bouring princes, who, contrary to the rules of good neighbourhood, and the principles of the law of nations, protect these assemblages, that the nation can no longer suffer this want of respect, and these sources of hostility. Finally, you have given me to understand, that one general sensation is felt by the nation, and that the cry of all the French is for war, in preference to a ruinous and degrading patience.

Gentlemen, I have long thought that our circumstances required great circumspection in our measures; that having scarcely yet weathered the agitations and storms of a revolution, and in the first essays of an infant constitution, no means ought to be neglected that could preserve France from the incalculable evils of war. These means I have always employed. 'On the one hand, I have done every thing to recal the French emigrants to the bosom of their country, and induce them to submit to the new laws which a great majority of the nation has adopt. ed; on the other, I have employed amicable intimations; I have caused formal and precise requisitions to be made, to divert the neighbouring princes from giving them a support calculated to flatter their hopes, and encourage them in their rash designs.

The emperor has done all that was to be expected from a faithful ally, by forbidding and dispersing all assemblages within his states.

My measures at the courts of other princes have not been equally successful. Unaccommodating answers have been given to my requisitions.

These unjust refusals call for

resolutions of another kind. The nation has manifested its wishes. You have collected them, you have weighed the consequences, you have expressed them to me by your message. Gentlemen, you have not anticipated me. As the representative of the people, I felt the people's injuries; and I am now to inform you of the resolution I have taken to pursue demand.

I have caused a declaration to be made to the elector of Treves, that if, before the 15th of January, he do not put a stop, within his states, to all collecting of troops, and all hostile dispositions on the part of the French, who have taken refuge in them, I shall no longer consider him but as the enemy of France. I shall cause similar declarations to be made to all who favour assemblages contrary to the tranquillity of the kingdom; and by securing to foreigners all the protection which they ought to expect from our laws, I shall have a right to demand a speedy and complete reparation of all the injuries which Frenchmen may have received.

I have written to the emperor to engage him to continue his good offices, and, if necessary, to exert his authority as head of the empire, to avert the evils which the obstinacy of certain members of the Germanic body, if longer persisted in, cannot fail to occasion. Much may, undoubtedly be expected from his interposition, supported by the powerful influence of his example; but I am, at the same time, making the most proper military arrangements to render these declarations respected.

And if they shall not be attend, ed to, then, gentlemen, it will only

Protest of the Princes of the House of Bourbon against the King's Acceptance of the Constitution.

T is in vain that an unfortunate Monarch, always captive, though free in appearance, has consented to the ruin of his faithful subjects -to the ruin of the monarchy-by accepting a pretended constitution of the empire: it is in vain that he has signed his own degradation; this sanction, which the king has given in fact to a monstrous code, is really no sanction in right. And who can be persuaded of the legality of such an assent, while every thing proclaims the contrary?

Can a prince left alone amidst usurpers, surrounded with the wrecks of his own throne, encompassed by fears and menaces, beset by intrigue, have freedom of choice? And without freedom of choice, is not every consent null ?

Freedom consists in being able to chuse without danger, and without fear; it cannot exist without this condition, and consent is null, when refusal would hazard the safety and property of him who gives it. If the king had refused to accept the constitution, he would have been deprived of the crown; so had the usurping assembly decreed. And in rejecting with disdain a degraded crown, and presented by a seditious assembly, was the king master of the choice of his asylum? and would he not have exposed his person, and all that was still more dear to him, to outrage, and his faithful subjects to proscription, to murder, and to conflagration?

Without doubt, had Louis XVI. entertained the hope of dying at least with glory, if his blood could have saved France, the inheritor of the virtues of Henry IV. would have displayed his courage. Forced to obtain his inheritance by conquest, he would, like him, have been the victor and the father of his subjects; and, like him, would have compelled them to become happy. But what can courage do without support! Henry had an army, while Louis, alone, betrayed, abandoned, captive in the hands of his enemies, without troops, without auxiliaries, forced even to regret the happy obscurity of the meanest of his subjects, in the midst of an importunate crowd, who served rather to besiege than defend him, found not even one friend to share his sorrows and wipe away his tears.

The king then could form no other determination than that which he adopted, without hazarding the loss of his crown, and per

haps

haps of his life. His degradation, and even his death, would have been an useless sacrifice to honour; it would have cost France long and fruitless remorse, but could not have saved it.

The king then was not free, his sanction is therefore null; and in this case to disobey illusory orders is to give the strongest and most courageous proof of obedience and fidelity; it is to serve the real monarch, it is to serve God and our country.

