BOOK V. I.

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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 constitution 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 constituent Assembly—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 institutions are but ideas, and that those ideas, when overthrown, involve in their fall thrones and nations. Whatsoever the spirit of God 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 title 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, assistance, 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 assigned 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, passion, 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 assistance 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 surpass) 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 constitution, 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 superstition, that second nature of the Spaniards. A coup d'État, 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 assumed 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-fÉs 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 emancipate his government; his good intentions had all been frustrated and checked, and he had been forced to sacrifice his ministers to the vengeance of superstition. 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 Godoy 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 asserted 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 Godoy 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.

The state of Italy was yet worse; for it was severed into pieces that, unlike the snake, were unable to reunite. Naples was under the severe sway of Spain, and the yoke of Austria pressed on Milan and Lombardy. Rome was nought but the capital of an idea—her people had disappeared, and she had now become the modern Ephesus, at which each cabinet sought an oracle favourable to its own cause, and paid for this purpose the members of the sacred college. Although the centre of all diplomatic intrigue, and the spot where all worldly ambition humbled itself but to increase its power,—although this court could shake Europe to its foundations, it was yet unable to govern it. The elective aristocracy, cardinals chosen by powers at variance with each other; the elective monarchy, a pope whose qualifications were old age and feebleness, and who was only crowned on condition of a speedy decease: such was the temporal government of the Roman States. This government combined in itself all the weakness of anarchy, and all the vices of despotism. It had produced its inevitable result, the servitude of the state, the poverty of the government and the misery of the population; Rome was no longer anything but the great Catholic municipality, and her government nought save a republic of diplomatists. Rome possessed a temple enriched with the offerings of the Christian world, a sovereign and ambassadors, but neither population, treasure, nor army. It was the venerated shadow of that universal monarchy to which the popes had pretended in the golden age of Catholicism, and of which they had only preserved the capital and the court.

VII.

Venice drew near its fall, but the silence and mystery of its government concealed even from the Venetians the decrepitude of the state. The government was an aristocratic sovereignty, founded on the corruption of the people and treachery, for the master sinew of the government was espionage; its prestige, mystery; its power, the torture. It lived on terror and voluptuousness; its police was a system of secret confession, of each against the other. Its cells, termed the Piombi or Leads, and which were entered at night by the Bridge of Sighs, were a hell that closed on the captive never to re-open. The wealth of the East flowed in on Venice from the fall of the Lower Empire. She became the refuge of Greek civilisation, and the Constantinople of the Adriatic; and the arts had emigrated thither from Byzance, with commerce. Its marvellous palaces, washed by the waves, were crowded together on a narrow spot of ground, so that the city was like a vessel at anchor, on board which a people driven from the land have taken refuge with all their treasures. She was thus impregnable, but could not exercise the least influence over Italy.

VIII.

Genoa, a more popular and more turbulent republic, subsisted only by her fleet and her commerce. Hemmed in between barren mountains and a gulf without a shore, it was only a port peopled by sailors. The marble palaces, built one above the other on the rocky banks, looked down on the sea, their sole territory. The portraits of the doges and the statue of AndreÀ Doria constantly reminded the Genoese that from the waves had proceeded their riches and their renown, and that there alone they could hope to look for them. Its ramparts were impregnable, its arsenals full; and thus Genoa formed the stronghold of armed commerce.

The immense country of Tuscany, governed and rendered illustrious by the MÉdici, those Pericles of Italy, was learned, agricultural, industrious, but unwarlike. The house of Austria ruled it by its archdukes, and these princes of the north, transported to the palaces of the Pitti or the CÔmo, contracted the mild and elegant manners of the Tuscans; and the climate and serenity of the hills of Florence softened there even tyranny, and these princes became voluptuaries or sages. Florence, the city of Leo X., of philosophy, and the arts, had transformed even religion. Catholicism, so ascetic in Spain, so gloomy in the north, so austere and literal in France, so popular at Rome, had become at Florence, under the MÉdici and the Grecian philosophers, a species of luminous and Platonic theory, whose dogmata were only sacred symbols, and whose pomps were only pleasures that overpowered the mind and the senses. The churches at Florence were more museums of Christ than his sanctuaries; the colonies of all the arts and trades of Greece had emigrated, on the entry of Mahomet II. into Constantinople, to Florence, and there they had prospered; and a new Athens, enriched like the ancient with temples, porticoes, and statues, beautified the banks of the Arno.

Leopold, the philosopher prince, awaited there, busied in learning the art of governing men and putting in practice new theories of political economy, the moment to mount the imperial throne of Austria, where his destiny was not to leave him long. He was the Germanicus of Germany, and philosophy could alone display him to the world, after having lent him for a few years to Italy.

Piedmont, whose frontiers reached to the heart of France by the Alpine valleys, and on the other side the walls of Genoa and the Austrian possessions on the Po, was governed by the house of Savoy, one of the most ancient of the royal lines in Europe. This military monarchy had its intrenched camp, rather than its capital, in Turin. The plains it occupied in Italy had been, and were destined to be, the field of battle for Austria and France; and her positions were the keys of Italy.

This population, accustomed to war, was necessarily constantly under arms to defend itself, or to unite with that one of the two powers whose rivalry could alone assure its independence. Thus, military disposition was its strength; its weakness lay in having half its possessions in Italy, half in France. The whole of Savoy is French in language, descent, and manners; and at any great commotion Savoy must detach itself from Italy, and fall on this side of its own accord. The Alps are too essential a frontier to two people to belong to only one; for if their south side looks to Italy, their north looks to France. The snow, the sun, and the torrents have thus willed this division of the Alps between two nations. Policy does not long prevail against nature, and the house of Savoy was not sufficiently powerful to preserve the neutrality of the valleys of the Alps and the roads of Italy; and though it increase in power in Italy, yet it must be worsted in a struggle against France. The court of Turin was doubly allied to the house of France by the marriage of the Comte d'Artois and the Comte de Provence, brothers of Louis XVI., with two princesses of the house of Savoy. The clergy had more influence at this court than at any other in Italy; and hated instinctively all revolutions, because they threatened its political influence. From religious feeling—from family feeling—from political feeling, Savoy was destined to become the first scene of conspiracy against the French Revolution.

IX.

There was yet another in the north, and that was Sweden; but there it was neither a superstitious attachment to Catholicism, nor family feeling, nor even national interest, that excited the hostility of a king against the Revolution; it was a more noble sentiment—the disinterested glory of combating for the cause of kings; and, above all, for a queen whose beauty and whose misfortunes had won the heart of Gustavus III., in which blazed the last spark of that chivalrous feeling that vowed to avenge the cause of ladies, to assist the oppressed, and succour the right. Extinguished in the south, it burnt, for the last time, in the north, and in the breast of a king. Gustavus III. had in his policy something of the adventurous genius of Charles XII., for the Sweden of the race of Wasa is the land of heroes. Heroism, when disproportioned to genius and its resources, resembles folly: there was a mixture of heroism and folly in the projects of Gustavus against France; and yet this folly was noble, as its cause—and great, as his own courage. Fortune had accustomed Gustavus to desperate and bold enterprises; and success had taught him to believe nothing impossible. Twice he had made a revolution in his kingdom, twice he had striven single-handed against the gigantic power of Russia, and had he been seconded by Prussia, Austria, and Turkey, Russia would have found a rampart against her in the north. The first time, abandoned by his troops, in his tent by his revolted generals, he had escaped, and alone, made an appeal to his brave Dalecarlians. His eloquence, and his magnanimous bearing had caused a new army to spring from the earth. He had punished traitors, rallied cowards, concluded the war, and returned triumphant to Stockholm, borne on the shoulders of his people, wrought up to a pitch of enthusiasm. The second time, seeing his country torn by the anarchical predominance of the nobility, he had resolved, in the depths of his own palace, on the overthrow of the constitution. United in feeling with the bourgeoisie and the people, he had led on his troops, sword in hand; imprisoned the senate in its chamber; dethroned the nobility, and acquired for royalty the prerogatives it required in order to defend and govern the country. In three days, and before one drop of blood had been shed, Sweden under his sword had become a monarchy. Gustavus's confidence in his own boldness was confirmed. The monarchical feeling in him was strengthened by all the hatred which he bore to the privileges of the orders he had overturned. The cause of the king was identified with his own.

