The Age of Napoleon Read online

  Once again the populace of Paris had taken charge of the Revolution by forcing the King’s hand. Now, subject to his subjects, he accepted the Declaration of the Rights of Man as a fait accompli. A third wave of emigration began.

  VI. THE REVOLUTIONARY CONSTITUTION: 1790

  Freed from royal resistance, but uncomfortably aware of the surveillant city, the Assembly proceeded to write the constitution that would specify and legalize the achievements of the Revolution.

  First, should it retain the kingship? It did, and allowed it to be hereditary, for it feared that until the sentiments of legitimacy and loyalty could be transferred from the monarch to the nation, the mesmerizing aura of royalty would be necessary to social order; and the right of transmission would be a guard against wars of succession and such schemes as were then brewing in the Palais-Royal. But the powers of the king were to be strictly limited. The Assembly would vote him annually a “civil list” for his expenses; any further outlay would require application to the legislature. If he left the kingdom without the Assembly’s permission he could be deposed, as he would shortly see. He could choose and dismiss his ministers, but each minister would be required to submit a monthly statement of his disposal of the funds allotted to him, and he could at any time be arraigned before a high court. The king was to command the Army and the Navy, but he could not declare war, or sign a treaty, without the legislature’s prior consent. He should have the right to veto any legislation submitted to him; but if three successive legislatures passed the vetoed bill it was to become law.

  Should the legislature, so supreme, have two chambers, as in England and America? An upper chamber could be a check to hasty action, but it could also become a bastion of aristocracy or old age. The Assembly rejected it, and, as a further guard, declared an end to all hereditary privileges and titles except the king’s. The legislature was to be elected by “active citizens” only—male adult property holders paying in direct taxes an amount equal to the value of three days’ work; this included prosperous peasants but excluded hired labor, actors, and proletaires; these were classed as “passive citizens,” for they could easily be manipulated by their masters or their journalists to become tools of reaction or violence. On this arrangement 4,298,360 men (in a population of 25 million souls) enjoyed the franchise in the France of 1791; 3 million adult males were voteless. The bourgeois Assembly, fearful of the city populace, was certifying the bourgeois Revolution.

  For electoral and administrative purposes the constitution divided France into eighty-three départements, each of these into communes (43,360). For the first time France was to become a unified nation, without privileged provinces or internal tolls, and all with one system of measurements and laws. Penalties were fixed by law, and were no longer at the discretion of a judge. Torture, the pillory, and branding were abolished, but the death penalty was retained, to Robespierre’s present discontent and future convenience. Persons accused of crime could choose to be tried by a jury of “active citizens” chosen by lot; a minority of three votes out of twelve would suffice for acquittal. Civil cases were decided by judges. The old parlements, which had begotten a second aristocracy, were replaced by a new judiciary appointed by the electoral assemblies. A high court was chosen by lot from lower-court justices, two to a département.

  Two immense and related problems remained: how to avoid bankruptcy, and how to regulate the relations between Church and state. Taxes were failing to finance the government, and the Church held enviable wealth untaxed. It took the recently appointed bishop of Autun, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, to propose (October 11, 1789) the solution: let the property of the Church be used for the payment of the national debt.

  Talleyrand is one of the doubly intriguing characters in history. He came of an old family distinguished for its military services, and he would probably have followed a similar career had he not permanently dislocated his foot by a fall at the age of four; he had to limp his way through life, but managed to surmount every obstacle. His parents resigned him to the Church. In the seminary he read Voltaire and Montesquieu, and maintained a mistress nearby. Apparently he was expelled (1775), but in that year (his twenty-first) he received from Louis XVI the Abbey of St.-Denis in Reims. He was ordained a priest in 1779, and on the next day became vicar general to his uncle the Archbishop of Reims. He continued to please highborn ladies; by one of them he had a son, who became an officer under Napoleon. In 1788 Talleyrand was appointed bishop of Autun over the protests of his pious mother, who knew that he was a man of little faith. Nevertheless he drew up for presentation to the States-General a program of reforms which so impressed his clergy that they made him their deputy.40

