The French Revolution

by Sir Charles Edward Mallet

To the surprise of the Girondists, the Jacobin leaders took a totally different line. Fearing that the declaration of war would increase the power of the Government and would strengthen the hands of the hated Lafayette, the Jacobins began to sever themselves from the Gironde, and to oppose the idea of a campaign. No doubt, their opposition was partly due to the fact that on principle many of them were averse to war, although in the days of the Jacobin triumph, this principle, like others, was to be cast to the winds. But in so far as their opposition was due to tactical and party reasons, it shows a strange lack of political discernment, for of all parties then existing the Jacobins were the most certain to profit by the outbreak of hostilities. Brissot and the Girondists saw this clearly, and vainly endeavoured to convince their allies. From that time forward the rivalry between Robespierre and Brissot became bitter and acute. But the Jacobin politicians allowed their fear of the Executive to carry them away. Anything which made rulers powerful must, they thought, be dangerous to freedom. Danton, Robespierre, Marat and Billaud-Varennes, all adopted the same language, and the Jacobin Club protested loudly against the demand for war.

But the Girondists carried the day. Lafayette's manœuvres, their own enthusiasm, and the militant temper of the nation, all helped their designs. Narbonne's schemes indeed collapsed, and early in March, 1792, he was dismissed from a Ministry with most of which he disagreed. But the war-party revenged Narbonne's dismissal by driving his colleagues from office. Louis, yielding to the storm, and endeavouring once again, as he had sometimes endeavoured before, to identify himself with the Assembly, selected a new Ministry from the popular party. Roland was appointed Minister of the Interior, and Dumouriez took the portfolio of Foreign Affairs. Dumouriez, who owed his appointment to the Girondists, for whom, nevertheless, he had a rich contempt, was the only person of note in the Government, but he possessed ability enough to compensate for all the deficiencies of his colleagues. Lax in morality and principle, he was a man of infinite resource, bold, ambitious and consummately adroit. He welcomed the idea of a conflict with Austria. He hoped, as Narbonne had done, to secure the neutrality or alliance of England, and, if possible, the friendship of Prussia, but he was prepared to take the chances of a struggle with the rest of Europe. The appointment of the new Ministry gave the Girondists the command of the political situation, and from that moment France drifted rapidly into war.

Events abroad made a rupture easy. In spite of the provocations offered to him by the French Assembly, Leopold had clung steadily to peace. His sagacity saw that the one chance for the Monarchy in France lay in the desire of the Constitutional party to re-establish order. He was determined to strengthen their hands, if he could, and for that purpose to limit the interference of the Powers to joint diplomatic pressure in their behalf. But early in March, 1792, Leopold suddenly died. His heir Francis, unrestrained by his father's tact and moderation, assumed a different tone and showed less patience. The chances of any effective pressure from the Powers declined, as the prospect of war rose on the horizon. Francis' language was sufficiently sharp to give the Assembly the pretext which it longed for, and on the 20th April, Louis, amid general enthusiasm, came down to the Assembly and declared war against Austria. The effects of that momentous step no comment can exaggerate. It ruined the best hopes of the Revolution, and prepared the way for a military despotism in the future. All who hesitated, all who felt that mistakes had been committed but who still hoped that they might be repaired, all who believed that the Revolution might yet vindicate itself by combining liberty with order, saw themselves forced to choose, no longer between order and disorder, but between the old system and the new, between the ancient Monarchy and freedom, between the cause of their country and the cause of the invaders. Had there been no war with Europe, the astonishing episode of the Jacobin triumph, the worst excesses of the later Revolution, and all the crimes and glories of the Terror, could never have taken place in France.

It should be clearly understood that, even after the declaration of war, the friends of the Monarchy, who wished the Revolution to pause, were in a great majority both in Paris and in France. But they were disorganised and often lukewarm, divided into numberless different groups, jealous and distrustful of one another, largely governed by personal motives, with no clear policy before them, incapable of acting loyally together, and without the ability to act wisely, even if they could unite. Barnave and the Lameths distrusted Lafayette. Lafayette distrusted Dumouriez. The stronger royalists distrusted Barnave. The King distrusted all alike. On the other side was a smaller but more active party, full of enthusiasm and audacity, not, it is true, without enmities and divisions of its own, but still better organised than its opponents, prepared to embark on a policy of danger, and to hope that the future would turn to its account. In that situation of affairs the war broke out, and its effects were soon apparent. It rendered Louis' dethronement almost certain. It drew a sharp line between those who were on the side of France and of the Revolution, and those who were on the side of the Emigrants and invaders, a line which placed the King upon one side and the vast majority of his subjects on the other. It rallied all patriots to the party which undertook the national defence. It made the Jacobins, whom the enemy denounced, the heroes of the popular resistance. It forced into helpless inaction all those who wanted order and a king, but who could not lift voice or hand for Louis, if by doing so they weakened the unity of France. It rendered possible, though it did not necessitate, the Terror, for it converted all opponents of the Revolution into traitors. It led at once to national peril, and through peril to panic and confusion. In the confusion the elements of disorder, already rife in France and taught impunity by the experience of the past two years, rose uncontrolled in insurrection, and patriotism became identified with crime.

