Again, there is a fruitless and eternal debate opened if we are to consider separately every chief personality concerned. Did Brissot really want war? Did Danton want it? Did the Emperor want it? Did Berlin want it? Did Spain? Did the King, Louis? Did Dumouriez? The varying ignorance of each character named, the varying intensity of the emotions and necessities of each, the divergence of particular objects in each individual case make such a synthesis impossible. But if one looks at the field in general and considers the common action of men between the return from Varennes and that April day when Louis was compelled to read out the Declaration of War before the French Parliament, a true picture, I think, arises in the mind, which—when, if ever, the Revolution ceases to incline the judgment—will be the final judgment of History. It is as follows:—
All desired war: all feared it. All attempted to postpone it. But, as all energy of its nature polarises, these energetic hatreds and fears gathered round two centres. The one in France had for its heart the young men from the south and all their group, soon to be called the “Girondins,” who, when the new Parliament gathered at the close of the summer of Varennes, rapidly came to lead it. These men, Gallic in temper, more and more desired to bring to the issue of arms sooner rather than later what they thought must end—could not but end—in war. Round this clear opinion, by the time winter had come, what was living and active in France increasingly gathered. It is a phenomenon repeated a hundred times in the history of the French people. We shall certainly see an example of it in our own generation. The hand once upon the hilt of the sword draws it.
Over against this current of opinion the Emperor (Marie Antoinette’s brother), the King of Prussia, the English oligarchy, the Spanish Bourbons also tended to war; their decision was not due to an increase of determination—they were determined on the main question all along—but to the gradual settlement of details long in negotiation between them. These details settled, and the mutual suspicions and jealousies of the Allies sufficiently though partially appeased, the privileged bodies of Europe certainly marched against France, and to the Girondin crusade was opposed something which was intended not to be resistance but rather a rapid and successful act of police. The thing had got to end, and, though the Powers only crossed the frontier in the succeeding summer, all the Courts of Europe and all the privileged bodies of the old Society were contented and glad that the fight was on. Nor were any more contented than the governing class in England, who had helped to engineer the campaign and who could not but reap the fruit of it, though it was profoundly to their interest not to bring into the field the insufficient armed forces at their command.
In the appreciation of this situation an element must be remembered without which the modern student goes all astray. The Allies seemed bound to win. We to-day, looking back upon those amazing twenty years, forget that truth. Valmy, though still almost inexplicable, has happened, and we take it for granted. The long straggling regiments of Napoleon, the butchers’ boys turned generals, the vulgarian dukes and marshals, the volunteer gunners and the rest of it, won; and their victory is now part of the European mind. In that winter before the war broke out, as ’91 turned into ’92, it was not so.
The elements obvious to every thinking man, especially to the cold and therefore profoundly insufficient judgment of alien observers in Paris itself (of such coxcombs as Gouverneur Morris, for instance), were elements which made the final and rapid defeat of the Revolution certain, and gave that approaching defeat all the qualities of what I have called it, an act of police. The Allies might be jealous and suspicious one of the other, but there can be no doubt once an accord was come to—and it was reached in the early months of ’92—that against the anarchy into which the French people had fallen, and the hopeless indiscipline of their swollen armies, the operations of the invaders would soon become but a series of executions and a summary and severe suppression of armed mobs. The enthusiasm of the Girondins, and soon of all France, was the enthusiasm of rhetoricians and that self-doubting expectation of the impossible which is proper to inebriate moods. Nor was there one commander of experience west of the Rhine who anticipated victory for the French, nor one commander east of the Rhine who dreaded the failure of the kings. It was mere sound—as poetry and music are mere sound—that urged the French to war. And those who in theory combated the policy of war, of whom Robespierre was the most remarkable, those who, from their concrete experience, desired to fend it off (with the army in such a state! with the military temper of the people so hopelessly wild!)—that is, you may say, every general officer—foresaw at the best some sort of compromise whereby the Revolution would end, after some few battles lost, in some sort of Limited Monarchy. It was the appetite for a Limited Monarchy which made so many acquiesce in such a campaign in spite of the certainty of defeat. It was the fear that the great ideal of the Revolution might tail off into a Limited Monarchy that made the most ardent democrats oppose the policy of what could not but be a disastrous war.
FACSIMILE OF THE FIRST PAGE OF THE LETTER WRITTEN ON THE 3RD
SEPTEMBER, 1791, BY MARIE ANTOINETTE TO THE EMPEROR,
HER BROTHER, PROPOSING ARMED INTERVENTION
Meanwhile, during the earlier months of this development, the French nobles who had crossed the frontier (the Émigrés), and notably the brothers of the King, were an element of peril to either side, lest, a small and irresponsible body, they should provoke hostilities before either side demanded them. The Émigrés were active because they had nothing to lose, and careless of the moment because for them negotiation was unnecessary. To restrain this activity was the chief anxiety of the great interests which were slowly coalescing into that invincible instrument of war whose mission it was to restore order under the King of Prussia and the Duke of Brunswick. As the months proceed, as the coalition forms, this disturbing element is of less and less importance. In the early summer of ’92, when war is once declared, the Émigrés fall into line with the rest of the Allies; and when the invading army crosses the frontier, the Émigrés cross with it in the natural course of things and merge in the advancing flood.
Such was the general development of the European situation between the month of July 1791 and the month of April 1792.