He had embraced with enthusiasm that of Louis XVI. Peace, which he had concluded with Russia, allowed him to direct his attention and his forces towards France. His military genius dreamed of a triumphant expedition to the banks of the Seine. It was there that he desired to acquire glory. He had visited Paris in his youth; under the name of the Count de Haga he had partaken of the hospitalities of Versailles. Marie Antoinette, then in the brilliancy of her youth and beauty, now appeared humiliated, and a captive in the hands of a pitiless people. To deliver this woman, restore the throne, to make himself at once feared and blessed by this capital, seemed to him one of those adventures formerly sought by crowned chevaliers. His finances alone opposed the execution of this bold design. He negotiated a loan with the court of Spain, attached to him the French emigrants renowned for their military talents, requested plans from the Marquis de BouillÉ, solicited the courts of St. Petersburg and Berlin to unite with him in this crusade of kings. He asked of England nothing but neutrality. Russia encouraged him; Austria temporised; Spain trembled; England looked on. Each new shock of the Revolution at Paris found Europe undecided and always behind-hand in counsels and resolutions. Monarchical Europe, hesitating and divided, did not know what it had to fear, nor what it ought to do.

Such was the political situation of cabinets with respect to France. But as to ideas, the feelings of the people were different.

The movement of intelligence and philosophy at Paris was responded to by the agitation of the rest of Europe, and especially in America. Spain, under M. d'Aranda, was become alive to the general feeling; the Jesuits had disappeared; the Inquisition had extinguished its fires; the Spanish nobility blushed for the sacred theocracy of its monks. Voltaire had correspondents at Cadiz and at Madrid. The forbidden produce of our ideas was favoured even by those whose charge was to exclude it. Our books crossed the snows of the Pyrenees. Fanaticism, tracked by the light to its last den, felt Spain escaping from it. The excess of a tyranny long undergone, prepared ardent minds for the excess of liberty.

In Italy, and even at Rome, the sombre Catholicism of the middle age was lighted up by the reflections of time. It played even with the dangerous arms which philosophy was about to turn against it. It seemed to consider itself as a weakened institution, which ought to have its long duration pardoned in consequence of its complaisance towards princes and the age. Benedict XIV. (Lambertini) received from Voltaire the dedication of "Mahomet." The Cardinals Passionei and Quirini, in their correspondence with Ferney[6],—Rome, in its bulls, preached tolerance for dissenters, and obedience to princes. The pope disavowed and reformed the company of Jesus: he soothed the spirit of the age. Clement XIV. (Ganganelli) shortly after secularised the Jesuits, confiscated their possessions, and imprisoned their superior, Ricci, in the castle of Saint Angelo, the Bastille of papacy. Severe only towards exaggerated zealots, he enchanted the Christian world by the evangelical sweetness, the grace of his understanding, and the poignancy of his wit; but pleasantry is the first step to the profanation of dogmata. The crowd of strangers and English whom his affability attracted to Italy and retained at Rome, caused, with the circulation of gold and science, the inflowing of scepticism and indifference, which destroy creeds before they sap institutions.

Naples, under a corrupt court, left fanaticism to the populace. Florence, under a philosophical prince, was an experimental colony of modern doctrines. The poet Alfieri, that TyrtÆus of Italian liberty, produced there his revolutionary dramas, and there sowed his maxims against the two-fold tyranny of popes and kings in every theatre in Italy.

Milan, beneath the Austrian flag, had within its walls a republic of poets and philosophers. Beccaria wrote there more daringly than Montesquieu. His work on "Crimes and Punishments" was a bill of accusation of all the laws of his native country. Parini Monte, Cesarotti, Pindemonte, Ugo Foscolo gay, serious, and heroic poets, then satirised the absurdities of their tyrants, the baseness of their fellow-countrymen, or sang, in patriotic odes, the virtues of their ancestors, and the approaching deliverance of their country.

Turin alone, attached to the house of Saxony, was silent, and proscribed Alfieri.

In England, the mind, a long time free, had produced sound morals. The aristocracy felt itself sufficiently strong never to become persecuting. Worship was there as independent as conscience. The dominant religion was a political institution, which, whilst it bound the citizen, left the believer to his free will. The government itself was popular, only the people consisted of none but its leading citizens. The House of Commons more resembled a senate of nobles than a democratic forum; but this parliament was an open and resounding chamber, where they discussed openly in face of the throne, as in the face of all Europe, the most comprehensive measures of the government. Royalty, honoured in form, whilst in fact it is excluded and powerless, merely presides over these debates, and adds order to victory; it was, in reality, nothing more than a perpetual consulate of this Britannic senate. The voices of the leading orators, who contested the rule of the nation, echoed thence, through and out of Europe. Liberty finds its level in the social world, like the waves in the common bed of the ocean. One nation is not free with impunity—one people is not in bondage with impunity—all finally compares and equalises itself.

England had been intellectually the model of nations, and the envy of the reflecting universe. Nature and its institutions had conferred upon it men worthy of its laws. Lord Chatham, sometimes leading the opposition, sometimes at the head of the government, had expanded the space of parliament to the proportions of his own character and his own language. Never did the manly liberty of a citizen before a throne—never did the legal authority of a prime minister before a people display themselves in such a voice to assembled citizens. He was a public man in all the greatness of the phrase—the soul of a nation personified in an individual—the inspiration of the nation in the heart of a patrician. His oratory had something as grand as action—it was the heroic in language. The echo of Lord Chatham's discourses were heard—felt on the Continent. The stormy scenes of the Westminster elections[7] shook to the very depths the feelings of the people, and that love of turbulence which slumbers in every multitude, and which it so often mistakes for the symptoms of true liberty. These words of counterpoise to royal power, to ministerial responsibility, to laws in operation, to the power of the people, explained at the present by a constitution—explained in the past by the accusation of Strafford, the tomb of Sidney, on the scaffold of a king, had resounded like old recollections and strange novelties.

The English drama had the whole world for audience. The great actors for the moment were Pitt, the controller of these storms, the intrepid organ of the throne, of order, and the laws of his country; Fox, the precursory tribune of the French Revolution, who propagated the doctrines by connecting them with the revolutions of England, in order to sanctify them in the eyes of the English; Burke, the philosophical orator, every one of whose orations was a treatise; then the Cicero of the opposition party, and who was so speedily to turn against the excesses of the French Revolution, and curse the new faith in the first victim immolated by the people; and lastly, Sheridan, an eloquent debauchee, liked by the populace for his levity and his vices, seducing his country, instead of elevating it. The warmth of the debates on the American war, and the Indian war, gave a more powerful interest to the storms of the English parliament.

The independence of America, effected by a newly-born people, the republican maxims on which this new continent founded its government, the reputation attached to the fresh names, which distance increased more than their victories,—Washington, Franklin, La Fayette, the heroes of public imagination; those dreams of ancient simplicity, of primitive manners, of liberty at once heroic and pastoral, which the fashion and illusion of the moment had transported from the other side of the Atlantic,—all contributed to fascinate the spirit of the Continent, and nourish in the mind of the people contempt for their own institutions, and fanaticism for a social renovation.

Holland was the workshop of innovators; it was there that, sheltered by a complete toleration of religious dogmata, by an almost republican liberty, and by an authorised system of contraband, all that could not be uttered in Paris, in Italy, in Spain, in Germany, was printed. Since Descartes, independent philosophy had selected Holland for its asylum: Boyle had there rendered scepticism popular: it was the land sacred to insurrection against all the abuses of power, and had subsequently become the seat of conspiracy against kings. Every one who had a suspicious idea to promulgate, an attack to make, a name to conceal, went to borrow the presses of Holland. Voltaire, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Diderot, Helvetius, Mirabeau himself—had gone there to naturalise their writings in this land of publicity. The mask of concealment which these writers assumed in Amsterdam deceived no one, but it effected their security. All the crimes of thought were there inviolable; it was at the same time the asylum and the arsenal of new ideas. An active and vast trade in books made a speculation of the overthrow of religion and thrones. The prodigious demand for prohibited works which were thus circulated in the world, proved sufficiently the increasing alteration of ancient beliefs in the mind of the people.

XI.

In Germany, the country of phlegm and patience, minds apparently so slow shared with serious and concentrated ardour in the general movement of mind in Europe. Free thought there assumed the form of an universal conspiracy. It was enveloped in mystery. Learned and formal Germany liked to give even to its insurrection the appearances of science and tradition. The Egyptian initiations, mystic ceremonies of the middle age, were imitated by the adepts of new ideas. Men thought as they conspired. Philosophy moved veiled in symbols; and that veil was torn away only in secret societies, from which the profane were excluded. The prestiges of the imagination, so powerful in the ideal and dreamy nature of Germany, served as a bait to the newly arisen truths.

