There was not then, as there is to-day, in London a vast and organised journalistic system by which news is afforded, withheld, or falsified at will. Nay, even had there been such a monopoly, journals had not one-hundredth of the power they have to-day. Again, those who governed England then were usually well travelled and were acquainted with the French tongue. Again, there existed, what has since failed us, strong independent opinion and a cultivated middle class. The female La Motte was, therefore, not welcomed in London with those transports of affection or homage which she would receive to-day; but there was already sufficient horror at continental procedure and sufficient certitude in the baseness of all administration of justice abroad to stand her in very good stead. The nourishment of the public conscience upon the sins of foreigners had already begun. La Motte was something of a martyr, and, as she seemed poor, could make some livelihood out of the public folly. She began that series of pretended “Revelations” which were in some few months to be among the principal torments of the Queen. Whether (like Esterhazy by our Press in the parallel I have already drawn) she was bribed to say such things, we have no record. At any rate her publications paid her—for a time.
It has been said that Marie Antoinette helped the La Motte to fly from prison. It may be so. When in a great public quarrel the innocent side is blundering and unwise, its acts of unwisdom are incalculable. Marie Antoinette had certainly sent to have the woman visited in prison. It is possible that, as she had hoped a public trial could help her, so she hoped now the La Motte loose would do less harm than the La Motte imprisoned and gagged, with every rumour free to circulate. Perhaps she was wholly ignorant of the whole matter. Anyhow the La Motte was loose—and the flood of calumny springing from London flowed against the Queen and did its work. She, at Versailles, grew every day to be more and more absorbed in the crisis which was developing with such rapidity—for it was already apparent as March proceeded that the experiment of the Notables had failed. Calonne had still his native courage and his peculiar rapidity of manœuvre; he fought his hand hard—but the opposition was too plain, too large, and too strong for him. His plan had been just—he had conceived the reformation of lightening the worst taxes and of arranging a more equal redistribution of the burdens upon land—a new redistribution in which no privilege should exist of rank or custom—and, more daring, but still, in the tradition of Turgot, he had planned an adumbration of the Revolution by proposing provincial, local, and parochial assemblies.
Two currents of hostility met him: one that the Notables in the main stood personally for privilege; the other that every one in France desired more change, and, above all, more “democratisation” of the centre of the national machinery.
There was an appetite for debate, for “facts”; a demand for exact accounts and public audit and public consent to taxes.
These two currents gained their intensity, however, from the legend which had gathered round Calonne, as the Financier of the Deficit and the Adviser of the Throne. A symbolic character, which was never his but which has endured almost to our own time, was popularly superimposed upon him, a character of mere frivolity, of mere extravagance in time of security, especially of subservience to fancied expensive whims of the Queen.
She, alas! thought to do a public service and a strong one by persuading Louis to the dismissal of his Minister when his failure with the Notables was proved. She won. On the 8th April 1787 Calonne fell, to be exiled, to fly (of course) to London, and thence, only too probably, to help swell that river of evil speaking and writing which, since her thirtieth year, had flowed so regularly against the character of Marie Antoinette; but which now broke all bounds and filled half the pamphlets.
If in this she acted publicly, decidedly, and to her hurt, in her next equally decisive step the Queen acted even more publicly, more decisively, and more both to her own hurt and that of the alien populace whom she already detested but desired, in such a crisis, to rule. After some mention of Necker, she forced Loménie upon the King.
The writing of history, more than any other liberal occupation, suffers from routine. I will not detain the reader of this chronicle with any long digression upon the effect of the French Revolution, upon the nature, the prodigious force and the universality of what may be called, according to the taste of the scholar, the Catholic reaction or the Catholic renaissance of our day. Still less would I disturb the progress of my story with a divagation upon the ease with which our academies here fall into every trap set them by the enemies of the Faith abroad—whether those enemies be random politicians, high stoics, sceptics of a noble temper, common usurers, or men fanatical against all restriction of the senses. But I will so far delay the reader at this moment as to state plainly a succession of undoubted historical and contemporary truths in no particular order, and to beg him to reach a conclusion by a comparison of them all.
It is in the routine of our universities to say that Catholicism was struck to death by two great upheavals: the Reformation opened it to attack; the Revolution dealt the mortal blow: it is now said to be dying, and especially in France. This is the first truth: that our universities say these things; some regret, some are pleased: but it is believed and said in either camp. Next, it is true that Louis XVI. practised his religion and believed in it. Next, it is true that his Queen, never wholly abandoning the rule of religion—far from it—was now, in 1787, particularly devoted and increasingly exact in her observance; daily, as she daily suffered, more penetrated inwardly by the spirit of the Church. A fourth truth is that no single man pretending to high intelligence in that generation of Frenchmen believed in more than a God: the only quarrel was between those who believed in such a Being and those who denied this last of dogmas. The fifth truth is, that but yesterday all the French hierarchy and all the 80,000 priests of the Church—save, perhaps, three—suffered the loss of all corporate property and all established income rather than vary in one detail from the discipline of Rome. The sixth truth is that the prominent and outstanding names of the French hierarchy or of the Church’s defenders before and during this revolutionary crisis were: Rohan, an evil liver, a cheat, a fool, and a blackguard; Talleyrand, something even lower in morals than he was higher in wit; the Archbishop of Narbonne—living six hundred miles from his See with his own niece for mistress; Grégoire, a full schismatic and in his way an honest man; Maury, a vulgar politician, like one of our own vulgar politicians to-day, a priest out for a fortune, a sort of “Member of Parliament,” a petty persecutor of the Pope in person and of the Papacy, in time a Cardinal—and this man Loménie. The seventh truth is that Marie Antoinette (who practised her religion) ardently supported Loménie and befriended him, and that, therefore, Louis (who was devout) accepted him for Chief Minister.