Marshal Luckner was nominated in his place. La Fayette, much dissatisfied, kept the command of the central army.

Luckner was upwards of seventy years of age, but retained all the fire and activity of the warrior; he only required genius to have been a great general. He had a reputation for complaisance, which sufficed for everything. It is a great advantage for a general to be a stranger in the country in which he is serving. He has no one jealous of him: his superiority is pardoned, and presumed if it do not exist, in order to crush his rivals: such was old Luckner's position. He was a German,-pupil of the great Frederic, with whom he had served with éclat during the seven years' war, as commandant of the vanguard, at the moment when Frederic changed the war, and commenced its tactics. The Duc de Choiseul was desirous of depriving Prussia of a general of this great school, to teach the modern art of battles to French generals. He had attracted Luckner from his country by force of temptations, fortune, and honors. The National Assembly, from respect to the memory of the philosopher king, had preserved to Luckner the pension of 60,000 francs which had been paid to him during the Revolution. Luckner, indifferent to constitutions, believed himself a revolutionist from gratitude. He was almost the only one amongst the ancient general officers who had not emigrated. Surrounded by a brilliant staff of young officers of the party of La Fayette, Charles Lameth, du Jarri, Mathieu de Montmorency, he believed he had the opinions which they instilled into him. The king caressed, the Assembly flattered, the army respected, him. The nation saw in him the mysterious genius of the old war coming to give lessons of victory to the untried patriotism of the Revolution, and concealing its infinite resources under the bluntness of his exterior, and the obscure Germanism of his language. They addressed to him, from all sides, homage as though he were an unknown God. He did not deserve either this adoration, or the outrages with which he was soon after overwhelmed. He was a brave and coarse soldier, as misplaced in courts as in clubs. For some days he was an idol, then the plaything of the Jacobins, who, at last, threw him to the guillotine, without his being able to comprehend either his popularity or his crime.

XIV.

Berthier, who afterwards became Napoleon's right hand,

He

was then the head of Luckner's staff. The old general seized, with warlike instinct, on Dumouriez's bold plan. had entered at the head of 22,000 men on the Austrian territory at Courtray and Menin. Biron and Valence, his two seconds in command, entreated him to remain there, and Dumouriez, in his letters, urged him in similar manner. On arriving at Lille, Dumouriez learnt that Luckner had suddenly retreated on Valenciennes, after having burnt the suburbs of Courtray; thus giving, on our frontier, the signal of hesitation and retreat.

The Belgian population, their impulses thus checked by the disasters or timidity of France, lost all hope, and bent beneath the Austrian yoke. General Montesquieu collected the army of the south with difficulty. The king of the Sardinians concentrated a large force on the Var. The advanced guard of La Fayette, posted at Gliswel, at a league from Maubeuge, was beaten by the Duke of Saxe-Teschen, at the head of 12,000 men. The great invasion of the Duke of Brunswick, in Champagne, was preparing. The emigration took off the officers, desertion diminished our soldiery. The clubs disseminated distrust against the commanders of our strong places.

The Girondists were urging on rebellion, the Jacobins were exciting the army to anarchy, the volunteers did not rise, the ministry was null, the Austrian committee of the Tuileries corresponded with various powers, not to deceive the nation, but to save the lives of the king and his family. A suspected government, hostile Assembly, seditious clubs, a national guard intimidated and deprived of its chief, incendiary journalism, dark conspiracies, factious municipality, a conspirator-mayor, people distrustful and starving, Robespierre and Brissot, Vergniaud and Danton, Girondists and Jacobins, face to face, having the same spoil to contend for -the monarchy, and struggling for pre-eminence in demagoguism in order to acquire the favor of the people; such was the state of France, within and without, at the moment when exterior war was pressing France on all sides, and causing it to burst forth with disasters and crimes. The Girondists and Jacobins united for a moment, suspended their personal animosity, as if to see which could best destroy the powerless constitution which separated them. The bourgeoisie, personified by the Feuillants, the national guard, and La Fayette, alone remained attached to the constitution. The Gironde, from the tribune itself, made that appeal to

the people against the king which it was subsequently doomed to make in vain in favor of the king against the Jacobins. In order to control the city, Brissot, Roland, Pétion, excited the suburbs, those capitals of miseries and seditions. Every time that a people which has long crouched in slavery and ignorance is moved to its lowest depths, then -appear monsters and heroes, prodigies of crime and prodigies of virtue; such were about to appear under the con spiring hand of the Girondists and demagogues.

BOOK XVI.

I.

