Part 13

For the later weeks of September Lafayette had cast his influence on the side of those who designed to strengthen the executive. He had restrained his men when they threatened to come to support the National Assembly. To yield to that movement was to acknowledge defeat, and loss of available popularity and power. When he came to the Hôtel de Ville and found that his army was resolved to go, he opposed the project, and for many hours held his ground. The men whom he commanded were not interested on their own account in the daily allowance of food. Their anger was with the Royal Guards, and their purpose was to take their place. Then there would be less danger of resistance to the decrees, or of flight to the provinces.

Lafayette could not appear before the king at their head without evident hostility and revolt; for their temper was threatening, and he was rapidly losing control. By delay and postponement he gained something. Instead of arriving as an assailant, he came as a deliverer. When he remonstrated, his soldiers said that they meant no injury to the king, but that he must obey or abdicate. They would make their general Regent; but if he refused to put himself at their head, they would take his life. They told him that he had commanded long enough, and now he must follow. He did not yield until the tumult had risen high, and the strain on his authority was breaking.

Early in the afternoon the watchers who followed the march of the women from the rare church towers reported that they had crossed the Seine without opposition. It was known, therefore, that the road was open, that the approach of the army would be under cover of the contingent that had preceded, that there was no danger of collision.

About four o'clock Lafayette sent word to the Hôtel de Ville--for his men would not allow him out of sight--that it was time to give him his orders, as he could not prevent the departure. They were brought to him where he sat in the saddle in the Place de Grève, and he read them with an expression of the utmost alarm. They contained all that ambition could desire, for the four points which he was directed to insist on made him Dictator of France. But it was added that the orders were given because he demanded them. Lafayette never produced that document; and he left it to the commissaries sent with him to urge the one demand in which he was interested, the establishment of the Court at Paris.

He started about five o'clock, with nearly 20,000 men. From the barrier by which he left Paris he sent a note in pencil to reassure the Government as to his intentions. It was a march of seven hours. At the passage of the Seine, he sent on an officer with further explanations; and he declared that he was coming under compulsion, and would have gone back if the bridge had been held in force. Before Versailles he halted his men, and made them take the oath of fidelity to the king and the Assembly.

The news of his coming had been received with terror. A man, dressed like a workman, who had been on the march with him, hurried forward to the Palace, and was at once admitted. It was the future Duke de Richelieu, twice, in after years, Prime Minister. What he told of the mood of the men added to the alarm. Another Council was held, at which the majority were in favour of flight. "Sir," said St. Priest, "if you go to Paris, it may cost you your crown." "That advice," said Necker, "may cost you your head." Nobody doubted that flight signified civil war. But St. Priest carried his point, and rode off to prepare Rambouillet for the royal family. As he knew that the decision was the gravest that could be taken, and that Necker's words were probably true, he dropped into a walk, and was overtaken by his wife. From her he learnt that the hazardous decision had been reversed, and that the king would remain at Versailles. His interview with the deputation of women had had a momentary success, and provoked cries of "Vive le Roi!" Thereupon Necker recovered the lost ground, with the aid of Liancourt, who first brought the king to Paris in the summer. The carriages, which were ready, were countermanded. Later on, they were again sent for, but this time they were stopped by the people.

The confusion of counsel was such that one of the ministers afterwards declared that, if the Duke of Orleans had appeared and pressed his demands, he would have obtained everything. It is said that the managers of his party saw this, and showed him his opportunity, during the panic that preceded Lafayette. It is even stated that they brought him to the very door of the council chamber, and that he flinched, with the regency within reach of his hand. When the National Guard arrived, his chances vanished.

Lafayette never was able to prove the Duke's complicity in the crime of that night. When the Duke asked him what evidence he had, he replied that if he had had evidence he would have sent him for trial; but that he had enough reason for suspicion to require that he should leave the country. Thrice the Duke, forcibly encouraged by Mirabeau, refused to go. Thrice the general insisted, and the Duke started for England. Mirabeau exclaimed that he would not have him for a lackey. A long inquiry was held, and ended in nothing. The man who knew those times best, Roederer afterwards assured Napoleon that, if there was an Orleanist conspiracy, Orleans himself was not in it.