Scarcely could this pretended assent be credited if the king had proclaimed it amidst his family, surrounded with his ancient and faithful servants, with all his military household; in fine, with all the splendor of his former power. Then the royal assent, though the occasion of so much ruin, would nevertheless have been recognised as just, at least reputed free; then we might have condemned the error of the prince, but should not have wept over his chains; then the fact would have been incontestible, we could only have disputed the right.

In fact, even if the king had enjoyed full possession of his liberty, would he have had the right to sanction laws contrary to the fundamental laws of the kingdom? Could he, from a mistaken generosity, and in the expectation of a deceitful calm, have sacrificed along with himself, his family, his successors, the true happiness of the people, generations present and to come? Could he give a valid approbation to the pretended constitution, which has occasioned so many misfortunes? Possessor for life of the throne, which he received from his ancestors, could the

king, in alienating his primordial rights, destroy the constitutive basis on which it is founded? Born defender of the religion of the state, could he consent to what tends to its ruin, and abandon its ministers to wretchedness and disgrace? Bound to administer justice to his subjects, could he renounce the function, essentially royal, of causing it to be administered by tribunals legally constituted, and of superintending himself the administration? Protector of the rights of all the orders, and of the possessions of individuals, could he sanction the invasion of the one, and the violation of the other? Father of his people, could he abandon them to disorder and anarchy? In fine, could he highly approve what reason and justice condemn, and eternize the misfortunes of France?

And what is this constitution, which they pretend to give us, but a monster destructive of laws human and divine; a work of offence and iniquity; null from the vice of the convocation of the members of the assemblystyling themselves constituting; null from the combination of the deliberating body, a combination subversive of the first basis of the state, the distinction of orders; null from the principles which it establishes, since they overturn the throne and the altar, and tend to replunge men in barbarism by appearing to bring them back to nature; null from its consequences, dreadful consequences, of which experience already presents a too faithful catalogue in the disorder of the finances, in the scarcity of money, in the stagnation of commerce, in the want of discipline among the troops, in

the

the inactivity of the tribunals, the silence of the laws, the tyranny of the factious, and the oppression of the rich; in one word, the triumph of licentiousness over true liberty? It would be useless to accumulate reasoning: truth is too striking; and facts already speak so loudly, that the consequence cannot be denied, without a species of self-deception. The king then had no right to sanction such a constitution, of which his sanction, already null by the defect of freedom, is null likewise by the defect of right. Ah! when, victorious over the Gauls, the first Franks, assembled in the Champ-de-Mars, raised Pharamond on the shield; when their warlike voices exclaimed-" Reign over us, and let your descendants reign over our children"-they were far from foreseeing, that at the end of fourteen ages a generation would come, whose madness would destroy the work of wisdom and of valour! When Philip the Fair, reviving the rights of the people, that had been disregarded under indolent monarchs, summoned to the statesgeneral the deputies of the third estate, and placed them along with the peers of his realm, he did not suspect that one day this ungrateful order would overturn the two others, would deck ambitious tribunes with the spoils of the supreme power, and leave only the phantom of a king on the throne of Charlemagne.

No, it shall not be so :-No, the French monarchy shall not perish: and since motives which it is impossible for us to perceive, but which can originate only from the violence and constraint which, by being disguised, are only more cruel, force Louis XVI to subscribe

an acceptance which his heart rejects, which his own interest and that of his people condemn, and which his duty as king expressly prohibits;

We protest in the face of the whole world, and in the most solemn manner, against this illusive act, and all that may follow from it. We have shown that it is null of itself, null by defect of liberty. null from the radical vice of all the operations of the usurping assembly, which, not being an assembly of the states-general, is nothing. We are supported by the rights of the whole nation, in rejecting decrees diametrically opposite to their wishes, expressed by the unanimous tenor of instructions to their representatives; and we disavow, on behalf of the nation, those treacherous mandatories, who, in violating their orders, and departing from the mission entrusted to them, ceased to be its representatives. We will maintain what is evident, that, having acted contrary to their title, they have acted without power, and what they could not legally do cannot be validly accepted.

We protest for the king, and in his name, against what can only bear its false impression. His voice being stifled by oppression, we will be its necessary organs; and we express his real sentiments, as they exist in the oath of his accession to the throne, as they have appeared in the actions of his whole life, as they have been displayed in the declaration which he made at the first moment when he believed himself free. He neither can nor ought to have any other, and his will exists only in those acts where it breathes freely.

We