Everybody now turned to the great legislator of 1789 for the Constitution of the hour. With incomparable opportunities for observation, he had maturely revolved schemes for the government of France on the lines of that which was rejected in 1795. He refused to write anything; but he consented to dictate, and his words were taken down by Boulay de la Meurthe, and were published long after, in a volume of which there is no copy at Paris or in London.
What I have just said will give you a more favourable view of Sieyès than you may find in books. The Abbé was not a high-minded man, and he has no friends in his own country. Some dislike him because he was a priest, some because he was an unfrocked priest. He is odious to royalists as a revolutionist, and to republicans as a renegade. I have spoken of him as a political thinker, not as a writer, an orator, or an administrator. Mr. Wentworth Dilke and Mr. Buckle[1] have pointed out something more than specks in the character of Burke. Even if much of what they say is true, I should not hesitate to acknowledge him as the first political intellect of his age. Since I first spoke of Sieyès, certain papers have come to light tending to show that he was as wicked as the rest of them. They would not affect my judgment on his merit as a thinker.
[1] Dilke, Papers of a Critic, vol. ii. pp. 309-384; Buckle, History of Civilisation, ed. J. M. Robertson, pp. 258-269.
In this oracular manner the Constitution of 1799 came into existence, and it was not his fault that it degenerated in the strong hands of Napoleon. He named the three Consuls, refusing to be one himself, and he passed into ceremonious obscurity as president of the Senate.
When the Emperor had quarrelled with his ablest advisers he regretted that he had renounced the aid of such an auxiliary. He thought him unfit to govern, for that requires sword and spurs; but he admitted that Sieyès often had new and luminous ideas, and might have been useful to him beyond all the ministers of the Empire. Talleyrand, who disliked Sieyès, and ungenerously reproached him with cupidity, spoke of him to Lord Brougham as the one statesman of the time. The best of the political legacy of the Revolution has been his work. Others pulled down, but he was a builder, and he closed in 1799 the era which he had opened ten years before. In the history of political doctrine, where almost every chapter has yet to be written, none will be more valuable than the one that will show what is permanent and progressive in the ideas that he originated.
It was the function of the constituent Assembly to recast the laws in conformity with the Rights of Man, to abolish every survival of absolutism, every heirloom of inorganic tradition, that was inconsistent with them. In every department of State they were obliged to make ruins, to remove them, and to raise a new structure from the foundation. The transition from the reign of force to the reign of opinion, from custom to principle, led to a new order through confusion, uncertainty, and suspense. The efficacy of the coming system was nowhere felt at first. The soldiers, who were so soon to form the finest army ever known, ran away as soon as they saw a shot fired. The prosperous finances of modern France began with bankruptcy. But in one division of public life the Revolution not only made a bad beginning, but went on, step by step, to a bad end, until, by civil war and anarchy and tyranny, it had ruined its cause. The majority of the clergy were true to the new ideas, and on some decisive occasions, June 19 and August 4, promoted their victory. Many prelates were enlightened reformers, and even Robespierre believed that the inferior clergy were, in the bulk, democratic. Nevertheless the Assembly, by a series of hostile measures, carefully studied, and long pursued, turned them into implacable enemies, and thereby made the Revolution odious to a large part of the French people.
This gradual but determined change of front, improbable at first, and evidently impolitic, is the true cause of the disastrous conflict in which the movement of 1789 came to ruin. Had there been no ecclesiastical establishment to deal with, it may be that the development of Jacobin theory, or the logic of socialism, would have led to the same result. As it was, they were secondary causes of the catastrophe that was to follow. That there was a fund of active animosity for the church, in a generation tutored by Voltaire, Diderot, Helvétius, Holbach, Rousseau and Raynal, none could doubt. But in the men of more immediate influence, such as Turgot, Mirabeau and Sieyès, contempt was more visible than resentment; and it was by slow degrees that the full force of aversion predominated over liberal feeling and tolerant profession. But if the liberal tendency had been stronger, and tolerant convictions more distinct, there were many reasons which made a collision inevitable between the Church and the prevailing ideas. The Gallican Church had been closely associated with the entire order of things which the Assembly, at all costs, was resolved to destroy. For three centuries from the time when they became absolute the French kings had enjoyed all the higher patronage. No such prerogative could be left to the Crown when it became constitutional, and it was apparent that new methods for the appointment of priest and prelate, that a penetrating change in the system of ecclesiastical law, would be devised.
Two things, chiefly, made the memory of monarchy odious: dynastic war and religious persecution. But the wars had ended in the conquest of Alsace, and in the establishment of French kings in Spain and Naples. The odium of persecution remained; and if it was not always assignable to the influence of the clergy, it was largely due to them, and they had attempted to renew it down to the eve of the Revolution. The reduction of the royal power was sure to modify seriously the position of men upon whom the royal power, in its excess, had so much relied, and who had done so much to raise up and to sustain it. People had come to believe that the cause of liberty demanded, not the emancipation, but the repression of the priesthood. These were underlying motives; but the signal was given by financial interests. The clergy, being a privileged order, like the nobles, were involved in the same fate. With the nobles, at the same night sitting of August 4, they surrendered the right of taxing, and of not being taxed.
When the principle of exemption was rejected, the economists computed that the clergy owed 100 millions of arrears. Their tithes were abolished, with a promise of redemption. But this the landowners would not suffer, and they gained largely by the transaction. It followed that the clergy, instead of a powerful and wealthy order, had to become salaried functionaries. Their income was made a charge on the State; and as the surplice fees went with the abolished tithe, the services of the parish priest to his parishioners were gratuitous. It was not intended that the priests should be losers, and the bargain was a bad one for the public. It involved an expenditure of at least two millions a year, at a time when means were wanting to pay the national creditor. The consequences were obvious. The State, having undertaken to remunerate the inferior clergy out of a falling revenue, had a powerful motive to appropriate what remained of the Church property when the tithes were lost. That resource was abundant for the purpose. But it was concentrated in the hands of the higher clergy and of religious orders—both under the ban of opinion, as nobles or as corporations. Their wealth would clear off the debts of the clergy, would pay all their salaries and annuities, and would strengthen the public credit. After the first spoliation, in the month of August, these consequences became clear to all, and the secularisation of Church property was a foregone conclusion.