task, which was no sooner perceived than the entire population, men, women, and children, poured forth to aid in the work. This preliminary to the fête was one of the most joyous parts of it. An altar was erected to the country in the midst. Bishop Talleyrand and three hundred of the clergy undertook to officiate. But before the mass the king, deputies, and all the authorities took solemnly the oath to the constitution. 69,000 national guards were marshalled on the plain. The rain fell in torrents; but to show how little their spirits were damped by it, the armed assembly broke into a dance. The sun shone, however, for the Bishop of Autun's mass; and the rest of the day or days was a joyous fête, such as the French know so well how to get up and to enjoy. But if the federation was a meeting of glad and patriotic hearts, it was also the means of bringing together wicked ones. That class of the Parisian mob whose vocation was to hang and to massacre had been for some time kept down; but now they met with kindred spirits from the provinces, men without means or scruples, who found the capital too promising a field for their exertions ever to quit it. How easily such bands were recruited from the federals of the south may be judged from the fact of 50,000 workmen being found totally destitute of employ at Lyons alone. The fête of the federation, therefore, which was imagined as the crowning ceremony of the new constitution, was in fact but the inauguration of fresh scenes of insurrection and disorder. Still, however the anarchists gained ground for a future opportunity, authority held its place in the capital and elsewhere. Lafayette, suspected and frowned upon at the Tuileries, awed its enemies more than his own into respect. Military mastery was more threatening than civic in 1790. The Count de Bouillé commanded in Lorraine, where he found great difficulty in keeping his troops from being seduced CHAP. XXXVIII. XXXVIII. CHAP. by the emissaries of the Paris anarchists. In August the soldiers of several regiments stationed at Metz rose, and began by imprisoning their officers; the reactionary tendency of these was the great-cause. The assembly, having abrogated the aristocratic privileges of the officers of the old army, ought to have lost no time in reorganising the army itself. Bouillé succeeded in pacifying the mutineers. This was no sooner done than the garrison of Nancy mutinied also. Bouillé had the address to make the soldiers of Metz march against their comrades. A severe conflict ensued. In the end the mutineers of Nancy were put down, and their leaders given over to punishment. This event had a salutary effect in discouraging the anarchists of the capital, but a pernicious one in encouraging the reactionary party and hopes of the court. The queen and Louis placed trust in Bouillé. He and Mirabeau were most anxious to recover the king from the nullity to which he had been reduced, a nullity that Mirabeau saw must end in the supremacy of the rabble. Bouillé entertained the same opinion; and could Lafayette have been similarly persuaded, the three might have devised the means and accomplished the end of setting the monarchy once more erect. But none of these fully agreed either amongst themselves or with the court. Bouillé's idea, that most congenial to the court, was that the king should escape to a fortress on the frontier, where he could not only hoist his own royal banner, but receive aid from his brother potentates of Europe. Mirabeau deprecated this. He would have the monarch rely solely upon French support, and that not royalist so much as moderate revolutionist. Lyons he recommended latterly as the best rallying place. At one time he thought Fontainebleau sufficiently distant. But Lafayette was as yet averse to any plan of escape, not only because he was in a manner responsible for the guard of the king, but that he believed the consti tution to be capable of being worked, and the king CHAP. endowed with no insufficient amount of power. Independent of flight, Mirabeau's plans for the recovery of the monarchy were neither coherent nor hopeful. At first he was anxious to be appointed to office, and to wield its power in prosecuting his scheme. The court was wrong in not gratifying him. A minister so able and energetic might have rallied the scattered elements of conservatism, and saved the throne; but neither the royal family nor the ministers would admit such preference. We have seen how the Archbishop of Bordeaux defeated it. Suspected and rendered impotent by his colleagues of the assembly, Mirabeau prepared to discredit that body, ruin its popularity by impelling it to rash measures, and then make use of the discontent it created, especially among the clergy, to strengthen monarchic reaction. Mirabeau's great mistake lay in supposing that a new assembly would be more moderate and practical than the old. In the new he even favoured the exclusion of a member of the constituent assembly from re-election.