Powerlessness of the Law.
If the deputies who, on the 1st of October, 1791, so solemnly and enthusiastically swore to the Constitution, had been willing to open their eyes, they would have seen this Constitution constantly violated, both in its letter and spirit, over the entire territory. As usual, and through the vanity of authorship, M. Thouret, the last president of the Constituent Assembly, had, in his final report, hidden disagreeable truth underneath pompous and delusive phrases; but it was only necessary to look over the monthly record to see whether, as guaranteed by him, "the decrees were faithfully executed in all parts of the empire."—" Where is this faithful execution to be found?" inquires Mallet du Pan.2301"Is it at Toulon, in the midst of the dead and wounded, shot in the very face of the amazed municipality and Directory? Is it at Marseilles, where two private individuals are knocked down and massacred as aristocrats," under the pretext "that they sold to children poisoned sugar-plums with which to begin a counter-revolution?" Is it at Arles, "against which 4,000 men from Marseilles, dispatched by the club, are at this moment marching?" Is it at Bayeux, "where the sieur Fauchet against whom a warrant for arrest is out, besides being under the ban of political disability, has just been elected deputy to the Legislative Assembly?" Is it at Blois, "where the commandant, doomed to death for having tried to execute these decrees, is forced to send away a loyal regiment and submit to licentious troops?" Is it at Nîmes, "where the Dauphiny regiment, on leaving the town by the Minister's orders, is ordered by the people" and the club "to disobey the Minister and remain?" Is it in those regiments whose officers, with pistols at their breasts, are obliged to leave and give place to amateurs? Is it at Toulouse, "where, at the end of August, the administrative authorities order all unsworn priests to leave the town in three days, and withdraw to a distance of four leagues?" Is it in the outskirts of Toulouse, "where, on the 28th of August, a municipal officer is hung at a street-lamp after an affray with guns?" Is it at Paris, where, on the 25th of September, the Irish college, vainly protected by an international treaty, has just been assailed by the mob; where Catholics, listening to the orthodox mass, are driven out and dragged to the authorized mass in the vicinity; where one woman is torn from the confessional, and another flogged with all their might?2302
These troubles, it is said, are transient; on the Constitution being proclaimed, order will return of itself. Very well, the Constitution is voted, accepted by the King, proclaimed, and entrusted to the Legislative Assembly. Let the Legislative Assembly consider what is done in the first few weeks. In the eight departments that surround Paris, there are riots on every market-day; farms are invaded and the cultivators of the soil are ransomed by bands of vagabonds; the mayor of Melun is riddled with balls and dragged out from the hands of the mob streaming with blood.2303At Belfort, a riot for the purpose of retaining a convoy of coin, and the commissioner of the Upper-Rhine in danger of death; at Bouxvillers, owners of property attacked by poor National Guards, and by the soldiers of Salm-Salm, houses broken into and cellars pillaged; at Mirecourt, a flock of women beating drums, and, for three days, holding the Hôtel-de-Ville in a state of siege.——One day Rochefort is in a state of insurrection, and the workmen of the harbor compel the municipality to unfurl the red flag.2304On the following day, it is Lille, the people of which, "unwilling to exchange its money and assignats for paper-rags, called billets de confiance, gather into mobs and threaten, while a whole garrison is necessary to prevent an explosion." On the 16th of October, it is Avignon in the power of bandits, with the abominable butchery of the Glacière. On the 5th of November, at Caen, there are eighty-two gentlemen, townsmen and artisans, knocked down and dragged to prison, for having offered their services to the municipality as special constables. On the 14th of November, at Montpellier, the roughs triumph; eight men and women are killed in the streets or in their houses, and all conservatives are disarmed or put to flight. By the end of October, it is a gigantic column of smoke and flame shooting upward suddenly from week to week and spreading everywhere, growing, on the other side of the Atlantic, into civil war