General Bouillé was of this number. After having long refused to take the civic oath, he did so at last with this intention. He had a numerous body of troops under his command near the northern frontier; he was clever, resolute, attached to the king, opposed to the revolution, such as it had then become, though the friend of reform; a circumstance that afterwards brought him into suspicion at Coblentz. He kept his army isolated from the citizens, that it might remain faithful, and that it might not be infected with the spirit of insubordination which they communicated to the troops. By skilful management, and the ascendancy of a great mind, he also succeeded in retaining the confidence and attachment of his soldiers. It was not thus elsewhere. The officers were the objects of a general dislike; they were accused of diminishing the pay, and having no concern for the great body of the troops. The prevailing opinions had also something to do with this dissatisfaction. These combined causes led to revolts among the men; that of Nancy, in August, 1790, produced great alarm, and became almost the signal of a civil war. Three regiments, those of Châteauvieux, Maître-de-camp, and the King's own, rebelled against their chiefs. Bouillé was ordered to march against them; he did so at the head of the garrison and national guard of Metz. After an animated skirmish, he subdued them. The assembly congratulated him; but Paris, which saw in Bouillé a conspirator, was thrown into fresh agitation at this intelligence. Crowds collected, and the impeachment of the ministers who had given orders to Bouillé to march upon Nancy was clamorously demanded. Lafayette, however, succeeded in allaying this ebullition, supported by the assembly, which, finding itself placed between a counter- revolution and anarchy, opposed both with equal wisdom and courage.
The aristocracy triumphed at the sight of the difficulties which perplexed the assembly. They imagined that it would be compelled to be dependent on the multitude, or deprive itself entirely of its support; and in either case the return to the ancient régime appeared to them short and easy. The clergy had its share in this work. The sale of church property, which it took every means to impede, was effected at a higher price than that fixed. The people, delivered from tithes and reassured as to the national debt, were far from listening to the angry suggestions of the priests; they accordingly made use of the civil constitution of the clergy to excite a schism. We have seen that this decree of the assembly did not affect either the discipline or the creed of the church. The king sanctioned it on the 26th of December; but the bishops, who sought to cover their interests with the mantle of religion, declared that it encroached on the spiritual authority. The pope, consulted as to this purely political measure, refused his assent to it, which the king earnestly sought, and encouraged the opposition of the priests. The latter decided that they would not concur in the establishment of the civil constitution; that those of them who might be suppressed would protest against this uncanonical act, that every bishopric created without the concurrence of the pope should be null, and that the metropolitans should refuse institution to bishops appointed according to civil forms.
The assembly strengthened this league by attempting to frustrate it. If, contrary to their real desire, it had left the dissentient priests to themselves, they would not have found the elements of a religious war. But the assembly decreed that the ecclesiastics should swear fidelity to the nation, the law, and the king, and to maintain the civil constitution of the clergy. Refusal to take this oath was to be attended by the substitution of others in their bishoprics and cures. The assembly hoped that the higher clergy from interest, and the lower clergy from ambition, would adopt this measure.
The bishops, on the contrary, thought that all the ecclesiastics would follow their example, and that by refusing to swear, they would leave the state without public worship, and the people without priests. The result satisfied the expectations of neither party; the majority of the bishops and curés of the assembly refused to take the oath, but a few bishops and many curés took it. The dissentient incumbents were deprived, and the electors nominated successors to them, who received canonical institution from the bishops of Autun and Lida. But the deprived ecclesiastics refused to abandon their functions, and declared their successors intruders, the sacraments administred by them null, and all Christians who should venture to recognise them excommunicated. They did not leave their dioceses; they issued charges, and excited the people to disobey the laws; and thus an affair of private interest became first a matter of religion and then a matter of party. There were two bodies of clergy, one constitutional, the other refractory; they had each its partisans, and treated each other as rebels and heretics. According to passion or interest, religion became an instrument or an obstacle; and while the priests made fanatics the revolution made infidels. The people, not yet infected with this malady of the upper classes, lost, especially in towns, the faith of their fathers, from the imprudence of those who placed them between the revolution and their religion. "The bishops," said the marquis de Ferrières, who will not be suspected, "refused to fall in with any arrangements, and by their guilty intrigues closed every approach to reconciliation; sacrificing the catholic religion to an insane obstinacy, and a discreditable attachment to their wealth."
Every party sought to gain the people; it was courted as sovereign. After attempting to influence it by religion, another means was employed, that of the clubs. At that period, clubs were private assemblies, in which the measures of government, the business of the state, and the decrees of the assembly were discussed; their deliberations had no authority, but they exercised a certain influence. The first club owed its origin to the Breton deputies, who already met together at Versailles to consider the course of proceeding they should take. When the national representatives were transferred from Versailles to Paris, the Breton deputies and those of the assembly who were of their views held their sittings in the old convent of the Jacobins, which subsequently gave its name to their meetings. It did not at first cease to be a preparatory assembly, but as all things increase in time, the Jacobin club did not confine itself to the influencing the assembly; it sought also to influence the municipality and the people, and received as associates members of the municipality and common citizens. Its organization became more regular, its action more powerful; its sittings were regularly reported in the papers; it created branch clubs in the provinces, and raised by the side of legal power another power which first counselled and then conducted it.
