As many errors as words. The following is the truth. The illness of the Dauphin had not prevented the two privileged orders from being received by the king. This preference offended the Communes. They ordered the President to solicit an audience. He discharged his duty with great caution. All his proceedings were concerted with two ministers, Necker and M. de Barentin. The king answered, "It is impossible for me to see M. Bailly in the situation in which I am to-night, nor to-morrow morning, nor to fix a day for receiving the deputation of the Third Estate." The note ends with these words: "Show my note to M. Bailly for his vindication."
Thus, on the day of these events the Dauphin was not dead; thus the king was not obliged to yield, he did not receive Bailly; thus the chamber had no act of insensibility to applaud; thus Louis XVI. perceived so clearly that the President of the Communes was fulfilling the duties of his office, that he felt it requisite to give him an exoneration.
The death of the Dauphin happened on the 4th of June. As soon as the assembly of the Third Estate were informed of it, they charged the President, I quote the very words, "to report to their majesties the deep grief with which this news had penetrated the Communes."
A deputation of twenty members, having Bailly at their head, was received on the 6th. The President thus expressed himself: "Your faithful Communes are deeply moved by the circumstance in which your majesty has the goodness to receive their deputation, and they take the liberty to address to you the expression of all their regrets, and of their respectful sensibility."
Such language can, I think, be delivered without uneasiness to the appreciation of all good men.
Let us be correct; the Communes did not obtain at once the audience that they demanded on account of the difficulties of the ceremonial. They would have wished to make the Third Estate speak kneeling. "This custom," said M. de Barentin, "has existed from time immemorial, and if the king wished...." "And if twenty-five millions of men do not wish it," exclaimed Bailly, interrupting the minister, "where are the means to force them?" "The two privileged orders," replied the Guard of the Seals, somewhat stunned by the apostrophe, "no longer require the Third Estate to bend the knee; but, after having formerly possessed immense privileges in the ceremonial, they limit themselves now to asking some difference. This difference I cannot find." "Do not take the trouble to seek for it," replied the President hastily: "however slight the difference might be, the Communes will not suffer it."
This digression was required through a grave and recent error. The memory of Bailly will not suffer by it, since it has afforded me the opportunity of establishing, beyond any reply, that in our fellow academician a noble firmness was on occasions allied to urbanity, mildness, and politeness. But what will be said of the puerilities which I have been obliged to recall, of the mean pretensions of the courtiers on the eve of an immense revolution? When the Greeks of the Lower Empire, instead of going on the ramparts valiantly to repel the attacks of the Turks, remained night and day collected around some sophists in their lyceums and academies, their sterile debates at least related to some intellectual questions; but at Versailles, there was nothing in action, on the part of two out of three orders, but the most miserable vanity.
By an express arrangement, decreed from the beginning, among the Members of the Communes, the Dean or President had to be renewed every week. Notwithstanding the incessant representations of Bailly, this legislative article was long neglected, so fortunate did the Assembly feel in having at their head this eminent man, who to undeniable knowledge, united sincerity, moderation, and a degree of patriotism not less appreciated.
He thus presided over the Third Estate on the memorable days that determined the march of our great revolution.
On the 17th of June, for instance, when the Deputies of the Communes, worn out with the tergiversations of the other two orders, showed that in case of need they would act without their concurrence, and resolutely adopted the title of National Assembly,—they provided against presumed projects of dissolution, by stamping as illegal all levies of contribution which were not granted by the Assembly.
Again, on the 20th of June, when the Members of the National Assembly, affronted at the Hall having been closed and their meetings suspended without an official notification, with only the simple form of placards and public criers, as if a mere theatre was in question, they assembled at a tennis-court, and "took an oath never to separate, but to assemble wherever circumstances might render it requisite, until the Constitution of the Kingdom should be established and confirmed on solid foundations."
Once more, Bailly was still at the head of his colleagues on the 23d of June, when, by an inexcusable inconsistency, and which perhaps was not without some influence on the events of that day, the Deputies of the Third Estate were detained a long time at the servants' door of the Hall of Meeting, and in the rain; while the deputies of the other two orders, to whom a more convenient and more suitable entrance had been assigned, were already in their places.
The account that Bailly gave of the celebrated royal meeting on the 23d of June, does not exactly agree with that of most historians.
The king finished his speech with the following imprudent words: "I order you, Gentlemen, to separate immediately."
The whole of the nobility and a portion of the clergy retired; while the Deputies of the Communes remained quietly in their places. The Grand Master of the Ceremonies having remarked it, approaching Bailly said to him, "You heard the king's order, Sir?" The illustrious President answered, "I cannot adjourn the Assembly until it has deliberated on it." "Is that indeed your answer, and am I to communicate it to the king?" "Yes, Sir," replied Bailly, and immediately addressing the Deputies who surrounded him, he said, "It appears to me that the assembled nation cannot receive an order."
It was after this debate, at once both firm and moderate, that Mirabeau addressed from his place the well-known apostrophe to M. de Brézé. The President disapproved both of the basis and the form of it; he felt that there was no sufficient motive; for, said he, the Grand Master of the Ceremonies made use of no menace; he had not in any way insinuated that there was an intention to resort to force; he had not, above all, spoken of bayonets. At all events, there is an essential difference between the words of Mirabeau as related in almost all the Histories of the Revolution, and those reported by Bailly. According to our illustrious colleague the impetuous tribune exclaimed, "Go tell those who sent you, that the force of bayonets can do nothing against the will of the nation." This is, to my mind, much more energetic than the common version. The expression, "We will only retire by the force of bayonets!" had always appeared to me, notwithstanding the admiration conceded to it, to imply only a resistance which would cease on the arrival of a corporal and half-a-dozen soldiers.