in St. Domingo, where wild beasts are let loose against their keepers; 50,000 blacks take the field, and, at the outset, 1,000 whites are assassinated, 15,000 Negroes slain, 200 sugar-mills destroyed and damage done to the amount of 600,000,000; "a colony of itself alone worth ten provinces, is almost annihilated."2305At Paris, Condorcet is busy writing in his journal that "this news is not reliable, there being no object in it but to create a French empire beyond the seas for the King, where there will be masters and slaves." A corporal of the Paris National Guard, on his own authority, orders the King to remain indoors, fearing that he may escape, and forbids a sentinel to let him go out after nine o'clock in the evening;2306at the Tuileries, stump-speakers in the open air denounce aristocrats and priests; at the Palais-Royal, there is a pandemonium of public lust and incendiary speeches.2307There are centers of riot in all quarters, "as many robberies as there are quarter-hours, and no robbers punished; no police; overcrowded courts; more delinquents than there are prisons to hold them; nearly all the private mansions closed; the annual consumption in the faubourg St. Germain alone diminished by 250 millions; 20,000 thieves, with branded backs, idling away time in houses of bad repute, at the theaters, in the Palais-Royal, at the National Assembly, and in the coffee-houses; thousands of beggars infesting the streets, crossways, and public squares. Everywhere an image of the deepest poverty which is not calling for one's pity as it is accompanied with insolence. Swarms of tattered vendors are offering all sorts of paper-money, issued by anybody that chose to put it in circulation, cut up into bits, sold, given, and coming back in rags, fouler than the miserable creatures who deal in it."2308Out of 700,000 inhabitants there are 100,000 of the poor, of which 60,000 have flocked in from the departments;2309among them are 30,000 needy artisans from the national workshops, discharged and sent home in the preceding month of June, but who, returning three months later, are again swallowed up in the great sink of vagabondage, hurling their floating mass against the crazy edifice of public authority and furnishing the forces of sedition.—At Paris, and in the provinces, disobedience exists throughout the hierarchy. Directories countermand ministerial orders. Here, municipalities brave the commands of their Directory; there, communities order around their mayor with a drawn sword. Elsewhere, soldiers and sailors put their officers under arrest. The accused insult the judge on the bench and force him to cancel his verdict; mobs tax or plunder wheat in the market; National Guards prevent its distribution, or seize it in the storehouses. There is no security for property, lives, or consciences. The majority of Frenchmen are deprived of their right to worship in their own faith, and of voting at the elections. There is no safety, day or night, for the élite of the nation, for ecclesiastics and the gentry, for army and navy officers, for rich merchants and large landed proprietors; no protection in the courts, no income from public funds; denunciations abound, expulsions, banishments to the interior, attacks on private houses; there is no right of free assemblage, even to enforce the law under the orders of legal authorities.2310Opposed to this, and in contrast with it, is the privilege and immunity of a sect formed into a political corporation, "which extends its filiations over the whole kingdom, and even abroad; which has its own treasury, its committees, and its by-laws; which rules the government, which judges justice,"2311and which, from the capital to the hamlet, usurps or directs the administration. Liberty, equality, and the majesty of the law exist nowhere, except in words. Of the three thousand decrees given birth to by the Constituent Assembly, the most lauded, those the best set off by a philosophic baptism, form a mass of stillborn abortions of which France is the burying-ground. That which really subsists underneath the false appearances of right, proclaimed and sworn to over and over again, is, on the one hand, an oppression of the upper and cultivated classes, from which all the rights of man are withdrawn, and, on the other hand, the tyranny of the fanatical and brutal rabble which assumes to itself all the rights of sovereignty.
Decrees against the nobles and clergy.—Amnesty fordeserters, convicts, and bandits.—Anarchical and levelingmaxims.
