The other nominations were made in the same spirit. Manuel[11] was named procureur de la commune;—Danton, his deputy, which was his first step in popularity; he did not owe it, like Pétion, to the public esteem, but to his own intriguing. He was appointed in spite of his reputation. The people are apt to excuse the vices they find useful.
The nomination of Pétion to the office of maire of Paris gave the Girondists a constant point d'appui in the capital. Paris, as well as the Assembly, escaped from the king's hands. The work of the Constituent Assembly crumbled away in three months. The wheels gave way before they were set in motion. All presaged an approaching collision between the executive power and the power of the Assembly. Whence arose this sudden decomposition? It is now the moment for throwing a glance over this labour of the Constituent Assembly and its framers.
BOOK VII.
I.
The Constituent Assembly had abdicated in a storm.
This assembly had consisted of the most imposing body of men that had ever represented, not only France, but the human race. It was in fact the œcumenical council of modern reason and philosophy. Nature seemed to have created expressly, and the different orders of society to have reserved, for this work, the geniuses, characters, and even vices most requisite to give to this focus of the lights of the age the greatness, éclat, and movement of a fire destined to consume the remnants of an old society, and to illumine a new one. There were sages, like Bailly and Mounier; thinkers, like Siéyès; factious partisans, like Barnave; statesmen like Talleyrand; men, epochs, like Mirabeau, and men, principles like Robespierre. Each cause was personified by what most distinguished each party. The very victims were illustrious. Cazalès, Malouet, Maury, sounded forth in bursts of grief and eloquence the successive falls of the throne, the aristocracy, and the clergy. This active centre of the thoughts of a century, was sustained during the whole time by the storm of perpetual political conflict. Whilst they were deliberating within, the people were acting without, and struck at the doors. These twenty-six months of consultations were one uninterrupted sedition. Scarcely had one institution crumbled to pieces in the tribune, than the nation swept it away to clear the space for another institution. The anger of the people was only its impatience of obstacles, its madness was only the excitement of its reason. Even in its fury it was always a truth that agitated it. The tribunes only blinded, by dazzling it. The unique characteristic of this Assembly was that passion for the ideal which it always felt itself irresistibly urged on to accomplish. An act of perpetual faith in reason and justice: a holy passion for the good and right, which possessed it, and made it devote itself to its work; like the statuary who seeing the fire in the furnace, where he was casting his bronze, on the point of being extinguished, threw his furniture, his children's bed, and even his house into the flame, preferring rather that all should perish than that his work should be lost.
Thus it is that the Revolution has become a date in the human mind, and not merely an event in the history of the people. The men of the Constituent Assembly were not Frenchmen, they were universal men. We mistake, we vilify them when we consider them only as priests, aristocrats, plebeians, faithful subjects, malcontents or demagogues. They were, and they felt themselves to be, better than that,—workmen of God; called by him to restore social reason, and found right and justice throughout the universe. None of them, except those who opposed the Revolution, limited the extent of its thought to the boundaries of France. The declaration of the Rights of Man proves this. It was the decalogue of the human race in all languages. The modern Revolution called the Gentiles, as well as the Jews, to partake of the light and reign of Fraternity.
II.
Thus, not one of its apostles who did not proclaim peace amongst nations. Mirabeau, La Fayette, Robespierre himself erased war from the symbol which they presented to the nation. It was the malcontent and ambitious who subsequently demanded it, and not the leading Revolutionists. When war burst out the Revolution had degenerated. The Constituent Assembly took care not to place on the frontiers of France the boundaries of its truths, and to limit the sympathising soul of the French Revolution to a narrow patriotism. The globe was the country of its dogmata. France was only the workshop; it worked for all other people. Respectful of, or indifferent to, the question of national territories, from the first moment it forbade conquest. It only reserved to itself the property, or rather the invention of universal truths which it brought to light. As vast as humanity, it had not the selfishness to isolate itself. It desired to give, and not to deprive. It sought to spread itself by right, and not by force. Essentially spiritual, it sought no other empire for France than the voluntary empire which imitation by the human mind conferred upon it.