Thus, when the notes came to go between the Austrian and the French governments, he was silent. He fears that France is unprepared; he fears that the King is betraying the nation. How much he was a traitor was not known till a far later period; but when at least it is proved that something is undermining the French people, that, apart from the defeats and the lack of preparation, there is treason, then he leaves his silence. The policy of the Moderate acting in a settled state is no longer possible to any one; the court and the nation stood one against the other, and one side or the other must be taken by every man. Then he put off the conventions which he respected, and which he regretted to the end; he went back into the street; he headed the insurrection, destroyed the monarchy; for twelve months he took upon himself all the responsibility of errors in his own policy, and of crime in that of his associates. He saved France, but at this expense, that he went out of the world with a reputation which he knew to be false, that he saw his great powers vulgarised, and that he could never possess, either in his own mind or before the world, not even in France, his true name. The whole of this tragedy is to be found in his trial, and here and there in the few phrases that escape him in the speeches or with his friends. If you sum it up, it comes to this paraphrase of a great sentence: Son nom était flétri mais la France était libre.
It was upon April the 18th that the new Girondin ministry received the note from Vienna rejecting the French proposals of a month before. The poor King, who had been protesting his loyalty to the nation in Paris, had been protesting in Vienna the necessity of sending an army to save him, and Austria gave this reply. On April 20th the Assembly declared war with practical unanimity[110] upon “the King of Hungary and of Bohemia.” But the phrase was useless. You might as well put a match into gunpowder and say, “It is the sulphur I am after, not the charcoal.” Prussia joined, and within a year we shall see all Europe at war with France, in a war that outlawed and destroyed.
Danton was right. France was hopelessly unready. She had not learnt the necessary truth that the soldier is a man with a trade. The orators had mistaken words for things; honest and great as they were, they had fallen in this matter into the faults common to small and dishonest verbiage. The rout and panic under De Dillon, his murder by the troops, the occupation of Quiévrain, came one upon the other. Paris was full of terror and anger in proportion to the greatness of the things she had done, which now seemed all destroyed. “We said and did things that should have convinced the world; we were to be a people unconquerable from our love of liberty, and we appear a beaten, panic-stricken lot—volunteers and babblers who cannot stand fire.” The King dismissed the Girondin ministers, even sent Dumouriez away, heard Roland’s remonstrance, knew that the Assembly was more and more against him; but he remained calm. There was a plan of the simplest. There was to be nothing but a few days of monotonous marching between the allies and Paris. Lafayette with his army of the centre was on his side. The Assembly decreed a great camp of 20,000 men under Paris, and the disbanding of the guard; the guard was disbanded, but the King vetoed the decree. Lafayette wrote his letter menacing the Parliament with his army; the reaction seemed in full success and the invaders secure, when Danton reappeared.
On the 18th of June he found the old phrases against Lafayette at the Jacobins. “It is a great day for France; Lafayette with only one face on is no longer dangerous.” He did not make, but he permitted the 20th of June; and as Paris rose, and the immense mob, grotesque, many-coloured, armed with all manner of sharp things, passed before the Assembly and into the Tuilleries, it might have been a signal or a warning. The excited citizen makes a poor soldier, but if Paris moves the whole great body of France stirs. Such giants take long to be fully awake, and it is a matter of months to drill men; still it is better to let great enemies sleep. There was in that foolish, amiable crowd, with its pleasure at the sight of the King, its comic idea of warning him, something serious underlying. Danton will be using it in a very short time; for there are points of attack where mobs are like machine-guns—ridiculous in general warfare, but very useful indeed in special conditions, and in these conditions invincible. This something serious was that vague force (you may call it only an idea) which you will never find in an individual, and which you will always discover in a mass—the great common man which the French metaphysicians have called “Le Peuple;” that, drilled, is called by the least metaphysical an army.
A week later Lafayette appeared. He demanded the right to use the army, and July opened with the certainty of civil war.
July is the month of fevers; the heat has been moving northward, and all France is caught in it. The grapes fill out, and even in Picardy or in the Cotentin you feel as though the Midi were giving her spirit to the north. July made the Revolution and closed it. A month that saw the Bastille fall and that buried Robespierre is a very national time.
If you overlook France at this moment, you may see the towns stirring as they had stirred three years before; it is from them that the opposition rises—especially from Marseilles. A crowd of young men dragging cannon, the common-place sons of bourgeois, whom the time had turned into something as great as peasants or as soldiers, surged up the white deserts along the Rhone, passing the great sheet of vineyards that slopes up the watershed of Burgundy. As they came along they sang an excellent new marching song. When they at last saw Paris, especially the towers of Notre Dame from where they just show above the city as you come in from Fontainebleau, and as the roads came in together and the suburbs thickened they sang it with louder voices. On the evening of the 30th they came to the gates, and the workmen of the south-eastern quarter began to sing it and called it the “Marseillaise.” No one can describe music; but if in a great space of time the actions of the French become meaningless and the Revolution ceases to be an origin, some one perhaps will recover this air, as we have recovered a few stray notes of Greek music, and it will carry men back to the Republic.
For ten days the insurrection grew. In a secret committee which the Sections formed, men violent like Fournier, or good soldiers like Westermann, or local leaders of quarters like Santerre—but all outside the official body—organised the fighting force, and at their head the one man who held the strings of the municipality—Danton. The Assembly had heard Vergniaud’s angry speech, but it had also confirmed the constitution and the monarchy in the “baiser Lamourette.” Paris had to work alone, and the King, seeing only Paris before him, filled the Tuilleries, and stood by with a small garrison to repress the mere movement of the city—“something that should have been done in ’89.”
It was on a Paris thus enfevered, doubtful, nursing a secret insurrectionary plan, but full of men who hesitated and doubted, having still many who were loyal, that there fell[111] the document which the King had asked of his friends—but which he must, on seeing it, have regretted—the manifesto of the commander of the allies. This extraordinary monument of folly is rarely presented in its entirety. It is only in such a form that its full monstrosity can be appreciated, and I have therefore been at pains to translate for my readers the rather halting French in which Charles William proposed to arrest the movements of Providence. It ran as follows[112]:—
“Their Majesties the Emperor and the King of Prussia having given me the command of the armies assembled on the French frontier, I have thought it well to tell the inhabitants of that kingdom the motives that have inspired the measures taken by the two sovereigns and the intentions that guide them.