The movement of events was rapid. At the end of April, the campaign opened with an attempted invasion of Belgium. But the French troops were disorganised; their commanders were timid and incapable; two French divisions were shamefully defeated, and the general of one was murdered by his men. 'You marched out like madmen,' wrote Dumouriez bitterly, 'and you returned like fools.' The bad news from the front intensified the excitement in Paris. Another Ministerial crisis resulted in the appointment of Servan, a stern Republican, as Minister of War. The attacks upon the Queen redoubled. The lawlessness of the politicians of the streets increased. The Girondists, determined to weaken the Monarchy, abolished the King's constitutional guard, voted the banishment of all refractory priests, and decreed that a camp of twenty thousand men from the departments should be formed in the immediate neighbourhood of the capital. Since the winter, the Parisian mobs had been armed with pikes; and it seems that the Girondists, knowing that the influence of the Jacobin leaders with the populace of Paris was greater than their own, desired to have at hand a strong force of ardent revolutionists, distinct from the Parisians, on whom they could rely. The King, however, disliking these proposals, and wearied by the studied rudeness of his Ministers, refused to sanction the formation of the camp and the persecution of the refractory priests. Then Madame Roland, in her husband's name, attacked him in a foolish and impertinent letter, and Louis, roused to unusual irritation, dismissed his Girondist advisers on the 12th June. For a moment Dumouriez remained at the head of affairs; but finding that he could not induce Louis to accept his views, he too resigned a few days later, and accepted a command in the army. Lafayette took advantage of the occasion to make a violent attack upon Dumouriez, thus converting into an enemy a man whom he might have found an invaluable ally. Louis fell back on a new Ministry of personal friends of Lafayette, and the General wrote to the Assembly denouncing and threatening the Jacobin party. Thereupon the mob forces of Paris, equally alarmed by the dismissal of the Girondists and by the tone of Lafayette, broke into insurrection and invaded the Tuileries on the 20th June.

The insurrection of the 20th June, which had been for some time preparing, was not the work of the Republican leaders. The Girondists held aloof, and Danton and Robespierre discouraged the proposal. It was entirely the action of the subalterns of the party, led by Santerre. Almost to the last, the responsible men held back. Even on the 10th August, the Girondist leaders, who had been working for months to upset the throne, hesitated, when the victory was within their grasp. They had grown afraid of their Jacobin allies, while the Jacobins knew the smallness of their own forces, and still feared the strength of their opponents. The abortive riot of the 20th of June was followed by a brief reaction in the King's favour. Lafayette came up to Paris, denounced the rioters at the bar of the Assembly, proposed to shut the Jacobin club, and offered to carry the King out of Paris. The National Guards and the Parisian bourgeois, shocked by the insult offered to the Sovereign, showed themselves ready to rally round Lafayette. One of the new ministers, Terrier de Monciel, was a man of considerable energy and insight. He urged the King to place himself in the hands of the Constitutional party, and with their help to escape from Paris and appeal to France. But Louis, even in his desperate situation, could not be prevailed on to act cordially with Lafayette. He preferred to trust to the chapter of accidents and to wait for the Allies to deliver him. The General's offers were coldly received. The favourable moment was allowed to pass. Lafayette, naturally offended, and always incapable of decisive action, returned humiliated to his army. Monciel's schemes were rejected, and, early in July, he and his colleagues resigned. The Court had deliberately thrown away its last chance of safety.