Bailly quitted the chair of President of the National Assembly on the 2d of July. His scientific celebrity, his virtue, his conciliating spirit, had not been superfluous in habituating certain men to see a member of the Communes preside over an assembly in which there was a prince of the blood, a prince of the church, the greatest lords of the kingdom, and all the high dignitaries of the clergy. The first person named to succeed to Bailly was the Duke d'Orléans. After his refusal, the Assembly chose the Archbishop of Vienne (Pompignan).
Bailly recalls to mind with sensibility, in his memoirs, the testimonies of esteem that he obtained through his difficult and laborious presidency. The 3d of July, on the proposition of the Duke de la Rochefoucauld and of the Archbishop of Bordeaux, the National Assembly sent a deputation to their illustrious ex-president, to thank him (these are the precise words) "for his noble, wise, and firm conduct." The electoral body of Bordeaux had been beforehand with these homages. The Chamber of Commerce of that town, at the same time, decided that the portrait of the great citizen should decorate their hall of meeting. The Academy of Sciences, the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles Lettres, did not remain insensible to the glory that one of their members had acquired in the career of politics, and testified it by numerous deputations. Finally, Marmontel, in the name of the French Academy, expressed to Bailly "how proud that assembly was to count, among its members an Aristides that no one was tired of calling the Just."
I shall not excite surprise, I hope, by adding, after such brilliant testimonies of sympathy, that the inhabitants of Chaillot celebrated the return of Bailly amongst them by fêtes, and fireworks, and that even the curate of the parish and the churchwardens, unwilling to be surpassed by their fellow-citizens, nominated the historian of antediluvian astronomy honorary churchwarden. I will, at all events, repress the smile that might arise from such private reminiscences, by reminding the reader that a man's moral character is better appreciated by his neighbours, to whom he shows himself daily without disguise, than that of more considerable persons, who are only seen on state occasions, and in official costume.
The Bastille had been taken on the 14th of July. That event, on which, during upwards of half a century, there have been endless discussions, on opposite sides, was characterized in the following way, in the address to the National Assembly, drawn up by M. Moreau de Saint Méry, in the name of the City Committee:—
"Yesterday will be for ever memorable by the taking of a citadel, consequent on the Governor's perfidy. The bravery of the people was irritated by the breaking of the word of honour. This act (the strongest proof that the nation who knows best how to obey, is jealous of its just liberties,) has been followed by incidents that from the public misfortunes might have been foreseen."
Lally Tollendal said to the Parisians, on the 15th of July: "In the disastrous circumstances that have just occurred, we did not cease to participate in your griefs; and we have also participated in your anger; it was just."
The National Assembly solicited and obtained permission from the king on the 15th of July, to send a deputation to Paris, which they flattered themselves would restore order and peace in that great city, then in a convulsed state. Madame Bailly, always influenced by fear, endeavoured, though vainly, to dissuade her husband from joining the appointed deputies. The learned academician naïvely replied, "After a presidency that has been applauded, I am not sorry to show myself to my fellow-citizens." You see, Gentlemen, that Bailly always admits the future reader of his Posthumous Memoirs confidentially into his most secret feelings.
The deputation completed its mandate at the Town Hall, to the entire satisfaction of the Parisian populace; the Archbishop of Paris, its President, had already proposed to go in procession to the Cathedral to singTe Deum; they were preparing to depart, when the Assembly, giving way to a spontaneous enthusiasm, with an unanimous voice, proclaimed Bailly Mayor of Paris, and Lafayette Commander-in-Chief of the National Guard, the creation of which had just been authorized.
The official minutes of the Municipality state, that on being thus unexpectedly named, Bailly bent forward to the Assembly, his eyes bathed in tears, and that amidst his sobs he could only utter a few unconnected words to express his gratitude. The Mayor's own recital differs very little from this official relation. Still I shall quote it as a model of sincerity and of modesty.
"I know not whether I wept, I know not what I said; but I remember well that I was never so surprised, so confused, and so beneath myself. Surprise adding to my usual timidity before a large assembly, I rose, I stammered out a few words that were not heard, and that I did not hear myself, but which my agitation, much more than my mouth, rendered expressive. Another effect of my sudden stupidity was, that I accepted without knowing what a burden I was taking on myself."
Bailly having become Mayor, and being tacitly accepted by the National Assembly, even from the 16th of July, availed himself of his intimacy with Vicq-d'Azyr, the Queen's physician, to persuade Louis XVI. to show himself to the Parisians. This advice was listened to. On the 17th the new magistrate addressed the king near the barrière de la Conférence, in a discourse that began thus:—
"I bring to your Majesty the keys of your good city of Paris. They are the same that were presented to Henry IV. He had reconquered his people, here the people have reconquered their king."
The antithesis: "he had reconquered his people, here the people have reconquered their king," was universally applauded. But since then, it has been criticized with bitterness and violence. The enemies of the Revolution have striven to discover in it an intention of committing an outrage, to which the character of Bailly, and still more so the first glance at an examination of the rest of his discourse, give a flat contradiction. I will acknowledge, Gentlemen, I think that I have even a right to decline the epithet of "unfortunate," which one of our most respectable colleagues in the French Academy has pronounced relative to this celebrated phrase, while doing justice at the same time to the sentiments of the author. The poison contained in the few words that I have quoted, was very inoffensive, since more than a year passed without any courtier, though furnished like a microscope with, all the monarchical susceptibilities, beginning to suspect its existence.
