It was, of course, the object of each party to obtain the greatest possible majority in the National Convention now to be assembled, for arranging upon some new footing the government of France, and for replacing that Constitution to which faith had been so repeatedly sworn.

The Jacobins made the most energetic exertions. They not only wrote missives through their two thousand affiliated societies, but sent three hundred commissaries, or delegates, to superintend the elections in the different towns and departments; to exhort their comrades not only to be firm, but to be enterprising; and to seize with strong hand the same power over the public force, which the mother society possessed in Paris. The advice was poured into willing ears; for it implied the sacred right of insurrection, with the concomitant privileges of pillage and slaughter.

The power of the Jacobins was irresistible in Paris, where Robespierre, Danton, and Marat, who shared the high places in their synagogue, were elected by an immense majority;[293] and of the twenty deputies who represented Paris, there were not above five or six unconnected with the massacres. Nor were they any where unsuccessful, where there existed enough of their adherents to overawe by threats, clamour, and violence, the impartial voice of the public.

But in every state there is a great number of men who love order for itself, and for the protection it affords to property. There were also a great many persons at heart Royalists, either pure or constitutional, and all these united in sending to the National Convention deputies, who, if no opportunity occurred of restoring the monarchy, might at least co-operate with the Girondists and more moderate Republicans in saving the life of the unfortunate Louis, and in protecting men's lives, and property in general, from the infuriate violence of the Jacobins. These supporters of order—we know no better name to assign to them—were chiefly representatives of the departments, where electors had more time to discriminate and reflect, than when under the influence of the revolutionary societies and clubs of the towns. Yet Nantes, Bourdeaux, Marseilles, Lyons, and other towns, chiefly in the west and south, were disposed to support the Girondists, and sent deputies favourable to their sentiments. Thus the Convention, when assembled, still presented the appearance of two strong parties; and the feebleness of that, which, being moderate in its views, only sought to act defensively consisted not in want of numbers, but in want of energy.

It was no good omen, that, on taking their places in the Assembly, these last assumed the Right Side; a position which seemed doomed to defeat, since it had been successively occupied by the suppressed parties of moderate Royalists and Constitutionalists. There was defeat in the very sound of the parti droit, whereas the left-hand position had always been that of victory. Men's minds are moved by small incidents in dubious times. Even this choice of seats made an impression upon spectators and auditors unfavourable to the Girondists, as all naturally shrink from a union with bad fortune. There was a considerable party of neutral members, who, without joining themselves to the Girondists, affected to judge impartially betwixt the contending parties. They were chiefly men of consciences too timid to go all the lengths of the Jacobins, but also of too timid nerves to oppose them openly and boldly. These were sure to succumb on all occasions, when the Jacobins judged it necessary to use their favourite argument of popular terror.

The Girondists took possession, however, of all ostensible marks of power. Danton was dismissed from his place as minister of justice; and they were, as far as mere official name and title could bestow it on them, in possession of the authority of government. But the ill-fated regulation which excluded ministers from seats in the Assembly, and consequently from any right save that of defence, proved as fatal to those of the new system, as it had done to the executive government of Louis.

Our remarks upon the policy of the great change from Monarchy to a Republic, will be more in place elsewhere.[294] Indeed, violent as the change sounded in words, there was not such an important alteration in effect as to produce much sensation. The Constitution of 1791 was a democracy to all intents and purposes, leaving little power with the King, and that little subject to be so much cramped and straitened in its operation, that the royal authority was even smaller in practice than it had been limited in theory. When to this is added, that Louis was a prisoner amongst his subjects, acting under the most severe restraint, and endangering his life every time he attempted to execute his constitutional power, he must long have been held rather an incumbrance on the motions and councils of the state, than as one of its efficient constituted authorities. The nominal change of the system of government scarcely made a greater alteration in the internal condition of France, than the change of a sign makes upon a house of entertainment, where the business of the tavern is carried on in the usual way, although the place is no longer distinguished as the King's Head.

