of those sacred questioners. Unfortunate man, said he, of what are you guilty? Of this child, sir; and I have married this woman, who is a Protestant, and her religion has nothing to do with mine. . . Death or my wife! Such is the cry that nature now and always will, inspire me with.” – The petitioner receives the honors of the Assembly. – (Ibid., XII 369).
[21] The grotesque is often that of a farce. “M. Piorry, in the name of poor; but virtuous citizens, tenders two pairs of buckles, with this motto: ‘They have served to hold the shoe-straps on my feet; they will serve to reduce under them, with the imprint and character of truth, all tyrants leagued against the constitution’ (Moniteur, XII. 457, session of May 21)” – Ibid., XIII. 249 (session of July 25). “A young citoyenne offers to combat, in person, against the enemies of her country;” and the president, with a gallant air, replies: “Made rather to soothe, than to combat tyrants, your offer, etc.”
[22] Moniteur, XL 576 (session of March 6); XII. 237, 314, 368 (sessions of April 27, May 5 and 14).
[23] Mercure de France. Sept. 19,1791, Feb.11, and March 3, 1792. — Buchez et Roux, XVI 185 (session of July 26, 1792).
[24] “Mémoires de Mallet du Pan,” 1433 (tableau of the three parties, with special information).
[25] Buchez et Roux, XII. 348 (letter by the deputy Chéron, president of the Feuillants Club). The deputies of the Legislative Assembly, registered at the Feuillants Club, number 264 besides a large number of deputies in the Constituent Assembly. — According to Mallet du Pan the so-called Independents number 250.
[26] These figures are verified by decisive ballottings (Mortimer- Ternauz, II. 205, 348.)
[27] Moniteur, XII. 393 (session of May 15, speech by Isnard): “The Constituent Assembly only half dared do what it had the power to do. It has left in the field of liberty, even around the very roots of the young constitutional tree, the old roots of despotism and of the aristocracy . . . It has bound us to the trunk of the constitutional tree, like powerless victims given up to the rage of their enemies.” – – Etienne Dumont saw truly the educational defects peculiar to the party. He says, apropos of Madame Roland: “I found in her too much of that distrustful despotism which belongs to ignorance of the world . . . What her intellectual development lacked was a greater knowledge of the world and intercourse with men of superior judgment to her own. Roland himself had little intellectual breadth, while all those who frequented her house never rose above the prejudices of the vulgar.”
[28] “Souvenirs”, by PASQUIER (Etienne-Dennis, duc), chancelier de France. in VI volumes, Librarie Plon, Paris 1893.
[29] Madame de Stael, “Considerations sur la Révolution Française, IIIrd part, ch. III.-Madame de Staël conversed with them and judges them according to the shrewd perceptions of a woman of the world.
[30] Louvet, “Mémoires” 32. “I belonged to the bold philosophers who, before the end of 1791, lamented the fate of a great nation, compelled to stop half-way in the career of freedom,” and, on page 38 — “A minister of justice was needed. The four ministers (Roland, Servane, etc.) “cast their eyes on me. . . Duranthon was preferred to me. This was the first mistake of the republican party. It paid dear for it. That mistake cost my country a good deal of blood and many tears.” Later on, he thinks that he has the qualifications for ambassador to Constantinople.
[31] Buzot, “Mémoires” (Ed. Dauban), pp.31, 39. “Born with a proud and independent spirit which never bowed at any one’s command, how could I accept the idea of a man being held sacred? With my heart and head possessed by the great beings of the ancient republics, who are the greatest honor to the human species, I practiced their maxims from my earliest years, and nourished myself on a study of their virtues. . . The pretended necessity of a monarchy . . . could not amalgamate, in my mind, with the grand and noble conceptions formed by me, of the dignity of the human species. Hope deceived me, it is true, but my error was too glorious to allow me to repent of it.” – Self- admiration is likewise the mental substratum of Madame Roland, Roland, Pétion, Barbaroux, Louvet, etc., (see their writings). Mallet du Pan well says: “On reading the memoirs of Madame Roland, one detects the actress, rehearsing for the stage. ” — Roland is an administrative puppet and would-be orator, whose wife pulls the strings. There is an odd, dull streak in him, peculiarly his own. For example, in 1787 (Guillon de Montléon, “Histoire de la ville de Lyon, pendant la Révolution,” 1.58), he proposes to utilize the dead, by converting them into oil and phosphoric acid. In 1788, he proposes to the Villefranche Academy to inquire “whether it would not be to the public advantage to institute tribunals for trying the dead?” in imitation of the Egyptians. In his report of Jan. 5, 1792, he gives a plan for establishing public festivals, “in imitation of the Spartans,” and takes for a motto, Non omnis moriar (Baron de Girardot, “Roland and Madame Roland”. I. 83, 185)
[32] Political club uniting moderate and constitutional monarchists. They got their nickname because they held their meetings in the old convent formerly used by the feullants, a branch of Cistercians who, led by LaBarrière, broke away in 1577. The Feuillant Club was dissolved in 1791. (SR).
[33] Moniteur, XI. 61 (session of Jan 7, 1792). – Ibid., 204 (Jan. 25); 281 (Feb. 1); 310 (Feb. 4); 318 (Feb. 6); 343 (Feb. 9); 487 (Feb. 26). – XII. 22 (April 2). Reports of all the sessions must be read to appreciate the force of the pressure. See, especially, the sessions of April 9 and 16, May 15 and 29, June 8, 9, 15, and 25, July 1, 2, 5, 9, 11, 17, 18, and 21, and, after this date, all the sessions. – Lacretelle, “Dix Ans d’Epreuves,” p. 78-81. “The Legislative Assembly served under the Jacobin Club while keeping up a counterfeit air of independence. The progress which fear had made in the French character was very great, at a time when everything was pitched in the haughtiest key. . . The majority, as far as intentions go, was for the conservatives; the actual majority was for the republicans.”
[34] Moniteur, XIII. 212, session of July 22.
[35] Moniteur, XII. 22, session of April 2. – Mortimer-Ternaux, II. 95. – Moniteur, XIII. 222, session of July 22.
[36] Lacretelle, “Dix Ans d’Epreuves,” 80.
[37] Mathieu Dumas, “Mémoires,” II. 88 (Feb. 23). – Hua, “Mémoires” d’un Avocat au Parliament de Paris,” 106, 121, 134, 154. Moniteur, XIII. 212 (session of July 21), speech by M. — “The avenues to this building are daily beset with a horde of people who insult the representatives of the nation.”
[38] De Vaublanc, “Mémoires,” 344. – Moniteur, XIII. 368 (letters and speeches of deputies, session of Aug. 9).
[39] Hua, 115. — Ibid., 90. 3 out of 4 deputies of Seine-et-Oise were Jacobins. “We met once a week to talk over the affairs of the department. We were obliged to drive out the vagabonds who, even at the table, talked of nothing but killing.”
[40] Moniteur, XII. 702. For example, on the 19th of June, 1792, on a motion unexpectedly proposed by Condorcet, that the departments be authorized to burn all titles (to nobility) in the various depots. — Adopted at once, and unanimously.
[41] Later Stalin and his successors should invest the United Nations and other international organizations to indirectly propose and ensure the acceptance of a new convention of human rights, children’s rights, the rights of refugees etc. In many cases these became the base of national legislation which is now giving trouble to many of the Western democracies. (SR).
[42] Hua, 114.
[43] Moniteur, XII. 664. – Mercure de France, June 23, 1792.
[44] Hua, 141. — Mathieu Dumas, II. 399: “It is remarkable that Lafond de Ladébat, one of our trustiest friends, was elected president on the 23rd of July, 1792. This shows that the majority of the Assembly was still sound; but it was only brought about by a secret vote in the choice of candidates. The same men who obeyed their consciences, through a sentiment of justice and of propriety, could not face the danger which surrounded them in the threats of the factions when they were called upon to vote by rising or sitting.”
[45] This description and others of the same period have undoubtedly been studied carefully by thousands of socialists and political hopefuls who, in any case, made use of similar tactics to take over thousands of governing committees, institutions and organizations. (SR).
CHAPTER III.
I.
Policy of the Assembly. – State of France at the end of 1791. – 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.[1] “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?[2]
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.[3] At 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.[4] On 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.”[5] At 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;[6] at 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.[7] There 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.”[8] Out of 700,000 inhabitants there are 100,000 of the poor, of which 60,000 have flocked in from the departments;[9] among 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.[10] Opposed 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,”[11] and 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.
II.
The Assembly hostile to the oppressed and favoring oppressors. — Decrees against the nobles and clergy. — Amnesty for deserters, convicts, and bandits. — Anarchical and leveling maxims.
