IX.
Brissot, as yet obscure, wrote Le Patriote Français. A politician, and aspiring to leading parts, he only excited revolutionary passions in proportion as he hoped one day to govern by them. At first a constitutionalist and friend of Necker and Mirabeau, a hireling before he became a doctrinaire, he saw in the people only a sovereign more suitable to his own ambition. The republic was his rising sun; he approached it as to his own fortune, but with prudence, and frequently looking behind him to see if opinion followed his traces.
Condorcet, an aristocrat by genius, although an aristocrat by birth, became a democrat from philosophy. His passion was the transformation of human reason. He wrote La Chronique de Paris.
Carra, an obscure demagogue, had created for himself a name of fear in the Annales Patriotiques. Fréron, in the Orateur du Peuple, rivalled Marat. Fauchet, in the Bouche de Fer, elevated democracy to a level with religious philosophy. The "last not least," Laclos, an officer of artillery, author of an obscene novel, and the confidant of the Duc d'Orleans, edited the Journal des Jacobins, and stirred up through France the flame of ideas and words of which the focus was in the clubs.
All these men used their utmost efforts to impel the people beyond the limits which Barnave had prescribed to the event of the 21st June. They desired to avail themselves of the instant when the throne was left empty to obliterate it from the constitution. They overwhelmed the king with insults and objurgations, in order that the Assembly might not dare to replace at the head of their institutions a prince whom they had vilified. They clamoured for interrogatory, sentence, forfeiture, abdication, imprisonment, and hoped to degrade royalty for ever by degrading the king. The republic saw its hour for the first moment, and trembled to allow it to escape. All these hands at once urged men's minds towards a decisive movement. Articles in the journals provoked motions, motions petitions, and petitions riots. The altar of the country in the Champ-de-Mars, which remained erected for a new federation, was the place which was already pointed out for the assemblies of the people. It was the Mons Aventinus, whither it was to retire, and whence it was to dictate to a timid and corrupt senate.
"No more king,—let us be republicans," wrote Brissot in the Patriote. "Such is the cry at the Palais Royal, and it does not gain ground fast enough; it would seem as though it were blasphemy. This repugnance for assuming the name of the condition in which the state actually is is very extraordinary in the eyes of philosophy." "No king! no protector! no regent! Let us have done with man-eaters of every sort and kind," re-echoed the Bouche de Fer. "Let the eighty-three departments enter into a federation, and declare that they will no longer endure tyrants, monarchs, or protectors. Their shade is as fatal to the people as that of the Bohonupas is deadly to all that lives. If we nominate a regent we shall soon fight for the choice of a master. Let us only contend for liberty."
Provoked by this reference to the regency, which appeared to point to him, the Duc d'Orleans wrote to the journals that he was ready to serve his country by land or by sea; but in respect to any question of regency, he from that moment renounced, and for ever, any pretensions to that title which the constitution might give him. "After having made so many sacrifices to the cause of the people," he said, "I am no longer in a condition to quit my position as a simple citizen. Ambition in me would be an inexcusable inconsistency."
Already discredited by all parties, this prince, henceforth incapable of serving the throne, was equally incapable of serving the republic. Odious to the royalists, put aside by the demagogues, suspected by the constitutionalists, there only remained to him the stoical attitude in which he took refuge. He had abdicated his rank, abdicated his own faction; he had abdicated the favour of the people. His life was all that remained to him.
At the same moment Camille Desmoulins was thus satirically apostrophising La Fayette, the first idol of the Revolution:—"Liberator of two worlds, flower of Janissaries, phœnix of Alguazils-major, Don Quixotte of Capet and the two chambers, constellation of the white horse[2], my voice is too weak to raise itself above the clamour of your thirty thousand spies, and as many more your satellites, above the noise of your four hundred drums, and your cannons loaded with grape. I had until now misrepresented your—more than—royal highness through the allusions of Barnave, Lameth, and Duport. It was after them that I denounced you to the eighty-three departments as an ambitious man who only cared for parade, a slave of the court similar to those marshals of the league to whom revolt had given the bâton, and who, looking upon themselves as bastards, were desirous of becoming legitimate; but all of a sudden you embrace each other, and proclaim yourselves mutually fathers of your country! You say to the nation, 'Confide in us; we are the Cincinnati, the Washingtons, the Aristides.' Which of these two testimonies are we to believe? Foolish people! The Parisians are like those Athenians to whom Demosthenes said, 'Shall you always resemble those athletes who struck in one place cover it with their hand,—struck in another place they place their hand there, and thus always occupied with the blows they receive, do not know either how to strike or defend themselves!' They are beginning to doubt whether Louis XVI. could be perjured since he is at Varennes. I think I see the same great eyes open when they shall see La Fayette open the gates of the capital to despotism and aristocracy. May I be deceived in my conjectures, for I am going from Paris, as Camillus my patron departed from an ungrateful country, wishing it every kind of prosperity. I have no occasion to have been an emperor like Diocletian to know that the fine lettuces of Salernum, which are far superior to the empire of the East, are quite equal to the gay scarf which a municipal authority wears, and the uneasiness with which a Jacobin journalist returns to his home in the evening, fearing always lest he should fall into an ambuscade of the cut-throats of the general. For me it was not to establish two chambers that I first mounted the tricolour cockade!"