While France was thus alarmed and agitated within, by change, by crime, by the most bitter political factions, the dawn of that course of victory had already risen on the frontiers, which, in its noonday splendour, was to blaze fiercely over all Europe. It is not our purpose to detail military events at present; we shall have but too many of them to discuss hereafter. We shall barely state, that the Duke of Brunswick's campaign, considered as relative to his proclamation, forms too good an illustration of the holy text, "Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall." The duke was at the head of a splendid army, which had been joined by fifteen thousand emigrants in the finest state of equipment, burning with zeal to rescue the King, and avenge themselves on those by whom they had been driven from their country. From what fatality it is hard to conceive, but the Duke of Brunswick seems to have looked with a certain degree of coldness and suspicion on those troops, whose chivalrous valour and high birth called them to the van, instead of the rear, in which the generalissimo was pleased to detain them. The chance of success that might justly have been expected from the fiery energy which was the very soul of French chivalry, from the fear which such an army might have inspired, or perhaps from the friends whom they might have found, was altogether lost. There was something in this extraordinary conduct, which almost vindicated the suspicion, that Prussia was warring on her own account, and was not disposed to owe too much of the expected success to the valour of the emigrants. And it escaped not the remark, both of the emigrants and the French at large, that Longwy and Verdun were ostentatiously taken possession of by the allies, not under the name of the King of France, or the Comte d'Artois, but in that of the Emperor; which appeared to give colour to the invidious report, that the allies were to be indemnified for the cost of their assistance, at the expense of the French line of frontier towns. Neither did the duke use his fine army of Prussians, or direct the motions of the Austrians under Clairfait, to any greater advantage. He had, indeed, the troops of the Great Frederick; but under the command of an irresolute and incapable leader, it was the sword of Scanderbeg in the hands of a boy.

This tardiness of the Duke of Brunswick's movements intimated a latent doubt of his own capacity to conduct the campaign. The superiority of his veteran and finely disciplined forces over the disorganized army of Dumouriez, reinforced as it was by crowds of Federates, who were perfect strangers to war, would have been best displayed by bold and rapid movements, evincing at once activity and combination, and alarming raw troops by a sense of danger, not in front alone, but on every point. Each day which these new soldiers spent unfought, was one step towards military discipline, and what is more, towards military confidence. The general who had threatened so hard, seemed to suspend his blow in indecision; and he remained trifling on the frontiers, "when Frederick, had he been in our front," said the French general, "would long since have driven us back upon Chalons."[295]

The result of so many false steps began soon to appear. Brunswick, whose army was deficient in battering guns, though entering France on a frontier of fortifications, was arrested by the obstinate defence of Thionville. Having at length decided to advance, he spent nine days in marching thirty leagues, but omitted to possess himself of the defiles of Argonnes, by which alone the army of Luckner could co-operate with that of Dumouriez. The allied general now found himself in the most elevated part of the province of Champagne, branded for its poverty and sterility with the unseemly name "La Champagne Pouilleuse," where he found difficulty to subsist his army. Meantime, if corn and forage were scarce, grapes and melons were, unfortunately, plenty. These last fruits are so proverbially unwholesome, that the magistrates of Liege, and some other towns, forbid the peasants to bring them to market under pain of confiscation. It was the first time such delicacies had been presented to the hyperborean appetites of the Prussians; and they could not resist the temptation, though the same penalty was annexed to the banquet, as to that which produced the first transgression. They ate and died. A fatal dysentery broke out in the camp, which swept the soldiers away by hundreds in a day, sunk the spirits of the survivors, and seems to have totally broken the courage of their commander.[296]

Two courses remained to the embarrassed general. One was, to make his way by giving battle to the French, by attacking them in the strong position which they had been permitted to occupy, notwithstanding the ease with which they might have been anticipated. It is true, Dumouriez had been very strongly reinforced. France, from all her departments, had readily poured forth many thousands of her fiery youth, from city and town, village and grange and farm, to protect the frontiers, at once, from the invasion of foreigners, and the occupation of thousands of vengeful emigrants. They were undisciplined, indeed, but full of zeal and courage, heated and excited by the scenes of the republic, and inflamed by the florid eloquence, the songs, dances, and signal-words with which it had been celebrated. Above all, they were of a country, which, of all others in Europe, has been most familiar with war, and the youth of which are most easily rendered amenable to military discipline.