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,[12] who left the soil only to escape popular outrages, it confiscates the property of all emigrants and orders this to be sold.[13] Through 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.[14] It 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.[15] It abolishes, as far as it can, their history and their past, by burning in the public depots their genealogical titles.[16] — 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;[17] it 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.[18] It 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.”[19] It lays injunctions on their dress; it places episcopal palaces in the market for sale, also the buildings still occupied by monks and nuns.[20] It 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.”[21]
“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,”[22] are all outspoken conspirators or concealed enemies. All public disasters are imputed to them. “The cause of the troubles,” says Brissot,[23] “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,[24] “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.[25]
“The defense of liberty,” says Lamarque,[26] “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?”[27] Isnard 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.”[28] — 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;[29] it 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;[30] it admits them to the bar of the house, and, taking a formal vote on it, extends to them the honors of the session.[31] Finally, 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 Comtat[32]; it stops the trial, almost over, of the Glacière butchers; it tolerates the return of these as victors,[33] and 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,[34] “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.”[35] Conceive 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.”[36] On 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,[37] “the people have the right to insist not merely on subsistence, but again on plenty and happiness.”[38]
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.”[39] The 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.
III.
War. – -Disposition of foreign powers. – – The King’s dislikes. — Provocation of the Girondins. — Dates and causes of the rupture.
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,[40] were 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.[41] — 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.[42]” 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,”[43] and 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 discussion[44] he 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.[45] — 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,”[46] fears 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.[47] To 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,[48] a penny-a-liner, busybody, and meddler, who, with the half-information of a nomad, scraps of newspaper ideas and reading- room lore,[49] added 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,[50] he 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.[51] Brissot, at bottom, regards himself as a Louis XIV, and expressly invites the Jacobins to imitate the haughty ways of the Great Monarch.[52] — 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,[53] “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.”[54]
“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.” [55]
” 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.”[56]
“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!”[57]
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.”[58] As to the gatherings of the émigrés, the Emperor having yielded on this point, he will yield on the others.[59] Let 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.”[60] The Assembly, so eager to start the quarrel, usurps the King’s right to take the first step and formally declares war, fixing the date.[61] — 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.[62] By 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.
IV.
Secret motives of the leaders. — Their control compromised by peace. — Discontent of the rich and cultivated class. — Formation and increase of the party of order. — The King and this party reconciled.
Behind their carmagnoles[63] we 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.”[64]
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.”[65] This man is Sieyès, “the leader of everything without seeming to lead anything.”[66] As 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.[67] It 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.[68] It 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. Isnard[69] railed 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,[70] “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.[71] He 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 exists[72] to 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,[73] says:
“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.[74] “Eighteen thousand officers of every grade, elected by the constitutionalists, seventy-one department administrations out of eighty-two, most of the tribunals,[75] all 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.”[76] — 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.
V.
Effects of the war on the common people.– Its alarms and fury. — The second revolutionary outburst and its characteristics. — Alliance of the Girondists with the mob. — The red cap and pikes. — Universal substitution of government by force for government by law.
Just the contrary with war; the aspect of things changes, and the alternative is the other way. It is no longer a choice between order and disorder, but between the new and the old regime, for, behind foreign opponents on the frontier, there stand the émigrés. The commotion is terrible, especially amongst the lower classes which mainly bore the whole weight of the old establishment; among the millions who live by the sweat of their brow, artisans, small farmers, métayers, day-laborers and soldiers, also the smugglers of salt and other articles, poachers, vagabonds, beggars and half-beggars, who, taxed, plundered, and harshly treated for centuries, have to endure, from father to son, poverty, oppression and disdain. They know through their own experience the difference between their late and their present condition. They have only to fall back on personal knowledge to revive in their imaginations the enormous royal, ecclesiastical, and seignorial taxes, the direct tax of eighty-one per cent., the bailiffs in charge, the seizures and the husbandry service, the inquisition of excise men, of inspectors of the salt tax, wine tax (rats de cave) and game-keepers, the ravages of wild birds and of pigeons, the extortions of the collector and his clerk, the delay and partiality in obtaining justice, the rashness and brutality of the police, the kicks and cuffs of the constabulary, the poor wretches gathered like heaps of dirt and filth, the promiscuousness, the over- crowding, the filth and the starvation of the prisons.[77] They have simply to open their eyes to see their immense deliverance; all direct or indirect taxes for the past two years legally abolished or practically suppressed, beer at two pennies a pot, wine at six, pigeons in their meat-safes, game on their turn-spits, the wood of the national forests in their lofts, the gendarmerie timid, the police absent, in many places the crops all theirs, the owner not daring to claim his share, the judge avoiding condemning them, the constable refusing to serve papers on them, privileges restored in their favor, the public authorities cringing to the crowds and yielding to their exactions, remaining quiet or unarmed in the face of their misdeeds, their outrages excused or tolerated, their superior good sense and deep feeling lauded in thousands of speeches, the jacket and the blouse considered as symbols of patriotism, and supremacy in the State claimed for the sans-culottes[78] in the name their merits and their virtues. — And now the overthrow of all this is announced to them, a league against them of foreign kings, the emigrants in arms, an invasion imminent, the Croats and Pandours in the field, hordes of mercenaries and barbarians crowding down on them again to put them in chains. — From the workshop to the cottage there rolls along a formidable outburst of anger, accompanied with national songs, denouncing the plots of tyrants and summoning the people to arms.[79] This is the second wave of the Revolution, fast swelling and roaring, less general than the first, since it bears along with it but little more than the lower class, but higher and much more destructive.
Not only, indeed, is the mass now launched forth coarse and crude, but a new sentiment animates it, the force of which is incalculable, that of plebeian pride, that of the poor man, the subject, who, suddenly erect after ages of debasement, relishes, far beyond his hopes and unstintedly, the delights of equality, independence, and dominion. “Fifteen millions white Negroes,” says Mallet du Pan,[80] worse fed, more miserable than those of St. Domingo, like them rebelled and freed from all authority by their revolt, accustomed like them, through thirty months of license, to ruling over all that is left of their former masters, proud like them of the restoration of their caste and exulting in their horny hands. One may imagine their transports of rage on hearing the trumpet-blast which awakens them, showing them on the horizon the returning planters, bringing with them new whips and heavier manacles? — Nothing is more distrustful than such a sentiment in such breasts — quickly alarmed, ready to strike, ready for any act of violence, blindly credulous, headlong and easily impelled, not merely against real enemies on the outside, but at first against imaginary enemies on the inside,[81] but also against the King, the ministers, the gentry, priests, parliamentarians, orthodox Catholics; against
all administrators and magistrates imprudent enough to have appealed to the law;
all manufacturers, merchants, and owners of property who condemn disorder;
the wealthy whose egotism keeps them at home;
all those who are well-off, well-bred and well-dressed.
They are all under suspicion because they have lost by the new regime, or because they have not adopted its ways. — Such is the colossal brute which the Girondins introduce into the political arena.[82] For six months they shake red flags before its eyes, goad it on, work it up into a rage and drive it forward by decrees and proclamations,
* against their adversaries and against its keepers,
* against the nobles and the clergy,
* against aristocrats inside France in complicity with those of Coblentz,
* against “the Austrian committee” the accomplice of Austria,
* against the King, whose caution they transform into treachery,
* against the whole government to which they impute the anarchy they excite, and the war of which they themselves are the instigators.[83]
Thus over-excited and topsy-turvy, the proletariat require only arms and a rallying-point. The Girondins furnish both. Through a striking coincidence, one which shows that the plan was concerted,[84] they start three political engines at the same time. Just at the moment when, through their deliberate saber-rattling, they made war inevitable, they invented popular insignia and armed the poor. At the end of January, 1792, almost during one week, they announced their ultimatum to Austria using a fixed deadline, they adopted the red woolen cap and began the manufacture of pikes. — It is evident that pikes are of no use in the open field against cannon and a regular army; accordingly the are intended for use in the interior and in towns. Let the national-guard who can pay for his uniform, and the active citizen whose three francs of direct tax gives him a privilege, own their guns; the stevedore, the market-porter, the lodger, the passive citizen, whose poverty excludes them from voting must have their pikes, and, in these insurrectionary times, a ballot is not worth a good pike wielded by brawny arms. — The magistrate in his robes may issue any summons he pleases, but it will be rammed down his throat, and, lest he should be in doubt of this he is made to know it beforehand. “The Revolution began with pikes and pikes will finish it.”[85] “Ah,” say the regulars of the Tuileries gardens, “if the good patriots of the Champs de Mars only had had pikes like these the blue-coats (Lafayette’s guards) would not have had such a good hand!” – “They are to be used everywhere, wherever there are enemies of the people, to the Château, if any can be found there!” They will override the veto and make sure that the National Assembly will approve the good laws. To this purpose, the Faubourg St. Antoine volunteers its pikes, and, to mark the use made of them, it complains that “efforts are made to substitute an aristocracy of wealth for the omnipotence of inherited rank.” It demands “severe measures against the rascally hypocrites who, with the Constitution in their hands, slaughter the people.” It declares that “kings, ministers and a civil list will pass away, but that the rights of man, national sovereignty and pikes will not pass away,” and, by order of the president, the National Assembly thanks the petitioners, “for the advice their zeal prompts them to give.
