Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3)

J >> John Morley >> Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3)

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Not only had wise counsellors been tried; consultative assemblies had
been tried also. Necker had been dismissed in 1781, after publishing the
memorable Report which first initiated the nation in the elements of
financial knowledge. The disorder waxed greater, and the monarchy drew
nearer to bankruptcy each year. The only modern parallel to the state of
things in France under Lewis the Sixteenth is to be sought in the state
of things in Egypt or in Turkey. Lewis the Fourteenth had left a debt of
between two and three thousand millions of livres, but this had been
wiped out by the heroic operations of Law; operations, by the way, which
have never yet been scientifically criticised. But the debt soon grew
again, by foolish wars, by the prodigality of the court, and by the
rapacity of the nobles. It amounted in 1789 to something like two
hundred and forty millions sterling; and it is interesting to notice
that this was exactly the sum of the public debt of Great Britain at the
same time. The year's excess of expenditure over receipts in 1774 was
about fifty millions of livres: in 1787 it was one hundred and forty
millions, or according to a different computation even two hundred
millions. The material case was not at all desperate, if only the court
had been less infatuated, and the spirit of the privileged orders had
been less blind and less vile. The fatality of the situation lay in the
characters of a handful of men and women. For France was abundant in
resources, and even at this moment was far from unprosperous, in spite
of the incredible trammels of law and custom. An able financier, with
the support of a popular chamber and the assent of the sovereign, could
have had no difficulty in restoring the public credit. But the
conditions, simple as they might seem to a patriot or to posterity, were
unattainable so long as power remained with a caste that were anything
we please except patriots. An Assembly of Notables was brought together,
but it was only the empty phantasm of national representation. Yet the
situation was so serious that even this body, of arbitrary origin as it
was, still was willing to accept vital reforms. The privileged order,
who were then as their descendants are now, the worst conservative party
in Europe, immediately persuaded the magisterial corporation to resist
the Notables. The judicial corporation or Parlement of Paris had been
suppressed under Lewis the Fifteenth, and unfortunately revived again at
the accession of his grandson. By the inconvenient constitution of the
French government, the assent of that body was indispensable to fiscal
legislation, on the ground that such legislation was part of the general
police of the realm. The king's minister, now Lomenie de Brienne,
devised a new judicial constitution. But the churchmen, the nobles, and
the lawyers all united in protestations against such a blow. The common
people are not always the best judges of a remedy for the evils under
which they are the greatest sufferers, and they broke out in disorder
both in Paris and the provinces. They discerned an attack upon their
local independence. Nobody would accept office in the new courts, and
the administration of justice was at a standstill. A loan was thrown
upon the market, but the public could not be persuaded to take it up. It
was impossible to collect the taxes. The interest on the national debt
was unpaid, and the fundholder was dismayed and exasperated by an
announcement that only two-fifths would be discharged in cash. A very
large part of the national debt was held in the form of annuities for
lives, and men who had invested their savings on the credit of the
government, saw themselves left without a provision. The total number of
fundholders cannot be ascertained with any precision, but it must have
been very considerable, especially in Paris and the other great cities.
Add to these all the civil litigants in the kingdom, who had portions of
their property virtually sequestrated by the suspension of the courts
into which the property had been taken. The resentment of this immense
body of defrauded public creditors and injured private suitors explains
the alienation of the middle class from the monarchy. In the convulsions
of our own time, the moneyed interests have been on one side, and the
population without money on the other. But in the first and greatest
convulsion, those who had nothing to lose found their animosities shared
by those who had had something to lose, and had lost it.

Deliberative assemblies, then, had been tried, and ministers had been
tried; both had failed, and there was no other device left, except one
which was destructive to absolute monarchy. Lewis the Sixteenth was in
1789 in much the same case as that of the King of England in 1640.
Charles had done his best to raise money without any parliament for
twelve years: he had lost patience with the Short Parliament; finally,
he was driven without choice or alternative to face as he best could the
stout resolution and the wise patriotism of the Long Parliament. Men
sometimes wonder how it was that Lewis, when he came to find the
National Assembly unmanageable, and discovering how rapidly he was
drifting towards the thunders of the revolutionary cataract, did not
break up a Chamber over which neither the court, nor even a minister so
popular as Necker, had the least control. It is a question whether the
sword would not have broken in his hand. Even supposing, however, that
the army would have consented to a violent movement against the
Assembly, the King would still have been left in the same desperate
straits from which he had looked to the States-General to extricate him.
He might perhaps have dispersed the Assembly; he could not disperse debt
and deficit. Those monsters would have haunted him as implacably as
ever. There was no new formula of exorcism, nor any untried enchantment.
The success of violent designs against the National Assembly, had
success been possible, could, after all, have been followed by no other
consummation than the relapse of France into the raging anarchy of
Poland, or the sullen decrepitude of Turkey.

