Marie Antoinette

by Hilaire Belloc

Mirabeau wanted money. He was a gentleman and his honour wanted it. In his appetite for it he did all a gentleman would do, sacrificing that self-respect which men not gentlemen would not part with to save their lives. He approached enemies and friends indifferently. La Fayette, whose militia power offended him and whose nullity drove him wild, La Fayette whom he had attacked and publicly jeered at, he quietly tapped for £2000 and railed when that cautious Saviour of Two Worlds sent less than half the sum. He had the gentleman’s morbid shame of old debts and the gentleman’s carelessness in contracting new. He was of the sort that kill themselves rather than finally default, and yet who take the road that makes defaulting sure. To such a man, now rising on the Revolutionary wave, entertaining, ordering secretarial work on every side, playing the part of a public god, the offer of the Court was new life. Yet here again some apology must be offered to the modern reader for the pettiness of the sum which sufficed in those days to purchase so much power upon such an occasion. For the salvation of the Monarchy Mirabeau was to receive, upon the payment of his debts, not half the income we give to a politician who has climbed on to the Front Bench: when he had accomplished his task he was to receive, upon retirement, a sum that would just purchase such a pension as we accord for life to a nephew or a son-in-law fatigued by two years of the Board of Trade. He accepted the terms: but for him and for those like him a wage, however shameful or secret, is but an opportunity for intense and individual action. He was the more himself and the less a servant when he had wages to spend. He designed his campaign at once: to see the Queen upon whose energy alone he relied and in whom—though he had never kissed her hand or spoken to her face to face—he divined a corresponding courage; and next, through her, while maintaining his demagogic power, to crush the growth of anarchy by the welding of an army; and at last to restore the Monarchy by a civil war. For order was, he imagined, the chief affair, and anarchy was all that great brain could discover in the early ferment of the time.

He was a man very capable of being a lover: he was an artist who ardently desired an instrument: he trusted his capacity with women, and he far over-priced the power in action though not the vigour of the Queen. She upon her side dreaded the meeting and delayed it, though Mercy himself and the new Archbishop of Toulouse, now her confessor, urged it.

Upon the 4th of June the Court had left Paris for St. Cloud to spend, within an hour of the capital and within sight of it, the months of summer. That memorable anniversary of her son’s death isolated and saddened the woman upon whom was thus thrown a responsibility too great for her judgment. All the month she hesitated, while the notes from Mirabeau in his new capacity as Counsellor of the Court, coming in continually more insistent, more authoritative, and more wide, made the meeting a necessity. At last, upon the 29th, she decided. A room was chosen, “such that none could know;” he was to come upon Friday, July 3, to the little back-door of the garden towards the park: there was a further delay—he was put off to the morrow. He slept at his sister’s house at Auteuil, and early on the Saturday morning, taking his sister’s son with him for sole companion, disguised, he drove to the little garden-door. Everything was silent about him in the summer morning as he drove from Auteuil to St. Cloud, that nephew of his riding as his postillion, and no one by. A certain suspicion weighed upon him. He remembered the delays, the secrecy; he remembered that no friend loved him as much as each loved or hated the Crown. Before he put his hand to the latch he gave the boy a note and said: “If I am not returned within three-quarters of an hour, give this to the Captain of the Militia,” and, having said this, he went alone into the garden.

In France and throughout his world the event of those days was the Federation. In ten days all the delegates would meet upon the Champ de Mars for the anniversary of the Bastille: the change in men was to be confirmed in a vast meeting of friendship: the King was to swear and a world quite renewed was to arise. Even in London the blaze of the triumph had struck the street, and the common shows were preparing pictures and models of the feast. Upon this all Europe was turned as the delegates came swarming daily into the simmering July of Paris and as the altar rose upon the great open field by the river. For him, and now for history also, a greater, what might, had Mirabeau lived, have been a more enduring scene, was the secret morning meeting so prepared.

The Queen awaited him in a room apart, the King at her side. She awaited with some hesitation the fierce step and the bold eye, the strong pitted face of “the Monster,” but her rank and a long apprenticeship to reception had taught her to receive. He came in and saw this woman whom he had so much desired to see, he spoke with her for half-an-hour, and as he left her he kissed her hand. Two things remained with him: the moderation, the over-moderation of the King, but in her a sort of regal determination which was half an illusion of his own, but which most powerfully filled his spirit and which left him enfeoffed to the cause he had so long chosen to serve. He came out to his nephew, where the carriage waited, radiant, all his energy renewed. He had perhaps a clear conception of the Queen in action supporting him, determining the King, eagerly accepting his wisdom and his plans. In that he gave her far too great a place; but great men impute greatness, and Mirabeau was too great for women.

