The trouble caused by the scarcity of food was stimulated by another motive second to it only in importance—the feverish excitement of political hope. Depressed and ignorant as they were, the labouring class in France had, nevertheless, grasped the idea that in some vague way the meeting of the States-General marked an era in their lives, and was somehow or other destined to ease the intolerable burden of their lot. With them political freedom and constitutional reform took the immediate shape of food, work, and relief from feudalism and taxation. Once the idea had been implanted in them, their restless anticipations rapidly increased. Every week of delay rendered them less manageable. Every check experienced by the Assembly was a spur to their impatience. Every step taken by the Government to assert its authority or to overawe the reformers filled them with indignation, suspicion and panic. In the poorer districts of Paris, and especially in the gardens of the Palais Royal—the headquarters of Bohemians, idlers, mischief-makers, crowds—the political excitement of the time found expression in perpetual demonstrations, not unmixed with rioting and outbreaks. The regular authorities of the city, unused to the spectacle, looked on, unable to control it. The police force of Paris under the Ancien Régime was so small as to be practically useless. The garrison, formed of the Gardes Françaises, who were responsible for the maintenance of order, sympathised with the citizens, who spared no hospitality or flatteries to gain them, and finally, mutinying against their officers, went over to the popular side. The other regiments in the neighbourhood showed a marked inclination to follow the example of the Gardes Françaises. The Government, deserted by its own agents, drew back; and the spirit of disorder, produced by the desire for food and the desire for freedom, obtained the mastery of Paris, and took command of the Revolution too.
The example set by Paris was immediately followed in the provinces. At Strasbourg, Lyons, Dijon, Troyes, Besançon, Rouen, Caen, all over the country, spontaneous risings occurred, directed against the authorities or practices of the Ancien Régime, and often accompanied by violence and bloodshed. The people, stimulated by the pressure of famine and by the feverish excitement of the time, and believing that the hour of their deliverance had come, determined to deliver themselves. In different places the outbreak took a hundred different forms. In garrison cities the people, imitating the Parisians, attacked the nearest fortress or castle, and, as in Paris, the troops generally fraternised with the assailants. In some quarters popular indignation was directed against the tax-offices and custom-houses, in some against the local magistrates, in some against the tithes, in some against the newly-introduced machinery, in some against the Jews, in most against corn-dealers and all concerned in trafficking in grain. In the towns the distressed workmen rose against the bourgeois, and against the unjust economic system, which had long rendered their condition unbearable. In the country districts the peasants rose against the iniquities of feudalism, and burned the monasteries and châteaux, where the court-rolls, the records of their hated liabilities, were kept. No doubt, with the desire to redress abuses there mingled, in the minds of an ignorant and embittered peasantry, a great deal of ferocity and crime. In many places indiscriminate war was declared against all kinds of property, and the outbreak took the form of a struggle between rich and poor. But the most notable features of the revolutionary movement were, first, its universality, and secondly, the powerlessness of the authorities to confront or to suppress it. Everywhere the agents of the administration collapsed. The Intendants, the law-courts, the police, completely paralysed, abdicated or disappeared, and the inhabitants of town and country alike, recognising the helplessness of the Government, gave way to an inevitable panic.
The consequence was that the months of July and August were signalised by a sense of insecurity amounting to terror. The wildest rumours pervaded the country, and the most extraordinary instances are found of places where the people, panic-stricken by some vague, unfounded report of the approach of brigands, who had no existence out of their imagination, rushed to arms or fled into concealment to protect themselves against their own alarm. One result of the 'great fear' was that volunteer forces of citizens, interested in restoring order, sprang up on all sides, in imitation of the National Guard just organised in Paris, to which they were destined before long to be assimilated; and these volunteer forces, though sometimes used by the bourgeois to repress the movements and to maintain the subjection of the labouring class, were still invaluable in restoring peace. Moreover, in place of the authorities of the Ancien Régime, there sprang up, to exercise the duties of administration, informal municipal committees composed of electors, which, usurping the powers abdicated by the Government, rapidly organised themselves, secured the obedience of their fellow-citizens, and set to work, as best they could, to reconstruct the administration of the country. The rapidity and skill with which these municipal committees and their volunteer forces organised themselves, clearly illustrate the readiness of the provinces to act on their own initiative and to take over the responsibilities of the Revolution, and show how completely the people of France at first kept pace with, if they did not outstrip, their leaders in Paris and Versailles.
The most obvious and the wisest course for the National Assembly to adopt, would have been to legalise as rapidly as possible the changes so suddenly effected, and to set to work without delay to organise the new administrative system. After the 14th July, the King had completely surrendered, and the Assembly had only to act in order to be obeyed. The task before it was, it is true, difficult and almost endless. It was imperatively necessary to restore order. But it was also imperatively necessary—and this the Assembly did not see—to construct, as quickly as it could be done, some form of local government, to replace the old order which had disappeared. It was imperative to provide by some means for the necessities of the revenue, until a permanent financial system could be organised, in place of the old taxes which people would no longer pay. It was imperative to take steps to convince, not only the bourgeois and the peasants, but the distressed artisans in the towns as well, that the Assembly was alive to the urgent necessities of the moment, had a real grasp of the situation of affairs, and would do all that could be done to protect their interests, and to save them from the starvation which they imminently feared. These were the measures which Mirabeau urged upon his colleagues, but unfortunately, there were few men in the Assembly who possessed the gift of practical statesmanship, which genius, lit by experience, had conferred on Mirabeau.