But to these new levies the Duke of Brunswick might have safely opposed the ardent valour of the emigrants, men descended of families whose deeds of chivalry fill the registers of Europe; men by whom the road to Paris was regarded as that which was to conduct them to victory, to honour, to the rescue of their King, to reunion with their families, to the recovery of their patrimony; men accustomed to consider disgrace as more dreadful by far than death, and who claimed as their birth-right, military renown and the use of arms. In one skirmish, fifteen hundred of the emigrant cavalry had defeated, with great slaughter, a column of the Carmagnoles, as the republican levies were called. They were routed with great slaughter, and their opponents had the pleasure to count among the slain a considerable number of the assassins of September.

But the French general had more confidence in the Carmagnole levies, from which his military genius derived a valuable support, than Brunswick thought proper to repose in the chivalrous gallantry of the French noblesse. He could only be brought to engage in one action, of artillery, near Valmy, which was attended with no marked consequence, and then issued his order for a retreat. It was in vain that the Comte d'Artois, with a spirit worthy of the line from which he was descended, and the throne to which he has now succeeded, entreated, almost implored, a recall of this fatal order; in vain that he offered in person to head the emigrant forces, and to assume with them the most desperate post in the battle, if the generalissimo would permit it to be fought. But the duke, obstinate in his desponding in proportion to his former presumption, was not of that high mind which adopts hazardous counsels in desperate cases. He saw his army mouldering away around him, beheld the French forming in his rear, knew that the resources of Prussia were unequal to a prolonged war, and, after one or two feeble attempts to negotiate for the safety of the captive Louis, he was at length contented to accept an implied permission to retreat without molestation. He raised his camp on the 29th of September,[297] and left behind him abundant marks of the dreadful state to which his army was reduced.[298]

When we look back on these events, and are aware of Dumouriez's real opinions, and the interest which he took in the fate of the King, we have little reason to doubt, that the Duke of Brunswick might, by active and prompt exertions, have eluded that general's defensive measures; nay, that judicious negotiation might have induced him, on certain points being conceded, to have united a part at least of his forces with those of the emigrants in a march to Paris, for the King's rescue, and the punishment of the Jacobins.

But had the restoration of Louis XVI. taken place by the armed hand of the emigrants and the allies, the final event of the war must still have been distant. Almost the whole body of the kingdom was diametrically opposed to the restoration of the absolute monarchy, with all its evils; and yet it must have been the object of the emigrants, in case of success, again to establish, not only royalty in its utmost prerogative, but all the oppressive privileges and feudal subjections which the Revolution had swept away. Much was to have been dreaded too, from the avidity of the strangers, whose arms had assisted the imprisoned Louis, and much more from what has since been aptly termed the Reaction, which must have taken place upon a counter-revolution. It was greatly to be apprehended, that the emigrants, always deeming too lightly of the ranks beneath them, incensed by the murder of their friends, and stung by their own private wrongs and insults, would, if successful, have treated the Revolution not as an exertion of the public will of France to free the country from public grievances, but as a Jacquerie, (which in some of its scenes it too much resembled,) a domestic treason of the vassals against their liege lords. It was the will of Providence, that the experience of twenty years and upwards should make manifest, that in the hour of victory itself, concessions to the defeated, as far as justice demands them, is the only mode of deriving permanent and secure peace.