The Mayor of Paris was at the Hôtel de Ville in the midst of those same Parisian citizens who inspired him, a few months before, with the mortifying reflection already quoted: "I remarked in the Assembly of Electors a dislike to literary people and Academicians." The feeling did not appear to be changed.
The political movement in 1789, had been preceded by two very serious physical perturbations which had great influence on the march of events. Every one is aware, that the excessively rigorous winter of 1788-89 was the cause of severe sufferings to the people. But it may not be so generally known, that on the 13th of July, 1788, a fall of hail of unprecedented size and quantity, in a few hours completely ravaged the two parallel zones lying between the department of the Charente and the frontiers of the Pays-Bas, and that in consequence of this frightful hail, the wheat partly failed, both in the north and in the west of France, until after the harvest of 1789.
The scarcity was already severely felt, when Bailly on the 15th of July accepted the appointment of Mayor of Paris. That day, it had been ascertained, from an examination of the quantity of corn at the Market Hall and of the private stocks of the bakers, that the supply of grain and flour would be entirely exhausted in three days. The next day, the 16th of July, all the overseers in the victualling administration had disappeared. This flight, the natural consequence of the terrible intimidation that hovered over those who were in any way connected with the furnishing of provisions, interrupted the operations which had been commenced, and exposed the city of Paris to famine.
Bailly, a magistrate of only one day's standing, considered that the multitude understands nothing, hears nothing when bread fails; that a scarcity, either real or supposed, is the great promoter of riots; that all classes of the population grant their sympathy to whoever cries,I am hungry; that this lamentable cry soon unites individuals of all ages, of both sexes, of every condition, in one common sentiment of blind fury; that no human power could maintain order and tranquillity in the bosom of a population that dreads the want of food; he therefore resolved to devote his days and his nights to provisioning the capital; to deserve, as he himself said, the title of theFather nourisher of the Parisians,—that title of which he showed himself always so proud, after having painfully gained it.
Bailly day by day recorded in his Memoirs a statement of his actions, of his anxieties, and of his fears. It may be good for the instruction of the more fortunate administrators of the present epoch, to insert here a few lines from the journal of our colleague.
"18th August. Our provisions are very much reduced. Those of the morrow depend strictly on the arrangements made on the previous evening; and now amidst this distress, we learn that our flour-wagons have been stopped at Bourg-la-Reine; that some banditti are pillaging the markets in the direction of Rouen, that they have seized twenty wagons of flour that were destined for us; ... that the unfortunate Sauvage was massacred at Saint Germain-en-Laye; ... that Thomassin escaped with difficulty from the fury of the populace at Choisy."
By repeating either these literal words, or something equivalent to them, for every day of distress throughout the year 1789, an exact idea may be formed of the anxieties that Bailly experienced from the morning after his installation as mayor. I deceive myself; to complete the picture we ought also to record the unreflecting and inconsiderate actions of a multitude of people whose destiny appeared to be, to meddle with every thing and to spoil every thing. I will not resist the wish to show one of these self-important men, starving (or very nearly so) the city of Paris.
"21st August. The store of victuals, Bailly says, was so scanty, that the lives of the inhabitants of Paris depended on the somewhat mathematical precision of our arrangements. Having learnt that a barge with eighteen hundred sacks of flour had arrived at Poissy, I immediately despatched a hundred wagons from Paris to fetch them. And behold, in the evening, an officer without powers and without orders, related before me, that having met some wagons on the Poissy road, he made them go back, because he did not think that there was a wharf for any loaded barge on the Seine. It would be difficult for me to describe the despair and the anger into which this recital threw me. We were obliged to put sentinels at the bakers' doors!"
The despair and the anger of Bailly were very natural. Even now, after more than half a century, no one thinks without a shudder of that obscure individual who, from not believing that a loaded barge could get up to Poissy, was going, on the 21st August, 1789, to plunge the capital into bloody disorders.
By means of perseverance, devotedness, and courage, Bailly succeeded in overcoming all the difficulties that the real scarcity, and the fictitious one, which was still more redoubtable, caused daily to arise. He succeeded, but his health from that epoch was deeply injured; his mind had undergone several of those severe shocks that we can never entirely recover from. Our colleague said, "when I used to pass the bakers' shops during the scarcity, and saw them besieged by a crowd, my heart sunk within me; and even now that abundance has been restored to us, the sight of one of those shops strikes me with a deep emotion."
The administrative conflicts, the source of which lay in the very bosom of the Council of the Commune, daily drew from Bailly the following exclamation, a faithful image of his mind:I have ceased to be happy. The embarrassments that proceeded from external sources touched him much less, and yet they were far from contemptible. Let us surmount our repugnance, although a reasonable one; let us cast a firm look on the sink where the unworthy calumnies were manufactured, of which Bailly was for some time the object.
Several years before our first revolution, a native of Neufchatel quitted his mountains, traversed the Jura, and lighted upon Paris. Without means, without any recognized talent, without eminence of any sort, repulsive in appearance, of a more than negligent deportment, it seemed unlikely that he should hope, or even dream, of success; but the young traveller had been told to have full confidence, although a celebrated academician had not yet given that singular definition of our country, "France is the home of foreigners." At all events, the definition was not erroneous in this instance, for soon after his arrival, the Neufchatelois was appointed physician to the household of one of the princes of the royal family, and formed strict intimacies with the greater part of the powerful people about the court.