The great Frederic had made his court the centre of religious incredulity. Sheltered by his power altogether military, contempt for Christianity and of monarchical institutions was freely propagated. Moral force was nothing to this materialist prince. Bayonets were in his eyes the right of princes; insurrection the right of the people; victories or defeats the public right. His constant run of good fortune was the accomplice of his immorality. He had received the recompence of every one of his vices, because his vices were great. Dying he had bequeathed his perverse genius to Berlin. It was the corrupting city of Germany. Military men educated in the school of Frederic, academies modelled after the genius of Voltaire, colonies of Jews enriched by war, and the French refugees, peopled Berlin and formed the public mind. This mind, full of levity, sceptic, impertinent and sneering, intimidated the rest of Germany. The weakened spirit of that land may be dated from the period of Frederic II. He was the corrupter of the empire—he conquered Germany in the French spirit—he was a hero of a falling destiny.

Berlin continued it after his death; great men always bequeath the impulse of their spirit to their country. The reign of Frederic had at least one happy result: religious tolerance arose in Germany from the very contempt in which Frederic had held religious creeds. Under the wing of this toleration the spirit of philosophy had organised occult associations, after the image of freemasonry. The German princes were initiated. It was thought an act of superior mind to penetrate into those shadows, which, in reality, included nothing beyond some general principles of humanity and virtue, with no direct application to civil institutions. Frederic in his youth had been initiated himself, at Brunswick, by Major Bielfeld; the emperor Joseph II., the most bold innovator of his time, had also desired to undergo these proofs at Vienna, under the tutelage of the baron de Born, the chief of the freemasons in Austria. These societies, which had no religious tendency in England, because there liberty conspired openly in parliament and in the press, had a wholly different sense on the Continent. They were the secret council-chambers of independent thought: the thought, escaping from books, passed into action. Between the initiated and established institutions, the war was concealed, but the more deadly.

The hidden agents of these societies had evidently for aim the creation of a government of the opinion of the human race, in opposition to the governments of prejudice. They desired to reform religious, political, and civil society, beginning by the most refined classes. These lodges were the catacombs of a new worship. The sect of illuminÉs, founded and guided by Weishaupt, was spreading in Germany in conjunction with the freemasons and the rosicrucians. The theosophists in their turn produced the symbols of supernatural perfection, and enrolled all susceptible minds and ardent imaginations around dogmata full of love and infinity. The theosophists, the Swedenborgians, disciples of the sublime but obscure Swedenborg, the Saint Martin of Germany, pretended to complete the Gospel, and to transform humanity by overcoming death and the senses. All these dogmata were mingled in an equal contempt for existing institutions in one same aspiration for the renewal of the mind and things. All were democratic in their last conclusion, for all were inspired by a love of mankind without distinction of classes.

Affiliations were multiplied ad infinitum. Prejudice, as it always occurs when zeal is ardent, was added fraudulently to truth, as if error or falsehood were the inevitable alloy of truth, and even the virtues of the human mind: they called up past ages, summoned spectres, and the dead were heard to speak. They played upon the plastic imagination of princes, by rapid transition from terror to enthusiasm. The knowledge of the phantasmagoria, then but little known, served as an auxiliary in these deceptions. On the death of Frederic II., his successor submitted to such tests, and was worked upon by wonders. Kings conspired against thrones. The princes of Gotha gave Weishaupt an asylum. Augustus of Saxony, prince Ferdinand of Brunswick, the prince of Neuvied, even the coadjutor of the ecclesiastical principalities on the banks of the Rhine, those of Mayence, Worms, and Constance, signalised themselves by their ardour for the mystic doctrines of freemasonry or the illuminati. Cagliostro was astounding Strasburgh—Cardinal de Rohan ruined himself, and bent before his voice. Like at the fall of great empires—like at the cradle of great things—these signs appeared every where. The most infallible was the general convulsion of human ideas. When a creed is crumbling to atoms, all mankind trembles.

The lofty geniuses of Germany and Italy were already singing the new era to their offspring; GÖethe the sceptic poet, Schiller the republican poet, Klopstock the sacred poet, intoxicated with their strophes the universities and theatres; each shock of the events of Paris had its contre coup and sonorous echo, multiplied by these writers on the borders of the Rhine. Poetry is the remembrance and anticipation of things: what it celebrates is not yet dead, and what it sings already hath existence. Poetry sang everywhere the unformed but impassioned hopes of the people. It is a sure augury—it is full of enthusiasm, for its voice is heard on all sides; science, poetry, history, philosophy, the stage, mysticism, the arts, the genius of Europe under every form, had passed over to the Revolution: not one name of a man of reputation in all Europe could be cited who remained attached to the party of the past. The past was overcome, because the mind of the human race had withdrawn from it—when the spirit hath flown life is extinct. None but mediocrities remain under the shelter of old forms and institutions: There was a general mirage in the horizon of the future; and, whether the small saw therein their safety, or the great an abyss, all went headlong towards the novelty.

XII.

Such was the tendency of minds in Europe, when the princes, brothers of Louis XVI., and the emigrant gentlemen, spread themselves over Savoy, Switzerland, Italy, and Germany, to demand succour and vengeance from powers and principalities against the Revolution. Never, from the first great emigrations of ancient people, fleeing from the Roman invasions, had been seen such a movement of terror and perturbation as this, which cast forth from the territory all the clergy and all the aristocracy of a nation. An immense vacuum was created in France: first, in the steps of the throne itself; next, in the court, in chÂteaux, in ecclesiastical dignities; and finally in the ranks of the army. Officers, all noble, emigrated in masses; the navy followed somewhat later, the example of the army, which also abandoned the flag. It was not that the clergy, the nobility, the land and sea officers were more pressed upon by the stir of revolutionary ideas which had agitated the nation in 1789; on the contrary, the movement commenced by them. Philosophy had in the first place enlightened the apex of the nation. The thought of the age was especially in the higher classes; but those classes who sought a reform by no means desired a disorganisation. When they had seen the moral agitation of ideas transform itself into an insurrection of the people, they had trembled. The reins of government violently snatched from the king by Mirabeau and La Fayette, at the Tennis court; the attempts of the 5th and 6th of October; privileges suppressed without compensation, titles abolished, the aristocracy handed over to execration, to pillage, to fire, and even to murder, in the provinces; religion deposed, and compelled to nationalise itself by a constitutional oath; and; finally the king's flight, his imprisonment in his palace, the threats of death vomited forth by the patriotic press, or the tribunes of popular clubs, against all aristocracy, the triumphant riots in the provinces, the defection of the French guards in Paris, the revolt of the Swiss of ChÂteauvieux at Nancy, the excesses of the soldiery, mutinous and unpunished, at Caen, Brest, and everywhere, had changed into horror and hatred the favourable feeling of the noblesse for the progress of opinion. It saw that the first act of the people was to degrade superior authority. The esprit de caste impelled the nobility to emigrate, the esprit de corps similarly influenced the officers, and the esprit de cour made it shameful to remain on a soil stained with so many outrages to royalty. The women, who then formed public opinion in France, and whose tender and easily excited imagination is soon transferred to the side of their victims, all sided with the throne and the aristocracy. They despised those who would not go and seek their avengers in foreign lands. Young men departed at their desire; those who did not, dared not show themselves. They sent them distaffs, as a token of their cowardice!

But it was not shame alone that led the officers and the nobles to join the ranks of the army, it was also the appearance of a duty; for the last virtue that was left to the French nobility was a religious fidelity to the throne: their honour, their second and almost only religion, was to die for their king; and any design against the throne, in their belief, was a design against heaven. Chivalry, that code of aristocratic feeling, had preserved and disseminated this noble prejudice throughout Europe; and, to the nobility, the king represented their country. This feeling, eclipsed for a while by the debaucheries of the regency, the scandalous vices of Louis XV., and the bold maxims of Rousseau's philosophy, was awakened in the heart of the gentlemen at the spectacle of the degradation and danger of the king and queen. In their eyes, the Assembly was nothing but a band of revolutionary subjects, who detained their sovereign a prisoner. The most voluntary acts of the king were suspected by them, and beneath his constitutional speeches, they imagined they discovered another and a contrary meaning; and the very ministers of Louis XVI. were believed to be nothing but his gaolers. A secret understanding existed between these gentlemen and the king, and counsels were held in secluded apartments of the Tuileries, at which the king alternately encouraged and forbade his friends to emigrate. And his orders, varied at each day and each fresh occurrence, were sometimes constitutional and patriotic when he hoped to re-establish and moderate the constitution at home; at other times, despairing and blameable when it seemed to him that the security of the queen and his children could only proceed from another country. Whilst he addressed official letters through his minister for foreign affairs to his brothers, and the Prince de CondÉ, to recall them, and point out to them their duty as citizens, the Baron de Breteuil, his confidential agent to the Foreign Powers, transmitted to the king of Prussia letters that revealed the secret thoughts of the king. The following letter to the king of Prussia, found in the archives of the chancellorship of Berlin, dated December 3rd, 1790, leaves no doubt of this double diplomacy of the unfortunate monarch. Louis XVI. wrote:—

