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French Revolution

{123} <h3> CHAPTER IX </h3> <h3> WAR BREAKS OUT </h3> From the 25th of June to the 17th of July the conflict between the middle class and the democratic party continued with great intensity. Louis was, in reality, less the object than the pretext of their quarrel. The Cordeliers urged that France, and not the assembly, should pronounce the King's fate, and to effect that it would be necessary to proceed to a referendum, to demand a popular vote. But this was precisely what the Constitution refused to permit, and hence the demand was in reality an attack on the Constitution. Day after day the agitation grew, changing slightly in form. Finally the democrats decided on a monster petition to be signed at the altar of the Champ de Mars on the 17th of July. Danton himself stood at one of the corners of the platform that day to help on the signing of the protest of the Parisian democracy. But Bailly, La Fayette, and the mass of the assembly had decided on a policy of repression. {124} The national guards arrived in strong force. Confusion followed. Volleys were fired. The mob, after losing many dead, fled for safety. Danton, escaping, left Paris and proceeded to London, where he remained until the storm had blown over. By this stroke the assembly for the moment retained control. But the situation was profoundly changed. If Danton and the popular insurrectional force were for the moment defeated, Robespierre and intellectual democracy were making rapid headway; the centre of gravity of revolutionary opinion was shifting in his direction. Just before the crisis the Jacobins had been invaded by a Palais Royal mob who had hooted down the constitutionalist speakers, and imposed their opinion on the club. This led to disruption. The moderate Jacobins left, and, at the neighbouring Feuillants, founded a new society that was gradually to become more and more retrograde. The few advanced Jacobins retained possession of the old club, with its great affiliation of country clubs, infused a radical element into its membership, and soon, making of Robespierre its mouthpiece and its prophet, advanced in the direction of imposing his doctrine of political salvation on France. Meanwhile the assembly, with its constitutional {125} keystone securely locked up in the Tuileries, was hastening to profit by its victory. The opportunity for completing the Constitution might never recur, and was eagerly seized. Louis, a necessary prop to the elaborate structure devised by the wisdom of the deputies, was deliberately made use of. Discredited, a virtual prisoner, finished as a monarch, he was converted into a constitutional fiction, and was compelled by his circumstances to resume the farce of kingship, and to put his signature to the Constitution which, on the 3rd of September, was sent to him. The Constitution of 1791 was compounded partly of political theory, partly of revolutionary effort, of desire to pull down the prerogatives of the monarchy in favour of the middle class. It was prefaced by a declaration of the rights of man that stamps the whole as a piece of class legislation. By this all Frenchmen were guaranteed certain fundamental rights of justice, of opinion, of speech, of opportunity,—these were passive rights. There were, however, active rights as well; and those were reserved for a privileged class.[1] {126} Only those paying taxes equivalent to three days' labour had active political rights, that is, the right to vote. In primary and secondary assemblies they were to elect the 750 deputies who were to constitute the sole representative chamber. This chamber was to sit for two years, the King having no authority to dissolve or prorogue it; and it was to possess full legislative power subject to the King's suspensive veto. The King was chief executive official, with a large power of appointment, and general control of matters of foreign policy. He was not to choose his ministers from among the deputies, and he lost all direct administrative control in the local sense. The intendants, and the provinces, and the généralités were gone; instead of them was a new territorial division into departments, in which local elective self-government was established. Communes and departments were to choose their own governing {127} committees, and the old centralized administration of the Bourbons had for the moment to make way for an opposite conception of government. The signing of the constitution by the King brought it into effect, and thereby an election became necessary for constituting the new representative body, a body that was to be known as the Législative. Before leaving its parent body, however, that began as States-General, became a national assembly and was later known as the Constituante, a word or two may be added to emphasize points not yet sufficiently indicated. The assembly changed in opinion and attitude during the course of its history, and was vastly different in September 1791 from what it had been in May 1789. It did achieve the purpose of translating a large part of the demands of the cahiers into legislative enactments; yet it did not learn the meaning of the word toleration, and it did not pave the way for liberty, but only for a doctrine of liberty. The elections to the Législative took place in September, under the influence of several cross currents of opinion. There was a slight reaction among certain classes in Paris in favour of the King, and several demonstrations took {128} place which an abler and more active monarch might have turned to advantage. On the other hand, the Jacobin Club attempted to use its machinery to influence the action of the electoral meetings. As a result, when the deputies met on the 1st of October, it was calculated that about 400 belonged to the floating central mass, 136 to the Jacobins, that is, Jacobins in the new Robespierre-Danton sense, 264 to the Feuillants. Among the latter there was a general inclination towards a policy of rehabilitating the royal power. The personnel of the new assembly differed totally from that of its predecessor, because of a self-denying ordinance whereby the members of the Constituante had excluded themselves from the new assembly. Yet there were many notable men among the new deputies, nearly all, however, Jacobins:—Brissot, the journalist, soon