Parties and Politicians under the Constituent Assembly.
It was one of the misfortunes of the Constituent Assembly that it never learned the arts of party government. When the preliminary struggle between the Commons and the privileged orders was over, and the three estates were finally united in one chamber, the Assembly broke up into many different groups; and although these groups in process of time shaped themselves roughly into parties, yet they so far retained their independence, that it was rarely possible to say on any particular question on which side the majority would be, or what groups and politicians might or might not combine together. At first the only distinction was between those who were opposed to the Revolution and those who were its supporters. Gradually, however, as the friends of the new movement insensibly divided, the representatives of the nobles and upper clergy, who had regarded the King's policy as dangerous from the first, found themselves reinforced by wiser politicians, and expanded into a respectable party occupying the benches on the Right. One section of this party—the extreme section—was, it is true, only a noisy and obstructive faction, with reactionary views and with interests largely selfish, which signalised itself, as class-politicians are wont to do, by frequent violence of expression, and by behaviour neither orderly nor well-bred. Among their leaders were the well-known lawyer, d'Eprémesnil, who, as one of the heroes of the Parlement of Paris, had enjoyed in 1788 an astonishing but brief popularity, and the Vicomte de Mirabeau, the conspicuous but too convivial brother of the great statesman who directed the Commons. A more important section of the party was formed by the phalanx of dignitaries of the Church, who followed the lead of the Archbishops of Rouen and Aix. As the attack upon the Church proceeded, these prelates drew after them a large number of the lower clergy, whose sympathies had at first leaned to the popular side. But the most prominent figures upon the benches of the Right were two men, whose remarkable abilities became better known as time went on—Maury, the versatile, witty, dissolute ecclesiastic, who, assisted by his rare power as a debater, rose to the front rank among the leaders of his party, and Cazalés, the indolent, unambitious soldier, whose clear head made it apparent to him, as it was to Maury, that the old order could never be entirely replaced, but who devoted his great oratorical gifts, whenever his lack of energy permitted him to use them, to defending the monarchy, and to denouncing mob-rule.
At first the politicians of the Right, though some were decidedly more liberal-minded than others, consisted principally of men attached to privilege upon grounds of interest, and utterly out of sympathy with the reforming spirit. But events moved fast; and before long the Right was reinforced by a group of deputies of higher capacity, who had welcomed the reforming movement, but whom the measures of the Assembly, after July, 1789, gradually drove into combination with the enemies of change. Among the members whom this group included were a few noblemen of Liberal opinions, in keen sympathy with constitutional reform—the Comte de Clermont-Tonnerre, the Comte de Lally-Tollendal, whose romantic story and generous eloquence more than once, in the first days of the Revolution, roused the interest and enthusiasm of the Assembly, and the Duc de Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, the friend of Turgot and of Arthur Young, and the finest type which those days offer, of what a Grand Seigneur might have been, but rarely was, under the Ancien Régime. The real leaders of this group in the Assembly were two conspicuous members of the Tiers-État, Mounier and Malouet. No deputies of the Commons had come to Versailles with a higher reputation than these two men. Mounier had been the head and front of the movement in Dauphiné in 1788, which had led to the famous Assembly of Vizille, and which had contributed as much as anything else to the summoning of the States-General. When Mounier arrived at Versailles, many people expected that he would become the recognised leader of the Commons. Malouet too had obtained, in Auvergne, a very great reputation during the elections. His fame also had preceded him to Versailles, and had marked him out for future celebrity. These men were no lovers of the Ancien Régime, no lovers of privilege or of unjust distinction. They had, many of them, studied English politics and had a great admiration for the English constitution. They wished to see something like it established in France. They hoped for a Parliament of two Houses, and for a State which would use and employ its leisured class. One of them, Malouet, had had, at home and in the colonies, considerable experience of affairs. They were all fully alive to the advisability of proceeding, with caution, to the wisdom, when possible, of following precedent, to the immediate necessity of enforcing and maintaining order. But it may be that some of them lacked the force, and it seems that Mounier especially lacked the self-command and insight, essential to a leader. For when, in October 1789, difficulties accumulated round them, some of them lost heart and temper, resigned their seats, and gave up the struggle. They had comparatively little sympathy with the vague philosophic and democratic theories in which the majority of their colleagues delighted. They had no sympathy whatever with the Assembly's hesitation to establish a strong Executive, with its passion for equality, or with its suspicious dread of Kings and Ministers and nobles. Studying their views to-day, in the calm light of our own system, it is difficult to refuse to this group of men the praise which is due to great enlightenment and moderation; but it is not difficult to understand, how, in those stormy times, when precedent and experience went for nothing, their grave, and measured counsels fell unheeded, and how, outstripped by the pace of Revolution, they fell back into the ranks of the party of reaction.
