This speech placed Brissot at the head of the conspirators of the Assembly; he brought to the young and untried party of the Gironde his reputation as a public writer, and a man who had had ten years' experience of the factions; the audacity of his policy flattered their impatience, and the austerity of his language made them believe in the depth of his designs. Condorcet, the friend of Brissot, and, like him, devoured by insatiable and unscrupulous ambition, mounting the tribune, merely commented on the preceding discourse, and concluded, like Brissot, by summoning the powers to pronounce for or against the constitution, and demanded the renewal of the corps diplomatique.

This discourse was visibly concerted, and it was evident that a party, already formed, took possession of the tribune, and was about to arrogate to itself the dominion of the Assembly. Brissot was its conspirator, Condorcet its philosopher, Vergniaud its orator. Vergniaud mounted the tribune, with all the prestige of his marvellous eloquence, the fame of which had long preceded him. The eager looks of the Assembly, the silence that prevailed, announced in him one of the great actors of the revolutionary drama, who only appear on the stage to win themselves popularity, to intoxicate themselves with applause, and—to die.

XV.

Vergniaud, born at Limoges, and an advocate at the bar of Bordeaux, was now in his thirty-third year, for the revolutionary movement had seized on and borne him along with its currents when very young. His dignified, calm, and unaffected features announced the conviction of his power. Facility, that agreeable concomitant of genius, had rendered alike pliable his talents, his character, and even the position he assumed. A certain nonchalance announced that he easily laid aside these faculties from the conviction of his ability to recover all his forces at the moment when he should require them. His brow was contemplative, his look composed, his mouth serious and somewhat sad; the deep inspiration of antiquity was mingled in his physiognomy with the smiles and the carelessness of youth. At the foot of the tribune he was loved with familiarity; as he ascended it each man was surprised to find that he inspired him with admiration and respect; but at the first words that fell from the speaker's lips they felt the immense distance between the man and the orator. He was an instrument of enthusiasm, whose value and whose place was in his inspiration. This inspiration, heightened by the deep musical tones of his voice, and an extraordinary power of language, had drunk in deep draughts at the purest sources of antiquity; his sentences had all the images and harmony of poesy, and if he had not been the orator of a democracy he would have been its philosopher and its poet. His genius, devoted to the people, yet forbade him to descend to the language of the people, even to flatter them. All his passions were noble as his words, and he adored the Revolution as a sublime philosophy destined to ennoble the nation without immolating on its altars other victims than prejudices and tyranny. He had doctrines, and no hatreds; the thirst of glory, and not of ambition,—nay, power itself, was in his eyes, too real, too vulgar a thing for him to aim at, and he disdained it for himself, and alone sought it for his ideas. Glory and posthumous fame were his objects alone; he mounted the tribune to behold them, and he beheld them later from the scaffold; and he plunged into the future, young, handsome, immortal in the annals of France, with all his enthusiasm, and some few stains, already effaced in his generous blood. Such was the man whom nature had given to the Girondists as their chief. He disdained the office, although he possessed all the qualities and the views, of a statesman; too careless to be the leader of a party, too great to be second to any one. Such was Vergniaud,—more illustrious than useful to his friends; he would not lead, but immortalised, them.

We will describe this great man more in detail at the period when his talent places him in a more conspicuous situation. "Are there circumstances," said he "in which the natural rights of man can permit a nation to adopt any measure against emigrations?" Vergniaud spoke against those pretended natural rights, and recognised, above all individual rights, the right of society, which comprises and dominates over all, just as the whole predominates over a portion: he compared political liberty to the right of a citizen to do what he pleases, provided he do nothing injurious to his country; but there he stops. Man can, no doubt, materially use this right to abdicate the country in which he was born and to which he belongs, as the limb belongs to the body, but this abdication is treason; for it severs the union between the nation and himself, and the nation no longer owes him or his property any protection. After having on this principle destroyed the puerile distinction between the functionary and the mere emigrant, he proved that society falls into decay if she refuse herself the right of retaining those who forsake her in her hour of danger and difficulty. When she gave him all the universe for his country, she refused him that which gave him birth. But what will be the consequence if this emigrant, ceasing to play merely the part of a cowardly fugitive, becomes a foe, and, assembling with his fellow-traitors, surrounds the nation with a band of conspirators? What, shall attack be permitted to the emigres, and good citizens forbidden to defend themselves?

XVI.

"But," continued he, "is France in this situation that she ought to fear from these men, who are about to excite all the ancient hatreds of the foreign courts against us? No; we shall soon see these proud mendicants, who are now receiving the roubles of Catherine and the millions of Holland, expiate in shame and misery the crimes their pride has entailed on them. Moreover these kings hesitate to attack us; they know that, to the spirit of philosophy that has infused into us the breath of liberty, there are no Pyrenees; they dread that the foot of their soldiers should touch a soil that blazes with this holy flame; they tremble, lest on the day of battle the patriots of every country should recognise each other, and two armies ready to combat be converted into a band of brethren, united against their tyrants. But should it be necessary to appeal to arms, we well remember that a thousand Greeks, combating for liberty, trampled on a million of Persians.

"We are told 'the emigres have no evil designs against their country; it is only a temporary absence: where are the legal proofs of what you assert? when you produce them it be time enough to punish the guilty.' Oh you who use such language, why were you not in the Roman senate when Cicero denounced Catiline? You would have asked him for the legal proof. I can picture his astonishment to myself: whilst he sought for proofs Rome would have been sacked, and you and Catiline have reigned over a heap of ruins. Legal proofs! And have you calculated the blood they will cost you to obtain? Now let us forestall our enemies, by adopting rigorous measures; let us rid the nation of this swarm of insects, greedy of its blood,—by whom it is pursued and tormented. But what should these measures be? In the first place seize on the property of the absentees. This is but a petty measure you will say. What matter its importance or its insignificancy, so that it be just. As for the officers who have deserted, the Code penal prescribes their fate—death and infamy. The French princes are even more culpable; and the summons to return to their country, which it is proposed to address to them, is neither sufficient for your honour nor your safety. Their attempts are openly made; either they must tremble before you, or you must tremble before them; you must choose. Men talk of the profound grief this will cause the king: Brutus immolated his guilty offspring at the shrine of his country, but the heart of Louis XVI. shall not be put to so severe a trial. If these princes, alike bad brothers and citizens, refuse to obey, let him turn to the hearts of the French nation, and they will amply repay his losses." (Loud applause.)

Pastoret, who spoke after Vergniaud, quoted the saying of Montesquieu, "There is a time when it is necessary to cast a veil over the statue of Liberty, as we conceal the statues of the Gods." To be ever on the watch, and to fear nothing, should be the maxim of every free people. He concluded by proposing repressive, but moderate and gradual measures, against the absentees.

XVII.

Isnard declared that the measures proposed until then were satisfactory to prudence, but not to justice, and the vengeance which an outraged nation owed to itself; and he thus continued:—

"If I am allowed to speak the truth, I shall say, that if we do not punish all these heads of the rebellion, it is not that we do not know, at the bottom of our hearts, that they are guilty, but because they are princes; and, although we have destroyed the nobility and distinctions of blood, these vain phantoms still affect our minds. Ah! it is time that this great level of equality, which has passed over France, should at length take its full effect. Then only will they believe in our equality. You should fear by this evidence of impunity that you may urge the people to excesses. The anger of the people is but too often the sequel to the silence of the laws. The law should enter the palaces of the great, as well as in the hovel of the poor, and as inexorable as death, when it falls upon the guilty, should make no distinction between ranks and titles. They try to lull you to sleep. I tell you that the nation should watch incessantly. Despotism and aristocracy do not sleep; and if nations doze but for a moment, they awake in fetters. If the fire of heaven was in the power of men, it should be darted at those who attempt the liberties of the people: thus, the people never pardon conspirators against their liberties. When the Gauls scaled the walls of the capital, Manlius awoke, hastened to the breach, and saved the republic. That same Manlius, subsequently accused of conspiring against public liberty, was cited before the tribunes. He presented bracelets, javelins, twelve civic crowns, thirty spoils torn from conquered enemies, and his breast scarred with cicatrices; he reminded them that he had saved Rome, and yet the sole reply was to cast him headlong from the same rock whence he had precipitated the Gauls. These, sirs, were a free people.

