The applause which constantly interrupted, and for a long time followed this discourse, after the orator had concluded, proved that the idea of a revolutionary dynasty already tempted some imaginations, and that if there existed no faction of Orleans, at least it was not without a leader. Robespierre, who no less detested a dynastic faction than the monarchy itself, saw with terror this symptom of a new power which appeared in the distant horizon. "I remark," he replied, "that there is too much reference to individuals, and not enough to the national interest. It is not true that we seek to degrade the relations of the king: there is no design to place them beneath other citizens—we wish to separate them from the people by an honourable distinction. What is the use of seeking titles for them? The relatives of the king will be simply the relatives of the king. The splendour of the throne is not derived from such vain denominations of rank. We cannot declare with impunity that there exists in France any particular family above another: it would be a nobility by itself. This family would remain in the midst of us, like the indestructible root of that nobility which we have destroyed—it would be the germ of a new aristocracy." Violent murmurs hailed these remarks of Robespierre. He was obliged to break off and apologise. "I see," he said in conclusion, "that we are no longer allowed to utter here, without reproach, opinions which our adversaries amongst the first have maintained in this assembly."

XI.

The whole difficulty of the situation was in the question whether or not, that constitution once completed, the nation would recognise in the constitution the right to revise and alter itself. It was on this occasion that Malouet, although abandoned by his party and hopeless, endeavoured, single-handed, the restoration of the royal authority. His discourse, worthy of the genius of Mirabeau, was a bill of terrible accusation against the excesses of the people, and the inconsistencies of the Assembly. Its moderation heightened its effect—the man of integrity was seen beneath the orator, and the statesman in the legislator. Something of the serene and stoical soul of Cato breathed in his words; but political eloquence is rather in the people who listen, than in the man who speaks. The voice is nothing without the reverberation that multiplies its echo. Malouet, deserted by his party, left by Barnave who listened with dismay, only spoke from his conscience; he fought no longer for victory, he only struggled for principle. Thus did he speak.—

"It is proposed to you to determine the epoch, and the conditions of the use of a new constituent power; it is proposed to you to undergo twenty-five years of disorder and anarchy before you have the right to amend. Remark, in the first place, under what circumstances it is proposed to you to impose silence on the appeals of the nation as to the new laws; it is when you have not as yet heard the opinion of those whose instincts and passions these new laws favour, when all contending passions are subdued by terror or by force; it is when France is no longer expounded but through the organ of her clubs. When it has been a question of suspending the exercise of the royal authority itself, what has been the language addressed to you from this tribune? You have been told 'we should have begun the Revolution from thence; but we were not aware of our strength.' Thus it only remains for your successors to measure their strength in order to attempt fresh enterprises. Such, in effect, is the danger of making a violent revolution and a free constitution march side by side. The one is only produced in tumultuous periods, and by passions and weapons, the other is only established by amicable arrangements between old interests and new. (Laughter, murmurs, and 'that is the point.') We do not count voices, we do not discuss opinions, to make a revolution. A revolution is a storm during which we must furl our sails, or we sink. But after the tempest, those who have been beaten by it, as well as those who have not suffered, enjoy in common the serenity of the sky. All becomes calm, and the horizon is cleared. Thus after a revolution, the constitution, if it be good, rallies all its citizens. There should not be one man in the kingdom who incurs danger of his life in expressing his free views of the constitution. Without this security there is no free will, no expression of opinion, no liberty; there will be only a predominant power, a tyranny popular or otherwise, until you have separated the constitution from the workings of the revolution. Behold all these principles of justice, morality, and liberty which you have laid down, hailed with joy, and oaths renewed, but violated immediately with unprecedented audacity and rage. It is at a moment when the holiest or the freest of constitutions has been proclaimed that the most infamous attempts against liberty, against property,—nay, what do I say?—against humanity and conscience, are multiplied and perpetuated! Does not this contrast alarm you? I will tell you wherefore. Yourselves deceived as to the mechanism of political society, you have sought its regeneration without reflecting on its dissolution; you have considered as an obstacle to your plans the discontent of some, and as a means the enthusiasm of others. Only desirous to overcome obstacles you have overturned principles, and taught the people to brave every thing. You have taken the passions of the people for auxiliaries. It is to raise an edifice by sapping the foundations. I repeat to you then, there is no free and durable constitution out of despotism but that which terminates a revolution, and which is proposed, accepted, and executed, by forms, calm, free, and totally different from the forms of the Revolution. All we do, all we seek for with excitement before we reach this point of repose, whether we obey the people or are obeyed by them; whether we would flatter, deceive, or serve them, is but the work of folly,—madness. I demand, therefore, that the constitution be peaceably and freely accepted by the majority of the nation and by the king. (Violent murmurs.) I know we call the national will, all that we know of proposed addresses, of assent, of oaths, agitations, menaces, and violence. (Loud expressions of angry dissent.) Yes, we must close the Revolution by beginning to destroy every tendency to violate it. Your committees of inquiry, laws respecting emigrants, persecutions of priests, despotic imprisonments, criminal proceedings against persons accused without proofs, the fanaticism and domination of clubs; but this is not all, licence has gone to such unbounded extent,—the dregs of the nation ferment so tumultuously:—(Loud burst of indignation.) Do we then pretend to be the first nation which has no dregs? The fearful insubordination of troops, religious disturbances, the discontents of the colonies, which already sound so ominously in our ports,—if the Revolution does not stop here and give place to the constitution;—if order be not re-established at once, and on all points, the shattered state will be long agitated by the convulsions of anarchy. Do you remember the history of the Greeks, where a first revolution not terminated produced so many others during a period of only half a century? Do you remember that Europe has her eyes fixed on your weakness and agitations, and whilst she will respect you if you are free within the limits of order, she will surely profit by your disorders if you only know how to weaken yourself and alarm her by your anarchy?"

