The Age of Napoleon Read online

  Through his efforts and other cautious considerations, the Assembly rejected the cry of the sansculottes for immediate deposition. Who could tell what anarchy would ensue? Would the bourgeois Assembly, and all property, be at the mercy of the unfranchised Parisian populace? So the word went out that the King had not fled but had been abducted; he must be allowed to keep his head, at least for a while, and as much of his crown as the new laws had left him. The radical leaders protested; the clubs and the journals called for the people to assemble on the Field of Mars; on July 17, 1791, fifty thousand came, and six thousand signed a demand for the King’s abdication.60 The Assembly ordered Lafayette and the National Guard to disperse the rebels; these refused, and some of them stoned the Guard; the angry soldiers fired, killing fifty men and women; so ended the universal brotherhood that had been pledged there a year before. Marat, proscribed and hunted by the police, lived in dank cellars, and called for a new revolution. Lafayette, his popularity ended, returned to the front, and waited impatiently for a chance to escape from the mounting chaos of France.

  The King, grateful for a reprieve, went in subdued state to the Assembly on September 13, 1791, and formally signed his assent to the new constitution. Returning to his desolate palace and Queen, he broke down and wept, and begged her to forgive him for having brought her from her happiness in Vienna to the shame of this defeat, and the mounting terror of this imprisonment.

  As that month neared its end, the Assembly prepared to conclude its labors. Perhaps the deputies were tired, and felt that they had done enough for a lifetime. And indeed, from their standpoint, they had accomplished much. They had presided at the collapse of the feudal system; they had abolished hereditary privileges; they had rescued the people from monarchical absolutism and an idle, arrogant aristocracy; they had established equality before the law, and had ended imprisonment without trial. They had reorganized local and provincial administration. They had chastened the once independent and censorious Church by confiscating its wealth and declaring freedom of worship and thought; they had revenged Jean Calas and Voltaire. They had seen with pleasure the emigration of reactionary nobles, and had put the upper middle class in control of the state. And they had embodied these changes in a constitution to which they had won the consent of the King, and of the great majority of the population, as a promise of national unity and peace.

  The National and Constituent Assembly completed its record by arranging for the election of a Legislative Assembly to transform the constitution into specific laws, and to meet with deliberation the problems of the future. Robespierre, hoping that a fresh poll would bring a more representative personnel to power, persuaded his fellow deputies to disbar themselves from election to the new legislature. Then, on September 30, 1791, “the most memorable of all political assemblies”61 declared itself dissolved.

  CHAPTER III

  The Legislative Assembly

  October 1, 1791-September 20, 1792

  I. PERSONS OF THE DRAMA

  THE elections for the second revolutionary congress were zealously monitored by the journalists and powerfully supervised by the clubs. Since censorship of the press had almost disappeared, the journalists had acquired new influence on public policy. Brissot, Loustalot, Marat, Desmoulins, Fréron, Laclos—each had a periodical for his tribune. Paris alone had 133 journals in 1790, and there were hundreds in the provinces. Nearly all of them followed a radical line. Mirabeau had told the King that if he wished to keep his throne or his head he must buy some popular journalists. “The old nobility,” said Napoleon, “would have survived if it had known enough to become master of printing materials…. The advent of cannon killed the feudal system; ink will kill the modern system.”1

  The clubs were almost as effective as the journals. The Breton Club, having followed King and Assembly to Paris, renamed itself Society of the Friends of the Constitution, and leased as a meeting place the refectory of a former Jacobin monastery near the Tuileries; later it expanded into the library, and even the chapel.2 The Jacobins, as history came to call them, were at first all deputies, but they soon enriched their membership by admitting persons prominent in science, literature, politics, or business; here former deputies like Robespierre, self-debarred from the new Assembly, found another fulcrum of power. Dues were high, and until 1793 most of the members came from the middle class.3

  The Jacobin influence was multiplied by the organization of affiliated clubs in many of the communes of France, and their general acceptance of the parent club’s lead in doctrine and strategy. There were some 6,800 Jacobin clubs in 1794, totaling half a million members.4 They formed an organized minority in a disorganized mass. When their policies were supported by the journals their influence was second only to that of the communes—which, through their municipal councils and constituent sections, controlled the local regiments of the National Guard. When all these forces were in harmony the Assembly had to do their bidding or face an unruly gallery, if not armed insurrection.