The women who invaded Versailles were followed by groups of men of the same description as those who committed the atrocities which followed the fall of the Bastille. As night fell they became formidable, skirmished with the guard, and tried to make their way into the Palace. At first, when his captains asked for orders to disperse the crowd, Lewis, against the advice of his sister, replied that he did not make war on women. But the men were armed, and evidently dangerous. The command, at Versailles, was in the hands of d'Estaing, the admiral of the American war, who at this critical moment showed no capacity. He refused to let his men defend themselves, and ordered them to withdraw. St. Priest grew impatient. Much depended on their having repressed the riot without waiting to be rescued by the army of Paris. He summoned the admiral to repel force by force. D'Estaing replied that he waited the king's orders. The king gave none. The minister then said: "When the king gives no orders, a general must judge and act for himself." Again the king was silent. Later, the same day, he adopted the words of St. Priest, and made them his own. He said that the Count d'Estaing ought to have acted on his own responsibility. No orders are needed by a man of spirit, who understands his duty. It was the constant wish of Lewis XVI. to be in the hands of stronger men, who would know how to save him in spite of himself.

Mounier had obtained his unqualified assent to the Rights of Man, and urged him to seize the moment to take refuge in some faithful province. It was the dangerous, but the honourable course, and there was hope that the Assembly, standing by him, would prevent an outbreak of war. He conveyed the royal message to the Assembly, at a night sitting, much hindered by the continued presence of the visitors from Paris. Just then Lafayette arrived, with his overwhelming force. He assured Mounier and his friends that the men he commanded would now be easy to satisfy. But he said nothing of the real purpose of his presence there. From the Assembly he passed on to the king. Leaving his 20,000 men behind him in the darkness, he appeared at the Palace gate, accompanied only by the commissaries from the Hôtel de Ville.

The Swiss behind the bars warned him to reflect what he was about to do. For he was entering a place crowded with men passionately excited against the revolutionary general, who, whether he came to save or to destroy, was no longer a subject, but a master. The general told them to let him in. As he passed, a voice called out, "There goes Cromwell." Lafayette stood still and answered, "Cromwell would not have come alone." Madame de Staël watched him as he entered the royal presence. His countenance, she says, was calm. Nobody ever saw it otherwise. Lewis received him with a sensation of relief, for he felt that he was safe. At that moment the sovereign indeed had perished, but the man was safe. The language of Lafayette was respectful and satisfactory. He left to his companions the disagreeable duty of imposing terms, and they exposed to the king the object of this strange interposition of the middle class in arms. He replied that he had already sanctioned the Rights of Man, that the minister would arrange with the municipality for the provisioning of Paris, that he himself would trust his person to the custody of the National Guard. The fourth, and only essential matter, the transfer of the Court to Paris, was left unsettled. That was to be the work reserved for the morrow. Word was sent to the Hôtel de Ville that all was well.

Lafayette, holding the issue in his hands, betrayed no impatience, and abstained from needless urging. His men undertook the outer line of defence, but the Palace itself was left to the Royal Guards. The king did not at once realise the position, and attempted to combine the old order with the new. For the remainder of the night there was a divided command and an uncertain responsibility. Between Lafayette outside and D'Estaing within, there was an unguarded door.

The general believed that he had done enough, and would easily gather the ripe fruit in the morning. Having informed the President of the Assembly, still ostensibly sitting, that order was restored, he went home to bed. He had had a long and trying day. His rest was destined to be short. Before daybreak a small band of ruffians, of the kind which the Revolution furnished as a proper instrument for conspirators, made their way by the garden entrance into the Palace. Those who aimed at the life of the king came upon a guard-room full of sleeping soldiers, and retired. The real object of popular hatred was the queen, and those who came for her were not so easily turned from their design. Two men on guard who fired upon them were dragged into the street and butchered, and their heads were borne as trophies to the Palais Royal. Their comrades fled for safety to the interior of the Palace. But one, who was posted at the door of Marie Antoinette, stood his ground, and his name, Miomandre de Sainte Marie, lives as a household word. One of the queen's ladies, whose sister has left a record of the scene, was awakened by the noise and opened the door. She saw the sentry, his face streaming with blood, holding a crowd at bay. He called to her to save the queen and fell, with the lock of a musket beaten into his brain. She instantly fastened the lock, roused the queen, and hurried her, without stopping to dress, to the king's apartment.