to be leader of a wing of the party that detaches itself from the one that follows Robespierre; Vergniaud, great as an orator; Isnard, Guadet, Gensonné; Condorcet, marquis and mathematician, philosopher, physicist and republican, noble mind and practical thinker; Cambon, stalwart in politics as in finance; Couthon, hostile to Brissot, later to be one of the Robespierre triumvirate. {129} This Jacobin group nearly at once established its influence over the more flaccid part of the assembly. Through its club organization it packed the public galleries of the house, and from that point directed the current of opinion by the judicious application of applause or disapproval. This was reinforced by the appel nominal, the manner of voting whereby each individual deputy could be compelled to enter the speaker's rostrum and there declare and explain his vote. To check the efforts of this dominating party, there was little but the inertia of the Court, and what the Feuillants might accomplish. Bailly, La Fayette, Lameth, La Rochefoucauld Liancourt, Clermont Tonnerre were among the conspicuous men of the club, but whatever their worth most of them were associated with a too narrow, unyielding attitude to obtain any wide support. The popular force was not behind them, but, for the moment, behind the Jacobins, and the instant the Jacobins became engaged in a struggle against the Feuillants, it pushed against the latter and presently toppled them over. Had the Feuillants and the Court come together, there was yet a chance that the tide would be stemmed. But that proved impossible. To the royal {130} family foreign help, foreign intervention, appeared the only chance of relief, and Marie Antoinette had long been urging her brother Leopold to come to her assistance. No course could have been more fatal, and the more probable intervention became, the more the democratic party appeared a patriotic party, and the more the King and Queen seemed traitors to the national cause. It was the foreign question that immediately engrossed the chief attention of the Législative, and the foreign question always led back to the great internal one represented by the King. At Coblenz, in the dominions of the Archbishop of Trièr, the Comte de Provence had set up what was virtually a government of his own. The émigrés had 3,000 or 4,000 men under arms, and a royal council organized, all that was necessary to administer France if she could be regained. The Législative now aimed a blow at them; the émigrés were to return to France before the 1st of January 1792, and those failing to do this were to be punishable by death. The decree was sent to the King who, unwilling to sign assent to the death of his brother and nobles, used his constitutional right of veto. This was the beginning of a conflict between {131} the assembly and the King, a struggle that showed the determination of the former not to recognise the right of veto prescribed by the Constitution. The Législative followed its attack on the émigrés by one on the priests. The clergy was discontented and, in the west, showed signs of inciting the peasantry to revolt; it was therefore decreed that every member of the clergy might be called on to take the oath to the civil constitution. This, again, the King vetoed, encouraged in his attitude by the Feuillants. The old struggle was being renewed; Jacobins and Feuillants were fighting one another over the person of the King. There was one question, however, on which the Feuillants and Brissot's wing of the Jacobins agreed; both wanted war. La Fayette, chief figure among the Feuillants, had sunk rapidly in popularity since his repression of the mob in July. In October he had resigned his command of the national guard. In November he had been defeated by the Jacobin Pétion for the mayoralty of Paris. He now hoped for a military command, and saw in war the opportunity for consolidating a victorious army by means of which the King and Constitution might be imposed on Paris. Brissot, ambitious and self-confident, his {132} head turned at the prospect of a conflagration, saw in a European war a field large enough in which to develop his untried statesmanship. The pretexts for war lay ready to hand. There was not only the tense situation arising between Austria and France because of the relation between the two reigning families, but there was also acute friction over certain territories belonging to German sovereign princes, such as those of Salm or Montbéliard, that were enclaved within the French border. Could the extinction of the feudal rights hold over such territory as German princes held within the borders of France? Such was the vexatious question which those princes were carrying to their supreme tribunal, that of the Emperor at Vienna. The opposition to the war was not so weighty. Louis realized the danger clearly enough, and knew that Austrian success would be visited on his head. Yet he was so helpless that he had to call the Feuillant nominee, Count Louis de Narbonne, his own natural cousin, to the ministry of war. The King was not alone in his opposition to the war,—Robespierre and Marat, nearly in accord, both stood for peace. Robespierre, from the first, had foreseen the course of the Revolution, had {133} prophetically feared the success of some soldier of fortune,—he was at this moment that unknown lieutenant of artillery, Napoleone Buonaparte,—who should with a stroke of the sword convert the Revolution to his purposes. Marat, in his more hectic, malevolent, uncertain way, was haunted by the same presentiment, and what he saw in war was this: "What afflicts the friends of liberty is that we have more to fear from success than from defeat … the danger is lest one of our generals be crowned with victory and lest … he lead his victorious army against the capital to secure the triumph of the Despot. I invoke heaven that we may meet with constant defeat … and that our soldiers … drown their leaders in their own blood."