History of the Girondists

History of the Girondists.

by Alphonse de Lamartine.

ADVERTIs.e.m.e.nT.

We have not thought it necessary to preface this recital by any introduction of the preceding epochs of the Revolution.

We have not re-produced, with the minute elaboration of an annalist, the numerous parliamentary and military details of all the events of these forty months. Two or three times we have, in order to group men and circ.u.mstances in ma.s.ses, made unimportant anachronisms.

We have written after having scrupulously investigated facts and characters: we do not ask to be credited on our mere word only. Although we have not enc.u.mbered our work with notes, quotations, and doc.u.mentary testimony, we have not made one a.s.sertion unauthorised by authentic memoirs, by unpublished ma.n.u.scripts, by autograph letters, which the families of the most conspicuous persons have confided to our care, or by oral and well confirmed statements gathered from the lips of the last survivors of this great epoch.

If some errors in fact or judgment have, notwithstanding, escaped us, we shall be ready to acknowledge them, and repair them in sequent editions, when the proofs have been transmitted to us. We shall not reply one by one to such denials and contradictions as this book may give rise to; it might be a tedious and unprofitable paper-war in the newspapers. But we will make notes of every observation, and reply _en ma.s.se_, by our proofs and tests, after a certain lapse of time. We seek the truth only, and should blush to make our work a calumny of the dead.

As to the t.i.tle of this book, we have only a.s.sumed it, as being unable to find any other which can so well define this recital, which has none of the pretensions of history, and therefore should not affect its gravity. It is an intermediate labour between history and memoirs.

Events do not herein occupy so much s.p.a.ce as men and ideas. It is full of private details, and details are the physiognomy of characters, and by them they engrave themselves on the imagination.

Great writers have already written the records of this memorable epoch, and others still to follow will write them also. It would be an injustice to compare us with them. They have produced, or will produce, the history of an age. We have produced nothing more than a "study" of a group of men and a few months of the Revolution.

A. L.

Paris, March 1. 1847.

BOOK I.

I.

INTRODUCTION.

I now undertake to write the history of a small party of men who, cast by Providence into the very centre of the greatest drama of modern times, comprise in themselves the ideas, the pa.s.sions, the faults, the virtues of their epoch, and whose life and political acts forming, as we may say, the nucleus of the French Revolution, perished by the same blow which crushed the destinies of their country.

This history, full of blood and tears, is full also of instruction for the people. Never, perhaps, were so many tragical events crowded into so short a s.p.a.ce of time, never was the mysterious connexion which exists between deeds and their consequences developed with greater rapidity.

Never did weaknesses more quickly engender faults,--faults crimes,--crimes punishment. That retributive justice which G.o.d has implanted in our very acts, as a conscience more sacred than the fatalism of the ancients[1], never manifested itself more unequivocally; never was the law of morality ill.u.s.trated by a more ample testimony, or avenged more mercilessly. Thus the simple recital of these two years is the most luminous commentary of the whole Revolution; and blood, spilled like water, not only shrieks in accents of terror and pity, but gives, indeed, a lesson and an example to mankind. It is in this spirit I would indite this work. The impartiality of history is not that of a mirror, which merely reflects objects, it should be that of a judge who sees, listens, and decides. Annals are not history; in order to deserve that appellation it requires a conviction; for it becomes, in after times, _that_ of the human race.

Recital animated by the imagination, weighed and judged by wisdom,--such is history as the ancients understood it; and of history conceived and produced in such a spirit, I would, under the Divine guidance, leave a fragment to my country.

II.

HISTORY OF THE GIRONDISTS.

Mirabeau had just died. The instinct of the people led them to press around the house of his tribune, as if to demand inspiration even from his coffin; but had Mirabeau been still living, he could no longer have given it; his star had paled its fires before that of the Revolution; hurried to the verge of an unavoidable precipice by the very chariot he himself had set in motion, it was in vain that he clung to the tribune.

