The history of the Girondists contains Lamartine's political faith. It is not without its poetry and its Utopian visions; but it is full of thought and valuable reflections, and breathes throughout the loftiest and most noble sentiments. Lamartine, in that history, becomes the panegyrist and the censor of the French Revolution. He vindicates with a powerful hand the ideas which it evolved; while he castigates, and depicts with poetic melancholy its mournful errors and its tragic character. He makes Vergniaud, the chief of the Girondists, say before his execution—"In grafting the tree, my friend, we have killed it. It was too old. Robespierrie cuts it. Will he be more successful than ourselves? No. This soil is too unsteady to nourish the roots of civil liberty; this people is too childish to handle its laws without wounding itself. It will come back to its kings as children come back to their rattle. We made a mistake in our births, in being born and dying for the liberty of the world. We imagined that we were in Rome, and we were in Paris. But revolutions are like those crises which, in a single night, turn men's hair gray. They ripen the people fast. The blood in our veins is warm enough to fecundate the soil of the Republic. Let us not take with us the future, and let us bequeath to the people our hope in return for the death which it gives us."[12]
It is impossible that Lamartine should not have felt as a poet what he expressed as a historian, and his character is too sincere to prevent him from acting out his conviction. In describing the death of the founders of the first French Republic, Lamartine employs the whole pathos of his poetic inspiration.
"They (the Girondists) possessed three virtues which in the eyes of posterity atone for many faults. They worshiped liberty; they founded the Republic—this precautions truth of future governments;—at last, they died, because they refused blood to the people. Their time has condemned them to death, the future has judged them to glory and pardon. They died because they did not allow Liberty to soil itself, and posterity will yet engrave on their memory the inscription which Vergniaud, their oracle, has, with his own hand, engraved on the wall of his dungeon: 'Rather death than crime!' 'Potius mori quam foedari!'"
Lamartine is visibly inclined in favor of the Girondists—the founders of the Republic; but his sense of justice does not permit him to condemn the Jacobins without vindicating their memory from that crushing judgment which their contemporaries pronounced upon them. He thus describes, in a few masterly strokes, the character of Robespierre:
"Robespierre's refusal of the supreme power was sincere in the motives which he alleged. But there were other motives which caused him to reject the sole government. These motives he did not yet avow. The fact is that he had arrived at the end of his thoughts, and that himself did not know what form was best suited to revolutionary institutions. More a man of ideas than of action, Robespierre had the sentiment of the Revolution rather than the political formula. The soul of the institutions of the future was in his dreams, but he lacked the mechanism of a popular government. His theories, all taken from books, were brilliant and vague as perspectives, and cloudy as the far distance. He contemplated them daily; he was dazzled by them; but he never touched them with the firm and precise hand of practice. He forgot that Liberty herself requires the protection of a strong power, and that this power must have a head to conceive, and hands to execute. He believed that the words Liberty, Equality, Disinterestedness, Devotion, Virtue, incessantly repeated, were themselves a government. He took philosophy for politics, and became indignant at his false calculations. He attributed continually his deceptions to the conspiracies of aristocrats and demagogues. He thought that in extinguishing from society the aristocrats and demagogues, he would be able to suppress the vices of humanity, and the obstacles to the work of liberal institutions. His notion of the people was an illusion, not a reality. He became irritated to find the people often so weak, so cowardly, so cruel, so ignorant, so changeable, so unworthy the rank which nature has assigned them. He became irritated and soured, and challenged the scaffold to extricate him from his difficulties. Then, indignant at the excesses of the scaffold, he returned to words of justice and humanity. Then once more he seized upon the scaffold, invoked virtue and suscitated death. Floating sometimes on clouds, sometimes in human gore, he despaired of mankind and became frightened at himself. 'Death, and nothing but death!' he cried, in conversation with his intimate friends, 'and the villains charge it upon me. What memory shall I leave behind me if this goes on? Life is a burthen to me!'"
Once, says Lamartine, the truth became manifest. He (Robespierre) exclaimed, with a gesture of despair, "No, I was not made to govern, I was made to combat the enemies of the people!"
These meditations on the character of Robespierre, show sufficiently that Lamartine, though he may not as yet have taken a positive direction in politics, has at least, from his vague poetical conceptions, returned to a sound state of political criticism, the inevitable precursor of sound theories. His views on the execution of the royal family are severe but just.
"Had the French nation a right to judge Louis XVI. as a legal tribunal?" demands Lamartine. "No! Because the judge ought to be impartial and disinterested—and the nation was neither the one nor the other. In this terrible but inevitable combat, in which, under the name of revolution, royalty and liberty were engaged for emancipating or enslaving the citizen, Louis XVI. personified the throne, the nation personified liberty. This was not their fault, it was their nature. All attempts at a mutual understanding were in vain. Their natures warred against each other in spite of their inclination toward peace. Between these two adversaries, the king and the people, of whom the one, by instinct, was prompted to retain, the other to wrest from its antagonist the rights of the nation, there was no tribunal but combat, no judge but victory. We do not mean to say that there was not above the parties a moral of the case, and acts which judge even victory itself. This justice never perishes in the eclipse of the law, and the ruin of empires; but it has no tribunal before which it can legally summon the accused; it is the justice of state, the justice which has neither regularly appointed judges, nor written laws, but which pronounces its sentences in men's consciences, and whose code is equity."
"Louis XVI. could not be judged in politics or equity, but by a process of state. Had the nation a right to judge him thus? As well might we demand whether she had a right to fight and conquer, in other words, as well might we ask whether despotism is inviolable—whether liberty is a revolt—whether there is no justice here below but for kings—whether there is, for the people, no other right than to serve and obey? The mere doubt is an act of impiety toward the people."
So far the political philosophy of Lamartine, the legal argument against the king, strikes us as less logical and just. We may agree with him in principle, but we cannot assent to the abstract justice of his conclusions.