This will seem to some persons no better than fatalism. But, in truth,
there are two popular ways of reading the history of events between 1789
and 1794, and each of them seems to us as bad as the other. According to
one, whatever happened in the Revolution was good and admirable, because
it happened. According to the other, something good and admirable was
always attainable, and, if only bad men had not interposed, always ready
to happen. Of course, the only sensible view is that many of the
revolutionary solutions were detestable, but no other solution was
within reach. This is undoubtedly the best of possible worlds; if the
best is not so good as we could wish, that is the fault of the
possibilities. Such a doctrine is neither fatalism nor optimism, but an
honest recognition of long chains of cause and effect in human affairs.

The great gathering of chosen men was first called States-General; then
it called itself National Assembly; it is commonly known in history as
the Constituent Assembly. The name is of ironical association, for the
constitution which it framed after much travail endured for no more than
a few months. Its deliberations lasted from May 1789 until September
1791. Among its members were three principal groups. There was, first, a
band of blind adherents of the old system of government with all or most
of its abuses. Second, there was a Centre of timid and one-eyed men, who
were for transforming the old absolutist system into something that
should resemble the constitution of our own country. Finally, there was
a Left, with some differences of shade, but all agreeing in the
necessity of a thorough remodelling of every institution and most of the
usages of the country. 'Silence, you thirty votes!' cried Mirabeau one
day, when he was interrupted by the dissents of the Mountain. This was
the original measure of the party that in the twinkling of an eye was to
wield the destinies of France. In our own time we have wondered at the
rapidity with which a Chamber that was one day on the point of bringing
back the grandnephew of Lewis the Sixteenth, found itself a little later
voting that Republic which has since been ratified by the nation, and
has at this moment the ardent good wishes of every enlightened
politician in Europe. In the same way it is startling to think that
within three years of the beheading of Lewis the Sixteenth, there was
probably not one serious republican in the representative assembly of
France. Yet it is always so. We might make just the same remark of the
House of Commons at Westminster in 1640, and of the Assembly of
Massachusetts or of New York as late as 1770. The final flash of a long
unconscious train of thought or intent is ever a surprise and a shock.
It is a mistake to set these swift changes down to political levity;
they were due rather to quickness of political intuition. It was the
King's attempt at flight in the summer of 1791 that first created a
republican party. It was that unhappy exploit, and no theoretical
preferences, that awoke France to the necessity of choosing between the
sacrifice of monarchy and the restoration of territorial aristocracy.

Political intuition was never one of Robespierre's conspicuous gifts.
But he had a doctrine that for a certain time served the same purpose.
Rousseau had kindled in him a fervid democratic enthusiasm, and had
penetrated his mind with the principle of the Sovereignty of the People.
This famous dogma contained implicitly within it the more indisputable
truth that a society ought to be regulated with a view to the happiness
of the people. Such a principle made it easier for Robespierre to
interpret rightly the first phases of the revolutionary movement. It
helped him to discern that the concentrated physical force of the
populace was the only sure protection against a civil war. And if a
civil war had broken out in 1789, instead of 1793, all the advantages of
authority would have been against the popular party. The first
insurrection of Paris is associated with the harangue of Camille
Desmoulins at the Palais Royal, with the fall of the Bastille, with the
murder of the governor, and a hundred other scenes of melodramatic
horror and the blood-red picturesque. The insurrection of the Fourteenth
of July 1789 taught Robespierre a lesson of practical politics, which
exactly fitted in with his previous theories. In his resentment against
the oppressive disorder of monarchy and feudalism, he had accepted the
counter principle that the people can do no wrong, and nobody of sense
now doubts that in their first great act the people of Paris did what
was right. Six days after the fall of the Bastille, the Centre were for
issuing a proclamation denouncing popular violence and ordering rigorous
vigilance. Robespierre was then so little known in the Assembly that
even his name was usually misspelt in the journals. From his obscure
bench on the Mountain he cried out with bitter vehemence against the
proposed proclamation:--'Revolt! But this revolt is liberty. The battle
is not at its end. Tomorrow, it may be, the shameful designs against us
will be renewed; and who will there then be to repulse them, if
beforehand we declare the very men to be rebels, who have rushed to
arms for our protection and safety?' This was the cardinal truth of the
situation. Everybody knows Mirabeau's saying about Robespierre:--'That
man will go far: he believes every word that he says!' This is much, but
it is only half. It is not only that the man of power believes what he
says; what he believes must fit in with the facts and with the demands
of the time. Now Robespierre's firmness of conviction happened at this
stage to be rightly matched by his clearness of sight.