The National Guard from Paris, who were outside, had not protected the two first victims; but then they interfered, and the Gardes Françaises, who had been the first mutineers, and had become the solid nucleus of the Parisian army, poured into the Palace. As they had made their expedition of the day before for no other purpose than to drive the royal troops away and to take their place, none could tell what the meeting of the two corps would be, and the king's men barricaded themselves against the new comers. But an officer reminded the Gardes Françaises of the day when the two regiments had withstood the English, side by side, and theirs had been rescued by the Gardes du Corps. So they called out, "Remember Fontenoy"; and the others answered the challenge and unbarred the door.

By the time that Lafayette appeared, roused from untimely slumber, his men were masters of the Palace, and stood between the royal family and the raging mob of baffled murderers. He made the captured guardsmen safe; but although he was in supreme command, he did not restore order outside. The last of the four points he had been instructed to obtain, the removal of the Court to his custody at the Tuileries and his own permanent elevation to a position superior to the throne, was not yet conceded. Until that was settled, the loyalty of his forces was restrained. Nobody was arrested. Men whose hands were red with the blood of Varicourt and Miomandre were allowed to defy justice, and a furious crowd was left for hours without molestation under the windows of the king. The only cry left for them to raise was "Paris," and it was sure in time to do its work. The king could not escape, for Lafayette held every gate. He could not resist, for Lafayette commanded every soldier. The general never pressed the point. He was too cautious to attend the council where the matter was considered, as if the freedom of choice was left. This time Necker had his way, and he came forward and announced to the assembled people that the Court was about to move to Paris. Lewis, who had wandered, helpless and silent, between his chair and the balcony, spoke at last, and confirmed it.

In that moment of triumph Lafayette showed himself a man of instinct and of action. The multitude had sufficiently served his purpose; but their own passions were not appeased, and the queen personified to them all the antagonistic and unpopular forces. The submission of the king was a foregone conclusion: not so the reconciliation of the queen. He said to her, "What are your Majesty's intentions?" She answered, "I know my fate, I mean to die at the feet of the king." Then Lafayette led her forward, in the face of the storm, and, as not a word could be heard, he respectfully kissed her hand. The populace saw and cheered. Under his protectorate, peace was made between the Court and the democracy.

In all these transactions, which determined the future of France, the Assembly had no share. They had had no initiative and no counsel. Their President had not known how to prevent the irruption of the women; he had supplied them with bread, and had been unable to turn them out until the National Guard arrived. After two in the morning, when he heard that all was quiet at the Palace, he adjourned the sitting. Next day he proposed that they should attend the king in a body; but Mirabeau would not allow it to be done. One hundred deputies gave a futile escort to the royal family, and the Assembly followed soon after. The power was passing from them to the disciplined people of Paris, and beyond them and their commander to the men who managed the masses. Their reign had lasted from July 16 to October 6.

It took seven hours to bring the royal family from Versailles to Paris, at a foot pace, surrounded by the victorious women, who cried: "We bring the baker, the baker's wife, and the baker's boy." And they were right. Supplies became abundant; and the sudden change encouraged many to believe that the scarcity had not been due to economic causes.