In vain do the honest men of the Assembly protest against this scandal and this overthrow. The Assembly, guided and forced by the Jacobins, will only amend the law to damn the oppressed and to authorize their oppressors.—Without making any distinction between armed assemblages at Coblentz, which it had a right to punish, and refugees, three times as numerous, old men, women and children, so many indifferent and inoffensive people, not merely nobles but plebeians,2312who left the soil only to escape popular outrages, it confiscates the property of all emigrants and orders this to be sold.2313Through the new restriction of the passport, those who remain are tied to their domiciles, their freedom of movement, even in the interior, being subject to the decision of each Jacobin municipality.2314It completes their ruin by depriving them without indemnity of all income from their real estate, of all the seignorial rights which the Constituent Assembly had declared to be legitimate.2315It abolishes, as far as it can, their history and their past, by burning in the public depots their genealogical titles.2316—To all unsworn ecclesiastics, two-thirds of the French clergy, it withholds bread, the small pension allowed them for food, which is the ransom of their confiscated possessions;2317it declares them "suspected of revolt against the law and of bad intentions against the country;" it subjects them to special surveillance; it authorizes their expulsion without trial by local rulers in case of disturbances; it decrees that in such cases they shall be banished.2318It suppresses "all secular congregations of men and women ecclesiastic or laic, even those wholly devoted to hospital service will take away from 600,000 children the means of learning to read and write."2319It lays injunctions on their dress; it places episcopal palaces in the market for sale, also the buildings still occupied by monks and nuns.2320It welcomes with rounds of applause a married priest who introduces his wife to the Assembly.—Not only is the Assembly destructive but it is insulting; the authors of each decree passed by it add to its thunderbolt the rattling hail of their own abuse and slander.
"Children," says a deputy, "have the poison of aristocracy and fanaticism injected into them by the congregations."2321
"Purge the rural districts of the vermin which is devouring them!"—"Everybody knows," says Isnard, "that the priest is as cowardly as he is vindictive... Let these pestiferous fellows be sent back to Roman and Italian lazarettos.. What religion is that which, in its nature, is unsocial and rebellious in principle?"
Whether unsworn, whether immigrants actually or in feeling, "large proprietors, rich merchants, false conservatives,"2322are all outspoken conspirators or concealed enemies. All public disasters are imputed to them. "The cause of the troubles," says Brissot,2323"which lay waste the colonies, is the infernal vanity of the whites who have three times violated an engagement which they have three times sworn to maintain." Scarcity of work and short crops are accounted for through their cunning malevolence.
"A large number of rich men, "says François de Nantes,2324"allow their property to run down and their fields to lie fallow, so as to enjoy seeing the suffering of the people."
France is divided into two parties, on the one hand, the aristocracy to which is attributed every vice, and, on the other hand, the people on whom is conferred every virtue.2325
"The defense of liberty," says Lamarque,2326"is basely abandoned every day by the rich and by the former nobility, who put on the mask of patriotism only to cheat us. It is not in this class, but only in that of citizens who are disdainfully called the people, that we find pure beings, those ardent souls really worthy of liberty."—One step more and everything will be permitted to the virtuous against the wicked; if misfortune befalls the aristocrats so much the worse for them. Those officers who are stoned, M. de la Jaille and others, "wouldn't they do better not to deserve being sacrificed to popular fury?"2327Isnard exclaims in the tribune, "it is the long-continued immunity enjoyed by criminals which has rendered the people executioners. Yes, an angry people, like an angry God, is only too often the terrible supplement of silent laws."2328—In other words crimes are justified and assassinations still provoked against those who have been assassinated for the past two years.