This stranger thirsted for literary glory. Amongst his early productions, a medico-philosophical work figured in three volumes, relative to the reciprocal influences of the mind and the body. The author thought he had produced achef d'œuvre; even Voltaire was not thought to be above analyzing it suitably; let us hasten to say that the illustrious old man, yielding to the pressing solicitations of the Duke de Praslin, one of the most active patrons of the Swiss doctor, promised to study the work and give his opinion of it.
The author was at the acmé of his wishes. After having pompously announced that the seat of the soul is in themeninges(cerebral membrane), could there be any thing to fear from the liberal thinker of Ferney? He had only forgotten that the patriarch was above all a man of good taste, and that the book on the body and soul offended all the proprieties of life. Voltaire's article appeared. He began with this severe and just lesson—"We should not be prodigal of contempt towards others, and of esteem for ourselves, to such a degree as will be revolting to our readers." The end was still more overwhelming. "We see harlequin everywhere cutting capers to amuse the pit."
Harlequin had received a sufficient dose. Not having succeeded in literature, he threw himself upon the sciences.
On betaking himself to this new career, the doctor of Neufchatel attacked Newton. But unluckily his criticisms were directed precisely to those points wherein optics may vie in evidence with geometry itself. This time the patron was M. de Maillebois, and the tribunal the Academy of Sciences.
The Academy pronounced its judgment gravely, without inflicting a word of ridicule; for example, it did not speak of harlequin; but it did not therefore remain the less established that the pretended experiments, intended, it was said, to upset Newton's, on the unequal refrangibility of variously coloured rays, and the explanation of the rainbow, &c., had absolutely no scientific value.
Still the author would not allow himself to have been beaten. He even conceived the possibility of retaliation; and, availing himself of his intimacy with the Duke de Villeroy, governor of the second city in the kingdom, he got the Academy of Lyons to propose for competition all the questions in optics, which for several years past had been the subjects of its disquisitions; he even furnished the amount of the prize out of his own pocket, under an assumed name.
The prize so longed for, and so singularly proposed, was not obtained, however, by the Duke de Villeroy's candidate, but by the astronomer Flaugergues. From that instant, the pseudo-physicist became the bitter enemy of the scientific bodies of the whole universe, of whoever bore the title of an academician. Putting aside all shame, he no longer made himself known in the field of natural philosophy, merely by imaginary experiments, or by juggleries; he had recourse to contemptible practices, with the object of throwing doubt upon the clearest and best proved principles of science; for example, the metallic needles discovered by the academician Charles, and which the foreign doctor had adroitly concealed in a cake of resin, in order to contradict the common opinion of the electric non-conductibility of that substance.
These details were necessary. I could not avoid characterizing the journalist who by his daily calumnies contributed most to undermine the popularity of Bailly. It was requisite besides, once for all, to strip him in this circle of the epithet of philosopher, with which men of the world, and even some historians, inconsiderately gratified him. When a man reveals himself by some brilliant and intelligent works, the public is pleased to find them united with good qualities of the heart. Nor should its joy be less hearty on discovering the absence of all intellectual merit in a man who had before shown himself despicable by his passions, or his vices, or even only by serious blemishes of character.
If I have not yet named the enemy of our colleague, if I have contented myself with recounting his actions, it is in order to avoid as much as I can the painful feeling that his name must raise here. Judge, Gentlemen, weigh, my scruples: the furious persecutor of Bailly, of whom I have been talking to you for some minutes, was Marat.
The revolution of '89 just occurred in time to relieve the abortive author, physiologist, and physicist from the intolerable position into which he had been thrown by his inability and his quackery.
As soon as the revolution had assumed a decided movement, great surprise was occasioned by the sudden transformations excited in the inferior walks of the political world. Marat was one of the most striking examples of these hasty changes of principles. The Neufchatel physician had shown himself a violent adversary to those opinions that occasioned the convocation of the assembly of Notables, and the national commotion in '89. At that time democratical institutions had not a more bitter or more violent censor. Marat liked it to be believed that in quitting France for England, he fled especially from the spectacle of social renovation which was odious to him. Yet a month after the taking of the Bastille, he returned to Paris, established a journal, and from its very beginning left far behind him, even those who, in the hope of making themselves remarkable, thought they must push exaggeration to its very farthest limits. The former connection of Marat with M. de Calonne was perfectly well known; they remembered these words of Pitt's: "The French must go through liberty, and then be brought back to their old government by licence;" the avowed adversaries of revolution testified by their conduct, by their votes, and even by their imprudent words, that according to them,the worstwas the only means of returning to what they callthe good; and yet these instructive comparisons struck only eight or ten members of our great assemblies, so small a share has suspicion in the national character, so painful is distrust to French sincerity. The historians of our troubles themselves have but skimmed the question that I have just raised—assuredly a very important and very curious one. In such matters, the part of a prophet is tolerably hazardous; yet I do not hesitate to predict, that a minute study of the conduct and of the discourses of Marat, would lead the mind more and more to those chapters in a treatise on the chase, wherein we see depicted bad species of falcons and hawks, at first only pursuing the game by a sign from the master, and for his advantage; but by degrees taking pleasure in these bloody struggles, and entering on the sport at last with passion and for their own profit.
Marat took good care not to forget that during a revolution, men, naturally suspicious, act in their more immediate affairs so as to render those persons suspected whose duty it is to watch over them. The Mayor of Paris, the General Commandant of the National Guard, were the first objects, therefore, at which the pamphleteer aimed. As an academician, Bailly had an extra claim to his hate.