Malouet demanded, therefore, that the constitution should be submitted to the judgment of the people, and to the free acceptance of the king.

XII.

This magnificent harangue only sounded as the voice of remorse in the bosom of the Assembly. It was listened to with impatience, and then forgotten with all speed. M. de La Fayette opposed, in a short speech, the proposition of M. Dandre, who desired to adjourn for thirty years the revision of the constitution. The Assembly neither adopted the advice of Dandre nor of La Fayette, but contented itself with inviting the nation not to make use for twenty-five years of its right to modify the constitution. "Behold us, then," said Robespierre, "arrived at the end of our long and painful career: it only remains for us to give it stability and duration. Why are we asked to submit to the acceptance of the king? The fate of the constitution is independent of the will of Louis XVI. I do not doubt he will accept it with delight. An empire for patrimony, all the attributes of the executive power, forty millions for his personal pleasures,—such is our offer! Do not let us wait, before we offer it, until he be away from the capital and environed by ill advisers. Let us offer it to him in Paris. Let us say to him, Behold the most powerful throne in the universe—will you accept it? Suspected gatherings, the system of weakening your frontiers, threats of your enemies without, manoeuvres of your enemies within,—all warns you to hasten the establishment of an order of things which assures and fortifies the citizens. If we deliberate, when we should swear, if our constitution may be again attacked, after having been already twice assailed, what remains for us to do? Either to resume our arms or our fetters. We have been empowered," he added, looking towards the seats of Barnave and the Lameths, "to constitute the nation, and not to raise the fortunes of certain individuals, in order to favour the coalition of court intriguers, and to assure to them the price of their complaisance or their treason."

XIII.

The constitutional act was presented to the king on the 3d of September, 1791. Thouret reported to the National Assembly in these words the result of the solemn interview between the conquered will of the monarch and the victorious will of his people:—"At nine o'clock in the evening our deputation quitted this chamber, proceeding to the chateau escorted by a guard of honour, consisting of various detachments of the national guard and gendarmerie. It was invariably accompanied by the applauses of the people. It was received in the council-chamber, where the king was attended by his ministers and a great number of his servants. I said to the king, 'Sire, the representatives of the nation come to present to your majesty the constitutional act, which consecrates the indefeasible rights of the French people—which gives to the throne its true dignity, and regenerates the government of the empire.' The king received the constitutional act, and thus replied: 'I receive the constitution presented to me by the National Assembly. I will convey to it my resolution after the shortest possible delay which the examination of so important an act must require. I have resolved on remaining in Paris. I will give orders to the commandant of the national Parisian guard for the duties of my guard.' The king, during the whole time, presented an aspect of satisfaction; and from all we saw and heard we anticipate that the completion of the Constitution will be also the termination of the Revolution." The Assembly and the tribunes applauded several times. It was one of those days of public hope, when faction retreats into the shade, to allow the serenity of good citizens to shine forth.