MIRABEAU

The transfer of the Government to Paris, which degraded and obscured the king, at once made the queen the foremost person in the State. Those days of October are an epoch in her character as well as in her life, and we must turn our thoughts to her, who had so much influence and so much sorrow, and who beyond all women in European history, excepting one, has charmed and saddened mankind. She had proved inferior to her position during the years of her prosperity, and had disgraced herself, even in her mother's eyes, by her share in the dismissal of Turgot. The Court was filled with stories injurious to her good name, and the calumny of the diamond necklace showed so clearly what a Prince of the Church thought her capable of, staking his existence on his belief, that her own sister suspected her, and they remained long estranged. Her frivolity was unchecked by religion; but a year or two before her misfortunes began, she became more serious; and when they were about to end, a priest found his way into the prison, and she was prepared to die. At first, she was dreaded as the most illiberal influence near the throne, and the Parliament of Paris denounced her as the occult promoter of oppression. In the decisive days of June 1789 she induced Lewis to sacrifice to the cause of aristocracy the opportune reforms that might have retrieved his fortunes. The emigration left her to confront alone the vengeance of the people. The terrific experience of October, when she saw death so near, and was made to feel so keenly the hatred she inspired, sobered in a moment the levity of her life, and brought out higher qualities. It was on that day that she began to remind those around her whose daughter she was. Ignorant as she was and passionate, she could never become a safe adviser. But she acquired decision, vigour, and self-command, and was able sometimes to strengthen the wavering mind of her husband. Too brave to be easily frightened, she refused at first the proffered aid of Mirabeau; and when, too late, she bent her pride to ask for it, she acted with her eyes open, without confidence or hope. For the surging forces of the day, for the idea that might have saved her, the idea of a government uniting the best properties of a monarchy with the best properties of a republic, she had neither sympathy nor understanding. Yet she was not wedded to the maxims that had made the greatness of her race, and the enmity of the princes and the émigrés saved her from the passions of the old régime. Condé spoke of her as a democrat; and she would have been glad to exchange the institutions of 1791 for something like the British constitution as it existed in those Tory days. She perished through her insincerity more than through the traditional desire for power. When the king was beheaded, the Prince Bishop of Bamberg and Würzburg, reputed the most sagacious and enlightened among the prelates of the empire, was heard to say, "It ought to have been the queen." We who see farther may allow the retribution that befell her follies and her errors to arrest our judgment.

Marie Antoinette's negotiation with Mirabeau, and the memorable endeavour of Mirabeau to restore the constitutional throne, is the central feature in the period now before us.

By the compulsory removal to Paris the democracy became preponderant. They were strengthened by the support of organized anarchy outside, and by the disappearance of their chief opponents within. Mounier was the first to go. The outrage at Versailles had occurred while he presided, and he resigned his seat with indignation. He attempted to rouse his own province against the Assembly, which had betrayed its mandate, and renounced its constituents; but Dauphiné, the home and basis of his influence, rejected him, and he went into exile. His example was followed by Lally Tollendal and a large number of moderate men, who despaired of their country, and who, by declining further responsibility, helped to precipitate the mischief they foresaw.

The constitutional cause, already opposed by Conservatives, was now deserted by the Liberals. Malouet remained at his post. He had been less prominent and less eager than Mounier, and he was not so easily discouraged. The Left were now able to carry out in every department of the State their interpretation of the Rights of Man. They were governed mainly by two ideas. They distrusted the king as a malefactor, convicted of the unpardonable sin of absolutism, whom it was impossible to subject to too much limitation and control; and they were persuaded that the securities for individual freedom which are requisite under a personal government are superfluous in a popular community conducting its affairs by discussion and compromise and adjustment, in which the only force is public opinion. The two views tended to the same practical result--to strengthen the legislative power, which is the nation, and weaken the executive power, which is the king. To arrest this tendency was the last effort that consumed the life of Mirabeau. The danger that he dreaded was no longer the power of the king, but the weakness of the king.