The leaders of the Assembly and the people armed with pikes unite against the rich, against Constitutionalists, against the government, and henceforth, the Jacobin extremists march side by side with the Girondins, both reconciled for the attack but reserved their right to disagree until after the victory.
“The object of the Girondists[86] is not a republic in name, but an actual republic through a reduction of the civil lists to five millions, through the curtailment of most of the royal prerogatives, through a change of dynasty of which the new head would be a sort of honorary president of the republic to which they would assign an executive council appointed by the Assembly, that is to say, by themselves.” As to the Jacobin extremists we find no principle with them but “that of a rigorous, absolute application of the Rights of Man. With the aid of such a charter they aim at changing the laws and public officers every six months, at extending their leveling process to every constituted authority, to all legal pre-eminence and to property. The only regime they long for is the democracy of a contentious rabble. . . The vilest instruments, professional agitators, brigands, fanatics, every sort of wretch, the hardened and armed poverty-stricken, who, in wild disorder” march to the attack of property and to “universal pillage” in short, barbarians of town and country “who form their ordinary army and never leave it inactive one single day.” – Under their universal, concerted and growing usurpation the substance of power melts wholly away in the hand of the legal authorities; little by little, these are reduced to vain counterfeits, while from one end of France, to the other, long before the final collapse, the party, in the provinces as well as at Paris, substitutes, under the cry of public danger, a government of might for the government of law.
_______________________________________________________________________
NOTES:
[1] Mercure de France, September 24, 1791. — Cf. Report of M. Alquier (session of Sept. 23).
[2] Mercure de France, Oct. 15, 1792 (the treaty with England was dated Sep. 26, 1786). — Ibid., Letter of M. Walsh, superior of the Irish college, to the municipality of Paris. Those who use the whips, come out of a neighboring grog-shop. The commissary of police, who arrives with the National Guard, “addresses the people, and promises them satisfaction,” requiring M. Walsh to dismiss all who are in the chapel, without waiting for the end of the mass. — M. Walsh refers to the law and to treaties. — The commissary replies that he knows nothing about treaties, while the commandant of the national guard says to those who laving the chapel, “In the name of human justice, I order you to follow me to the church of Saint-Etienne, or I shall abandon you to the people.”
[3] “The French Revolution,” Vol. I. pp.261, 263. — “Archives Nationales,” F7, 3185 and 3186 (numerous documents on the rural disturbances in Aisne). – Mercure de France, Nov. 5 and 26, Dec. 10, 1791. – Moniteur, X. 426 (Nov.22, 1791).
[4] Moniteur, X. 449, Nov. 23, 1791. (Official report of the crew of the Ambuscade, dated Sep. 30). The captain, M. d’Orléans, stationed at the Windward Islands, is obliged to return to Rochefort and is detained there on board his ship: “Considering the uncertainty of his mission, and the fear of being ordered to use the same hostilities against brethren for which he is already denounced in every club in the kingdom, the crew has forced the captain to return to France.”
[5] Mercure de France, Dec. 17, address of the colonists to the king.
[6] Moniteur, XIII. 200. Report of Sautereau, July 20, on the affair of Corporal Lebreton. (Nov. 11, 1791).
[7] Saint Huruge is first tenor. Justine (Sado-machosistic book by de Sade) makes her appearance in the Palais-Royal about the middle of 1791. They exhibit two pretended savages there, who, before a paying audience, revive the customs of Tahiti. (” Souvenirs of chancelier Pasquier. Ed. Plon, 1893))
[8] Mercure de France, Nov. 5, 1791. – Buchez et Roux, XII. 338. Report by Pétion, mayor, Dec. 9, 1791. “Every branch of the police is in a state of complete neglect. The streets are dirty, and full of rubbish; robbery, and crimes of every kind, are increasing to a frightful degree.” “Correspondance de M. de Staël” (manuscript), Jan. 22, 1792. “As the police is almost worthless, freedom from punishment, added to poverty, brings on disorder.”
[9] Moniteur, XI. 517 (session of Feb. 29, 1792). Speeches by de Lacépède and de Mulot.
[10] Lacretelle, “Dix ans d’Epreuves.” “I know no more dismal and discouraging aspect than the interval between the departure of the National Assembly, on the 10th August consummated by that of September 2.”
[11] Mercure de France, Sept. 3, 1791, article by Mallet du Pan.
[12] Moniteur, XI. 317 (session of Feb. 6, 1792). Speech by M. Cahier, a minister. Many of the emigrants belong to the class formerly called the Third-Estate. No reason for emigrating, on their part, can be supposed but that of religious anxieties.”
[13] Decree of Nov. 9, 1791. The first decree seems to be aimed only at the armed gatherings on the frontier. We see, however, by the debates, that it affects all emigrants. The decrees of Feb. 9 and March 30, 1792, bear upon all, without exception. — “Correspondance de Mirabeau et du Comte de la Marck,” III. 264 (letter by M. Pellenc, Nov. 12, 1791) The decree (against the emigrants) was prepared in committee; it was expected that the emigrants would return, but there was fear of them. It was feared that the nobles, associated with the unsworn priests in the rural districts, might add strength to a troublesome resistance. The decree, as it was passed, seemed to be the most suitable for keeping the emigrants beyond the frontiers.”
[14] Decree of Feb. 1, 1792. — Moniteur, XI. 412 (session of Feb. 17). Speech by Goupilleau. “Since the decree of the National Assembly on passports, emigrations have redoubled.” People evidently escaped from France as from a prison.
[15] Decrees of June 18 and August 25.
[16] Decree of June 19. — Moniteur, XIII. 331. “In execution of the law . . . there will be burnt, on Tuesday, August 7, on the Place Vendôme, at 2 o’clock: 1st, 600, more or less, of files of papers, forming the last of genealogical collections, titles and proofs of nobility; 2nd, about 200 files, forming part of a work composed of 263 volumes, on the Order of the Holy Ghost.”
[17] Decree of Nov. 29, 1791. (This decree is not in Duvergier’s collection~) — Moniteur, XII. 59, 247 (sessions of April 5 and 28, 1792).
[18] At the Jacobin Club, Legendre proposes a much a more expeditious measure for getting rid of the priests. “At Brest, he says, boats are found which are called Marie-Salopes, so constructed that, on being loaded with dirt, they go out of the harbor themselves. Let us have a similar arrangement for priests; but, instead of sending them out of the harbor, let us send them out to sea, and, if necessary, let them go down.” (“Journal de Amis de la Constitution,” number 194, May 15, 1792.)
[19] Moniteur, XII. 560 (decree of June 3).
[20] Decrees of July 19 and Aug. 4, completed by those of Aug. 16 and 19.
[21] Moniteur, XII. 59, 61 (session of April 3); X. 374 (session of Nov. 13; XII 230 (session of April 26). — The last sentence quoted was uttered by François de Nantes.
[22] Moniteur, XI. 43. (session of Jan. 5, speech by Isnard).
[23] Moniteur, XI. 356 (session of Feb. 10).
[24] Moniteur, XI. 230 (session of April 26).
[25] When I was a child the socialists etc. had substituted aristocracy with capitalists and today, in France, when the capitalists have largely disappeared, a great many evils are caused by the ‘patronat’. (SR).
[26] Moniteur (session of June 22).
[27] The words of Brissot (Patriote Français), number 887. — Letter addressed Jan. 5 to the club of Brest, by Messrs. Cavalier and Malassis, deputies to the National Assembly: “As to the matter of the sieur Lajaille, even though we would have taken an interest in him, that decorated aristocrat only deserved what he got. . . We shall not remain idle until all these traitors, these perjurers, whom we have spared so long, shall be exterminated” (Mercure de France, Feb. 4). — This Jaille affair is one of the most instructive, and the best supported by documents (Mercure de France, Dec.10 and 17). — “Archives Nationales,” F7, 3215, official report of the district administrators, and of the municipal officers of Brest, Nov. 27, 1791. — Letter by M. de Marigny, commissary in the navy, at Brest, Nov. 28. — Letters by M. de la Jaille, etc. — M. de la Jaille, sent to Brest to take command of the Dugay-Trouin, arrives there Nov.27. While at dinner, twenty persons enter the room, and announce to him, “in the name of many others,” that his presence in Brest is causing trouble, that he must leave, and that “he will not be allowed to take command of a vessel.” He replies, that he will leave the town, as soon as he has finished his dinner. Another deputation follows, more numerous than the first one, and insists on his leaving at once; and they act as his escort. He submits, is conducted to the city gates, and there the escort leaves him. A mob attacks him, and “his body is covered with contusions. He is rescued, with great difficulty, by six brave fellows, of whom one is a pork-dealer, sent to bleed him on the spot. “This insurrection is due to an extra meeting of ‘The Friends of the constitution,’ held the evening before in the theater, to which the public were invited.” M. de la Jaille, it must be stated, is not a proud aristocrat, but a sensible man, in the style of Florian’s and Berquin’s heroes. But just pounded to a jelly, he writes to the president of the “Friends of the Constitution,” that, “could he have flown into the bosom of the club, he would have gladly done so, to convey to it his grateful feelings. He had accepted his command only at the solicitation of the Americans in Paris, and of the six commissioners recently arrived from St. Domingo.” — Mercure de France, April 14, article by Mallet du Pan “I have asked in vain for the vengeance of the law against the assassins of M. de la Jaille. The names of the authors of this assault in full daylight, to which thousands can bear witness, are known to everybody in Brest. Proceedings have been ordered and begun, but the execution of the orders is suspended. More potent than the law, the motionnaires, protectors of assassins, frighten or paralyze its ministrants.”