La Fayette removed the degrading consignes, which made the Tuileries a jail to the royal family. The king ceased to be the hostage of the nation, in order to become its ostensible head. He gave some days to the apparent examination which he was supposed to bestow upon the Constitution. On the 13th he addressed to the Assembly, by the minister of justice, a message concerted with Barnave, thus conceived:—"I have examined the constitutional act. I accept it, and will have it carried into execution. I ought to make known the motives of my resolution. From the commencement of my reign I have desired the reform of abuses, and in all my acts I have taken for rule public opinion. I have conceived the project of assuring the happiness of the people on permanent bases, and of subjecting my own authority to settled rules. From these intentions I have never varied. I have favoured the establishment of trials of your work before it was even finished. I have done so in all sincerity; and, if the disorders which have attended almost every epoch of the Revolution have frequently affected my heart, I hoped that the law would resume its force, and that on reaching the term of your labours, every day would restore to it that respect, without which the people can have no liberty, and a king no happiness. I have long entertained that hope; and my resolution has only changed at the moment when I could hope no longer. Remember the moment when I quitted Paris: disorder was at its height—the licence of the press and the insolence of parties knew no bounds. Then, I avow, if you had offered to me the constitution, I should not have thought it my duty to accept it.

"All has changed. You have manifested the desire to re-establish order; you have revised many of the articles; the will of the people is no longer doubtful to me, and therefore I accept the constitution under better auspices. I freely renounce the co-operation I had claimed in this work, and I declare that when I have renounced it no other but myself has any right to claim it. Unquestionably I still see certain points in the constitution in which more perfection might be attained; but I agree to allow experience to be the judge. When I shall have fairly and loyally put in action the powers of government confided to me no reproach can be addressed to me, and the nation will make itself known by the means which the constitution has reserved to it. (Applause.) Let those who are restrained by the fear of persecutions and troubles out of their country return to it in safety. In order to extinguish hatreds let us consent to a mutual forgetfulness of the past. (The tribunes and the left renewed their acclamations.) Let the accusations and the prosecutions which have sprung solely from the events of the constitution be obliterated in a general reconciliation. I do not refer to those which have been caused by an attachment to me. Can you see any guilt in them? As to those who from excess, in which I can see personal insult, have drawn on themselves the visitation of the laws, I prove with respect to them that I am the king of all the French. I will swear to the constitution in the very place where it was drawn up, and I will present myself to-morrow at noon to the National Assembly."

The Assembly adopted unanimously, on the proposition of La Fayette, the general amnesty demanded by the king. A numerous deputation went to carry to him this resolution. The queen was present. "My wife and children, who are here," said the king to the deputation, "share my sentiments." The queen, who desired to reconcile herself to public opinion, advanced, and said, "Here are my children; we all agree to participate in the sentiments of the king." These words reported to the Assembly, prepared all hearts for the pardon which royalty was about to implore. Next day the king went to the Assembly; he wore no decoration but the cross of Saint Louis, from deference to a recent decree suppressing the other orders of chivalry. He took his place beside the president, the Assembly all standing.

"I come," said the king, "to consecrate solemnly here the acceptance I have given to the constitutional act. I swear to be faithful to the nation and the law, and to employ all the power delegated to me for maintaining the constitution, and carrying its decrees into effect. May this great and memorable epoch be that of the re-establishment of peace, and become the gage of the happiness of the people, and the prosperity of the empire." The unanimous applauses of the chamber, and the tribunes ardent for liberty, but kindly disposed towards the king, demonstrated that the nation entered with enthusiasm into this conquest of the constitution.

