Marie Antoinette

by Hilaire Belloc

The Assembly voted its thanks for the restoration of order: the vote was moved by Mirabeau. Bouillé commanded an army now silent, and the thing was done. But the minority of wealthy men that had thus dared applaud the executions at Nancy was now cut off from fellowship with the nation, and the civil war which Mirabeau desired was come in spirit—for the Government, the only possible executive, the Crown, was with that minority.

Necker, lost in public opinion, defeated in finance, thoroughly terrified at the sound of arms, was off across the frontier for ever to Geneva, his Bible and his money-bags. For a few months Mirabeau’s strength was to remain increasing, the one central thing—but secretly his power of action was marred, for, while the Court listened and heard him, it did not move. He would have seen the Queen—she would not see him. Already his complicity was guessed by a few—it had been denounced frenziedly amid parliamentary jeers and laughter by one young man, since dead: but the rumour had terrified the palace. Mirabeau, still taking the palace’s pay, still pouring in upon it Advices which he desired to be commands—(and yet still refused so much as a Royal audience)—grew continually upon the Parliament.

As his power over the Assembly increased, his fret against the hesitation of the Court increased with it; it increased to desperation, and that desperation was the more exasperated because a man of his temper could not grasp—in the absence of personal interviews—what it was that held back the Crown. Yet to a man of another temper the explanation would have been easy. There was a conflict, not only of mediocrity with genius, not only of two wills—the one accustomed to an inert command, the other avid to exercise a vigorous one—but a conflict also of ends to be attained; for that which Mirabeau desired—and which he thought the King and Queen to desire—was a national thing, whereas what the King and Queen now desired was a personal thing. He all the while was considering the Monarchy, an institution necessary to his country: they thought more and more daily of their individual selves: their habits, their wounded right, their children—their religion.

In nothing did the friction of that new machine, the alliance between Mirabeau and the Court, show more than in this matter of religion. To Mirabeau, as to every vigorous spirit of that generation, the Faith was inconceivable. How far, by an effort of fancy, he could picture minds that held it one cannot tell, but one may be certain that he could not but associate such minds with ineptitude. Now the business of 1790, unknown to the men who most mixed in that business, was Religion. France had of herself transformed herself in eighteen months. The Roman conceptions had returned, the municipalities governed, the whole people were moving in a stream together, equality had re-arisen to the surface of things; war, if war came, would be a national thing—the life in each had determined to be based upon a general will. At this overwhelming change the Parliament had assisted; it was their function to express its main features in new laws, and, as to details, to thresh them out in debate and make them fit the new scheme: among these details was the definition of the Clergy’s status. The Catholic Church was present—for the peasants at least—and it must thus still be recognised, its powers must be defined, the terms of its recognition must be formulated. These cultivated men of the Parliament—and I include the bishops—had no conception of Resurrection. The Church was an old thing, passive, woven into the lower stuff of the State; it would not again be what a dim tradition affirmed it once to have been. Let it die down quietly in its villages and go. As for the Institution of it, the higher-salaried places—its use in Government—why, that was to be Gallican.

Just before the Federation in July the Civil Constitution of the Clergy had passed the House. Just before Nancy the King had assented, and it was law.

To the men who spoke and legislated, it was a just and straightforward law; to us who know a future they could not know, it is a monstrous absurdity. Priests and bishops “elected”—not by enthusiasm or by clamour or by a populace ardent, but by paper votes—as we elect our dunderheads to Westminster! Unity, the prime test of life, secured by no more than a letter to Rome announcing election and courteously admitting communion! Every diocese and parish a new creation, created without any consultation of Peter and his Authority! Yet such was the sleep of the Faith a century ago that this incredible instrument provoked discussion only; and such protests as came were not protests of laughter or even of anger, but protests of argument—with after-thoughts of money. But the King and the Queen believed.

Had she not suffered, this void of the century in matters of the soul might have left Marie Antoinette indifferent. She had been indifferent to that prig-brother of hers when he played the philosopher at Vienna and the fool in the Netherlands. The populace, who guard the seeds of religion, were unknown to her as to the King and to the Parliament. But she had so suffered that she had concentrated upon the Creed: her husband had always held it simply—he was a simple man. Now, when he signed the Civil Constitution, and she knew of that act, it was proof that they had done with the national ferment, that their concern was to get away, to return, and to reconquer; that henceforward no public act of theirs, no acceptation of any Reform, had in it or was meant to have the least validity in conscience. She especially was quite cut off henceforward from the crown she had worn—it was no longer a symbol of her State for her; and if she had continued to wear it, as Mirabeau desired, after a reconquest achieved through civil war, she would have worn it contentedly over defeated subjects rather than over a nation.

All this Mirabeau saw as little as he saw the passion of the village priests, the anger of the women in the country-sides. The resistance (which immediately began) he thought purely political. Priests that would not take the oath were Partisans of the old tyranny and breakdown; the Pope, who was preparing his definite refusal, was a subtle Italian whom he, Mirabeau, must meet by a Gallic brutality. To the King Mirabeau secretly represented the Civil Constitution and the gathering revolt against it as an excellent lever for recruiting the provinces and raising that civil war of the Government against anarchy which was his whole policy; but to the Assembly (and here it was most of himself that appeared) he spoke against the Church’s refusal to accept with a violence that astounded, and at times provoked to rebuke, his most extreme admirers. All his spirit during that autumn and early winter of 1790-91 is one of diatribe and fury against the intangible foe he himself had raised.

On the 26th of November he forced the Assembly to vote the prosecution of priests who refused the oath; on the 4th of January he accused the hierarchy of their old game—“too well known in our history”—of playing for an “ultramontane” authority; ten days later, on the 14th, he broke all bounds: swore that the priests cared little if religion died (and much he cared for it!) so that their power was saved. The priests present left the hall. He continued with greater violence, and all the Assembly protested. On the proposition of Camus (himself next-door to a Huguenot) it was moved and carried that Mirabeau be no longer heard. When, a bare week after all this, a Letter of Advice reached the King from Mirabeau headed, “On the Way to make use of the Civil Constitution,” how should the King not be bewildered?

The King read it; he found a stupefying series of counsels. How could so simple a man as he understand the contradiction between Mirabeau’s public speeches and secret executive advice? “No time” (he read in Mirabeau’s private communication to the Crown)—“No time could be more favourable for uniting all the malcontents, the most dangerous ones, and raising his royal popularity to the detriment of the Assembly;” he was to provoke resistance secretly, to refuse executive aid: to throw the odium of the Civil Constitution and of the priests’ resistance to it on the Assembly. What could a man of Louis’ kind make of all this? Had Marie Antoinette been a she-Mirabeau, as Mirabeau half-believed her to be, she might have followed the plan. Contrariwise, she was a Christian mother, much too untaught and too devout by now to use religion for political intrigue. To emphasise their bewilderment, this Husband and Wife find that their late Confessor—whom they had indignantly rejected for his schism—had taken the oath at the pressing of Mirabeau himself.... It is not to be wondered at that Mirabeau’s advice hung fire.