  An Englishman in Paris in 1791 reported that “clubs abound in every street.”5 There were literary societies, sporting associations, Freemason lodges, workmen’s gatherings. Finding the Jacobins too expensive and bourgeois, some radical leaders formed in 1790 the “Society of the Friends of Man and the Citizen,” which the Parisians soon called the Cordeliers Club, because it met in the former monastery of the Cordelier (Franciscan) friars; this gave a platform to Marat, Hébert, Desmoulins, and Danton. Finding the Jacobins too radical, Lafayette, Bailly, Talleyrand, Lavoisier, André and Marie-Joseph de Chénier, and Du Pont de Nemours formed the “Society of 1789,” which began, in 1790, regular meetings in the Palais-Royal, to support the tottering monarchy. Another monarchical group, led by Antoine Barnave and Alexandre de Lameth, formed a club briefly known to history as the Feuillants, from their meeting in the convent of Cistercian monks so named. It was a sign of the rapid secularization of Parisian life that several abandoned monasteries were now centers of political agitation.

  The rival tempers of the clubs showed during the elections which slowly harvested, from June to September, 1791, the ballots for the new Assembly. The loyalists, softened to tolerance by education and comfort, relied on persuasion and bribery to garner votes; the Jacobins and the Cordeliers, hardened by the marketplace and the streets, seasoned bribery with force. Interpreting the law to the letter, they kept from the polls anyone who refused to take an oath of allegiance to the new constitution; so the great majority of practicing Catholics were automatically excluded. Crowds were organized to raid and disperse meetings of loyalists, as in Grenoble; in some cities, like Bordeaux, the municipal authorities forbade all club meetings except of the Jacobins; in one town the Jacobins and their followers burned a ballot box suspected of harboring a conservative majority.6

  Despite such democratic trimmings, the election sent to the Legislative Assembly a substantial minority dedicated to preserving the monarchy. These 264 “Feuillants” occupied the right section of the hall, and thereby gave a name to conservatives everywhere. The 136 deputies who acknowledged themselves Jacobins or Cordeliers sat at the left on an elevated section called the Mountain; soon they were named Montagnards. In the center sat 355 delegates who refused to be labeled; they came to be called the Plain. Of the 755 total 400 were lawyers, as befitted a lawmaking body; now the lawyers succeeded the clergy in control of the nation. Nearly all the deputies were of the middle class; the Revolution was still a bourgeois feast.

  Until June 20, 1792, the most vigorous group in the legislature was that which later received the name of the department of the Gironde. They were not an organized party (nor were the Montagnards), but they were nearly all from regions of industrial or commercial activity—Caen, Nantes, Lyons, Limoges, Marseilles, Bordeaux. The inhabitants of these thriving centers were accustomed to considerable self-rule; they controlled much of the money, the commerce, the foreign trade of the realm; and Bordeaux, capital of the Gironde, proudly remembered having nurtured Montaigne and M
ontesquieu. Nearly all the leading Girondins were members of the Jacobin Club, and they agreed with most other Jacobins in opposing the monarchy and the Church; but they resented the rule of all France by Paris and its populace, and proposed instead a federal republic of largely self-governed provinces.

  Condorcet was their theorist, philosopher, specialist in education, finance, and utopia; we have long since paid our debt to him.*Their great orator was Pierre Vergniaud: born at Limoges of a businessman father; left a seminary, studied law, practiced at Bordeaux, and was sent thence to the Legislative Assembly, which repeatedly made him its president. Still more influential was Jacques-Pierre Brissot, native of Chartres, something of an adventurer, sampling occupations, climates, and moral codes in Europe and America, briefly imprisoned in the Bastille (1784), founder (1788) of the Société des Noirs Amis, and sturdy worker for the emancipation of slaves. Sent to the Assembly as a deputy from Paris, he took charge of foreign policy, and led the way into war. Condorcet introduced him and Vergniaud to Mme. de Staël; they became devoted attendants at her salon, and helped her lover, the Comte de Narbonne-Lara, to appointment as minister of war by Louis XVI.7 For a long time the Girondins were called Brissotins.

