XXXIX. veto even to the first penal decrees against refractory CHAP. priests. And this was at the very time when the report of Gensonné showed these ecclesiastics to be exciting an open and dangerous rebellion. The assembly, finding itself resisted by the court, took measures to do without it. The members formed themselves into committees. Those devoted to the internal affairs of the kingdom opened a correspondence with the provinces. The committee of foreign affairs demanded of the minister all his documents and information. Seeing this, the Count de Montmorin withdrew; a new ministry was formed, chiefly on the recommendation of the Feuillants or Lameth party. Delessert became minister of foreign affairs, and undertook the dangerous task of at once satisfying the queen and the assembly. A better choice was that of the young Count de Narbonne for minister of war. The friend of Madame de Staël and of Madame de Condorcet, he sought to conciliate the two parties, those of the old and of the new assembly. By his eagerness to organise efficiently the military defences of the country, he won the confidence of the liberal leaders of the Gironde; whilst by his promises and purposes, first to render the armies victorious, and then make use of their ascendency to strengthen moderate councils in Paris, he commanded the adherence of the Feuillants. He won thus not only upon politicians, old and young, but even upon the king, whom he prompted to redeem the ungracious use of his veto by coming down to the assembly (December 1791), and declaring his indignation at the conduct of the émigrés, and his determination to compel the Elector of Treves, by the extremity of war if it was necessary, to disperse the menacing armies that were collected at Coblentz. In this the king was up to a certain point sincere. He deprecated the threats and proposed invasion of the émigrés as exasperating to the French people and provoking CHAP. XXXIX. them to crime; but he placed hopes, nevertheless, in the hostile attitude of the great powers of Europe. He recommended their meeting in congress, and presenting such united and formidable remonstrance to the French government and assembly as would induce the latter to restore the sovereign to the exercise of at least his constitutional influence and rights. The agent whom he sent to Germany found the emperor disposed to peace, and yet he promised to support the Elector of Treves if attacked, and he adhered to the demands of the imperial diet for the restoration of their feudal rights to the German princes who possessed lands in Alsace. This, though but the language of diplomatic menace, stirred beyond measure the ire of the new politicians of the legislative assembly. The foreign relations of the country formed a subject which had not deeply occupied them. The history of France was not then either profoundly or attractively written, and law was more familiar to the orators of the Gironde than treaties or diplomacy. One man alone was well acquainted with the foreign policy of the country; and this was the journalist Brissot. Passionate in language, from the habit of daily addressing an impassioned people, and going further than even the most extreme demagogues upon one most essential point, Brissot was still for leaning on the intelligent class rather than upon the infuriated mob. Foremost of all, he entertained the conviction, and expressed it, that Louis the Sixteenth could not be king of the revolution; † and he proclaimed 66 *"Narbonne and the king," says M. Louis Blanc, were for a guerre restreinte, or merely directed against the Elector of Treves." But the emperor had promised his protection to the elector; nor was it possible to imagine that the French republican armies would be allowed to crush that petty prince, without at the same time encountering the resist ance of the great German powers. The plan of Narbonne and Madame de Staël, moreover, was to acquire glory for the army and for himself, in order that the glory might give them power to counteract the ultrademocrats. But was glory to be won by hostilities against an Elector of Treves? † Brissot's Memoirs. himself a partisan of the republic at a time when Danton hesitated, and Robespierre declared that people did him far too much honour in styling him a republican. It was Brissot who drew up the first petition at the Jacobins against the re-installation of the king. When, however, the constituent assembly decreed that there should be a king, he submitted. He saw, however (his profession of journalist informed him of this too truly), that the people must have some great object of excitement and action; and he thought war the most wholesome. It would draw the ardent spirits away from the capital, would interest those, who remained in something more elevated than turbulence and murder. It would create an army and a national government, and turn the minds of the people from abstract theories of social and political science to conquest and glory. Whilst the members of the Gironde followed Brissot in his ardent declarations for war, the very same reasons which impelled them deterred Robespierre. He already floated foremost and highest on the waves of popular agitation, which he fed by denunciations of the court, of the aristocracy, and of all that existed in creed, habits, or society. A solitary man like Rousseau, with no knowledge of life or politics save a dreamy theory, he embraced this as a religion, and sought to force it upon the human race. With all Rousseau's envy and susceptibility, yet with none of his feeling, or his genius, he lived the same kind of cankerous existence as had done the renowned philosopher. Robespierre, however, was bred a lawyer. The master he studied under in Paris bade him confine his practice to the provinces, as he wanted all the requisites for success in the capital.* With a squeaking voice, an insignificant person, forbidding features (the * Memoir of Robespierre, Croker Collection. CHAP. XXXIX. CHAP. XXXIX. colour of his veins, said Madame de Staël, was green), and a cowardly nature, never was man less fitted for command; but when the times and the tastes descended from reverence for intellect to an admiration of all that was animal in man's nature, and from that subsequently descended still lower to the worship of human reptiles, then orators like Marat, formed to be the fag-end of the species, became, wonderful to relate, its divinities. As yet, however, Robespierre was undeveloped. The arch-assassin still lay swathed in the folds of the infantine philosophy of Rousseau; and he deprecated war, as he did the punishment of death, as things that ought not to exist in his Utopia. In this he disagreed with his friend Marat, who was furious against the proposers of war, but who declared already that the erection of scaffolds and the sacrifice of human victims upon them, would scare and defeat the enemy more effectually than battles. Brissot carried not only the assembly but the Jacobins with him, and these forced Robespierre to embrace the orator of war. Brissot declared the emperor to have broken the treaty of 1756 with France, and induced the assembly to vote that the king should demand a categorical answer and explanation on this point. But what most influenced the passions of the assembly was the report that the sovereigns were about to hold a congress, and, thus united, issue a demand to the French to modify their constitution and re-establish the king in full authority, with two chambers. Guadet, a member of the Gironde, took hold of this theme, and expatiated upon it with such a warmth that he induced the whole assembly to swear a solemn oath never to tolerate or treat with any demand to modify the constitution. These acts of the assembly evinced to foreign courts that it, and not the king, exercised the sovereign power, especially in foreign affairs, And this conviction, according to Hardenberg, implied that war was inevitable. The emperor and the King of Prussia accordingly formed a new league for the defence of the empire; and on the 17th of February Prince Kaunitz, the Austrian minister, forwarded to the envoy in Paris to communicate to the French government a despatch, which commenced with a refutation of the charge or intention of hostility, but which then launched into a virulent accusation of the republican party. "The emperor," it said, "after having first considered with his allies the proper means of aiding his brother-in-law the King of France, then in durance and distress, had abandoned all such projects on learning that Louis the Sixteenth had been restored to power and had accepted the constitution. Events, however, showed such hopes to be illusory. The assembly and its republican party had usurped the king's power, and, conscious that they were opposed by the majority of the nation, had recourse to anarchy and war to maintain their ascendency."* This philippic was not the produce of an Austrian pen. The French constitutionalists of the old assembly had drawn it up and forwarded it to Vienna, from whence it was returned in the shape of an Austrian despatch. Nothing could be more ill-judged. It exasperated the assembly, and forced the Jacobins and Robespierre to cease any opposition to the war, which would have broken forth at once had not the sudden death of the Emperor Leopold paralysed for a moment the efforts of Austria and its allies. The concoction of the Austrian despatch was not the only blunder of the constitutionalists, Lameth and Barnave. The circumstance most favourable to the king at the time was the presence of Narbonne in the ministry. He commanded the respect of the Gironde, though he * Mémoires d'un Homme d'État. CHAP. XXXIX. |