Among men of Marat's disposition, the wounds of self-love never heal. Without the hateful passions derived from this source, who would believe that an individual, whose time was divided between the superintendence of a daily journal, the drawing up of innumerable placards with which he covered the walls of Paris, together with the struggles of the Convention, the disputes not less fierce of the clubs; that an individual who, besides, had given himself the task of imposing an Agrarian law on the country, could find time to write the very long letters against the old official adversaries of his bad experiments, his absurd theories, his lucubrations devoid both of erudition and of talent; letters in which the Monges, the Laplaces, the Lavoisiers are treated with such an entire neglect of justice and of truth, and with such a cynical spirit, that my respect for this assembly prevents my quoting a single expression.
It was not then only the Mayor of Paris whom the pretended friend of the people persecuted; it was also the Academician Bailly. But the illustrious philosopher, the virtuous magistrate, gave no hold for positive and decided criminations. The hideous pamphleteer understood this well; and therefore he adopted vague insinuations, that allowed of no possible refutation, a method which, we may remark by the way, has not been without imitators. Marat exclaimed every day: "Let Bailly send in his accounts!" and the most powerful figure of rhetoric, as Napoleon said, repetition, finally inspires doubts in a stupid portion of the public, in some feeble, ignorant, and credulous minds in the Council of the Commune; and the scrupulous magistrate wished, in fact, to send in his accounts. Here they are in two lines: Bailly never had the handling of any public funds. He left the Hôtel de Ville, after having spent there two thirds of his patrimony. If his functions had been long protracted, he would have retired completely ruined. Before the Commune assigned him any salary, the expenses of our colleague in charities already exceeded 30,000 livres.
That was, Gentlemen, the final result. The details would be more striking, and the name of Bailly would ennoble them. I could show our colleague entering only once with his wife, to regulate the furnishing of the apartments that the Commune assigned him; rejecting all that had the appearance of luxury or even of elegance; to replace sets of china by sets of earthenware, new carpets by the half-used ones of M. de Crosnes, writing tables of mahogany by writing tables of walnut, &c. But all this would appear an indirect criticism, which is far from my thoughts. From the same motives, I will not say, that inimical to all sinecures, of all plurality of appointments, when the functions are not fulfilled, the Mayor of Paris, since he no longer regularly attended the meetings of the National Assembly, no longer fingered the pay of a deputy, and that this was proved, to the great confusion of the idiots, whose minds had been disturbed by Marat's clamours. Yet I will record that Bailly refused all that in the incomes of his predecessors had proceeded from an impure source; as, for example, the allowances from the lotteries, the amount of which was by his orders constantly paid into the coffers of the Commune.
You see, Gentlemen, that no trouble was required to show that the disinterestedness of Bailly was great, enlightened, dictated by virtue, and that it was at least equal to his other eminent qualities. In the series of accusations that I have extracted from the pamphlets of that epoch, there is one, however, as to which, all things considered, I will not attempt to defend Bailly. He accepted a livery from the city; on this point no blame was attached to him; but the colours of the livery were very gaudy. Perhaps the inventors of these bright shades had imagined, that the insignia of the first magistrate of the metropolis, in a ceremony, in a crowd, should, like the light from a Pharos, strike even inattentive eyes. But these explanations regard those who would make of Bailly a perfectly rational being, a man absolutely faultless; I, although his admirer, I resign myself to admit that in a laborious life, strewed with so many rocks, he committed the horrible crime, unpardonable let it be called, of having accepted from the Commune a livery of gaudy colours.
Bailly figured in the events of the month of October 1789, only by the unsuccessful efforts he made at Paris, to arrange with Lafayette how to prevent a great crowd of women from going to Versailles. When this crowd, considerably increased, returned on the 6th October very tumultuously escorting the carriages of the royal family, Bailly harangued the king at the Barrière de la Conférence. Three days after, he also complimented the Queen at the Tuileries in the name of the Municipal Council.
On retiring from the National Assembly, which he then called a Cavern of Anthropophagi, Lally Tollendal published a letter in which he found bitter fault with Bailly on account of these discourses. Lally was angry, recollecting that the day when the king reëntered his capital as a prisoner, surrounded by a very disrespectful crowd, and preceded by the heads of his body-guards, had appeared to Bailly a fine day!
If the two heads had been in the procession, Bailly becomes inexcusable; but the two epochs, or rather hours (to speak more correctly), have been confounded; the wretched men, who after a conflict with the body-guard, brought their barbarous trophies to Paris, left Versailles in the morning; they were arrested and imprisoned, by order of the municipality, as soon as they had entered the barriers of the capital. Thus the hideous circumstance reported by Lally was the dream of a wild imagination.
Bailly's Memoirs have thus far served me as a guide and check; now that this resource fails me, let us refer to his posthumous work.
I could only consult those Memoirs as far as they related to the public or private life of our colleague. Historians may consult them in a more general point of view. They will find some valuable facts in them, related without prejudice; ample matter for new and fruitful reflections on the way in which revolutions are generated, increase, and lead to catastrophes. Bailly is less positive, less absolute, less slashing, than the generality of his contemporaries, even respecting those events in which circumstances assigned to him the principal part to be acted; hence when he points out some low intrigue, in distinct and categorical terms, he inspires full confidence.
When the occasion will allow of it, Bailly praises with enthusiasm; a noble action fills him with joy; he puts it together and relates it with relish. This disposition of mind is sufficiently rare to deserve mention.