"Monsieur mon FrÈre,

"I have learnt from M. de Moustier how great an interest your majesty has displayed, not only for my person but for the welfare of my kingdom, and your majesty's determination to prove this interest, whenever it can be for the good of my people, has deeply touched me; and I confidently claim the fulfilment of it, at this moment, when, in spite of my having accepted the new constitution, the factious portion of my subjects openly manifest their intention of destroying the remainder of the monarchy. I have addressed the emperor, the empress of Russia, and the kings of Spain and Sweden, and I have suggested to them the idea of a congress of the principal powers of Europe, supported by an armed force, as the best measure to check the progress of faction here, to afford the means of establishing a better order of things, and preventing the evil that devours this country from seizing on the other states of Europe. I trust that your majesty will approve my ideas, and maintain the strictest secrecy respecting the step I have taken in this matter, as you will feel that the critical position in which I am placed at present compels me to use the greatest circumspection. It is for this reason that the Baron de Breteuil is alone acquainted with my secret, and through him your majesty can transmit me whatever you may think fit."

XIII.

This letter, added to that addressed by Louis XVI. to M. de BouillÉ, informing him that his brother-in-law the emperor Leopold was about to march a body of troops on Longwi, in order to afford a pretext for the concentration of the French troops on that frontier, and thus favour his flight from Paris, are irrefragable proofs of the counter-revolutionary understanding existing between the king and the foreign powers, no less than between the king and the leaders of the emigrÉs. The memoirs of the emigrÉs are full of proofs of this fact; and nature even attests them, for the cause of the king, the aristocracy, and the religious institutions was identical. The emperor Leopold was the brother of the queen of France; the dangers of the king were the dangers of all the other princes; for the example of the triumph of one people was contagious to all nations. The emigrÉs were the friends of the monarchy, and the defenders of kings; had they not exchanged a word more on the subject, they would have been united by the same feelings, the same interests. But in addition to this, they had preconcerted communication with each other, and the suspicions of the people were no empty chimeras, but the presentiment of the plots of their enemies.

The conspiracy of the court with all the courts and aristocracies abroad, with all the aristocracies of the emigrÉs, with their relations, of the king with his brothers, had no need of being carried on in writing. Louis XVI. himself, the most really revolutionary of all the monarchs who have occupied the throne, had no thought of treachery to the people or to the revolution, when he implored the armed succour of the other powers. This idea of an appeal to foreign forces, or even the emigrated forces, was not his real desire; for he dreaded the intervention of the enemies of France, he disapproved of emigration, and he was not without a feeling of offence at his brothers intriguing abroad, sometimes in his name, but often against his wishes. He shrank from the idea of passing in the eyes of Europe for a prince in leading-strings, whose ambitious brothers seized upon his rights in adopting his cause, and stipulated for his interests without his intervention. At Coblentz a regency was openly spoken of, and bestowed on the Comte de Provence, the brother of Louis XVI.; and this regency, that had devolved on a prince of the blood by emigration, whilst the king maintained a struggle at Paris, greatly humiliated Louis XVI. and the queen. This usurpation of their rights, although clothed in the dress of devotion and tenderness, was even more bitter to them than the outrages of the Assembly and the people. We always dread most that which is nearest to us, and the triumph of the emigration only promised them a throne, disputed by the regent who had restored it. This gratitude appeared to them a disgrace, and they knew not whether they had most to hope or to apprehend from the emigrÉs.

The queen, in her conversations with her friends, spoke of them with more bitterness than confidence. The king loudly complained of the disobedience of his brothers, and dissuaded from flight all those who demanded his advice; but his advice was as changeable as events; like all men balancing between hope and fear, he alternately bent and stood erect beneath the pressure of circumstances. His acts were culpable, but not his intentions; it was not the king who conspired, but the man, the husband, the father, who sought by foreign aid to ensure the safety of his wife and children; and he alone became criminal when all seemed desperate. The "tangled thread" of negotiation was incessantly broken off and renewed: that which was resolved yesterday was to-morrow disavowed; and the secret negotiators of these plots, armed with credentials and powers which had been recalled, yet continued to employ them, in spite of the king's orders, to carry on in his name those plans of which he disapproved. The prince de CondÉ, the Comte de Provence, and the Comte d'Artois had each his separate line of policy and court, and abused the king's name in order to increase his own credit and interest. Hence arises the difficulty, to those who write the history of that period, of tracing the hand of the king in all these conspiracies, carried on in his name, and to pronounce either his entire innocence or his palpable treachery. He did not betray his country, or sell his subjects; but he did not observe his oaths to the constitution or his country. An upright man, but a persecuted king, he believed that oaths, extorted by violence and eluded through fear, were no perjuries; and he broke each day some of those to which he had bound himself, under the belief, doubtless, that the excesses of the people freed him from his oath. Educated with all the prejudices of personal sovereignty, he sought with sincerity amidst this chaos of parties, who disputed with each other the empire, to find the nation; and failing to discover the object of his search, he fancied he had the right to find it in his own person. His crime, if there be any in his actions, was less the crime of his heart than the crime of his birth, his situation, and his misfortunes.

XIV.

The Baron de Breteuil, an old minister and ambassador, a man incapable of making the least concession, and ever counselling strong and forcible measures, had quitted France at the commencement of the year 1790, the king's secret plenipotentiary to all the other powers. He alone was, to all intents, and for all purposes, the sole minister of Louis XVI. He was, moreover, absolute minister; for once invested with the confidence and unlimited power of the king, who could not revoke, without betraying the existence of his occult diplomacy, he was in a position to make any use of it, and to interpret at will the intentions of Louis XVI. to his own views. The Baron de Breteuil did abuse it; not, as it is said, from personal ambition, but from excess of zeal for the welfare and dignity of his master. His negotiations with Catherine, Gustavus, Frederic, and Leopold were a constant incitement to a crusade against the Revolution of France.

The Count de Provence (afterwards Louis XVIII.), and the Count d'Artois (afterwards Charles X.), after several visits to the different courts of the South and North, had met at Coblentz, where Louis Venceslas, elector of TrÈves, their maternal uncle, received them with a more kind than politic welcome. Coblentz became the Paris of Germany, the focus of the counter-revolutionary conspiracy, the head quarters of all the French nobles assembled round their natural leaders, the two brothers of the captive king. Whilst they held there their wandering court, and formed the first links of the coalition of Pilnitz, the Prince de CondÉ, who, from inclination and descent, was of a more military disposition, formed the army of the Princes, consisting of eight or ten thousand officers, and no soldiers, and thus it was the head of the army severed from the trunk. Names renowned in history's annals, fervent devotion, youthful ardour, heroic bravery, fidelity, the conviction of success,—nothing was wanting to this army at Coblentz save an understanding with their country and time. Had the French noblesse but employed one half of the virtues and efforts they made to subdue the Revolution, in regulating it, the Revolution, although it changed the laws, would not have changed the monarchy. But it is useless to expect that institutions can comprehend the means that transform them. The king, the nobility, and the priests could not understand a revolution that threatened to destroy the noblesse, the clergy, and the throne. A contest became unavoidable; they had not space for the struggle in France, and they took their stand on a foreign soil.

XV.

Whilst the army of the princes thus increased in strength at Coblentz, the counter-revolutionary diplomacy was on the eve of the first great result it had been enabled to obtain in the actual state of Europe. The conferences of Pilnitz had opened, and the Count de Provence had sent the baron Roll from Coblentz to the king of Prussia, to demand in the name of Louis XVI. the assistance of his troops to aid in the re-establishment of order in France. The king of Prussia, before deciding, wished to learn the state of France from a man whose military talents and devoted attachment to the monarchy had gained him the confidence of the foreign courts,—the Marquis de BouillÉ. He fixed the ChÂteau de Pilnitz as the meeting place, and requested him to bring a plan of operation for the foreign armies on the different French frontiers; and on the 24th of August Frederic Willam, accompanied by his son, his principal generals, and his ministers, arrived at the ChÂteau de Pilnitz, the summer residence of the court of Saxony, where he had been preceded by the emperor.

