VII.
The Constituent Assembly had then done a good work; wise, and as durable as are the institutions of a people in travail, in an age of transition. The constitution of '91 had written all the truths of the times, and reduced all human reason to its epoch. All was true in its work except royalty, which had but one wrong, which was making the monarchy the depository of its code.
We have seen that this very fault was an excess of virtue. It receded before the deposing from the throne the family of its kings; it had the superstition of the past without having its faith, and desired to reconcile the republic and the monarchy. It was a virtue in its intentions; it was a mistake in its results; for it is an error in politics to attempt the impossible. Louis XVI. was the only man in the nation to whom the constituent royalty could not be confided, since it was he from whom the absolute monarchy had just been snatched: the constitution was a shared royalty, and but a few days previously, and he had possessed it entire. With any other person this royalty would have been a gift, for him alone it was an insult. If Louis XVI. had been capable of this abnegation of supreme power which makes disinterested heroes (and he was one), the deposed party, of which he was the natural head, was not like him; we may expect an act of sublime disinterestedness from a virtuous man, never from a party en masse. Party is never magnanimous; they never abdicate, they are extirpated. Heroic acts come from the heart, and party has no heart; they have only interests and ambition. A body is a thing of unvarying selfishness.
Clergy, nobility, court, magistracy, all abuses, all falsehoods, all contumelies, every injustice of a monarchy, are personified, in spite of Louis XVI., in the king. Degraded with him, they must desire to rise with him. The nation, which well perceived this fatal connection between the king and the counter-revolution, could not confide in the king, however it might venerate the man; it saw, in him, of necessity, the accomplice of every conspiracy against itself. The parvenus of liberty are as thinskinned as the parvenus of fortune. Jealousies must arise, suspicions would produce insults, insults resentments, resentments factions, factions shocks and overthrows: the momentary enthusiasm of the people, the sincere concessions of the king, avert nothing. The situations were false on both sides.
If there were in the Constituent Assembly more statesmen than philosophers, it must have perceived that an intermediate state was impossible, under the guardianship of a half-dethroned king. We do not confide to the vanquished the care and management of the conquests. To act as she acts, was to drive the king, without redemption, to treason or the scaffold. An absolute party is the only safe party in great crises. The tact consists in knowing when to have recourse to extreme measures at the critical minute. We say it unhesitatingly—history will hereafter say as we do. Then came a moment when the Constituent Assembly had the right to choose between the monarchy and the republic, and when she had to choose the republic. There was the safety of the Revolution and its legitimacy. In wanting resolution it failed in prudence.
VIII.
But, they say with Barnave, France is monarchical by its geography as by its character, and the contest arises in minds directly between the monarchy and the republic. Let us make ourselves understood:—
Geography is of no party; Rome and Carthage had no frontiers; Genoa and Venice had no territories. It is not the soil which determines the nature of the constitutions of people, it is time. The geographical objection of Barnave fell to the ground a year afterwards, before the prodigies in France in 1792. It proved that if a republic fails in unity and centralisation, it is unable to defend a continental nationality. Waves and mountains are the frontiers of the weak—men are the frontiers of a people. Let us then have done with geography. It is not geometricians but statesmen who form social constitutions.
Nations have two great interests which reveal to them the form they should take, according to the hour of the national life which they have attained—the instinct of their conservation, and the instinct of their growth. To act, or be idle, to walk, or sit down, are two acts wholly different, which compel men to assume attitudes wholly diverse. It is the same with nations. The monarchy or the republic correspond exactly amongst a people to the necessities of these two opposite conditions of society—repose or action. We here understand two words; these two words, repose and action, in their most absolute acceptation; for there is repose in republics, as there is action in monarchies.
Is it a question of preservation, of reproduction, of development in that kind of slow and insensible growth which people have like vast vegetables? Is it a question of keeping in harmony with the European balance of preserving its laws and manners; of maintaining its traditions, perpetuating opinions and worship, of guaranteeing properties and right conduct, of preventing troubles, agitation, factions? The monarchy is evidently more proper for this than any other state of society. It protects in lower classes that security which it desires for its own elevated condition. It is order in essence and selfishness: order is its life—tradition its dogma, the nation is its heritage, religion its ally, aristocracies are its barrier against the invasions of the people. It must preserve all this or perish. It is the government of prudence, because it is also that of great responsibility. An empire is the stake of a monarch—the throne is everywhere a guarantee of immobility. When we are placed on high we fear every shake, for we have but to lose or to fall.