  History remembers better Jean-Marie Roland de La Platière, chiefly because he married a brilliant woman who provided him with ideas and style, deceived him, celebrated his memory, and dignified her ascent to the guillotine with a famous and possibly legendary sentence. When Jeanne-Manon Phlipon, aged twenty-five, met Jean-Marie at Rouen in 1779, he was forty-five years old, incipiently bald, and somewhat worn out by business cares and philosophical rumination. He had a pleasant paternal smile, and preached a noble stoicism that enchanted Manon. She was already familiar with the ancient classics and heroes; she had read Plutarch at the age of eight, sometimes substituting him for the prayerbook when in church; “Plutarch prepared me to be a republican.”8

  She was a high-spirited child. “On two or three occasions when my father whipped me I bit the thigh across which he placed me,”9 and she never lost her bite. But also she read the lives of the saints, and prophetically longed for martyrdom; she felt the beauty and moving solemnity of Catholic ritual, and retained her respect for religion, and some vestiges of the Christian creed, even after relishing Voltaire, Diderot, d’Holbach, and d’Alembert. She did not take much to Rousseau; she was too tough for his sentiment. Instead she lost her heart to Brutus (either one), to both the Catos, and both the Gracchi; it was from them that she and the Girondins took political ideals. She read, too, the letters of Mme. de Sévigné, for she aspired to write perfect prose.

  She had suitors, but she was too conscious of her accomplishments to tolerate any ordinary lover. Perhaps, at twenty-five, she thought it best to compromise. She found in Roland “a strong mind, incorruptible honesty, knowledge, and taste…. His gravity made me consider him, as it were, without sex.”10 After their marriage (1780) they lived in Lyons, which she described as “a city superbly built and situated, flourishing in commerce and manufactures, … famed for riches of which even the Emperor Joseph was envious.”11 In February, 1791, Roland was sent to Paris to defend the business interests of Lyons before the committees of the Constituent Assembly. He attended meetings of the Jacobin Club, and developed a close friendship with Brissot. In 1791 he persuaded his wife to move with him to Paris.

  There she graduated from his secretary to his adviser; not only did she draw up his reports with an elegance that revealed her mind and hand, but she seems to have guided his political policy. On March 10, 1792, through the influence of Brissot, he was made minister of the interior to the King. Meanwhile Manon established a salon where Brissot, Pétion, Condorcet, Buzot and other Girondins regularly met to formulate their plans.12 She gave them food and counsel, and to Buzot her secret love; and she followed or preceded them bravely to death.

  II. WAR: 1792

  It was a critical period for the Revolution. The émigrés, by 1791, had assembled twenty thousand troops at Coblenz, and were making headway with their appeals for help. Frederick William II of Prussia listened, for he thought he might use this opportunity to enlarge his realm along the Rhine. The Emperor Joseph II of the Holy Roman Empire might have gone to his sister’s aid, but his people too were in revolt, he was something of a revolutionist himself, and he was dying. His brother Leopold II, who succeeded him in 1790, was not inclined to war, but he issued with the King of Prussia a cautious “Declaration of Pillnitz” (August 27, 1791), inviting other rulers to join them in efforts to restore in France “a monarchical form of government which shall at once be in harmony with the rights of sovereigns, and promote the welfare of the French nation.”

  Strange to say, both the monarchists and the republicans favored war. The Queen had repeatedly urged her imperial brothers to come to her rescue; and the King had explicitly asked the rulers of Prussia, Russia, Spain, Sweden, and Austria-Hungary to collect an armed force to restore the royal power in France.13 On February 7, 1792, Austria and Prussia signed a military alliance against France; Austria was hungry for Flanders, Prussia for Alsace. On March 1 Leopold II died, and was succeeded by his son Francis II, who itched for battle by proxy and for glory in person. In France Lafayette favored war in the hope that he would be commander in chief, and so be in a position to dictate to both the Assembly and the King. General Dumouriez, minister for foreign affairs, favored war in expectation that the Netherlands would welcome him as their liberation from Austria, and might reward him with a minor crown. Since there was as yet no talk of conscription, the peasantry and the proletariat accepted war as now a necessary evil because the unhindered return of the émigrés would restore and perhaps vengefully intensify the injustices of the Old Regime. The Girondins favored war because they expected Austria and Prussia to attack France, and counterattack was the best defense. Robespierre opposed the war on the ground that the proletariat would shed their blood for it, and the middle class would pocket any gains. Brissot outtalked him; “the time has come,” he cried, “for a new crusade, a crusade for universal freedom.”14 On April 20, 1792, the Legislative Assembly, with only seven dissenting votes, declared war upon Austria only, hoping to divide the allies. So began the twenty-three years of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. On April 26 Rouget de Lisle, at Strasbourg, composed “The Marseillaise.”

