to win Danton, who at this time became influential as a member of the municipality. He was a bold frank ruffian, with touches of humanity about him, a lover of pleasure like Dumouriez himself. He was the animal type of the revolution, as Marat was the reptile. Dumouriez, in the interest of the Girondists, strongly recommended them to make a friend of Danton, since without some popular champion, some able partisan in the clubs, and in the crowd, such sticks as Roland, Clavière, and Servan could not possibly maintain their position. Instead of listening to him, the Rolands and the Girondists could not tolerate Dumouriez himself, who was light of character and purpose, who spent the secret service money without giving any account of it, and who chose his subordinates more for their cleverness than their morality.

It was folly of the little Roland circle not only to indispose the king, but to play the puritan; to exclude and alienate the men best fitted to supply the influence and talents which they wanted. Dumouriez was the chief whose dexterity could have conciliated the monarch, and at the same time inspired the better patriots with confidence; he was a man of action, and a man of the world, and the Girondists should have sacrificed their scruples to obtain his alliance, as the Lafayettists ought to have done to secure the co-operation of Mirabeau; but the most fatal characteristic of the revolution, the most fatal certainly to the revolutionists, was the impossibility of the chiefs holding together.

Unfortunately Dumouriez's acts with regard to the foreign enemy, though marked by spirit, were not crowned with success. The best hopes for maintaining the king in his position, and giving his ministers real power, lay in the success of the armies. The Jacobins and Robespierre, although they had ceased to oppose the war, continued to denounce Lafayette as incapable of conducting it with sincerity and vigour.

CHAP. XXXIX.

CHAP Victory would have been the conclusive answer to XXXIX. such attacks, but unhappily it came not. Dumouriez's

summons as minister of foreign affairs to the Austrian cabinet had been met by the dry answer that the latter adhered to its former declaration, and M. de Cobenzel did not shrink from repeating to the French envoy all the fears, griefs, and suspicions of his court. Dumouriez had hereupon induced the king to appear in the assembly and announce a declaration of war against the emperor (April 20, 1791).

Dumouriez pressed the king to follow this up by the invasion of Belgium, the unsettled and disaffected state of which province offering every facility to the scheme, but all was marred by the inexperience of the troops, with the want of skill and influence in the new officers. In the last days of April, Lafayette, from Metz and Givet, Biron, from Valenciennes, and Dillon, from Lille, marched into the Belgian territory. The principal army, that of Lafayette, was intended to get possession of Namur; the other two were destined to support his movements. As Biron was advancing towards Mons, his vanguard, consisting of cavalry, was seized with a sudden panic at the first view of what they supposed to be an army; they fled in disorder, dragged their companions in their flight, and abandoned even their camp to the enemy. Dillon, marching from Lille with an inconsiderable force, fared worse, for his troops were not only seized with panic, but murdered their general to silence and cover his remonstrances. Lafayette, on hearing the disasters of the divisions destined to support him, stopped short, and returned to his original quarters in France. Thus were the hopes of Dumouriez and the scheme of Narbonne defeated for the present.

Such events as these necessarily augmented that great dissolvent of the assembly, fear. Provincial anarchy from within, enemies from without, were

XXXIX.

menacing, and the heart of the king was certainly with CHAP. the enemies who menaced, not with the government which resisted. No wonder that the Girondists, however desirous of maintaining Louis the Sixteenth at the head of the government, were suspicious of him. Neither is it astonishing that the more extreme patriots saw no remedy save in dethroning and setting aside the king altogether. The worst of fear as a motive in political action is its variability, sometimes swelling to a panic, and the rash acts which that inspires, sometimes relapsing to slumbering and passive acquiescence. Such sentiments chiefly actuated the centre, or ventre, of the assembly, whose voting one day in a conservative sense, and the next in a revolutionary one, gave hopes to both parties, and forbade a settled plan to either. This was one of the disadvantages of too numerous an assembly. Its seven hundred and fifty members partook of the fluctuating nature of a mob, and were actuated by the same fears. This was soon perceived, and it was found a much more ready way to success to frighten the assembly than to persuade it. The popular party got up a system of tumultuous fêtes and processions, in which the people, armed with pikes and without uniform, outnumbered the national guards and their firelocks. The council of the department, far more conservative than the municipality, strove to prevent these amusements and manifestations; but the mayor, Pétion, instead of forbidding the manufacture of pikes, merely ordered the holders to register them.

