The Girondists were not less eager for a declaration of hostilities. Either the King must, in that case, place his veto upon the measure, or he must denounce hostilities against his brother-in-law and his brothers, subjecting himself to all the suspicions of bad faith which such a measure inferred. If the arms of the nation were victorious, the risk of a revolution in favour of royalty by insurrections within, or invasions from without the kingdom, was ended at once and for ever. And if the foreigners obtained advantages, it would be easy to turn the unpopularity of the defeat upon the monarch, and upon the Constitutionalists, who had insisted, and did still insist, on retaining him as the ostensible head of the executive government.
The Jacobins, those whose uniform object it was to keep the impulse of forcible and revolutionary measures in constant action, seemed to be divided among themselves on the great question of war or peace. Robespierre himself struggled, in the club, against the declaration of hostilities, probably because he wished the Brissotins to take all the responsibility of that hazardous measure, secure beforehand to share the advantage which it might afford those Republicans against the King and Constitutionalists. He took care that Louis should profit nothing by the manner in which he pleaded the cause of justice and humanity. He affected to prophesy disasters to the ill-provided and ill-disciplined armies of France, and cast the blame beforehand on the known treachery of the King and the Royalists, the arbitrary designs of La Fayette and the Constitutionalists, and the doubtful patriotism of Brissot and Condorcet. His arguments retarded, though they could not stop, the declaration of war, which probably they were not intended seriously to prevent; and the most violent and sanguinary of men obtained a temporary character for love of humanity, by adding hypocrisy to his other vices. The Jacobins in general, notwithstanding Robespierre's remonstrances, moved by the same motives which operated with the Brissotins, declared ultimately in favour of hostilities.[181]
The resolution for war, therefore, predominated in the Assembly, and two preparatory measures served, as it were, to sound the intentions of the King on the subject, and to ascertain how far he was disposed to adhere to the constitutional government which he had accepted, against those who, in his name, seemed prepared by force of arms to restore the old system of monarchy. Two decrees were passed against the emigrants in the Assembly, [Nov. 9.] The first was directed against the King's brother, and summoned Xavier Stanislaus, Prince of France, to return into France in two months, upon pain of forfeiting his right to the regency. The King consented to this decree: he could not, indeed, dissent from it with consistency, being, as he had consented to be, the holder of the crown under a constitution, against which his exiled brother had publicly declared war. The second decree denounced death against all emigrants who should be found assembled in arms on the 1st of January next.[182] The right of a nation to punish with extreme pains those of its native subjects who bear arms against her, has never been disputed. But although, on great changes of the state, the vanquished party, when essaying a second struggle, stand in the relation of rebels against the existing government, yet there is generally wisdom as well as humanity, in delaying to assert this right in its rigour, until such a period shall have elapsed, as shall at once have established the new government in a confirmed state of possession, and given those attached to the old one time to forget their habits and predilections in its favour.
Under this defence, Louis ventured to use the sole constitutional weapon with which he was intrusted. He refused his consent to the decree. Sensible of the unpopularity attending this rejection, the King endeavoured to qualify it, by issuing a severe proclamation against the emigrants, countermanding their proceedings;—which was only considered as an act of dissimulation and hypocrisy.
The decree last proposed, jarred necessarily on the heart and sensibility of Louis; the next affected his religious scruples. The National Assembly had produced a schism in the Church, by imposing on the clergy a constitutional oath, inconsistent with their religious vows. The philosophers in the present legislative body, with all the intolerance which they were in the habit of objecting against the Catholic Church, resolved to render the breach irreparable.
They had, they thought, the opportunity of striking a death's blow at the religion of the state, and they remembered, that the watch-word applied by the Encyclopedists to Christianity, had been Ecrasez l'Infame. The proposed decree bore, that such priests as refused the constitutional oath should forfeit the pension allowed them for subsistence, when the government seized upon the estates of the clergy; that they should be put into a state of surveillance, in the several departments where they resided, and banished from France the instant they excited any religious dissensions.[183]
A prince, with the genuine principles of philosophy, would have rejected this law as unjust and intolerant; but Louis had stronger motives to interpose his constitutional veto, as a Catholic Christian, whose conscience would not permit him to assent to the persecution of the faithful servants of his Church. He refused his assent to this decree also.
In attempting to shelter the emigrants and the recusant churchmen, the King only rendered himself the more immediate object of the popular resentment. His compassion for the former was probably mingled with a secret wish, that the success of their arms might relieve him from his present restraint; at any rate, it was a motive easily imputed, and difficult to be disproved. He was, therefore, represented to his people as in close union with the bands of exiled Frenchmen, who menaced the frontiers of the kingdom, and were about to accompany the foreign armies on their march to the metropolis. The royal rejection of the decree against the orthodox clergy was imputed to Louis's superstition, and his desire of rebuilding an ancient Gothic hierarchy unworthy of an enlightened age. In short, that was now made manifest, which few wise men had ever doubted, namely, that so soon as the King should avail himself of his constitutional right, in resistance to the popular will, he was sure to incur the risk of losing both his crown and life.[184]
Meantime this danger was accelerated by the consequences of a dissension in the royal cabinet. It will scarcely be believed, that situations in the ministry of France, so precarious in its tenure, so dangerous in its possession, so enfeebled in its authority, should have been, even at this time, the object of ambition; and that to possess such momentary and doubtful eminence, men, and wise men too, employed all the usual arts of intrigue and circumvention, by which rival statesmen, under settled governments and in peaceful times, endeavour to undermine and supplant each other. We have heard of criminals in the Scottish Highlands, who asserted with obstinacy the dignity of their clans, when the only test of pre-eminence was the priority of execution. We have read, too, of the fatal raft, where shipwrecked men in the midst of the Atlantic, contended together with mortal strife for equally useless preferences. But neither case is equal in extravagance to the conduct of those rivals, who struggled for power in the cabinet of Louis XVI. in 1792, when, take what party they would, the jealousy of the Assembly, and the far more fatal proscription of the Jacobins, was sure to be the reward of their labours. So, however, it was, and the fact serves to show, that a day of power is more valuable in the eyes of ambition, than a lifetime of ease and safety.
CHANGE OF MINISTRY.