less than his education, sympathies, and hates, bore him to the opposition, there were in his pecuniary wants, and his ambitious dreams of a statesmanship, à la Richelieu, circumstances that at times resistlessly brought him within the influence of court power. Uncertain how far he could overpower the disadvantages of his personal position, wounded that the movement party were little inclined to value his co-operation, and still less to accept his leadership, he early felt, or feigned alarm at the fermentation in the public mind, and its possible evolution in great national calamities; and before one act of legislation was accomplished, or he had had a month's experience of the fanatical impracticability of one side, I use his own words, and the intolerant spirit of resistance on the other, he personally proposed to his enemy, Necker, and through him to the queen, "the only man," he said, "connected with the court," to concur, at the price of an embassadorship to Constantinople, in supporting the court system of policy.
He appears to have fancied for some days that his proposals were accepted; but before he could enter on any of the Eastern arrangements his active mind had already suggested, he learned that the overture was rejected "with a contempt which," as Madame Campan sagaciously admits, "the court would doubtless have concealed, if they could have foreseen the future." Contenting himself with the angry menace, "They shall soon hear some of my news," within a month he became the author of successive defeats, the most insulting a monarch could receive from his parliament, and which were fated to exercise an active influence in the overturn of that royalty he was afterward to defend.
The king, anxious to arrange the differences which kept the three orders aloof from each other, and from legislation, had sent to the Tiers-Etat a message, wise in its suggestions, and conciliatory in its tone. Under the eloquence of Mirabeau, the house passed to the order of the day.
Irritated by insult, and complaining that the antagonism of the three orders prevented any progress in the public business for which they were convened, the king summoned a general meeting of all the deputies, and after an address, in which he expressed his royal pleasure that the three orders should form separate chambers, he commanded the assembly to disperse, that they might meet under the ordinances his prerogative had prescribed. The clergy, the nobles obey; the commons remain uncertain, hesitating, and almost in consternation. The royal command is again communicated to them, with the intimation, that having heard the king's intentions they had now only to obey. The crisis of the royal prerogative, obedience, hung but on the turn of a feather: the repulsed Mirabeau arose, and turned it against the king. "We have," said he, in a voice of thunder, "we have heard the intentions attributed to the king; and you, sir, who have no place, nor voice, nor right of speech here, are not competent to remind us of them. Go tell your master that we are here by the will of the people, and that we are not to be expelled but by the power of bayonets!"
Cheered and supported by the now reassured Tiers-Etat, he next, in imitation of the English parliament, carried, that the persons of the deputies were inviolate, that any one infringing that right should be pursued as an enemy of the country, and that the payment of taxes, till further legislation, should be obligatory only during the existence of the legislative corps.
Added to the bold title of "National Assembly," newly adopted, these votes were the assumption of a kingship by the Tiers-Etat; and as public opinion enthusiastically backed the innovation, the divided peers and ecclesiastics were compelled at length to join, and be submerged in the mass of popular deputies.
A civil war could alone stand between royal power and its destruction. For some weeks the court prepared for even such an eventuality. "Ministers play high stakes," writes Mirabeau, on the 5th of July; "they are compromising the king, for in menacing Paris and the Assembly they are menacing France. All reaction is equal to action: the more the pressure now, the more terrible do I foresee will be the reaction. Paris will not suffer itself to be muzzled by a bevy of nobles thrown into despair by their own stupidity; but they shall pay the penalty of the attempt… The storm must soon break out. It is arranged that I ask the withdrawal of the troops; but be you ready (at Paris) to help the step!"
The demand was evaded by the king; the soldiery were largely increased and concentrated; the arrests of the more revolutionary deputies, including, of course, Mirabeau, were decided on; Necker was summarily dismissed: but on the other side able and active emissaries roused Paris by statements the most exciting, and taking all characters, with the costumes of either sex, caressed, fêted, and partially won over the soldiery, and before the court could take one step toward its purposes, Paris was in full insurrection, the troops corrupted or overpowered, the Bastile taken, and under the plea of anarchical excuse, the whole bourgeoisie of Paris placed in a few hours under arms as National Guards.
The king, taught that it was not revolt but revolution, preferred, as every body foresaw, submission to civil war, recalled Necker, and visited triumphant Paris, at once the hostage and conquest of a popular triumph.
Mirabeau, more or less connected with the Orleanists, had speculated with them on the chances of confusion; for to him it was a small thing, provided he had bread, that it was baked in an oven warmed with the conflagration of an empire. Looking forward with complacency to every contingency of revolutionary crises, assured that a common danger, flinging aside, as unimportant, questions of personal character, would make power the prey of genius and audacity, he was correspondingly annoyed by a re-arrangement that promised for a time a well-grounded tranquillity.
The destruction of the Bastile securing that of "The Syllas of thought," he now transformed into a full political newspaper, his weekly "Letter to his Constituents," under which title he had evaded, from the first assembly of the States-General, the censorship on the press. Aware, from a knowledge of Wilkes and his history, of the power of journalism to a politician, and above all, to a demagogue in a free country, he was, in the full sense of the term, the first newspaper editor of France, and owed to the vigorous use of this novel agency, not only useful additions to his pecuniary resources, but a great portion of that popular idolatry that followed him to the grave.
The court which, in calling together the States, had no higher aim than to regenerate the finances of the country, and, as one step, to obtain the help of the people in stripping a numerous aristocracy of their baneful exemption from state-burdens, had already found out its own share in the peril of the experiment, and now sought, by a close alliance with the noblesse, to avert the ruin that too evidently menaced both. But the torrent had but accumulated at each irresistible concession, and every day's work added to the democratic elements of a constitution that had already made royalty a cipher, and annihilated, as political institutions, the church and aristocracy.
Of course new schemes of regal antagonism again raised their heads, and again a popular manifestation, bringing Paris into the very boudoir of the queen, at Versailles, demonstrated the impuissance of all that took the name of French royalism. The October insurrection was fomented by Mirabeau and his Orleanist friends, for the same purpose as that of July, to secure personal safety, and obtain a new scene of action, by terrifying the court into exile, or the acceptance of Orleans' protection. Had the duke been raised to the "lieutenant-generalship of the kingdom," Mirabeau counted on a premiership, in which he purposed to become the Chatham or Pitt of France. Had Louis the Sixteenth fled the kingdom after the example of the Comte D'Artois, he purposed to proclaim a republic, and become its "first consul;" and should the doom be that France should be divided by civil war, and cut up into its old kingdoms, he speculated on a sovereignty in his ancestral country, Provence, which had already greeted him with so encouraging an enthusiasm.
Strangeness of event! While the monarchy, so short-lived, still survived the insatiate Mirabeau, two of the extraordinary contingencies he speculated on have already happened, to the profit of other actors, and the existing republic, in its mutinous armies, intolerant factions, and insane dynasties, offers no very improbable portent that, even after half a century of a centralized and well-fixed nationality, the old repartition of kingdoms may again present itself!
The great consummation of the confusion, however, failed for the overmuch of