[28] Mercure de France, Nov. 12 (session of Oct. 31st, 1792).
[29] Decree of Feb. 8, and others like it, on the details, as, for instance, that of Feb. 7.
[30] April 9, at the Jacobin Club, Vergniaud, the president, welcomes and compliments the convicts of Chateau-vieux.
[31] Mortimer-Ternaux, book I, vol. I. (especially the session of April 15).
[32] Comtat (or comtat Venaisssin) ancient region in France under papal authority from 1274 to 1791.(SR)
[33] Moniteur, XII. 335. – Decree of March 20 (the triumphal entry of Jourdan and his associates belongs to the next month).
[34] Moniteur, XII. 730 (session of June 23).
[35] Moniteur, XII. 230 (session of April 12).
[36] Moniteur. XI. 6, (session of March 6).
[37] Moniteur, XI. 123, (session of Jan. 14)
[38] 150 years later these rights were written into the International Declaration of Human Rights in Paris in 1948. (SR).
[39] Mercure de France, Dec. 23 (session of Dec. 23), p.98.
[40] Moniteur, X. 178 (session of Oct. 20, 1791). Information supplied by the deputies of the Upper and Lower Rhine departments. — M. Koch says: “An army of émigrés never existed, unless it be a petty gathering, which took place at Ettenheim, a few leagues from Strasbourg. . . (This troop) encamped in tents, but only because it lacked barracks and houses.” — M. —, deputy of the lower Rhine, says: “This army at Ettenheim is composed of about five or six hundred poorly-clad, half-paid men, deserters of all nations, sleeping in tents, for lack of other shelter, and armed with clubs, for lack of fire-arms and deserting every day, because money is getting scarce. The second army, at Worms, under the command of a Condé, is composed of three hundred gentlemen, and as many valets and grooms. I have to add, that the letters which reach me from Strasbourg, containing extracts of inside information from Frankfort, Munich, Regensburg, and Vienna, announce the most pacific intentions on the part of the different courts, since receiving the notification of the king’s submission.” The number of armed emigrants increases, but always remain very small (Moniteur, X. 678, letter of M. Delatouche, an eyewitness, Dec. 10). “I suppose that the number of emigrants scattered around on the territories of the grand-duke of Baden, the bishop of Spires, the electorates, etc., amounts to scarcely 4,000 men.”
[41] Moniteur, X. 418 (session of Nov. 15, 1791). Report by the minister Delessart. In August, the emperor issued orders against enlistments, and to send out of the country all Frenchmen under suspicion; also, in October, to send away the French who formed too numerous a body at Ath and at Tournay (Now in Belgium). — Buchez et Roux, XII. 395, demands of the king, Dec. 14, — Ibid., XIII. 15, 16, 19, 52, complete satisfaction given by the Elector of Trèves, Jan. 1, 1792, communicated to the Assembly Jan. 6; publication of the elector’s orders in the electorate, Jan. 3. The French envoy reports that they are fully executed, which news with the documents, are communicated to the Assembly, on the 8th, 16, and 19th of January. — ” Correspondance de Mirabeau et M. de la Marck,” III.287. Letter of M. de Mercy-Argenteau, Jan. 9, 1792. “The emperor has promised aid to the elector, under the express stipulation that he should begin by yielding to the demands of the French, as otherwise no assistance would be given to him in case of attack.”
[42] Mallet du Pan, “Mémoires,” I. 254 (February, 1792). — ” Correspondance de Mirabeau et du M. de la Marck,” III. 232 (note of M. de Bacourt). On the very day and at the moment of signing the treaty at Pilnitz, at eleven o’clock in the evening, the Emperor Leopold wrote to his prime minister, M. de Kaunitz, “that the convention which he had just signed does not really bind him to anything; that it only contains insignificant declarations, extorted by the Count d’Artois.” He ends by assuring him that “neither himself nor his government is in any way bound by this instrument.”
[43] Words of M. de Kaunitz, Sept. 4, 1791 (“Recueil,” by Vivenot, I. 242).
[44] Moniteur, XI. 142 (session of Jan. 17). – Speech by M. Delessart. – Decree of accusation against him March 10. – Declaration of war, April 20. – On the real intentions of the King, cf. Malouet, “Malouet, “Mémoires” II. 199-209; Lafayette, “Mémoires,” I. 441 (note 3); Bertrand de Molleville, “Mémoires,” VI. 22; Governor Morris, II. 242, letter of Oct. 23, 1792.
[45] Moniteur, X. 172 (session of Oct. 20, 1791). Speech by Brissot. – – Lafayette, I. 441. “It is the Girondists who, at this time, wanted a war at any price” – Malouet, II. 209. “As Brissot has since boasted, it was the republican party which wanted war, and which provoked it by insulting all the powers.”
[46] Buchez et Roux, XII. 402 (session of the Jacobin Club, Nov. 28, 1791).
[47] Gustave III., King of Sweden, assassinated by Ankerstrom, says: “I should like to know what Brissot will say.”
[48] On Brissot’s antecedents, cf. Edmond Biré, “La Légende des Girondins.” Personally, Brissot was honest, and remained poor. But he had passed through a good deal of filth, and bore the marks of it. He had lent himself to the diffusion of an obscene book, “Le Diable dans un bénitier,” and, in 1783, having received 13,355 francs to found a Lyceum in London, not only did not found it, but was unable to return the money.
[49] Moniteur, XI. 147. Speech by Brissot, Jan. 17. Examples from whom he borrows authority, Charles XII., Louis XIV., Admiral Blake, Frederic II., etc.
[50] Moniteur. X. 174. “This Venetian government, which is nothing but a farce . . . Those petty German princes, whose insolence in the last century despotism crushed out. . . Geneva, that atom of a republic. . .That bishop of Liège, whose yoke bows down a people that ought to be free . . . I disdain to speak of other princes. . . That King of Sweden, who has only twenty-five millions income, and who spends two-thirds of it in poor pay for an army of generals and a small number of discontented soldiers. . . As to that princess (Catherine II.), whose dislike of the French constitution is well known, and who is about as good looking as Elizabeth, she cannot expect greater success than Elizabeth in the Dutch revolution.” (Brissot, in this last passage, tries to appear at once witty and well read.)
[51] Letter of Roland to the king, June 10, 1792, and letter of the executive council to the pope, Nov. 25, 1792. Letter of Madame Roland to Brissot, Jan. 7, 1791. “Briefly, adieu. Cato’s wife need not gratify herself by complimenting Brutus.”
[52] Buchez et Roux, XII. 410 (meeting of the Jacobin club, Dec. 10, 1791). “A Louis XIV. declares war against Spain, because his ambassador had been insulted by the Spanish ambassador. And we, who are free, might hesitate for an instant!”
[53] Moniteur, X, 503 (session of Nov.29). The Assembly orders this speech to be printed and distributed in the departments.
[54] Moniteur , X. 762 (session of Dec. 28).
[55] Moniteur, XI. 147, 149 (session of Jan.17); X. 759 (session of Dec. 28). — Already, on the 10th of December, he had declared at the Jacobin club: “A people that has conquered its freedom, after ten centuries of slavery, needs war. War is essential to it for its consolidation.” (Buchez et Roux, XII. 410). — On the 17th of January, in the tribune, he again repeats: “I have only one fear, and that is, that we may not have war.”
[56] Moniteur, XI. 119 (session of Jan.13). Speech by Gensonné, in the name of the diplomatic committee, of which he is the reporter.
[57] Moniteur, XI. 158 (session of Jan. 18). The Assembly orders the printing of this speech.
[58] Moniteur, XI. 760 (session of Dec. 28).
[59] Moniteur, XI. 149 (session of Jan. 17). Speech by Brissot.
[60] Moniteur, XI. 178 (session of Jan.20). Fauchet proposes the following decree: “All partial treaties actually existent are declared void. The National Assembly substitutes in their place alliances with the English, the Anglo-American, the Swiss, Polish, and Dutch nations, as long as they will be free . . When other nations want our alliance, they have only to conquer their freedom to have it. Meanwhile, this will not prevent us from having relations with them, as with good natured savages . . . Let us occupy the towns in the neighborhood which bring our adversaries too near us . . . Mayence, Coblentz, and Worms are sufficient” – Ibid.,, p.215 (session of Jan.25). One of the members, supporting himself with the authority of Gélon, King of Syracuse, proposes an additional article: “We declare that we will not lay down our arms until we shall have established the freedom of all peoples.” These stupidities show the mental condition of the Jacobin party.
