V. 1789. The royal to Paris. Such was the haste used to urge them on, that, in passing CHAP. to the carriage, the King and Queen were compelled to step in a pool of blood which had collected where the two gardes-du-corps had been beheaded.* All the exertions, 69. all the authority of M. Lafayette, were unable to prevent family come the people from carrying in the front of the procession Oct. 8. the two heads of the privates of the body-guard who had been decapitated under the windows of the palace. At Sèvres, a village on the road to Paris, they forced a hairdresser to powder and curl the gory locks of the heads. Jourdan, a monster in human form, afterwards nicknamed Coupe-tête, marched first with naked arms, bearing a huge hatchet on his shoulder, drenched in blood. The remainder of the noble gardes-du-corps, two hundred in number, almost all wounded and still bleeding, in the deepest dejection, followed the carriage; around it were cannon, dragged by the populace, bestrode by frantic women, many armed with swords and pikes. From every side arose shouts of triumph, mingled with revolutionary songs. "Here is the baker, his wife, and the little apprentice!" exclaimed the women in derision at the King, the Queen, and the Dauphin. These exclamations were intermingled with the cries of "All the bishops to the lamp-post!" which were received with unbounded applause, and demonstrated the general and deadly hostility to religion. Loaves of bread, borne on the point of pikes, every where appeared, to indicate the plenty which the return of the sovereign was expected to confer upon the capital. The Riv. 322, regiment of Flanders followed, in heart-rending affliction at 182. Lac. being obliged to surrender their sovereign to his rebellious vii. 248. subjects. The Gardes Françaises, profoundly ashamed of 142. Dép. the associates who had seduced them from their duty, 170. Cammarched in military order in the hideous procession, 34. Web. i. without ever taking their eyes from the ground.1 The ii. 545. monarch, after a painful journey of seven hours, during * A fact communicated by General Lafayette to the historian Labaume.LABAUME, iii. 545, note. 1 Mig. i. 95. 323. Th. i. Burke, v. de Châtelet, pan, ii. 83, 453. Lab. V. 1789. CHAP. which he was compelled to drink, drop by drop, the bitterest dregs in the cup of humiliation, entered Paris, a captive among his own subjects, and adorning the triumph of his most inveterate enemies. He was conducted to the Hôtel de Ville, and thence to the Tuileries, which thenceforward became his palace and his prison. Vast 70. changes sembly. Thus terminated the first era of the revolutionary government; the first period, during which a shadow of introduced independence was left to the legislature. The revolution by the As of the 14th July had overturned the crown, by depriving it of the whole military force of the kingdom; but the revolt of the 6th October subjugated the legislature as well as the sovereign, by bringing them both captive and defenceless into the capital, where the only armed force was at the disposal of the municipality, elected by the universal suffrage of the inhabitants. Just five months had elapsed since the meeting of the States-general; and during that time not only the power of the sovereign had been overthrown, but the very structure of society changed. Instead of an absolute government, there was now to be seen a turbulent democracy; instead of an obsequious nobility, a discontented legislature; instead of the pride of ancient, the insolence of newly-acquired power. The right to tithes, the most venerable institution of the Christian church; the feudal privileges, flowing from the first conquest of Gaul by the followers of Clovis; the immunities of corporations, purchased by the blood of infant freedom-all had perished. The principle of universal equality had been recognised; all authority admitted to flow from the people; and the right of insurrection numbered amongst the most sacred of the social duties. The power of the sovereign was destroyed; he had been insulted, and narrowly escaped being murdered in his own palace, and was now a captive, surrounded by perils, in the midst of his capital. Changes greater than those brought about in England from the time of Alfred, were effected in France in less than five months. V. 1789. 71. Their ex ness. Experience might well have taught the promoters of CHAP. the French Revolution, that such excessive precipitation could lead to nothing but disastrous results. Nothing durable in nature is formed except by the slowest degrees; the flowers of the summer are as ephemeral as the warmth cessive rashwhich produces them; the oak, the growth of centuries, survives the maturity and the decay of empires. The dominion of Alexander, raised in a few campaigns, was divided within the lifetime of those who witnessed its birth; the Roman empire, formed in a succession of ages, endured a thousand years. It is in vain to It is in vain to suppose that the habits of a nation can be changed, and its character altered, by merely giving it new institutions. We cannot confer on childhood the firmness of maturity by putting on it the dress of manhood. It is no apology for the Constituent Assembly to say, that they committed no violence themselves; that their measures were in great part adopted from the purest philanthropy; that they were themselves the victims of the faction which disgraced the Revolution. In public men we expect not merely good intentions, but prudent conduct; it is no excuse for those who have done evil, to assert that they did so that good might come of it. "Words," says Lamartine, "put nations in motion, bayonets alone arrest their course." If we pull down with too much haste, we do as much mischief as if we retain with too much obstinacy. The virtuous should always recollect that, if they remove the half, the reckless will speedily destroy the whole. 