Arrived at Valence, he found that the old society had vanished. Both the bishop and the Abbé Saint-Ruf were dead. Mme. du Colombier had withdrawn with her daughter to her country-seat. The brothers were able, therefore, to take up their lives just where they had made the break at Auxonne: Louis pursuing the studies necessary for entrance to the corps of officers, Napoleon teaching him, and frequenting the political club; both destitute and probably suffering, for the officer's pay was soon far in arrears. In such desperate straits it was a relief for the elder brother that the allurements of his former associations were dissipated; such companionship as he now had was among the middle and lower classes, whose estates were more proportionate to his own, and whose sentiments were virtually identical with those which he professed.
The list of books which he read is significant: Coxe's "Travels in Switzerland," Duclos's "Memoirs of the Reigns of Louis XIV and Louis XV," Machiavelli's "History of Florence," Voltaire's "Essay on Manners," Duvernet's "History of the Sorbonne," Le Noble's "Spirit of Gerson," and Dulaure's "History of the Nobility." There exist among his papers outlines more or less complete of all these books. They prove that he understood what he read, but unlike other similar jottings by him they give little evidence of critical power. Aside from such historical studies as would explain the events preliminary to that revolutionary age upon which he saw that France was entering, he was carefully examining the attitude of the Gallican Church toward the claims of the papacy, and considering the rôle of the aristocracy in society. It is clear that he had no intention of being merely a curious onlooker at the successive phases of the political and social transmutation already beginning; he was bent on examining causes, comprehending reasons, and sharing in the movement itself.
By the summer of 1791 the first stage in the transformation of France had almost passed. The reign of moderation in reform was nearly over. The National Assembly had apprehended the magnitude but not the nature of its task, and was unable to grasp the consequences of the new constitution it had outlined. The nation was sufficiently familiar with the idea of the crown as an executive, but hitherto the executive had been at the same time legislator; neither King nor people quite knew how the King was to obey the nation when the former, trained in the school of the strictest absolutism, was deprived of all volition, and the latter gave its orders through a single chamber, responsive to the levity of the masses, and controlled neither by an absolute veto power, nor by any feeling of responsibility to a calm public opinion. This was the urgent problem which had to be solved under conditions the most unfavorable that could be conceived.
During the autumn of 1789 famine was actually stalking abroad. The Parisian populace grew gaunt and dismal, but the King and aristocracy at Versailles had food in plenty, and the contrast was heightened by a lavish display in the palace. The royal family was betrayed by one of its own house, the despicable Philip "Égalité," who sought to stir up the basest dregs of society, that in the ferment he might rise to the top; hungry Paris, stung to action by rumors which he spread and by bribes which he lavished, put Lafayette at its head, and on October fifth marched out to the gates of the royal residence in order to make conspicuous the contrast between its own sufferings and the wasteful comfort of its servants, as the King and his ministers were now considered to be. Louis and the National Assembly yielded to the menace, the court returned to Paris, politics grew hotter and more bitter, the fickleness of the mob became a stronger influence. Soon the Jacobin Club began to wield the mightiest single influence, and as it did so it grew more and more radical.
Throughout the long and trying winter the masses remained, nevertheless, quietly expectant. There was much tumultuous talk, but action was suspended while the Assembly sat and struggled to solve its problem, elaborating a really fine paper constitution. Unfortunately, the provisions of the document had no relation to the political habits of the French nation, or to the experience of England and the United States, the only free governments then in existence. Feudal privilege, feudal provinces, feudal names having been obliterated, the whole of France was rearranged into administrative departments, with geographical in place of historical boundaries. It was felt that the ecclesiastical domains, the holders of which were considered as mere trustees, should be adapted to the same plan, and this was done. Ecclesiastical as well as aristocratic control was thus removed by the stroke of a pen. In other words, by the destruction of the mechanism through which the temporal and spiritual authorities exerted the remnants of their power, they were both completely paralyzed. The King was denied all initiative, being granted merely a suspensive veto, and in the reform of the judicial system the prestige of the lawyers was also destroyed. Royalty was turned into a function, and the courts were stripped of both the moral and physical force necessary to compel obedience to their decrees. Every form of the guardianship to which for centuries the people had been accustomed was thus removed—royal, aristocratic, ecclesiastical, and judicial. Untrained to self-control, they were as ready for mad excesses as were the German Anabaptists after the Reformation or the English sectaries after the execution of Charles.
Attention has been called to the disturbances which arose in Auxonne and elsewhere, to the emigration of the nobles from that quarter, to the utter break between the parish priests and the higher church functionaries in Dauphiny; this was but a sample of the whole. When, on July fourteenth, 1790, the King accepted a constitution which decreed a secular reorganization of the ecclesiastical hierarchy according to the terms of which both bishops and priests were to be elected by the taxpayers, two thirds of all the clergy in France refused to swear allegiance to it. All attempts to establish the new administrative and judicial systems were more or less futile; the disaffection of officials and lawyers became more intense. In Paris alone the changes were introduced with some success, the municipality being rearranged into forty-eight sections, each with a primary assembly. These were the bodies which later gave Buonaparte the opening whereby he entered his real career. The influence of the Jacobin Club increased, just in proportion as the majority of its members grew more radical. Necker trimmed to their demands, but lost popularity by his monotonous calls for money, and fell in September, reaching his home on Lake Leman only with the greatest difficulty. Mirabeau succeeded him as the sole possible prop to the tottering throne. Under his leadership the moderate monarchists, or Feuillants, as they were later called, from the convent of that order to which they withdrew, seceded from the Jacobins, and before the Assembly had ceased its work the nation was cleft in two, divided into opponents and adherents of monarchy. As if to insure the disasters of such an antagonism, the Assembly, which numbered among its members every man in France of ripe political experience, committed the incredible folly of self-effacement, voting that not one of its members should be eligible to the legislature about to be chosen.
