From the 5th and 6th of October, 1789, to the month of April, 1791, the national assembly completed the reorganization of France; the court gave itself up to petty intrigues and projects of flight; the privileged classes sought for new means of power, those which they formerly possessed having been successively taken from them. They took advantage of all the opportunities of disorder which circumstances furnished them with, to attack the new régime and restore the old, by means of anarchy. At the opening of the law courts the nobility caused the Chambres de vacations to protest; when the provinces were abolished, it made the orders protest. As soon as the departments were formed, it tried new elections; when the old writs had expired, it sought the dissolution of the assembly; when the new military code passed, it endeavoured to excite the defection of the officers; lastly, all these means of opposition failing to effect the success of its designs, it emigrated, to excite Europe against the revolution. The clergy, on its side, discontented with the loss of its possessions still more than with the ecclesiastical constitution, sought to destroy the new order by insurrections, and to bring on insurrections by a schism. Thus it was during this epoch that parties became gradually disunited, and that the two classes hostile to the revolution prepared the elements of civil and foreign war.
CHAPTER IV
FROM APRIL, 1791, TO THE 3OTH SEPTEMBER. THE END OF THE CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY
The French revolution was to change the political state of Europe, to terminate the strife of kings among themselves, and to commence that between kings and people. This would have taken place much later had not the kings themselves provoked it. They sought to suppress the revolution, and they extended it; for by attacking it they were to render it victorious. Europe had then arrived at the term of the political system which swayed it. The political activity of the several states after being internal under the feudal government, had become external under the monarchical government. The first period terminated almost at the same time among all the great nations of Europe. Then kings who had so long been at war with their vassals, because they were in contact with them, encountered each other on the boundaries of their kingdoms, and fought. As no domination could become universal, neither that of Charles V. nor that of Louis XIV., the weak always uniting against the strong, after several vicissitudes of superiority and alliance, a sort of European equilibrium was established. In order to appreciate ulterior events, I propose to consider this equilibrium before the revolution.
Austria, England, and France had been, from the peace of Westphalia to the middle of the eighteenth century, the three great powers of Europe. Interest had leagued the two first against the third. Austria had reason to dread the influence of France in the Netherlands; England feared it on the sea. Rivalry of power and commerce often set them at variance, and they sought to weaken or plunder each other. Spain, since a prince of the house of Bourbon had been on the throne, was the ally of France against England. This, however, was a fallen power: confined to a corner of the continent, oppressed by the system of Philip II., deprived by the Family Compact of the only enemy that could keep it in action, by sea only had it retained any of its ancient superiority. But France had other allies on all sides of Austria: Sweden on the north; Poland and the Porte on the east; in the south of Germany, Bavaria; Prussia on the west; and in Italy, the kingdom of Naples. These powers, having reason to dread the encroachments of Austria, were naturally the allies of her enemy. Piedmont, placed between the two systems of alliance, sided, according to circumstances and its interests, with either. Holland was united with England or with France, as the party of the stadtholders or that of the people prevailed in the republic. Switzerland was neutral.
In the last half of the eighteenth century, two powers had risen in the north, Russia and Prussia. The latter had been changed from a simple electorate into an important kingdom, by Frederick-William, who had given it a treasure and an army; and by his son Frederick the Great, who had made use of these to extend his territory. Russia, long unconnected with the other states, had been more especially introduced into the politics of Europe by Peter I. and Catharine II. The accession of these two powers considerably modified the ancient alliances. In concert with the cabinet of Vienna, Russia and Prussia had executed the first partition of Poland in 1772; and after the death of Frederick the Great, the empress Catharine and the emperor Joseph united in 1785 to effect that of European Turkey.
The cabinet of Versailles, weakened since the imprudent and unfortunate Seven Years' War, had assisted at the partition of Poland without opposing it, had raised no obstacle to the fall of the Ottoman empire, and even allowed its ally, the republican party in Holland, to sink under the blows of Prussia and England, without assisting it. The latter powers had in 1787 re-established by force the hereditary, stadtholderate of the United Provinces. The only act which did honour to French policy, was the support it had happily given to the emancipation of North America. The revolution of 1789, while extending the moral influence of France, diminished still more its diplomatic influence.
England, under the government of young Pitt, was alarmed in 1788 at the ambitious projects of Russia, and united with Holland and Prussia to put an end to them. Hostilities were on the point of commencing when the emperor Joseph died, in February, 1790, and was succeeded by Leopold, who in July accepted the convention of Reichenbach. This convention, by the mediation of England, Russia, and Holland, settled the terms of the peace between Austria and Turkey, which was signed definitively, on the 4th of August, 1791, at Sistova; it at the same time provided for the pacification of the Netherlands. Urged by England and Prussia, Catharine II. also made peace with the Porte at Jassy, on the 29th of December, 1791. These negotiations, and the treaties they gave rise to, terminated the political struggles of the eighteenth century, and left the powers free to turn their attention to the French Revolution.
The princes of Europe, who had hitherto had no enemies but themselves, viewed it in the light of a common foe. The ancient relations of war and of alliance, already overlooked during the Seven Years' War, now ceased entirely: Sweden united with Russia, and Prussia with Austria. There was nothing now but the kings on one side, and people on the other, waiting for the auxiliaries which its example, or the faults of princes might give it. A general coalition was soon formed against the French revolution. Austria engaged in it with the hope of aggrandizement, England to avenge the American war, and to preserve itself from the spirit of the revolution; Prussia to strengthen the threatened absolute power, and profitably to engage its unemployed army; the German states to restore feudal rights to some of their members who had been deprived of them, by the abolition of the old régime in Alsace; the king of Sweden, who had constituted himself the champion of arbitrary power, to re-establish it in France, as he had just done in his own country; Russia, that it might execute without trouble the partition of Poland, while the attention of Europe was directed elsewhere; finally, all the sovereigns of the house of Bourbon, from the interest of power and family attachments. The emigrants encouraged them in these projects, and excited them to invasion. According to them, France was without an army, or at least without leaders, destitute of money, given up to disorder, weary of the assembly, disposed to the ancient régime, and without either the means or the inclination to defend itself. They flocked in crowds to take a share in the promised short campaign, and formed into organized bodies under the prince de Condé, at Worms, and the count d'Artois, at Coblentz.
The count d'Artois especially hastened the determination of the cabinets. The emperor Leopold was in Italy, and the count repaired to him, with Calonne as minister, and the count Alphonse de Durfort, who had been his mediator with the court of the Tuileries, and who had brought him the king's authority to treat with Leopold. The conference took place at Mantua, and the count de Durfort returned, and delivered to Louis XVI. in the name of the emperor, a secret declaration, in which was announced to him the speedy assistance of the coalition. Austria was to advance thirty- five thousand men on the frontier of Flanders; the German states, fifteen thousand on Alsace; the Swiss, fifteen thousand on the Lyonese frontier; the king of Sardinia, fifteen thousand on that of Dauphiné; Spain was to augment its army in Catalonia to twenty thousand; Prussia was well disposed in favour of the coalition, and the king of England was to take part in it as elector of Hanover. All these troops were to move at the same time, at the end of July; the house of Bourbon was then to make a protest, and the powers were to publish a manifesto; until then, however, it was essential to keep the design secret, to avoid all partial insurrection, and to make no attempt at flight. Such was the result of the conferences at Mantua on the 20th May, 1791.