stentorian voice made the vaults ring; and after he had spoken for two hours, and his breath was completely exhausted, the admiring and enthusiastic shouts which greeted him amounted almost to frenzy. Thus the orator fancied himself a Mirabeau, while the spectators imagined themselves the Constituent Assembly, deciding the fate of France.”
The journals and pamphlets are written in the same style. Every brain is filled with the fumes of conceit and of big words; the leader of the crowd is he who raves the most, and he guides the wild enthusiasm which he increases.
Let us consider the most popular of these chiefs ; they are the green or the dry fruit of literature, and of the bar. The newspaper is the stall which every morning offers them for sale, and if they suit the overexcited public it is simply owing to their acid or bitter flavor. Their empty, unpracticed minds are wholly void of political conceptions; they have no capacity or practical experience. Desmoulins is twenty-nine years of age, Loustalot twenty-seven, and their intellectual ballast consists of college reminiscences, souvenirs of the law schools, and the common-places picked up in the houses of Raynal and his associates. As to Brissot and Marat, who are ostentatious humanitarians, their knowledge of France and of foreign countries consists in what they have seen through the dormer windows of their garrets, and through utopian spectacles. In minds like these, empty or led astray, the Contrat- Social could not fail to become a gospel; for it reduces political science to a strict application of an elementary axiom which relieves them of all study, and hands society over to the caprice of the people, or, in other words, delivers it into their own hands. – – Hence they demolish all that remains of social institutions, and push on equalization until everything is brought down to the same level.
“With my principles,” writes Desmoulins,[19] “is associated the satisfaction of putting myself where I belong, of showing my strength to those who have despised me, of lowering to my level all whom fortune has placed above me: my motto is that of all honest people: ‘No superiors!'”
Thus, under the great name of Liberty, each vain spirit seeks its revenge and finds its nourishment. What is sweeter and more natural than to justify passion by theory, to be factious in the belief that this is patriotism, and to cloak the interests of ambition with the interests of humanity?
Let us picture to ourselves these directors of public opinion as they were three months earlier: Desmoulins, a briefless barrister, living in furnished lodgings with petty debts, and on a few louis extracted from his relations. Loustalot, still more unknown, was admitted the previous year to the Parliament of Bordeaux, and has landed at Paris in search of a career. Danton, another second-rate lawyer, coming out of a hovel in Champagne, borrowed the money to pay his expenses, while his stinted household is kept up only by means of a louis which is given to him weekly by his father-in-law, who is a coffee-house keeper. Brissot, a strolling Bohemian, formerly employee of literary pirates, has roamed over the world for fifteen years, without bringing back with him either from England or America anything but a coat out at elbows and false ideas; and, finally, Marat; a writer that has been hissed, an abortive scholar and philosopher, a misrepresenter of his own experiences, caught by the natural philosopher Charles in the act of committing a scientific fraud, and fallen from the top of his inordinate ambition to the subordinate post of doctor in the stables of the Comte d’Artois. — At the present time, Danton, President of the Cordeliers, can arrest any one he pleases in his district, and his violent gestures and thundering voice secure to him, till something better turns up, the government of his section of the city. A word of Marat’s has just caused Major Belzunce at Caen to be assassinated. Desmoulins announces, with a smile of triumph, that “a large section of the capital regards him as one among the principal instigators of the Revolution, and that many even go so far as to say that he is the author of it.” Is it to be supposed that, borne so high by such a sudden jerk of fortune, they wish to put on the drag and again descend? and is it not clear that they will aid with all their might the revolt which hoists them towards the loftiest summits? — Moreover, the brain reels at a height like this ; suddenly launched in the air and feeling as if everything was tottering around them, they utter exclamations of indignation and terror, they see plots on all sides, imagine invisible cords pulling in an opposite direction, and they call upon the people to cut them. With the full weight of their inexperience, incapacity, and improvidence, of their fears, credulity, and dogmatic obstinacy, they urge on popular attacks, and their newspaper articles or discourses are all summed up in the following phrases:
“Fellow-citizens, you, the people of the lower class, you who listen to me, you have enemies in the Court and the aristocracy. The Hôtel-de-Ville and the National Assembly are your servants. Seize your enemies with a strong hand, and hang them, and let your servants know that they must quicken their steps!”
Desmoulins styles himself “District-attorney of the gallows,”[20] and if he at all regrets the murders of Foulon and Berthier, it is because this too expeditious judgment has allowed the proofs of conspiracy to perish, thereby saving a number of traitors: he himself mentions twenty of them haphazard, and little does he care whether he makes mistakes.
“We are in the dark, and it is well that faithful dogs should bark, even at all who pass by, so that there may be no fear of robbers.”
>From this time forth Marat[21] denounces the King, the ministers, the administration, the bench, the bar, the financial system and the academies, all as “suspicious;” at all events the people only suffer on their account.
“The Government is monopolizing grain, to make us to pay through the nose for a poisonous bread.”
The Government, again, through a new conspiracy is about to blockade Paris, so as to starve it with greater ease. Utterances of this kind, at such a time, are firebrands thrown upon fear and hunger to kindle the flames of rage and cruelty. To this frightened and fasting crowd the agitators and newspaper writers continue to repeat that it must act, and act alongside of the authorities, and, if need be, against them. In other words, We will do as we please; we are the sole legitimate masters;
“in a well-constituted government, the people as a body are the real sovereign: our delegates are appointed only to execute our orders ; what right has the clay to rebel against the potter?”
On the strength of such principles, the tumultuous club which occupies the Palais-Royal substitutes itself for the Assembly at Versailles. Has it not all the titles for this office? The Palais- Royal “saved the nation” on the 12th and 13th of July. The Palais- Royal, “through its spokesmen and pamphlets,” has made everybody and even the soldiers “philosophers.” It is the house of patriotism, “the rendezvous of the select among the patriotic,” whether provincials or Parisians, of all who possess the right of suffrage, and who cannot or will not exercise it in their own district. “It saves time to come to the Palais-Royal. There is no need there of appealing to the President for the right to speak, or to wait one’s time for a couple of hours. The orator proposes his motion, and, if it finds supporters, mounts a chair. If he is applauded, it is put into proper shape. If he is hissed, he goes away. This was the way of the Romans.” Behold the veritable National Assembly ! It is superior to the other semi-feudal affair, encumbered with “six hundred deputies of the clergy and nobility,” who are so many intruders and who “should be sent out into the galleries.” — Hence the pure Assembly rules the impure Assembly, and “the Café Foy lays claim to the government of France.”
IV.
Intervention by the popular leaders with the Government. – Their pressure on the Assembly.
On the 30th of July, the harlequin who led the insurrection at Rouen having been arrested, “it is openly proposed at the Palais Royal[22] to go in a body and demand his release.” — On the 1st of August, Thouret, whom the moderate party of the Assembly have just made President, is obliged to resign; the Palais-Royal threatens to send a band and murder him along with those who voted for him, and lists of proscriptions, in which several of the deputies are inscribed, begin to be circulated. — From this time forth, on all great questions-the abolition of the feudal system, the suppression of tithes, a declaration of the rights of man, the dispute about the Chambers, the King’s power of veto,[23] the pressure from without inclines the balance: in this way the Declaration of Rights, which is rejected in secret session by twenty-eight bureaus out of thirty, is forced through by the tribunes in a public sitting and passed by a majority. — Just as before the 14th of July, and to a still greater extent, two kinds of compulsion influence the votes, and it is always the ruling faction which employs both its hands to throttle its opponents. On the one hand this faction takes post on the galleries in knots composed nearly always of the same persons, “five or six hundred permanent actors,” who yell according to understood signals and at the word of command.[24] Many of these are French Guards, in civilian clothes, and who relieve each other: previously they have asked of their favorite deputy “at what hour they must come, whether all goes on well, and whether he is satisfied with those fools of parsons (calotins) and the aristocrats.” Others consist of low women under the command of Théroigne de Méricourt, a virago courtesan, who assigns them their positions and gives them the signal for hooting or for applause. Publicly and in full session, on the occasion of the debate on the veto, “the deputies are applauded or insulted by the galleries according as they utter the word ‘suspensive,’ or the word ‘indefinite.’ ” “Threats,” (says one of them) “circulated; I heard them on all sides around me.” These threats are repeated on going out: “Valets dismissed by their masters, deserters, and women in rags,” threaten the refractory with the lamp post, “and thrust their fists in their faces. In the hall itself, and much more accurately than before the 14th of July, their names are taken down, and the lists, handed over to the populace,” travel to the Palais-Royal, from where they are dispatched in correspondence and in newspapers to the provinces.[25] – Thus we see the second means of compulsion; each deputy is answerable for his vote, at Paris, with his own life, and, in the province, with those of his family. Members of the former Third-Estate avow that they abandon the idea of two Chambers, because “they are not disposed to get their wives’ and children’s throats cut.” On the 30th of August, Saint-Hurugue, the most noisy of the Palais-Royal barkers, marches off to Versailles, at the head of 1,500 men, to complete the conversion of the Assembly. This garden club indeed, from the heights of its great learning, integrity, and immaculate reputation, decides that the ignorant, corrupt, and doubtful deputies must be got rid of.” That they are such cannot be questioned, because they defend the royal sanction; there are over 600 and more, 120 are deputies of the communes, who must be expelled to begin with, and then must be brought to judgment.[26] In the meantime they are informed, as well as the Bishop of Langres, President of the National Assembly, that “15,000 men are ready to light up their chateaux and in particular yours, sir.” To avoid all mistake, the secretaries of the Assembly are informed in writing that ” 2,000 letters” will be sent into the provinces to denounce to the people the conduct of the malignant deputies: “Your houses are held as a surety for your opinions: keep this in mind, and save yourselves !” At last, on the morning of the 1st of August, five deputations from the Palais-Royal, one of them led by Loustalot, march in turn to the Hôtel-de-Ville, insisting that the drums should be beaten and the citizens be called together for the purpose of changing the deputies, or their instructions, and of ordering the National Assembly to suspend its discussion on the veto until the districts and provinces could give expression to their will: the people, in effect, alone being sovereign, and alone competent, always has the right to dismiss or instruct anew its servants, the deputies. On the following day, August 2nd, to make matters plainer, new delegates from the same Palais-Royal suit gestures to words; they place two fingers on their throats, on being introduced before the representatives of the commune, as a hint that, if the latter do not obey, they will be hung.
After this it is vain for the National Assembly to make any show of indignation, to declare that it despises threats, and to protest its independence; the impression is already produced. “More than 300 members of the communes,” says Mounier, “had decided to support the absolute veto.” At the end of ten days most of these had gone over, several of them through attachment to the King, because they were afraid of “a general uprising,” and “were not willing to jeopardize the lives of the royal family.” But concessions like these only provoke fresh extortions. The politicians of the street now know by experience the effect of brutal violence on legal authority. Emboldened by success and by impunity, they reckon up their strength and the weakness of the latter. One blow more, and they are undisputed masters. Besides, the issue is already apparent to clear-sighted men. When the agitators of the public thoroughfares, and the porters at the street-corners, convinced of their superior wisdom, impose decrees by the strength of their lungs, of their fists, and of their pikes, at that moment experience, knowledge, good sense, cool-blood, genius, and judgment, disappear from human affairs, and things revert back to chaos. Mirabeau, in favor of the veto for life, saw the crowd imploring him with tears in their eyes to change his opinion :
“Monsieur le Comte, if the King obtains this veto, what will be the use of a National Assembly? We shall all be slaves “[27]
Outbursts of this description are not to be resisted, and all is lost. Already, near the end of September, the remark applies which Mirabeau makes to the Comte de la Marck:
“Yes, all is lost; the King and Queen will be swept away, and you will see the populace trampling on their lifeless bodies.”