  But the Girondins had not calculated on the condition of the French Army. On the eastern front it numbered 100,000 men, opposing only 45,000 Austrian troops; but they were officered by men nurtured in the Old Regime. When General Dumouriez ordered these officers to lead their soldiers into action, they replied that their raw volunteers were not prepared, with either weapons or discipline, to face trained soldiery. When, nevertheless, the order to advance was repeated, several officers resigned, and three cavalry regiments went over to the enemy. Lafayette sent to the Austrian governor at Brussels an offer to lead his National Guard to Paris and restore the authority of the King if Austria would agree not to enter French territory. Nothing came of the proposal except Lafayette’s later impeachment (August 20, 1792), and his flight to the enemy.

  Matters reached a crisis when the Legislative Assembly sent to the predominantly Girondist ministry measures seeking the King’s signature for the establishment of a protective armed camp around Paris, and for the discontinuance of state stipends for nonjuring priests and nuns. The King, in a flurry of decision, not only refused to sign, but dismissed all the ministers except Dumouriez, who soon resigned to take command on the Belgian front. When the news of these vetoes circulated through Paris it was interpreted as a sign that Louis was expecting an army, French or alien, to reach Paris soon and put an end to the Revolution. Wild plans were made to evacuate the capital, and to form a new revolutionary army on the farther side of the Loire. The Girondist leaders spread among the sections a call for a mass demonstration before the Tuileries.

  So on June 20, 1792, an excited crowd of men and women—patriots, ruffians, adventurers, fervent followers of Rob
espierre, Brissot, or Marat—forced their way into the courtyard of the Tuileries, shouting demands and taunts, and insisting on seeing “Monsieur et Madame Véto.” The King ordered his guards to let a number of them in. Half a hundred came, brandishing their varied weapons. Louis took his stand behind a table, and heard their petition—to withdraw his vetoes. He answered that these were hardly the fit place and circumstances for considering such complex matters. For three hours he listened to arguments, pleas, and threats. One rebel shouted, “I demand the sanction of the decree against the priests; … either the sanction or you shall die!” Another pointed his sword at Louis, who remained apparently unmoved. Someone offered him a red cap; he put it gaily on his head; the invaders shouted, “Vive la nation! Vive la liberté!” and finally “Vive le Roi!” The petitioners left, and reported that they had given the King a good scare; the crowd, dissatisfied but tired, melted back into the city. The decree against the nonjuring clergy was enforced despite the veto; but the Assembly, anxious to dissociate itself from the populace, gave the King an enthusiastic reception when, at its invitation, he came to accept its pledge of continued loyalty.15

  The radicals did not relish this ceremonious reconciliation of the bourgeoisie with the monarchy; they suspected the sincerity of the King, and resented the readiness of the Assembly to stop the Revolution now that the middle class had consolidated its economic and political gains. Robespierre and Marat were gradually turning the Jacobin Club from its bourgeois sentiments to wider popular sympathies. The proletariat in the industrial cities was moving toward cooperation with the workers of Paris. When the Assembly asked each of the departments to send a detachment of the Federation of National Guards to join in celebrating the third anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, these “Fédérés” were mostly chosen by the city communes, and favored radical policies. One particularly rebel regiment, 516 strong, set out from Marseilles on July 5, vowing to depose the King. On their march through France they sang the new song that Rouget de Lisle had composed, and from them it took the name that he had not intended—“The Marseillaise.”*