  Despite desperate opposition by its clerical members, the Assembly (November 2, 1789) voted, 508 to 346, to nationalize ecclesiastical property, then valued at three billion francs.41 It pledged the government to “provide in a fitting manner for the expenses of public worship, the maintenance of the ministers, and the relief of the poor.” On December 19 it empowered a Caisse de l’Extraordinaire to sell 400 million francs’ worth of “assignats”—notes assigning to the holder a right to a stated amount of ecclesiastical property, and bearing interest at five percent until a sale could be effected. With proceeds from these assignats the government paid off its more urgent debts, so assuring the support of the financial community for the new regime. But the buyers of the assignats found it difficult to make satisfactory purchases; they used them as currency; and as the state issued more and more of them, and inflation continued, they lost value except in the payment of taxes, where the Treasury was compelled to receive them at their face worth. So the Treasury again found itself with losses exceeding its income year after year.

  Having crossed the Rubicon, the Assembly (February 13, 1790) suppressed monasteries, allowing pensions to the dispossessed monks;42 nuns were left untouched, as performing valued services in education and charity. On July 12 a “Civil Constitution of the Clergy” was promulgated, regulating the priests as paid employees of the state, and recognizing Catholicism as the national religion. Protestants and Jews might worship freely in their private conventicles, but without support from the government. Catholic bishops were to be chosen by the electoral assemblies of the departments; and in this voting non-Catholic electors—Protestant, Jew, or agnostic—were free to participate.43 All priests, before receiving any stipend from the state, were required to pledge full obedience to the new constitution. Of the 134 bishops in France, 130 refused to take this oath; of the 70,000 parish priests, 46,000 refused.44 The great majority of the population sided with the nonjurors, and boycotted the services of the jurant priests. The rising conflict between the conservative Church, supported by the people, and the predominantly agnostic assemblies, supported by the upper middle class, became a main factor in the waning of the Revolution. Chiefly because of this unpopular legislation the King long refused to sign the new constitution.

  Others had reasons for rejecting it. Robespierre led a strong minority in protesting that the restriction of the franchise to property owners violated the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and was a provocative insult to the Parisian proletaires who had repeatedly saved the Assembly from the armies of the King. The peasantry agreed with townspeople in resenting the abandonment of the governmental regulations that had in some measure protected producers and consumers from a “free market” manipulated by distributors.

  Nevertheless the Assembly felt, with some justice, that the constitution was a remarkable document, giving legal and definitive form to the triumphant Revolution. The middle-class deputies, now supreme, considered that the commonalty—of whom the majority were still illiterate—was not ready to share, in proportion to its numbers, in the deliberations and decisions of the government. Besides, now that the nobility had fled, was it not the turn of the bourgeoisie to direct a state increasingly dependent upon a wisely managed and energetically advancing economy? So the Assembly, regardless of the King’s hesitations,
declared France a constitutional monarchy; and, on June 5, 1790, it invited the eighty-three departments to send their federated National Guards to join the people of Paris and the government of France on the Champ-de-Mars in celebrating—on the first anniversary of the taking of the Bastille—the fulfillment of the Revolution. As the invitation and the enthusiasm spread, thirty foreigners, led by a rich Dutchman known to history as “Anacharsis Cloots,”*entered the Assembly on June 19, and asked for the honor of French citizenship, and for admission to the Feast of the Federation as an “embassy of the human race.” It was so ordered.

