PRIVILEGES OF PROVINCES ABANDONED.

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the ancient treaties of their province with France, nevertheless manifested the desire of uniting. Provence said the same, next Burgundy and Bresse, Normandy, Poitou, Auvergne, and Artois. Lorraine, in affecting language, said that it would not regret the domination of its adored sovereigns who were the fathers of the people, if it had the happiness of uniting with its brethren, and of entering with them all together into the maternal mansion of France,--into that vast and glorious family. Next came the turn of the cities. Their deputies came in crowds to lay their privileges upon the altar of their native land.

The officers of justice were unable to pierce the crowd surrounding the tribune, to bring their tribute. A member of the Parliament of Paris imitated their example, renouncing the hereditary succession of offices,-transmissible nobility.

The archbishop of Paris demanded that they should remember God on that great day, and sing a Te Deum.

"But the king, gentlemen," said Lally, "the king who has convoked us after the long lapse of two centuries, shall he not have his reward? Let us proclaim him the restorer of French liberty!"

The night was far advanced: it was two o'clock. That night dispelled for ever the long and painful dream of the thousand years of the middle ages. The approaching dawn was that of liberty! Since that marvellous night, no more classes, but Frenchmen; no more provinces, but one France!

God save France!

CHAPTER V.

THE CLERGY AND THE PEOPLE.

Prophetic Speeches of Fauchet.-Powerless Efforts for Reconciliation.-Imminent Ruin of the Ancient Church.-The Church had abandoned the People.-Buzot claims the Estates of the Clergy for the Nation, August 6th.-Suppression of Tithes, August 11th.-Religious Liberty acknowledged.-League of the Clergy, the Nobility, and the Court.Paris abandoned to itself.--No Public Authority, few Acts of Violence.--Patriotic Donations.--Devotion and Sacrifice.-(August, 1789.)

THE resurrection of the people who at length burst their sepulchre, feudality itself rolling away the stone by which it

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PROPHETIC SPEECHES OF FAUCHET.

had kept them immured, the work of ages in one night, such was the first miracle-the divine and authentic miracle-of this new Gospel!

How applicable here are those words pronounced by Fauchet over the skeletons found in the Bastille ! "Tyranny had sealed them within the walls of those dungeons which she believed to be eternally impenetrable to the light. The day of revelation is come! The bones have arisen at the voice of French liberty; they depose against centuries of oppression and death, prophesying the regeneration of human nature, and the life of nations!"*

Noble language of a true prophet. Let us cherish it in our hearts, as the treasure of hope. Yes, they will rise again! The resurrection begun on the ruins of the Bastille, continued through the night of the 4th of August, will display in the light of social life those crowds still languishing in the shadows of death. Day dawned in '89; next, the morn arose shrouded in storms; then, a dark, total eclipse. The sun will yet shine "Solem quis dicere falsum audeat ?"

out.

It was two hours after midnight when the Assembly concluded its important work, and separated. In the morning (August 5th), Fauchet was making, at Paris, his funeral oration over the citizens killed before the Bastille. Those martyrs of liberty had just gained, that very night, in the destruction of the great feudal Bastille, their palm, and the price of their blood.

Fauchet there found once more words worthy of eternal remembrance: "How those false interpreters of divine oracles have injured the world! They have consecrated despotism, and made God the accomplice of tyrants. What says the Gospel? You will have to appear before kings; they will order you to act unrighteously, and you shall resist them till death. False doctors triumph, because it is written: Give. unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's. But must they also give unto Cæsar what is not Cæsar's? Now liberty is not Cæsar's; it belongs to human nature."

Tyrants

*Printed at the end of Dussaulx's Euvre des Sept Jours. He says admirably on another occasion: "We have reached the middle of time. are ripe." See his three speeches on liberty, spoken at Saint-Jacques, SainteMarguerite, and Notre-Dame.

IMPOTENT EFFORTS FOR RECONCILIATION.

219

Those eloquent words were still more so in the mouth of him who, on the 14th of July, had shown himself doubly heroic by courage and humanity. Twice had he attempted, at the peril of his life, to save the lives of others, and stop the effusion of blood. A true Christian and true citizen, he had wished to save all, both men and doctrines. His blind charity defended at the same time ideas hostile to one another, and contradictory dogmas. He united the two Gospels in one bond of love, without any attention to the difference of their principles, or to their opposite characters. Spurned and excluded by the priests, he looked upon what had caused his persecution as something, for that very reason, that he ought to respect and cherish. Who has not fallen into the very same error? Who has not cherished the hope of saving the past by hastening the future? Who would not have wished to quicken the spirit without killing the old form?—to rekindle the flame without molesting the dead ashes? Vain endeavour! In vain would we withhold our breath. It expands in the air, and flies to the four quarters of the world.

