Lectures on the French Revolution

by Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton Acton

The opposition presented a united front, but was rent by many stages of gravitation towards Democracy. They also were generally anxious to establish political freedom, even by the greatest sacrifices. By freedom they meant, first, deliverance from known and habitual causes of oppression. True, there might be others; but they were less clear and less certain. All European experience proclaimed that the executive constantly masters the legislative, even in England. It was absurd to suppose that every force that, for centuries, had helped to build up absolutism, had been destroyed in two months. They would rise again from the roots, and the conflict would be constantly renewed.

The salvation seemed to lie in the principle that all power is derived from the people, and that none can exist against the people. The popular will may be expressed by certain forms; it cannot be arrested by obstacles. Its action may be delayed; it cannot be stopped. It is the ultimate master of all, without responsibility or exemption, and with no limit that is not laid down in the Rights of Man. The limits there defined are sufficient, and individual liberty needs no further protection. Distrust of the nation was not justified by the manner in which it had chosen and instructed its deputies.

In studying this group of public men, men to whom the future belonged, we are forced to admit the element of national character. No philosophy is cheaper or more vulgar than that which traces all history to diversities of ethnological type and blend, and is ever presenting the venal Greek, the perfidious Sicilian, the proud and indolent Spaniard, the economical Swiss, the vain and vivacious Frenchman. But it is certainly true that in France the liberty of the press represents a power that is not familiar to those who know its weakness and its strength, who have had experience of Swift and Bolingbroke and Junius. Maury once said, "We have a free press: we have everything." In 1812, when Napoleon watched the grand army crossing the Niemen to invade Russia, and whistled the tune of Malbrook, he interrupted his tune to exclaim, "And yet all that is not equal to the songs of Paris!" Chateaubriand afterwards said that, with the liberty of the press, there was no abuse he would not undertake to destroy. For he wrote French as it had never been written, and the magnificent roll of his sentences caught the ear of his countrymen with convincing force. When, in 1824, he was dismissed from the Foreign Office, his friend, the editor of the Journal des Débats, called on the Prime Minister Villèle and warned him, "We have overthrown your predecessor, and we shall be strong enough to overthrow you." Villèle replied, "You succeeded against him by aid of royalism: you cannot succeed against me but by aid of revolution." Both prophecies came true. The alliance of Chateaubriand with the newspaper turned out the Ministry in 1827, and the Monarchy in 1830.

In September 1789, the liberty of the press was only four months old, and the reign of opinion was beginning on the Continent. They fancied that it was an invincible force, and a complete security for human rights. It was invaluable if it secured right without weakening power, like the other contrivances of Liberalism. They thought that when men were safe from the force above them, they required no saving from the influence around them. Opinion finds its own level, and a man yields easily and not unkindly to what surrounds him daily. Pressure from equals is not to be confounded with persecution by superiors. It is right that the majority, by degrees, should absorb the minority. The work of limiting authority had been accomplished by the Rights of Man. The work of creating authority was left to the Constitution. In this way men of varying opinions were united in the conclusion that the powers emanating from the people ought not to be needlessly divided.

Besides Sieyès, who found ideas, and Talleyrand, who found expedients, several groups were, for the time, associated with the party which was managed by Duport. There were some of the most eminent jurists, eager to reform the many systems of law and custom that prevailed in France, who became the lawgivers of successive Assemblies, until they completed their code under Napoleon. Of all the enemies of the old monarchical régime, they were the most methodical and consistent. The leader of the Paris Bar, Target, was their most active politician. When he heard of a plan for setting the finances in order he said, "If anybody has such a plan, let him at once be smothered. It is the disorder of the finances that puts the king in our power." The Economists were as systematic and definite as the lawyers, and they too had much to destroy. Through Dupont de Nemours their theories obtained enduring influence.

There were two or three of the future Girondins who taught that the people may be better trusted than representatives, and who were ready to ratify the Constitution, and even to decide upon the adoption of laws, by the popular vote. And there were two men, not yet distinctly divided from these their future victims, who went farther in opposition to the Rights of Man, and towards the confusion of powers. In their eyes, representation and delegation were treason to true democracy. As the people could not directly govern itself, the principle exacted that it should do so as nearly as possible, by means of a perpetual control over the delegates. The parliamentary vote ought to be constantly brought into harmony with the wish of the constituency, by the press, the galleries and the mob. To act consciously in opposition to the delegating power was a breach of trust. The population of Paris, being the largest collected portion of sovereign power, expresses its will more surely than deputies at second hand. Barère, who was one of these, proposed an ingenious plan by which every law that passed remained suspended until after the next elections, when the country pronounced upon it by imperative mandate. Thus he disposed of royal veto and dissolution.

Robespierre would not suspend the law, but left it to the next legislature to rectify or revoke the errors of the last. He argued that powers require to be checked in proportion to the danger they present. Now the danger from a power not representative exceeds that from a power that represents, and is better acquainted with the needs and wishes of the mass. A nation governs itself, and has a single will, not two. If the whole does not govern the part, the part will govern the whole. Robespierre conceived that it was time to constitute powers sufficient to conquer the outward foe, and also the inward; one for national safety, and one for national progress, and the elevation of the poor at the expense of the minorities that have oppressed them. He stands at the end of the scale, and the idea of liberty, as it runs through the various sets of thought, is transformed into the idea of force. From Sieyès to Barnave, from Barnave to Camus, from Camus to Buzot, and from Buzot the Girondin to Robespierre the Jacobin who killed the Girondins, we traverse the long line of possible politics; but the transitions are finely shaded, and the logic is continuous.

In the second week of September the Constitution of Mounier was defeated by the union of these forces. The main question, the institution of a Senate, was not seriously debated. It was feared as the refuge of the defeated classes, and was not defended by those classes themselves. They were not willing that a new aristocracy should be raised upon their ruins; and they suspected that Government would give the preference to that minority of the nobles who went over in time, and who were renegades in the eyes of the rest. It was felt that a single Chamber is stronger in resistance to the executive than two, and that the time might come for a senate when the fallen aristocracy had ceased to struggle, and the Crown was reconciled to its reduced condition.

On September 9 the President of the Assembly, La Luzerne, bishop of Langres, was driven by insult to resign. The next day the Assembly adopted the single Chamber by 499 to 89, the nobles abstaining.

On September 11 the decisive division took place. Mounier had insisted on the unlimited right of veto. The debate went against him. It was admitted on his own side that the king would, sooner or later, have to yield. The others agreed that the king might resist until two elections had decided in favour of the vetoed measure. He might reject the wish of one legislature, and even of two; he would give way to the third. The Ministers themselves were unable to insist on the absolute veto in preference to the suspensive thus defined. A letter from the king was sent to the Assembly, to inform them that he was content with the temporary veto. Mounier did not allow the letter to be read, that it might not influence votes. He was defeated by 673 to 325. The Conservatives had deserted him when he defended the Upper House; and now the king deserted him when he defended the rights of the Crown. It was a crushing and final disaster. For he fell, maintaining the cause of aristocracy against the nobles, and the cause of prerogative against the monarch. The Democrats triumphed by 410 votes one day, and 350 the next. The battle for the Constitution on the English model was fought and lost.