72. sudden in The danger of political changes arises not from their immediate, but their ultimate consequences; not so much Danger of from those who originate, as those who follow them up. novation. Alterations, once rashly commenced, cannot easily be stopped; the fever of innovation seizes the minds of the energetic part of mankind, and the prudent speedily become unable to stem the torrent. The prospect of gain rouses the ambitious and the reckless; they issue from V. 1789. CHAP. obscurity to share the spoil, and in the struggle rapidly acquire a fatal ascendency. They do so, because they are not restrained by the scruples which influence the good, nor fettered by the apprehensions which paralyse the opulent. Having nothing to lose, they are indifferent as to the consequences of their actions; having no principles, they accommodate themselves to those of the most numerous and least worthy of the people. Revolutions are chiefly dangerous, because they bring such characters into public situations; the Constituent Assembly was chiefly blamable, because it pursued a course which roused them in every part of France. It was itself the first to experience the truth of these principles. In its haste to subdue the throne it raised the people, and speedily became subjected to the power it expected to govern. 73. of the 6th the Assem bly. The victory of the 6th October was not less over the The victory legislature than the throne. Brought to Paris without October was protection, it was at the mercy of the populace, and really over not less enthralled than the King. The ultimate consequences did not appear for some years; but the Reign of Terror flowed naturally from the publication of the Rights of Man, and the decimation of the Convention from the rashness of the Constituent Assembly. It soon became apparent that the position of the National Assembly, and the residence of the monarch, during its sitting, in the capital, was a fatal circumstance, of which both had ample cause to repent. Freedom of deliberation was out of the question in such a situation: at first, the deputies were carried away by the applause of the galleries, and the contagion of popular feeling: latterly, they were enslaved by the terror of popular violence. All the insurrections which established the Reign of Terror, the captivity of the King, the subjugation of the Assembly, were owing to the perilous vicinity of Paris. If the great work of national reformation is to be successfully carried through, it must be in a remote or secure situation, where the applause and the violence of the multitude are equally V. removed, and the minds of men are not liable to be CHAP. swayed by the flattery, or intimidated by the threats, of the people intrusted to their care. 1789. 74. had arrived tance was Before the era at which we have now arrived, the period had come when it was evident that the popular party had The period resolved on an entire usurpation of the whole powers of of when resisthe state; and that determined resistance was the only necessary. course which could have arrested their treasonable encroachments. The forcible union of the legislature in a single chamber-the confiscation of the church estatesthe formation of a highly democratic constitution, inconsistent with any thing like public order, and the refusal of the absolute veto, in defiance of the cahiers from every part of France, were all acts of violence, from which nothing but the establishment of democratic tyranny was to be anticipated. But when, in addition to all this, the King was besieged by a furious mob in his own palace, when his apartments were ransacked, and his consort all but murdered by hired assassins, the rule of law as well as of authority was at an end; the hour had arrived to conquer or die. By resistance in this extremity, he at least had the chance of rousing the better class of the nation to his and their own defence-but for the fatal emigration of the noblesse, he unquestionably would have done so. When, by their desertion and the treachery of the army, he was compelled to yield to such outrages-to submit to be led a captive amidst savage and drunken mobs to his own palace he was in effect forced to place his neck beneath the lowest of the populace, and prepare, in the unresisted ascent of guilt, for all the sanguinary in. 90, 91. excesses which followed.1 If the army and the Tiers Etat were the parties chiefly in fault in the previous stage of the Revolution, the nobility have most to answer for in this. It was their fatal defection which paralysed the monarch, when he and all his councillors had become sensible of the insatiable ambition of the commons, and which rendered it impos 1 Mounier, 75. Great fault bility at this of the no period. |