Eight days after this, on the 5th and 6th of October, it breaks out against both King and Queen, against the National Assembly and the Government, against all government present and to come; the violent party which rules in Paris obtains possession of the chiefs of France to hold them under strict surveillance, and to justify its intermittent outrages by one permanent outrage.
V.
The 5th and 6th of October.
Once more, two different currents combine into one torrent to hurry the crowd onward to a common end. — On the one hand are the cravings of the stomach, and women excited by the famine:
“Now that bread cannot be had in Paris, let us go to Versailles and demand it there; once we have the King, Queen, and Dauphin in the midst of us, they will be obliged to feed us;” we will bring back “the Baker, the Bakeress, and the Baker’s boy.”
— On the other hand, there is fanaticism, and men who are pushed on by the need to dominate.
“Now that our chiefs yonder disobey us, — let us go and make them obey us forthwith; the King is quibbling over the Constitution and the Rights of Man — make him approve them ; his guards refuse to wear our cockade — make them accept it; they want to carry him off to Metz — make him come to Paris, here, under our eyes and in our hands, he, and the lame Assembly too, will march straight on, and quickly, whether they like it or not, and always on the right road.”
— Under this confluence of ideas the expedition is arranged.[28] Ten days before this, it is publicly alluded to at Versailles. On the 4th of October, at Paris, a woman proposes it at the Palais- Royal; Danton roars at the Cordeliers; Marat, “alone, makes as much noise as the four trumpets on the Day of Judgment.” Loustalot writes that a second revolutionary paroxysm is necessary.” “The day passes,” says Desmoulins, “in holding councils at the Palais-Royal, and in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, on the ends of the bridges, and on the quays… in pulling off the cockades of but one color…. These are torn off and trampled under foot with threats of the lamp post, in case of fresh offense; a soldier who is trying to refasten his, changes his mind on seeing a hundred sticks raised against him.”[29] These are the premonitory symptoms of a crisis; a huge ulcer has formed in this feverish, suffering body, and it is about to break.
But, as is usually the case, it is a purulent concentration of the most poisonous passions and the foulest motives. The vilest of men and women were engaged in it. Money was freely distributed. Was it done by intriguing subalterns who, playing upon the aspirations of the Duke of Orleans, extracted millions from him under the pretext of making him lieutenant-general of the kingdom? Or is it due to the fanatics who, from the end of April, clubbed together to debauch the soldiery, and stir up a body of ruffians for the purpose of leveling and destroying everything around them?[30] There are always Machiavellis of the highways and of houses of ill-fame ready to excite the foul and the vile of both sexes. On the first day that the Flemish regiment goes into garrison at Versailles an attempt is made to corrupt it with money and women. Sixty abandoned women are sent from Paris for this purpose, while the French Guards come and treat their new comrades. The latter have been treated at the Palais-Royal, while three of them, at Versailles, exclaim, showing some crown pieces of six livres, “What a pleasure it is to go to Paris! one always comes back with money !” In this way, resistance is overcome beforehand. As to the attack, women are to be the advanced guard, because the soldiers will scruple to fire at them; their ranks, however, will be reinforced by a number of men disguised as women. On looking closely at them they are easily recognized, notwithstanding their rouge, by their badly-shaven beards, and by their voices and gait.[31] No difficulty has been found in obtaining men and women among the prostitutes of the Palais-Royal and the military deserters who serve them as bullies. It is probable that the former lent their lovers the cast-off dresses they had to spare. At night all will meet again at the common rendezvous, on the benches of the National Assembly, where they are quite as much at home as in their own houses.[32] — In any event, the first band which marches out is of this stamp, displaying the finery and the gaiety of the profession; “most of them young, dressed in white, with powdered hair and a sprightly air;” many of them “laughing, singing, and drinking,” as they would do at setting out for a picnic in the country. Three or four of them are known by name — one brandishing a sword, and another, the notorious Théroigne. Madeleine Chabry Louison, who is selected to address the King, is a pretty grisette who sells flowers, and, no doubt, something else, at the Palais-Royal. Some appear to belong to the first rank in their calling, and to have tact and the manners of society — suppose, for instance, that Champfort and Laclos sent their mistresses. To these must be added washerwomen, beggars, bare-footed women, and fishwomen, enlisted for several days before and paid accordingly. This is the first nucleus, and it keeps on growing; for, by compulsion or consent, the troop incorporates into it, as it passes along, all the women it encounters — seamstresses, portresses, housekeepers, and even respectable females, whose dwellings are entered with threats of cutting off their hair if they do not fall in. To these must be added vagrants, street-rovers, ruffians and robbers — the lees of Paris, which accumulate and come to the surface every time agitation occurs: they are to be found already at the first hour, behind the troop of women at the Hôtel- de-Ville. Others are to follow during the evening and in the night. Others are waiting at Versailles. Many, both at Paris and Versailles, are under pay: one, in a dirty whitish vest, chinks gold and silver coin in his hand. — Such is the foul scum which, both in front and in the rear, rolls along with the popular tide; whatever is done to stem the torrent, it widens out and will leave its mark at every stage of its overflow.
The first troop, consisting of four or five hundred women, begin operations by forcing the guard of the Hôtel-de-Ville, which is unwilling to make use of its bayonets. They spread through the rooms and try to burn all the written documents they can find, declaring that there has been nothing but scribbling since the Revolution began.[33] A crowd of men follow after them, bursting open doors, and pillaging the magazine of arms. Two hundred thousand francs in Treasury notes are stolen or disappear; several of the ruffians set fire to the building, while others hang an abbé. The abbé is cut down, and the fire extinguished only just in time: such are the interludes of the popular drama. In the meantime, the crowd of women increases on the Place de Grève, always with the same unceasing cry, “Bread!” and “To Versailles!” One of the conquerors of the Bastille; the usher Maillard, offers himself as a leader. He is accepted, and taps his drum; on leaving Paris, he has seven or eight thousand women with him, and, in addition, some hundreds of men ; by dint of remonstrances, he succeeds in maintaining some kind of order amongst this rabble as far as Versailles. — But it is a rabble notwithstanding, and consequently so much brute force, at once anarchical and imperious. On the one hand, each, and the worst among them, does what he pleases — which will be quite evident this very evening. On the other hand, its ponderous mass crushes all authority and overrides all rules and regulations — which is at once apparent on reaching Versailles. — Admitted into the Assembly, at first in small numbers, the women crowd against the door, push in with a rush, fill the galleries, then the hall, the men along with them, armed with clubs, halberds, and pikes, all pell-mell, side by side with the deputies, taking possession of their benches, voting along with them, and gathering about the President, who, surrounded, threatened, and insulted, finally abandons the position, while his chair is taken by a woman.[34] A fishwoman commands in a gallery, and about a hundred women around her shout or keep silence at her bidding, while she interrupts and abuses the deputies:
“Who is that speaker there? Silence that blabbermouth; he does not know what he is talking about. The question is how to get bread. Let papa Mirabeau speak — we want to hear him.”
A decree on subsistence having been passed, the leaders demand something in addition; they must be allowed to enter all places where they suspect any monopolizing to be going on, and the price of “bread must be fixed at six sous the four pounds, and meat at six sous per pound.”
“You must not think that we are children to be played with. We are ready to strike. Do as you are bidden.”
All their political injunctions emanate from this central idea. And further:
“Send back the Flemish regiment — it is a thousand men more to feed, and they take bread out of our mouths.” — “Punish the aristocrats, who hinder the bakers from baking.” “Down with the skull-cap; the priests are the cause of our trouble! ” — “Monsieur Mounier, why did you advocate that villainous veto? Beware of the lamp post ! ”
Under this pressure, a deputation of the Assembly, with the President at its head, sets out on foot, in the mud, through the rain, and watched by a howling escort of women and men armed with pikes: after five hours of waiting and entreaty, it wrings from the King, besides the decree on subsistence, about which there was no difficulty, the acceptance, pure and simple, of the Declaration of Rights, and his sanction to the constitutional articles. — Such is the independence of the King and the Assembly.[35] Thus are the new principles of justice established, the grand outlines of the Constitution, the abstract axioms of political truth under the dictatorship of a crowd which extorts not only blindly, but which is half-conscious of its blindness.
“Monsieur le President,” some among the women say to Mounier, who returns with the Royal sanction, “will it be of any real use to us? will it give poor folks bread in Paris?”
Meanwhile, the scum has been bubbling up around the chateau; and the abandoned women subsidized in Paris are pursuing their calling.[36] They slip through into the lines of the regiment drawn on the square, in spite of the sentinels. Théroigne, in an Amazonian red vest, distributes money among them.
“Side with us,” some say to the men; “we shall soon beat the King’s Guards, strip off their fine coats and sell them.”
Others lie sprawling on the ground, alluring the soldiers, and make such offers as to lead one of them to exclaim, “We are going to have a jolly time of it !” Before the day is over, the regiment is seduced; the women have, according to their own idea, acted for a good motive. When a political idea finds its way into such heads, instead of ennobling them, it becomes degraded there; its only effect is to let loose vices which a remnant of modesty still keeps in subjection, and full play is given to luxurious or ferocious instincts under cover of the public good. — The passions, moreover, become intensified through their mutual interaction; crowds, clamor, disorder, longings, and fasting, end in a state of frenzy, from which nothing can issue but dizzy madness and rage. — This frenzy began to show itself on the way. Already, on setting out, a woman had exclaimed,
“We shall bring back the Queen’s head on the end of a pike!”[37]
On reaching the Sèvres bridge others added,
“Let us cut her throat, and make cockades of her entrails!”
Rain is falling; they are cold, tired, and hungry, and get nothing to eat but a bit of bread, distributed at a late hour, and with difficulty, on the Place d’Armes. One of the bands cuts up a slaughtered horse, roasts it, and consumes it half raw, after the manner of savages. It is not surprising that, under the names of patriotism and “justice,” savage ideas spring up in their minds against “members of the National Assembly who are not with the principles of the people,” against “the Bishop of Langres, Mounier, and the rest.” One man in a ragged old red coat declares that “he must have the head of the Abbé Maury to play nine-pins with.” But it is especially against the Queen, who is a woman, and in sight, that the feminine imagination is the most aroused.
“She alone is the cause of the evils we endure …. she must be killed, and quartered.”
— Night advances; there are acts of violence, and violence engenders violence.
“How glad I should be,” says one man, “if I could only lay my hand on that she-devil, and strike off her head on the first curbstone !”
Towards morning, some cry out,
“Where is that cursed cat? We must eat her heart out… We’ll take off her head, cut her heart out, and fry her liver I ”
— With the first murders the appetite for blood has been awakened; the women from Paris say that “they have brought tubs to carry away the stumps of the Royal Guards,” and at these words others clap their hands. Some of the riffraff of the crowd examine the rope of the lamp post in the court of the National Assembly, and judging it not to be sufficiently strong, are desirous of supplying its place with another “to hang the Archbishop of Paris, Maury, and d’Espréménil.” — This murderous, carnivorous rage penetrates even among those whose duty it is to maintain order, one of the National Guard being heard to say that “the body-guards must be killed to the last man, and their hearts torn out for a breakfast.”
