168

THE KING IN PERSON DISSOLVES THE ASSEMBLY.

The king gave, some days afterwards, a fête to the people of Paris, and distributed abundant alms to the indigent. He desired that even the miserable should have his day of content, at the commencement of that era of joy, which his reconciliation with his people promised to his reign. The Te Deum was sung in the cathedral of Paris, as on a day of victory, to bless the cradle of the French constitution. On the 30th of September, the king closed the Constituent Assembly. Before he entered the chamber, Bailly, in the name of the municipality; Pastoret, in the name of the departments, congratulated the Assembly on the conclusion of its work:-"Legislators," said Bailly, "you have been armed with the greatest power that men can require. To-morrow you will be nothing. It is not, therefore interest or flattery which praises you-it is your works. We announce to you the benedictions of posterity, which commence for you from to-day!" "Liberty," said Pastoret, "had fled beyond the seas, or taken refuge in the mountains,-you have raised her fallen throne. Despotism had effaced every page of the book of nature; you have re-established the decalogue of freemen !"

XIV.

The king, surrounded by his ministers, entered the Assenbly at three o'clock: lengthened cries of Vive le roi for a moment checked his speaking. 'Gentlemen," said Louis XVI., "after the completion of the constitution, you have resolved on to-day terminating your labors. It would have been desirable, perhaps, that your session should have been prolonged, in order that you, yourselves, should prove your work. But you have wished, no doubt, to mark by this the difference which should exist between the functions of a constituent body and ordinary legislators. I will exercise all the power you have confided to me in assuring to the constitution the respect and obedience due to it. For you, gentlemen, who, during a long and painful career, have evinced an indefatigable zeal in your labors, there remains a last duty to fulfil when you are scattered over the face of the empire; it is to enlighten your fellow-citizens as to the spirit of the laws you have made; to purify and unite opinions by the example you will give to the love of order and submission to the laws. Be, on your return to your homes, the interpreters of my sentiments to your fellow-citizens; tell

THE ASSEMBLY DISSOLVED.

169

them that the king will always be their first and most faithful friend—that he desires to be loved by them, and can only be happy with them and by them."

The president replied to the king:-"The National Assembly having arrived at the termination of its career, enjoys, at this moment the first fruit of its labors. Convinced that the government best suited to France is that which reconciles the respected prerogatives of the throne with the inalienable rights of the people, it has given to the state a constitution which equally guarantees royalty and liberty. Our successors, charged with the onerous burden of the safety of the empire, will not misunderstand their rights, nor the limits of the constitution: and you, sire, you have almost completed everything-by accepting the Constitution, you have consummated the Revolution."

The king departed amidst loud acclamations. It appeared that the National Assembly was in haste to lay down the responsibility of events which it no longer felt itself capable of controlling. "The National Assembly declares," says Target, its president, "that its mission is finished, and that, at this moment, it terminates its sittings.'

The people, who crowded round the Manège, and saw with pain the Revolution abdicated into the hands of the king, insulted, as it recognized them, the members of the Right-even Barnave. They experienced even on the first day the ingratitude they had so often fomented. They separated in sorrow and in discouragement.

When Robespierre and Pétion went out, the people crowned them with oaken chaplets, and took the horses off their carriage in order to drag them home in triumph. The power of these two men already proved the weakness of the constitution, and presaged its fall. An amnestied king eturned powerless to his palace. Timid legislators abdiated in trouble. Two triumphant tribunes were elevated by the people. In this was all the future. The Constituent Assembly, begun in an insurrection of principles, ended as a sedition. Was it the error of those principles-was it the fault of the Constituent Assembly? We will examine the question at the end of the last book of this volume, in casting a retrospect over the acts of the Constituent Assembly; till then we will delay this judgment, in order not to interfere with the progress of the recital.

170

OPINIONS OF THE REVOLUTION IN EUROPE.

BOOK V.

I.

