CHAPTER XXII.
[1] Feuillet de Conches, i., p. 205.
[2] M. Foulon was about this time made paymaster of the army and navy, and was generally credited with ability as a financier; but he was unpopular, as a man of ardent and cruel temper, and was brutally murdered by the mob in one of the first riots of the Revolution.
[3] The king.
[4] Necker.
[5] Feuillet de Conches, i., p. 214.
[6] Ibid., p. 217.
[7] On one occasion when the Marquis de Bouillé pointed out to him the danger of some of his plans as placing the higher class at the mercy of the mob, "dirigé par les deux passions les plus actives du coeur humain, l'intérêt et l'amour propre, … il me répondit froidement, en levant les yeux au ciel, qu'il fallait bien compter sur les vertus morales des hommes."—Mémoires de M. de Bouillé, p. 70; and Madame de Staël admits of her father that he was "se fiant trop, il faut l'avouer, à l'empire de la raison," and adds that he "étudia constamment l'esprit public, comme la boussole à laquelle les décisions du roi devaient se conformer."— Considérations sur la Révolution Française, i., pp. 171, 172.
[8] Her exact words are "si … il fasse reculer l'autorité du roi" (if he causes the king's authority to retreat before the populace or the Parliament).
[9] "Histoire de Marie Antoinette," par M. Montjoye, p. 202.
[10] Madame de Campan, p. 412.
[11] This edict was registered in the "Chambre Syndicate," September 13th, 1787.—La Reine Marie Antoinette et la Rév. Française, Recherches Historiques, par le Comte de Bel-Castel, p. 246.
[12] There is at the present moment so strong a pretension set up in many constituencies to dictate to the members whom they send to Parliament as if they were delegates, and not representatives, that it is worth while to refer to the opinion which the greatest of philosophical statesman, Edmund Burke, expressed on the subject a hundred years ago, in opposition to that at a rival candidate who admitted and supported the claim of constituents to furnish the member whom they returned to Parliament with "instructions" of "coercive authority." He tells the citizens of Bristol plainly that such a claim he ought not to admit, and never will. The "opinion" of constituents is "a weighty and respectable opinion, which a representative ought always to rejoice to hear, and which he ought most seriously to consider; but authoritative instruction, mandates issued which the member is bound blindly and implicitly to obey, to vote, and to argue for, though contrary to the clearest conviction of his judgment and his conscience; these are things utterly unknown to the laws of this land, and which arise from a fundamental mistake of the whole order and tenor of our constitution. Parliament is not a congress of embassadors from different and hostile interests…but Parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole, where not local purposes, not local prejudices ought to guide, but the general good resulting from the general reason of the whole. You choose a member indeed; but when you have chosen him, he is not member of Bristol, but he is a member of Parliament."—General Election Speech at the Conclusion of the Poll at Bristol, November 3d, 1774, Burke's Works, vol. iii., pp. 19, 20, ed. 1803.
[13] De Tocqueville considers the feudal system in France in many points more oppressive than that of Germany.—Ancien Régime, p. 43.
[14] Silence des grenouilles. Arthur Young, "Travels in France during 1787, '88, '89," p. 537. It is singular proof how entirely research into the condition of the country and the people of France had been neglected both by its philosophers and its statesmen, that there does not seem to have been any publication in the language which gave information on these subjects. And this work of Mr. Young's is the one to which modern French writers, such as M. Alexis de Tocqueville, chiefly refer.
[15] "The lettres de cachet were carried to an excess hardly credible; to the length of being sold, with blanks, to be filled up with names at the pleasure of the purchaser, who was thus able, in the gratification of private revenge, to tear a man from the bosom of his family, and bury him in a dungeon, where he would exist forgotten and die unknown."—A. Young, p. 532. And in a note he gives an instance of an Englishman, named Gordon, who was imprisoned in the Bastile for thirty years without even knowing the reason of his arrest.
[16] Arthur Young, writing January 10th, 1790, identifies Les Enragés with the club afterward so infamous as the Jacobins. "The ardent democrats who have the reputation of being so much republican in principle that they do not admit any political necessity for having even the name of the king, are called the Enragés. They have a meeting at the Jacobins', the Revolution Club which assembles every night in the very room in which the famous League was formed in the reign of Henry III." (p. 267).
[17] M. Droz asserts that a collector of such publications bought two thousand five hundred in the last three months of 1788, and that his collection was far from complete.—Histoire de Louis XVI., ii., p. 180.
[18] "Tout auteur s'érige en législateur."—Memorial of the Princes to the King, quoted in a note to the last chapter of Sismondi's History, p. 551, Brussels ed., 1849.
[19] In reality the numbers were even more in favor of the Commons: the representatives of the clergy were three hundred and eight, and those of the nobles two hundred and eighty-five, making only five hundred and ninety-three of the two superior orders, while the deputies of the Tiers- État were six hundred and twenty-one.—Souvenirs de la Marquise de Créquy, vii., p. 58.
[20] "Se levant alors, 'Non,' dit le roi, 'ce ne peut être qu'à Versailles, à cause des chasses.'"—LOUIS BLANC, ii., p. 212, quoting Barante.
[21] "La reine adopta ce dernier avis [that the States should meet forty or sixty leagues from the capital], et elle insista auprès du roi que l'on s'eloignât de l'immense population de Paris. Elle craignait dès lors que le peuple n'influençât les délibérations des députés."—MADAME DE CAMPAN, ch 83.
[22] Chambrier, i., p. 562.