XIV.
The king, surrounded by his ministers, entered the Assembly at three o'clock: lengthened cries of Vive le roi for a moment checked his speaking. "Gentlemen," said Louis XVI., "after the completion of the constitution, you have resolved on to-day terminating your labours. It would have been desirable, perhaps, that your session should have been prolonged in order that you, yourselves, should prove your work. But you have wished, no doubt, to mark by this the difference which should exist between the functions of a constituent body and ordinary legislators. I will exercise all the power you have confided to me in assuring to the constitution the respect and obedience due to it. For you, gentlemen, who, during a long and painful career, have evinced an indefatigable zeal in your labours, there remains a last duty to fulfil when you are scattered over the face of the empire; it is to enlighten your fellow citizens as to the spirit of the laws you have made; to purify and unite opinions by the example you will give to the love of order and submission to the laws. Be, on your return to your homes, the interpreters of my sentiments to your fellow-citizens; tell them that the king will always be their first and most faithful friend—that he desires to be loved by them, and can only be happy with them and by them."
The president replied to the king:—"The National Assembly having arrived at the termination of its career, enjoys, at this moment, the first fruit of its labours. Convinced that the government best suited to France is that which reconciles the respected prerogatives of the throne with the inalienable rights of the people, it has given to the state a constitution which equally guarantees royalty and liberty. Our successors, charged with the onerous burden of the safety of the empire, will not misunderstand their rights, nor the limits of the constitution: and you, sire, you have almost completed every thing—by accepting the Constitution, you have consummated the Revolution."
The king departed amidst loud acclamations. It appeared that the National Assembly was in haste to lay down the responsibility of events which it no longer felt itself capable of controlling. "The National Assembly declares," says Target, its president, "that its mission is finished, and that, at this moment, it terminates its sittings."
The people, who crowded round the Manège, and saw with pain the Revolution abdicated into the hands of the king, insulted, as it recognised them, the members of the Right—even Barnave. They experienced even on the first day the ingratitude they had so often fomented. They separated in sorrow and in discouragement.
When Robespierre and Pétion went out, the people crowned them with oaken chaplets, and took the horses off their carriage in order to drag them home in triumph. The power of these two men already proved the weakness of the constitution, and presaged its fall. An amnestied king returned powerless to his palace. Timid legislators abdicated in trouble. Two triumphant tribunes were elevated by the people. In this was all the future. The Constituent Assembly, begun in an insurrection of principles, ended as a sedition. Was it the error of those principles—was it the fault of the Constituent Assembly? We will examine the question at the end of the last book of this volume, in casting a retrospect over the acts of the Constituent Assembly; till then we will delay this judgment, in order not to interfere with the progress of the recital.
BOOK V.
I.
Whilst an instant's breathing time was permitted to France between two convulsive efforts, and the Revolution as yet knew not whether it should maintain the constitution it had gained, or employ it as a weapon to obtain a republic, Europe began to arouse itself; egotistical and improvident, she merely beheld in the first movement in France a comedy played at Paris on the stage of the States General and the constituent Assembly—between popular genius, represented by Mirabeau, and the vanquished genius of the aristocracy, personified in Louis XVI. and the clergy. This grand spectacle had been in the eyes of the sovereigns and their ministers merely the continuation of the struggle (in which they had taken so much interest, and showed so much secret favour) between Voltaire and Jean Jacques Rousseau on one side, and the old aristocratical and religious system on the other. To them the Revolution was the philosophy of the eighteenth century, which had migrated from the salons into the public streets, and from books to speeches. This earthquake in the moral world, and these shocks at Paris, the presages of some unknown change in European destinies, attracted far more than they affrighted them. They had not as yet learned that institutions are but ideas, and that those ideas, when overthrown, involve in their fall thrones and nations. Whatsoever the spirit of God wills, that also do all mankind will, and are to accomplish, unperceived even by themselves. Europe bestowed attention, time, and astonishment on the commencement of the French Revolution, and that was all it needed to bring it to maturity. The spark not having been extinguished at its outbreak was fated to kindle and consume every thing before it. The moral and political state of Europe was eminently favourable to the contagion of new ideas. Time, men, and things, all lay at the mercy of France.