The last memorial he addressed to the king, which the Iron Chest has surrendered to us, together with the secret of his venality, testify the failure and dejection of his mind. His counsels are versatile, incoherent, and almost childish:--now he will arrest the Revolution with a grain of sand--now he places the salvation of the Monarchy in a proclamation of the crown and a regal ceremony which shall revive the popularity of the king,--.and now he is desirous of buying the acclamations of the tribune, and believes the nation, like him, to be purchasable at a price. The pettiness of his means of safety are in contrast with the vast increase of perils; there is a vagueness in every idea; we see that he is impelled by the very pa.s.sions he has excited, and that unable any longer to guide or control them, he betrays, whilst he is yet unable to crush, them. The prime agitator is now but the alarmed courtier seeking shelter beneath the throne, and though still stuttering out terrible words in behalf of the nation and liberty, which are in the part set down for him, has already in his soul all the paltriness and the thoughts of vanity which are proper to a court. We pity genius when we behold it struggling with impossibility. Mirabeau was the most potent man of his time; but the greatest individual contending with an enraged element appears but a madman. A fall is only majestic when accompanied by virtue.

Poets say that clouds a.s.sume the form of the countries over which they have pa.s.sed, and moulding themselves upon the valleys, plains, or mountains, acquire their shapes and move with them over the skies. This resembles certain men, whose genius being as it were acquisitive, models itself upon the epoch in which it lives, and a.s.sumes all the individuality of the nation to which it belongs. Mirabeau was a man of this cla.s.s: he did not invent the Revolution, but was its manifestation.

But for him it might perhaps have remained in a state of idea and tendency. He was born, and it took in him the form, the pa.s.sion, the language which make a mult.i.tude say when they see a thing--There it is.

He was born a gentleman and of ancient lineage, refugee and established in Provence, but of Italian origin: the progenitors were Tuscan. The family was one of those whom Florence had cast from her bosom in the stormy excesses of her liberty, and for which Dante reproaches his country in such bitter strains for her exiles and persecutions. The blood of Machiavel and the earthquake genius of the Italian republics were characteristics of all the individuals of this race. The proportions of their souls exceed the height of their destiny: vices, pa.s.sions, virtues are all in excess. The women are all angelic or perverse, the men sublime or depraved, and their language even is as emphatic and lofty as their aspirations. There is in their most familiar correspondence the colour and tone of the heroic tongues of Italy.

The ancestors of Mirabeau speak of their domestic affairs as Plutarch of the quarrels of Marius and Sylla, of Caesar and Pompey. We perceive the great men descending to trifling matters. Mirabeau inspired this domestic majesty and virility in his very cradle. I dwell on these details, which may seem foreign to this history, but explain it. The source of genius is often in ancestry, and the blood of descent is sometimes the prophecy of destiny.

III.

Mirabeau"s education was as rough and rude as the hand of his father, who was styled the _friend of man_, but whose restless spirit and selfish vanity rendered him the persecutor of his wife and the tyrant of all his family. The only virtue he was taught was honour, for by that name in those days they dignified that ceremonious demeanour which was too frequently but the show of probity and the elegance of vice.

Entering the army at an early age, he acquired nothing of military habits except a love of licentiousness and play. The hand of his father was constantly extended not to aid him in rising, but to depress him still lower under the consequences of his errors: his youth was pa.s.sed in the prisons of the state; his pa.s.sions, becoming envenomed by solitude, and his intellect being rendered more acute by contact with the irons of his dungeon, where his mind lost that modesty which rarely survives the infamy of precocious punishments.

Released from gaol, in order, by his father"s command, to attempt to form a marriage beset with difficulties with Mademoiselle De Marignan, a rich heiress of one of the greatest families of Provence, he displayed, like a wrestler, all kinds of stratagems and daring schemes of policy in the small theatre of Aix. Cunning, seduction, courage, he used every resource of his nature to succeed, and he succeeded; but he was hardly married, before fresh persecutions beset him, and the stronghold of Pontarlier gaped to enclose him. A love, which his _Lettres a Sophie_ has rendered immortal, opened its gates and freed him. He carried off Madame de Monier from her aged husband. The lovers, happy for some months, took refuge in Holland; they were seized there, separated and shut up, the one in a convent and the other in the dungeon of Vincennes.