The retreat of the Prussians was executed in the best possible order, and in the most leisurely manner. But if to them it was a measure of disgrace, it was to the unfortunate emigrants who had joined their standard, the signal of utter despair and ruin. These corps were composed of gentlemen, who, called suddenly and unprovided from their families and homes, had only brought with them such moderate sums of money as could be raised in an emergency, which they had fondly conceived would be of very brief duration. They had expended most of their funds in providing themselves with horses, arms, and equipments—some part must have been laid out in their necessary subsistence, for they served chiefly at their own expense—and perhaps, as might have been expected among high-spirited and high-born youths, their slender funds had not been managed with an economical view of the possibility of the reverses which had taken place. In the confusion and disorder of the retreat, their baggage was plundered by their auxiliaries, that is to say, by the disorderly Prussian soldiers, who had shaken loose all discipline; and they were in most cases reduced for instant maintenance to sell their horses at such paltry prices as they could obtain. To end the history of such of this devoted army as had been engaged in the Duke of Brunswick's campaign, they were disbanded at Juliers, in November 1792.

The blindness of the sovereigns, who, still continuing a war on France, suffered such fine troops to be dissolved for want of the means of support, was inexcusable; their cold and hard-hearted conduct towards a body of gentlemen, who, if politically wrong, were at least devoted to the cause for which Austria asserted that she continued in arms, was equally unwise and ungenerous. These gallant gentlemen might have upbraided the Kings who had encouraged, and especially the general who led, this ill-fated expedition, in the words of Shakspeare, if he had been known to them,—

But the reproaches of those who have no remedy but the exposition of their wrongs, seldom reach the ears of the powerful by whom these wrongs have been committed.

It is not difficult to conceive the agony with which these banished gentlemen abandoned all hopes of saving the life of their King, and the recovery of their rank and fortune. All their proud vaunts of expected success were lost, or converted into serpents to sting them. They had no hope before them, and, what is worst to men of high spirit, they had fallen with scarce a blow struck for honour, far less for victory. They were now doomed, such as could, to exercise for mere subsistence the prosecution of sciences and arts, which they had cultivated to adorn prosperity—to wander in foreign lands, and live upon the precarious charity of foreign powers, embittered every where by the reflections of some, who pitied the folly that could forfeit rank and property for a mere point of honour; and of others, who saw in them the enemies of rational liberty, and upbraided them with the charge, that their misfortunes were the necessary consequence of their arbitrary principles.

It might have in some degree mitigated their calamity, could some gifted sage have shown them, at such distance as the Legislator of Israel beheld the Promised Land from Mount Pisgah, the final restoration of the royal house, in whose cause they had suffered shipwreck of their all. But how many perished in the wilderness of misfortune which intervened—how few survived the twenty years wandering which conducted to this promised point! and of those few, who, war-worn and wearied by misfortunes, survived the restoration of royalty, how very few were rewarded by more than the disinterested triumph which they felt on that joyful occasion! and how many might use the simile of a royalist of Britain on a similar occasion,—"The fleece of Gideon remained dry, while the hoped-for restoration shed showers of blessing on all France beside!"

The emigrant regiments under the command of the Prince of CondÉ had another and nobler fate. They retained their arms, and signalized themselves by their exertions; were consumed by the sword, and in toils of service, and died at least the death of soldiers, mourned, and not unrevenged. But they were wasting their devoted courage in the service of foreigners; and if their gallantry was gratified by the defeat of those whom they regarded as the murderers of their king and as usurpers of their rights, they might indeed feel that their revenge was satiated, but scarce in any sense could they regard their victories as serviceable to the cause to which they had sacrificed their country, their possessions, their hopes, their lives. Their fate, though on a much more extensive scale, much resembles that of the officers of the Scottish army in 1690, who, following the fortunes of James II. to France, were at length compelled to form themselves into a battalion of privates, and, after doing many feats of gallantry in the service of the country where they found refuge, at length melted away under the sword of the enemy, and the privations of military service. History, while she is called upon to censure or commend the actions of mankind according to the rules of immutable justice, is no less bound to lament the brave and generous, who, preferring the dictates of honourable feeling to those of prudence, are hurried into courses which may be doubtful in policy, and perhaps in patriotism, but to which they are urged by the disinterested wish of discharging what they account a conscientious duty. The emigrants were impolitic, perhaps, in leaving France, though that conduct had many apologies; and their entrance into their country in arms to bring back the despotic system, which Louis XVI. and the whole nation, save themselves, had renounced, was an enterprise unwisely and unjustly undertaken. But the cause they embraced was one dear to all the prejudices of the rank and sentiments in which they had been brought up; their loyal purpose in its defence is indisputable; and it would be hard to condemn them for following one extreme, when the most violent and tyrannical proceedings were, in the sight of all Europe, urging another, so bloody, black, and fatal as that of the faction which now domineered in Paris, and constrained men, whose prejudices of birth or education were in favour of freedom, to loathe the very name of France, and of the Revolution.