By a forced conclusion, if the victims are criminals, their executioners are honest, and the Assembly, which rigorously proceeds against the former, reserves all its indulgence for the latter. It reinstates the numerous deserters who abandoned their flags previous to the 1st of January, 1789;2329it allows them three sous per league mileage, and brings them back to their homes or to their regiments to become, along with their brethren whose desertion is more recent, either leaders or recruits for the mob. It releases from the galleys the forty Swiss guards of Chateauroux whom their own cantons desired to have kept there; it permits these "martyrs to Liberty" to promenade the streets of Paris in a triumphal car;2330it admits them to the bar of the house, and, taking a formal vote on it, extends to them the honors of the session.2331Finally, as if it were their special business to let loose on the public the most ferocious and foulest of the rabble, it amnesties Jourdan, Mainvielle, Duprat, and Raphel, fugitive convicts, jail-birds, the condottieri of all lands assuming the title of "the brave brigands of Avignon," and who, for eighteen months, have pillaged and plundered the Comtat2332; it stops the trial, almost over, of the Glacière butchers; it tolerates the return of these as victors,2333and their installation by their own act in the places of the fugitive magistrates, allowing Avignon to be treated as a conquered city, and, henceforth, to become their prey and their booty. This is a willful restoration of the vermin to the social body, and, in this feverish body, nothing is overlooked that will increase the fever. The most anarchical and deleterious maxims emanate, like miasma, from the Assembly benches. The reduction of things to an absolute level is adopted as a principle; "equality of rights," says Lamarque,2334"is to be maintained only by tending steadily to an equality of fortunes;" this theory is practically applied on all sides since the proletariat is pillaging all who own property.—"Let the communal possessions be partitioned among the citizens of the surrounding villages," says François de Nantes, "in an inverse ratio to their fortunes, and let him who has the least inheritance take the largest share in the divisions."2335Conceive the effect of this motion read at evening to peasants who are at this very moment claiming their lord's forest for their commune. M. Corneille prohibits any tax to be levied for the public treasury on the wages of manual labor, because nature, and not society, gives us the "right to live."2336On the other hand, he confers on the public treasury the right of taking the whole of an income, because it is society, and not nature, which institutes public funds; hence, according to him, the poor majority must be relieved of all taxation, and all taxes must fall on the rich minority. The system is well-timed and the argument apt for convincing indigent or straitened tax-payers, namely, the refractory majority, that its taxes are just, and that it should not refuse to be taxed.—
"Under the reign of liberty," says President Daverhoult,2337"the people have the right to insist not merely on subsistence, but again on plenty and happiness."2338
Accordingly, being in a state of poverty they have been betrayed.—"Elevated to the height achieved by the French people," says another president, "it looks down upon the tempests under its feet."2339The tempest is at hand and bursts over its head. War, like a black cloud, rises above the horizon, overspreads the sky, thunders and wraps France filled with explosive materials in a circle of lightening, and it is the Assembly which, through the greatest of its mistakes, draws down the bolt on the nation's head.
Disposition of foreign powers.—The King's dislikes.—Provocation of the Girondins.—Dates and causes of therupture
It might have been turned aside with a little prudence. Two principal grievances were alleged, one by France and the other by the Empire.—On the one hand, and very justly, France complained of the gathering of émigré's, which the Emperor and Electors tolerated against it on the frontier. In the first place, however, a few thousand gentlemen, without troops or stores, and nearly without money,2340were hardly to be feared, and, besides this, long before the decisive hour came these troops were dispersed, at once by the Emperor in his own dominions, and, fifteen days afterwards, by the Elector of Trèves in his electorate.2341—On the other hand, according to treaties, the German princes, who owned estates in Alsace, made claims for the feudal rights abolished on their French possessions and the Diet forbade them to accept the offered indemnity. But, as far as the Diet is concerned, nothing was easier nor more customary than to let negotiations drag along, there being no risk or inconvenience attending the suit as, during the delay, the claimants remained empty-handed.—If, now, behind the ostensible motives, the real intentions are sought for, it is certain that, up to January, 1792, the intentions of Austria were pacific. The grants made to the Comte d'Artois, in the Declaration of Pilnitz, were merely a court-sprinkling of holy-water, the semblance of an illusory promise and subject to a European concert of action, that is to say, annulled beforehand by an indefinite postponement, while this pretended league of sovereigns is at once "placed by the politicians in the class of august comedies.2342" Far from taking up arms against "New France" in the name of old France, the emperor Leopold and his prime minister Kaunitz, were delighted to see the constitution completed and accepted by the King; it "got them out of an embarrassing position,"2343and Prussia as well. In the running of governments, political advantage is the great incentive and both powers needed all their forces in another direction, in Poland. One for retarding, and the other for accelerating the division of this country, and both, when the partition took place, to get enough for themselves and prevent Russia from getting too much.—The sovereigns of Prussia and Austria, accordingly, did not have any idea of saving Louis XVI, nor of conducting the émigrés back, nor of conquering French provinces. If anything was to be expected from them on account of personal ill-will, there was no fear of their armed intervention.—In France it is not the King who urges a rupture; he knows too well that the hazards of war will place him and his dependents in mortal danger. Secretly as well as publicly, in writing to the émigrés, his wishes are to bring them back or to restrain them. In his private correspondence he asks of the European powers not physical but moral aid, the external support of a congress which will permit moderate men, the partisans of order, all owners of property, to raise their heads and rally around the throne and the laws against anarchy. In his ministerial correspondence every precaution is taken not to touch off or let someone touch off an explosion. At the critical moment of the discussion2344he entreats the deputies, through M. Delessart, his Minister of Foreign Affairs, to weigh their words and especially not to send a demand containing a "dead line." He resists, as far as his passive nature allows him, to the very last. On being forced to declare war he requires beforehand the signed advice of all his ministers. He does not utter the fatal words, until he, "with tears in his eyes" and in the most dire straits, is dragged on by an Assembly qualifying all caution as treason and which has just dispatched M. Delessart to appear, under a capital charge, before the supreme court at Orléans.