Love, which, like fire in the veins of the earth, is always detected in some crevice of man"s destiny, lighted up in a single and ardent blaze all Mirabeau"s pa.s.sions. In his vengeance it was outraged love that he appeased; in liberty, it was love which he sought and which delivered him; in study, it was love which still ill.u.s.trated his path. Entering obscure into his cell, he quitted it a writer, orator, statesman, but perverted--ripe for any thing, even to sell himself, in order to buy fortune and celebrity. The drama of life was conceived in his head, he wanted but the stage, and that time was preparing for him. During the few short years which elapsed for him between his leaving the keep of Vincennes and the tribune of the National a.s.sembly, he employed himself with polemic labours, which would have weighed down another man, but which only kept him in health. The Bank of Saint Charles, the Inst.i.tutions of Holland, the books on Prussia, the skirmish with Beaumarchais, his style and character, his lengthened pleadings on questions of warfare, the balance of European power, finance, those biting invectives, that war of words with the ministers or men of the hour, resembled the Roman forum in the days of Clodius and Cicero. We discern the men of antiquity in even his most modern controversies. We may fancy that we hear the first roarings of those popular tumults which were so soon to burst forth, and which his voice was destined to control. At the first election of Aix, rejected with contempt by the _n.o.blesse_, he cast himself into the arms of the people, certain of making the balance incline to the side on which he should cast the weight of his daring and his genius. Ma.r.s.eilles contended with Aix for the great plebeian; his two elections, the discourses he then delivered, the addresses he drew up, the energy he employed, commanded the attention of all France. His sonorous phrases became the proverbs of the Revolution; comparing himself, in his lofty language, to the men of antiquity, he placed himself already in the public estimation in the elevated position he aspired to reach. Men became accustomed to identify him with the names he cited; he made a loud noise in order to prepare minds for great commotions; he announced himself proudly to the nation in that sublime apostrophe in his address to the Ma.r.s.eillais: "When the last of the Gracchi expired, he flung dust towards heaven, and from this dust sprung Marius! Marius, less great for having exterminated the Cimbri than for having prostrated in Rome the aristocracy of the n.o.bility."

From the moment of his entry into the National a.s.sembly he filled it: he was the whole people. His gestures were commands; his movements _coups d"etat_. He placed himself on a level with the throne, and the n.o.bility felt itself subdued by a power emanating from its own body. The clergy, which is the people, and desires to reconcile the democracy with the church, lends him its influence, in order to destroy the double aristocracy of the n.o.bility and bishops.

All that had been built by antiquity and cemented by ages fell in a few months. Mirabeau alone preserved his presence of mind in the midst of this ruin. His character of tribune ceases, that of the statesman begins, and in this he is even greater than in the other. There, when all else creep and crawl, he acts with firmness, advancing boldly. The Revolution in his brain is no longer a momentary idea--it is a settled plan. The philosophy of the eighteenth century, moderated by the prudence of policy, flows easily, and modelled from his lips. His eloquence, imperative as the law, is now the talent of giving force to reason. His language lights and inspires every thing; and though almost alone at this moment, he has the courage to remain alone. He braves envy, hatred, murmurs, supported by the strong feeling of his superiority. He dismisses with disdain the pa.s.sions which have hitherto beset him. He will no longer serve them when his cause no longer needs them. He speaks to men now only in the name of his genius. This t.i.tle is enough to cause obedience to him. His power is based on the a.s.sent which truth finds in all minds, and his strength again reverts to him. He contests with all parties, and rises superior to one and all. All hate him because he commands; and all seek him because he can serve or destroy them. He does not give himself up to any one, but negotiates with each: he lays down calmly on the tumultuous element of this a.s.sembly, the basis of the reformed const.i.tution: legislation, finance, diplomacy, war, religion, political economy, balances of power, every question he approaches and solves, not as an Utopian, but as a politician. The solution he gives is always the precise mean between the theoretical and the practical. He places reason on a level with manners, and the inst.i.tutions of the land in consonance with its habits. He desires a throne to support the democracy, liberty in the chambers, and in the will of the nation, one and irresistible in the government. The characteristic of his genius, so well defined, so ill understood, was less audacity than justness. Beneath the grandeur of his expression is always to be found unfailing good sense. His very vices could not repress the clearness, the sincerity of his understanding. At the foot of the tribune he was a man devoid of shame or virtue: in the tribune he was an honest man. Abandoned to private debauchery, bought over by foreign powers, sold to the court in order to satisfy his lavish expenditure, he preserved, amidst all this infamous traffic of his powers, the incorruptibility of his genius. Of all the qualities of a great man of his age, he was only wanting in honesty. The people were not his devotees, but his instruments,--his own glory was the G.o.d of his idolatry; his faith was posterity; his conscience existed but in his thought; the fanaticism of his idea was quite human; the chilling materialism of his age had crushed in his heart the expansion, force, and craving for imperishable things. His dying words were "sprinkle me with perfumes, crown me with flowers, that I may thus enter upon eternal sleep." He was especially of his time, and his course bears no impress of infinity. Neither his character, his acts, nor his thoughts have the brand of immortality. If he had believed in G.o.d, he might have died a martyr, but he would have left behind him the religion of reason and the reign of democracy. Mirabeau, in a word, was the reason of the people; and that is not yet the faith of humanity!

