During the American war of independence, there were constant diplomatic relations between the Republic and the American deputies who came to France for the congress of Versailles. The Venetian archives contain a letter signed by John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson, by which the Americans hoped to lay the foundations of a commercial treaty; but owing to the excessive caution of Venice the attempt had no result. The Republic of the Adriatic had almost always looked eastward for her trade, and distrusted the new world which she had declined to help to discover. The original letter, written in the English language, and addressed to the Venetian Ambassador in Paris, Daniele Dolfin, has not been published, I believe; and I shall not insult the memory of such writers by attempting to turn Romanin’s
Rom. viii. 229, 230.
translation back into their language. The letter explains that the three signers are fully empowered by their government to negotiate a friendly treaty of commerce, and will be glad to enter upon the negotiation as soon as the Venetian Ambassador is properly authorised to do so; in signing they use the form, ‘your most obedient, humble servants.’ For the benefit of any American who may wish to get at the original, I may add that Romanin found the letter in the Archives of the Senate, with the despatches from France of Daniele Dolfin, envelope 261.
A letter from another Venetian Ambassador in Paris, Cappello, prophetically dated July fourteenth, 1788, exactly one year before the destruction
Rom. ix. 153.
of the Bastille, to the very day, sounds the first warning alarm of the approaching revolution; few writers have better summed up the condition of the French monarchy when it was on the brink of the abyss, and no diplomatist could have given his own country better advice.
The Committee of the Savi, who concentrated all power into their own hands, did not even communicate this letter to the Senate. Cappello spoke still more clearly when he made his formal report in person, on returning from his mission and after leaving Paris just when the King was to be asked to sign the Constitution, a document for which the Ambassador confesses that he can find no name. ‘It is not a monarchy,’ he says, ‘for it takes everything from the monarch; it is not a democracy, because the people are not the legislators; it is not that of an aristocracy, for the mere name is looked upon in France not as treason against the King, but as treason against the nation.... The National Assembly began by encroaching upon all powers, and by confounding within itself all the attributes of sovereignty, usurping the administrative functions from the executive power, and from the judiciary the right of judging criminal cases.’
It is easy to understand the impression made by such a report, in the course of which the Ambassador narrated the scenes that took place in Versailles and at the Tuileries after the night of October sixth, 1789. The aristocratic Venetian Republic sympathised profoundly with the dying French monarchy; but it was impossible to believe that such a state of things would last long, and the government was painfully surprised by the letter in which Louis XVI. announced that he accepted the situation. That letter is in existence. In it the King declares that he has accepted the new form of government ‘of his own free will; that the National Assembly is only a reform of the ancient States General, and will ensure the happiness of the nation and the monarchy.’ The King adds, as if to hide his weakness from himself, that what is called a ‘revolution’ is mostly only the destruction of a mass of prejudices and abuses which endanger the public wealth, and that he was therefore proud to think that he should leave his son something; better
Rom. ix. 178.
than the crown as he had inherited it from his ancestors, namely, a constitutional monarchy.