The day, still far off, when we shall finally recognize that our great revolution presented, even in the interior, even during the most cruel epochs, something besides anarchical and sanguinary scenes: the day when, like the intrepid fishermen in the Gulf of Persia and on the coasts of Ceylon, a zealous and impartial writer will consent to plunge head-foremost into the ocean of facts of all sorts, of which our fathers were witnesses, and exclusively seize the pearls, disdainfully rejecting the mud,—Bailly's Memoirs will furnish a glorious contingent to this national work. Two or three quotations will explain my ideas, and will show, besides, how scrupulously Bailly registered all that could shed honour on our country.
I will take the first fact from the military annals; a grenadier of the French Guard saves his commanding officer's life, although the people thought that they had great reason of complaint against him. "Grenadier, what is your name?" exclaimed the Duke de Châtelet, full of gratitude. The soldier replied, "Colonel, my name is that of all my comrades."
I will borrow the second fact from the civil annals: Stephen de Larivière, one of the electors of Paris, had gone on the 20th of July, to fetch Berthier de Sauvigny, who had been fatally arrested at Compiègne, on the false report that the Assembly of the Town Hall wished to prosecute him as intendant of the army, by which a few days before the capital had been surrounded. The journey was performed in an open cabriolet, amidst the insults of a misled population, who imputed to the prisoner the scarcity and bad quality of the bread. Twenty times, guns, pistols, sabres, would have put an end to Berthier's life, if, twenty times, the member of the Commune of Paris had not voluntarily covered him with his body. When they reached the streets of the capital, the cabriolet had to penetrate through an immense and compact crowd, whose exasperation bordered on delirium, and who evidently wished to perpetrate the utmost extremities; not knowing which of the two travellers was the Intendant of Paris, they betook themselves to crying out, "let the prisoner take off his hat!" Berthier obeyed, but Larivière uncovered his head also at the same instant.
All parties would gain by the production of a work, that I desire to see most earnestly. For my part, I acknowledge, I should be sorry not to see in it the answer made to Francis II. by one of the numerous officers who committed the fault, so honestly acknowledged afterwards,—a fault that no one would commit now,—that of joining foreigners in arms. The Austrian prince, after his coronation, attempted, at a review, to induce our countrymen to admire the good bearing of his troops, and finally exclaimed, "There are materials wherewith to crush the Sans-culottes." "That remains to be seen!" instantly answered the émigré officer.
May these quotations lead some able writer to erect a monument still wanting to the glory of our country! There is in this subject, it seems to me, enough to inspire legitimate ambition. Did not Plutarch immortalize himself by preserving noble actions and fine sentiments from oblivion?
The illustrious Mayor of Paris had not the leisure to continue writing his reminiscences beyond the date of the 2d of October, 1789. The analysis and appreciation of the events subsequent to that epoch will remain deprived of that influential sanction, pure as virtue, concise and precise as truth, which I found in the handwriting of our colleague. Xenocrates, historians say, who was celebrated among the Greeks for his honesty, being called to bear witness before a tribunal, the judges with common consent stopped him as he was advancing towards the altar according to the usual custom, and said, "These formalities are not required from you; an oath would add nothing to the authority of your words." Such, Bailly presents himself to the reader of his Posthumous Memoirs. None of his assertions leave any room for indecision or doubt. He needs not high-flown expressions or protestations in order to convince; nor would an oath add authority to his words. He may be deceived, but he is never the deceiver.
I will spare no effort to give to the description of the latter part of Bailly's life, all the correctness which can result from a sincere and conscientious comparison of the writings published as well by the partisans as by the enemies of our great revolution. Such, however, is my desire to prevent two phases, though very distinct, being confounded together, that I shall here pause, in order to cast a scrupulous glance on the actions and on the various publications of our colleague. I shall moreover thus have an easy opportunity of filling up some important lacunæ.
I read in a biographical article, otherwise very friendly, that Bailly was nominated the very day of, and immediately after, the assassination of M. de Flesselles; and in this identity the wish was to insinuate that the first Mayor of Paris received this high dignity from the bloody hands of a set of wretches. The learned biographer, notwithstanding his good will, has ill repelled the calumny. With a little more attention he would have succeeded better. A simple comparison of dates would have sufficed. The death of M. de Flesselles occurred on the 14th of July; Bailly was nominated two days after.
I will address the same remark to the authors of a Biographical Dictionary still more recent, in which they speak of the ineffectual efforts that Bailly made to prevent the multitude from murdering the governor of the Bastille (de Launay). But Bailly had no opportunity of making an effort, for he was then at Versailles; no duty called him to Paris, nor did he become Mayor till two days after the taking of the fortress. It is really inexcusable not to have compared the two dates, by which these errors would have been avoided.
Many persons very little acquainted with contemporaneous history, fancy that during the whole duration of Bailly's administration, Paris was quite a cut-throat place. That is a romance; the following is the truth:—
Bailly was Mayor during two years and four months. In that time there occurred four political assassinations; those of Foulon and of Berthier de Sauvigny, his son-in-law, at the Hôtel de Ville; that of M. Durocher, a respectable officer of the gendarmerie, killed at Chaillot, by a musket-shot, in August, 1789; and that of a baker massacred in a riot in the month of October of the same year. I do not speak of the assassination of two unfortunate men on the Champ de Mars in July, 1791, as that deplorable fact must be considered separately.
The individuals guilty of the assassination of the baker were seized, condemned to death, and executed. The family of the unfortunate victim became the object of the anxious care of all the authorities, and obtained a pension.
The death of M. Durocher was attributed to some Swiss soldiers who had revolted.
The horrible and ever to be deplored assassinations of Foulon and of Berthier, are among those misfortunes which, under certain given circumstances, no human power could prevent.