The Archduke Francis, afterwards the emperor Francis II., the MarÉchal de Lascy, the Baron de Spielman, and a numerous train of courtiers, attended the emperor. The two sovereigns, the rivals of Germany, seemed for a time to have laid aside their rivalry to occupy themselves solely with the safety of the thrones of Europe; this fraternity of the great family of monarchs prevailed over every other feeling, and they treated each other more like brothers than sovereigns, whilst the elector of Saxony, their entertainer, enlivened the conference by a succession of splendid fÊtes.

In the midst of a banquet the unexpected arrival of the Count d'Artois at Dresden was announced, and the king of Prussia requested permission from the emperor for the French prince to appear. The emperor consented, but previous to admitting him to their official conferences the two monarchs had a secret interview, at which two of their most confidential agents only were present. The emperor inclined to peace, the inertness of the Germanic body weighed down his resolve, for he felt the difficulty of communicating to this vassal federation of the empire the unity and energy necessary to attack France in the full enthusiasm of her Revolution. The generals, and even the MarÉchal de Lascy himself, hesitated before frontiers reputed to be impregnable, whilst the emperor was apprehensive for the Low Countries and Italy. The French maxims had passed the Rhine, and might explode in the German states at the moment when the princes and people were called upon to take arms against France, and the diet of the people might prove more powerful than the diet of the kings. Dilatory measures would have the same intimidating effect on the revolutionary genius, without presenting the same dangers to Germany; and would it not be more prudent to form a general league of all the European powers to surround France with a circle of bayonets, and summon the triumphant party to restore liberty to the king, dignity to the throne, and security to the Continent? "Should the French nation refuse," added the emperor, "then we will threaten her in a manifesto, with a general invasion, and should it become necessary, we will crush her beneath the irresistible weight of the united forces of all Europe." Such were the counsels of that temporising genius of empires that awaits necessity without ever forestalling, and would fain be assured of every thing without the least risk.

XVI.

The king of Prussia, more impatient and more threatening, confessed to the emperor that he had no faith in the effect of these threats. "Prudence," said he, "is a feeble defence against audacity, and the defensive is but a timid position to assume in the face of the Revolution. We must attack it in its infancy; for to give time to the French principles, is to give them strength. To treat with the popular insurrection, is to prove to them that we fear, and are disposed to form a compact with them. We must surprise France in the very act of anarchy, and publish a manifesto to Europe when the armies have crossed the frontiers and success has given authority to our declaration."

The emperor appeared moved; he, however, insisted on the dangers to which a sudden invasion would inevitably expose Louis XVI., he showed the letters of this prince, and intimated that the Marquis de Noailles and M. de Montmorin—the one French ambassador at Vienna, the other minister for Foreign Affairs at Paris, who were both devoted to the king—held out hopes to the court of Vienna of the speedy re-establishment of order and monarchical modifications of the constitution in France; and he demanded the right of suspending his decision until the month of September, although in the mean while military preparations should be made by both powers. The scene was changed the next morning by the Count d'Artois. This young prince had received from the hand of nature all the exterior qualifications of a chevalier: he spoke to the sovereigns in the name of the thrones; to the emperor in the name of an outraged and dethroned sister. The whole emigration, with its misfortunes, its nobility, its valour, its illusions, seemed personified in him. The Marquis de BouillÉ and M. de Calonne, the genius of war and the genius of intrigue, had followed him to these conferences. He obtained several audiences of the two sovereigns, he inveighed with respect and energy against the temporising system of the emperor, and violently roused the Germanic sluggishness. The emperor and the king of Prussia authorised the Baron de Spielman for Austria, the Baron de Bischofswerden for Prussia, and M. de Calonne for France, to meet the same evening, and draw up a declaration for the signature of the monarchs.

The Baron de Spielman, under the immediate dictation of the emperor, drew up the document. M. de Calonne in vain combated, in the name of the Count d'Artois, the hesitation that disconcerted the impatience of the emigrÉs. The next day, on their return from a visit to Dresden, the two sovereigns, the Count d'Artois, M. de Calonne, the MarÉchal de Lascy, and the two negotiators, met in the emperor's apartment, where the declaration was read and discussed, every sentence weighed, and some expressions modified; and at the proposal of M. de Calonne, and the entreaties of the Count d'Artois, the emperor and the king of Prussia consented to the insertion of the last phrase, that threatened the Revolution with war.

Subjoined is the document that was the date of a war of twenty-two years' duration.

"The emperor and the king of Prussia, having listened to the wishes and representations of Monsieur and Monsieur le Comte d'Artois, declare conjointly that they look upon the present position of the king of France as an object of common interest to all the sovereigns of Europe. They trust that this interest cannot fail to be acknowledged by all the powers whose assistance is claimed; and that, in consequence, they will not refuse to employ, conjointly with the emperor and the king of Prussia, the most efficacious means, proportioned to their forces, for enabling the king of France to strengthen with the most perfect liberty the bases of a monarchical government, equally conformable to the rights of sovereigns and the welfare of the French nation. Then, and in that case, their aforesaid majesties are resolved to act promptly and in concert with the forces requisite to attain the end proposed and agreed on. In the mean time they will issue all needful orders to their troops to hold themselves in a state of readiness."

This declaration, at once timid and threatening, was evidently too much for peace, too little for war; for such words encourage the revolution, without crushing it. They at once showed the impatience of the emigrÉs, the resolution of the king of Prussia, the hesitation of the powers, the temporising policy of the emperor. It was a concession to force and weakness, to peace and war; the whole state of Europe was there unveiled, for it was the declaration of the uncertainty and anarchy of its councils.

XVII.

After this imprudent and useless act, the two sovereigns separated. Leopold to go and be crowned at Prague, and the king of Prussia, returning to Berlin, began to put his army on a war footing. The emigrants, triumphing in the engagement they had entered into, increased in numbers. The courts of Europe, with the exception of England, sent in equivocal adhesions to the courts of Berlin and Vienna. The noise of the declaration of Pilnitz burst forth, and died away in Paris in the midst of the fÊtes in honour of the acceptance of the constitution.

However, Leopold, after the conferences at Pilnitz, was more earnest than ever in his attempts to find excuses for peace. The Prince de Kaunitz, his minister, feared all violent shocks, which might derange the old diplomatic mechanism, whose workings he so well knew. Louis XVI. sent the Count de Fersen secretly to him, in order to disclose his real motives in accepting the constitution, and to entreat him not to provoke, by any preparation of arms, the bad feelings of the Revolution, which seemed to be quieted by its triumph.

The emigrant princes, on the contrary, filled all courts with the words uttered in favour of their cause in the declaration of Pilnitz. They wrote a letter to Louis XVI., in which they protested against the oath of the king to the constitution, forced, as they declared, from his weakness and his captivity. The king of Prussia, on receiving the circular of the French cabinet, in which the acceptance of the constitution was notified, exclaimed, "I see the peace of Europe assured!" The courts of Vienna and Berlin feigned to believe that all was concluded in France by the mutual concessions of the king and the Assembly. They made up their minds to see the throne of Louis XVI. abased, provided that the Revolution would consent to allow itself to be controlled by the throne.

Russia, Sweden, Spain, and Sardinia were not so easily appeased. Catherine II. and Gustavus III., the one from a proud feeling of her power, and the other from a generous devotion to the cause of kings, arranged together, to send 40,000 Russians and Swedes to the aid of the monarchy. This army, paid by a subsidy of 15,000,000f. of Spain, and commanded by Gustavus in person, was to land upon the coast of France, and march upon Paris, whilst the forces of the empire crossed the Rhine.

These bold plans of the two northern courts were displeasing to Leopold and the king of Prussia. They reproached Catherine with not keeping her promises, and making peace with the Turks. Could the emperor march his troops on the Rhine whilst the battles of the Russians and Ottomans continued on the Danube and threatened the remoter provinces of his empire? Catherine and Gustavus nevertheless did not abate in their open protection to the emigration party. These two sovereigns accredited ministers plenipotentiary to the French princes at Coblentz. This was declaring the forfeiture of Louis XVI., and even the forfeiture of France. It was recognising that the government of the kingdom was no longer at Paris, but at Coblentz. Moreover, they contracted a treaty of alliance, offensive and defensive, between Sweden and Russia in the common interest of the re-establishment of the monarchy.