"Old abuses," replied the president, "which had for a long time triumphed over the good intentions of the best of kings, oppressed France. The National Assembly has re-established the basis of public prosperity. What it has desired the nation has willed. Your majesty no longer desires in vain the happiness of Frenchmen. The National Assembly has nothing more to wish, now that on this day in its presence you consummate the constitution by accepting it. The attachment of Frenchmen decrees to you the crown, and what assures it to you is the need that so great a nation must always have of an hereditary power. How sublime, sire, will be in the annals of history this regeneration, which gives citizens to France, to Frenchmen a country, to the king a fresh title of greatness and glory, and a new source of happiness!"

The king then withdrew, being accompanied to the Tuileries by the entire Assembly; the procession with difficulty making its way through the immense throng of people which rent the air with acclamations of joy. Military music and repeated salvos of artillery taught France that the nation and the king, the throne and liberty, were reconciled in the constitution, and that after three years of struggles, agitations, and shocks, the day of concord had dawned. These acclamations of the people in Paris spread throughout the empire. France had some days of delirium. The hopes which softened men's hearts, brought back their old feelings for its king. The prince and his family were incessantly called to the windows of their palace to receive the applause of the crowds. They sought to make them feel how sweet is the love of a people.

The proclamation of the constitution on the 18th had the character of a religious fete. The Champ-de-Mars was covered with battalions of the national guard. Bailly, mayor of Paris, the municipal authorities, the department, public functionaries, and all the people betook themselves thither. One hundred and one cannon shots hailed the reading of the constitutional act, made to the nation from the top of the altar of the country. One cry of Vive la Nation! uttered by 300,000 voices, was the acceptation by the people. The citizens embraced, as members of one family. Balloons, bearing patriotic inscriptions, rose in the evening in the Champs Elysees, as if to bear to the skies the testimony of the joy of a regenerated people. Those who went up in them threw out copies of the book of the constitution. The night was splendid with illuminations. Garlands of flames, running from tree to tree, formed, from the Arc de l'Etoile to the Tuileries, a sparkling avenue, crowded with the population of Paris. At intervals, orchestras filled with musicians sounded forth the pealing notes of glory and public joy. M. de La Fayette rode on horseback at the head of his staff. His presence seemed to place the oaths of the people and the king under the guard of the armed citizens. The king, the queen, and their children appeared in their carriage at eleven o'clock in the evening. The immense crowd that surrounded them as if in one popular embrace,—the cries of Vive le Roi! Vive la Reine! Vive le Dauphin!—hats flung in the air, the gestures of enthusiasm and respect, made for them a triumph on the very spot over which they had passed two months previously in the midst of the outrages of the multitude, and deep murmuring of the excited populace. The nation seemed desirous of redeeming these threatening days, and to prove to the king how easy it was to appease the people, and how sweet to it was the reign of liberty! The national acceptance of the laws of the Constituent Assembly was the counterproof of its work. It had not the legality, but it had really the value, of an individual acceptance by primary assemblies. It proved that the will of the public mind was satisfied. The nation voted by acclamation, what the wisdom of its Assembly had voted on reflection. Nothing but security was wanting to the public feeling. It seemed as if it desired to intoxicate itself by the delirium of its happiness; and that it compensated, by the very excess of its manifestations of joy, for what it lacked in solidity and duration.

The king sincerely participated in this general joyous feeling. Placed between the recollections of all he had suffered for three years, and the lowering storms he foresaw in the future, he endeavoured to delude himself, and to feel persuaded of his good fortune. He said to himself, that perhaps he had mistaken the popular opinion; and that having at least surrendered himself unconditionally to the mercy of his people—that people would respect in him his own power and his own will: he swore in his honest and good heart fidelity to the constitution and love to the nation he really loved.

The queen herself returned to the palace with more national thoughts: she said to the king, "They are no longer the same people;" and, taking her son in her arms, she presented him to the crowd who thronged the terrace of the chateau, and seemed thus to invest herself in the eyes of the people with the innocence of age and the interest of maternity.