"And we, since the day we acquired our liberty, have not ceased to pardon our patricians their conspiracies, have not ceased to recompense their crimes by sending them chariots of gold: as for me, if I voted such gifts, I should die of remorse. The people contemplate and judge us, and on their sentence depends the destiny of our labours. Cowards, we lose the public confidence; firm, our enemies would be disconcerted. Do not then sully the sanctity of the oath, by making it pause in deference before mouths thirsting for our blood. Our enemies will swear with one hand, whilst with the other they will sharpen their swords against us."

Each violent sentence in this harangue excited in the Assembly and the tribunes those displays of public feeling which found expression in loud applause. It was felt that, for the future, the only line of policy would be in the anger of the nation; that the time for philosophy in the tribune was passed, and that the Assembly would not be slow in throwing aside principles in order to take up arms.

The Girondists, who did not wish that Isnard should have gone so far, felt that it was necessary to follow him whithersoever popularity should lead him. In vain did Condorcet defend his proposition for a delay of the decree. The Assembly, in a report brought up by Ducastel, adopted the decree of its legislative committee. The principal clauses were, that the French, assembled on the other side of the frontiers, should be, from that moment, declared actuated by conspiracy towards France; that they should be declared actual conspirators, if they did not return before the 1st of January, 1792, and as such punished with death; that the French princes, brothers of the king, should be punishable with death, like other emigrants, if they did not obey the summons thus sent to them; that, for the present, their revenues should be sequestrated; and, finally, that those military and naval officers who abandoned their posts without leave, or their resignation being accepted, should be considered as deserters, and punished with death.

XVIII.

These two decrees struck terror to the heart of the king, and consternation to his council. The constitution gave him the right of suspending them by the royal veto; but to suspend the effects of the national indignation against the armed enemies of the Revolution, was to invoke it on his own head. The Girondists artfully fomented these elements of discord between the Assembly and the king. They impatiently awaited until the refusal to sanction the decrees should urge irritation to its height, and force the king to fly or place himself in their hands.

The most monarchical spirit of the Constituent Assembly still reigned in the Directory of the department of Paris. Desmeuniers, Baumetz, Talleyrand-Perigord, Larochefoucauld, were the principal members. They drew up an address to the king, entreating him to refuse his sanction to the decree against the nonjuring priests. This address, in which the Legislative Assembly was treated with much disdain, breathes the true spirit of government as regards religious matters. It is comprised in the axiom which is or ought to be the code of all consciences, "Since no religion is a law, let no religion be a crime!"

A young writer whose name, already celebrated, was to be hereafter consecrated by martyrdom, Andre Chenier, considering the question in the highest strain of philosophy, published on the same subject a letter worthy of posterity. It is the property of genius not to allow its views to be obscured by the prejudices of the moment. Its gaze is too lofty for vulgar errors to deprive it of the ever-during light of truth. It has by anticipation in its decisions the impartiality of the future.

"All those," says Andre Chenier, "who have preserved the liberty of their reason, and in whom patriotism is not a violent desire for rule, see with much pain that the dissensions of the priests have of necessity occupied the first sittings of the Assembly. It is true that the public mind is enlightened on this point, on which even the Constituent Assembly itself is deceived. It has pretended to form a civil code of religion, that is to say, it had the idea of creating one priesthood after having destroyed another. Of what consequence is it that one religion differs from another? Is it for the National Assembly to reunite the divided sects, and weigh all their differences? Are politicians theologians? We shall only be delivered from the influence of these men when the National Assembly shall have maintained for each the perfect liberty of following or inventing whatsoever religion may please it; when every one shall pay for the worship he prefers to adopt, and pays for no other; and when the impartiality of tribunals, in such cases, shall punish alike the persecutors or the seditious of all forms of worship: and the members of the National Assembly say also, that all the French people are not yet sufficiently ripe for this doctrine. We must reply to them,—this may be, but it is for you to ripen us by your words, your acts, your laws! Priests do not trouble states when states do not disturb them. Let us remember that eighteen centuries have seen all the Christian sects, torn and bleeding from theological absurdities and sacerdotal hatreds, always terminate by arming themselves with popular power."

This letter passed over the heads of the parties who disputed the conscience of the people; but the petition of the Directory of Paris, which demanded the veto of the king against the decrees of the Assembly, produced violent opposition petitions. For the first time, Legendre, a butcher of Paris, appeared at the bar of the Assembly, where he vociferated in oratorical strain the imprecations of the people against the enemies of the nation and crowned traitors. Legendre decked his trivial ideas in high-sounding language. From this junction of vulgar ideas with the ambitious expressions of the tribune sprung that strange language in which the fragments of thought are mingled with the tinsel of words, and thus the popular eloquence of the period resembles the ill-combined display at an extravagant parvenu. The populace was proud at robbing the aristocracy of its language, even to turn it against them; but whilst it filched, it soiled it. "Representatives," said Legendre, "bid the eagle of victory and fame to soar over your heads and ours; say to the ministers, We love the people,—let your punishment begin: the tyrants must die!"

XIX.

Camille Desmoulins, the Aristophanes of the Revolution, then borrowed the sonorous voice of the Abbe Fauchet, in order to make himself heard. Camille Desmoulins was the Voltaire of the streets; he struck on the chord of passion by his sarcasms. "Representatives," said he, "the applauses of the people are its civil list: the inviolability of the king is a thing most infinitely just, for he ought, by nature, to be always in opposition to the general will and our interest. One does not voluntarily fall from so great a height. Let us take example from God, whose commandments are never impossible; let us not require from the ci-devant sovereign an impossible love of the national sovereignty; is it not very natural that he should give his veto to the best decrees? But let the magistrates of the people—let the Directory of Paris—let the same men, who, four months since, in the Champ-de-Mars, fired upon the citizens who were signing a petition against one decree, inundate the empire with a petition, which is evidently but the first page of a vast register of counter-revolution, a subscription to civil war, sent by them for signature to all the fanatics, all the idiots, all the slaves, all the robbers of the eighty-three departments, at the head of which are the exemplary names of the members of the Directory of Paris—fathers of their country! There is in this such a complication of ingratitude and fraud, prevarication and perverseness, philosophical hypocrisy and perfidious moderation, that on the instant we rally round the decrees and around yourselves. Continue faithful, mandatories, and if they obstinately persist in not permitting you to save the nation, well, then, we will save it ourselves! For at last the power of the royal veto will have a term, and the taking of the Bastille is not prevented by a veto.

"For a long while we have been in possession of the civism of our Directory, when we saw it in an incendiary proclamation, not only again open the evangelical pulpits to the priests, but the seditious tribunes to conspirators in surplices! Their address is a manifesto tending to degrade the constitutional powers: it is a collective petition—it is an incentive to civil war, and the overthrow of the constitution. Assuredly we are no admirers of the representative government, of which we think with J. J. Rousseau; and if we like certain articles but little, still less do we like civil war. So many grounds of accusation! The crime of these men is settled. Strike, then! If the head sleeps, shall the arm act? Raise not that arm again; do not rouse the national club only to crush insects. A Varnier or De Latre! Did Cato and Cicero accuse Cethegus or Catiline? It is the leaders we should assail. Strike at the head."

This strain of irony and boldness, less applauded by the clapping of hands than by shouts of laughter, delighted the tribunes. They voted the sending of the proces verbal of the meeting into every department. It was legislatively elevating a pamphlet to the dignity of a public act, and to distribute ready-made insult to the citizens, that they might have a supply to vent against public authority. The king trembled before the pamphleteer; he felt from this first treatment of his baffled prerogative that the constitution would crumble in his hands each time that he dared to make use of it.