All through the month of July the agitation in Paris increased. On the 11th, the National Assembly declared that the country was in danger, and issued a stirring appeal for volunteers. The Republicans began to rally again, and the arrival of the Fédérés from the departments, to celebrate the festival of the fall of the Bastille, although partly checked by the vigorous action of Monciel, supplied them with the force which they required. The troops of the line remaining in the capital were ordered to the front. The leaders of the insurrection of the 20th June, acting with the Fédérés from the provinces, and encouraged this time by the Jacobin leaders, set to work to organise a rising in the revolutionary Sections of Paris. The denunciations of the King and of Lafayette, and the intimidation of the deputies in the streets redoubled. The reactionary party heightened the excitement by prophesying the speedy vengeance of the invaders. The allied forces at last began to show signs of activity, and at the end of July, the Duke of Brunswick, their commander-in-chief, issued a manifesto to the French people.

The idea of a manifesto had originated with Louis himself. Before the end of May, acting on the advice of Malouet and Montmorin, he had sent Mallet du Pan with a confidential message to the Allied Sovereigns at Frankfort. In this communication he entreated the Powers to adhere to Leopold's policy, to make it plain that their object was not to dismember France or to restore the proscribed classes, but only to set the King free, so that he might suppress the Jacobins, and readjust the Constitution in the interests of order and liberty combined. Louis' objects were not unworthy, but the policy by which he sought to achieve them was hopelessly unsound. Even had the Allies taken his advice, no arguments could have made the invasion palatable to Frenchmen. And, once war was declared, there was little chance that his advice would be heeded. Since the outbreak of hostilities the influence of the Emigrants had increased abroad. They paid no attention to the warnings of Louis. They indignantly discarded the moderate language suggested to them by Mallet du Pan, and imparted their own spirit to the Duke of Brunswick's manifesto. The result was that the manifesto, with its violent and irrational menaces, caused the wildest indignation in France, roused the whole people to protest against it, and immediately facilitated the deposition of the King.

At last, early in August, the crisis came. The manifesto of the Allies, the arrival of a body of zealous Republican Fédérés from Marseilles, and the final breach between the King and the Gironde, precipitated the insurrection. The municipal authorities distributed cartridges freely in the Faubourg St. Antoine, while they refused ammunition to the National Guard. The insurrectionary leaders in the Sections completed their organisation, and arranged matters with the officials of the Commune. It is curious to notice that, almost at the end, the Girondists, frightened by the success of the Jacobins, tried to avert a rising and to compromise with the King. Had Louis been willing to replace them in office and to accept their terms unreservedly, it seems almost certain that they would at the last moment have broken with the Jacobins, and, in spite of their vaunted republicanism, have ranged themselves on the King's side. But Louis would listen to no overtures, and so they left him to his fate. It is also curious to notice how small—even at this time of keen excitement and revolutionary triumph—the insurrectionary battalions were, how few voters supported them in the Sections, how the heads of the party trembled for the result, and how difficult they found it to raise an adequate and imposing force. Had the defenders of the Tuileries had a leader to inspire them, had Louis for once laid sentiment aside and displayed a flash of determined courage, the rising might have been defeated and the mob dispersed. Napoleon, who watched the whole scene from a window, and who afterwards declared in St. Helena that the spectacle in the Tuileries gardens at nightfall was more horrible than any of his battle-fields, believed that, had Louis used his opportunities, he might easily have won the day. But the irresolution, which had been his ruin, dogged the King's footsteps to the last, and the 10th August ended in the capture of the Tuileries and the destruction of the throne.

The six weeks which followed the victorious insurrection were weeks of intense excitement in Paris. The two sections of Republicans divided the spoil. Roland and his colleagues returned to office, and Danton was appointed Minister of Justice. For the moment Danton became the most conspicuous man in France. The young lawyer had thrown himself into the revolutionary movement with characteristic intrepidity and ardour. Reckless, cynical, unscrupulous as he was, Danton bore the stamp of greatness. He was a king fit for the turbulent, ambitious spirits, whom Robespierre was too timid a theorist, and Marat too gloomy a fanatic to inspire. His physical vigour, his stentorian voice, his eloquent fancy, his fierce contempt for little men and little measures, the rough but genuine kindliness of his nature, and his real enthusiasm for his country and for freedom, appealed irresistibly to the imagination of his followers. Wherever he had appeared, whether at the Cordeliers Club, in the early days of the Revolution, or, later, among the officials of the Department of the Seine, or, later still, in the Commune of Paris, he had made a profound impression, and after the 10th August he naturally took the lead. Unquestionably Danton had grave faults. He had too few principles or scruples, little elevation of character, no refinement of mind. But yet there is a certain air of grandeur round him. His patriotism and courage cannot be doubted. His insight and capacity for statesmanship stand in marked contrast to the incapacity of his associates. No man learned more or more quickly from experience. And of his surpassing force and influence there are a hundred proofs.