The king gave, some days afterwards, a fete to the people of Paris, and distributed abundant alms to the indigent. He desired that even the miserable should have his day of content, at the commencement of that era of joy, which his reconciliation with his people promised to his reign. The Te Deum was sung in the cathedral of Paris, as on a day of victory, to bless the cradle of the French constitution. On the 30th of September, the king closed the Constituent Assembly. Before he entered the chamber, Bailly, in the name of the municipality; Pastoret, in the name of the departments, congratulated the Assembly on the conclusion of its work:—"Legislators," said Bailly, "you have been armed with the greatest power that men can require. To-morrow you will be nothing. It is not, therefore interest or flattery which praises you—it is your works. We announce to you the benedictions of posterity, which commence for you from to-day!" "Liberty," said Pastoret, "had fled beyond the seas, or taken refuge in the mountains,—you have raised her fallen throne. Despotism had effaced every page of the book of nature; you have re-established the decalogue of freemen!"

XIV.

The king, surrounded by his ministers, entered the Assembly at three o'clock: lengthened cries of Vive le roi for a moment checked his speaking. "Gentlemen," said Louis XVI., "after the completion of the constitution, you have resolved on to-day terminating your labours. It would have been desirable, perhaps, that your session should have been prolonged in order that you, yourselves, should prove your work. But you have wished, no doubt, to mark by this the difference which should exist between the functions of a constituent body and ordinary legislators. I will exercise all the power you have confided to me in assuring to the constitution the respect and obedience due to it. For you, gentlemen, who, during a long and painful career, have evinced an indefatigable zeal in your labours, there remains a last duty to fulfil when you are scattered over the face of the empire; it is to enlighten your fellow citizens as to the spirit of the laws you have made; to purify and unite opinions by the example you will give to the love of order and submission to the laws. Be, on your return to your homes, the interpreters of my sentiments to your fellow-citizens; tell them that the king will always be their first and most faithful friend—that he desires to be loved by them, and can only be happy with them and by them."

The president replied to the king:—"The National Assembly having arrived at the termination of its career, enjoys, at this moment, the first fruit of its labours. Convinced that the government best suited to France is that which reconciles the respected prerogatives of the throne with the inalienable rights of the people, it has given to the state a constitution which equally guarantees royalty and liberty. Our successors, charged with the onerous burden of the safety of the empire, will not misunderstand their rights, nor the limits of the constitution: and you, sire, you have almost completed every thing—by accepting the Constitution, you have consummated the Revolution."

The king departed amidst loud acclamations. It appeared that the National Assembly was in haste to lay down the responsibility of events which it no longer felt itself capable of controlling. "The National Assembly declares," says Target, its president, "that its mission is finished, and that, at this moment, it terminates its sittings."

The people, who crowded round the Manege, and saw with pain the Revolution abdicated into the hands of the king, insulted, as it recognised them, the members of the Right—even Barnave. They experienced even on the first day the ingratitude they had so often fomented. They separated in sorrow and in discouragement.

When Robespierre and Petion went out, the people crowned them with oaken chaplets, and took the horses off their carriage in order to drag them home in triumph. The power of these two men already proved the weakness of the constitution, and presaged its fall. An amnestied king returned powerless to his palace. Timid legislators abdicated in trouble. Two triumphant tribunes were elevated by the people. In this was all the future. The Constituent Assembly, begun in an insurrection of principles, ended as a sedition. Was it the error of those principles—was it the fault of the Constituent Assembly? We will examine the question at the end of the last book of this volume, in casting a retrospect over the acts of the Constituent Assembly; till then we will delay this judgment, in order not to interfere with the progress of the recital.



BOOK V.

I.

Whilst an instant's breathing time was permitted to France between two convulsive efforts, and the Revolution as yet knew not whether it should maintain the constitution it had gained, or employ it as a weapon to obtain a republic, Europe began to arouse itself; egotistical and improvident, she merely beheld in the first movement in France a comedy played at Paris on the stage of the States General and the constituent Assembly—between popular genius, represented by Mirabeau, and the vanquished genius of the aristocracy, personified in Louis XVI. and the clergy. This grand spectacle had been in the eyes of the sovereigns and their ministers merely the continuation of the struggle (in which they had taken so much interest, and showed so much secret favour) between Voltaire and Jean Jacques Rousseau on one side, and the old aristocratical and religious system on the other. To them the Revolution was the philosophy of the eighteenth century, which had migrated from the salons into the public streets, and from books to speeches. This earthquake in the moral world, and these shocks at Paris, the presages of some unknown change in European destinies, attracted far more than they affrighted them. They had not as yet learned that institutions are but ideas, and that those ideas, when overthrown, involve in their fall thrones and nations. Whatsoever the spirit of God wills, that also do all mankind will, and are to accomplish, unperceived even by themselves. Europe bestowed attention, time, and astonishment on the commencement of the French Revolution, and that was all it needed to bring it to maturity. The spark not having been extinguished at its outbreak was fated to kindle and consume every thing before it. The moral and political state of Europe was eminently favourable to the contagion of new ideas. Time, men, and things, all lay at the mercy of France.

