A.D. 1791.]

SEVERE MEASURES ADOPTED AGAINST THE EMIGRANTS.

585

citizens, under the constitution, there was a prevailing followed in the same track as Brissot. Dumas, and some feeling that he privately gave them different advice. That other moderate deputies, contended that the doctrine of the king did maintain a secret correspondence with some of Brissot was ferocious, and calculated to inflame the passions the insurgents is certain; but it is neither proved, nor does of the people; that it was not necessary to do more than to it appear probable, that he sanctioned their intentions of order all emigrants to return within three months, on pain making war on the country. Louis was always averse to of forfeiting their civil rights and citizenship. The the idea of bloodshed, and all his interests pointed assembly ordered Brissot's speech to be printed and sent to towards having the influential royalists in the country, the departments. where they might join their efforts with the constitu- On the 25th of October Vergniaud, the orator of the tionalists for the support of his person and throne. But Girondists, ascended the tribune. Vergniaud professed to their obstinate absence drove the assembly now to such despise all the efforts of the combined emigrants and foreign severe measures against them as compelled Louis to exercise powers against France, into which, he said, philosophy had his veto in their favour, and he thus destroyed his popularity infused the breath of liberty till there were no Pyrenees; with the public, and caused himself to be considered as really that the tyrants trembled lest, on the day of battle, the two in league with the emigrants. Nevertheless, it was the armies ready to combat should be converted into a band of advice of all the king's ministers, as well as it appears to have brethren united against the despots. Vergniaud might been his own feeling, that they should return, for they therefore have well recommended them to leave the might have added immensely to the influence in favour of emigrants in deserved contempt. But, no! he was as fierce the throne. Louis, therefore, again exhorted the emigrants as Brissot himself against them. He demanded that they to return; but they continued inflexible. He next wrote should forestall their enemies, and crush this swarm of to the officers of the army and navy, deploring the informa-insects ready to drink the nation's blood; that they should tion that he had received, that they were quitting the confiscate all their property; and as for the officers who had service, and that he could not consider those his friends who deserted, let them suffer the death and infamy prescribed by did not, like himself, remain at their posts; but this was the penal code. Men, he said, talked of the profound grief equally ineffectual, and the minister at war reported to the this would occasion the king, on account of his brothers; assembly that one thousand nine hundred officers had but Brutus had immolated his guilty offspring at the shrine deserted. The assembly was greatly incensed; the Gi- of his country, and the heart of Louis would not be put to rondists deemed it a good opportunity to force the king to so severe a trial. deal a blow at the nobility and at his own brothers. On the M. Pastoret recommended moderate and gradual measures 20th of October Brissot ascended the tribune, and demanded against the emigrants; but Isnard, another Girondist, demeasures of severity against the emigrants. He declared fended the proceedings of the assembly, which had ordered that it was the mistaken indifference of the late assembly the printing and distribution of the speeches of Condorcet which had left the present menacing body of emigrants on and Vergniaud as well as of that of Brissot. He fully supthe frontiers. Had there existed a thoroughly plebeian ported their views. At the close of the debate a decree was legislature, they would long ago have been dispersed. passed requiring the king's brothers to return to France "Punish the chiefs," he exclaimed, "and emigrations and within three months, on pain of forfeiting all their rights revolts will cease." He pointed to the attitude of the chief as citizens, and their claims as princes on the succession to monarchs of the continent, to the late meeting at Pilnitz, the crown. On the 2nd of November a letter was read from and declared that the emigrants, in league with these a patriot who had acted the spy at Coblentz and other places, enemies of France, were worse robbers and assassins than and was himself in the gallery of the house to support, if Cartouche, who had died on the wheel. He then divided necessary, his statements. He affirmed that thirteen thouthe emigrants into three classes-the king's brothers and sand emigrants were ready to invade France; that the the prince of Condé; the public functionaries who had priests had assumed arms; that an active correspondence abandoned their posts; and the simple citizens, who had was carried on betwixt these emigrants and the king's followed their example from fear or imitation. Against regiments near the frontiers; he charged Delauney, a relathe first and second class he demanded the severest punish-tion of the late governor of the Bastille, and commandant of ment; the third he would leave to time, which would at the volunteer guard at Longwy, of being in league with length send them home again. He observed that ministers would talk to them of considerations of state, family reasons; they must pay no attention to such arguments. They must address themselves to foreign powers, and compel them to discountenance the emigrants, or to declare themselves. He then considered what causes they had for dread-publicly thanked. On the 9th of November a second decree ing a conflict with these foreign nations, and concluded that they had none. "Unquestionably," he said, "you have declared to Europe that you will not attempt any more conquests; but you have a right to say to it Choose between certain rebels and a nation!'"