Louis XVI. then earnestly desiring the disarming, sent to Coblentz the Baron ViomÉnil and the Chevalier de Coigny to command his brothers and the Prince de CondÉ to disarm and disperse the emigrants. They received his orders as coming from a captive, and disobeyed without even sending him a reply. Prussia and the empire showed more deference to the king's intentions. These two courts disbanded the army collected by the princes, and ordered to be punished in their states all insults offered to the tricolour cockade; but at the very moment when the emperor thus gave evidence of his desire to maintain peace, war was about to involve him in spite of himself. What human wisdom sometimes refuses to the greatest causes, it sees itself compelled to accord to the smallest. Such was Leopold's situation. He had refused war to the great interests of the monarchy, and the strong feelings of the family which asked it from him, and yet was about to grant it to the insignificant interests of certain princes of the empire, whose possessions were in Alsace and Lorraine, and whose personal rights were violated by the new French constitution. He had refused succour to his sister, and was about to accord it to his vassals. The influence of the diet, and his duties as head of the empire, led him on to steps to which his personal feelings would never have urged him. By his letter of 3d December, 1791, he announced to the cabinet of the Tuileries the formal resolution on his part "of giving aid to the princes holding lands in France, if he did not obtain their perfect restoration to all the rights which belonged to them by treaty."

XVIII.

This threatening letter, secretly communicated in Paris, (before it was officially sent,) by the French ambassador in Vienna, was received by the king with much alarm, and with joy by certain of his ministers, and the political party of the Assembly. War cuts through every thing. They hailed it as a solution to the difficulties which they felt were crushing them. When there is no longer any hope in the regular order of events, there is in what is unknown. War appeared to these adventurous spirits a necessary diversion to the universal ferment; a career to the Revolution; a means for the king again to seize on power by acquiring the support of the army. They hoped to change the fanaticism of liberty into the fanaticism of glory, and to deceive the spirit of the age by intoxicating it with conquests instead of satisfying it with institutions.

The Girondist deputies were of this party. Brissot was their inspiration. Flattered by the title of statesmen, which they already assumed from vanity, and which was used towards them with irony, they were desirous to justify their pretensions by a bold stroke, which would change the scene, and disconcert, at the same time, the king, the people, and Europe. They had studied Machiavel, and considered the disdain of the just as a proof of genius. They little heeded the blood of the people, provided that it cemented their ambition.

The Jacobin party, with the exception of Robespierre, clamoured loudly for war: his fanaticism deceived him as to his weakness. War was to these men an armed apostleship, which was about to propagate their social philosophy over the universe. The first cannon shot fired in the name of the rights of man would shake thrones to their centre. Then there was finally a third party which hoped for war, that of the constitutional modÉrÉs, which flattered itself that it would restore sound energy to the executive power, by the necessity of concentrating the military authority in the hands of the king at the moment when the nationality should be menaced. All extremity of war places the dictatorship in the hands of the party which makes it, and they hoped, on behalf of the king, and of themselves, for this dictatorship of necessity.

XIX.

A young, but already influential, female had lent to this latter party the prestige of her youth, her genius, and her enthusiasm—it was Madame de StÄel. Necker's daughter, she had inspired politics from her birth. Her mother's salon had been the coenaculum of the philosophy of the 18th century. Voltaire, Rousseau, Buffon, D'Alembert, Diderot, Raynal, Bernardin de Saint Pierre, Condorcet had played with this child, and fostered her earliest ideas. Her cradle was that of the Revolution. Her father's popularity had played about her lips, and left there an inextinguishable thirst for fame. She sought it in the storms of the populace, in calumny, and death. Her genius was great, her soul pure, her heart deeply impassioned. A man in her energy, a woman in her tenderness, that the ideal of her ambition should be satisfied, it was necessary for her to associate in the same character genius, glory, and love.

Nature, education, and fortune rendered possible this triple dream of a woman, a philosopher, and a hero. Born in a republic, educated in a court, daughter of a minister, wife of an ambassador, belonging by birth to the people, to the literary world by talent, to the aristocracy by rank, the three elements of the Revolution mingled or contended in her. Her genius was like the antique chorus, in which all the great voices of the drama unite in one tumultuous concord. A deep thinker by inspiration, a tribune by eloquence, a woman in attraction, her beauty, unseen by the million, required intellect to be admired, and admiration to be felt. Hers was not the beauty of form and features, but visible inspiration and the manifestation of passionate impulse. Attitude, gesture, tone of voice, look—all obeyed her mind, and created her brilliancy. Her black eyes, flashing with fire, gave out from beneath their long lids as much tenderness as pride. Her look, so often lost in space, was followed by those who knew her, as if it were possible to find with her the inspiration she sought. That gaze, open, yet profound as her understanding, had as much serenity as penetration. We felt that the light of her genius was only the reverberation of a mine of tenderness of heart. Thus there was a secret love in all the admiration she excited; and she, in admiration, cared only for love. Love with her was but enlightened admiration.

Events rapidly ripened; ideas and things were crowded into her life: she had no infancy. At twenty-two years of age she had maturity of thought with the grace and softness of youth. She wrote like Rousseau, and spoke like Mirabeau. Capable of bold conceptions and complicated designs, she could contain in her bosom at the same time a lofty idea and a deep feeling. Like the women of old Rome who agitated the republic by the impulses of their hearts, or who exalted or depressed the empire with their love, she sought to mingle her feelings with her politics, and desired that the elevation of her genius should elevate him she loved. Her sex precluded her from that open action which public position, the tribune, or the army only accord to men in public governments; and thus she compulsorily remained unseen in the events she guided. To be the hidden destiny of some great man, to act through and by him, to grow with his greatness, be eminent in his name, was the sole ambition permitted to her—an ambition tender and devoted, which seduces a woman whilst it suffices to her disinterested genius. She could only be the mind and inspiration of some political man; she sought such a one, and in her delusion believed she had found him.

XX.

There was then in Paris a young general officer of illustrious race, excessively handsome, and with a mind full of attraction, varied in its powers and brilliant in its display. Although he bore the name of one of the most distinguished families at court, there was a cloud over his birth. Royal blood ran in his veins, and his features recalled those of Louis XV. The affection of Mesdames the aunts of Louis XVI. for this youth, educated under their eyes, attached to their persons, and who rose by their influence to the highest employments in the court and army, gave credit to many mysterious rumours.

This young man was the count Louis de Narbonne. Sprung from this origin, brought up in this court, a courtier by birth; spoiled by the hands of these females, only remarkable for his good looks, his levities, and his hasty wit; it was not to be expected that such a person was imbued with that ardent faith which casts a man headlong into the centre of revolutions, or the stoical energy which produces and controls them. He saw in the people only a sovereign, more exacting and more capricious than any others, towards whom it was necessary to display more skill to seduce, more policy to manage them. He believed himself sufficiently plastic for the task, and resolved to attempt it. Without a lofty imagination, he yet had ambition and courage, and he viewed the position of affairs as a drama, similar to the Fronde[8], in which skilful actors could enlarge their hopes in proportion to the facts, and direct the catastrophe. He had not sufficient penetration to see, that in a revolution there is but one serious actor—enthusiasm; and he had none. He stammered out the words of a revolutionary tongue—he assumed the costume, but had not the spirit of the times.

The contrast of this nature and of this part, this court favourite casting himself into the crowd to serve the nation, this aristocratic elegance, masked in patriotism of the tribune, pleased public opinion for the moment. They applauded this transformation as a difficulty overcome. The people was flattered by having great lords with it. It was a testimony of its power. It felt itself king, by seeing courtiers bowing to it, and excused their rank by reason of their complaisance.

Madame de StÄel was seduced as much by the heart as the intellect of M. de Narbonne. Her masculine and sensitive imagination invested the young soldier with all she desired to find in him. He was but a brilliant, active, high-couraged man; she pictured him a politician and a hero. She magnified him with all the endowments of her dreams, in order to bring him up to her ideal standard. She found patrons for him; surrounded him with a prestige; created a name for him, marked him out a course. She made him the living type of her politics. To disdain the court, gain over the people, command the army, intimidate Europe, carry away the Assembly by his eloquence, to struggle for liberty, to save the nation, and become, by his popularity alone, the arbiter between the throne and the people, to reconcile them by a constitution, at once liberal and monarchical; such was the perspective that she opened for herself and M. de Narbonne.

She but awakened his ambition, yet he believed himself capable of the destinies which she dreamed of for him. The drama of the constitution was concentrated in these two minds, and their conspiracy was for some time the entire policy of Europe.