II.

A long period of peace had softened the minds, and deadened those hereditary hatreds that oppose the communication of feelings and the similarity of ideas between different nations. Europe, since the treaty of Westphalia, had become a republic of perfectly balanced powers, where the general equilibrium of power resulting from each formed a counterpoise to the other. One glance sufficed to show the solidity and unity of this European building, every beam of which, opposing an equal resistance to the others, afforded an equal support by the pressure of all the states.

Germany was a confederation presided over by Austria, the emperors were the chiefs only of this ancient feudalism of kings, dukes, and electors. The house of Austria was more powerful through itself and its vast possessions than through the imperial dignity. The two crowns of Hungary and Bohemia, the Tyrol, Italy, and the Low Countries, gave it an ascendency, which the genius of Richelieu had been able to fetter, but not to destroy. Powerful to resist, but not to impel, Austria was more fitted to sustain than to act; her force lies in her situation and immobility, for she is like a block in the middle of Germany,—her power is in her weight; she is the pivot of the balance of European power. But the federative diet weakened and enervated its designs by those secret influences all federations naturally possess. Two new states, unperceived until the time of Louis XIV., had recently risen, out of reach of the power, and the long rivalry of the houses of Bourbon and Austria: the one in the north of Germany, Prussia; the other in the east, Russia. The policy of England had encouraged the rise of these two infant powers, in order to form the elements of political combinations that would admit of her interests obtaining a firm footing.

III.

A hundred years had hardly elapsed since an emperor of Austria had conferred the title of king on a margrave of Prussia, a subordinate sovereign of two millions of men, and yet Prussia already balanced in Germany the influence of the house of Austria. The Machiavelian genius of Frederic the Great had become the genius of Prussia. His monarchy, composed of territories acquired by victory, required war to strengthen itself, still more of agitation and intrigue to legitimise itself. Prussia was in a ferment of dissolution amidst the German states. Scarcely had it risen into existence than it abdicated all German feeling by leaguing with England and Russia; and England, always on the watch to widen these breaches, had used Prussia as her lever in Germany. Russia, whose two-fold ambition already had designs on Asia on the one hand, on Europe on the other, had made it an advanced guard on the west, and used it as an advanced camp on the borders of the Rhine. Thus Prussia was the point of the Russian sword in the very heart of France. Military power was every thing; its government was only discipline, its people only an army. As for its ideas, its policy was to place itself at the head of the Protestant states, and offer protection, assistance, and revenge to all those whose interest or whose ambition was threatened by the house of Austria. Thus by its nature Prussia was a revolutionary power.

Russia, to whom nature had assigned a sterile yet immense place on the globe, the ninth part of the habitable world, and a population of forty millions of men, all compelled by the savage genius of Peter the Great to unite themselves into one nation, seemed yet to waver between two roads, one of which led to Germany, the other to the Ottoman empire. Catherine II. governed it: a woman endowed with wondrous beauty, passion, genius, and crime,—such are necessary in the ruler of a barbarous nation, in order to add the prestige of adoration to the terror inspired by the sceptre. Each step she took in Asia awakened an echo of surprise and admiration in Europe, and for her was revived the name of Semiramis. Russia, Prussia, and France, intimidated by her fame, applauded her victories over the Turks, and her conquests in the Black Sea, without apparently comprehending that she weighed down the European power, and that once mistress of Poland and Constantinople, nothing then would prevent her from carrying out her designs on Germany, and extending her arm over all the West.

IV.