* Mirabeau in fact thought the tide of revolution at its ebb when it was in fact about to flow with redoubled energy. His own death, however, contributed greatly to this, not only from the check to demagogism which it took from the assembly, but from the inconsiderate and illconducted measures into which it flung the court; for Louis and his queen, however little they followed the counsels of Mirabeau, still trusted in his miraculous power of oratory to save them. Unfortunately, the superiority of his eloquence did but raise up enemies to him in the assembly, where his influence was daily decreasing. His own excesses, more than years-perhaps, too, his despair of reaching any issue from the revolutionary career in which all were involved-contributed to cut short his days. *Correspondance de Mirabeau avec La Marck, t. ii. p. 451. XXXVIII. CHAP. XXXVIII. Hostility to him disappeared and malice grew silent when his approaching end was announced; and when it was consummated the assembly decreed to him all the apotheosis that genius and virtue could claim. His body was borne to the Pantheon with royal pomp; and yet the assembly a few days after passed a vote that no member of a representative assembly should be appointed minister, thus marking their dread and jealousy at the same time with their admiration of the great orator. The year 1791 had brought fresh causes of popular discontent and ministerial embarrassment. Prepared to make a change, and appoint other and more liberal men, Louis as usual did but half of what each required, and so satisfied none. Necker had withdrawn, and all the ministers followed him save Montmorin. But their successors were equally null. The machinations of the émigrés beyond the frontier began to make themselves felt within it. The majority of the clergy declined the oath to the civil constitution ordained for them; and ecclesiastics began to take the place of nobles in popular execration. The assembly discussed a law against the émigrés, and ordered the regiments to be put on a war footing (January 1791). Prussia and England had put down the ultra-liberals of Holland. Austrian troops had marched to do the same by those of Flanders. England threatening Spain with war, the latter invoked the succour of France, according to the family compact. Louis the Sixteenth hoped to take advantage of this, and raise an armed force; but the democrats dreaded an armament under any pretext as long as the king retained his power. In the middle of April, about a fortnight after the death of Mirabeau, the royal family ordered their carriage to proceed to St. Cloud. vious summer there without *The only reproach, and probably a just one, was, that the na They had spent the premuch objection; but this * tional guard were treated with disrespect at St. Cloud by the court. СНАР. year the jealous fears of the people were more awakened by the malevolence of the émigrés, and by the too well- XXXVIII, founded report that the court meditated a furtive removal to some frontier fortress. When the carriage therefore appeared at the gate of the Tuileries, and after the royal family had taken their seats, the people collected to oppose their departure.* Lafayette was summoned, and the general used his utmost efforts to persuade the people to allow country air and exercise to the royal family.† They were inexorable; and the national guard so evidently sympathised with them that Lafayette durst not order them to use force to clear the way. Louis and his family accordingly withdrew to the palace, which appeared to them henceforth a prison; and, not without reason, they commenced planning their escape from a durance so harsh and so humiliating. There can be no doubt that, from the death of Mirabeau, and even previously, the king had taken a resolution decidedly hostile to the revolution. He could not sanction the civil constitution of the clergy, and his chief reason for desiring to go to St. Cloud was to pass Easter there, and receive the sacraments from a priest who had not taken the oath to the constitution. This was perceived, and formed the subject of discussion in the journals, as well as a source of fresh popular animosity to the king. Louis, too, formally and regularly registered his protests against the sanction which he felt himself compelled to give to the decrees of the assembly. A position so false could only end by a catastrophe. Early in June Louis signified to M. de Bouillé at Metz that he would quit the Tuileries on the night of * Mem. of Lafayette, &c. † According to La Marck, it was not a mob that collected, but citizens, shop-keepers, and artists, who, on this occasion, crowded to the Car rousel, which made it more distaste- |