Madame de StÄel, M. de Narbonne, and the constitutional party were for war; but theirs was to be a partial and not a desperate war which, shaking nationality to its foundations, would carry away the throne and throw France into a Republic. They contrived by their influence to renew all the personal staff of the diplomacy, exclusively devoted to the emigrants or the king. They filled foreign courts with their adherents, M. de Marbois was sent to the Diet of Ratisbon, M. BarthÉlemy to Switzerland, M. de Talleyrand to London, M. de SÉgur to Berlin. The mission of M. de Talleyrand was to endeavour to fraternise the aristocratic principle of the English constitution with the democratic principle of the French constitution, which they believed they could effect and control by an Upper Chamber. They hoped to interest the statesmen of Great Britain in a Revolution, imitated from their own, which, after having convulsed the people, was now becoming moulded in the hands of an intelligent aristocracy. This mission would be easy, if the Revolution were in regular train for some months in Paris. French ideas were popular in London. The opposition was revolutionary. Fox and Burke, then friends, were most earnest in their desire for the liberty of the Continent[9]. We must render this justice to England, that the moral and popular principle concealed in the foundation of its constitution, has never stultified itself by combating the efforts of other nations to acquire a free government. It has everywhere accorded the liberty similar to its own.

XXI.

The mission of M. de SÉgur at Berlin was more delicate. Its object was to detach the king of Prussia from his alliance with the emperor Leopold, whose coronation was not yet known, and to persuade the cabinet of Berlin into an alliance with revolutionary France. This alliance held out to Prussia with its security on the Rhine the ascendency of the new-sprung ideas in Germany: it was a Machiavelian idea, which would smile at the agitating spirit of the great Frederic, who had made of Prussia the corrosive influence (la puissance corrosive) of the empire.

These two words—seduce and corrupt—were all M. de SÉgur's instructions. The king of Prussia had favourites and mistresses. Mirabeau had written in 1786, "There can be at Berlin no secrets for the ambassador of France, unless money and skill be wanting; the country is poor and avaricious, and there is no state secret which may not be purchased with three thousand louis." M. de SÉgur, imbued with these ideas, made it his first object to buy over the two favourites. The one was daughter of Elie Enka, who was a musician in the chapel of the late king. Handsome and witty, she had at twelve years of age attracted the notice of the king, then prince royal, and he had, at that early age, as in anticipation of his amour, bestowed on her all the care and all the cost of a royal education. She had travelled in France and in England, and knew all the European languages; she had polished her natural genius by contact with the lettered men and artists of Germany. A feigned marriage with Rietz, valet de chambre of the king, was the pretext for her residence at court, and gave her the opportunity for surrounding herself with the leading men in politics and literature in the city of Berlin. Spoiled by the precocity of her fortune, yet careless as to its retention, she had allowed two rivals to dispute the king's heart. One, the young Countess d'Ingenheim, had just died in the flower of her youth; the other, the Countess d'Ashkof, had borne the king two children, and flattered herself, in vain, with having extricated him from the empire of Madame Rietz.

The Baron de Roll, in the name of the Count d'Artois, and the Viscount de Caraman, in the name of Louis XVI., had possessed themselves of all the avenues to this cabinet. The Count de Goltz, ambassador from Prussia to Paris, had informed his court of the object of M. de SÉgur's mission. The report ran amongst well-informed persons that this envoy carried with him several millions (francs), destined to pay the weakness or the treason of the Berlin cabinet.

A copy of the secret instructions of M. de SÉgur reached Berlin two hours before him, which revealed to the king the whole plan of seduction and venality that the agent of France was to practice on his favourites and mistresses, whose character, ambition, rivalries, weaknesses, true or feigned, the means of acting by them on the mind of the king, were all and severally noted down with the security of confidence. There was a tariff for all consciences,—a price for every treachery. The favourite aide-de-camp of the king, Rischofwerder, then very powerful, was to be assailed by irresistible offers, and in case his connivance should be revealed, a splendid establishment in France was to guarantee him against any eventuality.

These instructions fell into the very hands of those whose fidelity was thus priced, and they gave them to the king with all the innocence of individuals shamefully calumniated. The king blushed for himself at the empire over his politics thus ascribed to love and intrigue. He was indignant at the fidelity of his subjects being thus assailed: all negotiation was nipped in the bud before the arrival of the negotiator. M. de SÉgur was received with coldness and all the irony of contempt. Frederic Willam affected never to mention him in his circle, and asked aloud before him, of the envoy of the elector of Mayence, news of the Prince de CondÉ: the envoy replied that this prince was approaching the frontiers of France with his army. "He is right," said the king, "for he is on the point of entering there." M. de SÉgur, accustomed, from his long residence and his familiar footing at the court of Catherine, to take love for the intermediary of his affairs, induced, it is said, the countess d'Ashkof and prince Henry of Prussia to join the peace party. This success was but a snare for his negotiation. The king, arranging with the emperor, affected for some time to lean towards France, to complain of the exactions of emigration, and to make much of the ambassador; who, thus cajoled, sent the warmest assurances to the French cabinet as to the intentions of Prussia. But the sudden disgrace of the countess d'Ashkof and the offer of alliance with France insultingly repulsed, threw at once light and confusion into the plots of M. de SÉgur: he demanded his recall. The humiliation of seeing his talents played with, the hopes of his party annihilated, the prospect of his country's misfortunes, and Europe in flames, had, it was reported, urged his sadness to despair. The report ran that he had attempted his life. This imputed suicide was but a brain fever occasioned by the anguish of a proud mind deeply wounded.

XXII.

The same party attempted, and at nearly the same time, to acquire for France a sovereign whose renown weighed as heavily as a throne in the opinion of Europe. This was the duke of Brunswick, a pupil of the great Frederic, the presumed heir of his military fame and inspiration, and proclaimed, by anticipation, by the public voice, generalissimo, in the coming war against France. To carry off from the emperor and the king of Prussia the chief of their armies, was to deprive Germany of confidence and of victory.

The name of the duke of Brunswick was a prestige which invested Germany with a feeling of terror and inviolability. Madame de StÄel and her party attempted it. This secret negotiation was concerted amongst Madame de StÄel, M. de Narbonne, M. de La Fayette, and M. de Talleyrand. M. de Custine, son of the general of that name, was chosen to convey to the duke of Brunswick the wishes of the constitutional party. The young negotiator was well prepared for his mission: witty, attractive, clever, an intense admirer of Prussian tactics and the duke of Brunswick, from whom he had had lessons in Berlin, he inspired confidence into this prince beforehand. He offered to him the rank of generalissimo of the French armies, an allowance of three millions of francs, and an establishment in France equivalent to his possessions and rank in the empire. The letter bearing these offers was signed by the minister of war and Louis XVI. himself.

M. de Custine set out from France in the month of January; on his arrival he handed his letter to the duke. Four days elapsed before an interview was accorded to him. On the fifth day, the duke admitted him to a personal and private interview. He expressed to M. de Custine with military frankness his pride and gratitude that the price attached to his merits by France must inspire in him: "But," he added, "my blood is German and my honour Prussia's; my ambition is satisfied with being the second person in this monarchy, which has adopted me. I would not exchange for an adventurous glory on the shifting stage of revolutions, the high and firm position which my birth, my duty, and some reputation already acquired have secured for me in my native land."

After this conversation, M. de Custine, finding the prince immoveable, disclosed his ultimatum, and held before his eyes the dazzling chance of the crown of France, if it fell from the brow of Louis XVI. into the hands of a conquering general. The duke appeared overwhelmed, and dismissed M. de Custine without depriving him of all hope of his accepting such an offer. But shortly afterwards, the duke, from duplicity, repentance, or prudence, replied by a formal refusal to both these propositions. He addressed his reply to Louis XVI., and not to his minister; and this unhappy king thus learnt the last word of the constitutional party, and how frail was the tenure on his brow of a crown which was already offered perspectively to the ambition of a foe!


territories, from the first moment it forbade conquest. It only reserved to itself the property, or rather the invention of universal truths which it brought to light. As vast as humanity, it had not the selfishness to isolate itself. It desired to give, and not to deprive. It sought to spread itself by right, and not by force. Essentially spiritual, it sought no other empire for France than the voluntary empire which imitation by the human mind conferred upon it.

Its work was prodigious, its means a nullity; all that enthusiasm can inspire, the Assembly undertook and perfected, without a king, without a military leader, without a dictator, without an army, without any other strength than deep conviction. Alone, in the midst of an amazed people, with a disbanded army, an emigrating aristocracy, a despoiled clergy, a conspiring court, a seditious city, hostile Europe—it did what it designed. Such is the will, such the real power of a people—and such is truth, the irresistible auxiliary of the men who agitate themselves for God. If ever inspiration was visible in the prophet or ancient legislator, it may be asserted that the Constituent Assembly had two years of sustained inspiration. France was the inspired of civilisation.

III.