The next day the constitutional party in greater force at the meeting recalled the sending of this pamphlet to the departments. Brissot was angry in his journal, the Patriote Francais. It was there and at the Jacobins more than in the tribune, that he gave instructions to his party, and allowed the idea of a republic to escape him. Brissot had not the properties of an orator: his dogged spirit, sectarian and arbitrary, was fitter for conspiracy than action: the ardour of his mind was excessive, but concentrated. He shed neither those lights nor those flames which kindle enthusiasm—that explosion of ideas. It was the lamp of the Gironde party; it was neither its beacon nor its torch.

XX.

The Jacobins, weakened for a time by the great number of their members elected to the Legislative Assembly, remained for a brief space without a fixed course to pursue, like an army disbanded after victory. The club of the Feuillants, composed of the remains of the constitutional party in the Constituted Assembly, strove to resume the ascendency over the mind of the people. Barnave, Lameth, and Duport were the leaders of this party. Fearful of the people, and convinced that an Assembly without any thing to counterbalance it would inevitably absorb the poor remnant of the monarchy, this party wished to have two chambers and an equally poised constitution. Barnave, whose repentance had led him to join this party, remained at Paris, and had secret interviews with Louis XVI.; but his counsels, like those of Mirabeau in his latter days, were but vain regrets, for the Revolution was beyond their power to control, and no longer obeyed them. They yet, however, maintained some influence over the constituted bodies of Paris, and the resolutions of the king, who could not bring himself to believe that these men, who yesterday were so powerful against it, were to-day destitute of influence; and they formed his last hope against the new enemies he saw in the Girondists.

The national guard, the directory of the department of Paris! the mayor of Paris himself, Bailly, and all that party in the nation who wished to maintain order, still supported them—theirs was the party of repentance and terror. M. de La Fayette, Madame de Staeel, and M. de Narbonne, had a secret understanding with the Feuillants, and a part of the press was on their side. These papers sought to render M. de Narbonne popular, and to obtain for him the post of minister of war. The Girondist papers already excited the anger of the people against this party. Brissot sowed the seeds of calumny and suspicion: he denounced them to the hatred of the nation. "Number them—name them," said he; "their names denounce them; they are the relics of the dethroned aristocracy, who would fain resuscitate a constitutional nobility, establish a second legislative chamber and a senate of nobles, and who implore, in order to gain their ends, the armed intervention of the powers. They have sold themselves to the Chateau de Tuileries, and sell there a great portion of the members of the Assembly; they have amongst them neither men of genius nor men of resolution; their talent is but treason, their genius but intrigue."

It was thus that the Girondists and the Jacobins, though at this moment beaten, prepared those enmities against the Feuillants that, at no remote period, were destined to disperse the club. Whilst the Girondists followed this course, the royalists continually urged the people to excesses through the medium of their papers, in order, as they said, to find a remedy for the evil in the evil itself. Thus they encouraged the Jacobins against the Feuillants, and heaped ridicule and insult on those leaders of the constitutional party who sought to save a remnant of the monarchy; for that which they detested most was the success of the revolution. Their doctrine of absolute power was less humiliatingly contradicted in their eyes by the overthrow of the empire and throne, than in the constitutional monarchy that preserved at once the king and liberty. Since the aristocracy lost the possession of the supreme power, its sole ambition—its only aim—was to see it fall into the hands of those most unworthy to hold it. Incapable of again rising by its own force, it sought to find in disorder the means of so doing; and from the first day of the Revolution to the last, this party had no other instinct, and it was thus that it ruined itself whilst it ruined the monarchy. It carried the hatred of the Revolution even to posterity; and though they did not take an active part in the crimes of the Revolution, yet their best wishes were with it. Every fresh excess of the people gave a new ray of hope to its enemies: such is the policy of despair, blind and criminal as herself.

XXI.

An example of this at this moment occurred. La Fayette resigned the command of the national guard into the hands of the council general of the commune. At this meeting blazed the last faint spark of popular favour. After he quitted the chamber a deliberation was held as to what mark of gratitude and regard the city of Paris should offer him. The general addressed a farewell letter to the civic force, and affected to believe that the formation of the constitution was the era of the Revolution, and reduced him, like Washington, to the rank of a simple citizen of a free country. "The time of revolution," said he, in this letter, "has given place to a regular organisation, owing to the liberty and prosperity it assures us. I feel it is now my duty to my country to return unreservedly into her hands all the force and influence with which I was intrusted for her defence during the tempests that convulsed her—such is my only ambition. Beware how you believe," added he, in conclusion, "that every species of despotism, is extinct!" And he then proceeded to point out some of those perils and excesses into which liberty might fall at her first outset.

This letter was received by the national guard with an enthusiasm rather feigned than sincere. They wished to strike a last blow against the factious by adhering to the principles of their general, and voted to him a sword forged from the bolts of the Bastille, and a marble statue of Washington. La Fayette hastened to enjoy this premature triumph, and resigned the dictatorship at the moment when a dictatorship was most necessary to his country. On his retirement to his estates in Auvergne, he received the deputation of the national guard, who brought him the proces verbal of the debate. "You behold me once more amidst the scenes where I was born," said he; "I shall not again quit them, save to defend and confirm our new-formed liberty should it be menaced."

The different opinions of parties followed him in his retirement. "Now," said the Journal de la Revolution, "that the hero of two worlds has played out his part at Paris, we are curious to know if the ex-general has done more harm than good to the Revolution. In order to solve the problem, let us examine his acts. We shall first see that the founder of American liberty does not dare comply with the wishes of the people in Europe, until he had asked permission from the monarch. We shall see that he grew pale at the sight of the Parisian army on its road to Versailles—alike deceiving the people and the king; to the one he said, 'I deliver the king into your power,' to the other, 'I bring you my army.' We should have seen him return to Paris, dragging in his train those brave citizens who were alone guilty of having sought to destroy the keep of Vincennes as they had destroyed the Bastille, their hands bound behind their backs. We see him on he morrow of the journee des poignards, touch the hands of those whom he had denounced to public indignation the yesterday. And now we behold him quit the cause of liberty, by a decree which he himself had secretly solicited, and disappear for a moment in Auvergne to re-appear on our frontiers. Yet he has done us some service, let us acknowledge it. We owe to him to have accustomed our national guards to go through the civic and religious ceremonies; to bear the fatigue of the morning drill in the Champs Elysees; to take patriotic oaths and to give suppers. Let us then bid him adieu! La Fayette, to consummate the greatest revolution that a nation ever attempted, we required a leader, whose mind was on an equality with so great an event. We accepted you; the pliability of your features, your studied orations, your premeditated axioms—all those productions of art that nature disavows, seemed suspicious to the more clear-sighted patriots. The boldest of them followed you, tore the mask from your visage, and cried—Citizens, this hero is but a courtier, this sage but an impostor. Now, thanks to you, the Revolution can no longer bite, you have cut the lion's claws; the people is more formidable to its conductors; they have reassumed the whip and spur, and you fly. Let civic crowns strew your paths, though we remain; but where shall we find a Brutus?"

XXII.

Bailly, mayor of Paris, withdrew at the same time, abandoned by that party of whom he had been the idol, and whose victim he began to be; but his philosophic mind rated more highly the good done to the people than its favour, and more ambitious of being useful than of governing it, he already testified that heroic contempt for the calumnies of his enemies he afterwards displayed for death.

His voice was, however, lost in the tumult of the approaching municipal elections; two men already disputed the dignity of mayor of Paris, for in proportion as the royal authority declined, and that of the constitution was absorbed in the troubles of the kingdom, the mayor of Paris would become the real dictator of the capital.