—This Marat wrote on the 24th of April 1792, in his little pamphlet newspaper l'Ami du peuple. During the first part of 1792 the popular agitation grew. France was now throwing all the enthusiasm, the vital emotion of patriotism into her internal upheaval. Rouget de Lisle invented his great patriotic hymn, christened in the following August the Marseillaise. Men who could get no guns, armed themselves with pikes. The red Phrygian cap of liberty was adopted. The magic word, citizen, became {134} the cherished appellation of the multitude. And in the assembly the orators declaimed vehemently against the traitors, the supporters of the foreigner in their midst. Vergniaud, from the tribune of the assembly menacing the Austrian princess of the Tuileries, exclaimed: "Through this window I perceive the palace where perfidious counsels delude the Sovereign.… Terror and panic have often issued from its portals; this day I bid them re-enter, in the name of the Law; let all its inmates know that it is the King alone who is inviolable, that the Law will strike the guilty without distinction, and that no head on which guilt reposes can escape its sword." The thunders of Vergniaud and the other Jacobin orators rolled not in vain. By March the Drissotins dominated the situation. They frightened the King into acquiescence in their war policy and they drove Narbonne and the Fayettists, their temporary allies, from office, installing a new ministry made up of their own adherents. That new ministry included Roland, Clavière and Dumouriez;—Roland, a hard-headed, hard-working man of business, whose young wife with her beauty and enthusiasm was to be the soul of the unfortunate Girondin party; Clavière, a banker, speculator, {135} friend of Mirabeau, and generally doubtful liberal; Dumouriez, a soldier, able, adventurous, of large instincts political and human, ambitious and forceful beyond his colleagues. The Brissotin ministry was well equipped with talent, and was intended to carry through the war, which was voted by the assembly on the 20th of April. This step had been gradually led up to by an acrimonious exchange of diplomatic votes. The war, now that it had broken out, was found to involve more powers than Austria. The king of Prussia, unwilling to let Austria pose as the sole defender of the Germanic princes of the Rhineland, had in August 1791 joined the Emperor in the declaration of Pillnitz, threatening France with coercion. He now acted up to this, and joined in the war as the ally of the Emperor. Leopold died in March, and was succeeded by his son, Marie Antoinette's nephew, Francis II. Three armies were formed by France for the conflict, and were placed under the orders of Rochambeau, La Fayette, and Luckner. They were weak in numbers, as the fortresses soaked up many thousands of men, and unprepared for war. The allies concentrated their troops in the neighbourhood of Coblenz. The {136} Duke of Brunswick was placed in command, and by the end of July perfected arrangements for marching on Paris with an Austro-Prussian army of 80,000 men. The breaking out of war inflamed still further the political excitement of France. In April a festival, or demonstration, was held in honour of the soldiers of Chateauvieux' Swiss regiment, now released from the galleys. Angry protests arose from the moderates, an echo of the assembly's vote of thanks to Bouillé for repressing the mutineers six months before. These protests, however, went unheeded, for the Jacobins were now virtually masters of Paris. Not only did they control the public galleries of the assembly but they had gained a majority on the Commune and had secured for Manuel and Danton its legal executive offices of procureur and substitut. In May difficulties arose between the King and his ministers, arising partly from the exercise of the power of veto once more. On the 12th of June the ministers were forced from office and were replaced by moderates or Fayettists, Dumouriez going to the army to replace Rochambeau. The Brissotin party, furious at this defeat, decided on a monster {137} demonstration against the King for the 20th of June. The 20th of June 1792 was one of the great days of the Revolution, but, on the whole, less an insurrection than a demonstration. Out of the two great faubourgs of the working classes, St. Antoine and St. Marceaux, came processions of market porters, market women, coal heavers, workmen, citizens, with detachments of national guards here and there. Santerre, a popular brewer and national guard commander, appeared the leader; but the procession showed little sign of having recourse to violence. Bouquets were carried, and banners with various inscriptions such as: "We want union!" "Liberty!" One of the most extreme said: "Warning to Louis XVI: the people, weary of suffering, demand liberty or death!" Proceeding to the assembly a petition was tumultuously presented wherein it was declared that the King must observe the law, and that if he was responsible for the continued inactivity of the armies he must go. The mob then flowed on to the palace, was brought up by some loyal battalions of national guards; but presently forced one of the gates and {138} irresistibly poured in. A disorderly scene followed. The King maintained his coolness and dignity. For four long hours the mob pushed through the palace, jostling, apostrophising, the King and Queen. A few national guards, a few members of the assembly, attempted to give Louis some sort of protection. But he was practically surrounded and helpless. What saved him was his coolness, his good sense, and the fact that there was no intent to do him bodily harm save among some groups too unimportant to make themselves felt. To please the men of the faubourgs Louis consented to place a red liberty cap on his head, and to empty a bottle of wine as a sign of fraternization. Finally Vergniaud and Pétion succeeded in having the palace evacuated; and the assassination of Louis, which many had feared and a few hoped, had been averted. [1] There is no opportunity here for discussing adequately the clause in the declaration to the effect that every citizen is entitled to concur in making laws. That clause apparently conflicts with what I have said above. My explanation of the discrepancy is based on this: that the declaration is a much tinkered, composite document, made up over a period of many months, and not logical at every point. The clause here mentioned I explain as a direct echo of the elections to the States-General; it was one of the first drafted; its precise significance was soon lost sight of and its inconsistency remained unnoticed. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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