[61] The decree is passed Jan. 25. The alliance between Prussia and Austria takes place Feb. 7 (De Bourgoing, “Histoire diplomatique de l’Europe pendant la Révolution Française,” I. 457).
[62] Albert Sorel, “La Mission du Comte de Ségur à Berlin” (published in the Temps, Oct. 15, 1878). Dispatch of M. de Ségur to M. Delessart, Feb. 24, 1792. Count Schulemburg repeated to me that they had no desire whatever to meddle with our constitution. But, said he with singular animation, we must guard against gangrene. Prussia is, perhaps, the country which should fear it least; nevertheless, however remote a gangrened member may be, it is better to it off than risk one’s life. How can you expect to secure tranquility, when thousands of writers every day . . . mayors, office-holders, insult kings, and publish that the Christian religion has always supported despotism, and that we shall be free only by destroying it, and that all princes must be exterminated because they are all tyrants?”
[63] A popular jig of these revolutionary times, danced in the streets and on the public squares. -TR.
[64] Buchez et Roux, XXV. 203 (session of April 3, 1793). Speech by Brissot. -Ibid., XX. 127. “A tous les Républicains de France, par Brissot,” Oct. 24, 1792. “In declaring war, I had in view the abolition of royalty.” He refers, in this connection, to his speech of Dec. 30, 1791, where he says, “I fear only one thing, and that is, that we shall not be betrayed. We need treachery, for strong doses of poison still exist in the heart of France, and heavy explosions are necessary to clear it out.”
[65] Mallet du Pan, “Mémoires,” I. 260 (April, 1792), and I. 439 (July, 1792).
[66] Any revolutionary leader, from Lenin, through Stalin to Andropov may confirm the advantage of acting in secret. (SR).
[67] “The French Revolution,” I. 262 and following pages.
[68] Buchez et Roux, XIII. 92-99 (January, 1792); (February). — Coral, “Lettres inédites,” 33. (One of these days, out of curiosity, he walked along as far as the Rue des Lombards.) “Witness of such crying injustice, and indignant at not being able to seize any of the thieves that were running along the street, loaded with sugar and coffee to sell again, I suddenly felt a feverish chill over all my body.” (The letter is not dated. The editors conjectures that the year was 1791. I rather think that it was 1792.)
[69] Moniteur, XI. 45 and 46 (session of Jan. 5). The whole of Isnard’s speech should be read.
[70] Buchez et Roux, XIII. 177. Letter by Pétion, Feb. 10.
[71] Buchez et Roux, XIII. 252. Letter of André Chénier, in the Journal de Paris, Feb. 26. – Schmidt, “Tableaux de la Révolution Franaise,” I. 76. Reply of the Directory of the Department of the Seine to a circular by Roland, June 12, 1792. The contrast between the two classes is here clearly defined. “We have not resorted to those assemblages of men, most of them foreigners, for the opinion of the people, among the enemies of labor and repose standing by themselves and having no part in common interests, already inclined to vice through idleness, and who prefer the risks of disorder to the honorable resources of indigence. This class of men, always large in large cities, is that whose noisy harangues fill the streets, Squares, and public gardens of the capital, that which excites seditious gatherings, that which constantly fosters anarchy and contempt for the laws — that, in fine, whose clamor, far from reflecting public Opinion, indicates the extreme effort made to prevent the expression of public opinion. . . We have studied the opinion of the people of Paris among those useful and laborious men warmly attached to the State at all points of their existence through every object of their affection, among owners of property, tillers of the soil, tradesmen and workers . . . An inviolable attachment . . . to the constitution, and mainly to national Sovereignty, to political equality and constitutional monarchy, which are its most important characteristics and their almost unanimous sentiment.”
[72] Governor Morris, letter of June 20, 1792.
[73] “Souvenirs”, by Pasquier (Etienne-Dennis, duc), chancelier de France. in VI volumes, Librarie Plon, Paris 1893. Vol. I. page 84.
[74] Malouet, II. 203. Every report that came in from the provinces announced (to the King and Queen) a perceptible amelioration of public opinion, which was becoming more and more perverted. That which reached them was uninfluenced, whilst the opinions of clubs, taverns, and street-corners gained enormous power, the time being at hand when there was to be no other power.” The figures given above are by Mallet du Pan, “Mémoires,” II. 120.
[75] Moniteur, XII. 776 (session of June 28). Speech by M. Lamarque, in a district court: “The incivism of the district courts in general is well known.”
[76] Bertand de Molleville, “Mémoires,” VI. 22. — After having received the above instructions from the King, Bertrand calls on the Queen, who makes the same remark: “Do you not think that fidelity to one’s oath is the only plan to pursue?” “Yes, Madame, certainly.” “Very well; rest assured that we shall not waver. Come, M. Bertrand, take courage; I hope that with firmness, patience, and what comes of that, all is not yet lost.”
[77] M. de Lavalette, “Mémoires,” I. 100. — Lavalette, in the beginning of September, 1792, enlists as a volunteer and sets out, along with two friends, carrying his knapsack on his back, dressed in a short and wearing a forage cap. The following shows the sentiments of the peasantry: In a village of makers of wooden shoes, near Vermanton (in the vicinity of Autun), “two days before our arrival a bishop and two vicars, who were escaping in a carriage, were stopped by them. They rummaged the vehicle and found some hundreds of francs, and, to avoid returning these, they thought it best to massacre their unfortunate owners. This sort of occupation seeming more lucrative to these good people than the other one, they were on the look-out for all wayfarers.” The three volunteers are stopped by a little hump- backed official and conducted to the municipality, a sort of market, where their passports are read and their knapsacks are about to be examined. “We were lost, when d’Aubonnes, who was very tall jumped on the table. . . and began with a volley of imprecations and market slang which took his hearers by surprise. Soon raising his style, he launched out in patriotic terms, liberty, sovereignty of the people, with such vehemence and in so loud a voice, as to suddenly effect a great change and bring down thunders of applause. But the crazy fellow did not stop there. Ordering Leclerc de la Ronde imperiously to mount on the table, he addressed the assemblage: “You shall see whether we are not Paris republicans. Now, sir, say your republican catechism – ‘What is God? what are the People? and what is a King?’ His friend, with an air of contrition and in a nasal tone of voice, twisting himself about like a harlequin, replies: ‘God is matter, the People are the poor, and the King is a lion, a tiger, an elephant who tears to pieces, devours, and crushes the people down.'” — “They could no longer restrain themselves. The shouts, cries, and enthusiasm were unbounded. They embraced the actors, hugged them, and bore them away. Each strove to carry us home with him, and we had to drink all round”
[78] The reader will meet the French expression sans-culottes again and again in Taine’s or any other book about the French revolution. The nobles wore a kind of breeches terminating under the knee while tight long stockings, fastened to the trousers, exposed their calves. The male leg was as important an adornment for the nobles as it was to be for the women in the 20th Century. The poor, on the other hand, wore crude long trousers, mostly without a crease, often without socks or shoes, barefoot in the summer and wooden shoed in the winter. (SR).
[79] The song of “Veillons au salut de l’empire” belongs to the end of 1791. The “Marseillaise” was composed in April, 1792.
[80] Mercure de France, Nov. 23, 1791.
[81] Philippe de Ségur, “Mémoires,” I. (at Fresnes, a village situated about seven leagues from Paris, a few days after Sep. 2, 1792). “A band of these demagogues pursued a large farmer of this place, suspected of royalism and denounced as a monopoliser because he was rich. These madmen had seized him, and, without any other form of trial, were about to put an end to him, when my father ran up to them. He addressed them, and so successfully as to change their rage into a no less exaggerated enthusiasm for humanity. Animated by their new transports, they obliged the poor farmer, still pale and trembling, and whom they were just going to hang on its branches, to drink and dance along with them around the tree of liberty.”
[82] Lacretelle, “Dix ans d’Epreuves,” 78. “The Girondists wanted to fashion a Roman people out of the dregs of Romulus, and, what is worse, out of the brigands of the 5th of October.”
[83] These pages must have made a strong impression upon Lenin when he read them in the National Library in Paris around 1907. (SR).
[84] Lafayette, I. 442. “The Girondists sought in the war an opportunity for attacking with advantage, the constitutionalists of 1791 and their institutions.” — Brissot (Address to my constituents). “We sought in the war an opportunity to set traps for the king, to expose his bad faith and his relationship with the emigrant princes.” – Moniteur, (session of April 3, 1793). Speech by Brissot: “‘I had told the Jacobins what my opinion was, and had proved to them that war was the sole means of unveiling the perfidy of Louis XVI. The event has justified my opinion.” — Buchez et Roux, VIII. 60, 216, 217. The decree of the Legislative Assembly is dated Jan. 25, the first money voted by a club for the making of pikes is on Jan. 31, and the first article by Brissot, on the red cap, is on Feb. 6.