WHILST an instant's breathing time was permitted to France between two convulsive efforts, and the Revolution as yet knew not whether it should maintain the constitution it had gained, or employ it as a weapon to obtain a republic, Europe began to rouse itself; egotistical and improvident, she merely beheld in the first movement in France a comedy played at Paris on the stage of the States General and the Constituent Assembly-between popular genius, represented by Mirabeau, and the vanquished genius of the aristocracy, personified in Lous XVI. and the clergy. This grand spectacle had been in the eyes of the sovereigns and their ministers merely the continuation of the struggle (in which they had taken so much interest, and showed so much secret favor) between Voltaire and Jean Jacques Rousseau on one side, and the old aristocratical and religious system on the other. To them the Revolution was the philosophy of the eighteenth century, which had migrated from the salons into the public streets, and from books to speeches. This earthquake in the moral world, and these shocks at Paris, the presages of some unknown change in European destinies, attracted far more than they affrighted them. They had not as yet learned that institutions are but ideas, and that those ideas, when overthrown, involve in their fall thrones and nations. Whatsoever the spirit of God wills, that also do all mankind will, and are to accomplish, unperceived even by themselves. Europe bestowed attention, time, and astonishment on the commencement of the French Revolution, and that was all it needed to bring it to maturity. The spark not having been extinguished at its outbreak, was fated to kindle and consume everything before it. The moral and political state of Europe was eminently favorable to the contagion of new ideas. Time, men, and things, all lay at the mercy of France.

II.

A long period of peace had softened the minds, and deadened those hereditary hatreds that oppose the communica

tion of feelings and the similarity of ideas between different nations. Europe, since the treaty of Westphalia, had become a republic of perfectly balanced powers, where the general equilibrium of power resulting from each formed a counterpoise to the other. One glance sufficed to show the solidity and unity of this European building, every beam of which, opposing an equal resistance to the others, afforded an equal support by the pressure of all the states.

Germany was a confederation presided over by Austria, the emperors were the chiefs only of this ancient feudalism of kings, dukes, and electors. The house of Austria was more powerful through itself and its vast possessions than through the imperial dignity. The two crowns of Hungary and Bohemia, the Tyrol, Italy, and the Low Countries, gave it an ascendency, which the genius of Richelieu had been able to fetter, but not to destroy. Powerful to resist, but not to impel, Austria was more fitted to sustain than to act; her force lies in her situation and immobility, for she is like a block in the middle of Germany, her power is in her weight; she is the pivot of the balance of European power. But the federative diet weakened and enervated its designs by those secret influences all federations naturally possess. Two new states, unperceived until the time of Louis XIV., had recently risen, out of reach of the power, and the long rivalry of the houses of Bourbon and Austria: the one in the north of Germany, Prussia; the other in the east, Russia. The policy of England had encouraged the rise of these two infant powers, in order to form the elements of political combinations that would admit of her interests obtaining a firm footing.

III.

A hundred years had hardly elapsed since an emperor of Austria had conferred the title of king on a margrave of Prussia, a subordinate sovereign of two millions of men, and yet Prussia already balanced in Germany the influence of the house of Austria. The Machiavelian genius of Frederic the Great had become the genius of Prussia. His monarchy, composed of territories acquired by victory, required war to strengthen itself, still more of agitation and intrigue to legitimize itself. Prussia was in a ferment of dissolution amidst the German states. Scarcely had it risen into existence, than it abdicated all German feeling by leaguing with Eng

land and Russia; and England, always on the watch to widen these breaches, had used Prussia as her lever in Germany. Russia, whose twofold ambition already had designs on Asia on the one hand, on Europe on the other, had made it an advanced guard on the west, and used it as an advanced camp on the borders of the Rhine. Thus Prussia was the point of the Russian sword in the very heart of France. Military power was everything; its government was only discipline, its people only an army. As for its ideas, its policy was to place itself at the head of the Protestant states, and offer protection, assistance, and revenge to all those whose interest or whose ambition was threatened by the house of Austria. Thus by its nature Prussia was a revolutionary power.

Russia, to whom nature had assigned a sterile yet immense place on the globe, the ninth part of the habitable world, and a population of forty millions of men, all compelled by the savage genius of Peter the Great to unite themselves into one nation, seemed yet to waver between two roads, one of which led to Germany, the other to the Ottoman empire. Catherine II. governed it: a woman endowed with wondrous beauty, passion, genius, and crime-such are necessary in the ruler of a barbarous nation, in order to add the prestige of adoration to the terror inspired by the sceptre. Each step she took in Asia awakened an echo of surprise and admiration in Europe, and for her was revived the name of Semiramis. Austria, Prussia, and France, intimidated by her fame, applauded her victories over the Turks, and her conquests in the Black Sea, without apparently comprehending that she weighed down the European power, and that once mistress of Poland and Constantinople, nothing then would prevent her from carrying out her designs on Germany, and extending her arm over all the West.

IV.

England, humiliated in her maritime pride by the brilliant rivalry of the French fleet in the Indian Seas, irritated by the assistance given by France to aid America in her struggle for independence, had secretly allied herself in 1788 with Prussia and Holland, to counterbalance the effect of the alliance of France with Austria, and to intimidate Russia in her invasion of Turkey. England at this moment relied on the genius of one man, Mr. Pitt, the greatest statesman of the