Lectures on the French Revolution. Acton John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, Baron

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СКАЧАТЬ Their uncertainty was all at once auspiciously relieved. Dreux Brézé, the master of ceremonies, reappeared, and as he brought a message from the king he wore his plumed hat upon his head. With clamorous outcries he was told to uncover, and he uttered a reply so insolent that his son, describing the scene in public after many years, declined to repeat his words. Therefore, when he asked whether they had heard the king's order to depart, he received a memorable lesson. Mirabeau exclaimed, "Yes, but if we are to be expelled, we shall yield only to force." Brézé answered, correctly, that he did not recognise Mirabeau as the organ of the Assembly, and he turned to the president. But Bailly rose above Mirabeau, and said, "The nation is assembled here, and receives no orders." At these words the master of ceremonies, as if suddenly aware of the presence of majesty, retired, walking backwards to the door. It was at that moment that the old order changed and made place for the new. For Sieyès, who possessed the good gift of putting a keen edge to his thoughts, who had begun his career in Parliament ten days before by saying, "It is time to cut the cables," now spoke, and with superb simplicity thus defined the position: "What you were yesterday you are now. Let us pass to the order of the day." In this way the monarchy, as a force distinct from a form, was not assailed, or abolished, or condemned, but passed over. Assault, abolition, condemnation were to follow, and already there were penetrating eyes that caught, in the distance, the first gleam of the axe. "The king," said Mirabeau, "has taken the road to the scaffold."

      The abdication of prerogative, which the king offered on June 23, went far; but the people demanded surrender in regard to privilege. The Assembly, submitting to the geometrical reasoning of Sieyès and to the surprise of the Tennis Court, had frightened him into an alliance with the nobles, and he linked his cause to theirs. He elected to stand or fall with interests not his own, with an order which was powerless to help him, which could make no return for his sacrifice in their behalf, which was unable for one hour to defend itself, and was about to perish by its own hand. The failure of June 23 was immediately apparent. The Assembly, having dismissed Dreux Brézé, was not molested further. Necker consented to resume office, with greatly increased popularity. Under the influence of the royal declaration forty-seven nobles, being a portion only of the Liberal minority, went over to the Commons, and Talleyrand followed at the head of twenty-five prelates. Then the king gave way. He instructed the resisting magnates to join the National Assembly. In very sincere and solemn terms they warned him that by such a surrender he was putting off his crown. The Count d'Artois rejoined that the king's life would be in danger if they persisted. There was one young nobleman rising rapidly to fame as a gracious and impressive speaker, whom even this appeal to loyal hearts failed to move. "Perish the monarch," cried Cazalès, "but not the monarchy!"

      Lewis underwent the humiliation of revoking, on June 27, what he had ceremoniously promulgated on the 23rd, because there was a fatal secret. Paris was agitated, and the people promised the deputies to stand by them at their need. But what could they effect at Versailles against the master of so many legions? Just then a mutiny broke out in the French guards, the most disciplined body of troops in the capital, and betrayed the key to the hollow and unstable counsels of the Government. The army could not be trusted. Necker suspected it as early as February. In the last week of June, the English, Prussian, and Venetian envoys report that the crown was disabled because it was disarmed. The regiments at hand would not serve against the national representatives. It was resolved to collect faithful bands of Swiss, Alsatians, and Walloons. Ten foreign regiments, near 30,000 men in all, were hurried to the scene. They were the last hope of royalism. Trusty friends were informed that the surrender was only to last until the frontier garrisons could be brought to Versailles. D'Artois confided to one of them that many heads must fall. And he uttered the sinister proverb which became historic in another tragedy: If you want an omelette you must not be afraid of breaking eggs.

      VI

      THE FALL OF THE BASTILLE

      After the dramatic intervention of the Marquis de Brézé, the king's speech of June 23 was never seriously considered by the Assembly. Yet the concessions, which it made to the spirit of political progress, satisfied philosophic observers, and there had been no time in English history where changes so extensive, proceeding from the Crown, would have failed to conciliate the people. It was a common belief in those days, expressly sanctioned by the Economists, that secondary liberties, carried far enough, are worth more than formal securities for the principle of self-government. One is of daily use and practical advantage; the other is of the domain of theory, dubiously beneficial, and without assurance of enlightenment and justice. A wise, honest, and intelligent administration gives more to men than the established reign of uncertain opinion. These arguments had more weight with philosophers than with the deputies, for it was already decided that they must make the Constitution. All the king offered, and a great deal more, they intended to take. Much that he insisted on preserving they were resolved to destroy. The offer, at its best, was vitiated by the alloy: for the most offensive privileges, immunities, and emoluments of rank were to be perpetuated, and it was against these that the fiercest force of the revolutionary movement was beating. In order that they might be abolished, the nation tendered its indefeasible support, its unconquerable power, to its representatives.

      If the Assembly, content with the advantage gained over the king, had surrendered unconditionally to the nobles, and assented, for a few political reforms, to the social degradation of the democracy, they would have betrayed their constituents. On that consideration they were compelled to act. They acted also on the principle, which was not new, which came down indeed from mediæval divines, but which was newly invested with universal authority, that the law is not the will of the sovereign that commands, but of the nation that obeys. It was the very marrow of the doctrine that obstruction of liberty is crime, that absolute authority is not a thing to be consulted, but a thing to be removed, and that resistance to it is no affair of interest or convenience, but of sacred obligation. Every drop of blood shed in the American conflict was shed in a cause immeasurably inferior to theirs, against a system more legitimate by far than that of June 23. Unless Washington was an assassin, it was their duty to oppose, if it might be, by policy, if it must be, by force, the mongrel measure of concession and obstinacy which the Court had carried against the proposals of Necker. That victory was reversed, and the success of the Commons was complete. They had brought the three orders into one; they had compelled the king to retract his declaration and to restore his disgraced minister; they had exposed the weakness of their oppressors, and they had the nation at their back.

      On June 27, in the united Assembly, Mirabeau delivered an address of mingled triumph and conciliation, which was his first act of statesmanship. He said that the speech from the throne contained large and generous views that proved the genuine liberality of the king. He desired to receive them gratefully without the drawbacks imposed by unthinking advisers, and to respect the just rights of the noblesse. He took the good without the evil, extricating Lewis from his entanglement, and tracing the line by which he might have advanced to great results. "The past," he said, "has been the history of wild beasts. We are inaugurating the history of men; for we have no weapon but discussion, and no adversary but prejudice."

      Their victory brought loss as well as gain to the Commons, and there was reason to think that the counsel of Sieyès, to let the other orders take their own separate course, was founded on wisdom. Their opponents, joining under compulsion, had the means as well as the will of doing them injury.

      For the clergy there was a brief season of popular favour. The country priests, sprung from the peasantry, and poorly off, shared many of their feelings. The patronage of the State went to men of birth; and one of these, the Archbishop of Aix, had proclaimed his belief that, if anybody was to be exempt from taxation, it ought to be the impoverished layman, not the wealthy ecclesiastic. When it chanced that the Committee of Constitution was elected without any member of the clergy upon it, the Commons raised a cry that they should be introduced in their proportion. They, in a fraternal spirit, refused. And the second Committee, the one that actually drew up the scheme, was composed of three churchmen to five laymen. The nobles were not reconciled, and refused to unite with men of English views in a Tory party. To them, the separation of orders was a fundamental maxim of security, which they had inherited, which СКАЧАТЬ