It is true that a passionate mob, its unearthly admixture of laughter
with fury, of vacancy with deadly concentration, is as terrible as some
uncouth antediluvian, or the unfamiliar monsters of the sea, or one of
the giant plants that make men shudder with mysterious fear. The history
of our own country in the eighteenth century tells of the riots against
meeting-houses in Doctor Sacheverell's time, and the riots against
papists and their abettors in Lord George Gordon's time, and
Church-and-King riots in Doctor Priestley's time. It would be too
daring, therefore, to maintain that the rabble of the poor have any more
unerring political judgment than the rabble of the opulent. But, in
France in 1789, Robespierre was justified in saying that revolt meant
liberty. If there had been no revolt in July, the court party would have
had time to mature their infatuated designs of violence against the
Assembly. In October these designs had come to life again. The royalists
at Versailles had exultant banquets, at which, in the presence of the
Queen, they drank confusion to all patriots, and trampled the new emblem
of freedom passionately underfoot. The news of this odious folly soon
travelled to Paris. Its significance was speedily understood by a
populace whose wits were sharpened by famine. Thousands of fire-eyed
women and men tramped intrepidly out towards Versailles. If they had
done less, the Assembly would have been dispersed or arbitrarily
decimated, even though such a measure would certainly have left the
government in desperation.

At that dreadful moment of the Sixth of October, amid the slaughter of
guards and the frantic yells of hatred against the Queen, it is no
wonder that some were found to urge the King to flee to Metz. If he had
accepted the advice, the course of the Revolution would have been
different; but its march would have been just as irresistible, for
revolution lay in the force of a hundred combined circumstances. Lewis,
however, rejected these counsels, and suffered the mob to carry him in
bewildering procession to his capital and his prison. That great man who
was watching French affairs with such consuming eagerness from distant
Beaconsfield in our English Buckinghamshire, instantly divined that this
procession from Versailles to the Tuileries marked the fall of the
monarchy. 'A revolution in sentiment, manners, and moral opinions, the
most important of all revolutions in a word,' was in Burke's judgment to
be dated from the Sixth of October 1789.

The events of that day did, indeed, give its definite cast to the
situation. The moral authority of the sovereign came to an end, along
with the ancient and reverend mystery of the inviolability of his
person. The Count d'Artois, the King's second brother, one of the most
worthless of human beings, as incurably addicted to sinister and
suicidal counsels in 1789 as he was when he overthrew his own throne
forty years later, had run away from peril and from duty after the
insurrection of July. After the insurrection of October, a troop of the
nobles of the court followed him. The personal cowardice of the
Emigrants was only matched by their political blindness. Many of the
most unwise measures in the Assembly were only passed by small
majorities, and the majorities would have been transformed into
minorities, if in the early days of the Revolution these unworthy men
had only stood firm at their posts. Selfish oligarchies have scarcely
ever been wanting in courage. The emigrant noblesse of France are almost
the only instance of a great privileged and territorial caste that had
as little bravery as they had patriotism. The explanation is that they
had been an oligarchy, not of power or duty, but of self-indulgence.
They were crushed by Richelieu to secure the unity of the monarchy. They
now effaced themselves at the Revolution, and this secured that far
greater object, the unity of the nation.

The disappearance of so many of the nobles from France was not the only
abdication on the part of the conservative powers. Cowed and terrified
by the events of October, no less than three hundred members of the
Assembly sought to resign. The average attendance even at the most
important sittings was often incredibly small. Thus the Chamber came to
have little more moral authority in face of the people of Paris than had
the King himself. The people of Paris had themselves become in a day the
masters of France.