This speech placed Brissot at the head of the conspirators of the assembly. Condorcet mounted the tribune, and

the emigrants, and not only he, but the king's war minister, Duportail, a friend of La Fayette. All this information, so well calculated to excite the passions of the assembly, and aid the object of the jacobins and Girondists, was received as gospel, and the man called to the bar of the house and

was passed, declaring that an Frenchmen assembled on the frontiers were suspected of conspiracy against this country; that all such as should continue there till the 1st of January should be treated as traitors; princes and public functionaries were pronounced amenable to the same punishments; that the incomes of all such emigrants, from lands, moneys, or offices, should from the present moment be

A.D. 1791.]

MARRIAGES OF THE CONSTITUTIONAL PRIESTS.

587

article in the new constitution against it, nor any new law to that effect, there required no law to sanction it. It was constitutional, and the administrators had no right to deprive married priests of their salaries or their cures. On this ground, the assembly passed to the order of the day, and the clergy thenceforward acted on this sanction-such as it was.

them the rumour of his parentage. He was very handsome, only thirty-six years of age, courteous, vain, witty, and ambitious. Madame de Staël, though married, was passionately in love with him, and her imagination invested him with all the qualities calculated to save a nation. "He was," says Lamartine, "but a brilliant, active, high-couraged man; she pictured him a politician and a hero. She magnified him with all the endowments of her dreams, in order There was now also a demand made that the forty-one to bring him up to her ideal standard. She found patrons soldiers of the Swiss regiment of Château Vieux, who had for him; surrounded him with a prestige; created a name been condemned to the galleys for their concern in the insurfor him; marked him out a course. She made him a living rection at Nancy, should be released. The jacobin club took type of her politics. To disdain the court, gain over the up their cause, and sent Collot d'Herbois to the minister people, command the army, intimidate Europe, carry away Montmorin to demand their liberation. The minister refused; the assembly by his eloquence, to struggle for liberty, to save and the jacobin club began a subscription for these soldiers, the nation, to become, by his popularity alone, the arbiter to aid one set on foot by the jacobin club of Brest, which between the throne and the people, to reconcile them by a declared them the victims of Bouillé's tyranny. The matter constitution at once liberal and monarchical-such was the was then introduced to the assembly by Goupilleau, and the perspective that she opened for herself and M. de Narbonne. assembly ordered their liberation. The refusal of MontThey were for war, and filled by their influence the personal morin to gratify the jacobins on this head seems to have staff of the diplomacy exclusively devoted to the emigrants added double fury to their hatred of the king's ministers. or the king. They filled foreign courts with their adherents. Duportail was so bitterly assailed that he resigned. M. de Marbois was sent to the Diet of Ratisbon; M. Barthé- Duport-Dutertre, minister of justice, and Bertrand de lemy, to Switzerland; M. Talleyrand, to London; M. de Molleville were pursued with equal rancour, and Fauchet Segur, to Berlin. They hoped to win England to their then fell on M. De Lessart, the minister of the interior, and interests; they relied much on the enthusiasm of the Fox accused him of high treason to the assembly; but, on the party for the revolution; they trusted, in the end, to obtain 22nd of December, De Lessart appeared in the assembly, a second chamber, and thus control the jacobinism of the and completely justified himself. We shall see, however, assembly. They hoped to secure as the generalissimo of that Fauchet and Brissot never relaxed their persecutions their army the duke of Brunswick, the pupil of Frederick of till they had ruined him, and caused him to be massacred Prussia, and who had won so much fame in the wars of by the people. If there were any men in France more Germany. Negotiations for this purpose were secretly carried miserable than all others, they were the king and his on by madame de Staël, Narbonne, La Fayette, and Talley-ministers. rand. M. Custine was their agent; and he bore letters offering Ferdinand the generalissimoship of the French armies, three millions of francs annually, and princely rank equal to his own in Germany. These letters were signed by the minister of war and by Louis himself. Custine even held out hopes of Ferdinand succeeding to the crown, should Louis be deposed; but the duke was too wise to listen to these startling overtures.