England, humiliated in her maritime pride by the brilliant rivalry of the French fleet in the Indian Seas, irritated by the assistance given by France to aid America in her struggle for independence, had secretly allied herself in 1788 with Prussia and Holland, to counterbalance the effect of the alliance of France with Austria, and to intimidate Russia in her invasion of Turkey. England at this moment relied on the genius of one man, Mr. Pitt, the greatest statesman of the age, son of Lord Chatham, the only political orator of modern ages who equalled (if he did not surpass) Demosthenes. Mr. Pitt, in a manner born in the council of kings, and brought up at the tribune of his country, at the age of twenty-three was launched in political life. At this age, when other men have scarcely emerged from childhood, he was already the most eminent of all that aristocracy that confided their cause to him as the most worthy to uphold it, and when almost a boy he acquired the government of his country from the admiration excited by his talents, and held it almost without interruption up to his death by his enlightened views of policy, and the energy of his resolution. He showed the House of Commons what a great statesman, supported by the opinion of the nation, can dare to attempt and accomplish, with the consent (and sometimes against it) of a parliament. He was the despot of the constitution, if we may link together those two words that can alone express his lawful omnipotence. The struggle against the French Revolution was the continual act of his twenty-five years of ministerial life; he became the antagonist of France, and died vanquished.

And yet it was not the Revolution that he hated, it was France, and in France it was not liberty he hated, for at heart he loved freedom; it was the destruction of this balance of Europe that, once destroyed, left England isolated in its ocean. At this moment, England, hostile towards America, at war with India, a coolness existing between itself and Spain, secretly hating Russia, had on the Continent nothing but Prussia and the Stadtholder; and observation and temporisation became a necessary part of its policy.

V.

Spain, enervated by the reign of Philip III. and Ferdinand VI., had recovered some degree of internal vitality and external dignity during the long reign of Charles III.; Campomanes, Florida Blanca, the Comte d'Aranda, his ministers, had struggled against superstition, that second nature of the Spaniards. A coup d'etat, meditated in silence, and executed like a conspiracy by the court, had driven out of the kingdom the Jesuits, who reigned under the name of the kings. The family agreement between Louis XV. and Charles III., in 1761, had guaranteed the thrones, and all the possessions of the different branches of the house of Bourbon. But this political compact had been unable to guarantee this many-branched dynasty against the decay of its root, and that degeneracy that gives effeminate and weak princes as successors to mighty kings. The Bourbons became satraps at Naples, and in Spain crowned monks, and the very palace of the Escurial had assumed the appearance and the gloom of a monastery.

The monacal system devoured Spain, and yet this unfortunate country adored the evil that destroyed it. After having been subject to the caliphs, Spain became the conquest of the popes; and their authority reigned paramount there under every costume; whilst theocracy made its last efforts there. Never had the sacerdotal system more completely swayed a nation, and never had a nation been reduced to a more abject state of degradation. The Inquisition was its government,—the auto-da-fes its triumphs,—bull-fights and processions its only diversions. Had the inquisitorial reign lasted a few years more, this people would have been no longer reckoned amongst the civilised inhabitants of Europe.

Charles III. had trembled at each new effort he made to emancipate his government; his good intentions had all been frustrated and checked, and he had been forced to sacrifice his ministers to the vengeance of superstition. Florida Blanca and d'Aranda died in exile, to which they had been condemned for the crime of having served their country. The weak Charles IV. had mounted the throne and reigned for several years, guided by a faithless wife, a confessor, and a favourite. The loves of Godoy and the queen formed the whole of the Spanish policy, and to the fortune of the favourite all the rest of the empire was sacrificed. What mattered it that the fleet rotted in the unfinished ports of Charles III.—that Spanish America asserted its independence—that Italy bent beneath the yoke of Austria—that the house of Bourbon combated in vain in France the progress of a new system—that the Inquisition and the monks cast a gloom over and devoured the whole of the peninsula,—all this was nothing to the court, provided the queen were but loved and Godoy great. The palace of Aranjuez was like the walled tomb of Spain, into which the active spirit that now agitated Europe could no longer penetrate.

VI.

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

VII.

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

VIII.

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

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

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

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

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

IX.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

X.

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

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

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

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

XI.

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

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

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

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

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

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

XII.

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

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

"Monsieur mon Frere,

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

XIII.

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

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

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

XIV.

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

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

XV.

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

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

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

XVI.

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

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