The first experiment of the popular party in the way of a revolutionary procession was to celebrate the liberation of certain Swiss soldiers who had been condemned to the galleys for taking part in the mutiny of Nancy, and for having fired upon the troops which came to reduce them. As times were changed, and as Bouillé, who reduced Nancy, was in exile for his conduct at Varennes, the sentence against the Swiss of

CHAP.

the Châteauvieux regiment was reversed, and Collot XXXIX. d'Herbois undertook to bring them in triumph from Brest. The fête was celebrated in April, soon after the appointment of the Girondists to office, and however offensive to and fiercely opposed by the Feuillants, or constitutional royalists, the Girondists did not offer any impediment to it. The procession halted in the Champ de Mars, and went through the usual jubilee. Unable to prevent it, the Feuillants celebrated in like manner the memory of Simonneau, the mayor of Etampes, who had perished in resisting a mob of cannibals in that town. The Parisians, who welcomed the Swiss mutineers, and adopted their bonnet rouge, gave but a cold tribute to Simonneau.*

It was these successful fêtes and processions which inspired the popular leaders with the idea of getting up one, which, concealing its designs under the appearance of festivity, should fill the court and gardens of the Tuileries with the multitude, force their way into the palace, to humiliate and terrify the king at least into abandoning his veto, if not afford the opportunity for a worse crime.

Prudent conduct on the part of Louis and his secret advisers would no doubt have defeated these plans. In order to do so, it was requisite for the monarch to be true to the ministers whom he had chosen, and who did not wish to weaken the throne, whilst determined to uphold and defend the revolution. Instead of such obvious and necessary policy, the king and his advisers of the constitutionalists brought about the dismissal of the Girondist ministers, and of Dumouriez himself, which left the crown at the mercy of the people and its parties.

It was plain, indeed, to the Girondist ministers, Roland, Clavière, and Servan, that the king, had no confidence in them. They assembled round the council *Prudhomme, Révolution de Paris.

table at the Tuileries, and the monarch presided; but he shrank from discussing with them any subject of importance, and paid more attention to Dumouriez's jokes than Roland's suggestions. Moreover, there was the grave circumstance of the veto put upon all the principal votes of the assembly, which veto Robespierre in the Jacobins was continually twitting the Girondists for not overcoming. Louis was encouraged to treat the three Girondists with contempt by perceiving the difference that existed, and that grew wider, between them and Dumouriez. Unable to make their expostulations be listened to in council, the ministers preferred to draw up a joint letter containing their opinions, that is, their grievances. Dumouriez deprecated the drawing up of such a manifesto against the king, which he foresaw would be published. Defeated in their project of a joint letter, two at least of the ministers resolved to pursue their plan separately. Roland did so by allowing his wife to prepare a strong letter to the monarch, which he duly presented. It appeared not only strong but insulting to Louis, and yet it was well meant; for its menaces were intended to warn the monarch that a popular insurrection was in course of machination, and that, if he persisted in his dilatory and deceptive policy, it would inevitably break over his head.

If Roland's letter was uncourtly, the mode which the war minister, Servan, took of venting his opinion was certainly outrageous. Without saying a word on the subject in council, he rose in the assembly (June 4), and proposed that, as on the 14th of July all national guards were obliged to assemble to take the civic oath, the opportunity should be taken of drafting five fédérés from each canton, to meet immediately in Paris, and form in its vicinity a camp of 20,000 men. The king was shocked. This was the reinforcement of the Parisian mob with an army of turbulent democrats from the provinces. Dumouriez was no less annoyed.

CHAP.

XXXIX.