Finally, towards midnight, the National Guard of Paris arrives; but it only adds one insurrection to another, for it has likewise mutinied against its chiefs.[38]
“If M. de Lafayette is not disposed to accompany us,” says one of the grenadiers, “we will take an old grenadier for our commander.”
Having come to this decision, they sought the general at the Hôtel- de-Ville, and the delegates of six of the companies made their instructions known to him.
“General, we do not believe that you are a traitor, but we think that the Government is betraying us…. The committee on subsistence is deceiving us, and must be removed. We want to go to Versailles to exterminate the body-guard and the Flemish regiment who have trampled on the national cockade. If the King of France is too feeble to wear his crown, let him take it off; we will crown his son and things will go better.”
In vain Lafayette refuses, and harangues them on the Place de Grève; in vain he resists for hours, now addressing them and now imposing silence. Armed bands, coming from the Faubourgs Saint-Antoine and Saint-Marceau, swell the crowd; they take aim at him; others prepare the lamp-post. He then dismounts and endeavors to return to the Hôtel-de-Ville, but his grenadiers bar the way:
“Morbleu, General, you will stay with us; you will not abandon us !”
Being their chief it is pretty plain that he must follow them; which is also the sentiment of the representatives of the commune at the Hôtel-de-Ville, who send him their authorization, and even the order to march, “seeing that it is impossible for him to refuse.”
Fifteen thousand men thus reach Versailles, and in front of and along with them thousands of ruffians, protected by the darkness. On this side the National Guard of Versailles, posted around the chateau, together with the people of Versailles, who bar the way against vehicles, have closed up every outlet.[39] The King is prisoner in his own palace, he and his, with his ministers and his court, and with no defense. For, with his usual optimism, he has confided the outer posts of the chateau to Lafayette’s soldiers, and, through a humanitarian obstinacy which he is to maintain up to the last,[40] he has forbidden his own guards to fire on the crowd, so that they are only there for show. With common right in his favor, the law, and the oath which Lafayette had just obliged his troops to renew, what could he have to fear? What could be more effective with the people than trust in them and prudence? And by playing the sheep one is sure of taming brutes!
>From five o’clock in the morning they prowl around the palace- railings. Lafayette, exhausted with fatigue, has taken an hour’s repose,[41] which hour suffices for them.[42] A populace armed with pikes and clubs, men and women, surrounds a squad of eighty-eight National Guards, forces them to fire on the King’s Guards, bursts open a door, seizes two of the guards and chops their heads off. The executioner, who is a studio model, with a heavy beard, stretches out his blood-stained hands and glories in the act; and so great is the effect on the National Guard that they move off; through sensibility, in order not to witness such sights: such is the resistance! In the meantime the crowd invade the staircases, beat down and trample on the guards they encounter, and burst open the doors with imprecations against the Queen. The Queen runs off; just in time, in her underclothes; she takes refuge with the King and the rest of the royal family, who have in vain barricaded themselves in the il-de-Boeuf, a door of which is broken in: here they stand, awaiting death, when Lafayette arrives with his grenadiers and saves all that can be save — their lives, and nothing more. For, from the crowd huddled in the marble court the shout rises, “To Paris with the King !” a command to which the King submits.
Now that the great hostage is in their hands, will they deign to accept the second one? This is doubtful. On the Queen approaching the balcony with her son and daughter, a howl arises of “No children!” They want to have her alone in the sights of their guns, and she understands that. At this moment M. de Lafayette, throwing the shield of his popularity over her, appears on the balcony at her side and respectfully kisses her hand. The reaction is instantaneous in this over-excited crowd. Both the men and especially the women, in such a state of nervous tension, readily jump from one extreme to another, rage bordering on tears. A portress, who is a companion of Maillard’s,[43] imagines that she hears Lafayette promise in the Queen’s name “to love her people and be as much attached to them as Jesus Christ to his Church.” People sob and embrace each other; the grenadiers shift their caps to the heads of the body-guard. Everything will be fine : “the people have won their King back.” — Nothing is to be done now but to rejoice; and the cortege moves on. The royal family and a hundred deputies, in carriages, form the center, and then comes the artillery, with a number of women bestriding the cannons; next, a convoy of flour. Round about are the King’s Guards, each with a National Guard mounted behind him; then comes the National Guard of Paris, and after them men with pikes and women on foot, on horseback, in cabs, and on carts; in front is a band bearing two severed heads on the ends of two poles, which halts at a hairdresser’s, in Sèvres, to have these heads powdered and curled;[44] they are made to bow by way of salutation, and are daubed all over with cream; there are jokes and shouts of laughter; the people stop to eat and drink on the road, and oblige the guards to clink glasses with them; they shout and fire salvos of musketry; men and women hold each other’s hands and sing and dance about in the mud. — Such is the new fraternity: a funeral procession of legal and legitimate authorities, a triumph of brutality over intelligence, a murderous and political Mardi-gras, a formidable masquerade which, preceded by the insignia of death, drags along with it the heads of France, the King, the ministers, and the deputies, that it may constrain them to rule to until according to its frenzy, that it may hold them under its them pikes until it is pleased to slaughter them.
VI.
The Government and the nation in the hands of the revolutionary party.
This time there can be no mistake: the Reign of Terror is fully and firmly established. On this very day the mob stops a vehicle, in which it hopes to find M. de Virieu, and declares, on searching it, that “they are looking for the deputy to massacre him, as well as others of whom they have a list.”[45] Two days afterwards the Abbé Grégoire tells the National Assembly that not a day passes without ecclesiastics being insulted in Paris, and pursued with “horrible threats.” Malouet is advised that “as soon as guns are distributed among the militia, the first use made of them will be to get rid of those deputies who are bad citizens,” and among others of the Abbé Maury. “The moment I stepped out into the streets,” writes Mounier, “I was publicly followed. It was a crime to be seen in my company. Wherever I happened to go, along with two or three of my companions, it was stated that an assembly of aristocrats was forming. I had become such an object of terror that they threatened to set fire to a country-house where I had passed twenty-four hours; and, to relieve their minds, a promise had to be given that neither myself nor my friends should be again received into it.” In one week five or six hundred deputies have their passports[46] made out, and hold themselves ready to depart. During the following month one hundred and twenty give in their resignations, or no longer appear in the Assembly. Mounier, Lally-Tollendal, the Bishop of Langres, and others besides, quit Paris, and afterwards France. Mallet du Pan writes, “Opinion now dictates its judgment with steel in hand. Believe or die is the anathema which vehement spirits pronounce, and this in the name of Liberty. Moderation has become a crime.” After the 7th of October, Mirabeau says to the Comte de la Marck:
“If you have any influence with the King or the Queen, persuade them that they and France are lost if the royal family does not leave Paris. I am busy with a plan for getting them away.”
He prefers everything to the present situation, “even civil war;” for “war, at least, invigorates the soul,” while here, “under the dictatorship of demagogues, we are being drowned in slime.” Given up to itself, Paris, in three months, “will certainly be a hospital, and, perhaps, a theater of horrors.” Against the rabble and its leaders, it is essential that the King should at once coalesce “with his people,” that he should go to Rouen, appeal to the provinces, provide a Centre for public opinion, and, if necessary, resort to armed resistance. Malouet, on his side, declares that “the Revolution, since the 5th of October, “horrifies all sensible men, and every party, but that it is complete and irresistible.” Thus the three best minds that are associated with the Revolution — those whose verified prophecies attest genius or good sense; the only ones who, for two or three years, and from week to week, have always predicted wisely, and who have employed reason in their demonstrations — these three, Mallet du Pan, Mirabeau, Mabuet, agree in their estimate of the event, and in measuring its consequences. The nation is gliding down a declivity, and no one possesses the means or the force to arrest it. The King cannot do it : “undecided and weak beyond all expression, his character resembles those oiled ivory balls which one vainly strives to keep together.”[47] And as for the Assembly, blinded, violated, and impelled on by the theory it proclaims, and by the faction which supports it, each of its grand decrees only renders its fall the more precipitate.
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Notes:
[1] Bailly, ” Mémoires,” II. 195, 242.
[2] Elysée Loustalot, journalist, editor of the paper “Révolutions de Paris,” was a young lawyer who had shown a natural genius for innovative journalism. He was to die already in 1790. (SR.)
[3] Montjoie, ch. LXX, p. 65.
[4] Bailly, II. 74, 174, 242, 261, 282, 345, 392.
[5] Such as domiciliary visits and arrests apparently made by lunatics. (“Archives de la Préfecture de Police de Paris.”) — And Montjoie, ch. LXX. p.67. Expedition of the National Guard against imaginary brigands who are cutting down the crops at Montmorency and the volley fired in the air. — Conquest of Ile-Adam and Chantilly.
[6] Bailly, II. 46, 95, 232, 287, 296.
[7] “Archives de la Préfecture de Police,” minutes of the meeting of the section of Butte des Moulins, October 5, 1789.
[8] Bailly, II. 224. — Dusaulx, 418, 202, 257, 174, 158. The powder transported was called poudre de traite (transport); the people understood it as poudre de traître (traitor). M. de la Salle was near being killed through the addition of an r. It is he who had taken command of the National Guard on the 13th of July.
[9] Floquet, VII. 54. There is the same scene at Granville, in Normandy, on the 16th of October. A woman had assassinated her husband, while a soldier who was her lover is her accomplice; the woman was about to he hung and the man broken on the wheel, when the populace shout, “The nation has the right of pardon,” upset the scaffold, and save the two assassins.
[10] Bailly, II. 274 (August 17th).
[11] Bailly, II, 83, 202, 230, 235, 283, 299.
[12] Mercure de France, the number for September 26th. – De Goncourt, p. 111.
[13] Mercier, “Tableau de Paris,” I, 58; X. 151.
[14] De Ferrières, I. 178. — Buchez and Roux, II. 311, 316. — Bai11y, II. 104, 174, 207, 246, 257, 282.
[15] Mercure de France, September 5th, 1789. Horace Walpole’s Letters, September 5, 1789. — M. de Lafayette, “Mémoires,” I. 272. During the week following the 14th of July, 6,000 soldiers deserted and went over to the people, besides 400 and 800 Swiss Guards and six battalions of the French Guards, who remain without officers, and do as they please. Vagabonds from the neighboring villages flock in, and there are more than “30,000 strangers and vagrants” in Paris.
[16] Bailly, II. 282. The crowd of deserters was so great that Lafayette was obliged to place a guard at the barriers to keep them from entering the city. “Without this precaution the whole army would have come in.”
