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

by Alphonse de Lamartine

Such a plan of action is the republic—the only one that befits the trying period of transformation. It is the government of passion, the government of crises, the government of revolutions. So long as revolutions are unfinished, so long does the instinct of the people urge them to a republic; for they feel that every other hand is too feeble to give that onward and violent impulse necessary to the Revolution. The people (and they act wisely), will not trust an irresponsible, perpetual, and hereditary power to fulfil the commands of the epochs of creation—they will perform them themselves. Their dictatorship appears to them indispensable to save the nation; and what is a dictatorship but a republic? It cannot resign its power until every crisis be over, and the great work of revolution completed and consolidated. Then it can again resume the monarchy, and say, "Reign in the name of the ideas I have given thee!"

XIII.

The Constituent Assembly was then blind and weak, not to create a republic as the natural instrument of the Revolution. Mirabeau, Bailly, La Fayette, Siéyès, Barnave, Talleyrand, and Lameth acted in this respect like philosophers, and not great politicians, as events have amply proved. They believed the Revolution finished as soon as it was written, and the monarchy converted as soon as it had sworn to preserve the constitution. The Revolution was but begun, and the oath of royalty to the Revolution as futile as the oath of the Revolution to royalty. These two elements could not mingle until after an interval of an age—this interval was the republic. A nation does not change in a day, or in fifty years, from revolutionary excitements to monarchical repose. It is because we forgot it at the hour when we should have remembered it, that the crisis was so terrible, and that we yet feel its effects. If the Revolution, which perpetually follows itself, had had its own natural and fitting government, the republic—this republic would have been less tumultuous and less perturbed than the five attempts we made for a monarchy. The nature of the age in which we live protests against the traditional forms of power: at an epoch of movement—a government of movement—such is the law.

XIV.

The National Assembly, it is said, had not the right to act thus; for it had sworn allegiance to the monarchy and recognised Louis XVI., and could not dethrone him without a crime. The objection is puerile, if it originates in minds who do not believe in the possession of the people by dynasties. The Assembly at its outset had proclaimed the inalienable right of the people; and the lawfulness of necessary insurrection, and the oath of the Tennis Court (Serment du Jeu de Paume), were nought but an oath of disobedience to the king and of fidelity to the nation. The Assembly had afterwards proclaimed Louis XVI. king of the French. If they possessed the power of proclaiming him king, they also possessed that of proclaiming him a simple citizen. Forfeiture for the national utility, and that of the human race, was evidently one of its principles, and yet how did it act? It leaves Louis XVI. king, or makes him king, not through respect for that institution, but out of respect for his person, and pity for so great a downfall. Such was the truth; it feared sacrilege, and fell into anarchy. It was clement, noble, and generous. Louis XVI. had deserved well from his people; who well can dare to censure so magnanimous a condescension? Before the king's departure for Varennes, the absolute right of the nation was but an abstract fiction, the summum jus of the Assembly. The royalty of Louis XVI. was respectable and respected, once again it was established.

XV.

But a moment arrived, and this moment was when the king fled his kingdom, protesting against the will of the nation, and sought the assistance of the army, and the intervention of foreign powers, when the Assembly legitimately possessed the rigorous right of disposing of the power, thus abandoned or betrayed. Three courses were open: to declare the downfall of the monarchy, and proclaim a republican revolution; the temporary suspension of the royalty, and govern in its name during its moral eclipse; and, lastly, to restore the monarchy.

The Assembly chose the worst alternative of the three. It feared to be harsh, and was cruel; for by retaining the supreme rank for the king, it condemned him to the torture of the hatred and contempt of the people; it crowned him with suspicions and outrages; and nailed him to the throne, in order that the throne might prove the instrument of his torture and his death.

Of the two other courses, the first was the most logical, to proclaim the downfall of the monarchy and the formation of a republic.

The republic, had it been properly established by the Assembly, would have been far different from the republic traitorously and atrociously extorted nine months after by the insurrection of the 10th of August. It would have doubtless suffered the commotion, inseparable from the birth of a new order of things. It would not have escaped the disorders of nature in a country where every thing was done by first impulse, and impassioned by the magnitude of its perils. But it would have originated in law and not in sedition—in right, and not in violence—in deliberation, and not in insurrection. This alone could have changed the sinister conditions of its birth and its future fate; it might become an agitating power, but it would remain pure and unsullied.