It is the Assembly then which launches the disabled ship on the roaring abysses of an unknown sea, without a rudder and leaking at every seam. It alone slips the cable which held it in port and which the foreign powers neither dared nor desired to sever. Here, again, the Girondists are the leaders and hold the axe; since the last of October they have grasped it and struck repeated blows.2345—As an exception, the extreme Jacobins, Couthon, Collot d'Herbois, Danton, Robespierre, do not side with them. Robespierre, who at first proposed to confine the Emperor "within the circle of Popilius,"2346fears the placing of too great a power in the King's hands, and, growing mistrustful, preaches distrust.—But the great mass of the party, led by clamorous public opinion, impels on the timid marching in front. Of the many things of which knowledge is necessary to conduct successfully such a complex and delicate affair, they know nothing. They are ignorant about cabinets, courts, populations, treaties, precedents, timely forms and requisite style. Their guide and counselor in foreign relations is Brissot whose pre-eminence is based on their ignorance and who, exalted into a statesman, becomes for a few months the most conspicuous figure in Europe.2347To whatever extent a European calamity may be attributed to any one man, this one is to be attributed to him. It is this wretch, born in a pastry-cook's shop, brought up in an attorney's office, formerly a police agent at 150 francs per month, once in league with scandal-mongers and black-mailers,2348a penny-a-liner, busybody, and meddler, who, with the half-information of a nomad, scraps of newspaper ideas and reading-room lore,2349added to his scribblings as a writer and his club declamation, directs the destinies of France and starts a war in Europe which is to destroy six millions of lives. In the attic where his wife is washing his shirts, he enjoys rebuking rulers and, on the 20th of October, in the tribune,2350he begins by insulting thirty foreign sovereigns. Such keen, intense enjoyment is the stuff on which the new fanaticism daily feeds itself. Madame Roland herself delights, with evident complacency, in it, something which can be seen in the two famous letters in which, with a supercilious tone, she first instructs the King and next the Pope.2351Brissot, at bottom, regards himself as a Louis XIV, and expressly invites the Jacobins to imitate the haughty ways of the Great Monarch.2352—To the tactlessness of the intruder, and the touchiness of the parvenu, we can add the rigidity of the sectarian. The Jacobins, in the name of abstract rights, deny historic rights; they impose from above, and by force, that truth of which they are the apostles, and allow themselves every provocation which they prohibit to others.
"Let us tell Europe," cries Isnard,2353"that ten millions of Frenchmen, armed with the sword, with the pen, with reason, with eloquence, might, if provoked, change the face of the world and make tyrants tremble on their thrones of clay."
"Wherever a throne exists," says Hérault de Séchelles, "there is an enemy."2354
"An honest peace between tyranny and liberty," says Brissot, "is impossible. Our Constitution is an eternal anathema to absolute monarchs... It places them on trial, it pronounces judgment on them; it seems to say to each: to-morrow thou have ceased to be or shalt be king only through the people... War is now a national benefit, and not to have war is the only calamity to be dreaded."2355
"Tell the king," says Gensonné, "that the war is a must, that public opinion demands it, that the safety of the empire makes it a law."2356
"The state we are in," concludes Vergniaud, "is a veritable state of destruction that may lead us to disgrace and death. So then to arms! to arms! Citizens, freemen, defend your liberty, confirm the hopes of that of the human race... Lose not the advantage of your position. Attack now that there is every sign of complete success... The spirits of past generations seem to me crowding into this temple to conjure you, in the name of the evils which slavery had compelled them to endure, to protect the future generations whose destinies are in your hands! Let this prayer be granted! Be for the future a new Providence! Ally yourselves with eternal justice!"2357
Among the Marseilles speakers there is no longer any room for serious discussion. Brissot, in reply to the claim made by the Emperor on behalf of the princes' property in Alsatia, replies that "the sovereignty of the people is not bound by the treaties of tyrants."2358As to the gatherings of the émigrés, the Emperor having yielded on this point, he will yield on the others.2359Let him formally renounce all combinations against France.
