. The king could not devote himself to the maintenance of a system which exposed him to such treatment, and enabled his adversaries to dispose of all The queen, a more important person than her husband, was more openly committed to reaction. The failure of the great experiment drove her back to absolutism. As she repudiated the ÉmigrÉs in 1791, so she now repudiated the constitutionalists, and chose rather to perish than to owe her salvation to their detested aid. She looked for deliverance only to the foreigners slowly converging on the Moselle. Her agents had excluded a saving allusion to constitutional liberty in the manifesto of the Powers; and she had dictated the threats of vengeance on the inhabitants of Paris. The king himself had called in the invaders. His envoy, concealed in the uniform of a Prussian major, rode by the side of Brunswick. His brothers were entering France with the heavy baggage of the enemies, and Breteuil, the agent whom he trusted more than his brothers, was preparing to govern, and did in September govern, the provinces they occupied, under the shelter of their bayonets. For him the blow was about to fall—not for his safety, but for his plenary authority. The purpose of the allied sovereigns, and of the ÉmigrÉs who prompted them, stood confessed. They were fighting for unconditional restoration, and both as invaders and as absolutists the king was their accomplice. The country could not make war with confidence, if the military power was in the hands of traitors. The king could protect them from the horrors with which they were threatened on his account, not as the head of the executive, but as a hostage. He was a danger in his palace; he would be a security in prison. All this was obvious at the time, and the effect it had was to disable and disarm the friends of Early in August the most revolutionary section of Paris decided that the king should be deposed. The Assembly rescinded the vote. Then the people of that section and some others made known that they would execute their own decree, unless the Assembly itself made it unnecessary and accomplished legally what would otherwise be done by the act of the sovereign people, superseding all powers and standing above law. Time was to be allowed until August 9. If the king was still on the throne upon the evening of that day, the people of Paris would sound the tocsin against him. On August 8 the Assembly came to a vote on the conduct of Lafayette, in abandoning his army in time of war to threaten his enemies at home. He was justified by 406 votes to 224. It was the last appearance of the Liberal party. Four hundred deputies, a majority of the entire body, kept out of the way in the moment of danger, and allowed the Girondin and republican remnant to proceed without them. The absolution of Lafayette proclaimed the resolve not to dethrone the king. The Gironde had no constitutional remedy for its anxieties. The next step would be taken by the democracy of Paris, and their victory would be a grave danger to the Gironde On August 9 the Jacobin leaders settled their plan of action. Their partisans in each section were to elect three commissaries to act with the Commune for the public good, and to strengthen, and, if necessary, eventually to supersede, the existing municipality. About one-half of Paris sent them, and they assembled in the course of the night at the HÔtel de Ville, apart from the legal body. In the political science of the day the constituency suspended the constituted authorities and resumed all delegated powers. The revolutionary town-councillors, who now came to the front, are the authors of the atrocities that afflicted France during the next two years. They were creatures of Danton. And as we now enter the company of malefactors and the Chamber of Horrors, we must bear this in mind, that our own laws punish the slightest step towards absolute government with the same supreme penalty as murder; so that morally the difference between the two extremes is not serious. The agents are ferocious ruffians, and the leaders are no better; but they are at the same time influenced by republican convictions, as respectable as those of the ÉmigrÉs. The function of this supplementary Commune was not to lead the insurrection or direct the attack, but to disable the defence; for the commander of the National Guard received his orders from the HÔtel de Ville, and he was a loyal soldier. The forces of the Revolution were not overwhelming. The men from Marseilles and Brest were intent on fighting, and so were some from the departments. But when the tocsin rang from the churches soon after midnight, the Paris combatants assembled slowly, and the event might be doubtful. Ammunition was supplied Having disposed of the general commanding, the new Commune appointed Santerre to succeed him, and then took the place of the former Commune. There was no obstacle now to the concentration and advance of the insurgents, and they appeared in the space between the There was a looker-on who lived to erect a throne in the place of the one that fell that day, and to be the next sovereign who reigned at the Tuileries. In 1813 Napoleon told Roederer that he had watched the scene from a window on the Carrousel, and assured him that he had made a fatal mistake. Many of the National Guard were staunch, and the royal forces were superior to those with which he himself conquered in VendÉmiaire. He thought that the defence ought to have been victorious. I do not suppose he seriously resented the blunder to which he owed so much. Roederer was a clever man, and there is some reason to doubt whether he was single-minded in desiring to prevent the uncertain conflict. The queen was eager to fight, and spoke brave words to every one. Afterwards, when she heard the cannonade from her refuge in the reporter's box, she said to d'Hervilly: "Well, do you think now that we were Roederer, vigorously backed by his colleagues of the department, informed the king of what he had seen and heard, assured him that the Tuileries could not be defended with the forces present, and that there was no safety except in the Assembly, the only authority that was regarded. It was but two days since the deputies, by an immense majority, had approved the act of Lafayette. He thought they might be trusted to protect the king. As there was nothing left to fight for, he affirmed that those who remained behind would be in no danger. He would not allow the garrison to retire, and he left the Swiss, without orders, to their fate. Marie Antoinette resisted vehemently, and Lewis was not easy to convince. At last he said that there was nothing to be done, and gave orders to set out. But the queen in a fury turned upon him, and exclaimed: "Now I know you for what you are!" Lewis told his valet to wait his return; but as they crossed the garden, where the men were sweeping the gravel, he remarked: "The leaves are falling early this year." Roederer heard, and understood. A newspaper had said that the throne would not last to the fall of the leaf; and it was by those trivial but significant words that the fallen monarch acknowledged the pathetic solemnity of the moment, and indicated that the footsteps which took him away from his palace would never be retraced. A deputation met him at the door of the Assembly, and he entered, saying that he came there The royalists did not at first perceive that the monarchy was at an end. They imagined that the king was again With no severer effort than the signing of an order, Lewis might have called up other regiments of Swiss, who would have made the stronghold of monarchy impregnable. And it would have been in his power, before sunset that day, to march out of Paris at the head of a victorious army, and at once to proclaim reforms which enlightened statesmen had drawn up. His queen was active and resolute; but she had learnt, in adversity, to think more of the claims of authority and the historic right of kings. She shared Burke's passionate hatred for men whose royalism was conditional. At every step downward they were the authors of their own disaster. The French Republic was not a spontaneous evolution of social elements. The issue between constitutional monarchy, the richest and most flexible of political forms, and the Republic one and indivisible (that is, not federal), which is the most rigorous and sterile, was decided by the crimes of men, and by errors more inevitably fatal than crime. There is another world for the expiation of guilt; but the wages of folly are payable here below. |