Brienne had fallen: the Queen, and the Queen alone, had put back Necker in his place. Why had she done this? From a desire to rule, and an opportunity for it.
There are those who discover in themselves the capacity to govern, that is to organise the wills of men. Often great soldiers find this in themselves, and are led to govern a whole State at last: such was Napoleon.
There are others to whom cheating, intrigue and cunning are native: such are, at bottom, however high their station, the slaves, not the dictators or the helpers, of their fellow-beings; they have a keen nose for the herd; they will always follow it, and it is their ambition to fill posts where they can give favours and draw large salaries. Of this sort are parliamentary politicians to-day: from such we draw our Ministers. They have of poor human nature an expert knowledge such as usurers have and panders; they are, therefore, not unsuited to choose permanent officials or to recommend to others places of trust and power.
There is a third kind, and to this third kind Marie Antoinette belonged—as many another woman and feminine man has belonged. It neither organises nor intrigues; it desires to do neither, and is incapable of both. All it desires is to be able to say “I govern.” The accident of the last two years had permitted her to say this—but, having said it, she could say nothing more. She knew the outcry against Calonne: she undid him. She knew the reputation of Brienne: she made him. She saw Brienne most evidently out of favour with opinion: she un-made him. She heard shouts for Necker—and Necker was summoned to her little room, was regally examined, graciously received and installed.
Those who can govern through a period of peril (that is, those who can organise the wills of men during the short and indeterminate time before any resultant of clashing social forces has yet appeared) note, decide, order, speak, and do—and when it is too late to act, their genius tells them that it is too late. In the early winter of 1788 it was not yet too late. What would one possessed of the power of government have done? In the first place, such an one would have stated the evil publicly in detail and with authority; in the next, chosen not one but a body of men to deal with particular difficulties (as, for instance, a particular légiste for the troubles of that absurdity, the Common Law; a particular soldier to suggest a reform of the army, &c.); in the third, used as allies all the positive forces available, all the enthusiasms, all the tide—to this force (by persuasion) how much may not be harnessed? So Mirabeau would have done; so Napoleon did; so some ready eye in 1788 might have planned. The States-General is the fever? You shall have it: in Paris, with splendour. The Commons are the cry? They shall be in full double number and with special new powers—a new dress, perhaps, as well. The nation is crying out for Government? Give them the Crown: the King on horseback day after day.
Had some such judgment controlled that moment, France would have preserved the Monarchy, old institutions clothed in their old names would have been squeezed and fitted into new moulds; France so changing, there would have been some change in Europe—an episode well worthy of memory and noted by special historians. The Bishops of the Church in France would—to-day—have been what Rohan and Narbonne were then; the Faith, already derelict, would by this time very probably have descended to be a ritual for wealthy women or an opinion for a few valueless, weak men: that self-praise and that divorce from reality which is the mark of our backwaters in Europe and of the new countries everywhere would (perhaps) have settled in the succeeding century upon all Europe, and, for the first time in its long history, our civilisation would have missed one of its due resurrections. As it was, God intended the Revolution. Therefore, every error and insufficiency in those directing its inception was permitted, and therefore, on account of such insufficiency, the full force of a military people ran freely, as run natural things, and achieved what we know.
The Queen had nominated Necker from a mere desire to rule, and had therefore simply chosen the man most loudly called for. Necker, on his side, was well worthy of so facile a judgment; he was all that is meant by Geneva.
By his own standards, which were those of a company promoter, he was just barely honest—by those of chivalric honour he was deplorably tainted. Full of avarice, order and caution, a very Huguenot, he sought everywhere an economic solution for political problems; unsoldierly, of course, and in the presence of danger worthless, he was none the less patient in detail and of a persevering kind; very vacillating in the presence of fierce and conflicting desires around him, he was yet tenacious of a general plan. To all these characters he added that kind of ambition which is avid of popularity on condition that it shall face no bodily risk and that it shall labour in words or on paper only. He had his reward: his insignificant figure was for a year the symbol of all the great ferment; his presence with, or absence from, the Council was the test of advance or of retreat in the revolutionary movement. So for one year—then for a few months he is forgotten; then he hears a mob in the streets, and flies.
With such a man as figurehead it is not difficult to judge the obvious development of the autumn and winter which produced the first great Parliament of the Revolution. Opinion was invited: the pamphlets poured in. On matters already fixed in public opinion Necker could be decisive, as, for instance, that the Commons in the approaching Assembly should be as numerous as the clergy and the nobles combined—for this was the universal rule in provincial parliaments; but when (two days after Christmas) this point (which had afforded food for violent writing but was in reality certain to be conceded)—when, I say, this point was fixed by King and Queen and Council, Necker so drafted the decision as to make it appear all his own to the populace: while at Court the angry higher nobility said it was all the Queen’s. A far more decisive matter—and one that escaped the partisans—was whether the Nobles, Clergy, and Commons should sit and vote together, as the necessity for a Popular Will—for one voice—demanded, or should play the antique fool and, in a crisis so actual and vivid, solemnly vote separately, checking each other’s decisions, nullifying the public mandate—all for the sake of custom. Here Necker could have decided and changed history: but there was not an opinion sufficiently unanimous to guide him in his nullity. He left that essential piece of procedure to be settled by the Estates themselves when they should have met; he thus (as will be seen) made of the first and most necessary act of the States-General, the insistence of the Commons that all should vote together, an illegal thing—and so coloured all their succeeding action with the colour of rebellion. One thing Necker had done of his own judgment, and it was idiotic. He had summoned the Notables again for a month in the autumn—he was soon glad to be rid of that folly: the decree I have mentioned followed, and in February 1789—legally before the end of January—the elections to the States-General began.