The Girondists were delighted at thus keeping the wretched monarch between their law and his own faith—schismatic if he recognised the decree, and a traitor to the nation if he refused it. Conquerors in this victory, they advanced towards another.
After having forced the king to strike at the religion of his conscience, they wished to force him to deal a blow at the nobility and his own brothers. They renewed the question of the emigrants. The king and his ministers had anticipated them. Immediately after the acceptance of the constitution, Louis XVI. had formally renounced all conspiracy, interior or exterior, in order to recover his power. The omnipotence of opinion had convinced him of the vanity of all the plans submitted to him for crushing it. The momentary tranquillity of spirits after so many shocks, the reception he had met with in the Assembly, the Champ-de-Mars, in the theatre,—the freedom and honours restored to him in his palace, had persuaded him that, if the constitution had some fanatics, royalty had no implacable enemies in his kingdom. He believed the constitution easy of execution in many of its provisions, and impracticable in others. The government which they imposed on him seemed to him as a philosophical experiment which they desired to make with their king. He only forgot one thing, and that is, the experiments of a people are catastrophes. A king who accepts the terms of a government which are impossible, accepts his own overthrow by anticipation. A well-considered and voluntary abdication is more regal than that daily abdication which is undergone in the degradation of power. A king saves, if not his life, at least his dignity. It is more suitable to majesty royal to descend by its own will, than to be cast down headlong. From the moment when the king is king no longer, the throne becomes the last place in the kingdom.
Be this as it may, the king frankly declared to his ministers his intention of legally executing the constitution, and of associating himself unreservedly and without guile to the will and destiny of the nation. The queen, by one of those sudden and inexplicable changes in the heart of woman, threw herself, with the trust of despair, into the party of the constitution. "Courage," she said to M. Bertrand de Molleville, minister and confidant of the king: "Courage! I hope, with patience, firmness, and perseverance, that all is not lost."
The minister of marine, Bertrand de Molleville, wrote, by the king's orders, to the commandants of the ports a letter, signed by the king:—"I am informed," he said, in this circular, "that emigrations in the navy are fast increasing. How is it that the officers of a service always so dear to me, and which has invariably given me proofs of its attachment, are so mistaken at what is due to their country, to me, and to themselves! This extreme step would have seemed to me less surprising some time since, when anarchy was at its height, and when its termination was unseen; but now, when the nation desires to return to order and submission to the laws, is it possible that generous and faithful sailors can think of separating from their king? Tell them to remain where their country calls them. The precise execution of the constitution is to-day the surest means of appreciating its advantages, and of ascertaining what is wanting to make it perfect. It is your king who desires you to remain at your posts as he remains at his. You would have considered it a crime to resist his orders, you will not refuse his prayers."
He wrote to general officers, and to commandants of the land forces:—"In accepting the constitution, I have promised to maintain it within, and defend it against enemies without; this solemn act should banish all uncertainty. The law and the king are henceforth identified. The enemy of the law becomes that of the king. I cannot consider those sincerely devoted to my person who abandon their country at the moment when it has the greatest need of their services. Those only are attached to me who follow my example and unite with me for the public weal, and remain inseparable from the destiny of the empire!"
Finally, he ordered M. de Lessart, the minister for foreign affairs, to publish the following proclamation, addressed to the French emigrants:—"The king," thus it ran, "informed that a great number of French emigrants are withdrawing to foreign lands, cannot see without much grief such an emigration. Although the law permits to all citizens a free power to quit the kingdom, the king is anxious to enlighten them as to their duties, and the distress they are preparing for themselves. If they think, by such means, to give me a proof of their affection, let them be undeceived; my real friends are those who unite with me in order to put the laws in execution, and re-establish order and peace in the kingdom. When I accepted the constitution, I was desirous of putting an end to civil discord—I believed that all Frenchmen would second my intentions. However, it is at this moment that emigration is increasing: some depart because of the disturbances which have threatened their lives and property. Ought we not to pardon the circumstances? Have not I too my sorrows? And when I forget mine, can any one remember his perils? How can order be again established if those interested in it abandon it by abandoning themselves? Return, then, to the bosom of your country: come and give to the laws the support of good citizens. Think of the grief your obstinacy will give to the king's heart; they would be the most painful he could experience."
The Assembly was not blinded by these manifestations; it saw beneath a secret design of escaping from the severest measures; it was desirous of compelling the king to carry them out, and, let us add, the nation and the public safety also required it.
XII.
Mirabeau had treated the question of the emigration of the Constituent Assembly rather as a philosopher than a statesman. He had disputed with the legislator the right of making laws against emigration: he was mistaken. Whenever a theory is in contradiction to the welfare of society it is because that theory is false, for society is the supreme truth.
Unquestionably in ordinary times, man is not imprisoned by nature, and ought not to be by the law, within the frontiers of his native land; and, with this view, the laws against emigration should only be exceptional laws. But, because exceptional, are these laws therefore unjust? Evidently not. The public danger has its peculiar laws, as necessary and as just as laws made in a time of security. A state of war is not a state of peace. You shut your frontiers to strangers in war time; you may close them to your citizens. A city is legally put in a state of siege during a sedition. We can put the nation in a state of siege in case of external danger co-existent with internal conspiracy. By what absurd abuse of liberty can a state be constrained to tolerate on a foreign soil gatherings of citizens armed against itself, which it would not tolerate in its own land? And if these gatherings should be culpable without, why should the state be interdicted from shutting up those roads which lead emigrants to these gatherings? A nation defends itself from its foreign enemies by arms, from its internal foes by its laws. To act otherwise would be to consecrate without the country the inviolability of conspiracies which were punished within: it would be to proclaim the legality of civil war, provided it was mixed up with foreign war, and that sedition was covered by treason. Such maxims ruin a whole people's nationality, in order to protect abuse of liberty by certain citizens. The Constituent Assembly was so wrong as to sanction such. Had it proclaimed from the beginning the laws repressive of emigration in troubled times, during revolutions, or on the eve of war, it would have proclaimed a national truth, and prevented one of the great dangers and principal causes of the excesses of the Revolution. The question now was no longer to be treated with reason, but by vindictive feelings. The imprudence of the Constituent Assembly had left this dangerous weapon in the hands of parties who were about to turn it against the king.