In certain places the advent of the Renaissance in the sixteenth century closed the story of Representation; in others, under the influence of the Reformation, it became a form. In the two chief centres of the West two varied fortunes attached to the two failing branches of that great mediæval scheme. In Protestant England the form of Representation survived; in Catholic France the memory. By one of those ironies in which History or Providence delights, the English oligarchy, which, in the phrase of a principal English writer, “had risen upon the ruins of Religion,” the Howards, the “Cromwells,” the Cecils, and the rest, maintained the form of The House of “Commons.” The squires used that organ in the seventeenth century to destroy the power of a Crown whose own folly had, through the plunder of the Monasteries, led to its own complete impoverishment and to the enrichment of the gentry. The squires maintained that Crown but kept it as their salaried servant, and thus throughout the eighteenth century the fossil of a representative system was in England not only cherished but actively cherished to serve us as the armour of privilege. Parliament remained intensely national, full of sacred ceremonies and forms, and still using conveniently to the rich some shadow of that theory of national sovereignty which, in breaking with the Faith, the nation had broken with perhaps for ever: whether for ever or not our own immediate future will show.
For Europe the strange accident by which dry-bones Representation thus survived in England was of vast consequence. This fossil bridged the gulf between the living Parliaments of the Middle Ages and the advent of modern democracy—and by a curious inquiry into the archæology and the extinct functions of English public life, Catholic Europe has begun to reconstruct its own past. For England the consequences of the survival are known to all who have watched the complexion of the Commons and type of membership that House to-day enjoys—and the strange mode of recruitment of the Lords!
In France the fortunes of Representation, that mediæval thing, became, from the moment when the Middle Ages failed, very different. The Gallic States-General had stood by the side of, and nominally informing, a Roman and centralised sovereignty: they were not, like the English Parliament, an institution immixed in and at last identical with a wealthy oligarchy; they were an institution that stood by the side of and was at last suppressed by a national despotism. They ceased abruptly (in 1614), but they never lost their soul. Should they hear the call to resurrection they could rise whole and quick, a complete voice of the nation to counsel or to command. In July 1787, with the protestation of the Parlement of Paris and its appeal to the past, that call had come, and from that moment onward it was plain that all France would now soon be found in action. Within two years the thing was decided.
What was the Queen’s position during those two years? She was in the saddle. Her fulness of life, her firmness of purpose, had come upon her quickly. She was already divorced from joy; she was already, and for the first time, mixed constantly with public affairs. It is sometimes written that Loménie de Brienne “gave her a place in the Council.” That is nonsense. She chose to enter publicly what, in private, had been hers since the March of 1787 at the latest: what had been partly hers long before. Her strength of utterance, her now formative disillusions (for disillusionment is formative in women), her apparent peril (for peril is formative in those who desire to govern), her recent grievous humiliation and suffering (for these are formative in all), formed her and gave her fixed and constructive power. Her power was most imperfectly, at moments disastrously, used; but if the reader would understand the violent five years which follow this moment and culminate in the crash of the throne, he must first seize the fact that, though vast impersonal forces at issue were melting and recasting France, and therefore Europe, the personality nearest the French Executive throughout was that of Marie Antoinette.
In her room at Versailles met the coming intriguers during the struggle with the Parlement under Brienne. She it was against whom the dishonoured Orleans, with the instinct of a demagogue, intrigued and whispered. She it was who spoke of “a necessary rigour” when the fighting begun; she—we may presume or be certain—who forbade the King to fly in the days of October; she certainly upon whom the great effort of Mirabeau turned; she who planned or rather guided the escape to Varennes; she who principally suffered from the recapture; she who constantly and actively advised Vienna, Mercy, Fersen, Mallet, in the perilous months that followed that failure; she who sustained the Court after the 20th of June; she against whom Paris charged on the 10th of August: hers was that power the memory of which exasperated the Revolution and drove even its military advisers to useless reprisals, and to her death at last.
I do not say that the powers of that awful time were personal or of this world—far from it. Nor do I say that you will not find crowded into that little æon of years a greater host of high and individual wills than a century may count in meaner times—there were a regiment of active, organising, and creative minds astir within a mile of Notre Dame. Still less do I pretend that the Queen’s judgment, her rapidity, her energy, and her certitude were comparable to any of a hundred or more in that arena. She was nothing compared with their greatest, little compared with their least. But I say that close to the executive—to that which, until August ’92, could command soldiers, sign edicts, and, above all, correspond with foreign Powers—its adviser, its constant moderator, at times its very self, was the Queen.
Her last child, the baby of eleven months, was now in the July of 1787 dead. It was the second death of a thing loved that she had known—her mother’s the first; it was the first death she had seen of a thing loved. In the desertion of her friends, the great part she had to play, the open wound of the necklace verdict, she took that death as but one more poignant sorrow. The little girl had been ailing for but four days: Marie Antoinette shut herself up with her husband and his sister for one day in Trianon to recover that shock. She returned to act.
She applauded and sustained her husband—or rather Brienne—during the struggle with the Parlement all July. She heard (and despised) the call for the States-General. When the Lit de Justice, the solemn ceremony by which the King could enforce the registration of his edicts in spite of the Parlement’s refusal, was held on the 6th of August, it was held at Versailles, as it were under the Queen’s eye: the Parlement replied by refusing to admit the registration so made.
The Parisian crowd surrounded the Parlement in Paris and applauded: not for this or that, nor for the nature of the taxes protested, nor for anything but for that prime principle—that the States-General should be summoned. The Queen ordered economies: they came into force at once, that very week. Those who lost their posts became new enemies of hers: the economies were nothing to the crowd: she gained nothing with the public: she lost more with Versailles. It was dangerous for her to approach the capital.