[85] Buchez et Roux, XIII. 217 (proposal of a woman, member of the club of l’Evêché, Jan. 31, 1792). — Articles in the Gazette Universelle, Feb.11, and in the Patriote Français, Feb. 13. – Moniteur, XI. 576 (session of March 6). – Buchez et Roux, XV. (session of June 10). Petition of 8,000 national guards in Paris: “This faction which stirs up popular vengeance . . . which seeks to put the caps of labor in conflict with the military casques, the pike with the gun, the rustic’s dress with the uniform.”
[86] Mallet du Pan, “Mémoires,” II 429 (note of July, 1792). – Mercure de France, March 10, 1792, article by Mallet du Pan.
CHAPTER IV. The Departments.
I.
Provence in 1792. — Early supremacy of the Jacobins in Marseilles. — Composition of the party. — The club and the municipality. — Expulsion of the “Earnest” regiment.
Should you like to see the revolutionary tree when, for the first time, it came fully into leaf, it is in the department of the Bouches- du-Rhône you have to look. Nowhere else had it been so precocious, nowhere were local circumstances and native temperament so well adapted to enhance its growth. — ” A blistering sky, an excessive climate, an arid soil, rocks, . . . savage rivers, torrential or dry or overburdened,” blinding dust, nerves upset by steady northern blasts or by the intermittent gusts of the sirocco. A sensual race choleric and impetuous, with no intellectual or moral ballast, in which the mixture of Celt and Latin has destroyed the humane suavity of the Celt and the serious earnestness of the Roman; “complete, tough, powerful, and restless men,”[1] and yet gay, spontaneous, eloquent, dupes of their own bombast, suddenly carried away by a flow of words and superficial enthusiasm. Their principal city numbering 120,000 souls, in which commercial and maritime risks foster innovating and adventurous spirits; in which the sight of suddenly- acquired fortunes expended on sensual enjoyments constantly undermines all stability of Character; in which politics, like speculation, is a lottery offering its prizes to audacity; besides all this, a free port and a rendezvous for lawless nomads, disreputable people, without steady trade,[2] scoundrels, and blackguards, who, like uprooted, decaying seaweed, drift from coast to coast around the entire circle of the Mediterranean sea; a veritable sink filled with the dregs of twenty corrupt and semi-barbarous civilizations, where the scum of crime cast forth from the prisons of Genoa, Piedmont, Sicily, indeed, of all Italy, of Spain, of the Archipelago, and of Barbary,3 accumulates and ferments.2 No wonder that, in such a time the reign of the mob should be established there sooner than elsewhere.[3] — After many an explosion, this reign is inaugurated August 17, 1790, by the removal of M. Lieutaud, a sort of bourgeois, moderate Lafayette, who commands the National Guard. Around him rally a majority of the population, all men “honest or not, who have anything to lose.”[4] After he is driven out, then proscribed, then imprisoned, they resign themselves, and Marseilles belongs to the low class, to 40,000 destitute and rogues led by the club.
The better to ensure their empire, the municipality, one month after the expulsion of M. Lieutaud, declared every citizen “active” who had any trade or profession[5]; the consequence is that vagabonds attend the meetings of the sections in contempt of constitutional law. The consequence, was that property-owners and commercial men withdrew, which was wise on their part, for the usual demagogic machinery is set in motion without delay. “Each section-assembly is composed of a dozen factious spirits, members of the club, who drive out honest people by displaying cudgels and bayonets. The deliberations are prepared beforehand at the club, in concert with the municipality, and woe to him who refuses to adopt them at the meeting! They go so far as to threaten citizens who wish to make any remarks with instant burial in the cellars under the churches.”[6] The argument proved irresistible: “the majority of honest people are so frightened and so timid” that not one of them dare attend these meetings, unless protected by public force. “More than 80,000 inhabitants do not sleep peacefully,” while all the political rights are vested in “five or six hundred individuals,” legally disqualified. Behind them marches the armed rabble, “the horde of brigands without a country,”[7] always ready for plundering, murder, and hanging. In front of them march the local authorities, who, elected through their influence, carry on the administration under their guidance. Patrons and clients, members of the club and its satellites, they form a league which plays the part of a sovereign State, scarcely recognizing, even in words, the authority of the central government.[8] The decree by which the National Assembly gives full power to the Commissioners to re- establish order is denounced as plébécide; these conscientious and cautious moderators are qualified as “dictators”; they are denounced in circular letters to all the municipalities of the department, and to all Jacobin clubs throughout the kingdom;[9] the club is somewhat disposed to go to Aix to cut off their heads and send them in a trunk to the president of the National Assembly, with a threat that the same penalty awaits himself and all the deputies if they do not revoke their recent decrees. A few days after this, four sections draw up an act before a notary, stating the measures they had taken towards sending an army of 6,000 men from Marseilles to Aix, to get rid of the three intruders. The commissioners dare not enter Marseilles, where “gibbets are ready for them, and a price set on their heads.” It is as much as they can do to rescue from the faction M. Lieutaud and his friends, who, accused of lése-nation, confined without a shadow of proof, treated like mad dogs, put in chains,[10] shut up in privies and holes, and obliged to drink their own urine for lack of water, impelled by despair to the brink of suicide, barely escape murder a dozen times in the courtroom and in prison.[11] Against the decree of the National Assembly ordering their release, the municipality makes reclamations, contrives delays, resists, and finally stirs up its usual instruments. Just as the prisoners are about to be released a crowd of “armed persons without uniform or officer,” constantly increased “by vagabonds and foreigners,” gathers on the heights overlooking the Palais de Justice, and makes ready to fire on M. Lieutaud. Summoned to proclaim martial law, the municipality refuses, declaring that “the general detestation of the accused is too manifest”; it demands the return of the Swiss regiment to its barracks, and that the prisoners remain where they are; the only thing which it grants them is a secret permission to escape, as if they were guilty; they, accordingly, steal away clandestinely and in disguise.[12] — The Swiss regiment, however, which prevents the magistrates from violating the law, must pay for its insolence, and, as it is incorruptible, they decide to drive it out of the town. For four months the municipality multiplies against it every kind of annoyance,[13] and, on the 16th of October, 1791, the Jacobins provoke a row in the theater against its officers. The same night, outside the theater, four of these are attacked by armed bands; the post to which they retreat is nearly taken by assault; they are led to a prison for safety, and there they still remain five days afterwards, “although their innocence is admitted.” Meanwhile, to ensure “public tranquility,” the municipality has required the commander of the post to immediately replace the Swiss Guard with National Guards on all the military posts; the latter yields to force, while the useless regiment, insulted and threatened, has nothing to do but to pack off.[14] This being done, the new municipality, still more Jacobin than the old one,[15] separates Marseilles from France, erects the city into a marauding republican government, gets up expeditions, levies contributions, forms alliances, and undertakes an armed conquest of the department.
II. The expedition to Aix.
The town of Marseilles send an expedition to Aix. — The regiment is disarmed. — The Directory driven out. — Pressure on the new Directory.
The first thing is to lay its hand on the district capital, Aix, where the Swiss regiment is stationed in garrison and where the superior authorities are installed. This operation is the more necessary inasmuch as the Directory of the department loudly commends the loyalty of the Swiss Guard and takes occasion to remind the Marseilles municipality of the respect due to the law. Such remonstrance is an insult, and the municipality, in a haughty tone, calls upon the Directory to avow or disavow its letter; “if you did not write it, it is a foul report which it is our duty to examine into, and if you did, it is a declaration of war made by you against Marseilles.”[16] The Directory, in polite terms and with great circumspection, affirms both its right and its utterance, and remarks that “the prorata list of taxes of Marseilles for 1791 is not yet reported;” that the municipality is much more concerned with saving the State than with paying its contribution and, in short, it maintains its censure. — If it will not bend it must break, and on the 4th of February, 1792, the municipality sends Barbaroux, its secretary, to Paris, that he may mitigate the outrages they are preparing. During the night of the 25- 26, the drums beat the general alarm, and three or four thousand men gather and march to Aix with six pieces of cannon. As a precaution they pretend to have no leaders, no captains or lieutenants or even corporals; to quote them, all are equal, all volunteers, each being summoned by the other; in this fashion, as all are responsible, no one is.[17] They reach Aix at eleven o’clock in the forenoon, find a gate open through the connivance of those in league with them among the populace of the town and its suburbs, and summon the municipality to surrender the sentinels. In the mean time their emissaries have announced in the neighboring villages that the town was menaced by the Swiss regiment; consequently four hundred men from Aubagne arrive in haste, while from hour to hour the National Guards from the surrounding villages likewise rush in. The streets are full of armed men; shouts arise and the tumult increases; the municipal body, in the universal panic, loses its wits. This body is afraid of a nocturnal fight “between troops of the line, citizens, National Guards and armed strangers, no one being able to recognize one another or know who is an enemy.” It sends back a detachment of three hundred and fifty Swiss Guards, which the Directory had ordered to its support, and consigns the regiment to its quarters. — At this the Directory takes to flight. Military sentinels of all kinds are disarmed while the Marseilles throng, turning its advantages to account, announces to the municipality at two o’clock in the morning that, “allow it or not ” it is going to attack the barracks immediately; in fact, cannon are planted, a few shots are fired, a sentinel killed, and the hemmed-in regiment is compelled to evacuate the town, the men without their guns and the officers without their swords. Their arms are stolen, the people seize the suspected, the street-lamp is hauled down and the noose is made ready. Cayol, the flower-girl, is hung. The municipality, with great difficulty, saves one man who is already lifted by the rope two feet from the ground, and obtains for three others “a temporary refuge” in prison.