[17] De Ferrières, I. 103. — De Lavalette, I. 39. — Bailly, I. 53 (on the lawyers). “It may be said that the success of the Revolution is due to this class.” — Marmontel, II. 243 “Since the first elections of Paris, in 1789, I remarked,” he says, “this species of restless intriguing men, contending with each other to be heard, impatient to make themselves prominent….It is well known what interest this body (the lawyers) had to change Reform into Revolution, the Monarchy into a Republic; the object was to organize for itself a perpetual aristocracy.” — Buchez and Roux, II. 358 (article by C. Desmoulins). “In the districts everybody exhausts his lungs and his time in trying to be president, vice-president, secretary or vice-secretary”
[18] Eugène Hatin, “Histoire de la Presse,” vol. V. p. 113. “Le Patriote français” by Brissot, July 28, 1789. — “L’Ami du Peuple,” by Marat, September 12, 1789. — “Annales patriotiques et littéraires,” by Carra and Mercier, October 5, 1789, — “Les Révolutions de Paris,” chief editor Loustalot, July 17th, 1789. – “Le Tribun du peuple,” letters by (middle of 1789). – “Révolutions de France et de Brabant,” by C. Desmoulins, November 28, 1789; his “France libre” (I believe of the month of August, and his “Discours de la Lanterne” of the month of September). – “The Moniteur” does not make its appearance until November 24, 1789. In the seventy numbers which follow, up to February 3, 1790, the debates of the Assembly were afterwards written out, amplified, and put in a dramatic form. All numbers anterior to February 3, 1790, are the result of a compilation executed in the year IV. The narrative part during the first six months of the Revolution is of no value. The report of the sittings of the Assembly is more exact, but should be revised sitting by sitting and discourse by discourse for a detailed history of the National Assembly. The principal authorities which are really contemporary are, “Le Mercure de France,” “Le Journal de Paris,” “Le point de Jour” by Barrère, the “Courrier de Versailles,” by Gorsas, the “Courrier de Provence” by Mirabeau, the “Journal des Débats et Décrets,” the official reports of the National assembly, the “Bulletin de l’Asemblée Nationale,” by Marat, besides the newspapers above cited for the period following the 14th of July, and the speeches, which are printed separately.
[19] C. Desmoulins, letters of September 20th and of subsequent dates. (He quote, a passage from Lucan in the sense indicated). — Brissot, “Mémoires,” passim. — Biography of Danton by Robinet. (See the testimony of Madame Roland and of Rousselin de Saint-Albin.)
[20] “Discours de la Lanterne.” See the epigraph of the engraving.
[21] Buchez and Roux; III. 55; article of Marat, October lst. “Sweep all the suspected men out of the Hôtel-de-Ville. . . . . Reduce the deputies of the communes to fifty; do not let them remain in office more than a month or six weeks, and compel them to transact business only in public.” — And II. 412, another article by Marat. — Ibid. III. 21. An article by Loustalot. – C. Desmoulins, “Discours de la Lanterne,” passim. — Bailly, II. 326.
[22] Mounier, “Des causes qui ont empêche les Français d’être libre,” I. 59. – Lally-Tollendal, second letter, 104. — Bailly, II. 203.
[23] De Bouillé, 207. — Lally-Tollendal, ibid, 141, 146. — Mounier, ibid., 41, 60.
[24] Mercure de France, October 2, 1790 (article of Mallet du Pan: “I saw it”). Criminal proceedings at the Châtelet on the events of October 5th and 6th. Deposition of M. Feydel, a deputy, No. 178. – – De Montlosier, i. 259. — Desmoulins (La Lanterne). “Some members of the communes are gradually won over by pensions, by plans for making a fortune and by flattery. Happily, the incorruptible galleries are always on the side of the patriots. They represent the tribunes of the people seated on a bench in attendance on the deliberations of the Senate and who had the veto. They represent the metropolis and, fortunately, it is under the batteries of the metropolis that the constitution is being framed.” (C. Desmoulins, simple-minded politician, always let the cat out of the bag.)
[25] “Procédure du Châtelet,” Ibid. Deposition of M. Malouet (No. 111). “I received every day, as well as MM. Lally and Mounier, anonymous letters and lists of proscriptions on which we were inscribed. These letters announced a prompt and violent death to every deputy that advocated the authority of the King.”
[26] Buchez and Roux, I. 368, 376. — — Bailly, II. 326, 341. – Mounier, ibid., 62, 75.
[27] Etienne Dumont, 145. — Correspondence between Comte de Mirabeau and Comte de la Marck.
[28] “Procédure criminelle du Châtelet,” Deposition 148. – Buchez and Roux, III. 67, 65. (Narrative of Desmoulins, article of Loustalot.) Mercure de France, number for September 5, 1789. “Sunday evening, August 30, at the Palais-Royal, the expulsion of several deputies of every class was demanded, and especially some of those from Dauphiny. . . They spoke of bringing the King to Paris as well as the Dauphin. All virtuous citizens, every incorruptible patriot, was exhorted to set out immediately for Versailles.”
[29] These acts of violence were not reprisals; nothing of the kind took place at the banquet of the body-guards (October 1st). “Amidst the general joy,” says an eye-witness, I heard no insults against the National Assembly, nor against the popular party, nor against anybody. The only cries were ‘Vive le Roi! Vive la Reine! We will defend them to the death!'” (Madame de Larochejacquelein, p.40. – Ibid. Madame Campan, another eye-witness.) — It appears to be certain, however, that the younger members of the National Guard at Versailles turned their cockades so as to be like other people, and it is also probable that some of the ladies distributed white cockades. The rest is a story made up before and after the event to justify the insurrection. — Cf. Lerol, “Histoire de Versailles,” II. 20-107. Ibid. p. 141. “As to that proscription of the national cockade, all witnesses deny it.” The originator of the calumny is Gorsas, editor of the Courrier de Versailles.
[30] “Procédure Criminelle du Châtelet.” Depositions 88, 110, 120, 126, 127, 140, 146, 148. — Marmontel, “Mémoires,” a conversation with Champfort, in May, 1789. — Morellet, “Mémoires,” I. 398. (According to the evidence of Garat, Champfort gave all his savings, 3,000 livres, to defray the expenses of maneuvers of this description.) — Malouet (II. 2). knew four of the deputies “who took direct part in this conspiracy.”
[31] “Procédure Criminelle du Châtelet.” 1st. On the Flemish soldiers. Depositions 17, 20, 24, 35, 87, 89, 98. — 2nd. On the men disguised as women. Depositions 5, 10, 14, 44, 49, 59, 60, 110, 120, 139, 145, 146, 148. The prosecutor designates six of them to be seized. — 3rd. On the condition of the women of the expedition. Depositions 35, 83, 91, 98, 146, and 24. — 4th. On the money distributed. Depositions 49, 56, 71, 82, 110, 126.
[32] “Procédure Criminelle du Châtelet.” Deposition 61. “During the night scenes, not very decent, occurred among these people, which the witness thought it useless to relate.”
[33] “Procédure Criminelle du Châtelet.” Depositions 35, 44, 81. — Buchez and Roux, III. 120. (Minutes of the meeting of the Commune, October 5th.) Journal de Paris, October 12th. A few days after, M. Pic, clerk of the prosecutor, brought “a package of 100,000 francs which he had saved from the enemies’ hands,” and another package of notes was found thrown, in the hubbub, into a receipt-box.
[34] “Procédure Criminelle du Châtelet.” Depositions 61, 77, 81, 148, 154. — Dumont, 181. — Mounier, “Exposé justificatif,” and specially “Fait relatif à la dernière insurrection.”
[35] “Procédure Criminelle du Châtelet.” Deposition 168. The witness sees on leaving the King’s apartment ” several women dressed as fish-wives, one of whom, with a pretty face, has a paper in her hand, and who exclaims as she holds it up, ‘He! F…, we have forced the guy to sign.’ ”
[36] “Procédure Criminelle du Châtelet.” Depositions 89, 91, 98. “Promising all, even raising their petticoats before them.”
[37] “Procédure Criminelle du Châtelet,” Depositions 9, 20, 24, 30, 49, 61, 82, 115, 149, 155.
[38] Procédure criminelle du Châtelet.” Depositions 7, 30, 35, 40. – – Cf. Lafayette, “Mémoires,” and Madame Campan, “Mémoires.”
[39] “Procédure Criminelle du Châtelet.” Deposition 24. A number of butcher-boys run after the carriages issuing from the Petite-Ecurie shouting out, “Don’t let the curs escape!”
[40] “Procédure Criminelle du Châtelet.” Depositions 101, 91, 89, and 17. M. de Miomandre, a body-guard, mildly says to the ruffians mounting the staircase: “My friends, you love your King, and yet you come to annoy him even in his palace!”
[41] Malouet, II. 2. “I felt no distrust,” says Lafayette in 1798; “the people promised to remain quiet.”
[42] “Procédure Criminelle du Chatelet.” Depositions 9, 16, 60, 128, 129, 130, 139, 158, 168, 170. — M. du Repaire, body-guard, being sentry at the railing from two o’clock in the morning, a man passes his pike through the bars saying, “You embroidered b. . . , your turn will come before long.” M. de Repaire, ” retires within the sentry-box without saying a word to this man, considering the orders that have been issued not to act.”
[43] “Procédure Criminelle du Châtelet.” Depositions 82, 170 — Madame Campan. II. 87. — De Lavalette, I.33. — Cf. Bertrand de Molleville, Mémoires.”
[44] Duval,” Souvenirs de la Terreur,” I. 78. (Doubtful in almost everything, but here he is an eye-witness. He dined opposite the hair-dresser’s, near the railing of the Park of Saint-Cloud.) — M. de Lally-Tollendal’s second letter to a friend. “At the moment the King entered his capital with two bishops of his council with him in the carriage, the cry was heard, “Off to the lamp post with the bishops!”
[45] De Montlosier, I. 303. — Moniteur, sessions of the 8th, 9th, and 10th of October. — Malouet, II. 9, 10, 20. — Mounier, Recherches sur les Causes, etc.,” and “Addresse aux Dauphinois.”
[46] De Ferrières, I. 346. (On the 9th of October, 300 members have already taken their passports.) Mercure de France, No. of the 17th October. Correspondence of Mirabeau and M. de la Marck, I. 116, 126, 364.
[47] Correspondence of Mirabeau and M. de la Marck, I.175. (The words of Monsieur to M. de la Marck.)
BOOK SECOND. THE CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY, AND THE RESULT OF ITS LABORS.
CHAPTER I.
THE CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY. – CONDITIONS REQUIRED FOR THE FRAMING OF GOOD LAWS.
Among the most difficult undertakings in this world is the formulation of a national constitution, especially if this is to be a complete and comprehensive work. To replace the old structures inside which a great people has lived by a new, different, appropriate and durable set of laws, to apply a mold of one hundred thousand compartments on to the life of twenty-six million people, to construct it so harmoniously, adapt it so well, so closely, with such an exact appreciation of their needs and their faculties, that they enter it of themselves and move about it without collisions, and that their spontaneous activity should at once find the ease of familiar routine, – is an extraordinary undertaking and probably beyond the powers of the human mind. In any event, the mind requires all its powers to carry the undertaking out, and it cannot protect itself carefully enough against all sources of disturbance and error. An Assembly, especially a Constituent Assembly, requires, outwardly, security and independence, inwardly, silence and order, and generally, calmness, good sense, practical ability and discipline under competent and recognized leaders. Do we find anything of all this in the Constituent Assembly?
I.
These conditions absent in the Assembly – Causes of disorder and irrationality – The place of meeting – The large number of deputies – Interference of the galleries – Rules of procedure wanting, defective, or disregarded.- The parliamentary leaders – Susceptibility and over-excitement of the Assembly – Its paroxysms of enthusiasm. – Its tendency to emotion. -It encourages theatrical display – Changes which these displays introduce in its good intentions.
