His begs, she entreats the king to undo what she has done, to recall Necker. His return did not take long; he was there, near at hand, convinced, as usual, that nothing could ever go on without him. Louis XVI. said to him good-naturedly: "For my part I am not at all tenacious of that declaration." Necker required no more, and made no condition. vanity once satisfied, his delight in hearing everybody shout Necker! deprived him of every other thought. He went out, overjoyed, into the great court of the castle, and to comfort the multitude, passed in the midst of them. There a few silly persons fell on their knees and kissed his hands. He, much affected, said: "Yes, my children,-yes, my children,—I remain; be comforted." He burst into tears, and then shut himself up in his cabinet. The poor tool of the court remained without exacting anything; he remained to shield the cabal with his name, to serve them as an advertisement, and reassure them against the people; he restored courage to those worthies, and gave them the time to summon more troops. CHAPTER V. MOVEMENT OF PARIS. Assembly of the Electors, June 25th.-Insurrection of the French Guards.Agitation of the Palais Royal.-Intrigues of the Orleans party.-The King commands the junction of the Orders, June 27th.-The people deliver the French Guards, June 30th.-The Court prepares for War.Paris demands permission to arm.--Necker dismissed, July 11th, 1789. THE situation of things was strange,-evidently temporary. The Assembly had not obeyed. But the king had not revoked anything. The king had recalled Necker; but he kept the Assembly like a prisoner among his troops; he had excluded the public from the sitting; the grand entrance remained shut; the Assembly entered by the small one, and debated with closed doors. The Assembly protested feebly and but slightly. The resistance, on the 23rd, seemed to have exhausted its strength. ASSEMBLY OF THE ELECTORS OF PARIS. Paris did not imitate its weakness. 119 It was not content to see its deputies making laws in prison. On the 24th the ferment was terrible. On the 25th it burst out in three different ways at once; by the electors, by the crowd, and by the soldiery. The seat of the Revolution fixes itself at Paris. The electors had agreed to meet again after the elections, in order to complete their instructions to the deputies whom they had elected. Though the ministry refused its permission,* the coup d'état, on the 23rd, urged them on; they had likewise their coup d'état, and assembled, of their own accord, on the 25th, in the Rue Dauphine. A wretched assembly-room, occupied at that moment by a wedding-party, which made room for them, received, at first, the Assembly of the electors of Paris. This was their Tennis-court. There Paris, through their medium, made an engagement to support the National Assembly. One of them, Thuriot, advised them to go to the Hotelde-Ville, into the great hall of Saint-Jean, which nobody durst refuse them. These electors were mostly rich men, citizens of note; the aristocracy was numerous in this body; but among them were, also, men of over-excited minds. First, two men, fervent révolutionnaires, with a singular tendency to mysticism; one was the abbé Fauchet, eloquent and intrepid; the other, his friend Bonneville, (the translator of Shakespeare). Both, in the thirteenth century, would have caused themselves, most certainly, to be burnt as heretics. In the nineteenth they were as forward as any, or rather the first, to propose resistance; which was scarcely to be expected from the burgess assembly of the electors. On the 6th of June, Bonneville proposed that Paris should be armed, and was the first to cry, "To arms."‡ * Compare the Mémoires de Bailly with the Procès-verbal des Electeurs, drawn up by Bailly et Duveyrier. Yet, nowhere had more reliance been placed on the weakness of the people. The well-known gentleness of Parisian manners, the multitude of government people, and financiers, who could but lose in a rebellion, the crowds of those who lived on abuses, had altogether created a belief, before the elections, that Paris would prove very citizen-like, easy, and timid. See Bailly, pp. 16, 150. Dussaulx, Œuvre des Sept Jours, p. 271, (ed. 1822). 120 INSURRECTION OF THE FRENCH GUARDS. Fauchet, Bonneville, Bertolio, and Carra, a violent journalist, made these bold motions, which ought to have been made from the first in the National Assembly:-firstly, the Citizen Guard; secondly, the early organization of a true, elective, and annual Commune; thirdly, an address to the King, for the removal of the troops and the liberty of the Assembly, and for the revocation of the coup d'état of the 23rd. On the very day of the first assembly of the electors, as if the cry to arms had resounded in the barracks, the soldiers of the French Guards, confined for several days past, overpowered their guard, walked about in Paris, and went to fraternise with the people in the Palais Royal. For some time past, secret societies had been forming among them; they swore they would obey no orders that might be contrary to those of the Assembly. The Act of the 23rd, in which the king declared, in the strongest manner, that he would never change the institution of the army; that is to say, that the nobility should for ever monopolize every grade, and that the plebeian could never rise, but that the common soldier would die in the ranks-that unjustifiable declaration necessarily finished what the revolutionary contagion had begun. The French Guards, residents in Paris, and mostly married men, had seen the depôt in which the children of the soldiers were educated, free of expense, shortly before suppressed by M. Du Châtelet, their hard-hearted colonel. The only change made in the military institutions, was made against them. In order to appreciate properly the words institution of the army, we should know, that in the budget of that time, the officers were reckoned at forty-six millions (of francs), and the soldiers at forty-four.