These two men were La Fayette and Petion. La Fayette supported by the constitutionalists and the national guard, Petion by the Girondists and the Jacobins. The royalist party, by pronouncing for or against one of them, would decide the election. The king had no longer the influence of the government, which he had suffered to escape from his grasp, but he still possessed the occult powers of corruption over the leaders of the different parties. A portion of the twenty-five millions of francs (1,000,000l.) was applied by M. de Laporte, the intendant de la liste civile, and by MM. Bertrand de Molleville and Montmorin, his ministers, in purchasing votes at the elections, motions at the clubs, applause or hisses in the Assembly. These subsidies, which had commenced with Mirabeau, now descended to the lowest dregs of the factions; they bribed the royalist press, and found their way into the hands of the orators and writers apparently most inveterate against the court; and many false manoeuvres, to which the people were urged, arose from no other source. There was a ministry of corruption, over which perfidy presided. Many obtained from this source, under pretence of aiding the court, the power of moderating or betraying the people; then fearing lest their treachery should be discovered, they hid it by a second betrayal, and turned against the king his own motions. Danton was of this number. Sometimes, through motives of charity or peace, the king gave a monthly sum to be distributed amongst the national guard, and the quartiers in which insurrection was most to be apprehended. M. de La Fayette, and Petion himself, often drew money from this source. Thus the king could, by employing those means, ensure the election, and by joining the constitutionalist party determine the choice of Paris in favour of M. de La Fayette. M. de La Fayette was one of the first originators of this revolution which humbled the throne; his name was associated with every humiliation of the court, with all the resentment of the queen, all the terrors of the king; he had been first their dread, then their protector, and, lastly, their guardian: could he be now their hope? Would not this post of mayor of Paris, this vast, civil, and popular dignity, after this long-armed dictatorship in the capital, be to La Fayette but a second stepping-stone that would raise him higher than the throne, and cast the king and constitution into the shade? This man, with his theoretically liberal ideas, was well-intentioned, and wished rather to dominate than to reign; but could any reliance be placed on these good intentions that had been so often overcome? Was it not full of these good intentions that he had usurped the command of the civic force—captured the Bastille with the insurgent Gardes Francaises—marched to Versailles at the head of the populace of Paris—suffered the chateau to be forced on the 6th of October—arrested the royal family at Varennes, and retained the king a prisoner in his own palace? Would he now resist should the people again command him? Would he abandon the role of the French Washington when he had half fulfilled it? The human heart is so constituted that we rather prefer to cast ourselves into the power of those who would destroy us than seek safety from those who humiliate us. La Fayette humiliated the king, and more especially the queen.

A respectful independence was the habitual expression of La Fayette's countenance in presence of Marie Antoinette. There was perceptible in the general's attitude, it was to be seen in his words, distinguishable in his accent, beneath the cold and polished forms of the courtier, the inflexibility of the citizen. The queen preferred the factions. She thus plainly spoke to her confidents. "M. de La Fayette," she said, "will not be the mayor of Paris in order that he may the sooner become the maire du Palais. Petion is a Jacobin, a republican; but he is a fool, incapable of ever becoming the leader of a party: he would be a nullity as maire, and, besides, the very interest he knows we should take in his nomination might bind him to the king."

Petion was the son of a procureur at Chartres, and a townsman of Brissot; was brought up in the same way as he,—in the same studies, same philosophy, same hatreds. They were two men of the same mind. The Revolution, which had been the ideal of their youth, had called them on the scene the same day, but to play very different parts. Brissot, the scribe, political adventurer, journalist, was the man of theory; Petion, the practical man. He had in his countenance, in his character, and his talents, that solemn mediocrity which is of the multitude, and charms it; at least he was a sincere man, a virtue which the people appreciate beyond all others in those who are concerned in public affairs. Called by his fellow citizens to the National Assembly, he acquired there a name rather from his efforts than his success. The fortunate compeer of Robespierre, and then his friend, they had formed by themselves that popular party, scarcely visible at the beginning, which professed pure democracy and the philosophy of J. J. Rousseau; whilst Cazales, Mirabeau, and Maury, the nobility, clergy, and bourgeoisie, alone disputed the government. The despotism of a class appeared to Robespierre and Petion as odious as the despotism of a king. The triumph of the tiers etat was of little consequence, so long as the people, that is to say, all human kind in its widest acceptation, did not prevail. They had given themselves as a task, not victory to one class over another, but the victory and organisation of a divine and absolute principle—humanity. This was their weakness in the first days of the Revolution, and subsequently their strength. Petion was beginning to gather in its harvest.

He had gradually, by his doctrines and his speeches, insinuated himself into the confidence of the people of Paris; he connected himself with literary men by the cultivation of his mind; with the Orleans party by his intimacy with Madame de Genlis, the favourite of the prince, and governess to his children. He was spoken of in one place as a sage, who sought to embody philosophy in the constitution; in another as a sagacious conspirator, who desired to sap the throne, or to place upon it the Duc D'Orleans, embodying the interests and dynasty of the people. This two-fold reputation was equally advantageous to him. Honest men believed him to be an honest man,—malcontents to be a malcontent: the court disdained to fear him; it saw in him only an innocent Utopian, and had for him that contemptuous indulgence which aristocrats have invariably for men of political creed; besides, Petion ridded it of La Fayette. To change its foe was to give it breathing time.

These three elements of success gave Petion an immense majority; he was nominated mayor of Paris by more than 6000 votes. La Fayette had but 3000. He might at this moment, from the depth of his retreat, have fairly measured by these figures the decline of his popularity. La Fayette represented the city, Petion the nation. The armed bourgeoisie quitted public affairs with the one, and the people assumed them with the other. The Revolution marked with a proper name the fresh step she had made.

Petion, scarcely elected, went in triumph to the Jacobins, and was thus carried in the arms of patriots into the tribune. Old Dusault, who occupied it at the moment, stammered out a few words, interrupted by his sobs, in honour of his pupil. "I look on M. Petion," said he, "as my son; it is very bold no doubt." Petion overcome, embraced the old man with ardour; the tribunes applauded and wept.

The other nominations were made in the same spirit. Manuel[11] was named procureur de la commune;—Danton, his deputy, which was his first step in popularity; he did not owe it, like Petion, to the public esteem, but to his own intriguing. He was appointed in spite of his reputation. The people are apt to excuse the vices they find useful.

The nomination of Petion to the office of maire of Paris gave the Girondists a constant point d'appui in the capital. Paris, as well as the Assembly, escaped from the king's hands. The work of the Constituent Assembly crumbled away in three months. The wheels gave way before they were set in motion. All presaged an approaching collision between the executive power and the power of the Assembly. Whence arose this sudden decomposition? It is now the moment for throwing a glance over this labour of the Constituent Assembly and its framers.



BOOK VII.

I.

The Constituent Assembly had abdicated in a storm.

This assembly had consisted of the most imposing body of men that had ever represented, not only France, but the human race. It was in fact the oecumenical council of modern reason and philosophy. Nature seemed to have created expressly, and the different orders of society to have reserved, for this work, the geniuses, characters, and even vices most requisite to give to this focus of the lights of the age the greatness, eclat, and movement of a fire destined to consume the remnants of an old society, and to illumine a new one. There were sages, like Bailly and Mounier; thinkers, like Sieyes; factious partisans, like Barnave; statesmen like Talleyrand; men, epochs, like Mirabeau, and men, principles like Robespierre. Each cause was personified by what most distinguished each party. The very victims were illustrious. Cazales, Malouet, Maury, sounded forth in bursts of grief and eloquence the successive falls of the throne, the aristocracy, and the clergy. This active centre of the thoughts of a century, was sustained during the whole time by the storm of perpetual political conflict. Whilst they were deliberating within, the people were acting without, and struck at the doors. These twenty-six months of consultations were one uninterrupted sedition. Scarcely had one institution crumbled to pieces in the tribune, than the nation swept it away to clear the space for another institution. The anger of the people was only its impatience of obstacles, its madness was only the excitement of its reason. Even in its fury it was always a truth that agitated it. The tribunes only blinded, by dazzling it. The unique characteristic of this Assembly was that passion for the ideal which it always felt itself irresistibly urged on to accomplish. An act of perpetual faith in reason and justice: a holy passion for the good and right, which possessed it, and made it devote itself to its work; like the statuary who seeing the fire in the furnace, where he was casting his bronze, on the point of being extinguished, threw his furniture, his children's bed, and even his house into the flame, preferring rather that all should perish than that his work should be lost.

