History of the Girondists, Volume I / Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution

by Alphonse de Lamartine

"For a long while we have been in possession of the civism of our Directory, when we saw it in an incendiary proclamation, not only again open the evangelical pulpits to the priests, but the seditious tribunes to conspirators in surplices! Their address is a manifesto tending to degrade the constitutional powers: it is a collective petition—it is an incentive to civil war, and the overthrow of the constitution. Assuredly we are no admirers of the representative government, of which we think with J. J. Rousseau; and if we like certain articles but little, still less do we like civil war. So many grounds of accusation! The crime of these men is settled. Strike, then! If the head sleeps, shall the arm act? Raise not that arm again; do not rouse the national club only to crush insects. A Varnier or De Lâtre! Did Cato and Cicero accuse Cethegus or Catiline? It is the leaders we should assail. Strike at the head."

This strain of irony and boldness, less applauded by the clapping of hands than by shouts of laughter, delighted the tribunes. They voted the sending of the procès verbal of the meeting into every department. It was legislatively elevating a pamphlet to the dignity of a public act, and to distribute ready-made insult to the citizens, that they might have a supply to vent against public authority. The king trembled before the pamphleteer; he felt from this first treatment of his baffled prerogative that the constitution would crumble in his hands each time that he dared to make use of it.

The next day the constitutional party in greater force at the meeting recalled the sending of this pamphlet to the departments. Brissot was angry in his journal, the Patriote Français. It was there and at the Jacobins more than in the tribune, that he gave instructions to his party, and allowed the idea of a republic to escape him. Brissot had not the properties of an orator: his dogged spirit, sectarian and arbitrary, was fitter for conspiracy than action: the ardour of his mind was excessive, but concentrated. He shed neither those lights nor those flames which kindle enthusiasm—that explosion of ideas. It was the lamp of the Gironde party; it was neither its beacon nor its torch.

XX.

The Jacobins, weakened for a time by the great number of their members elected to the Legislative Assembly, remained for a brief space without a fixed course to pursue, like an army disbanded after victory. The club of the Feuillants, composed of the remains of the constitutional party in the Constituted Assembly, strove to resume the ascendency over the mind of the people. Barnave, Lameth, and Duport were the leaders of this party. Fearful of the people, and convinced that an Assembly without any thing to counterbalance it would inevitably absorb the poor remnant of the monarchy, this party wished to have two chambers and an equally poised constitution. Barnave, whose repentance had led him to join this party, remained at Paris, and had secret interviews with Louis XVI.; but his counsels, like those of Mirabeau in his latter days, were but vain regrets, for the Revolution was beyond their power to control, and no longer obeyed them. They yet, however, maintained some influence over the constituted bodies of Paris, and the resolutions of the king, who could not bring himself to believe that these men, who yesterday were so powerful against it, were to-day destitute of influence; and they formed his last hope against the new enemies he saw in the Girondists.

The national guard, the directory of the department of Paris! the mayor of Paris himself, Bailly, and all that party in the nation who wished to maintain order, still supported them—theirs was the party of repentance and terror. M. de La Fayette, Madame de Stäel, and M. de Narbonne, had a secret understanding with the Feuillants, and a part of the press was on their side. These papers sought to render M. de Narbonne popular, and to obtain for him the post of minister of war. The Girondist papers already excited the anger of the people against this party. Brissot sowed the seeds of calumny and suspicion: he denounced them to the hatred of the nation. "Number them—name them," said he; "their names denounce them; they are the relics of the dethroned aristocracy, who would fain resuscitate a constitutional nobility, establish a second legislative chamber and a senate of nobles, and who implore, in order to gain their ends, the armed intervention of the powers. They have sold themselves to the Château de Tuileries, and sell there a great portion of the members of the Assembly; they have amongst them neither men of genius nor men of resolution; their talent is but treason, their genius but intrigue."

It was thus that the Girondists and the Jacobins, though at this moment beaten, prepared those enmities against the Feuillants that, at no remote period, were destined to disperse the club. Whilst the Girondists followed this course, the royalists continually urged the people to excesses through the medium of their papers, in order, as they said, to find a remedy for the evil in the evil itself. Thus they encouraged the Jacobins against the Feuillants, and heaped ridicule and insult on those leaders of the constitutional party who sought to save a remnant of the monarchy; for that which they detested most was the success of the revolution. Their doctrine of absolute power was less humiliatingly contradicted in their eyes by the overthrow of the empire and throne, than in the constitutional monarchy that preserved at once the king and liberty. Since the aristocracy lost the possession of the supreme power, its sole ambition—its only aim—was to see it fall into the hands of those most unworthy to hold it. Incapable of again rising by its own force, it sought to find in disorder the means of so doing; and from the first day of the Revolution to the last, this party had no other instinct, and it was thus that it ruined itself whilst it ruined the monarchy. It carried the hatred of the Revolution even to posterity; and though they did not take an active part in the crimes of the Revolution, yet their best wishes were with it. Every fresh excess of the people gave a new ray of hope to its enemies: such is the policy of despair, blind and criminal as herself.

XXI.

An example of this at this moment occurred. La Fayette resigned the command of the national guard into the hands of the council general of the commune. At this meeting blazed the last faint spark of popular favour. After he quitted the chamber a deliberation was held as to what mark of gratitude and regard the city of Paris should offer him. The general addressed a farewell letter to the civic force, and affected to believe that the formation of the constitution was the era of the Revolution, and reduced him, like Washington, to the rank of a simple citizen of a free country. "The time of revolution," said he, in this letter, "has given place to a regular organisation, owing to the liberty and prosperity it assures us. I feel it is now my duty to my country to return unreservedly into her hands all the force and influence with which I was intrusted for her defence during the tempests that convulsed her—such is my only ambition. Beware how you believe," added he, in conclusion, "that every species of despotism, is extinct!" And he then proceeded to point out some of those perils and excesses into which liberty might fall at her first outset.

This letter was received by the national guard with an enthusiasm rather feigned than sincere. They wished to strike a last blow against the factious by adhering to the principles of their general, and voted to him a sword forged from the bolts of the Bastille, and a marble statue of Washington. La Fayette hastened to enjoy this premature triumph, and resigned the dictatorship at the moment when a dictatorship was most necessary to his country. On his retirement to his estates in Auvergne, he received the deputation of the national guard, who brought him the procès verbal of the debate. "You behold me once more amidst the scenes where I was born," said he; "I shall not again quit them, save to defend and confirm our new-formed liberty should it be menaced."