* We should know, that Jourdan, Joubert, and Kléber, who had served at first, quitted the military profession, as a desperate career, a sort of no thoroughfare. Augereau was an under-officer in the infantry, Hoche a sergeant in the French Guards, and Marceau a common soldier; those noble-hearted and aspiring youths were fixed in this low condition for ever. Hoche, who was twentyone years of age, nevertheless completed his own education, as if about to be a General-in-Chief; he devoured everything, * Necker, Administration, ii., 422, 435. (1784). AGITATION IN THE PALAIS ROYAL. 121 literature, politics, and even philosophy; must we add, that this great man, in order to purchase a few books, used to embroider officers' waistcoats, and sell them in a coffee-house.* The trifling pay of a soldier was, under one pretence or other, absorbed by deductions, which the officers squandered away among themselves.† The insurrection of the French Guards was not a pretorian mutiny, a brutal riot of the soldiery,-it came in support of the declarations of the electors and the people. That truly French troop, Parisian in a great measure, followed the lead of Paris, followed the law, the living law,-the National Assembly. They arrived in the Palais Royal, saluted, pressed, embraced, and almost stifled by the crowd. The soldier, that true paria of the ancient monarchy, so ill-treated by the nobles, is welcomed by the people. And what is he, under his uniform, but the very people? Two brothers have met each other, the soldier and the citizen, two children of the same mother; they fall into each other's arms, and burst into tears. Hatred and party-spirit have vilified all that, disfigured those grand scenes, and soiled the page of history, at pleasure. A vast importance has been attached to this or that ridiculous anecdote; a worthy amusement for petty minds! All these immense commotions they have attributed to some miserable, insignificant causes. Paltry fools! try to explain by a straw, washed away by the waves, the agitation of the ocean. No: those movements were those of a whole people, true, sincere, immense, and unanimous; France had her share in them, and so had Paris; all men, (each in his own degree,) acted, some with their hands and voices, others with their minds, with their fervent wishes, from the depths of their hearts. But why do I say France? It would be more true to say the world. An envious enemy, a Genevese, imbued with every English prejudice, cannot help avowing, that at that decisive moment, the whole world was looking on, observing with uneasy sympathy the march of our Revolution, and feeling that France was doing, at her own risk and peril, the business of mankind.‡ Arthur Young, an English agriculturist, a positive, special *Rousselin, Vie de Hoche, i., 20. The single regiment of Beauce believed it was cheated of the sum of 240,727 francs. E. Dumont, Souvenirs, p. 135. 122 man. INTRIGUES OF THE ORLEANS PARTY. man, who had, whimsically enough, come to France, to study its modes of agriculture, at such a moment, is astonished at the deep silence reigning about Paris; no coach, hardly a The terrible agitation concentrating everything within, made a desert of all beyond. He enters; the tumult frightens him; he traverses, in astonishment, that noisy capital. He is taken to the Palais Royal, the centre of the conflagration, the burning focus of the furnace. Ten thousand men were speaking at once; ten thousand lights in the windows; it was a day of victory for the people; fire-works were let off, and bonfires made. Dazzled and confounded by that moving Babel, he hastily retires. Yet the lively and excessive emotion of that people, united in one common thought, soon gains upon the traveller; he gradually becomes associated, without even being aware of his change of sentiments, to the hopes of liberty; the Englishman prays for France.* All men forgot themselves. The place, that strange place where the scene was passing, seemed, at such moments, to forget itself. The Palais Royal was no longer the Palais Royal. Vice, in the grandeur of so sincere a passion, in the heat of enthusiasm, became pure for an instant. The most degraded raised their heads, and gazed at the sky; their past life, like a bad dream, was gone, at least for a day; they could not be virtuous, but they felt themselves heroic, in the name of the liberties of the world! Friends of the people, brothers to one another, having no longer any selfish feeling, and quite ready to share everything. That there were interested agitators in that multitude, cannot be doubted. The minority of the nobility, ambitious men, fond of noise, such as Lameth and Duport, worked upon the people by their pamphlets and agents. Others, still worse, joined them. All that took place, we must say, beneath the windows of the Duke of Orleans, before the eyes of that intriguing, greedy, polluted court. Alas! who would not pity our Revolution? That ingenuous, disinterested, sublime movement, spied and overlooked by those who hoped one day or other to turn it to their advantage! * Of course with many exceptions, and on condition that France adopts the constitution of England. Arthur Young's Travels, vol. i., passim. |