Let us examine its work. The principle of power was entirely displaced: royalty had ended by believing that it was the exclusive depositary of power. It had demanded of religion to consummate this robbery in the eyes of the people, by telling them that tyranny came from God, and was responsible to God only. The long heirship of throned races had made it believed that there was a right of reigning in the blood of crowned families. Government instead of being a function had become a possession; the king master instead of being chief. This misplaced principle displaced everything. The people became a nation, the king a crowned magistrate. Feudality, subaltern royalty, assumed the rank of actual property. The clergy, which had had institutions and inviolable property, was now only a body paid by the state for a sacred service. It was from this only one step to receiving a voluntary salary for an individual service. The magistracy ceased to be hereditary. They left it its unremoveability to confirm its independence. It was an exception to the principle of offices when a dismissal was possible, a semi-sovereignty of justice—but it was one step towards the truth. The legislative power was distinct from the executive power. The nation in an assembly freely chosen, declared its will, and the hereditary and irresponsible king executed it. Such was the whole mechanism of the Constitution—a people—a king—a minister. But the king irresponsible, and consequently passive, was evidently a concession to custom, the respectful fiction of suppressed royalty.

IV.

He was no longer will; for to will is to do. He was not a functionary; for the functionary acts and replies. The king did not reply. He was but a majestic inutility in the constitution. The functions destroyed, they left the functionary. He had but one attribute, the suspensive veto, which consisted of his right to suspend, for three years, the execution of the Assembly's decrees. He was an obstacle; legal, but impotent for the wishes of the nation. It was evident that the Constituent Assembly, perfectly convinced of the superfluity of the throne in a national government, had only placed a king at the summit of its institutions to check ambition, and that the kingdom should not be called a republic. The only part of such a king was to prevent the truth from appearing, and to make a show in the eyes of a people accustomed to a sceptre. This fiction, or this nullity cost the people 30,000,000 (of francs) a year in the civil list, a court, continual jealousies, and the interminable corruption practised by the court on the organs of the nation. This was the real vice of the constitution of 1791: it was not consistent. Royalty embarrassed the constitution; and all that embarrasses injures. The motive of this inconsistency was less an error of its reason than a respectful piety for an ancient prejudice, and a generous tenderness towards a race which had long worn the crown. If the race of the Bourbons had been extinct in the month of September 1791, certainly the Constituent Assembly would not have invented a king.

V.

However, the royalty of '91, very little different from the royalty of to-day, could work for a century, as well as a day. The error of all historians is to attribute to the vices of the constitution the brief duration of the work of the Constituent Assembly. In the first place, the work of the Constituent Assembly was not principally to perpetuate this wheelwork of useless royalty, placed out of complaisance to the people's eyes, in machinery which did not regulate it. The work of the Constituent Assembly was the regeneration of ideas and government, the displacing of power, the restoration of right, the abolition of all subjugation even of the mind, the freedom of consciences, the formation of an administration; and this work lasts, and will endure as long as the name of France. The vice of the institution of 1791 was not in any one particular point. It has not perished because the veto of the king was suspensive instead of absolute; it has not perished, because the right of peace or war was taken from the king, and reserved to the nation; it has not perished, because it did not place the legislative power in one chamber only instead of in two: these asserted vices are to be found in many other constitutions, which still endure. The diminution of the royal power was not the main danger to royalty in '91; it was rather its salvation, if it could have been saved.

VI.

The more power was given to the king, and action to the monarchical principle, the quicker the king and the principle would have fallen; for the greater would have been the distrust and hatred against him. Two chambers, instead of one, would not have preserved any thing. Such divisions of power would have no value, but in proportion as they are sacred. They are only sacred in proportion as they are the representatives of real existing force in the nation. Would a revolution which had not paused before the iron gates of the ChÂteau of Versailles have respected the metaphysical distinction of power of two kinds!

Besides, where were, and where would be now, the constitutive elements of two chambers, in a nation whose entire revolution is but a convulsion towards unity? If the second chamber be democratic and temporary, it is but a twofold democracy with but one common impulse. It can only serve to retard the common impulse, or destroy the unity of the public will. If it be hereditary and aristocratic, it supposes an aristocracy pre-existent in, and acknowledged by, the state. Where was this aristocracy in 1791? Where is it now? A modern historian says, "In the nobility, in the presence of social inequalities." But the Revolution was made against the nobility, and in order to level social hereditary inequalities. It was to ask of the Revolution itself to make a counter-revolution. Besides, these pretended divisions of power are always fictions; power is never really divided. It is always here or there, in reality and in its integrity,—it is not to be divided. It is like the will, it is one or it is not. If there be two chambers, it is in one of the two; the other complies or is dissolved. If there be one chamber and a king, it is in the king or the chamber. In the king, if he subjugates the Assembly by force, or if he buys it by corruption; in the chamber if it agitates the public mind, and intimidates the court and the army by the power of its language, and the superiority of its opinions. Those who do not see this have no eyes. In this soidisant balance of power there is always a controlling weight; equilibrium is a chimera. If it did exist, it would produce mere immobility.

VII.

The Constituent Assembly had then done a good work; wise, and as durable as are the institutions of a people in travail, in an age of transition. The constitution of '91 had written all the truths of the times, and reduced all human reason to its epoch. All was true in its work except royalty, which had but one wrong, which was making the monarchy the depository of its code.

We have seen that this very fault was an excess of virtue. It receded before the deposing from the throne the family of its kings; it had the superstition of the past without having its faith, and desired to reconcile the republic and the monarchy. It was a virtue in its intentions; it was a mistake in its results; for it is an error in politics to attempt the impossible. Louis XVI. was the only man in the nation to whom the constituent royalty could not be confided, since it was he from whom the absolute monarchy had just been snatched: the constitution was a shared royalty, and but a few days previously, and he had possessed it entire. With any other person this royalty would have been a gift, for him alone it was an insult. If Louis XVI. had been capable of this abnegation of supreme power which makes disinterested heroes (and he was one), the deposed party, of which he was the natural head, was not like him; we may expect an act of sublime disinterestedness from a virtuous man, never from a party en masse. Party is never magnanimous; they never abdicate, they are extirpated. Heroic acts come from the heart, and party has no heart; they have only interests and ambition. A body is a thing of unvarying selfishness.

Clergy, nobility, court, magistracy, all abuses, all falsehoods, all contumelies, every injustice of a monarchy, are personified, in spite of Louis XVI., in the king. Degraded with him, they must desire to rise with him. The nation, which well perceived this fatal connection between the king and the counter-revolution, could not confide in the king, however it might venerate the man; it saw, in him, of necessity, the accomplice of every conspiracy against itself. The parvenus of liberty are as thinskinned as the parvenus of fortune. Jealousies must arise, suspicions would produce insults, insults resentments, resentments factions, factions shocks and overthrows: the momentary enthusiasm of the people, the sincere concessions of the king, avert nothing. The situations were false on both sides.

If there were in the Constituent Assembly more statesmen than philosophers, it must have perceived that an intermediate state was impossible, under the guardianship of a half-dethroned king. We do not confide to the vanquished the care and management of the conquests. To act as she acts, was to drive the king, without redemption, to treason or the scaffold. An absolute party is the only safe party in great crises. The tact consists in knowing when to have recourse to extreme measures at the critical minute. We say it unhesitatingly—history will hereafter say as we do. Then came a moment when the Constituent Assembly had the right to choose between the monarchy and the republic, and when she had to choose the republic. There was the safety of the Revolution and its legitimacy. In wanting resolution it failed in prudence.

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 constitutions 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 constitutions.

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 assume attitudes 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 classes 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 classes 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 title 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 destitute. 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 constituted interests. He is the king of the worship, aristocracy, laws, manners, abuses, and falsehoods of the empire. Even the vices of the constitution 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 assume 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 passion, 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 Constituent Assembly was then blind and weak, not to create a republic as the natural instrument of the Revolution. Mirabeau, Bailly, La Fayette, SiÉyÈs, 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 constitution. 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 Assembly, 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 Assembly 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 Assembly 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 institution, 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, noble, 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 Assembly. 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 assistance of the army, and the intervention of foreign powers, when the Assembly 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 Assembly 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 Assembly, 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 impassioned 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 massacre of the guards—the assault on the palace—the flight of the king to the Assembly—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 massacres 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 instituted, would have intimidated Europe far more than an Émeute legitimised by bloodshed and assassination. War might have been avoided, or, if it was inevitable, have been more unanimous and more triumphant; our generals would not have been massacred 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 Assembly 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 constitution 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 Assembly. 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 constitutional 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 assume as a definitive government that which I assumed 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 constituted by the people. What avails a throne? I remain erect: it is the attitude of a people in travail!

In a word, the Constituent Assembly, 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 Assembly dared to do every thing save to reign: the reign of the Revolution was nought but a republic: and the Assembly 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.


                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

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