The tame and dishonourable retreat of the Duke of Brunswick and his Prussians, naturally elated the courage of a proud and martial people. Recruits flowed into the Republican ranks from every department; and the generals, Custine on the Rhine, and Montesquiou on the side of Savoy, with Dumouriez in the Netherlands, knew how to avail themselves of these reinforcements, which enabled them to assume the offensive on all parts of the extensive south-eastern frontier of France.

The attack of Savoy, whose sovereign, the King of Sardinia, was brother-in-law of the Comte d'Artois, and had naturally been active in the cause of the Bourbons, was successfully commenced, and carried on by General Montesquiou already mentioned, a French noble, and an aristocrat of course by birth, and as it was believed by principle, but to whom, nevertheless, the want of experienced leaders had compelled the ruling party at Paris to commit the command of an army. He served them well, possessed himself of Nice and Chamberi, and threatened even Italy.[300]

On the centre of the same line of frontier, Custine, an excellent soldier and a fierce republican, took Spires, Oppenheim, Worms, finally the strong city of Mentz, and spread dismay through that portion of the Germanic empire. Adopting the republican language of the day, he thundered forth personal vengeance, denounced in the most broad and insulting terms, against such princes of the Germanic body as had distinguished themselves by zeal against the Revolution; and, what was equally formidable, he preached to their subjects the flattering and exciting doctrines of the Republicans, and invited them to join in the sacred league of the oppressed people against princes and magistrates, who had so long held over them a usurped power.[301]

But the successes of Dumouriez were of a more decided and more grateful character to the ruling men in the Convention. He had a heavier task than either Custine or Montesquiou; but his lively and fertile imagination had already devised modes of conquest with the imperfect means he possessed. The difference between commanders is the same as between mechanics. A workman of commonplace talents, however expert custom and habit may have made him in the use of his ordinary tools, is at a loss when deprived of those which he is accustomed to work with. The man of invention and genius finds out resources, and contrives to make such implements as the moment supplies answer his purpose, as well, and perhaps better, than a regular chest of working utensils. The ideas of the ordinary man are like a deep-rutted road, through which his imagination moves slowly, and without departing from the track; those of the man of genius are like an avenue, clear, open, and smooth, on which he may traverse as occasion requires.

Dumouriez was a man of genius, resource, and invention. Clairfait, who was opposed to him, a brave and excellent soldier, but who had no idea of strategie or tactics, save those current during the Seven Years' War. The former knew so well how to employ the fire and eagerness of his Carmagnoles, of whose blood he was by no means chary, and how to prevent the consequences of their want of discipline, by reserves of his most steady and experienced troops, that he gave Clairfait a signal defeat at Jemappes, on the 6th November, 1792.[302]

It was then that both Austria and Europe had reason to regret the absurd policy of Joseph II., both in indisposing the inhabitants towards his government, and, in the fine provinces of the Austrian Netherlands, dismantling the iron girdle of fortified towns, with which the wisdom of Europe had invested that frontier. Clairfait, who, though defeated, was too good a disciplinarian to be routed, had to retreat on a country unfriendly to the Austrians, from recollection of their own recent insurrection, and divested of all garrison towns; which must have been severe checks, particularly at this period, to the incursion of a revolutionary army, more fitted to win battles by its impetuosity, than to overcome obstacles which could only be removed by long and patient sieges.

As matters stood, the battle of Jemappes was won, and the Austrian Netherlands were fully conquered without further combat by the French general. We shall leave him in his triumph, and return to the fatal scenes acting in Paris.