We have only to look at it outwardly to have some doubts about it. At Versailles, and then at Paris, the sessions are held in an immense hall capable of seating 2,000 persons, in which the most powerful voice must be strained in order to be heard. It is not calculated for the moderate tone suitable for the discussion of business; the speaker is obliged to shout, and the strain on the voice communicates itself to the mind; the place itself suggests declamation; and this all the more readily because the assemblage consists of 1,200, that is to say, a crowd, and almost a mob. ‘At the present day (1877), in our assemblies of five or six hundred deputies, there are constant interruptions and an incessant buzz; there is nothing so rare as self-control, and the firm resolve to give an hour’s attention to a discourse opposed to the opinions of the hearers. — What can be done here to compel silence and patience? Arthur Young on different occasions sees “a hundred members on the floor at once,” shouting and gesticulating. “Gentlemen, you are killing me!” says Bailly, one day, sinking with exhaustion. Another president exclaims in despair, “Two hundred speaking at the same time cannot be heard; will you make it impossible then to restore order in the Assembly?” The rumbling, discordant din is further increased by the uproar of the galleries.[1]
“In the British Parliament,” writes Mallet du Pan, “I saw the galleries cleared in a trice because the Duchess of Gordon happened unintentionally to laugh too loud.”
Here, the thronging crowd of spectators, stringers, delegates from the Palais-Royal, soldiers disguised as citizens, and prostitutes collected and marshaled, applaud, clap their hands, stamp and hoot, at their pleasure. This is carried to so great an extent that M. de Montlosier ironically proposes “to give the galleries a voice in the deliberations.”[2] Another member wishes to know whether the representatives are so many actors, whom the nation sends there to endure the hisses of the Paris public. Interruptions, in fact, take place as in a theater, and, frequently, if the members do not give satisfaction, they are forced to desist. On the other hand, the deputies who are popular with this energetic audience, on which they keep and eye, are actors before the footlights: they involuntarily yield to its influence, and exaggerate their ideas as well as their words to be in unison with it. Tumult and violence, under such circumstances, become a matter of course, and the chances of an Assembly acting wisely are diminished by one-half; on becoming a club of agitators, it ceases to be a conclave of legislators.
Let us enter and see how this one proceeds. Thus encumbered, thus surrounded and agitated, does it take at least those precautions without which no assembly of men can govern itself. When several hundred persons assemble together for deliberation, it is evident that some sort of an internal police is necessary; first of all, some code of accepted usage, some written precedents, by which its acts may be prepared and defined, considered in detail, and properly passed. The best of these codes it ready to hand: at the request of Mirabeau, Romilly has sent over the standing orders of the English House of Commons.[3} But with the presumption of novices, they pay no attention to this code; they imagine it is needless for them; they will borrow nothing from foreigners; they accord no authority to experience, and, not content with rejecting the forms it prescribes, “it is with difficulty they can be made to follow any rule whatever.” They leave the field open to the impulsiveness of individuals; any kind of influence, even that of a deputy, even of one elected by themselves, is suspected by them; hence their choice of a new president every fortnight. – They submit to no constraint or control, neither to the legal authority of a parliamentary code, nor to the moral authority of parliamentary chiefs. They are without any such; they are not organized in parties; neither on one side nor on the other is a recognized leader found who fixes the time, arranges the debate, draws up the motion, assigns parts, and gives the rein to or restrains his supporters. Mirabeau is the only one capable of obtaining this ascendancy; but, on the opening of the Assembly, he is discredited by the notoriety of his vices, and, towards the last, is compromised by his connections with the Court. No other is of sufficient eminence to have any influence; there is too much of average and too little of superior talent. – Their self-esteem is, moreover, as yet too strong to allow any concessions. Each of these improvised legislators has come satisfied with his own system, and to submit to a leader to whom he would entrust his political conscience, to make of him what three out of four of these deputies should be, a voting machine, would require an apprehension of danger, some painful experience, an enforced surrender which he is far from realizing.[4] For this reason, save in the violent party, each acts as his own chief, according to the impulse of the moment, and the confusion may be imagined. Strangers who witness it, lift their hands in pity and astonishment. “They discuss nothing in their Assembly,” writes Gouverneur Morris,[5] “One large half of the time is spent in hallowing and bawling…. Each Man permitted to speak delivers the Result of his Lubrications,” amidst this noise, taking his turn as inscribed, without replying to his predecessor, or being replied to by his successor, without ever meeting argument by argument; so that while the firing is interminable, “all their shots are fired in the air.” Before this “frightful clatter” can be reported, the papers of the day are obliged to make all sorts of excisions, to prune away “nonsense,” and reduce the “inflated and bombastic style.” Chatter and clamor, that is the whole substance of most of these famous sittings.
“You would hear,” says a journalist, “more yells than speeches; the sittings seemed more likely to end in fights than in decrees. . . . Twenty times I said to myself, on leaving, that if anything could arrest and turn the tide of the Revolution, it would be a picture of these meetings traced without caution or adaptation. . . All my efforts were therefore directed to represent the truth, without rendering it repulsive. Out of what had been merely a row, I concocted a scene. . . I gave all the sentiments, but not always in the same words. I translated their yells into words, their furious gestures into attitudes, and when I could not inspire esteem, I endeavored to rouse the emotions.”
There is no remedy for this evil; for, besides the absence of discipline, there is an inward and fundamental cause for the disorder. These people are too susceptible. They are Frenchmen, and Frenchmen of the eighteenth century; brought up in the amenities of the utmost refinement, accustomed to deferential manners, to constant kind attentions and mutual obligations, so thoroughly imbued with the instinct of good breeding that their conversation seems almost insipid to strangers.[6] — And suddenly they find themselves on the thorny soil of politics, exposed to insulting debates, flat contradictions, venomous denunciation, constant detraction and open invective; engaged in a battle in which every species of weapon peculiar to a parliamentary life is employed, and in which the hardiest veterans are scarcely able to keep cool. Judge of the effect of all this on inexperienced, highly strung nerves, on men of the world accustomed to the accommodations and amiabilities of universal urbanity. They are at once beside themselves. – And all the more so because they never anticipated a battle; but, on the contrary, a festival, a grand and charming idyll, in which everybody, hand in hand, would assemble in tears around the throne and save the country amid mutual embraces. Necker himself arranges, like a theater, the chamber in which the sessions of the Assembly are to be held.[7] “He was not disposed to regard the Assemblies of the States-General as anything but a peaceful, imposing, solemn, august spectacle, which the people would enjoy;” and when the idyll suddenly changes into a drama, he is so frightened that it seems to him as if a landslide had occurred that threatened, during the night, to break down the framework of the building. – At the time of the meeting of the States-General, everybody is delighted; all imagine that they are about to enter the promised land. During the procession of the 4thof May,
“tears of joy,” says the Marquis de Ferrières, “filled my eyes. . . . In a state of sweet rapture I beheld France supported by Religion” exhorting us all to concord. “The sacred ceremonies, the music, the incense, the priests in their sacrificial robes, that dais, that orb radiant with precious stones. .. I called to my mind the words of the prophet. . . . My God, my country, and my countrymen, all were one with myself! ”
Such emotions repeatedly explode in the course of the session, and resulted in the passage of laws which no one could have imagined.
“Sometimes,”[8] writes the American ambassador, “a speaker gets up in the midst of a deliberation, makes a fine discourse on a different subject, and closes with a nice little resolution which is carried with a hurrah. Thus, in considering the plan of a national bank proposed by M. Necker, one of them took it into his head to move that every member should give his silver buckles, which was agreed to at once, and the honorable mover laid his upon the table, after which the business went on again.”
Thus, over-excited, they do not know in the morning what they will do in the afternoon, and they are at the mercy of every surprise. When they are seized with these fits of enthusiasm, infatuation spreads over all the benches; prudence gives way, all foresight disappears and every objection is stifled. During the night of the 4th of August,[9] “nobody is master of himself . The Assembly presents the spectacle of an inebriated crowd in a shop of valuable furniture, breaking and smashing at will whatever they can lay their hands on.”
“That which would have required a year of care and reflection,” says a competent foreigner, “was proposed, deliberated over, and passed by general acclamation. The abolition of feudal rights, of titles, of the privileges of the provinces, three articles which alone embraced a whole system of jurisprudence and statesmanship, were decided with ten or twelve other measures in less time than is required in the English Parliament for the first reading of an important bill.”
“Such are our Frenchmen,” says Mirabeau again, “they spend a month in disputes about syllables, and overthrow, in a single night, the whole established system of the Monarchy !”[10]
The truth is, they display the nervousness of women, and, from one end of the Revolution to the other, this excitability keeps on increasing.
Not only are they excited, but the pitch of excitement must be maintained, and, like the drunkard who, once stimulated, has recourse again to strong waters, one would say that they carefully try to expel the last remnants of calmness and common sense from their brains. They delight in pompous phrases, in high-sounding rhetoric, in declamatory sentimental strokes of eloquence: this is the style of nearly all their speeches, and so strong is their taste, they are not satisfied with the orations made amongst themselves. Lally and Necker, having made “affecting and sublime” speeches at the Hôtel-de-Ville, the Assembly wish them to be repeated before them:[11] this being the heart of France, it is proper for it to answer to the noble emotions of all Frenchmen. Let this heart throb on, and as strongly as possible, for that is its office, and day by day it receives fresh impulses. Almost all sittings begin with the reading of flattering addresses or of threatening denunciations. The petitioners frequently appear in person, and read their enthusiastic effusions, their imperious advice, their doctrines of dissolution. To-day it is Danton, in the name of Paris, with his bull visage and his voice that seems a tocsin of insurrection; to-morrow, the vanquishers of the Bastille, or some other troop, with a band of music which continues playing even into the hall. The meeting is not a conference for business, but a patriotic opera, where the eclogue, the melodrama, and sometimes the masquerade, mingle with the cheers and the clapping of hands.[12] — A serf of the Jura is brought to the bar of the Assembly aged one hundred and twenty years, and one of the members of the cortège, ” M. Bourbon de la Crosnière, director of a patriotic school, asks permission to take charge of an honorable old man, that he may be waited on by the young people of all ranks, and especially by the children of those whose fathers were killed in the attack on the Bastille.” [13] Great is the hubbub and excitement. The scene seems to be in imitation of Berquin,[14] with the additional complication of a mercenary consideration.
But small matters are not closely looked into, and the Assembly, under the pressure of the galleries, stoops to shows, such as are held at fairs. Sixty vagabonds who are paid twelve francs a head, in the costumes of Spaniards, Dutchmen, Turks, Arabs, Tripolitans, Persians, Hindus, Mongols, and Chinese, conducted by the Prussian Anacharsis Clootz, enter, under the title of Ambassadors of the Human Race, to declaim against tyrants, and they are admitted to the honors of the sitting. On this occasion the masquerade is a stroke devised to hasten and extort the abolition of nobility.[15] At other times, there is little or no object in it; its ridiculousness is inexpressible, for the farce is played out as seriously and earnestly as in a village award of prizes. For three days, the children who have taken their first communion before the constitutional bishop have been promenaded through the streets of Paris; at the Jacobin club they recite the nonsense they have committed to memory; and, on the fourth day, admitted to the bar of the Assembly, their spokesman, a poor little thing of twelve years, repeats the parrot-like tirade. He winds up with the accustomed oath, upon which all the others cry out in their piping, shrill voices, ” We swear ! ” As a climax, the President, Trejlhard, a sober lawyer, replies to the little gamins with perfect gravity in a similar strain, employing metaphors, personifications, and everything else belonging to the stock-in-trade of a pedant on his platform:
“You merit a share in the glory of the founders of liberty, prepared as you are to shed your blood in her behalf.”