Henceforth there is no authority at the department headquarters, or rather it has changed hands. Another Directory, more pliable, is installed in the place of the fugitive Directory. Of the thirty-six administrators who form the Council only twelve are present at the election. Of the nine elected only six consent to sit, while often only three are found at its sessions, which three, to recruit their colleagues, are obliged to pay them.[18] Hence, notwithstanding their position is the best in the department, they are worse treated and more unfortunate than their servants outside. The delegates of the club, with the municipal officers of Marseilles seated alongside of them, oblige them either to keep silent, or to utter what they dictate to them.[19] “Our arms are tied,” writes one of them, “we are wholly under the yoke” of these intruders. “We have twice in succession seen more than three hundred men, many of them with guns and pistols, enter the hall and threaten us with death if we refused them what they asked. We have seen infuriate motionnaires, nearly all belonging to Avignon, mount the desks of the Directory, harangue their comrades and excite them to rioting and crime. “You must decide between life or death,” they exclaimed to us, “you have only a quarter of an hour to choose.” “National guards have offered their sabers through the windows, left open on account of the extreme heat, to those around us and made signs to them to cut our throats.” — Thus fashioned, reduced and drilled, the Directory is simply an instrument in the hands of the Marseilles demagogues. Camoïn, Bertin and Rebecqui, the worst agitators and usurpers, rule there without control. Rebecqui and Bertin, appointed delegates in connection with matters in Arles, have themselves empowered to call for defensive troops; they immediately demand them for attack, to which the Directory vainly remonstrates; they declare to it that “not being under its inspection, it has no authority over them; being independent of it, they have no orders to receive from it nor to render to it any account of their conduct.” So much the worse for the Directory on attempting to revoke their powers. Bertin informs its vice-president that, if it dares do this he will cut off his head. They reply to the Minister’s observations with the utmost insolence.[20] They glory in the boldness of the stroke and prepare another, their march on Aix being only the first halt in the long-meditated campaign which involves the possession of Arles.
III.
The Constitutionalists of Arles. — The Marseilles expedition against Arles. — Excesses committed by them in the town and its vicinity. — Invasion of “Apt,” the club and its volunteers.
No city, indeed, is more odious to them. — For two years, led or pushed on by its mayor, M. d’Antonelle, it has marched along with them or been dragged along in their wake. D’Antonelle, an ultra- revolutionary, repeatedly visited and personally encouraged the bandits of Avignon. To supply them with cannon and ammunition he stripped the Tour St. Louis of its artillery, at the risk of abandoning the mouths of the Rhone to the Barbary pirates.[21] In concert with his allies of the Comtat, the Marseilles club, and his henchmen from the neighboring boroughs, he rules in Arles “by terror.” Three hundred men recruited in the vicinity of the Mint, artisans or sailors with strong arms and rough hands, serve him as satellites. On the 6th of June 1791, they drive away, on their own authority, the unsworn priests, who had taken refuge in the town.[22] — At this, however, the “property-owners and decent people,” much more numerous and for a long time highly indignant, raise their heads; twelve hundred of them assemble in the church of Saint-Honorat, swore to maintain the constitution and public order,”[23] and then moved to the (Jacobin) club, where, in their quality of national guards and active citizens and in conformity with its by-laws, they were admitted en masse. At the same time, acting in concert with the municipality, they reorganize the National Guard and form new companies, the effect of which is to put an end to the Mint gang, thus depriving the faction of all its strength. Thenceforth, without violence or illegal acts, the majority of the club, as well as of the National Guard, consists of constitutional monarchists, the elections of November, 1791, giving to the partisans of order nearly all the administrative offices of the commune and of the district. M. Loys, a physician and a man of energy, is elected mayor in the place of M. d’Antonelle; he is known as able to suppress a riot, “holding martial law in one hand, and his saber in the other.” — This is too much; so Marseilles feel compelled to bring Arles under control “to atone for the disgrace of having founded it.”[24] In this land of ancient cities political hostility is embittered with old municipal grudges, similar to those of Thebes against Plate, of Rome against Veii, of Florence against Pisa. The Guelphs of Marseilles brooded over the one idea of crushing the Ghibellins of Arles. — Already, in the electoral assembly of November, 1791, M. d’Antonelle, the president, had invited the communes of the department to take up arms against this anti-jacobin city.[25] Six hundred Marseilles volunteers set out on the instant, install themselves at Salon, seize the syndic-attorney of the hostile district, and refuse to give him up, this being an advance-guard of 4,000 men promised by the forty or fifty clubs of the party.[26] To arrest their operations requires the orders of the three commissioners, resolutions passed by the Directory still intact, royal proclamations, a decree of the Constituent Assembly, the firmness of the still loyal troops and the firmer stand taken by the Arlesians who, putting down an insurrection of the Mint band, had repaired their ramparts, cut away their bridges and mounted guard with their guns loaded.[27] But it is only a postponement. Now that the commissioners have gone, and the king’s authority a phantom, now that the last loyal regiment is disarmed, the terrified Directory recast and obeying like a servant, with the Legislative Assembly allowing everywhere the oppression of the Constitutionalists by the Jacobins, a fresh Jacobin expedition may be started against the Constitutionalists with impunity. Accordingly, on the 23rd of March, 1792, the Marseilles army of 4,500 men sets out on its march with nineteen pieces of cannon.
In vain the commissioners of the neighboring departments, sent by the Minister, represent to them that Arles submits, that she has laid down her arms, and that the town is now garrisoned with troops of the line; — the Marseilles army requires the withdrawal of this garrison. — In vain the garrison departs. Rebecqui and his acolytes reply that “nothing will divert them from their enterprise; they cannot defer to anybody’s decision but their own in relation to any precaution tending to ensure the safety of the southern departments.” — In vain the Minister renews his injunctions and counter-orders. The Directory replies with a flagrant falsehood, stating that it is ignorant of the affair and refuses to give the government any assistance. — In vain M. de Wittgenstein, commander-in-chief in the south, offers his services to the Directory to repel the invaders. The Directory forbids him to take his troops into the territory of the department.[28] — Meanwhile, on the 29th of March, the Marseilles army effects a breach with its cannon in the walls of defenseless Arles; its fortifications are demolished and a tax of 1,400,000 francs is levied on the owners of property. In contempt of the National Assembly’s decree the Mint bandits, the longshoremen, the whole of the lowest class again take up their arms and lord it over the disarmed population. Although “the King’s commissioner and most of the judges have fled, jury examinations are instituted against absentees,” the juries consisting of the members of the Mint band.[29] The conquerors imprison, smite and slaughter as they please. Countless peaceable individuals are struck down and mauled, dragged to prison and many of them are mortally wounded. An old soldier, eighty years of age, retired to his country home three months earlier, dies after twenty days’ confinement in a dungeon, from a blow received in the stomach by a rifle butt; women are flogged. “All citizens that with an interest in law and order,” nearly five thousand families, have emigrated; their houses in town and in the country are pillaged, while in the surrounding boroughs, along the road leading from Arles to Marseilles, the villains forming the hard core of the Marseilles army, rove about and gorge themselves as in a vanquished country.[30]
They eat and drink voraciously, force the closets, carry off linen and food, steal horses and valuables, smash the furniture, tear up books, and burn papers.[31] All this is only the appropriate punishment of the aristocrats. Moreover, it is no more than right that patriots should be indemnified for their toil, and a few blows too many are not out of place in securing the rule of the right party. — For example, on the false report of order being disturbed at Château-Renard, Bertin and Rebecqui send off a detachment of men, while the municipal body in uniform, followed by the National Guard, with music and flags, comes forth to meet and salute it. Without uttering a word of warning, the Marseilles troop falls upon the cortège, strikes down the flags, disarms the National Guard, tears the epaulettes off the officers’ shoulders, drags the mayor to the ground by his scarf, pursues the counselors, sword in hand, puts the mayor and syndic-attorney in arrest, and, during the night, sacks four dwellings, the whole under the direction of three Jacobins of the place under indictment for recent crimes or misdemeanors. Henceforth at Château-Renard they will look twice before subjecting patriots to indictment.[32] — At Vélaux “the country house of the late seignior is sacked, and everything is carried away, even to the tiles and window-glass.” A troop of two hundred men “overrun the village, levy contributions, and put all citizens who are well-off under bonds for considerable sums.” Camoïn, the Marseille chief, one of the new department administrators, who is in the neighborhood, lays his hand on everything that is fit to be taken, and, a few days after this, 30,000 francs are found in his carpet-bag.-Taught by the example others follow and the commotion spreads. In every borough or petty town the club profits by these acts to satiate its ambition its greed, and its hatred. That of Apt appeals to its neighbors, whereupon 1,500 National Guards of Gordes, St. Saturnin, Gouls and Lacoste, with a thousand women and children armed with clubs and scythes, arrive one morning before the town. On being asked by whose orders they come in this fashion, they reply, “by the orders which their patriotism has given them.” — “The fanatics,” or partisans of the sworn priests, “are the cause of their journey”: they therefore “want lodgings at the expense of the fanatics only.” The three day’s occupation results for the latter and for the town in a cost of 20,000 livres.[33] They begin by breaking everything in the church of the Récollets, and wall up its doors. They then expel unsworn ecclesiastics from the town, and disarm their partisans. The club of Apt, which is the sole authority, remains in session three days: “the municipal bodies in the vicinity appear before it, apologize for themselves, protest their civism, and ask as a favor that no detachment be sent to their places. Individuals are sent for to be interrogated”; several are proscribed, among whom are administrators, members of the court, and the syndic-attorney. A number of citizens have fled; — the town is purged, while the same purging is pursued in numbers of places in and out of the district.[34] It is, indeed, attractive business. It empties the purses of the ill-disposed, and fills the stomachs of patriots; it is agreeable to be well entertained, and especially at the expense of one’s adversaries; the Jacobin is quite content to save the country through a round of feastings. Moreover, he has the satisfaction of playing king among his neighbors, and not only do they feed him for doing them this service, but, again, they pay him for it.[35] – All this is enlivening, and the expedition, which is a “sabbath,” ends in a carnival. Of the two Marseilles divisions, one, led back to Aix, sets down to “a grand patriotic feast,” and then dances fandangoes, of which “the principal one is led off by the mayor and commandant”;[36] the other makes its entry into Avignon the same day, with still greater pomp and jollity.