Thus it is that the Revolution has become a date in the human mind, and not merely an event in the history of the people. The men of the Constituent Assembly were not Frenchmen, they were universal men. We mistake, we vilify them when we consider them only as priests, aristocrats, plebeians, faithful subjects, malcontents or demagogues. They were, and they felt themselves to be, better than that,—workmen of God; called by him to restore social reason, and found right and justice throughout the universe. None of them, except those who opposed the Revolution, limited the extent of its thought to the boundaries of France. The declaration of the Rights of Man proves this. It was the decalogue of the human race in all languages. The modern Revolution called the Gentiles, as well as the Jews, to partake of the light and reign of Fraternity.

II.

Thus, not one of its apostles who did not proclaim peace amongst nations. Mirabeau, La Fayette, Robespierre himself erased war from the symbol which they presented to the nation. It was the malcontent and ambitious who subsequently demanded it, and not the leading Revolutionists. When war burst out the Revolution had degenerated. The Constituent Assembly took care not to place on the frontiers of France the boundaries of its truths, and to limit the sympathising soul of the French Revolution to a narrow patriotism. The globe was the country of its dogmata. France was only the workshop; it worked for all other people. Respectful of, or indifferent to, the question of national territories, from the first moment it forbade conquest. It only reserved to itself the property, or rather the invention of universal truths which it brought to light. As vast as humanity, it had not the selfishness to isolate itself. It desired to give, and not to deprive. It sought to spread itself by right, and not by force. Essentially spiritual, it sought no other empire for France than the voluntary empire which imitation by the human mind conferred upon it.

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

III.

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

IV.

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

V.

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

VI.

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

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

VII.

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

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

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

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

VIII.

But, they say with Barnave, France is monarchical by its geography as by its character, and the contest arises in minds directly between the monarchy and the republic. Let us make ourselves understood:—

Geography is of no party; Rome and Carthage had no frontiers; Genoa and Venice had no territories. It is not the soil which determines the nature of the constitutions of people, it is time. The geographical objection of Barnave fell to the ground a year afterwards, before the prodigies in France in 1792. It proved that if a republic fails in unity and centralisation, it is unable to defend a continental nationality. Waves and mountains are the frontiers of the weak—men are the frontiers of a people. Let us then have done with geography. It is not geometricians but statesmen who form social constitutions.

Nations have two great interests which reveal to them the form they should take, according to the hour of the national life which they have attained—the instinct of their conservation, and the instinct of their growth. To act, or be idle, to walk, or sit down, are two acts wholly different, which compel men to assume attitudes wholly diverse. It is the same with nations. The monarchy or the republic correspond exactly amongst a people to the necessities of these two opposite conditions of society—repose or action. We here understand two words; these two words, repose and action, in their most absolute acceptation; for there is repose in republics, as there is action in monarchies.

Is it a question of preservation, of reproduction, of development in that kind of slow and insensible growth which people have like vast vegetables? Is it a question of keeping in harmony with the European balance of preserving its laws and manners; of maintaining its traditions, perpetuating opinions and worship, of guaranteeing properties and right conduct, of preventing troubles, agitation, factions? The monarchy is evidently more proper for this than any other state of society. It protects in lower classes that security which it desires for its own elevated condition. It is order in essence and selfishness: order is its life—tradition its dogma, the nation is its heritage, religion its ally, aristocracies are its barrier against the invasions of the people. It must preserve all this or perish. It is the government of prudence, because it is also that of great responsibility. An empire is the stake of a monarch—the throne is everywhere a guarantee of immobility. When we are placed on high we fear every shake, for we have but to lose or to fall.

When then a nation is placed in a sufficing territory, with settled laws, fixed interests, sacred creeds, its worship in full force, its social classes graduated, its administration organised, it is monarchical in spite of seas, rivers, or mountains. It abdicates and empowers the monarchy to foresee, to will, to act for it. It is the most perfect of governments for such functions. It calls itself by the two names of society itself, unity and hereditary right.

IX.

If a people, on the contrary, is at one of those epochs when it is necessary to act with all the intensity of its strength in order to operate within and without one of those organic transformations which are as necessary to people as is a current to waves or explosion to compressed powers—a republic is the obligatory and fated form of a nation at such a moment.

For a sudden, irresistible, convulsive action of the social body, the arm and will of all is needed; the people become a mob, and rush headlong to danger. It can alone suffice to its own danger. What other arm but that of the whole people could stir what it has to stir?—displace what it has to displace?—install what it desires to found? The monarch would break his sceptre into fragments on it. There must be a lever capable of raising thirty millions of wills—this lever the nation alone possesses. It is in itself the moving power, the fulcrum and the lever.

X.

We cannot ask of the law to act against the law, of tradition to act against tradition, of established order to act against established order. It would be to require strength from weakness, life from suicide; and, besides, we should ask in vain of the monarchical power to accomplish these changes, in which very often all perish, and the king foremost. Such a course would be the contradiction to the monarchy: how could it attempt it?

To ask a king to destroy the empire of a religion which consecrates him; to despoil of their riches a clergy who has them by the same divine title as that by which he has tenure of his kingdom; to degrade an aristocracy which is the first step of his throne; to throw down social hierarchies of which he is the head and crown; to undermine laws of which he is the highest,—is to ask of the vaults of an edifice to sap the foundation. The king could not do so, and would not. In thus overthrowing all that serves him for support, he feels that he would be rendered wholly destitute. He would be playing with his throne and dynasty. He is responsible for his race. He is prudent by nature, and a temporiser from necessity. He must soothe, please, manage, and be on terms with all constituted interests. He is the king of the worship, aristocracy, laws, manners, abuses, and falsehoods of the empire. Even the vices of the constitution form a portion of his strength. To threaten them is to destroy himself. He may hate them: he dares not to attack them.

XI.

A republic alone can suffice for such crises: nations know this, and cling to it as their sole hope of preservation. The will of the people becomes the ruling power. It drives from its presence the timid, seeks the bold and the determined, summons all men to aid in the great work, makes trial of, employs, and combines the force, the devotion, the heroism of every man. It is the populace that holds the helm of the vessel, on which the most prompt, or the most firm seizes, until it is again torn from him by a stronger hand. But every one governs in the common name. Private consideration, timidity of situation, difference of rank, all disappears. No one is responsible—to-day he rises to power—to-morrow he descends to exile or the scaffold—there is no morrow, all is to-day—resistance is crushed by the irresistible power of movement. All bends—all yields before the people. The resentments of castes—the abolished forms of worship—the decimation of property—the extirpated abuses—the humiliated aristocracies—all are lost in the thundering sound of the overthrow of ancient ideas and things. On whom can we demand revenge? The nation answers for all to all, and no man has aught to require from it. It does not survive itself, it braves recrimination and vengeance—it is absolute as an element—anonymous, as fatality—it completes its work, and when that is ended, says, "Let us rest; and let us assume monarchy."

XII.

Such a plan of action is the republic—the only one that befits the trying period of transformation. It is the government of passion, the government of crises, the government of revolutions. So long as revolutions are unfinished, so long does the instinct of the people urge them to a republic; for they feel that every other hand is too feeble to give that onward and violent impulse necessary to the Revolution. The people (and they act wisely), will not trust an irresponsible, perpetual, and hereditary power to fulfil the commands of the epochs of creation—they will perform them themselves. Their dictatorship appears to them indispensable to save the nation; and what is a dictatorship but a republic? It cannot resign its power until every crisis be over, and the great work of revolution completed and consolidated. Then it can again resume the monarchy, and say, "Reign in the name of the ideas I have given thee!"