In times of scarcity, a slight word, either true or unfounded, suffices to create a terrible commotion.
Réveillon is made to say, that a workman can live upon fifteen sous per diem, and behold his manufactory destroyed from top to bottom.
They ascribe to Foulon the barbarous vaunt; "I will force the people to eat hay;" and without any order from the constituted authorities, some peasants, neighbours of the old minister, arrest him, take him to Paris, his son-in-law experiences the same fate, and the famished populace immolates both of them.
In proportion as the multitude appear to me unjust and culpable, in attacking certain men respecting a scarcity of provisions, when it is the manifest consequence of the severity of the seasons, I should be disposed to excuse their rage against the authors of factitious scarcities. Well, Gentlemen, at the time that Foulon was assassinated, the people, deceived by some impassioned orators of the Assembly, might, or let us rather say, ought to believe, that they were wilfully famished. Foulon perished the 22d of July, 1789; on the 15th, that is to say, seven days before, Mirabeau had addressed the following incendiary words to the inhabitants of the capital, from the National Tribune:—
"Henry IV. allowed provisions to be taken into besieged and rebellious Paris; but now, some perverse ministers intercept convoys of provisions destined for famished and obedient Paris."
Yet people have been so inconsiderate as to be astonished at the assassinations of Foulon and of Berthier. Going back in thought to the month of July, 1789, I perceive in the imprudent apostrophe of the eloquent tribune, more sanguinary disorders than the contemporary history has had to record.
One of the most honourable, one of the most respectable and the most respected members of the institute, having been led, in a recent work, to relate the assassination of Foulon, has thrown on the conduct of Bailly, under those cruel circumstances, an aspersion that I read with surprise and grief. Foulon was detained in the Hôtel de Ville. Bailly went down into the square, and succeeded for a moment in calming the multitude. "I did not imagine," said the Mayor in his memoirs, "that they could have forced the Hôtel de Ville, a well-guarded post, and an object of respect to all the citizens. I therefore thought the prisoner in perfect safety; I did not doubt but the waves of this storm would finally subside, and I departed."
The honourable author of theHistory of the Reign of Louis XVI.opposes to this passage the following words taken from the official minutes of the Hôtel de Ville: "The electors (those who had accompanied Bailly out to the square) reported in the Hall the certainty that the calm would not last long." The new historian adds: "How could the Mayor alone labour under this delusion? It is too evident, that on such a day, the public tranquillity was much too uncertain, to allow of the chief magistrate of the town absenting himself without deserving the reproach of weakness." The remainder of the passage shows too evidently, that in the author's estimation, weakness here was synonymous with cowardice.
It is against this, Gentlemen, that I protest with heartfelt earnestness. Bailly absented himself because he did not think that the Hôtel de Ville could be forced. The electors in the passage quoted do not enunciate a different opinion: where then is the contradiction?
Bailly deceived himself in this expectation, for the multitude burst into the Hôtel de Ville. We will grant that there was an error of judgment in this; but nothing in the world authorizes us to call in question the courage of the Mayor.
To decide after the blow, with so little hesitation or consideration, that Bailly ought not to have absented himself from the House of the Commune, we must forget that, under such circumstances, the obligations of the first magistrate of the city were quite imperious and very numerous; it is requisite, above all, not to remember that each day, the provision of flour required for the nourishment of seven or eight hundred thousand inhabitants, depended on the measures adopted on the previous evening. M. de Crosne, who on quitting the post of Lieutenant of Police, had not ceased to be a citizen, was during some days a very enlightened and zealous councillor for Bailly; but on the day that Foulon was arrested, this dismissed magistrate thought himself lost. He and his family made an appeal to the gratitude and humanity of our colleague. It was to procure a refuge for them, that Bailly employed the few hours of absence with which he was so much reproached: those hours during which that catastrophe happened which the Mayor could not have prevented, since even the superhuman efforts of General Lafayette, commanding an armed force, proved futile. I will add, that to spare M. de Crosne an arbitrary arrest, the imminent danger of which alas! was too evident in the death of Berthier, Bailly absented himself again from the Hôtel de Ville on the night of the 22d to the 23d of July, to accompany the former Lieutenant of Police to a great distance from Paris.
There is not a more distressing spectacle than that of one honest man wrongfully attacking another honest man. Gentlemen, let us never willingly leave the satisfaction and the advantage of it to the wicked.
To appreciate the actions of our predecessors with impartiality and justice, it would be indispensable to keep constantly before our eyes the list of unheard-of difficulties that the revolution had to surmount, and to remember the very restricted means of repression placed at the disposal of the authorities in the beginning.
The scarcity of food gave rise to many embarrassments, to many a crisis; but causes of quite another nature had not less influence on the march of events.
In his memoirs, Bailly speaks of the manœuvres of a redoubtable faction labouring for ... under the name of the.... The names are blank. A certain editor of the work filled up the lacunæ. I have not the same hardihood, I only wished to remark that Bailly had to combat at once both the spontaneous effervescence of the multitude, and the intrigues of a crowd of secret agents, who distributed money with a liberal hand.
Some day, said our colleague, the infernal genius who directed those intrigues andle bailleur de fondswill be known. Although the proper names are wanting, it is certain that some persons inimical to the revolution urged it to deplorable excesses.