The character of that famous Assembly, read in its own day by the critical but far-seeing eyes of Burke, has excited the wonder of posterity. Its most notable feature was its want of practical experience. Among the upper clergy and the nobles, there were, it is true, certain deputies, who from their position had obtained some knowledge of affairs, but these men were liable to be distrusted by their colleagues, because the moderation which their experience taught them, obviously coincided with their interests. Among the Commons there were not a dozen men who had held important administrative posts. There was only one deputy, Malouet, who had held the great office of Intendant, and was in consequence really familiar with the working of the old administrative system. The great majority of the deputies of the Commons consisted of lawyers of little celebrity, who brought to the Assembly all the facility of expression, but little of the utilitarian caution, which in England is associated with their profession. The place of experience, in the case of most members of the Assembly, was taken by a large imagination, a boundless optimism, a vast store of philosophic tags and democratic phrases, a fatal fluency of speech, a fine belief in logic, an academic disregard of the rude facts of practical existence. Never was any body of men so much inspired by hope and confidence, so full of honourable enthusiasm, so convinced of its own ability, or so fixed in its honest desire, to regenerate the world.
Accordingly, the early history of the Assembly is marked by a series of strange scenes, only possible in a nation with whom extreme versatility of temperament takes the place of humour, illustrating the susceptibility, the emotion, the feverish excitement, the liability of the whole body to act on the impulse of the moment, regardless of what the consequences might be. A happy phrase, a witty saying, a burst of declamation, would carry it off its feet, and settle the fate of a division. The prodigious quantity of written rhetoric declaimed from the tribune wasted a prodigious quantity of time, but there was always an audience ready to applaud it. The debates were conducted with very little order. The entire absence of method in the Chamber often frustrated the business-like work done by its committees. In vain Mirabeau urged his colleagues to adopt the procedure of the English House of Commons. The French people, newly emancipated, disdained the example of any other nation. In the great halls at Paris and Versailles, where the Assembly successively sat, the process of legislation continued to be attended by a constant clatter of talk and movement, interrupted by noisy shouts and gestures, by obstruction and personal abuse, and aggravated by the presence in the galleries of large numbers of strangers, whom at first the Assembly welcomed, and whose turbulence it afterwards vainly attempted to control. The noisy demonstrations in the Strangers' Gallery encouraged extreme speeches and proposals, shouted down unpopular orators, and gradually organised a species of mob-rule. The occupants of the galleries ultimately became one of the greatest dangers and defects of the Assembly. By the intimidation which they practised, not only inside its walls, but outside in the streets as well, they daunted and terrorised even brave men; and before long they forced into silence or flight many politicians, whose influence would have been valuable to the cause of moderation and good sense.
These facts ought not to be forgotten when one is considering the action of the Assembly, for they help to explain the slowness of its procedure, and illustrate the inexperience which was its besetting, but inevitable, fault. Moreover, during the months of July and August, the Assembly was probably still amazed at its own success, and had scarcely realised its own omnipotence. Most of the deputies of the majority, although anxious for reform, had no very definite opinions, and as yet the machinery of political parties and political principles did not exist among them. The consequence was that instead of acting with vigour and precision, they gave themselves up to general discussions. They imagined that men already in rebellion, clamouring for food and for a fair opportunity to earn it, would be satisfied by reiterated assurances that they were equal, sovereign, free; and proceeded to debate, for weeks together, the Declaration of the Rights of Man. From that subject they passed at length to consider the bases of the new constitution, and in the month of September two important constitutional questions were decided. The Assembly rejected by an overwhelming majority the proposal for dividing the future Parliament into two Houses on the English model, and resolved that there should be only one Chamber in the constitution which they were beginning to create. Secondly, jealous of the royal authority, and misled by unstatesmanlike counsels, the Assembly determined, against the wiser voice of Mirabeau, that the King should have, not an absolute, but only a suspensive veto on the laws passed by the future Parliament; in other words, that he should not be able to reject any measure which the Chamber approved, but might refuse his sanction to it until time or agitation compelled him to yield. Once only, in these early weeks, did the Assembly come near to the questions which were really agitating France, when, on the night of the 4th August, horrified by the report of its own committee, it gave way to the impulse of the moment, and abolished in a series of reckless resolutions all feudal survivals, serfdom, tithes, all exemptions from taxes, and every other exclusive privilege existing in the kingdom. And yet, unwise as the Assembly's conduct seems to us, and incapable as it unquestionably proved, nothing can be clearer than the uprightness of intention, which governed it as a whole in these early days, and the earnest enthusiasm for humanity and justice, which dictated its policy and distended its debates.
But while the Assembly debated, Paris starved. The victory of the 14th July had done little for the Parisians, and the disorder which had accompanied it, and which had broken out afresh, a week later, in the murder of the detested Intendant Foulon, had not by any means ceased. Three days after the fall of the Bastille, the King had come to Paris, to be publicly reconciled with his subjects, and Bailly and Lafayette had been informally elected, the one Mayor of Paris, the other Commander-in-chief of the new National Guard. Lafayette at once set to work to form the National Guard of Paris into a civic army of thirty thousand men, and incorporated the Gardes Françaises with them as a paid battalion. He spared no pains to attach the force to his own person; and it seems clear that he designed to use it, not only to maintain order in the interests of the middle class, and to keep down the large discontented element which swarmed in the city, but also as a political instrument, to direct the Revolution in accordance with his own views. But even with this force behind him, Lafayette found that order was exceedingly difficult to keep; while Bailly, for his part, was overwhelmed with anxiety, working day and night with troublesome subordinates to supply the capital with bread, which daily became dearer and harder to obtain.