IV.
The Jacobins of Avignon.– How they obtain recruits. – -Their robberies in the Comtat. — The Avignon municipality in flight or in prison. — Murder of Lécuyer and the Glacière massacre. — Entry of the murderers, supported by their Marseilles allies. — Jacobin dictatorship in Vaucluse and the Buches-du-Rhône.
Nowhere else in France was there another nest of brigands like it: not that a great misery might have produced a more savage uprising; on the contrary, the Comtat, before the Revolution, was a land of plenty. There was no taxation by the Pope; the taxes were very light, and were expended on the spot. “For one or two pennies, one here could have meat, bread, and wine.”[37] But, under the mild and corrupt administration of the Italian legates, the country had become “the safe asylum of all the rogues in France, Italy, and Genoa, who by means of a trifling sum paid to the Pope’s agents, obtained protection and immunity.” Smugglers and receivers of stolen goods abounded here in order to break through the lines of the French customs. “Bands of robbers and assassins were formed, which the vigorous measures of the parliaments of Aix and Grenoble could not wholly extirpate. Idlers, libertines, professional gamblers,”[38] kept-cicisbeos, schemers, parasites, and adventurers, mingle with men with branded shoulders, the veterans “of vice and crime, “the scapegraces of the Toulon and Marseilles galleys.” Ferocity here is hidden in debauchery, like a serpent hidden in its own slime, here all that is required is some chance event and this bad place will be transformed into a death trap.
The Jacobin leaders, Tournal, Rovère, the two Duprats, the two Mainvielles, and Lécuyer, readily obtain recruits in this sink. – They begin, aided by the rabble of the town and of its suburbs, peasants enemies of the octroi, vagabonds opposed to order of any kind, porters and watermen armed with scythes, turnspits and clubs, by exciting seven or eight riots. Then they drive off the legate, force the Councils to resign, hang the chiefs of the National Guard and of the conservative party,[39] and take possession of the municipal offices. –After this their band increases to the dimensions of an army, which, with license for its countersign and pillage for its pay, is the same as that of Tilly and Wallenstein, “a veritable roving Sodom, at which the ancient city would have stood aghast.” Out of 3,000 men, only 200 belong in Avignon; the rest are composed of French deserters, smugglers, fugitives from justice, vagrant foreigners, marauders and criminals, who, scenting a prey, come from afar, and even from Paris;[40] along with them march the women belonging to them, still more base and bloodthirsty. In order to make it perfectly plain that with them murder and robbery are the order of the day, they massacred their first general, Patrix, guilty of having released a prisoner, and elected in his place an old highway tramp named Jourdan, condemned to death by the court at Valence, but who had escaped on the eve of his execution, and who bore the nickname of Coupe-tête, because he is said to have cut off the heads at Versailles of two of the King’s guards.[41] — Under such a commander the troop increases until it forms a body of five or six thousand men, which stops people in the streets and forcibly enrolls them; they are called Mandrins, which is severe for Mandrin,[42] because their war is not merely on public persons and property, as his was, but on the possessions, the proprieties, and the lives of private individuals. One detachment alone, at one time, extorts in Cavaillon 25,000 francs, in Baume 12,000, in Aubignon 15,000, in Pioline 4,800, while Caumont is taxed 2,000 francs a week. At Sarrians, where the mayor gives them the keys, they pillage houses from top to bottom, carry off their plunder in carts, set fire, violate and slay with all the refinements of torture of so many Hurons. An old lady of eighty, and a paralytic, is shot at arms length, and left weltering in her blood in the midst of the flames. A child five years of age is cut in two, its mother decapitated, and its sister mutilated; they cut off the ears of the curé, set them on his brow like a cockade, and then cut his throat, along with that of a pig, and tear out the two hearts and dance around them.[43] After this, for fifty days around Carpentras, to which they lay siege in vain, the unprovoked, cruel instincts of the chauffeurs manifested at a later date, the ancient cannibalistic desires which sometimes reappear in convicts, and the perverted and over-strained sensuality found in maniacs, have full play.
On beholding the monster it has nourished, Avignon, in alarm, utters cries of distress.[44] But the brute, which feels its strength, turns against its former abettors, shows its teeth, and exacts its daily food. Ruined or not, Avignon must furnish its quota. “In the electoral assembly, Mainvielle the younger, elected elector, although he is only twenty-two, draws two pistols from his belt and struts around with a threatening air.”[45] Duprat, the president, the better to master his colleagues, proposes to them to leave Avignon and go to Sorgues, which they refuse to do; upon this he orders cannon to be brought, promises to pay those who will accompany him, drags along the timid, and denounces the rest before an upper national court, of which he himself has designated the members. Twenty of the electors thus denounced are condemned and proscribed; Duprat threatens to enter by force and have them executed on the spot, and, under his leadership, the army of Mandrins advances against Avignon. — Its progress is arrested, and, for two months, restrained by the two mediating commissioners for France; they reduce its numbers, and it is on the point of being disbanded, when the brute again boldly seizes its prey, about to make its escape. On the 21st of August, Jourdan, with his herd of miscreants, obtains possession of the palace. The municipal body is driven out, the mayor escapes in disguise, Tissot, the secretary, is cut down, four municipal officers and forty other persons are thrown into prison, while a number of houses belonging to the fugitives and to priests are pillaged, and thus supply the bandits with their first financial returns.[46] — Then begins the great fiscal operation which is going to fill their pockets. Five front men, chosen by Duprat and his associates, compose, with Lécuyer as secretary, a provisional municipal body, which, taxing the town 300,000 francs and suppressing the convents, offers the spoils of the churches for sale. The bells are taken down, and the hammers of the workmen engaged in breaking them to pieces are heard all day long. A strong-box full of plate, diamonds, and gold crosses, left with the director of the Mont-de-Piété, on deposit, is taken and carried off to the commune; a report is spread that the valuables pawned by the poor had been stolen by the municipality, and that those “robbers had already sent away eighteen trunks full of them.” Upon this the women, exasperated at the bare walls of the churches, together with the laborers in want of work or bread, all the common class, become furious, assemble of their own accord in the church of the Cordeliers, summon Lécuyer to appear before them, drag him from the pulpit and massacre him.[47]
This time there seems to be an end of the brigand party, for the entire town, the populace and the better class, are against them, while the peasants in the country shoot them down wherever they come across them. — Terror, however, supplies the place of numbers, and, with the 350 hired killers bravos still left to them, the extreme Jacobins undertake to overcome a city of 30,000 souls. Mainvielle the elder, dragging along two cannon, arrives with a patrol, fires at random into the already semi-abandoned church, and kills two men. Duprat assembles about thirty of the towns-people, imprisoned by him on the 31st of August, and, in addition to these, about forty artisans belonging to the Catholic brotherhoods, porters, bakers, coopers, and day-laborers, two peasants, a beggar, a few women seized haphazard and on vague denunciations, one of them, “because she spoke ill of Madame