A new impulse to the revolutionary movement was given by the death of Mirabeau on April second, 1791. His obsequies were celebrated in many places, and, being a native of Provence, there were probably solemn ceremonies at Valence. There is a tradition that they occurred during Buonaparte's second residence in the city, and that it was he who superintended the draping of the choir in the principal church. It is said that the hangings were arranged to represent a funerary urn, and that beneath, in conspicuous letters, ran the legend: "Behold what remains of the French Lycurgus." Mirabeau had indeed displayed a genius for politics, his scheme for a strong ministry, chosen from the Assembly, standing in bold relief against the feebleness of Necker in persuading Louis to accept the suspensive veto, and to choose his cabinet without relation to the party in power. When the mad dissipation of the statesman's youth demanded its penalty at the hour so critical for France, the King and the moderates alike lost courage. In June the worried and worn-out monarch determined that the game was not worth the playing, and on the twenty-first he fled. Though he was captured, and brought back to act the impossible rôle of a democratic prince, the patriots who had wished to advance with experience and tradition as guides were utterly discredited. All the world could see how pusillanimous was the royalty they had wished to preserve, and the masses made up their mind that, real or nominal, the institution was not only useless, but dangerous. This feeling was strong in the Rhone valley and the adjoining districts, which have ever been the home of extreme radicalism. Sympathy with Corsica and the Corsicans had long been active in southeastern France. Neither the island nor its people were felt to be strange. When a society for the defense of the constitution was formed in Valence, Buonaparte, though a Corsican, was at first secretary, then president, of the association.
The "Friends of the Constitution" grew daily more numerous, more powerful, and more radical in that city; and when the great solemnity of swearing allegiance to the new order was to be celebrated, it was chosen as a convenient and suitable place for a convention of twenty-two similar associations from the neighboring districts. The meeting took place on July third, 1791; the official administration of the oath to the civil, military, judicial, and ecclesiastical authorities occurred on the fourteenth. Before a vast altar erected on the drill-ground, in the presence of all the dignitaries, with cannon booming and the air resounding with shouts and patriotic songs, the officials in groups, the people in mass, swore with uplifted hands to sustain the constitution, to obey the National Assembly, and to die, if need be, in defending French territory against invasion. Scenes as impressive and dramatic as this occurred all over France. They appealed powerfully to the imagination of the nation, and profoundly influenced public opinion. "Until then," said Buonaparte, referring to the solemnity, "I doubt not that if I had received orders to turn my guns against the people, habit, prejudice, education, and the King's name would have induced me to obey. With the taking of the national oath it became otherwise; my instincts and my duty were thenceforth in harmony."
But the position of liberal officers was still most trying. In the streets and among the people they were in a congenial atmosphere; behind the closed doors of the drawing-rooms, in the society of ladies, and among their fellows in the mess, there were constraint and suspicion. Out of doors all was exultation; in the houses of the hitherto privileged classes all was sadness and uncertainty. But everywhere, indoors or out, was spreading the fear of war, if not civil at least foreign war, with the French emigrants as the allies of the assailants. On this point Buonaparte was mistaken. As late as July twenty-seventh, 1791, he wrote to Naudin, an intimate friend who was chief of the military bureau at Auxonne: "Will there be war? No; Europe is divided between sovereigns who rule over men and those who rule over cattle and horses. The former understand the Revolution, and are terrified; they would gladly make personal sacrifices to annihilate it, but they dare not lift the mask for fear the fire should break out in their own houses. See the history of England, Holland, etc. Those who bear the rule over horses misunderstand and cannot grasp the bearing of the constitution. They think this chaos of incoherent ideas means an end of French power. You would suppose, to listen to them, that our brave patriots were about to cut one another's throats and with their blood purge the land of the crimes committed against kings." The news contained in this letter is most interesting. There are accounts of the zeal and spirit everywhere shown by the democratic patriots, of a petition for the trial of the King sent up from the recent meeting at Valence, and an assurance by the writer that his regiment is "sure," except as to half the officers. He adds in a postscript: "The southern blood courses in my veins as swiftly as the Rhone. Pardon me if you feel distressed in reading my scrawl."[25]
Restlessness is the habit of the agitator, and Buonaparte's temperament was not exceptional. His movements and purposes during the months of July and August are very uncertain in the absence of documentary evidence sufficient to determine them. But his earliest biographers, following what was in their time a comparatively short tradition, enable us to fix some things with a high degree of probability. The young radical had been but two months with his new command when he began to long for change; the fever of excitement and the discomfort of his life, with probably some inkling that a Corsican national guard would ere long be organized, awakened in him a purpose to be off once more, and accordingly he applied for leave of absence. His colonel, a very lukewarm constitutionalist, angry at the notoriety which his lieutenant was acquiring, had already sent in a complaint of Buonaparte's insubordinate spirit and of his inattention to duty. Standing on a formal right, he therefore refused the application. With the quick resource of a schemer, Buonaparte turned to a higher authority, his friend Duteil, who was inspector-general of artillery in the department and not unfavorable. Something, however, must have occurred to cause delay, for weeks passed and the desired leave was not granted.