Immense applause from the “left” and the galleries, and a decree ordering the speeches of both president and children to be printed. The children, probably, would rather have gone out to play; but, willingly or unwillingly, they receive or endure the honors of the sitting.[16]
Such are the tricks of the stage and of the platform by which the managers here move their political puppets. Emotional susceptibility, once recognized as a legitimate force, thus becomes an instrument of intrigue and constraint. The Assembly, having accepted theatrical exhibitions when these were sincere and earnest, is obliged to tolerate them when they become mere sham and buffoonery. At this vast national banquet, over which it meant to preside, and to which, throwing the doors wide open, it invited all France, its first intoxication was due to wine of a noble quality; but it has touched glasses with the populace, and by degrees, under the pressure of its associates, it has descended to adulterated and burning drinks, to a grotesque unwholesome inebriety which is all the more grotesque and unwholesome, because it persists in believing itself to be reason.
II.
Inadequacy of its information – Its composition – The social standing and culture of the larger number – Their incapacity. Their presumption – Fruitless advice of competent men.- Deductive politics – Parties – The minority; its faults – The majority; its dogmatism.
If reason could only resume its empire during the lucid intervals! But reason must exist before it can govern, and in no French Assembly, except the two following this, have there ever been fewer political intellects. – Strictly speaking, with careful search, there could undoubtedly be found in France, in 1789, five or six hundred experienced men, such as the intendants and military commanders of every province; next to these the prelates, administrators of large dioceses the members of the local “parlements,” whose courts gave them influence, and who, besides judicial functions, possessed a portion of administrative power; and finally, the principal members of the Provincial Assemblies, all of them influential and sensible people who had exercised control over men and affairs, at once humane, liberal, moderate, and capable of understanding the difficulty, as well as the necessity, of a great reform; indeed, their correspondence, full of facts, stated with precision and judgment, when compared with the doctrinaire rubbish of the Assembly, presents the strongest possible contrast. – But most of these lights remain under a bushel; only a few of them get into the Assembly; these burn without illuminating, and are soon extinguished in the tempest.’ I. The venerable Machault is not there, nor Malesherbes; there are none of the old ministers or the marshals of France. Not one of the intendants is there, except Malouet, and by the superiority of this man, the most judicious of the Assembly, one can judge the services which his colleagues would have rendered. Out of two hundred and ninety-one members of the clergy,[17] there are indeed forty-eight bishops or archbishops and thirty-five abbots or canons, but, being prelates and with large endowments, they excite the envy of their order, and are generals without any soldiers. We have the same spectacle among the nobles. Most of them, the gentry of the provinces, have been elected in opposition to the grandees of the Court. Moreover, neither the grandees of the Court, devoted to worldly pursuits, nor the gentry of the provinces, confined to private life, are practically familiar with public affairs. A small group among them, twenty-eight magistrates and about thirty superior officials who have held command or have been connected with the administration, probably have some idea of the peril of society; but it is precisely for this reason that they seem to be behind the age and remain without influence. – In the Third-Estate, out of five hundred and seventy-seven members, only ten have exercised any important functions, those of intendant, councillor of state, receiver-general, lieutenant of police, director of the mint, and others of the same category. The great majority is composed of unknown lawyers and people occupying inferior positions in the profession, notaries, royal attorneys, register commissaries, judges and assessors of; the présidial, bailiffs and lieutenants of the bailiwick, simple practitioners confined from their youth to the narrow circle of an inferior jurisdiction or to a routine of scribbling, with no escape but philosophical excursions in imaginary space under the guidance of Rousseau and Raynal. There are three hundred and seventy-three of this class, to whom may be added thirty-eight farmers and husbandmen, fifteen physicians, and, among the manufacturers, merchants, and capitalists, some fifty or sixty who are their equals in education and in political capacity. Scarcely one hundred and fifty proprietors are here from the middle class.[18] To these four hundred and fifty deputies, whose condition, education, instruction, and mental range qualified them for being good clerks, prominent men in a commune, honorable fathers of a family, or, at best, provincial academicians, add two hundred and eight curés, their equals; this makes six hundred and fifty out of eleven hundred and eighteen deputies, forming a positive majority, which, again, is augmented by about fifty philosophical nobles, leaving out the weak who follow the current, and the ambitious who range themselves on the strong side. – We may divine what a chamber thus made up can do, and those who are familiar with such matters prophesy what it will do.[19]
“There are some able men in the National Assembly,” writes the American minister, “yet the best heads among them would not be injured by experience, and, unfortunately, there are great numbers who, with much imagination, have little knowledge, judgment, or reflection.”
It would be just as sensible to select eleven hundred notables from an inland province and entrust them to the repair of an old frigate. They would conscientiously break the vessel up, and the frigate they would construct in its place would founder before it left port.
If they would only consult the pilots and professional shipbuilders! — There are several of such to be found around them, whom they cannot suspect, for most of them are foreigners, born in free countries, impartial, sympathetic, and, what is more, unanimous. The Minister of the United States writes, two months before the convocation of the States-General:[20]
“I, a republican, and just, as it were, emerged from that Assembly which has formed one of the most republican of republican constitutions, – I preach incessantly respect for the prince, attention to the rights of the nobility, and moderation, not only in the object, but also in the pursuit of it.”
Jefferson, a democrat and radical, expresses himself no differently. At the time of the oath of the Tennis Court, he redoubles his efforts to induce Lafayette and other patriots to make some arrangement with the King to secure freedom of the press, religious, liberty, trial by jury, the habeas corpus, and a national legislature, – things which he could certainly be made to adopt, – and then to retire into private life, and let these institutions act upon the condition of the people until they had rendered it capable of further progress, with the assurance that there would be no lack of opportunity for them to obtain still more.
“This was all,” he continues, “that I thought your countrymen able to bear soberly and usefully.”
Arthur Young, who studies the moral life of France so conscientiously, and who is so severe in depicting old abuses, cannot comprehend the conduct of the Commons.
“To set aside practice for theory . . . in establishing the interests of a great kingdom, in securing freedom to 25,000,000 of people, seems to me the very acme of imprudence, the very quintessence of insanity.”
Undoubtedly, now that the Assembly is all-powerful, it is to be hoped that it will be reasonable:
“I will not allow myself to believe for a moment that the representatives of the people can ever so far forget their duty to the French nation, to humanity, and their own fame, as to suffer any inordinate and impracticable views – any visionary or theoretic systems – . . . to turn aside their exertions from that security which is in their hands, to place on the chance and hazard of public commotion and civil war the invaluable blessings which are certainly in their power. I will not conceive it possible that men who have eternal fame within their grasp will place the rich inheritance on the cast of a die, and, losing the venture, be damned among the worst and most profligate adventurers that ever disgraced humanity.”
As their plan becomes more definite the remonstrances become more decided, and all the expert judges point out to them the importance of the wheels which they are willfully breaking.
“As they have[21] hitherto felt severely the authority exercised over them in the name of their princes, every limitation of that authority seems to them desirable. Never having felt the evils of too weak an executive, the disorders to be apprehended from anarchy make as yet no impression” — “They want an American Constitution,[22] but with a King instead of a President, without reflecting they have no American citizens to support that Constitution. . . If they have the good sense to give the nobles, as nobles, some portion of the national power, this free constitution will probably last, But otherwise it will degenerate either into a pure monarchy, or a vast republic, or a democracy. Will the latter last? I doubt it. I am sure that it will not, unless the whole nation is changed.”
A little later, when they renounce a parliamentary monarchy to put in its place “a royal democracy,” it is at once explained to them that such an institution applied to France can produce nothing but anarchy, and finally end in despotism.
“Nowhere[23] has liberty proved to be stable without a sacrifice of its excesses, without some barrier to its own omnipotence. . . . Under this miserable government . . . the people, soon weary of storms, and abandoned without legal protection to their seducers or to their oppressors, will shatter the helm, or hand it over to some audacious hand that stands ready to seize it.”
Events occur from month to month in fulfillment of these predictions, and the predictions grow gloomier and more gloomy. It is a flock of wild birds:[24]
“It is very difficult to guess whereabouts the flock will settle when it flies so wild. . . . This unhappy country, bewildered in the pursuit of metaphysical whims, presents to our moral view a mighty ruin. The Assembly, at once master and slave, new in power, wild in theory, raw in practice, engrossing all functions without being able to exercise any, has freed that fierce, ferocious people from every restraint of religion and respect. . . . Such a state of things cannot last . . . The glorious opportunity is lost and for this time, at least, the Revolution has failed.”
We see, from the replies of Washington, that he is of the same opinion. On the other side of the Channel, Pitt, the ablest practician, and Burke, the ablest theorist, of political liberty, express the same judgment. Pitt, after 1789, declares that the French have overleaped freedom. After 1790, Burke, in a work which is a prophecy as well as a masterpiece, points to military dictatorship as the termination of the Revolution, “the most completely arbitrary power that has ever appeared on earth.” Nothing is of any effect. With the exception of the small powerless group around Malouet and Mounier, the warnings of Morris, Jefferson, Romilly, Dumont, Mallet du Pan, Arthur Young, Pitt and Burke, all of them men who have experience of free institutions, are received with indifference or repelled with disdain. Not only are our new politicians incapable, but they think themselves the contrary, and their incompetence is aggravated by their infatuation.
“I often used to say, “writes Dumont,[25] “that if a hundred persons were stopped at haphazard in the streets of London, and a hundred in the streets of Paris, and a proposal were made to them to take charge of the Government, ninety-nine would accept it in Paris and ninety-nine would refuse it in London . . . The Frenchman thinks that all difficulties can be overcome by a little quickness of wit. Mirabeau accepted the post of reporter to the Committee on Mines without having the slightest tincture of knowledge on the subject.”
In short, most of them enter politics “like the gentleman who, on being asked if he knew how to play on the harpsichord, replied, ‘I cannot tell, I never tried, but I will see.’ ”
“The Assembly had so high an opinion of itself, especially the left side of it, that it would willingly have undertaken the framing of the Code of Laws for all nations. . . Never has so many men been seen together, fancying that they were all legislators, and that they were there to correct all the errors of the past, to remedy all mistakes of the human mind, and ensure the happiness of all ages to come. Doubt had no place in their minds, and infallibility always presided over their contradictory decrees.” —
This is because they have a theory and because, according to their notion, this theory renders special knowledge unnecessary. Herein they are thoroughly sincere, and it is of set purpose that they reverse all ordinary modes of procedure. Up to this time a constitution used to be organized or repaired like a ship. Experiments were made from time to time, or a model was taken from vessels in the neighborhood; the first aim was to make the ship sail; its construction was subordinated to its work; it was fashioned in this or that way according to the materials on hand; a beginning was made by examining these materials, and trying to estimate their rigidity, weight, and strength. – All this is reactionary; the age of Reason has come and the Assembly is too enlightened to drag on in a rut. In conformity with the fashion of the time it works by deduction, after the method of Rousseau, according to an abstract notion of right, of the State and of the social compact.[26] According to this process, by virtue of political geometry alone, they shall have the perfect vessel and since it perfect it follows that it will sail, and that much better than any empirical craft. – They legislate according to this principle, and one may imagine the nature of their discussions. There are no convincing facts, no pointed arguments; nobody would ever imagine that the speakers were gathered together to conduct real business. Through speech after speech, strings of hollow abstractions are endlessly renewed as in a meeting of students in rhetoric for the purpose of practice, or in a society of old bookworms for their own amusement. On the question of the veto “each orator in turn, armed with his portfolio, reads a dissertation which has no bearing whatever” on the preceding one, which makes a “sort of academical session,”[27] a succession of pamphlets fresh every morning for several days. On the question of the Rights of Man fifty-four speakers are placed on the list.