For a time, the leading Girondists frequented the jacobin club; Brissot even became its president. The members of the Cordeliers, too, fraternised frequently with the Société Mère, though the mother society neither sought the Girondists as a body nor the Cordeliers. The members of both clubs jointly set up a monthly review, after the fashion of the English reviews, in which not only the leaders of both parties, but several English people, as John Oswald, These secret proceedings did not entirely escape the keen Helen Maria Williams, and Horne Tooke, as well as Thomas vision of the Girondist party. Their newspapers waged war Paine, wrote. Towards the end of the year a deputation of against the coalition with strong animosity. Brissot, in his English admirers of the French revolution, accompanied by journal, exclaimed, "Number them! name them! Their some Americans, presented an address to the club, and names denounce them. They are the relics of the de- another to Petion, the new mayor of Paris. They were throned aristocracy, who would fain resuscitate a constitu- received at the jacobin club with wonderful éclat; the flags tional nobility, establish a second legislative chamber and a of England, France, and America were suspended together, senate of nobles, and who implore, in order to gain their and very fine speeches were made to the deputation-one ends, the armed intervention of the powers. They have sold from a woman, who presented the English with a box conthemselves to the Tuileries, and sell there a great portion of taining a map of France, divided into the eighty-three the members of the assembly. They have amongst them departments, a cap of liberty, the new French constitution, neither men of genius nor men of resolution; their talent is their tricolour flags, the national cockade, ears of wheat, a but treason, their genius but intrigue." It was thus that civic crown, &c. The club also ordered, as proper ornajacobins and Girondists prepared those enmities which, at noments for their hall, busts of Rousseau, the abbé Mably, distant period, were destined to disperse the Feuillants.

Algernon Sidney, and Dr. Price.

Meantime, the spirit of the revolution was marching on. Whilst the nation was growing every day more jacoThe constitutional priests had many of them begun to binical, and the danger was becoming more imminent, marry, and now those of them who were not quite so bold the queen sent a secret agent to London to sound applied to the assembly for a decree to sanction the mar- Pitt. She hoped to win him to an announcement of riage of the clergy. It was contended that, as there was no supporting the throne of France in conjunction with

reserve.

the continental sovereigns; but Pitt showed his usual delivering the decree, said that it became the king to use He declared that England would not allow the firmest language towards the emigrants and the princes the revolutionary spirit to put down the monarchy, who encouraged them; that the language of his ministers but he said nothing expressly of supporting the monarch had not been hitherto sufficiently decisive; that if the himself; and the queen, who was always suspicious that French, driven from their country by the revocation of the the duke of Orleans was aiming at the crown, and that he edict of Nantes, had been protected by German princes, had made himself a party in England, was filled with Louis XIV. would have speedily punished them; that the alarm, lest Pitt's words only concealed the idea of such a interests of the king and the grandeur of the nation king. Still the attitude of the continental powers became demanded a language different to that of diplomacy; and more menacing. The troops of the emperor, in Belgium that he must assure the German princes that, unless and Luxembourg, pressed upon the very frontiers of France, they dispersed the emigrants, the French would carry into and the emigrants were constantly augmenting in the their territories, not fire and sword, but the rights of man. territories of the electors of Treves, Mayence, and Speir. Two hundred thousand men, in fact, formed a line along the French frontiers from Bâsle to the Scheldt.