Who was then able to see all that? Fauchet was mistaken, and so were many others. They endeavoured to believe the struggle ended, and peace restored; they wondered to find that the Revolution had been already in the Gospel. The heart of every one who heard those glorious words leaped with joy. The impression was so strong, the emotion so poignant, that they crowned the apostle of liberty with a civic wreath. The people and the armed population, the conquerors of the Bastille and the citizen guard, with drums beating in front, led him back to the Hôtel-de-Ville; a herald carried a crown before him.

Was this the last triumph of the priest, or the first of the citizen? Will those two characters, here confounded, be able to blend together? The tattered raiment, glorified by the balls of the Bastille, allow us here to perceive the new man ; in vain would he extend that robe in order to cover the past.

A new creed is advancing towards us, and two others are departing (how can it be helped ?)—the Church and Royalty.

Of the three branches of the antique oak,-Feudality, Royalty, Church,-the first fell on the 4th of August; the two others totter to and fro; I hear a loud wind in the branches ; they struggle, and resist strongly; their leaves are scattered

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IMMINENT RUIN OF THE ANCIENT CHURCH.

on the ground; nothing can withstand that storm. is doomed perish!

Let what

No regret, no useless tears! Gracious God! how long had that which imagines it is now dying, been sterile, dead and useless! What bears an overwhelming testimony against the Church in '89, is the state of utter neglect in which she had left the people. For two thousand years she alone had the duty of instructing them; and how had she performed it ? What was the end and aim of the pious foundations in the middle ages? What duties did they impose on the clergy? The salvation of souls, their religious improvement, the softening of manners, humanising of the people. They were your disciples, and given to you alone. Masters, what have you taught them?

the

Ever since the twelfth century, you have continued to speak to them a language no longer theirs, and the form of worship has ceased to be a mode of instructing them. The deficiency was supplied by preaching; but gradually it became silent, or spoke for the rich alone. You have neglected the poor, disdained the coarse mob. Coarse? Yes, through you. Through you, two people exist: the upper, civilised and refined to excess; the lower, rude and savage, much further removed from the other than in the beginning. It was your duty to fill up the interval, to be ever raising the lowly, and of the two to make one people. Now the crisis has come; and I see no cultivation acquired, no softening of manners among the classes of which you made yourselves the masters; what they possess, they have naturally, from the instinct of Nature, from the sap that she implants within us. The good is innate; and to whom must I attribute the evil, the anarchy, but to those who were answerable for their souls, and yet abandoned them?

In '89, what are your famous monasteries, your antique schools? The abode of idleness and silence. Grass grows there, and the spider spins her web. And your pulpits? Mute. And your books? Empty.

The eighteenth century passes away, an age of attacks, in which, from time to time, your adversaries summon you in vain to speak and to act, if you be still alive.

One thing alone might be urged in your defence; many of you believe it, though not one will avow it. It is, that, for a long time past, doctrine was exhausted, that you no

THE CHURCH HAD ABANDONED THE PEOPLE.

221

longer said anything to the people, having nothing to say, that you had lived your ages, an age of teaching,-an age of disputation that everything passes and changes; the heavens themselves will pass away. Powerfully attached to outward forms, unable to separate the spirit from them, not daring to aid the phoenix to die to live again, you remained dumb and inactive in the sanctuary, occupying the place of the priest. But the priest was no longer there.

Depart from the temple. You were there for the people, to give them light. Go, your lamp is extinct. They who built those churches, and lent them to you, now demand them. Who were they? The France of those times; restore them to the France of to-day.

To-day (August, '89,) France takes back the tithes, and to-morrow (November 2nd), she will take back the estates. By what right? A great jurisconsult has said: "By the right of disherison." The dead church has no heirs. To whom does her patrimony revert? To her author, to that PATRIA, whence the new church shall rise.

On the 6th of August, when the Assembly had been long discussing a loan proposed by Necker, and which, as he confessed, would not suffice for two months, a man who till then had seldom spoken, suddenly ascended the tribune; this time he said but these words: "The ecclesiastical estates belong to the nation.'

Loud murmurs. The man who had so frankly stated the position of things was Buzot, one of the leaders of the future Gironde party: his youthful, austere, fervent, yet melancholy countenance,* was one of those which bear impressed upon their brow the promise of a short destiny.

The attempted loan failed, was again proposed, and at length carried. It had been difficult to get it voted, and it was more difficult to get it completed. To whom were the public going to lend? To the ancien régime or the Revolution? Nobody yet knew. A thing more sure, and clear to every mind, was the uselessness of the clergy, their perfect unworthiness, and the incontestable right that the nation had to the ecclesiastical estates. Everybody was acquainted with the morals of the pre

See a description of him in the Mémoires of Madame Roland, t. ii.