IV.

Grand displays cast a veil of universal mourning over the secret sentiments which his death inspired to all parties. Whilst the various belfries tolled his knell, and minute guns were fired; whilst, in a ceremony that had a.s.sembled two hundred thousand spectators, they awarded to a citizen the funeral obsequies of a monarch; whilst the Pantheon, to which they conveyed his remains, seemed scarcely a monument worthy of such ashes,--what was pa.s.sing in the depths of men"s hearts?

The king, who held Mirabeau"s eloquence in pay, the queen, with whom he had nocturnal conferences, regretted him, perhaps, as the last means of safety: yet still he inspired them with more terror than confidence; and the humiliation of a crowned head demanding succour from a subject must have felt comforted at the removal of that destroying power which itself fell before the throne did. The court was avenged by death for the affronts which it had undergone. He was to the n.o.bility merely an apostate from his order. The climax of its shame must have been to be one day raised by him who had abased it. The National a.s.sembly had grown weary of his superiority; the Duc d"Orleans felt that a word from this man would unfold and crush his premature aspirations; M. de La Fayette, the hero of the _bourgeoisie_, must have been in dread of the orator of the people. Between the dictator of the city and the dictator of the tribune there must have been a secret jealousy. Mirabeau, who had never a.s.sailed M. de La Fayette in his discourses, had often in conversation allowed words to escape with respect to his rival which print themselves as they fall on a man. Mirabeau the less, and then M.

de La Fayette appeared the greater, and it was the same with all the orators of the a.s.sembly. There was no longer any rival, but there were many envious. His eloquence, though popular in its style, was that of a patrician. His democracy was delivered from a lofty position, and comprised none of that covetousness and hate which excite the vilest pa.s.sions of the human heart, and which see in the good done for the people nothing but an insult to the n.o.bility. His popular sentiments were in some sort but the liberality of his genius. The vast expansiveness of his mighty soul had no resemblance with the paltry impulses of demagogues. In acquiring rights for the people he seemed as though he bestowed them. He was a volunteer of democracy. He recalled by his part, and his bearing, to those democrats behind him, that from the time of the Gracchi to his own, the tribunes who most served the people had sprung from the ranks of the patricians. His talent, unequalled for philosophy of thought, for depth of reflection, and loftiness of expression, was another kind of aristocracy, which could never be pardoned him. Nature placed him in the foremost rank; and death only created a s.p.a.ce around him for secondary minds. They all endeavoured to acquire his position, and all endeavoured in vain. The tears they shed upon his coffin were hypocritical. The people only wept in all sincerity, because the people were too strong to be jealous, and they, far from reproaching Mirabeau with his birth, loved in him that n.o.bility as though it were a spoil they had carried off from the aristocracy.

Moreover, the nation, disturbed at seeing its inst.i.tutions crumbling away one by one, and dreading a total destruction, felt instinctively that the genius of a great man was the last stronghold left to them.

This genius quenched, it saw only darkness and precipices before the monarchy. The Jacobins alone rejoiced loudly, for it was only he who could outweigh them.

It was on the 6th of April, 1791, that the National a.s.sembly resumed its sittings. Mirabeau"s place, left vacant, reminded each gazer of the impossibility of again filling it; consternation was impressed on every countenance in the tribunes, and a profound silence pervaded the meeting. M. de Talleyrand announced to the a.s.sembly a posthumous address of Mirabeau. They would hear him though dead. The weakened echo of his voice seemed to return to his country from the depths of the vaults of the Pantheon. The reading was mournful. Parties were burning to measure their strength free from any counterpoise. Impatience and anxiety were paramount, and the struggle was imminent. The arbitrator who controlled them was no more.

V.

Before we depict the state of these parties, let us throw a rapid glance over the commencement of the Revolution, the progress it had made, and the princ.i.p.al leaders who were about to attempt directing it in the way they desired to see it advance.