The French, exasperated beyond further endurance, on the 22nd of November entered on the question of war in the assembly in earnest. Koch, of Strasburg, the wellknown historian, declared that no time was to be lost; that the German nations were every day violating the frontiers of France, and that the minister for foreign affairs was not to be trusted. He presented a report from the diplomatic committee, recommending the plans to be adopted, and concluded by demanding that the electors of Treves and Mayence, the bishop of Speir, and other German princes, should be called upon to disperse the armed emigrants collected in their states, and give instant satisfaction for the insult offered to French citizens. Isnard followed, on the 29th, in a very martial speech. He declared that a people in a state of revolution were in the very tone for achieving victories; that there was nothing to be feared except that the nation should think the assembly too slow. The enemies of France, he said, wanted to bring back the old state of things, the old noblesse, with famine, fire, and sword. They wanted to augment the prerogatives of a man who devoured thirty millions a-year, whilst millions of citizens, better than himself, languished in poverty and distress. He desired them to tell the king that he must reign by the people and for the people, and must stand by the constitution, which was, in truth, his only palladium; that he must proclaim to all Europe, that when the French took the sword, they would fling away the scabbard; that the war, once commenced, would not be a war of kings against peoples, but of peoples against kings; that the battles which nations fight at the command of despots, are like the blows which two friends, excited by a perfidious instigator, strike at each other in the dark. The moment a light appears they embrace, and take vengeance on him who deluded them. In like manner, if, when the hostile armies shall be engaged with ours, the light of philosophy bursts upon their sight, the nations will embrace one another before the face of dethroned tyrants, of consoled earth, of delighted heaven.

The enthusiasm which this speech excited was such, that the members crowded around Isnard to embrace him. His decree was instantly adopted. Twenty-four members, at the head of whom was M. Vaublanc, were deputed to carry this decree to the king. They were this time instantly admitted, for the king was anxious to do away with the effect of his exercise of the veto. M. Vaublanc, in

Louis promised everything, and, on the 14th of December, he went to the assembly, and assured them that he not only sympathised with them, but had already anticipated them in their wishes. He had sent requisitions to the German princes to remove the emigrants; the emperor Leopold had at once attended to it; and that he would now reiterate his demands to the electors of Treves and the rest, and that, if they did not attend quickly to his request, he would proclaim war against them. He retired amid loud applause, and, after his departure, the new minister of war, the count Narbonne, came forward to support these views. Madame de Staël and her party had succeeded in their designNarbonne was minister. Madame de Condorcet, a very beautiful and fascinating woman, had lent all her influence to the same object. The point of union betwixt the constitutional party-that of madame de Staël-and the Girondis party, was their equal desire for war, but from different motives; and hence their co-operation for the elevation of Narbonne. De Lessart and De Molleville, Narbonne's colleagues, saw with consternation Narbonne's appointment. It overthrew all their own policy. The king, as usual, was all indecision, going first with one minister's counsel, and then with that of another. Narbonne, from the moment of his appointment, had been all activity and courtesy. He expressed the highest confidence in the assembly, and be now came forward to announce that Rochambeau, Luckner, and La Fayette, were appointed commanders of the troops. and that he had the utmost confidence in both soldiers and officers. He obtained twenty millions of francs for the necessary preparations for the war, and the rank of marshal for Luckner and Rochambeau.

Luckner, a German, had been engaged with high dist.ne tion in the seven years' war. The duke of Choiseul had engaged him in the service of France. He was much attached to the new constitution, and, though getting di was in great vigour. Rochambeau, too, had distinguished himself in the seven years' war and in America. As for La Fayette, he had retired to his estate, when he was the called again into active service, much to the disgust of the jacobins, who heaped upon him the vilest abuse. Indeed, the jacobin club proposed that the assembly should declare itself dictator, abolish the appointments of Luckner, Bochambeau, and La Fayette, and replace them by par patriots. But Narbonne, having obtained his supplies, k no time in setting out on a tour through the country, to p: it into a state of defence. Three armies were formed. Rochambeau, who was now ailing, and out of humour, wai appointed to that stationed in Flanders, and called the army

A.D. 1791.]

ACTIVE PREPARATIONS FOR WAR.

589

of the north; La Fayette was put in command of the squadrons, with artillery requisite for two hundred thousand central division stationed at Metz; and Luckner, of the one men, and supplies for six months. This report was received stationed in Alsace. Narbonne made a rapid journey, and with acclamations.