This immense change led gradually to a decisive alteration in the
position of Robespierre. He found the situation of affairs at last
falling into perfect harmony with his doctrine. Rousseau had taught him
that the people ought to be sovereign, and now the people were being
recognised as sovereign _de facto_ no less than _de jure_. Any
limitations on the new divine right united the horror of blasphemy to
the secular wickedness of political treason. After the Assembly had come
to Paris, a famishing mob in a moment of mad fury murdered an
unfortunate baker, who was suspected of keeping back bread. These
paroxysms led to the enactment of a new martial law. Robespierre spoke
vehemently against it; such a law implied a wrongful distrust of the
people. Then discussions followed as to the property qualification of an
elector. Citizens were classed as active and passive. Only those were to
have votes who paid direct taxes to the amount of three days' wages in
the year. Robespierre flung himself upon this too famous distinction
with bitter tenacity. If all men are equal, he cried, then all men
ought to have votes: if he who only pays the amount of one day's work,
has fewer rights than another who pays the amount of three days, why
should not the man who pays ten days have more rights than the other who
only pays the earnings of three days? This kind of reasoning had little
weight with the Chamber, but it made the reasoner very popular with the
throng in the galleries. Even within the Assembly, influence gradually
came to the man who had a parcel of immutable axioms and postulates, and
who was ready with a deduction and a phrase for each case as it arose.
He began to stand out like a needle of sharp rock, amid the flitting
shadows of uncertain purpose and the vapoury drift of wandering aims.

Robespierre had no social conception, and he had nothing which can be
described as a policy. He was the prophet of a sect, and had at this
period none of the aims of the chief of a political party. What he had
was democratic doctrine, and an intrepid logic. And Robespierre's
intrepid logic was the nearest approach to calm force and coherent
character that the first three years of the Revolution brought into
prominence. When the Assembly met, Necker was the popular idol. Almost
within a few weeks, this well-meaning, but very incompetent divinity had
slipped from his throne, and Lafayette had taken his place. Mirabeau
came next. The ardent and animated genius of his eloquence fitted him
above all men to ride the whirlwind and direct the storm. And on the
memorable Twenty-third of June '89, he had shown the genuine audacity
and resource of a revolutionary statesman, when he stirred the Chamber
to defy the King's demand, and hailed the royal usher with the
resounding words:--'You, sir, have neither place nor right of speech. Go
tell those who sent you that we are here by the will of the people, and
only bayonets shall drive us hence!' But Mirabeau bore a tainted
character, and was always distrusted. 'Ah, how the immorality of my
youth,' he used to say, in words that sum up the tragedy of many a
puissant life, 'how the immorality of my youth hinders the public good!'
The event proved that the popular suspicion was just: the patriot is now
no longer merely suspected, but known, to have sullied his hands with
the money of the court. He did not sell himself, it has been said; he
allowed himself to be paid. The distinction was too subtle for men doing
battle for their lives and for freedom, and Mirabeau's popularity waned
towards the middle of 1790. The next favourite was Barnave, the generous
and high-minded spokesman of those sanguine spirits who to the very end
hoped against hope to save both the throne and its occupant. By the
spring of 1791 Barnave followed his predecessors into disfavour. The
Assembly was engaged on the burning question of the government of the
colonies. Were the negro slaves to be admitted to citizenship, or was a
legislature of planters to be entrusted with the task of social
reformation? Our own generation has seen in the republic of the West
what strife this political difficulty is capable of raising. Barnave
pronounced against the negroes. Robespierre, on the contrary, declaimed
against any limitation of the right of the negro, as a compromise with
the avarice, pride, and cruelty of a governing race, and a guilty
trafficking with the rights of man. Barnave from that day saw that his
laurel crown had gone to Robespierre.

If the people 'called him noble that was now their hate, him vile that
was their garland,' they did not transfer their affections without sound
reason. Barnave's sensibility was too easily touched. There are many
politicians in every epoch whose principles grow slack and flaccid at
the approach of the golden sun of royalty. Barnave was one of those who
was sent to bring back the fugitive King and Queen from Varennes, and
the journey by their side in the coach unstrung his spirit. He became
one of the court's clandestine advisers. Men of this weak susceptibility
of imagination are not fit for times of revolution. To be on the side of
the court was to betray the cause of the nation. We cannot take too much
pains to realise that the voluntary conversion of Lewis the Sixteenth to
a popular constitution and the abolition of feudalism, was practically
as impossible as the conversion of Pope Pius the Ninth to the doctrine
of a free church in a free state. Those who believe in the miracle of
free will may think of this as they please. Sensible people who accept
the scientific account of human character, know that the sudden
transformation of a man or a woman brought up to middle age as the heir
to centuries of absolutist tradition, into adherents of a government
that agreed with the doctrines of Locke and Milton, was only possible on
condition of supernatural interference. The King's good nature was no
substitute for political capacity or insight. An instructive measure of
the degree in which he possessed these two qualities may be found in
that deplorable diary of his, where on such days as the Fourteenth of
July, when the Bastille fell, and the Sixth of October, when he was
carried in triumph from Versailles to the Tuileries, he made the simple
entry, '_Rien_.' And he had no firmness. It was as difficult to keep the
King to a purpose, La Marck said to Mirabeau, as to keep together a
number of well-oiled ivory balls. Lewis, moreover, was guided by a more
energetic and less compliant character than his own.