These enemies had collected in the capital thirty or forty thousand vagabonds. What could be opposed to them? The Tribunals? They had no moral power, and were declared enemies to the revolution. The National Guard? It was only just formed; the officers scarcely knew each other, and moreover scarcely knew the men who were to obey them. Was it at least permitted to depend on the regular armed force? It consisted of six battalions of French Guards without officers; of six thousand soldiers who, from every part of France, had flocked singly to Paris, on reading in the newspapers the following expressions from General Lafayette: "They talk of deserters! The real deserters are those men who have not abandoned their standards." There were finally six hundred Swiss Guards in Paris, deserters from their regiments; for, let us speak freely, the celebrated monument of Lucerne will not prevent the Swiss themselves from being recognized by impartial and intelligent historians, as having experienced the revolutionary fever.
Those who, with such poor means of repression, flattered themselves that they could entirely prevent any disorder, in a town of seven or eight hundred thousand inhabitants in exasperation, must have been very blind. Those, on the other hand, who attempt to throw the responsibility of the disorders on Bailly, would prove by this alone, that good people should always keep aloof from public affairs during a revolution.
The administrator, a being of modern creation, now declares, with the most ludicrous self-sufficiency, that Bailly was not equal to the functions of a Mayor of Paris. It is, he says, by undeserved favour that his statue has been placed on the façade of the Hôtel de Ville. During his magistracy, Bailly did not create any large square in the capital, he did not open out any large streets, he elevated no splendid monument; Bailly would therefore have done better had he remained an astronomer or erudite scholar.
The enumeration of all the public erections that Bailly did not execute is correct. It might also have been added, that far from devoting the municipal funds to building, he had the vast and threatening castle of the Bastille demolished down to its very foundation's; but this would not deprive Bailly of the honour of having been one of the most enlightened magistrates that the city of Paris could boast.
Bailly did not enlarge any street, did not erect any palace during the twenty-eight months of his administration! No, undoubtedly! for, first it was necessary to give bread to the inhabitants of Paris; now the revenues of the town, added to the daily sums furnished by Necker, scarcely sufficed for those principal wants. Some years before, the Parisians had been very much displeased at the establishment of import dues on all alimentary substances. The writers of that epoch preserved the burlesque Alexandrine, which was placarded all over the town, on the erection of the Octroi circumvallation:
"Le mur murant Paris, rend Paris murmurant."[13]
"Le mur murant Paris, rend Paris murmurant."[13]
The multitude was not content with murmuring; the moment that a favourable opportunity occurred, it went to the barriers and broke them down. These were reëstablished by the administration with great trouble, and the smugglers often took them down by main force. TheOctroirevenue from the imports, which used to amount to 70,000 francs, now fell to less than 30,000. Those persons who have considered the figures of the present revenue, will assuredly not compare such very dissimilar epochs.
But it is said that ameliorations in the moral world may often be effected without expense. What were those for which the public was indebted to the direct exertions of Bailly? The question is simple, but repentance will follow the having asked it. My answer is this: One of the most honourable victories gained by mathematics over the avaricious prejudices of the administrations of certain towns has been, in our own times, the radical suppression of gambling-houses. I will hasten to prove that such a suppression had already engaged Bailly's attention, that he had partly effected it, and that no one ever spoke of those odious dens with more eloquence and firmness.
"I declare," wrote the Mayor of Paris on the 5th of May, 1790, "that the gambling-houses are in my opinion a public scourge. I think that these meetings not only should not be tolerated, but that they ought to be sought out and prosecuted, as much as the liberty of the citizens, and the respect due to their homes, will admit.
"I regard the tax that has been levied from such houses as a disgraceful tribute. I do not think that it is allowable to employ a revenue derived from vice and disorder, even to do good. In consequence of these principles, I have never granted any permit to gambling-houses; I have constantly refused them. I have constantly announced that not only they would not be tolerated, but that they would be sought out and prosecuted."
If I add that Bailly suppressed all spectacles of animal-fighting, at which the multitude cannot fail to acquire ferocious and sanguinary habits, I shall have a right to ask of every superficial writer, how he would justify the epithet of sterile, applied with such assurance to the administration of our virtuous colleague.
Anxious to carry out in practice that which had been largely recognized theoretically in the declaration of rights—the complete separation of religion from civil law,—Bailly presented himself before the National Assembly on the 14th of May, 1791, and demanded, in the name of the city of Paris, the abolition of an order of things which, in the then state of men's minds, gave rise to great abuses. If declarations of births, of marriages, and of deaths are now received by civil officers in a form agreeing with all religious opinions, the country is chiefly indebted for it to the intelligent firmness of Bailly.
The unfortunate beings for whom all public men should feel most solicitous, are those prisoners who are awaiting in prison the decrees of the courts of justice. Bailly took care not to neglect such a duty. At the end of 1790, the old tribunals had no moral power; they could no longer act; the new ones were not yet created. This state of affairs distracted the mind of our colleague. On the 18th of November, he expressed his grief to the National Assembly, in terms full of sensibility and kindness. I should be culpable if I left them in oblivion.
"Gentlemen, the prisons are full. The innocent are awaiting their justification, and the criminals an end to their remorse. All breathe an unwholesome air, and disease will pronounce terrible decrees. Despair dwells there: Despair says, either give me death, or judge me. When we visit those prisons, that is what the fathers of the poor and the unfortunate hear; this is what it is their duty to repeat to the fathers of their country. We must tell them that in those asylums of crime, of misery, and of every grief, time is infinite in its duration; a month is a century, a month is an abyss the sight of which is frightful.... We ask of the tribunals to empty the prisons by the justification of the innocent, or by examples of justice."
Does it not appear to you, Gentlemen, that calm times may occasionally derive excellent lessons, and, moreover, lessons expressed in very good language, from our revolutionary epoch?