Opposite to the politicians of the Right sat the great bulk of the Commons deputies, with a few nobles and a good many clergy among them. This, with its many groups and interests, was, in general terms, the party of Reform, the party which had made the Revolution, which embodied its virtues, its doctrines, its follies, its faults, and with which the responsibility for the policy of the Constituent Assembly rests. In the ranks of this great, heterogeneous party were to be found most of the well-known names of the early period of the Revolution. Among them was Bailly, the cultivated and distinguished man of science, with his high character, his gentle demeanour, his convinced optimism, his tender heart, his pardonable vanity, and his obvious limitations, perhaps the best type of the enthusiastic philanthropists who adopted with ardour the popular cause. Bailly played for a few months a conspicuous and honourable part. He received the high compliment of being appointed successively first President of the National Assembly and first Mayor of Paris; and then, losing heart and reputation among the embarrassments of the great office which he had not sought, he learned the fickleness of popular favour, and was sacrificed to the resentment of the people. Among them too was Sieyès, the democratic priest, the calm logician, the happiest maker of phrases in a nation of happy phrase-makers, the readiest of any to frame reports, to cast resolutions, to draw up plans, the imperturbable builder of constitutions which never endured, sublime in the assurance of his theories, and important owing to the influence which his cool head and ready tongue obtained. Among them was Talleyrand, the Bishop of Autun, the only distinguished Churchman of the time who took a leading part in the attack upon the Church, witty, supple, dissolute, extraordinarily able, and already beginning to display the rare dexterity in understanding men and in ranging his abilities upon the winning side, which afterwards made him the most powerful subject in Europe. Among them were Lafayette, who soon discovered in the great office conferred on him by the Parisians a larger scope for his restless ambition than he could have obtained in Parliamentary tactics, and Mirabeau, leader of no groups, but cynosure of all, the greatest statesman and orator of modern France. Among them were a number of eminent lawyers, Target and Thouret, second only to Sieyès in the influence which they exercised upon the form of the new constitution, with Lanjuinais and Tronchet, and many another celebrated advocate and jurist. Among them were Camus, the grave and determined leader of the Jansenists, who have been aptly named the Puritans of the Roman Catholic Church in France; Rabaut de St. Etienne, the leader of the Protestants, a brave, high-minded man, who had already, before the Revolution, won from the King the recognition of the rights of his co-religionists to citizenship; Dom Gerle, the singular Jacobin monk, whose earnestness was stronger than his reason; and Grégoire, the eloquent priest, with his fine dream of a purified national Church, one of the best of the many enthusiasts who contributed their high-minded errors to the work of national reform. Among them was Garat, the accomplished professor of history, whose facile and excitable convictions always moved with the tide, and who, in spite of his excellent intentions, was perhaps more responsible than any other man for the ruin of the brilliant party with which he came to be associated at a later time. Among them, lastly, was the fortunate Barère, in turn advocate, journalist and politician, at the beginning of the extraordinary career, in which, by dint of never having fixed opinions, he was to rise to the highest place in France.
But the most remarkable, and on the whole the most influential, of the many different groups in the party of Reform, was that which followed the lead of Duport, Barnave and Lameth. These men formed a close triumvirate of political allies. They collected about them the nucleus of a powerful party, and they generally controlled the policy of the Left. This group possessed in Duport a party organiser of elastic principles, but of considerable tact and ability; in Barnave an orator inferior in capacity to very few men in the history of the Revolution; and in the Comte Charles de Lameth one of the most popular and gifted of the young, liberal-minded nobles. Led by the triumvirate, and managed by Duport, it attached to itself many brilliant, well-bred and ambitious Radicals, including the Comte Alexandre de Lameth, the Duc d'Aiguillon and the Vicomte de Noailles, and it commanded a majority which on many occasions effectually decided the policy of the Assembly.
Finally, apart from the great majority of the deputies of the Left, there sat a small group of extreme politicians, destined to become very famous as a party. They were democrats of an acerb and uncompromising type. They were often violent in their speeches, exceedingly dogmatic in their views, finely contemptuous of experience and of facts, morbidly jealous of government and authority. But they unceasingly put forward, regardless of what the Assembly thought, the doctrines of theoretic democracy, in which they passionately believed, and they steadily won favour with the multitude, which, caring little for their dogmatic errors, appreciated their real devotion to its cause. Among the speakers of this remarkable group, the Assembly gradually learned to listen to the far-strained, interminable rhetoric of Robespierre, and to recognise the growing importance of Pétion, Merlin, Rewbell, Vadier, and Buzot.
If the popular party was the stronger in the Assembly, it was infinitely the stronger out of doors. The politicians of the galleries, of the cafés, of the district assemblies of Paris—notably of the district of the Cordeliers, where the well-known lawyer Danton was already building up his great reputation—began to exercise upon the course of events an influence which increased every day. The politicians of the streets and the elements of disorder were mostly upon the democratic side, and the consequence was that prominent members of the Right were repeatedly exposed to insults and persecution, which made their lives unsafe and almost intolerable. Some of them unwisely responded by challenging their opponents to duels, and the increase of political duels led more than once to outbreaks of excitement. In the matter of political clubs also the superiority of the popular party was marked. The little group of Breton deputies, which had expanded into a club of advanced reformers at Versailles, still further expanded when its members came to Paris. It took up its abode in the library of the old Jacobin convent in the Rue St. Honoré. It threw open its doors to all ardent supporters of the Revolution, whether they were members of the Assembly or not. It became the headquarters of those members of the Left who followed the lead of Duport and Barnave, and before long also of those sterner politicians who recognised the leadership of Robespierre and Pétion. On their side, the moderate members of the Right maintained for some time the 'Club des Impartiaux,' which afterwards became the 'Club Monarchique;' and the more moderate members of the Left, including among others Mirabeau, Lafayette, Talleyrand and Bailly, founded, in May, 1790, the 'Club of 1789,' to counterbalance the influence of the Jacobins. But neither of these enterprises succeeded in forming a strong political connection, and the advantages of elaborate organisation remained at the disposal of the Jacobins alone.