"I want war on the 10th of February," says Brissot, "unless we have received his renunciation."
No explanations; it is satisfaction we want; "to require satisfaction is to put the Emperor at our mercy."2360The Assembly, so eager to start the quarrel, usurps the King's right to take the first step and formally declares war, fixing the date.2361—The die is now cast.
"They want war," says the Emperor, "and they shall have it."
Austria immediately forms an alliance with Prussia, threatened, like herself, with revolutionary propaganda.2362By sounding the alarm belles the Jacobins, masters of the Assembly, have succeeded in bringing about that "monstrous alliance," and, from day to day, this alarm sounds the louder. One year more, thanks to this policy, and France will have all Europe for an enemy and as its only friend, the Regency of Algiers, whose internal system of government is about the same as her own.
Their control compromised by peace.—Discontent of the richand cultivated class.—Formation and increase of the partyof order.—The King and this party reconciled.
Behind their carmagnoles2363we can detect a design which they will avow later on.
"We were always obstructed by the Constitution," Brissot is to say, "and nothing but war could destroy the Constitution."2364
Diplomatic wrongs, consequently, of which they make parade, are simply pretexts; if they urge war it is for the purpose of overthrowing the legal order of things which annoys them; their real object is the conquests of power, a second internal revolution, the application of their system and a final state of equality.—Concealed behind them is the most politic and absolute of theorists, a man "whose great art is the attainment of his ends without showing himself, the preparation of others for far-sighted views of which they have no suspicion, and that of speaking but little in public and acting in secret."2365This man is Sieyès, "the leader of everything without seeming to lead anything."2366As infatuated as Rousseau with his own speculations, but as unscrupulous and as clear-sighted as Macchiavelli in the selection of practical means, he was, is, and will be, in decisive moments, the consulting counsel of radical democracy.
"His pride tolerates no superiority. He causes nobility to be abolished because he is not a noble; because he does not possess all he will destroy all. His fundamental doctrine for the consolidation of the Revolution is, that it is indispensable to change religion and to change the dynasty."
Now, had peace been maintained all this was impossible; moreover the ascendance of the party was compromised. Entire classes that had adhered to the party when it launched insurrection against the privileged, broke loose from it now that insurrection was directed against them; among thoughtful men and among those with property, most were disgusted with anarchy, and likewise disgusted with the abettors of it. Many administrators, magistrates and functionaries recently elected, loudly complained of their authority being subject to the mob. Many cultivators, manufacturers and merchants have become silently exasperated at the fruits of their labor and economy being surrendered at discretion to robbers and the indigent. It was hard for the flour-dealers of Etampes not to dare send away their wheat, to be obliged to supply customers at night, to tremble in their own houses, and to know that if they went out-doors they risked their lives.2367It was hard for wholesale grocers in Paris to see their warehouses invaded, their windows smashed, their bags of coffee and boxes of sugar valued at a low price, parceled out and carried away by old hags or taken gratis by scamps who ran off and sold them at the other end of the street.2368It was hard in all places for the families of the old bourgeoisie, for the formerly prominent men in each town and village, for the eminent in each art, profession or trade, for reputable and well-to-do people, in short, for the majority of men who had a good roof over their heads and a good coat on their backs, to undergo the illegal domination of a crowd led by a few hundred or dozens of stump-speakers and firebrands.—Already, in the beginning of 1792, this dissatisfaction was so great as to be denounced in the tribune and in the press. Isnard2369railed against "that multitude of large property-holders, those opulent merchants, those haughty, wealthy personages who, advantageously placed in the social amphitheater, are unwilling to have their seats changed." The bourgeoisie," wrote Pétion,2370"that numerous class free of any anxiety, is separating itself from the people; it considers itself above them,... they are the sole object of its distrust. It is everywhere haunted by the one idea that the revolution is a war between those who have and those who have not."