The Jacobin club, as it lost its primitive character and became a popular assembly, had been forsaken by part of its founders. The latter established another society on the plan of the old one, under the name of the club of '89. Sieyès, Chapelier, Lafayette, La Rochefoucauld directed it, as Lameth and Barnave directed that of the Jacobins. Mirabeau belonged to both, and by both was equally courted. These clubs, of which the one prevailed in the assembly and the other amongst the people, were attached to the new order of things, though in different degrees. The aristocracy sought to attack the revolution with its own arms; it opened royalist clubs to oppose the popular clubs. That first established under the name of the Club des Impartiaux could not last because it addressed itself to no class opinion. Reappearing under the name of the Club Monarchique, it included among its members all those whose views it represented. It sought to render itself popular with the lower classes, and distributed bread; but far from accepting its overtures, the people considered such establishments as a counter-revolutionary movement. The people disturbed their sittings, and obliged them several times to change their place of meeting. At length, the municipal authority found itself obliged, in January, 1791, to close this club, which had been the cause of several riots.
The distrust of the multitude was extreme; the departure of the king's aunts, to which it attached an exaggerated importance, increased its uneasiness, and led it to suppose another departure was preparing. These suspicions were not unfounded, and they occasioned a kind of rising which the anti-revolutionists sought to turn to account by carrying off the king. This project failed, owing to the resolution and skill of Lafayette. While the crowd went to Vincennes to demolish the dungeon which they said communicated with the Tuileries, and would favour the flight of the king, more than six hundred persons armed with swords and daggers entered the Tuileries to compel the king to flee. Lafayette, who had repaired to Vincennes to disperse the multitude, returned to quell the anti- revolutionists of the château, after dissipating the mob of the popular party, and by this second expedition he regained the confidence which his first had lost him.
The attempt rendered the escape of Louis XVI. more feared than ever. Accordingly, a short time after, when he wished to go to Saint Cloud, he was prevented by the crowd and even by his own guard, despite the efforts of Lafayette, who endeavoured to make them respect the law, and the liberty of the monarch. The assembly on its side, after having decreed the inviolability of the prince, after having regulated his constitutional guard, and assigned the regency to the nearest male heir to the crown, declared that his flight from the kingdom would lead to his dethronement. The increasing emigration, the open avowal of its objects, and the threatening attitude of the European cabinets, all cherished the fear that the king might adopt such a determination.
Then, for the first time, the assembly sought to stop the progress of emigration by a decree; but this decree was a difficult question. If they punished those who left the kingdom, they violated the maxims of liberty, rendered sacred by the declaration of rights; if they did not raise obstacles to emigration, they endangered the safety of France, as the nobles merely quitted it in order to invade it. In the assembly, setting aside those who favoured emigration, some looked only at the right, others only at the danger, and every one sided with or opposed the restrictive law, according to his mode of viewing the subject. Those who desired the law, wished it to be mild; but only one law could be practicable at such a moment, and the assembly shrank from enacting it. This law, by the arbitrary order of a committee of three members, was to pronounce a sentence of civil death on the fugitive, and the confiscation of his property. "The horror expressed on the reading of this project," cried Mirabeau, "proves that this is a law worthy of being placed in the code of Draco, and cannot find place among the decrees of the national assembly of France. I proclaim that I shall consider myself released from every oath of fidelity I have made towards those who may be infamous enough to nominate a dictatorial commission. The popularity I covet, and which I have the honour to enjoy, is not a feeble reed; I wish it to take root in the soil, based on justice and liberty." The exterior position was not yet sufficiently alarming for the adoption of such a measure of safety and revolutionary defence.
Mirabeau did not long enjoy the popularity which he imagined he was so sure of. That was the last sitting he attended. A few days afterwards he terminated a life worn out by passions and by toil. His death, which happened on the 2nd of March, 1791, was considered a public calamity; all Paris attended his funeral; there was a general mourning throughout France, and his remains were deposited in the receptacle which had just been consecrated aux grands hommes, in the name of la patrie reconnaissante. No one succeeded him in power and popularity; and for a long time, in difficult discussions, the eyes of the assembly would turn towards the seat from whence they had been accustomed to hear the commanding eloquence which terminated their debates. Mirabeau, after having assisted the revolution with his daring in seasons of trial, and with his powerful reasoning since its victory, died seasonably. He was revolving vast designs; he wished to strengthen the throne, and consolidate the revolution; two attempts extremely difficult at such a time. It is to be feared that royalty, if he had made it independent, would have put down the revolution; or, if he had failed, that the revolution would have put down royalty. It is, perhaps, impossible to convert an ancient power into a new order; perhaps a revolution must be prolonged in order to become legitimate, and the throne, as it recovers, acquire the novelty of the other institutions.