  But the hilly Field of Mars had to be sculptured for the occasion: an area three thousand by one thousand feet had to be leveled and terraced to hold 300,000 men, women, and children; and a central mound was to be raised for an altar at which King, princes, prelates, deputies, and commoners would mount and pledge their loyalty to the nation now legally reborn. And yet only fifteen days were left for the sculpturing. Who now can rival the fourteen pages45 in which Carlyle told how the people of Paris, male and female, young and old, came with picks and spades and wheelbarrows and song—“Ça ira!” (It Will Go!)—reshaped that vast terrain, and reared those terraces and that Autel de la Patrie? Which of us today would dare write with such brave blowing of rhetorical trumpets and prophetic ecstasy—especially if nearly half our manuscript had been burned by a hasty maid, and we had to gather and polish our scattered gems again? What a fire must have smoldered in that dour Scot to survive such a holocaust!

  So, in the week before the new holyday, soldiers from all of France traveled to Paris, and sometimes the Parisian National Guard marched out many miles to meet and escort them. On July 14, 1790, they all entered the Field of Mars in proud procession, fifty thousand strong,46 their banners waving, their bands playing, their throats hoarse with their lusty songs, and 300,000 exalted Parisians joining in. Bishop Talleyrand-Périgord, not yet excommunicate, said Mass; two hundred prelates and priests mounted the altar and took the oath; the King pledged himself to obey the new laws to the best of his ability, and all the assemblage cried out, “Vive le Roil” When the cannon sounded a salute, thousands of Parisians who had not been able to attend raised a hand toward the Champ-de-Mars, and made their pledge. In nearly every town similar festivities were held, with wine and food shared in common, and Catholic and Protestant pastors embracing as if they were Christians. How could any Frenchman doubt that a glorious new age had dawned?

  VII. MIRABEAU PAYS HIS DEBTS: APRIL 2, 1791

  One man, at least, could doubt, and one woman. To Louis and his Queen the Tuileries seemed a glass house in which their every move was subject to silent approval or prolonged condemnation by the populace. On August 31, 1790, a Swiss regiment in the King’s service at Nancy mutinied over delayed pay and official tyranny. Some of the rebels were shot down by the National Guard; some were sent to the galleys; some were hanged. Hearing of this, a crowd of forty thousand Parisians converged threateningly upon the royal palace, denouncing Lafayette, blaming the King for the “Nancy massacre,” and demanding the resignation of his ministers. Necker quietly departed (September 18, 1790) to live with his family at Coppet on Lake Geneva. Lafayette advised the King to pacify Paris by accepting the constitution.47 The Queen, however, suspected the general of planning to replace her as the power behind the throne, and so clearly expressed her antipathy that he left the court and resigned to Mirabeau the task of salvaging the monarchy.48

  Mirabeau was willing. He had need of money to support his lavish way of life; he felt that a coalition of King and Assembly was the only alternative to rule by leaders of the mob; and he saw no contradiction in pursuing this policy and replenishing his funds. As far back as September 28, 1789, he had written to his friend La Marck*: “All is lost. The King and Queen will be swept away, and you will see the populace triumphing over their helpless bodies.”49 And to the same friend, on October 7: “If you have any influence with the King or the Queen, persuade them that they and France are lost if the royal family does not leave Paris. I am busy with a plan for getting them away.”50 Louis rejected the plan, but he consented to finance Mirabeau’s defense of the monarchy. Early in May, 1790, he agreed to pay the great adventurer’s debts, to allow him 1,000 a month, and to reward him with 192,000 if he succeeded in reconciling the Assembly with the King.51 In August the Queen gave him a private interview in her gardens at St. Cloud. So great was the aura of majesty that the dragon of rebellion trembled with devotion when he kissed her hand. To his intimates he spoke of her ecstatically: “You know not the Queen. Her force of mind is prodigious. She is a man for courage.”52

  He considered himself “paid but not bought”; according to La Marck “he accepted payment for keeping his own opinions.”53 He had no intention of defending absolutism; on the contrary, the statement which he submitted to the King’s ministers on December 23, 1790, was a program for reconciling public liberty with the royal authority: “To attack the Revolution would be to overshoot the mark, for the movement that makes a great people give itself better laws deserves support…. Both the spirit of the Revolution and many elements in its constitution must be accepted…. I regard all the effects of the Revolution … as conquests so irrevocable that no upheaval, short of dismembering the realm, could destroy them.”54

