CHAP. a disciple of Voltaire, who carried his principles to an XXXIX. extreme. Robes By certain revolutionary writers the party of the Gironde has been stigmatised as that of a narrow middle class, of the bourgeoisie, in fine, which is treated as a very pestilent and pusillanimous portion of society. By this classification history is falsified altogether. Before the revolution, as well as after it, the men of intelligence and education, who gave impulse and effect to the great changes, were, nineteen out of twenty, of the middle class. Indeed, almost all the actors of the revolution, until the pike and the butcher's knife became its instruments, were of the middle class alone. pierre, Danton, and Marat belonged to it, quite as much as the Gironde. They were all three professional men: Marat, a physician, who sought power and obtained it merely for the purpose of killing; Danton, who did the same for the avowed passion of enjoying luxuries; Robespierre, for the gratification of envy, and without one rational end. "I always opposed Robespierre," said one of the Mountain, "because I never could discover in him an aim. He was always talking of virtue and the people's happiness; they were mere words, and used solely for his own power and profit. No one could tell what he was driving at."* To call these men champions of the people, because they obtained large power of life and death by the blindness of the multitude, were as idle as to proclaim the Girondists champions of the middle class, because they struggled for the common rights of humanity. The Girondists knew nothing of trade or business. They were men of the closet, noble in their aspirations, desirous of rendering the revolution beneficial and humane, as well as triumphant, but unable to communicate their sentiments to an ignorant people, whom the despotism and the priestcraft of the preceding century had brutalised. * Mémoires de Baudot, quoted by Quinet. XXXIX. The first acts of the new assembly showed fears, lest CHAP. it might not command that respect due to its position. After a solemn act of adoration towards the constitution, a deputation was sent to the king to announce that the assembly was constituted.* He could not receive them, they were told, till the morrow. Louis probably required time to consider what he should say. The deputation, indignant at the reply, demanded to be received then. They were so. And the king spoke but a few words in answer. He could not go to the assembly till Friday. All this was natural; but deputation and assembly took fire, as at an intended insult. With the spite of children, they voted that the terms sire and majesty should be suppressed for the future, and the king's chair put on a level with that of the president. Louis, in consequence, said he would not go at all, and, certain of the national guards, threatened some of the deputies with the bayonet. They thought it advisable, therefore, to rescind their angry vote. The king came in due form. Yet because the members sat down when he did, Louis the Sixteenth was more indignant than he ever was at the loss of important portions of his prerogative.‡ More serious differences soon arose between powers so ill-fitted to agree. Certain duties devolved upon the unfortunate monarch which, since he had accepted and sworn to the constitution, the nation had a right *To give all the references to works consulted for this chapter would fill the pages to the exclusion of the text. The Moniteur and Buchez and Roux's Histoire Parlementaire are the principal sources of debates and events. For the state of parties and affairs at the opening of the legislative assembly see the Souvenirs of M. Dumas. † Several complained of this in the Jacobins. Bazire brought it before the assembly. "The na tional guard," writes La Marck Madame Campan. XXXIX. CHAP. to expect his performing sincerely and efficiently. It was then threatened from without by foreign powers, as well as by its own émigrés, who, to the number of thousands, had congregated on the Rhine under the command of the brothers of the king. Moreover, the majority of the priesthood which refused to take the oath to the civil constitution, and who were encouraged by the pope to reject it, had already made progress in the organisation of rebellion throughout the western provinces.* Commissioners had been sent to enquire into the state of La Vendée. Their reports, drawn up by Gensonné, were laid before the assembly at this time. The ministers, called upon for statements of affairs in their several departments, did not conceal their gravity. Thus the first debates of the legislative assembly necessarily turned upon the penalties to be inflicted on the obstinate émigrés and the nonjuring priests, the first of whom were levying war against the country, and the latter against the constitution. The only other subjects which interested and disputed attention with them were the finances and the colonies. In nothing had the constituent assembly effected a greater revolution than in the laws of taxation and finance. Taille, capitation, and gabelle were abolished, the latter virtually. The imposts to replace these were voted, but to begin to raise them in such times was impracticable. In Necker's Comptes Rendus the ter * The constituent assembly had allowed such priests as refused to take oaths still to officiate in the chapels, as well as the constitutional priests. But the bishops forbade this, lest the two should be confounded, and ordered the nonjuring clergy to perform mass in holes and corners rather than in the desecrated churches. The nonjuring denounced those priests who accepted the civil constitution as no longer priests, and declared the marriages performed and the absolutions given by them null. Dumouriez, who commanded in La Vendée, says that at first the majority of the clergy were for submission, but when the oath was to be taken not only to what the assembly had decreed but might afterwards decree respecting the church, they fell off, and obeyed the injunctions of the royalist prelates. ritorial taxes were estimated at 180 millions of livres. The estimates for 1791 calculated 198 millions for landtax, and fifty millions for house-tax. The capitation was nearly fifty, tobacco and aides thirty millions, octroi forty millions; 500 millions were expected to be raised in these and other ways. But with expenditure valued at 750 millions, besides the interest of debt at 280 millions, such ways and means were insufficient. The commune of Paris, in addition to all it had robbed, demanded 200 millions of livres as the cost of its insurrections and assassinations. There was no hope of meeting this, even before war was proclaimed, except by the sale of church and emigrant property, and the issue of assignats thereon. At the time of the king's deposition 2,700,000,000 livres of assignats had been issued, and of course spent. Several millions, not of paper, but of coin, were imperatively demanded by Dumouriez to pay the army that had repelled the enemy. They were procured, of course, by a large issue of assignats, which Cambon declared himself fully entitled to create, since, although the estimated value of the confiscated property was well nigh exhausted, the taxpayers owed two years' arrears of contributions. * The colonial question was equally unsatisfactory. stituent assembly made matters worse, by first pro- *December 1790. The paper louis had fallen to 8 livres 10 sous. It is now at 16 livres.'- Pelhenc. CHAP. XXXIX. CHAP. and the complete massacre of the planters and their XXXIX. families. The conservatives pointed to these events as the first-fruits of revolution, and as a sample of what must necessarily take place at home. In the month of November the assembly, after long debates, passed decrees against the émigrés and against the nonjuring priests. The former were bidden to return before the new year, under penalty of death to their persons and confiscation of their property. Military men who emigrated were to be treated as deserters. The princes' pensions had hitherto been paid, but were no longer to be so. The decree against priests who refused to take the oath deprived them of their allowance, and enabled the authorities to send them out of their old parishes. Upon both these decrees the king placed his veto, thus nullifying the first acts of the assembly, and showing that he did not participate in their just sentiments of fear and indignation against the enemies of the state. Louis was guided at the time very much by the moderate members of the late assembly. Barnave and the Lameths had succeeded to Mirabeau as the secret councillors of the court, and these, together with Lafayette and the members of the club of Feuillants, looked not only with jealousy upon their successors in the new assembly, but underrated their talents. The constitution of 1791 had organised local administration in councils of departments and municipal councils. The former, chosen like the deputies by the secondary electors, were of a higher class, so as indeed to be afterwards denounced as so many nests of aristocracy throughout the country. The departmental council of the Seine, with the Duc de la Rochefoucauld at its head, was now the great stay of the Feuillants, or constitutional conservatives. They began by making a very imprudent use of their authority, persuading the king secretly, and petitioning him publicly, to apply his |