The old order of things had fallen, and the customary ways and forces were abolished. The country was about to be governed by new principles, new forms, and new men. All the assistance that order derives from habit and tradition, from local connection and personal credit, was lost. Society had to pass through a dangerous and chaotic interval, during which the supreme need was a vigorous administration. That is the statesmanlike idea which held possession of Mirabeau, and guided him consistently through the very tortuous and adventurous course of his last days. He had no jealousy of the Executive. Ministers ought to be chosen in the Assembly, ought to lead the Assembly, and to be controlled by it; and then there would be no motive to fear them and to restrict their action. That was an idea not to be learnt from Montesquieu, and generally repudiated by theorists of the separation of powers. It was familiar to Mirabeau from his experience of England, where, in 1784, he had seen the country come to the support of the king against the parliament. Thence he gathered the conception of a patriot king, of a king the true delegate and mandatory of the nation, in fact of an incipient Emperor. If his schemes had come to anything, it is likely that his democratic monarch might have become as dangerous as any arbitrary potentate could be, and that his administration would have proved as great an obstacle to parliamentary government as French administration has always been since Napoleon. But his purpose at the time was sincerely politic and legitimate, and he undertook alone the defence of constitutional principles. During the month of September Mirabeau raised the question of a parliamentary Ministry, both in the press and in the Assembly. He prepared a list of eminent men for the several offices, assigning to himself a seat in the Cabinet without a portfolio. It was a plan to make him and Talleyrand masters of the Government. The Ministers of the day did not trust him, and had no wish to make way for him, and when, on November 6, he proposed that Ministers be heard in the National Assembly, the Archbishop of Bordeaux instigated Montlosier and Lanjuinais to oppose him. Both were men of high character, and both had some attainments; and in their aversion for him, and for his evident self-seeking, they carried a motion forbidding deputies to take office. By this vote, of November 7, which permanently excluded Mirabeau from the councils of the king, the executive was deprived of authority. It is one of the decisive acts of the Constituent Assembly, for it ruined the constitutional monarchy.

Mirabeau was compelled to rely on a dissolution as the only prospect of better things. He knew that the vote was due as much to his own bad name as to a deliberate dislike of the English practice. The question for him now was whether he could accomplish through the Court what was impossible through the Assembly. He at once drew up a paper, exhorting the king to place himself at the head of the Revolution, as its moderator and guide. The Count of Provence refused to submit his plans to the king, but recommended him for the part of a secret adviser. Just then an event occurred, which is mysterious to this day, but which had the effect of bringing Mirabeau into closer relations with the king's brother. At Christmas, the Marquis de Favras was arrested, and it was discovered that he was a confidential agent of the Prince, who had employed him to raise a loan for a purpose that was never divulged--some said, to carry off the king to a frontier fortress, others suspected a scheme of counter-revolution. For the electoral law excluded the ignorant and the indigent from the franchise, limiting the rights of active citizenship to those who paid a very moderate sum in taxes. It was obvious that this exclusion, by confining power to property, created the raw material for Socialism in the future. Some day a dexterous hand might be laid on the excluded multitude congregated at Paris, to overthrow the government of the middle class. The Constituent Assembly was in danger of being overtrumped, and was necessarily suspicious.

By Mirabeau's advice, the Count of Provence at once made a public declaration of sound revolutionary sentiments, and disavowed Favras. His speech, delivered at the Hôtel de Ville, was well received and he rose in popular favour. Meantime, his unhappy confederate was tried for treason against the nation, and found guilty. Favras asked whether, on a full and explicit confession, his life would be spared. He was told that nothing could save him. The judge exhorted him to die in silence, like a brave man. The priest who assisted him afterwards professed that he had saved the life of the Count of Provence. Favras underwent his fate with fortitude, keeping his secret to the end. The evidence which would have compromised the prince was taken away, and no historian has seen it. The fatal documents were restored to him when he became king by the daughter of the man who had concealed them.

For some weeks the Count of Provence was ambitious of power, and allowed Mirabeau to put him forward as a kind of Prime Minister, or for a position analogous to that of the Cardinal-nephew in seventeenth-century Rome. He had ability, caution, and, for the moment, popularity; but he was irresolute, indolent, and vain. If anything could be made of him, it was clear that the active partner would be Mirabeau. He was neither loved nor trusted by the king and queen, and with such a confederate at his elbow he might become formidable. Necker devised a plan by which his scheming was easily frustrated. The king appeared before the Assembly, without preliminaries, and delivered an unexpected statement of policy, adopting the entire work of the Revolution, as far as it had gone, and praising in particular the recent division of Provinces into departments.

Every step, until that day, had been taken reluctantly, feebly, under compulsion. Every concession had been a defeat and a surrender. On February 4, under no immediate pressure, Lewis deliberately took the lead of the movement. It was an act, not of weakness, but of policy, not a wound received and acquiesced in, but a stroke delivered. The Assembly responded by at once taking the civic oath to maintain the Constitution. As that instrument did not yet exist, none could say what the demonstration would involve. It was adopted for the sake of committing the remnant of the privileged orders who yielded under protest.