XIII.

The Constituent Assembly was then blind and weak, not to create a republic as the natural instrument of the Revolution. Mirabeau, Bailly, La Fayette, Sieyes, Barnave, Talleyrand, and Lameth acted in this respect like philosophers, and not great politicians, as events have amply proved. They believed the Revolution finished as soon as it was written, and the monarchy converted as soon as it had sworn to preserve the constitution. The Revolution was but begun, and the oath of royalty to the Revolution as futile as the oath of the Revolution to royalty. These two elements could not mingle until after an interval of an age—this interval was the republic. A nation does not change in a day, or in fifty years, from revolutionary excitements to monarchical repose. It is because we forgot it at the hour when we should have remembered it, that the crisis was so terrible, and that we yet feel its effects. If the Revolution, which perpetually follows itself, had had its own natural and fitting government, the republic—this republic would have been less tumultuous and less perturbed than the five attempts we made for a monarchy. The nature of the age in which we live protests against the traditional forms of power: at an epoch of movement—a government of movement—such is the law.

XIV.

The National Assembly, it is said, had not the right to act thus; for it had sworn allegiance to the monarchy and recognised Louis XVI., and could not dethrone him without a crime. The objection is puerile, if it originates in minds who do not believe in the possession of the people by dynasties. The Assembly at its outset had proclaimed the inalienable right of the people; and the lawfulness of necessary insurrection, and the oath of the Tennis Court (Serment du Jeu de Paume), were nought but an oath of disobedience to the king and of fidelity to the nation. The Assembly had afterwards proclaimed Louis XVI. king of the French. If they possessed the power of proclaiming him king, they also possessed that of proclaiming him a simple citizen. Forfeiture for the national utility, and that of the human race, was evidently one of its principles, and yet how did it act? It leaves Louis XVI. king, or makes him king, not through respect for that institution, but out of respect for his person, and pity for so great a downfall. Such was the truth; it feared sacrilege, and fell into anarchy. It was clement, noble, and generous. Louis XVI. had deserved well from his people; who well can dare to censure so magnanimous a condescension? Before the king's departure for Varennes, the absolute right of the nation was but an abstract fiction, the summum jus of the Assembly. The royalty of Louis XVI. was respectable and respected, once again it was established.

XV.

But a moment arrived, and this moment was when the king fled his kingdom, protesting against the will of the nation, and sought the assistance of the army, and the intervention of foreign powers, when the Assembly legitimately possessed the rigorous right of disposing of the power, thus abandoned or betrayed. Three courses were open: to declare the downfall of the monarchy, and proclaim a republican revolution; the temporary suspension of the royalty, and govern in its name during its moral eclipse; and, lastly, to restore the monarchy.

The Assembly chose the worst alternative of the three. It feared to be harsh, and was cruel; for by retaining the supreme rank for the king, it condemned him to the torture of the hatred and contempt of the people; it crowned him with suspicions and outrages; and nailed him to the throne, in order that the throne might prove the instrument of his torture and his death.

Of the two other courses, the first was the most logical, to proclaim the downfall of the monarchy and the formation of a republic.

The republic, had it been properly established by the Assembly, would have been far different from the republic traitorously and atrociously extorted nine months after by the insurrection of the 10th of August. It would have doubtless suffered the commotion, inseparable from the birth of a new order of things. It would not have escaped the disorders of nature in a country where every thing was done by first impulse, and impassioned by the magnitude of its perils. But it would have originated in law and not in sedition—in right, and not in violence—in deliberation, and not in insurrection. This alone could have changed the sinister conditions of its birth and its future fate; it might become an agitating power, but it would remain pure and unsullied.

Only reflect for a moment how entirely its legal and premeditated proclamation would have altered the course of events. The 10th of August would not have taken place—the perfidy and tyranny of the commune of Paris—the massacre of the guards—the assault on the palace—the flight of the king to the Assembly—the outrages heaped on him there—and his imprisonment in the temple—would have never occurred.

The republic would not have killed a king, a queen, an innocent babe, and a virtuous princess; it would not have had the massacres of September, those St. Bartholomews of the people—that have left an indelible stain on the whole robes of liberty. It would not have been baptized in the blood of three hundred thousand human beings—it would not have armed the revolutionary tribunal with the axe of the people, with which it immolated a generation to make way for an idea,—it would not have had the 31st of May. The Girondists arriving at the supreme power, unsullied by crime, would have possessed more force with which to combat the demagogues; and the republic calmly and deliberately instituted, would have intimidated Europe far more than an emeute legitimised by bloodshed and assassination. War might have been avoided, or, if it was inevitable, have been more unanimous and more triumphant; our generals would not have been massacred by their soldiers amidst cries of treason. The spirit of the people would have combated with us, and the horror of our days of August, September, and January would not have alienated from our standards the nations attracted thither by our doctrines. Thus a single change in the origin of the republic changed the fate of the Revolution.

XVI.

But if this rigorous resolution was yet repugnant to the feelings of France, and if the Assembly had feared they had given birth to a republic prematurely, the third course was yet open, to proclaim the temporary cessation of royalty during ten years, and govern in a republican form in its name until the constitution was firmly and securely established. This course would have saved all the respect due to royalty; the life of the king—the life of the royal family—the rights of the people—the purity of the Revolution—it was at once firm and calm, efficacious and legitimate. It was such a dictatorship as the people had instinctively figured in the critical times of their existence. But instead of a short, fugitive, disturbed, and ambitious dictatorship of one man, it was the dictatorship of the nation, governing itself through its National Assembly. The nation might have respectfully laid by royalty during ten years, in order itself to carry out a work above the power of the king. This accomplished, resentment extinguished, habits formed, the laws in operation, the frontiers protected, the clergy secularised, the aristocracy humbled, the dictatorship could terminate. The king or his dynasty could ascend without danger a throne from which all danger was now averted. This veritable republic would have thus resumed the name of a constitutional monarchy, without changing any thing, and the statue of royalty would have been replaced on its pedestal when the base had been consolidated. Such would have been the consulate of the people, far superior to that consulate of a man who was to finish by ravaging Europe, and by the double usurpation of a throne and a revolution.

Or, if at the expiration of this national dictatorship, the nation, well governed and guided, found it dangerous or useless to re-establish the throne, what prevented it from saying, I now assume as a definitive government that which I assumed as a dictatorship: I proclaim the French republic as the only government befitting the excitement and energy of a regenerative epoch; for the republic is a dictatorship perpetuated and constituted by the people. What avails a throne? I remain erect: it is the attitude of a people in travail!

In a word, the Constituent Assembly, whose light illumined the globe—whose audacity in two years transformed an empire, had but one fault, that of coming to a close. It should have perpetuated itself: it abdicated. A nation that abdicates after a reign of two years, and on heaps of ruins, bequeaths the sceptre to anarchy. The king could reign no longer, the nation would not. Thus faction reigned, and the Revolution perished; not because it had gone too far, but because it had not been sufficiently bold. So true is it that the timidity of nations is not less disastrous than the weakness of kings; and that a people who knows not how to seize and guard all that which pertains to it, falls at once into tyranny and anarchy. The Assembly dared to do every thing save to reign: the reign of the Revolution was nought but a republic: and the Assembly left this name to factions, and this form to terror. Such was its fault—it expiated it: and the expiation is not yet ended for France.



BOOK VIII.

I.