  He labored with devotion and bribes to save the remnants of royal authority. The Assembly suspected his venality but respected his genius. On January 4, 1791, it chose him its president for the usual term of two weeks. He astonished all by the order of his management and the impartiality of his decisions. He worked all day, ate and drank all evening, and wore himself out with women. On March 25 he entertained two dancers from the Opéra. The next morning he was seized with violent intestinal cramps. He attended the Assembly on the twenty-seventh, but returned to his rooms exhausted and trembling. The news of his illness spread through Paris; theaters were closed out of respect for him; his house was besieged by people asking about his condition; one youth came offering his blood for transfusion.55 Talleyrand told him: “It is not easy to reach you; half of Paris is permanently outside your door.”56 Mirabeau died after much suffering, April 2, 1791.

  On April 3 a delegation from the electors of Paris asked the Assembly to convert the Church of St.-Geneviève into a shrine and tomb for French heroes, and that this Panthéon (“of all the gods”), as it was soon to be called, should bear on its front the inscription “Aux grands hommes la Patrie reconnaissante” (To its great men a grateful Fatherland). It was done, and Mirabeau was buried there on April 4 after what Michelet thought “the most extensive and popular funeral procession that had ever been in the world”;57 the historian estimated the crowd at between three and four hundred thousand—in the streets and the trees, at windows or on roofs; all of the Assembly except Pétion (who had secret evidence of Mirabeau’s receiving money from the King); all the Jacobin Club; twenty thousand National Guards; “One would have thought they were transferring the ashes of Voltaire—of one of those men who never die.”58 On August 10, 1792, proofs were found among the fallen King’s papers of payments to Mirabeau, and on September 22, 1794, the Convention ordered the tarnished hero’s remains removed from the Panthéon.

  VIII. TO VARENNES: JUNE 20, 1791

  The King, reluctant to surrender the nobility, the clergy, and the monarchy to total denudation of their ancient authority, and convinced that a people so individualistic and impetuous as the French would obey no rule, permit no restraints, not sanctioned and ingrained by time, clung hopefully to the vestigial powers still left him, and resisted the daily urging of nobles and the Queen that he should escape from Paris, perhaps from France, and return with an army, native or foreign, strong enough to reestablish him upon a reinvigorated throne. He signed (January 21, 1791) the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, but he felt that he was betraying the faith that had been his precious refuge against the disappointments of his life. He was profoundly shocked by the Assembly’s decision (May 30, 1791) to have th
e remains of Voltaire transferred to the Panthéon; it seemed intolerable to him that the arch-infidel of the century should be carried in triumph to lie with honors in what, only yesterday, had been a consecrated church. He gave his long-withheld consent to the Queen to prepare for a flight across the frontier. Her devoted friend, Count Axel von Fersen, raised money for the escape, and arranged the details; the King, certainly a gentleman, probably not a cuckold, thanked him fervently.59

  All the world knows that story: how the King and Queen disguised as M. and Mme. Korff, with their children and attendants, left the Tuileries furtively at midnight of June 20–21, 1791, and rode all next day, in joy and fear, 150 miles, to Varennes, near the frontier of what is now Belgium (then the Austrian Netherlands); how they were stopped there and arrested by peasants armed with pitchforks and clubs and led by Jean-Baptiste Drouet, postmaster of Ste.-Menehould. He sent to the Assembly for instructions; soon Barnave and Pétion came with the answer: Bring your captives, unharmed, back to Paris. Now it was a three days’ drive, leisurely led by sixty thousand of the National Guard. On the way Barnave sat in the royal coach opposite the Queen; he had been trained in the surviving chivalry of the Old Regime; he felt the glamour of royal beauty in distress. He wondered what would be her fate, and that of the children she guarded. By the time they reached Paris he was her slave.