Marie Antoinette's high mien in adversity, and the contrast between the
dazzling splendour of her first years and the scenes of outrage and
bloody death that made the climax of her fate, could not but strike the
imaginations of men. Such contrasts are the very stuff of which Tragedy,
the gorgeous muse with scepter'd pall, loves to weave her most imposing
raiment. But history must be just; and the character of the Queen had
far more concern in the disaster of the first five years of the
Revolution than had the character of Robespierre. Every new document
that comes to light heaps up proof that if blind and obstinate choice
of personal gratification before the common weal be enough to constitute
a state criminal, then the Queen of France was one of the worst state
criminals that ever afflicted a nation. The popular hatred of Marie
Antoinette sprang from a sound instinct. We shall never know how much or
how little truth there was in those frightful charges against her, that
may still be read in a thousand pamphlets. These imputed depravities far
surpass anything that John Knox ever said against Mary Stuart, or that
Juvenal has recorded against Messalina; and, perhaps, for the only
parallel we must look to the hideous stories of the Byzantine secretary
against Theodora, the too famous empress of Justinian and the persecutor
of Belisarius. We have to remember that all the revolutionary portraits
are distorted by furious passion, and that Marie Antoinette may no more
deserve to be compared to Mary Stuart than Robespierre deserves to be
compared to Ezzelino or to Alva. The aristocrats were the libellers, if
libels they were. It is at least certain that, from the unlucky hour
when the Austrian archduchess crossed the French frontier, a childish
bride of fourteen, down to the hour when the Queen of France made the
attempt to recross it in resentful flight one and twenty years
afterwards, Marie Antoinette was ignorant, unteachable, blind to events
and deaf to good counsels, a bitter grief to her heroic mother, the evil
genius of her husband, the despair of her truest advisers, and an
exceedingly bad friend to the people of France. When Burke had that
immortal vision of her at Versailles--'just above the horizon,
decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in,
glittering like the morning star, full of life and splendour and
joy'--we know from the correspondence between Maria Theresa and her
minister at Versailles, that what Burke really saw was no divinity, but
a flighty and troublesome schoolgirl, an accomplice in all the ignoble
intrigues, and a sharer of all the small busy passions, that convulse
the insects of a court. The levity that came with her Lorraine blood,
broke out in incredible dissipations; in indiscreet visits to the masked
balls at the opera, in midnight parades and mystifications on the
terrace at Versailles, in insensate gambling. 'The court of France is
turned into a gaming-hell,' said the Emperor Joseph, the Queen's own
brother: 'if they do not amend, the revolution will be cruel.' These
vices or follies were less mischievous than her intervention in affairs
of state. Here her levity was as marked as in the paltry affairs of the
boudoir and the ante-chamber, and here to levity she added both
dissimulation and vindictiveness. It was the Queen's influence that
procured the dismissal of the two virtuous ministers by whose aid the
King was striving to arrest the decay of the government of his kingdom.
Malesherbes was distasteful to her for no better reason than that she
wanted his post for some favourite's favourite. Against Turgot she
conspired with tenacious animosity, because he had suppressed a
sinecure which she designed for a court parasite, and because he would
not support her caprice on behalf of a worthless creature of her
faction. These two admirable men were disgraced on the same day. The
Queen wrote to her mother that she had not meddled in the affair. This
was a falsehood, for she had even sought to have Turgot thrown into the
Bastille. 'I am as one dashed to the ground,' cried the great Voltaire,
now nearing his end. 'Never can we console ourselves for having seen the
golden age dawn and vanish. My eyes see only death in front of me, now
that Turgot is gone. The rest of my days must be all bitterness.' What
hope could there be that the personage who had thus put out the light of
hope for France in 1776, would welcome that greater flame which was
kindled in the land in 1789?

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