Whilst the king, isolated at the summit of the constitution, sought support, sometimes by hazardous negotiations with foreigners, sometimes by rash attempts at corruption in the capital, a body, some Girondists and other Jacobins, but as yet confounded under the common denomination of patriots, began to unite and form the nucleus of a great republican idea: they were Petion, Robespierre, Brissot, Buzot, Vergniaud, Guadet, Gensonne, Carra, Louvet, Ducos, Fonfrede, Duperret, Sillery-Genlis, and many others, whose names have scarcely emerged from obscurity. The home of a young woman, daughter of an engraver of the Quai des Orfevres, was the meeting place of this union. It was there that the two great parties of the Gironde and the Montagne assembled, united, separated, and after having acquired power, and overturned the monarchy in company, tore the bosom of their country with their dissensions, and destroyed liberty whilst they destroyed each other. It was neither ambition, nor fortune, nor celebrity which had successively attracted these men to this woman's residence, then without credit, name, or comforts: it was conformity of opinion; it was that devoted worship which chosen spirits like to render in secret as in public to a new truth which promises happiness to mankind; it was the invisible attraction of a common faith, that communion of the first neophytes in the religion of philosophy, where the necessity for souls to unite before they associate by deeds, is felt. So long as the thoughts common to political men have not reached that point where they become fruitful, and are organised by contact, nothing is accomplished. Revolutions are ideas, and it is this communion which creates parties.

The ardent and pure mind of a female was worthy of becoming the focus to which converged all the rays of the new truth, in order to become prolific in the warmth of the heart, and to light the pile of old institutions. Men have the spirit of truth, women only its passion. There must be love in the essence of all creations; it would seem as though truth, like nature, has two sexes. There is invariably a woman at the beginning of all great undertakings; one was requisite to the principle of the French Revolution.[12] We may say that philosophy found this woman in Madame Roland.

The historian, led away by the movement of the events which he retraces, should pause in the presence of this serious and touching figure, as passengers stopped to contemplate her sublime features and white dress on the tumbril which conveyed thousands of victims to death. To understand her we must trace her career from the atelier of her father to the scaffold. It is in a woman's heart that the germ of virtue lies; it is almost always in private life that the secret of public life is reposed.

II.

Young, lovely, radiant with genius, recently married to a man of serious mind, who was touching on old age, and but recently mother of her first child, Madame Roland was born in that intermediary condition in which families scarcely emancipated from manual labour are, it may be said, amphibious between the labourer and the tradesman, and retain in their manners the virtues and simplicity of the people, whilst they already participate in the lights of society. The period in which aristocracies fall is that in which nations regenerate. The sap of the people is there. In this was born Jean Jacques Rousseau, the virile type of Madame Roland. A portrait of her when a child represents a young girl in her father's workshop, holding in one hand a book, and in the other an engraving tool. This picture is the symbolic definition of the social condition in which Madame Roland was born, and the precise moment between the labour of her hands and her mind.

Her father, Gratien Phlippon, was an engraver and painter in enamel. He joined to these two professions that of a trade in diamonds and jewels. He was a man always aspiring higher than his abilities allowed, and a restless speculator, who incessantly destroyed his modest fortune in his efforts to extend it in proportion to his ambitious yearnings. He adored his daughter, and could not, for her sake, content himself with the perspective of the workshop. He gave her an education of the highest degree, and nature had conferred upon her a heart for the most elevated destinies. We need not say what dreams, misery, and misfortunes men with such characters invariably bring upon their honest families.

The young girl grew up in this atmosphere of luxuriant imagination and actual wretchedness. Endowed with a premature judgment, she early detected these domestic miseries, and took refuge in the good sense of her mother from the illusions of her father and her own presentiments of the future.

Marguerite Bimont (her mother's name) had brought her husband a calm beauty, and a mind very superior to her destiny, but angelic piety and resignation armed her equally against ambition and despair. The mother of seven children, who had all died in the birth, she concentrated in her only child all the love of her soul. Yet this very love guarded her from any weakness in the education of her daughter. She preserved the nice balance of her heart and her mind; of her imagination and her reason. The mould in which she formed this youthful mind was graceful; but it was of brass. It might have been said that she foresaw the destinies of her child, and infused into the mind of the young girl that masculine spirit which forms heroes and inspires martyrs.

Nature lent herself admirably to the task, and had endowed her pupil with an understanding even superior to her dazzling beauty. This beauty of her earlier years, of which she has herself traced the principal features with infinite ingenuousness in the more sprightly pages of her memoirs, was far from having gained the energy, the melancholy, and the majesty which she subsequently acquired from repressed love, high thought, and misfortune.

A tall and supple figure, flat shoulders, a prominent bust, raised by a free and strong respiration, a modest and most becoming demeanour, that carriage of the neck which bespeaks intrepidity, black and soft hair, blue eyes, which appeared brown in the depth of their reflection, a look which like her soul passed rapidly from tenderness to energy, the nose of a Grecian statue, a rather large mouth, opened by a smile as well as speech, splendid teeth, a turned and well rounded chin gave to the oval of her features that voluptuous and feminine grace without which even beauty does not elicit love, a skin marbled with the animation of life, and veined by blood which the least impression sent mounting to her cheeks, a tone of voice which borrowed its vibrations from the deepest fibres of her heart, and which was deeply modulated to its finest movements (a precious gift, for the tone of the voice, which is the channel of emotion in a woman, is the medium of persuasion in the orator, and by both these titles nature owed her the charm of voice, and had bestowed it on her freely). Such at eighteen years of age was the portrait of this young girl, whom obscurity long kept in the shade, as if to prepare for life or death a soul more strong, and a victim more perfect.

III.

Her understanding lightened this beauteous frame-work with a precocious and flashing intelligence, which was already inspiration. She acquired, as it were, the most difficult accomplishments even from looking into their very elements. What is taught to her age and sex was not sufficient for her. The masculine education of men was a want and sport to her. Her powerful mind had need of all the means of thought for its due exercise. Theology, history, philosophy, music, painting, dancing, the exact sciences, chemistry, foreign tongues and learned languages, she learned all and desired more. She herself formed her ideas from all the rays which the obscurity of her condition allowed to penetrate into the laboratory of her father. She even secreted the books which the young apprentices brought and forgot for her in the workshop. Jean Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, Montesquieu, and the English philosophers, fell into her hands; but her real food was Plutarch.

"I shall never forget," she said, "the Lent of 1763, during which I every day carried that book to church, instead of the book of prayers: it was from this moment that I date the impressions and ideas which made me republican, when I had never formed a thought on the subject." After Plutarch, Fenelon made the deepest impression upon her. Tasso and the poets followed. Heroism, virtue, and love were destined to pour from their three vases at once into the soul of a woman destined to this triple palpitation of grand impressions.

In the midst of this fire in her soul her reason remained calm, and her purity spotless. She scarcely owns to the slightest and fugitive emotions of the heart and senses. "When as I read behind the screen which closed up my chamber from my father's apartment," she writes, "my breathing was at all loud, I felt a burning blush overspread my cheek, and my altered voice would have betrayed my agitation. I was Eucharis to Telemachus, and Herminia to Tancred. Yet, transformed as I was into them, I never thought myself of becoming anything to any body. I made no reflection that individually affected me; I sought nothing around me: it was a dream without awaking. Yet I remember having beheld with much agitation a young painter named Taboral, who called on my father occasionally. He was about twenty years of age, with a sweet voice, intelligent countenance, and blushed like a girl. When I heard him in the atelier, I had always a pencil or something to look after; but as his presence embarrassed as much as it pleased me, I went away quicker than I entered, with a palpitating heart, a tremor that made me run and hide myself in my little room."

