THERE existed in France at that moment one force which, in alliance with the Government, could have preserved the continuity of institutions, among other institutions of the Throne. That force resided in the personality of Mirabeau.
Had he survived and so succeeded—for his failure was only possible with death—the French nation might indeed have preserved all its forms and would then have lost its principle and power. It might have been transformed into something of lower vigour than itself, it might have grown to forget action, and the nineteenth century, which was to see our civilisation ploughed by the armies and sowed by the ideas of Napoleon—so that it became a century enormous with French energy and has left us to-day under a necessity still to persevere—might have been a time of easy reaction: an Europe without Germany, without Italy: an Europe having in its midst the vast lethargic body of the French Monarchy and dominated wholly by the mercantile activity of England.
This, I say, might, or rather would, have been the fate of the Revolution, and therefore of the world, with what further consequences we cannot tell, had Mirabeau, once in alliance with the Court, survived; for wherever in history the continuity of form has been preferred to a spirit of renascence, such lethargy and such decline have succeeded. But though an effect of this kind would have resulted for Christendom in general, for the Queen and for her family the success of Mirabeau would have been salvation. The air and the tradition of the palace would have survived; she would have grown old beside her husband in a State lessened but preserving many of the externals of power; her later years wise, resigned, and probably magnificent. As it was, the alliance between Mirabeau and the Court was made—but before the first year of its effect had run, Mirabeau was dead: he dead, the slope of change led Marie Antoinette, with rapid and direct insistence, to flight, to imprisonment, and to the scaffold.
It is but very rarely that so much can be laid to the action of one brain in history. What were the characters in Mirabeau’s position that made it true of him in this spring of 1790? They were these: that he had through certain qualities in him become accepted as the organ of a popular movement; that, by other qualities more profoundly rooted in him, he was determined upon order; and, finally, that an early maturity of judgment—already hardened before his fortieth year—strong passions often satisfied and their resulting fruit of deadness, much bitter humiliation, the dreadful annealing of poverty working upon known and vast capacity, had rendered him quite careless of those imaginary future things the vision of which alone can support men in the work of creation. He was now a man walking backwards, observing things known, judging men, testing their actions and motives as one would test natural and invariable forces, using the whole either to achieve some end which had already been achieved elsewhere—which was in existence somewhere and had reality—or to preserve things still standing around him, things whose nature he knew. He would have preserved all and he would have degraded his land. This most national of Frenchmen would have closed to France her avenue of growth. He was “practical”: and the chief quality of his people, which is the power most suddenly to evoke a corporate will, he did not comprehend. It was a mystery, and therefore he ignored it. Of things hidden he could divine nothing at all. The Faith, for example, being then driven underground, he utterly despised.
His command of spoken speech, sonorous, incisive, revealing, dominating by turns; his rapid concentration of phrase, his arrangement and possession (through others) of innumerable details, were points that made him the chief of a Parliament: his courage and advancing presence—for he was a sort of lion—peculiarly suited him to the Gauls, and his love of men, which was enormous, forbade the growth of those feminine enmities which are the only perils of our vulgar politicians to-day, and which sprouted from debate even in the high temper of the Revolution, as they must sprout wherever talking and not fighting is the game.
His travel, his wide reading, his communication throughout Europe and in the greatest houses with numerous close, varied and admiring friends, gave him that poise and that contempt for vision which made his leadership, when once he led, secure.
With all this went the passion to administrate, to do, which months of speeches and of opposition to the executive had but swollen. In April his opportunity came.
It was the Queen who made this capital move.
For many months indeed he would have come in secret to the aid of the Court. From the very meeting of the States-General the year before, Mirabeau had known that his place was with Government rather than in the tribune. His past of passion forbade him executive power. Necker, with quite another past—a nasty financial past—had dared to insult him in the early days of the Parliament. All the summer he had begged La Marck, his friend, to speak for him to the Queen, to the Throne. La Marck, who was very close to the Queen and was a companion since Trianon, had spoken, but Mirabeau was still a voice only, and, to women, an unpleasant one. In October he had directly attacked the Queen—she held him responsible for the two dreadful days and the insults of the drag back to Paris. The decrees in November which preserved the Assembly from decay by forbidding its members to accept office had closed the Ministry to him: in December he had tried to work a secret executive power through Monsieur, and Marie Antoinette’s distrust of Monsieur had again foiled him. La Marck had given up hope of helping his friend, the decrees and the debates of the Assembly shook the Throne with increasing violence, the King was counselless, when, after some long debate within herself, of which, in the nature of the thing, we can have no hint or record, the Queen, in the days when the preparation for her child’s sacrament was her chief affair, and a fortnight or so before that communion, determined to unite the brain of Mirabeau to the Crown.
She easily persuaded Louis. Before or after that persuasion she spoke to Mercy, and Mercy wrote to that ancestral Belgic land whither La Marck, certain that nothing could be done in Paris, and desiring to check the effects of the revolt in the Austrian Netherlands upon his estates, had betaken him three months before. La Marck at once returned; he crossed the frontier, and in his private house, up along the Faubourg St. Honoré, Mirabeau and Mercy met upon an April evening. All was most secretly done, so that none, not the populace, nor the Parliament, nor the courtiers—nor even Necker—should know. These two very separate abilities, Mercy and Mirabeau, recognised each other: for some days yet the latter, and the greater, the storm-tossed one, doubted; he still spoke of “an embassy” for his reward—he stooped to beg favour again of La Fayette. At last he was convinced of the Court’s sincerity, and on the 10th of May he wrote for the King—that is, for the Government (there was no other)—that first admirable Letter of Advice, which remains the chief monument of his genius. In one year he had proceeded from being an Evil Reputation to be a Speechifier, from a Speechifier to a something inspiring dread: now he was secretly in power; in half power; his was one of the hands on the tiller. To himself that year had been but a year of debt and makeshift; his principal relief at this vast change was a relief of the purse.