“I remember,” says Dumont, “that long discussion, which lasted for weeks, as a period of deadly boredom, — vain disputes over words, a metaphysical jumble, and most tedious babble; the Assembly was turned into a Sorbonne lecture-room,”
and all this while chateaux were burning, while town-halls were being sacked, and courts dared no longer hold assize, while the distribution of wheat was stopped, and while society was in course of dissolution. In the same manner the theologians of the Easter Roman Empire kept up their wrangles about the uncreated light of Mount Tabor while Mahomet II was battering the walls of Constantinople with his cannon. – Ours, of course, are another sort of men, juvenile in feeling, sincere, enthusiastic, even generous, and further, more devoted, laborious, and in some cases endowed with rare talent. But neither zeal, nor labor, nor talent are of any use when not employed in the service of a sound idea; and if in the service of a false one, the greater they are the more mischief they do.
Towards the end of the year 1789, there can be not doubt of this; and the parties now formed reveal their presumption, improvidence, incapacity, and obstinacy. “This Assembly,” writes the American ambassador,[28] “may be divided into three parties; —
one called the aristocrats, consists of the high clergy, the parliamentary judges, and such of the nobility as think they ought to form a separate order.” This is the party which offers resistance to follies and errors, but with follies and errors almost equally great. In the beginning “the prelates,[29] instead of conciliating the curés, kept them at a humiliating distance, affecting distinctions, exacting respect,” and, in their own chamber, “ranging themselves apart on separate benches.” The nobles, on the other hand, the more to alienate the commons, began by charging these with, “revolt, treachery, and treason,” and by demanding the use of military force against them. Now that the victorious Third-Estate has again overcome them and overwhelms them with numbers, they become still more maladroit, and conduct the defense much less efficiently than the attack. “In the Assembly,” says one of them, “they do not listen, but laugh and talk aloud;” they take pains to embitter their adversaries and the galleries by their impertinence. “They leave the chamber when the President puts the question and invite the deputies of their party to follow them, or cry out to them not to take part in the deliberation : through this desertion, the clubbists become the majority, and decree whatever they please.” It is in this way that the appointment of judges and bishops is withdrawn from the King and assigned to the people. Again, after the return from Varennes, when the Assembly finds out that the result of its labors is impracticable and wants to make it less democratic, the whole of the right side refuses to share in the debates, and, what is worse, votes with the revolutionaries to exclude the members of the Constituent from the Legislative Assembly. Thus, not only does it abandon its own cause, but it commits self-destruction, and its desertion ends in suicide. —
A second party remains, “the middle party,”[30] which consists of well-intentioned people from every class, sincere partisans of a good government; but, unfortunately, they have acquired their ideas of government from books, and are admirable on paper. But as it happens that the men who live in the world are very different from imaginary men who dwell in the heads of philosophers, it is not to be wondered at if the systems taken out of books are fit for nothing but to be upset by another book. Intellects of this stamp are the natural prey of utopians. Lacking the ballast of experience they are carried away by pure logic and serve to enlarge the flock of theorists. – The latter form the third party, which is called the “enragés (the wild men), and who, at the expiration of six months, find themselves “the most numerous of all.”
“It is composed,” says Morris, “of that class which in America is known by the name of pettifogging lawyers, together with a host of curates and many of those persons who in all revolutions throng to the standard of change because they are not well.[31] This last party is in close alliance with the populace and derives from this circumstance very great authority.”
All powerful passions are on its side, not merely the irritation of the people tormented by misery and suspicion, not merely the ambition and self-esteem of the bourgeois, in revolt against the ancient régime, but also the inveterate bitterness and fixed ideas of so many suffering minds and so many factious intellects, Protestants, Jansenists, economists, philosophers, men who, like Fréteau, Rabout-Saint-Etienne, Volney, Sieyès, are hatching out a long arrears of resentments or hopes, and who only await the opportunity to impose their system with all the intolerance of dogmatism and of faith. To minds of this stamp the past is a dead letter; example is no authority; realities are of no account; they live in their own Utopia. Sieyès, the most important of them all, judges that “the whole English constitution is charlatanism, designed for imposing on the people;”[32] he regards the English “as children in the matter of a constitution,” and thinks that he is capable of giving France a much better one. Dumont, who sees the first committees at the houses of Brissot and Clavières, goes away with as much anxiety as “disgust.”
“It is impossible,” he says, “to depict the confusion of ideas, the license of the imagination, the burlesque of popular notions. One would think that they saw before them the world on the day after the Creation.”
They seem to think, indeed, that human society does not exist, and that they are appointed to create it. Just as well might ambassadors “of hostile tribes, and of diverse interests, set themselves to arrange their common lot as if nothing had previously existed.” There is no hesitation. They are satisfied that the thing can be easily done, and that, with two or three axioms of political philosophy, the first man that comes may make himself master of it. Immoderate conceit of this kind among men of experience would seem ridiculous; in this assembly of novices it is a strength. A flock which has lost its way follows those who appears to forge ahead; they are the most irrational but they are the most confident, and in the Chamber as in the nation it is the daredevils who become leaders.
III. THE POWER OF SIMPLE, GENERAL IDEAS.
Ascendancy of the revolutionary party – Theory in its favor – The constraint thus imposed on men’s minds – Appeal to the passions – Brute force on the side of the party – It profits by this – Oppression of the minority.
Two advantages give this party the ascendancy, and these advantages are of such importance that henceforth whoever possesses them is sure of being master. – In the first place the prevailing theory is on the side of the revolutionaries, and they alone are, in the second place, determined thoroughly to apply it. This party, therefore, is the only one which is consistent and popular in the face of adversaries who are unpopular and inconsequent. Nearly all of the latter, indeed, defenders of the ancient régime, or partisans of a limited monarchy, are likewise imbued with abstract principles and philosophical speculation. The most refractory nobles have advocated the rights of man in their memorials. Mounier, the principal opponent of the demagogues, was the leader of the commons when they proclaimed themselves to be the National -Assembly.[33] This is enough: they have entered the narrow defile which leads to the abyss. They had no idea of it at the first start, but one step leads to another, and, willing or unwilling, they march on, or are pushed on. When the abyss comes in sight it is too late; they have been driven there by the logical results of their own concessions; they can do nothing but wax eloquent and indignant; having abandoned their vantage ground, they find no halting-place remaining. – There is an enormous power in general ideas, especially if they are simple, and appeal to the passions. None are simpler than these, since they are reducible to the axiom which assumes the rights of man, and subordinate to them every institution, old or new. None are better calculated to inflame the sentiments, since the doctrine enlists human arrogance and pride in its service, and, in the name of justice, consecrates all the demands of independence and domination. Consider three-fourths of the deputies, immature and prejudiced, possessing no information but a few formulas of the current philosophy, with no thread to guide them but pure logic, abandoned to the declamation of lawyers, to the wild utterances of the newspapers, to the promptings of self-esteem, to the hundred thousand tongues which, on all sides, at the bar of the Assembly, at the tribune, in the clubs, in the streets, in their own breasts, repeat unanimously to them, and every day, the same flattery:
“You are sovereign and omnipotent. Right is vested in you alone. The King exists only to execute your will. Every order, every corporation, every power, every civil or ecclesiastical association is illegitimate and null the moment you declare it to be so. You may even transform religion. You are the fathers of the country. You have saved France, you will regenerate humanity. The whole world looks on you in admiration; finish your glorious work — forward, always forward.”
Superior good sense and rooted convictions could alone stand firm against this flood of seductions and solicitations; but vacillating and ordinary men are carried away by it. In the harmony of applause which rises, they do not hear the crash of the ruins they produce. In any case, they stop their ears, and shun the cries of the oppressed; they refuse to admit that their work could possibly bring about evil results; they accept the sophisms and untruths which justify it; they allow the assassinated to be calumniated in order to excuse the assassins; they listen to Merlin de Douay, who, after three or four jacqueries, when pillaging, arson, and murder are going on in all the provinces, has just declared in the name of the Committee on Feudalism[34] that “a law must be presented to the people, the justice of which may enforce silence on the feudatory egoists who, for the past six months, so indecently protest against plunder; the wisdom of which may restore to a sense of duty the peasant who has been led astray for a moment by his resentment of a long oppression.” And when Raynal, the surviving patriarch of the philosophic party, one day, for a wonder, takes the plain truth with him into their tribune, they resent his straightforwardness as an outrage, and excuse it solely on the ground of his imbecility. An omnipotent legislator cannot depreciate himself; like a king he is condemned to self-admiration in his public capacity. “There were not thirty deputies amongst us,” says a witness, “who thought differently from Raynal,” but “in each other’s presence the credit of the Revolution, the perspective of its blessings, was an article of faith which had to be believed in;” and, against their own reason, against their conscience, the moderates, caught in the net of their own acts, join the revolutionaries to complete the Revolution.
Had they refused, they would have been compelled; for, to obtain the power, the Assembly has, from the very first, either tolerated or solicited the violence of the streets. But, in accepting insurrectionists for its allies, it makes them masters, and henceforth, in Paris as in the provinces, illegal and brutal force becomes the principal power of the State. “The triumph was accomplished through the people; it was impossible to be severe with them;”[35] hence, when insurrections were to be put down, the Assembly had neither the courage nor the force necessary. “They blame for the sake of decency; they frame their deeds by expediency.” and in turn justly undergo the pressure which they themselves have sanctioned against others. Only three or four times do the majority, when the insurrection becomes too daring — after the murder of the baker François, the insurrection of the Swiss Guard at Nancy, and the outbreak of the Champ de Mars — feel that they themselves are menaced, vote for and apply martial law, and repel force with force. But, in general, when the despotism of the people is exercised only against the royalist minority, they allow their adversaries to be oppressed, and do not consider themselves affected by the violence which assails the party of the “right:” they are enemies, and may be given up to the wild beasts. In accordance with this, the “left ” has made its arrangements; its fanaticism has no scruples; it is principle, it is absolute truth that is at stake; this must triumph at any cost. Besides, can there be any hesitation in having recourse to the people in the people’s own cause? A little compulsion will help along the good cause, and hence the siege of the Assembly is continually renewed. This was the practice already at Versailles before the 6th of October, while now, at Paris, it is kept up more actively and with less disguise.