In proportion as power snatched from the hands of the king by the Assembly disappeared, it passed into the commune of Paris. The municipality, that first element of nations which are forming themselves, is also the last asylum of authority when they are crumbling to pieces. Before it falls quite to the people, power pauses for a moment in the council-chamber of the magistrates of the city. The Hôtel de Ville had become the Tuileries of the people; after La Fayette and Bailly, Pétion reigned there: this man was the king of Paris. The populace (which has always the instinct of position) called him King Pétion. He had purchased his popularity, first by his private virtues, which the people almost always confound with public virtues, and subsequently by his democratic speeches in the Constituent Assembly. The skilful balance which he preserved at the Jacobins, between the Girondists and Robespierre, had rendered him respectable and important. Friend of Roland, Robespierre, Danton, and Brissot, at the same time suspected of too close connection with Madame de Genlis and the Duc d'Orleans' party, he still always covered himself with the mantle of proper devotion to order and a superstitious reverence for the constitution. He had thus all the apparent titles to the esteem of honest men and the respect of factions; but the greatest of all was in his mediocrity. Mediocrity, it must be confessed, is almost always the brand of these idols of the people either that the mob, mediocre itself, has only a

taste for what resembles it; or that jealous cotemporaries can never elevate themselves sufficiently high towards great characters and great virtues; or that Providence, which distributes gifts and faculties in proportion, will not allow that one man should unite in himself, amidst a free people, these three irresistible powers, virtue, genius, and popularity; or rather, that the constant favor of the multitude is a thing of such a nature that its price is beyond its worth in the eyes of really virtuous men, and that it is necessary to stoop too low to pick it up, and become too weak to retain it. Pétion was only king of the people on condition of being complaisant to its excesses. His functions as mayor of Paris, in a time of trouble, placed him constantly between the king, the Assembly, and the revolts. He bearded the king, flattered the Assembly, and pardoned crime. Inviolable as the capital which he personified in his position of first magistrate of the commune, his unseen dictatorship had no other title than his inviolability, and he used it with respectful boldness towards the king, bowed before the Assembly, and knelt to the malcontents. To his official reproaches to the rioters, he always added an excuse for crime, a smile for the culprits, encouragement to the misled citizens. The people loved him as anarchy loves weakness; it knew it could do as it pleased with him. As mayor, he had the law in his hand; as a man, he had indulgence on his lips and connivance in his heart: he was just the magistrate required in times of the coups d'état of the faubourgs.

Pétion allowed them to make all their preparations without appearing to see them, and legalized them whenever they were completed.

II.

His early connection with Brissot had drawn him towards Madame Roland. The ministry of Roland, Clavière, and Servan obeyed him more than even the king; he was present at all their consultations, and although their fall did not involve him, it wrested the executive power from his grasp. The expelled Girondists had no need to infuse their thirst of vengeance into the mind of Pétion. Unable any longer to conspire legally against the king, with his ministers, he yet could conspire with the factions against the Tuileries. The national guards, the people, the Jacobins, the faubourgs, the whole city, were in his hands; thus he could give sedi

ANOTHER PHASE OF THE REVOLUTION.

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tion to the Girondists to aid his party to regain the ministry; and he gave it them with all the hazards-all the crimes that sedition carries with it. Amongst these hazards was the assassination of the king and his family: this event was beforehand accepted by those who provoked the assembly of the populace, and their invasion of the king's palace. Girondists, Orleanists, Republicans, Anarchists, none of these parties perhaps actually meditated this crime, but they looked, upon it as an eventuality of their fortune. Pétion, who doubtless did not desire it, at least risked it; and if his intention was innocent, his temerity was a murder. What distance was there between the steel of twenty thousand pikes and the heart of Louis XVI.? Pétion did not betray the lives of the king, the queen, and the children, but he placed them at stake. The constitutional guard of the king had been ignominiously disbanded by the Girondists; the Duc de Brissac, its commander, was sent to the high court of Orleans, for imaginary conspiracies, his only conspiracy was his honor; and he had sworn to die bravely in defence of his master and his friend. He could have escaped, but though even the king advised him to fly, he refused. "If I fly," replied he, to the king's entreaties, "it will be said that I am guilty, and that you are my accomplice; my flight will accuse you: I prefer to die." He left Paris for the national court of Orleans: he was not tried, but massacred at Versailles, on the 6th of September, and his head with its white hairs was planted on one of the palisades of the palace gates, as if in atrocious mockery of that chivalrous honor that even in death guarded the gate of the residence of his king.

III.

The first insurrections of the Revolution were the spontaneous impulses of the people: on one side was the king, the court, and the nobility; on the other the nation. These two parties clashed by the mere impulse of conflicting ideas and interests. A word-a gesture-a chance-the assembling a body of troops a day's scarcity-the vehement address of an orator in the Palais Royal, sufficed to excite the populace to revolt, or to march on Versailles. The spirit of sedition was confounded with the spirit of the Revolution. Every one was factious-every one was a sol