Although her mother was very pious, she did not forbid her daughter from reading. She wished to inspire her with religion, and not enforce it upon her. Full of good sense and toleration, she left her with confidence to her reason, and sought neither to repress nor dry up the sap which would hereafter produce its fruit in her heart. A servile, not voluntary religion, appeared to her degradation and slavery which God could not accept as a tribute worthy of him. The pensive mind of her daughter naturally tended towards the great objects of eternal happiness or misery, and she was sure, at an earlier age than any other, to plunge deeply into their mysteries. The reign of sentiment began in her through the love of God. The sublime delirium of her pious contemplations embellished and preserved the first years of her youth, composed the rest by her philosophy, and seemed as if it must preserve her for ever from the tempests of passion. Her devotion was ardent; it took the tints of her soul, and she aspired to the cloister, and dreamed of martyrdom. Entering a convent, she found there propitious moments, surrendering her thoughts to mysticism and her heart to first friendships. The monotonous regularity of this life gently soothed the activity of her meditations. In the hours of relaxation she did not play with her companions, but retired beneath some tree to read and muse. As sensitive as Rousseau to the beauty of foliage, the rustling of the grass, the odour of the herbs, she admired the hand of God, and kissed it in his works. Overflowing with gratitude and inward delight, she went to adore him at church. There the sonorous organ's lengthened peal, uniting with the voices of the youthful nuns, completed the excess of her ecstacy. The Catholic religion has every mysterious fascination for the senses, and pleasure for the imagination. A novice took the veil during her residence in the convent. Her presentation at the entrance, her white veil, her crown of roses, the sweet and soothing hymns which directed her from earth to heaven, the mortuary cloth cast over her youthful and buried beauty, and over her palpitating heart, made the young artist shudder, and overwhelmed her with tears. Her destiny opened to her the image of great sacrifices, and she felt within herself by anticipation all the courage and the suffering.

IV.

The charm and custom of these religious feelings were never effaced from her mind. Philosophy, which soon became her worship, dissipated her faith, but left the impression it had created. She could not assist at the ceremonies of a worship whose mysteries her reason had repudiated, without feeling their attraction and respect. The sight of weak men united to adore and pray to the Father of the human race affected her sensibly. The music raised her to the skies. She quitted these Christian temples happier and better; so much are the recollections of infancy reflected and prolonged even in the most troubled existence.

This impassioned taste for infinity and pious sentiment continued their influences over her after her return to her father's house. "My father's house had not," she writes, "the solitary tranquillity of the convent, still plenty of air, and a wide space on the roof of our house near the Pont Neuf, were before my dreamy and romantic imagination. How many times from my window, which looked northward, have I contemplated with emotions the vast deserts of heaven, its glorious azure vault, so splendidly framed from the blue dawn of morning, behind the Pont-du-Change, until the golden sunset, when the glorious purple faded away behind the trees of the Champs Elysees and the houses of Chaillot. I did not fail thus to employ some moments at the close of a fine day; and quiet tears frequently stole deliciously from my eyes, whilst my heart, throbbing with an inexpressible sentiment, happy thus to beat, and grateful to exist, offered to the Being of beings a homage pure and worthy of him."

Alas! when she wrote these lines, she no longer saw but in her mind that narrow strip of the heaven of Paris, and the remembrance of those glorious evenings only illumined with a fugitive gleam the walls of her dungeon.

V.

But she was then happy, between her aunt Angelique and her mother, in what she calls the beautiful quarter of the Isle Saint Louis. On these straight quays, on this tranquil bank, she took the air on summer evenings, watching the graceful course of the river, and the distant landscape. In the morning she traversed these quays with holy zeal, in order to go to church, and that she might not meet in this lone road any thing to distract her attention. Her father, who liked her lofty studies, and was intoxicated at his daughter's success, was still desirous of initiating her in his own craft, and made her begin to engrave. She learned to handle the burin, and succeeded in this as in every thing else. As yet she did not derive any salary from it; but at the fete of her grandfather and grandmother, she presented to them as her offering, sometimes a head, which she had applied herself to execute for this express purpose, sometimes a small brass plate, highly polished, on which she had engraved emblems or flowers; and they in return gave her ornaments or something for her toilette, for which she confesses always to have been anxious.

This taste, natural to her age and sex, did not, however, distract her from the more humble domestic duties. She was not ashamed, after appearing on Sundays at church, or walking out elegantly dressed, to put on during the week a cotton gown, and go to market with her mother. She used even to go out to shops in their neighbourhood to buy parsley or salad, which had been forgotten. Although she felt herself somewhat humiliated by these domestic cares, which brought her down from the eminence of her Plutarch, and her visionary wanderings, she combined so much grace, and so much natural dignity, that the fruit-woman used to take pleasure in serving her before her other customers; and the first comers took no offence at this preference. This young girl, this future Heloise of the eighteenth century, who read serious books, who expounded the circles of the celestial globe, handled the pencil and burin, and in whose soul-aspiring thoughts and impassioned feelings already found space, was often called into the kitchen to prepare the vegetables for dinner. This mixture of serious shades, elegant research, and domestic occupations, ordered and sensibly mingled by her mother's sagacity, seemed to prepare her already for the vicissitudes of fortune, and in after days helped her to support them. It was Rousseau at Charmettes piling up the woodstack of Madame de Warens with the hand which was to write the Contrat Social, or Philopoemen chopping his wood.

VI.

From the retirement of such secluded life, she sometimes perceived the higher world which shone above her. The lights which displayed to her this great world offended, more than they dazzled, her sight. The pride of this aristocratic society, which saw without valuing her, weighed on her sensitive mind—a society in which her position was not assigned to her, seemed badly framed. It was less envy than justice that revolted in her. Superior beings have their places marked out by nature, and every thing that keeps them from occupying them, seems to them an usurpation. They find society frequently the reverse of nature, and take their revenge by despising it: from this arises the hatred of genius against power. Genius dreams of an order of things, in which the ranks should be marked out by nature and virtue; whilst in reality they are almost always derived from birth—that blind allotment of fate. There are few great minds which do not feel in their earliest progress the persecution of fortune, and who do not begin by an internal revolt against society. They are only quieted by their own discouragement. Some are resigned from a more lofty feeling to the place which God assigns to them. To put up with the world humbly is still more beautiful than to control it. This is the very acme of virtue. Religion leads to it in a day; philosophy only conducts to it by a lengthened life, misery, or death. These are days when the most elevated place in the world is a scaffold.

VII.

The young maiden once conducted by her grandmother to an aristocratic house, of which her humble parents were free, was deeply hurt at the tone of condescending superiority with which her grandmother and herself were treated. "My pride took alarm," she writes, "my blood boiled more than usual, and I blushed violently. I no longer inquired of myself why this lady was seated on a sofa, and my grandmother on a low stool; but my feelings led to such reflection, and I saw the end of the visit with satisfaction as if a weight was taken off my mind."

Another time she was taken to pass eight days at Versailles, in the palace of that king and queen whose throne she was one day to sap. Lodged in the attics with one of the female domestics of the Chateau, she was a close observer of this royal luxury, which she believed was paid for by the misery of the people, and that grandeur of things founded on the servility of courtiers. The lavishly spread tables, the walks, the play, presentations—all passed before her eyes in the pomp and vanity of the world. These ceremonious details of power were repugnant to her mind, which fed on philosophy, truth, liberty, and the virtue of the olden time. The obscure names, the humble attire, of the relatives who took her to see all this, only procured for her mere passing looks and a few words, which meant more protection than favour. The feeling that her youth, beauty, and merit, were unperceived by this crowd, who only adored favour or etiquette, oppressed her mind. The philosophy, natural pride, imagination, and fixedness of her soul were all wounded during this sojourn. "I preferred," she says, "the statues in the gardens to the personages of the palace." And her mother inquiring if she were pleased with her visit—"Yes," was her reply, "if it be soon ended; for else, in a few more days I shall so much detest all the persons I see, that I should not know what to do with my hatred." "What harm have they done you?" inquired her mother. "To make me feel injustice, and look upon absurdity." As she contemplated these splendours of the despotism of Louis XIV., which were drooping into corruption, she thought of Athens, but forgot the death of Socrates, the exile of Aristides, the condemnation of Phocion. "I did not then foresee," she writes, in melancholy mood, as she pens these lines—"that destiny reserved me to be the witness of crimes such as those of which they were the victims, and to participate in the glory of their martyrs, after having professed their principles."