At the beginning of the year 1790,[36] the band under pay comprises seven hundred and fifty effective men, most of them deserters or soldiers drummed out of their regiments, who are at first paid five francs and then forty sous a day. It is their business to make or support motions in the coffee-houses and in the streets, to mix with the spectators at the sittings of the sections, with the groups at the Palais-Royal, and especially in the galleries of the National- Assembly, where they are to hoot or applaud at a given signal. Their leader is a Chevalier de Saint-Louis, to whom they swear obedience, and who receives his orders from the Committee of Jacobins. His first lieutenant at the Assembly is a M. Saule, “a stout, small, stunted old fellow, formerly an upholsterer, then a charlatan hawker of four penny boxes of grease (made from the fat of those that had been hung – for the cure of diseases of the kidneys) and all his life a sot …. who, by means of a tolerably shrill voice, which was always well moistened, has acquired some reputation in the galleries of the Assembly.” In fact, he has forged admission tickets he has been turned out; he has been obliged to resume “the box of ointment, and travel for one or two months in the provinces with a man of letters for his companion.” But on his return, “through the protection of a groom of the Court, he obtained a piece of ground for a coffee-house against the wall of the Tuileries garden, almost alongside of the National Assembly,” and now it is at home in his coffee-shop behind his counter that the hirelings of the galleries ” come to him to know what they must say, and to be told the order of the day in regard to applause.” Besides this, he is there himself; “it is he who for three years is to regulate public sentiment in the galleries confided to his care, and, for his useful and satisfactory services, the Constituent Assembly will award him a recompense,” to which the Legislative Assembly will add ” a pension of six hundred livres, besides a lodging in an apartment of the Feuillants.”
We can divine how men of this stamp, thus compensated, do their work. From the top of the galleries[37] they drown the demands of the “right” by the force of their lungs; this or that decree, as, for instance, the abolition of titles of nobility, is carried, “not by shouts, but by terrific howls.”[38] On the arrival of the news of the sacking of the Hôtel de Castries by the populace, they applaud. On the question coming up as to the decision whether the Catholic faith shall be dominant, “they shout out that the aristocrats must all be hung, and then things will go on well.” Their outrages not only remain unpunished, but are encouraged: this or that noble who complains of their hooting is called to order, while their interference and vociferations, their insults and their menaces, are from this time introduced as one of the regular wheels of legislative operations. Their pressure is still worse outside the Chamber.[39] The Assembly is obliged several times to double its guard. On the 27th of September, 1790, there are 40,000 men around the building to extort the dismissal of the Ministers, and “motions for assassination” are made under the windows, On the 4th of January, 1791, whilst on a call of the house the ecclesiastical deputies pass in turn to the tribune, to take or refuse the oath to the civil constitution of the clergy, a furious clamor ascends in the Tuileries, and even penetrates into the Chamber. “To the lamp post with all those who refuse! ” On the 27th of September, 1790, M. Dupont, economist, having spoken against the assignats, is surrounded on leaving the Chamber and hooted at, hustled, pushed against the basin of the Tuileries, into which he was being thrown when the guard rescued him. On the 21st of June, 1790, M. de Cazalès just misses “being torn to pieces by the people.”[40] Deputies of the “right” are threatened over and over again by gestures in the streets and in the coffee-houses; effigies of them with ropes about the neck are publicly displayed. The Abbé Maury is several times on the point of being hung: he saves himself once by presenting a pistol. Another time the Vicomte de Mirabeau is obliged to draw his sword. M. de Clermont-Tonnerre, having voted against the annexation of the Comtat to France, is assailed with chairs and clubs in the Palais-Royal, pursued into a porter’s room and from thence to his dwelling; the howling crowd break in the doors, and are only repelled with great difficulty. It is impossible for the members of the “right” to assemble together; they are “stoned” in the church of the Capuchins, then in the Salon Français in the Rue Royale, and then, to crown the whole, an ordinance of the new judges shuts up their hall, and punishes them for the violence which they have to suffer.[41] In short they are at the mercy of the mob. The most moderate, the most liberal, and the most manly both in heart and head, Malouet, declares that “in going to the Assembly he rarely forgot to carry his pistols with him.”[42] “For two years,” he says, “after the King’s flight, we never enjoyed one moment of freedom and security.”
” On going into a slaughter-house,” writes another deputy, “you see some animals at the entrance which still have a short time to live, until the hour comes to dispatch them. Such was the impression which the assemblage of nobles, bishops, and parliamentarians[43] on the right side made on my mind every time I entered the Assembly, the executioners of the left side permitting them to breathe a little longer.”
They are insulted and outraged even upon their benches; “placed between peril within and peril without, between the hostility of the galleries,”[44] and that of the howlers at the entrance, ” between personal insults and the abbey of Saint-Germain, between shouts of laughter celebrating the burning of their chateaux and the clamors which, thirty times in a quarter of an hour, cry down their opinions,” they are given over and denounced “to the ten thousand Cerberuses ” of the journals and of the streets, who pursue them with their yells and “cover them with their slaver.” Any expedient is good enough for putting down their opposition, and, at the end of the session, in full Assembly, they are threatened with “a recommendation to the departments,” which means the excitement of riots and of the permanent jacquerie of the provinces against them in their own houses. – Parliamentary strategy of this sort, employed uninterruptedly for twenty-nine months, finally produces its effect. Many of the weak are gained over;[45] even on characters of firm temper fear has a hold; he who would march under fire with head erect shuddered at the idea of being dragged in the gutter by the rabble ; the brutality of the populace always exercises a material ascendancy over finely strung nerves. On the 12th of July, 1791,[46] the call of the house decreed against the absentees proves that one hundred and thirty-two deputies no longer appear in their places. Eleven days before, among those who take no further part in the proceedings. Thus, before the completion of the Constitution, the whole of the opposition, more than four hundred members, over one-third of the Assembly, is reduced to flight or to silence. By dint of oppression, the revolutionary party has got rid of all resistance, while the violence which gave to it ascendancy in the streets, now gives to it equal ascendance within the walls of Parliament.
IV.
Refusal to supply the ministry – Effects of this mistake – Misconception of the situation – The committee of investigation – Constant alarms – Effects of ignorance and fear on the work of the Constituent Assembly.
Generally in an omnipotent assembly, when a party takes the lead and forms a majority, it furnishes the Ministry; and this fact suffices to give, or to bring back to it, some glimpse of common sense. For its leaders, with the Government in their own hands, become responsible for it, and when they propose or pass a law, they are obliged to anticipate its effect. Rarely will a Secretary of War or of the Navy adopt a military code which goes to establish permanent disobedience in the army or in the navy. Rarely will a Secretary of the Treasury propose an expenditure for which there is not a sufficient revenue, or a system of taxation that provides no returns. Placed where full information can be procured, daily advised of every details, surrounded by skillful counselors and expert clerks, the chiefs of the majority, who thus become heads of the administration, immediately drop theory for practice; and the fumes of political speculation must be pretty dense in their minds if they exclude the multiplied rays of light which experience constantly sheds upon them. Let the most stubborn of theorists take his stand at the helm of a ship, and, whatever be the obstinacy of his principles or his prejudices, he will never, unless he is blind or led by the blind, persist in steering always to the right or always to the left. Just so after the flight to Varennes, when the Assembly, in full possession of the executive power, directly controls the Ministry, it comes to recognize for itself that its constitutional machine will not work, except in the way of destruction; and it is the principal revolutionaries, Barnave, Duport, the Lameths, Chapelier, and Thouret,[47] who undertake to make alterations in the mechanisms so as to lessen its friction. But this source of knowledge and reason, however, to which they are momentarily induced to draw, in spite of themselves and too late, has been turned off by themselves from the very beginning. On the 6th of November, 1789, in deference to principle and in dread of corruption, the Assembly had declared that none of its members should hold ministerial office. We see it in consequence deprived of all the instruction which comes from direct contact with affairs, surrendered without any counterpoise to the seductions of theory, reduced by its own decision to become a mere academy of legislation only.
Nay, still worse, through another effect of the same error, it condemns itself by its own act to constant fits of panic. For, having allowed the power which it was not willing to assume to slip into indifferent or suspect hands, it is always uneasy, and all its decrees bear an uniform stamp, not only of the willful ignorance within which it confines itself, but also of the exaggerated or chimerical fears in which its life is passed. – Imagine a ship conveying a company of lawyers, literary men, and other passengers, who, supported by a mutinous and poorly fed crew, take full command, but refuse to select one of their own number for a pilot or for the officer of the watch. The former captain continues to nominate them; through very shame, and because he is a good sort of man, his title is left to him, and he is retained for the transmission of orders. If these orders are absurd, so much the worse for him; if he resists them, a fresh mutiny forces him to yield; and even when they cannot be executed, he has to answer for their being carried out. In the meantime, in a room between decks, far away from the helm and the compass, our club of amateurs discuss the equilibrium of floating bodies, decree a new system of navigation, have the ballast thrown overboard, crowd on all sail, and are astonished to find that the ship heels over on its side. The officer of the watch and the pilot must, evidently, have managed the maneuver badly. They are accordingly dismissed and others put in their place, while the ship heels over farther yet and begins to leak in every joint. Enough: it is the fault of the captain and the old staff of officers, They are not well-disposed; for a beautiful system of navigation like this ought to work well; and if it fails to do so, it is because some one interferes with it. It is positively certain that some of those people belonging to the former régime must be traitors, who would rather have the ship go down than submit; they are public enemies and monsters. They must be seized, disarmed, put under surveillance, and punished. – Such is the reasoning of the Assembly. Evidently, to reassure it, a message from the Minister of the Interior chosen by the Assembly, to the lieutenant of police whom he had appointed, to come to his office every morning, would be all that was necessary. But it is deprived of this simple resource by its own act, and has no other expedient than to appoint a committee of investigation to discover crimes of “treason against the nation.”[48] What could be more vague than such a term? What could be more mischievous than such an institution? — Renewed every month, deprived of special agents, composed of credulous and inexperienced deputies, this committee, set to perform the work of a Lenoir or a Fouché, makes up for its incapacity by violence, and its proceedings anticipate those of the Jacobine inquisition.[49] Alarmist and suspicious, it encourages accusations, and, for lack of plots to discover, it invents them. Inclinations, in its eyes, stand for actions, and floating projects become accomplished outrages. On the denunciation of a domestic who has listened at a door, on the gossip of a washerwoman who has found a scrap of paper in a dressing-gown, on the false interpretation of a letter, on vague indications which it completes and patches together by the strength of its imagination, it forges a coup d’état, makes examinations, domiciliary visits, nocturnal surprises and arrests;[50] it exaggerates, blackens, and comes in public session to denounce the whole affair to the National Assembly. First comes the plot of the Breton nobles to deliver Brest to the English;[51] then the plot for hiring brigands to destroy the crops; then the plot of 14th of July to burn Paris; then the plot of Favras to murder Lafayette, Necker, and Bailly; then the plot of Augeard to carry off the King, and many others, week after week, not counting those which swarm in the brains of the journalists, and which Desmoulins, Fréron, and Marat reveal with a flourish of trumpets in each of their publications.
“All these alarms are cried daily in the streets like cabbages and turnips, the good people of Paris inhaling them along with the pestilential vapors of our mud.”[52]
…………..Now, in this aspect, as well as in a good many others, the Assembly is the people; satisfied that it is in danger,[53] it makes laws as the former make their insurrections, and protects itself by strokes of legislation as the former protects itself by blows with pikes. Failing to take hold of the motor spring by which it might direct the government machine, it distrusts all the old and all the new wheels. The old ones seem to it an obstacle, and, instead of utilizing them, it breaks them one by one — parliaments, provincial states, religious orders, the church, the nobles, and royalty. The new ones are suspicious, and instead of harmonizing them, it puts them out of gear in advance — the executive power, administrative powers, judicial powers, the police, the gendarmerie, and the army.[54] Thanks to these precautions it is impossible for any of them to be turned against itself; but, also, thanks to these precautions, none of them can perform their functions.[55]
In building, as well as in destroying, the Assembly had two bad