It was hardly two years since opinion had opened the breaches against the monarchy, yet it had already accomplished immense results. The weak and vacillating spirit of the government had convoked the a.s.sembly of Notables, whilst public spirit had placed its grasp on power and convoked the States General. The States General being established, the nation had felt its omnipotence, and from this feeling to a legal insurrection there was but a word; that word Mirabeau had uttered. The National a.s.sembly had const.i.tuted itself in front of, and higher than, the throne itself. The prodigious popularity of M. Necker was exhausted by concessions, and utterly vanished when he no longer had any of the spoils of monarchy to cast before the people. Minister of a monarch in retirement, his own had been utter defeat. His last step conducted him out of the kingdom. The disarmed king had remained the hostage of the ancient _regime_ in the hands of the nation. The declaration of the rights of man and citizen, the sole metaphysical act of the Revolution to this time, had given it a social and universal signification. This declaration had been much jeered; it certainly contained some errors, and confused in terms the state of nature and the state of society; but it was, notwithstanding, the very essence of the new dogma.

VI

There are objects in nature, the forms of which can only be accurately ascertained when contemplated afar off. Too near, as well as too far off, prevents a correct view. Thus it is with great events. The hand of G.o.d is visible in human things, but this hand itself has a shadow which conceals what it accomplishes. All that could then be seen of the French Revolution announced all that was great in this world, the advent of a new idea in human kind, the democratic idea, and afterwards the democratic government.

This idea was an emanation of Christianity. Christianity finding men in serf.a.ge and degraded all over the earth, had arisen on the fall of the Roman Empire, like a mighty vengeance, though under the aspect of a resignation. It had proclaimed the three words which 2000 years afterwards was re-echoed by French philosophy--liberty, equality, fraternity--amongst mankind. But it had for a time hidden this idea in the recesses of the Christian heart. As yet too weak to attack civil laws, it had said to the powers--"I leave you still for a short s.p.a.ce of time possession of the political world, confining myself to the moral world. Continue if you can to enchain, cla.s.s, keep in bondage, degrade the people, I am engaged in the emanc.i.p.ation of souls. I shall occupy 2000 years, perchance, in renewing men"s minds before I become apparent in human inst.i.tutions. But the day will come when my doctrines will escape from the temple, and will enter into the councils of the people; on that day the social world will be renewed."

This day had now arrived; it had been prepared by an age of philosophy, sceptical in appearance but in reality replete with belief. The scepticism of the 18th century only affected exterior forms, and the supernatural dogmata of Christianity, whilst it adopted with enthusiasm, morality and the social sense. What Christianity called revelation, philosophy called reason. The words were different, the meaning identical. The emanc.i.p.ation of individuals, of castes, of people, were alike derived from it. Only the ancient world had been enfranchised in the name of Christ, whilst the modern world was freed in the name of the rights which every human creature has received from the hand of G.o.d; and from both flowed the enfranchis.e.m.e.nt of G.o.d or nature. The political philosophy of the Revolution could not have invented a word more true, more complete, more divine than Christianity, to reveal itself to Europe, and it had adopted the dogma and the word of _fraternity_. Only the French Revolution attacked the form of this ruling religion; because it was incrusted in the forms of government, monarchical, theocratic, or aristocratic, which they sought to destroy. It is the explanation of that apparent contradiction of the mind of the 18th century, which borrowed all from Christianity in policy, and denied, whilst it despoiled, it. There was at one and the same time a violent attraction and a violent repulsion in the two doctrines. They recognised whilst they struggled against each other, and yearned to recognise each other even more completely when the contest was terminated by the triumph of liberty.

Three things were then evident to reflecting minds from and after the month of April, 1791; the one, that the march of the revolutionary movement advanced from step to step to the complete restoration of all the rights of suffering humanity--from those of the people by their government, to those of citizens by castes, and of the workman by the citizen; thus it a.s.sailed tyranny, privilege, inequality, selfishness, not only on the throne, but in the civil law; in the administration, in the legal distribution of property, in the conditions of industry, labour, family, and in all the relations of man with man, and man with woman: the second,--that this philosophic and social movement of democracy would seek its natural form in a form of government a.n.a.logous to its principle, and its nature; that is to say, representing the sovereignty of the people; republic with one or two heads: and, finally, that the social and political emanc.i.p.ation would involve in it the intellectual and religious emanc.i.p.ation of the human mind; that the liberty of thought, of speaking and acting, should not pause before the liberty of belief; that the idea of G.o.d confined in the sanctuaries, should shine forth pouring into each free conscience the right of liberty itself; that this light, a revelation for some, and reason for others, would spread more and more with truth and justice, which emanate from G.o.d to overspread the earth.

VII.