—It abstains, indeed, from the elections, it keeps away from patriotic clubs, it demands the restoration of order and the reign of law; it rallies to itself "the multitude of conservative, timid people, for whom tranquility is the prime necessity," and especially, which is still more serious, it charges the disturbances upon their veritable authors. With suppressed indignation and a mass of undisputed evidence, André Chénier, a man of feeling, starts up in the midst of the silent crowd and openly tears off the mask from the Jacobins.2371He brings into full light the daily sophism by which a mob, "some hundreds of idlers gathered in a garden or at a theater, are impudently called the people." He portrays those "three or four thousand usurpers of national sovereignty whom their orators and writers daily intoxicate with grosser incense than any adulation offered to the worst of despots;" those assemblies where "an infinitely small number of French appears large, because they are united and yell;" that Paris club from which honest, industrious, intelligent people had withdrawn one by one to give place to intriguers in debt, to persons of tarnished reputations, to the hypocrites of patriotism, to the lovers of uproar, to abortive talents, to corrupted intellects, to outcasts of every kind and degree who, unable to manage their own business, indemnify themselves by managing that of the public. He shows how, around the central factory and its twelve hundred branches of insurrection, the twelve hundred affiliated clubs, which, "holding each other's hands, form a sort of electric chain around all France" and giving it a shock at every touch from the center; their confederation, installed and enthroned, is not only as a State within the State, but rather as a sovereign State in a vassal State; summoning their administrative bodies to their bar, judicial verdicts set aside through their intervention, private individuals searched, assessed and condemned through their verdicts. All this constitutes a steady, systematic defense of insubordination and revolt; as, "under the name of hoarding and monopoly, commerce and industry are described as misdemeanors;" property is unsettled and every rich man rendered suspicious, "talent and integrity silenced." In short, a public conspiracy made against society in the very name of society, "while the sacred symbol of liberty is made use of as a seal" to exempt a few tyrants from punishment. Such a protest said aloud what most Frenchmen muttered to themselves, and from month to month, graver excesses exited greater censure.
"Anarchy exists2372to a degree scarcely to be paralleled, wrote the ambassador of the United States. The horror and apprehension, which the licentious associations have universally inspired, are such that there is reason to believe that the great mass of the French population would consider even despotism a blessing, if accompanied with that security to persons and property, experienced even under the worst governments in Europe."
Another observer, not less competent,2373says:
"it is plain to my eyes that when Louis XVI. finally succumbed, he had more partisans in France than the year previous, at the time of his flight to Varennes."
The truth of this, indeed, was frequently verified at the end of 1791 and beginning of 1792, by various investigations.2374"Eighteen thousand officers of every grade, elected by the constitutionalists, seventy-one department administrations out of eighty-two, most of the tribunals,2375all traders and manufacturers, every chief and a large portion of the National Guard of Paris," in short, the élite of the nation, and among citizens generally, the great majority who lived from day to day were for him, and for the "Right" of the Assembly against the "Left". If internal trouble had not been complicated by external difficulties, there would have been a change in opinion, and this the King expected. In accepting the Constitution, he thought that its defects would be revealed in practical operation and that they would lead to a reform. In the mean time he scrupulously observed the Constitution, and, through interest as well as conscience, kept his oath to the letter. "The most faithful execution of the Constitution," he said to one of his ministers, "is the surest way to make the nation see the changes that ought to be made in it."2376—In other words, he counted on experience, and it is very probable that if there had been nothing to interfere with experience, his calculations would have finally chosen between the defenders of order and the instigators of disorder. It would have decided for the magistrates against the clubs, for the police against rioters, for the king against the mob. In one or two years more it would have learned that a restoration of the executive power was indispensable for securing the execution of the laws; that the chief of police, with his hands tied, could not do his duty; that it was undoubtedly wise to give him his orders, but that if he was to be of any use against knaves and fools, his hands should first be set free.