The show of the Federation passed, gloriously; the life of the nation rose to passion and broke bounds. In the matter of the army, by which alone Authority could live, Mirabeau saw its strength dissolved. The melting of society had destroyed that discipline, the hardest, the most necessary and the least explicable bond among men: the frontier mutinied for arrears of pay, and with the first days of August it was evident that neither for defence nor for the re-establishment of law would the army be available. The army, that one solid weapon of the Monarchy, was now cracked all down the blade. The Army of the East, long, as I have said, the chief resource of the executive, was affected like the rest of the service. There Bouillé, a trained and careful man, wealthy, noble, of course, Whiggish in politics, and of middle age, held the command and saw from one day to another in all the garrisons of his command the method of soldiers failing. One mutiny followed another; regimental chests were seized for arrears of pay; the non-commissioned officers were no longer with the cadre in spirit; officers of the lower grades had been insulted, of the higher reluctantly and more reluctantly obeyed.

It was at this moment that Mirabeau saw fit to give that grave advice for which posterity has judged him so hardly and which yet betrays the decision of his soul. He determined upon civil war.

Many things might have saved him and the nation from such a policy: notably La Fayette, a plaster head of the Militia might have been made a reserve force behind the failing regulars; and it has been pretended that La Fayette and Mirabeau were now quite separate, and the wealthy young fellow useless to his elder the Statesman, because La Fayette, in opposing Mirabeau’s presidency of the Assembly for the Federation, had offended the vanity from which great orators suffer. The cause is insufficient. Mirabeau had lost all hope that La Fayette could act. He passed him by. What as a fact did prevent the immediate prosecution of Mirabeau’s policy was the insufficiency of the Queen, and this it was that saved the country and the memory of her adviser from a course that would certainly have preserved the Throne.

Contrasted against the surroundings of her family and her Court, even of her immediate enemies, her decision had shone: contrasted against Mirabeau’s will it was pale. She preferred, she even attempted to foist upon him, that project of foreign intervention which, three years later, killed her; and his famous words in his Advice of August 13 seemed to her rhetoric or worse. Its style was “extraordinary”: he was “mad.” “Four enemies are at the charge,” he had written, “the taxes, repudiation, the army, and winter”—she could not bear the style: but he was right. The harvest was in—it was not sufficient; a new and vast increase of assignats was voted—Mirabeau himself most urgently advising it—and on all this, at the end of August, came Nancy.

The chief and the last foundation of force for the King were the Swiss regiments. Those of the Guard in the last supreme moment of the Monarchy all but saved it. At Nancy in that August of 1790 three regiments were quartered, two French, one Swiss, that called “Château Vieux.” They mutinied, mainly for pay; after scenes which do not concern this book, they were broken—upon the last day of the month, with a loss to the still disciplined troops opposing them of forty officers and ten times that number of men. The gravity of that day was of a kind we also know, when, in some crisis (with us such crisis has been for generations foreign, not domestic) a much graver thing, a much louder noise, brings to a pitch emotion ready for violence and suddenly presents as a reality what all had desired or feared. Of such are the first shots of a war, the first news of a fatal illness. The French mutineers were disbanded. The opinion of the moment would have tolerated no course more severe: but—and this was the wedge that struck into the heart of the time and clove men asunder—the Swiss were made such an example of old things as the whole Revolution had come to sweep away. True, their own rich officers were the judges of the Swiss; what was done did not then lie and does not lie to-day on the conscience of the French people; but when of these foreign peasants, driven by poverty to a foreign service and maddened to mutiny by the fraudulent retaining of their pay, one-half were made the subjects of a public horror, the country gasped. The town of Nancy, a town of great beauty, the flower of Lorraine, had fought with and had supported the mutineers. It suffered the sight of half of the whole Swiss regiment marched out for punishment, half sent to barracks and then reserved for some obscurer fate. Of those so publicly destroyed, two-thirds were for the galleys, near a third were hanged on high gallows before all, to turn the stomachs of the new Citizens for a free state; one was broken on a wheel with clubs, his bones crushed to satisfy the privileged in a social order already infamous, his blood spattered on the pavement of a town which had befriended him. It was an anomaly of hell fallen in the midst of the new hopes and within six weeks of that clamour of goodwill upon the Champ de Mars when all such nightmares were to have been buried for ever.