Lectures on the French Revolution

Two things, chiefly, made the memory of monarchy odious: dynastic war and religious persecution. But the wars had ended in the conquest of Alsace, and in the establishment of French kings in Spain and Naples. The odium of persecution remained; and if it was not always assignable to the influence of the clergy, it was largely due to them, and they had attempted to renew it down to the eve of the Revolution. The reduction of the royal power was sure to modify seriously the position of men upon whom the royal power, in its excess, had so much relied, and who had done so much to raise up and to sustain it. People had come to believe that the cause of liberty demanded, not the emancipation, but the repression of the priesthood. These were underlying motives; but the signal was given by financial interests. The clergy, being a privileged order, like the nobles, were involved in the same fate. With the nobles, at the same night sitting of August 4, they surrendered the right of taxing, and of not being taxed.

When the principle of exemption was rejected, the economists computed that the clergy owed 100 millions of arrears. Their tithes were abolished, with a promise of redemption. But this the landowners would not suffer, and they gained largely by the transaction. It followed that the clergy, instead of a powerful and wealthy order, had to become salaried functionaries. Their income was made a charge on the State; and as the surplice fees went with the abolished tithe, the services of the parish priest to his parishioners were gratuitous. It was not intended that the priests should be losers, and the bargain was a bad one for the public. It involved an expenditure of at least two millions a year, at a time when means were wanting to pay the national creditor. The consequences were obvious. The State, having undertaken to remunerate the inferior clergy out of a falling revenue, had a powerful motive to appropriate what remained of the Church property when the tithes were lost. That resource was abundant for the purpose. But it was concentrated in the hands of the higher clergy and of religious orders – both under the ban of opinion, as nobles or as corporations. Their wealth would clear off the debts of the clergy, would pay all their salaries and annuities, and would strengthen the public credit. After the first spoliation, in the month of August, these consequences became clear to all, and the secularisation of Church property was a foregone conclusion.

On October 10 Talleyrand moved that it be appropriated by the State. He computed that after ample endowment of the clergy, there would be a present and increasing surplus of £2,000,000 a year. It was difficult for the clergy to resist the motion, after the agreement of August, that the State should make provision for them. The Archbishop of Paris had surrendered the tithe to be disposed of by the nation; and he afterwards added the gold and silver vessels and ornaments, to the value of several millions. Béthizy, Bishop of Usez, had declared the Church property a gift of the nation, which the nation alone could recall. Maury, loosely arguing, admitted that property is the product of law; from which it followed that it was subject to modification by law. It was urged in reply that corporate property is created by law, but not private, as the individual has his rights from nature. The clergy complained that the concessions of August were applied to their destruction in November, but they suffered by their change of front. Boisgelin, Archbishop of Aix, proposed a practical and statesmanlike arrangement. As the credit of the Church stood better than the credit of the State, he offered to advance £16,000,000 as a loan to the Government on the security of Church property, which it would thus become impossible for the Assembly to tamper with. The State would be rescued from its present difficulties; the Church would secure the enjoyment of its wealth for the future.

By restoring the finances, and the authority of government, it was believed that this plan would ensure the success of the Revolution, and would prevent the collapse that was already threatening. Necker, for a moment, was fascinated. But his wife reminded him that this compact would establish Catholicism for ever as the State Church in France, and he broke off the conference. Talleyrand's motion was altered and reproduced in a mitigated form; and on November 26, 1789, 568 votes to 346 decided that the possessions of the clergy were at the disposal of the nation. On December 19 it was resolved that the sum of 16 millions should be raised by the sale of the new national property, to be the basis for an issue of paper money. That was the beginning of the assignats that rendered signal service at first, and fell rapidly after two years. It was made apparent that more was at work below the surface than the financial purpose. There was the desire to break up a powerful organisation, to disarm the aristocratic episcopate, and to bind the individual priest to the Revolution. Therefore Malouet made no impression when he urged that they were taking on themselves the maintenance not only of the priesthood, but of the poor; and that no surplus would be available as long as there was a Frenchman starving.

In August, 1789, a committee on Church questions had been appointed, and in February, as it did not agree, its numbers were increased, and the minority was swamped. Thereupon they reported against the religious orders. Monasticism for some time had been declining, and the monks fell, in a few years, from 26,000 to 17,000. Nine religious orders disappeared in the course of twelve years. On February 13, 1790, the principle that the civil law supported the rule against the monk was abandoned. Members of monastic orders were to depart freely if they liked, and to remain if they liked. Those who elected to leave were to receive a pension. The position of those who remained was regulated in a series of decrees, adverse to the system, but favourable to the inmate. It was not until after the fall of the throne that all monastic orders were dissolved, and all their buildings were seized.

When the property of the Church became the property of the State, the committee drew up a scheme of distribution. They called it the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, meaning the regulation of relations between Church and State under the new Constitution.

The debate began on May 29, and the final vote was taken on July 12. The first object was to save money. The bishops were rich, they were numerous, and they were not popular. Those among them who had been chosen by the Church itself for its supreme reward, the Cardinal's hat – Rohan, Loménie de Brienne, Bernis, Montmorency and Talleyrand – were men notoriously of evil repute. Here then the Committee proposed to economise, reducing the number by fifty, and their income to a thousand a year. Each of the departments, just created, was to become a diocese. There were no archbishops. This was not economy, but theory. By putting all bishops on the same level, they lowered the papacy. For the Jansenists influenced the Assembly, and the Jansenists had, for a century, borne persecution, and had learnt to look with aversion both on papacy and prelacy, under which they had suffered, and they had grown less averse to presbyterianism. As they took away the patronage from the king, and did not transfer it to the Pope who was a more absolute sovereign than the king, and besides was a foreigner, they met the difficulty by the principle of election, which had been upheld by high authorities, and had played a great part in earlier times. The bishop was to be chosen by the departmental electors, the parish priest by the district electors; and this was to be done in the Church after Mass. It was assumed, but not ordained, that electors of other denominations would thereby be excluded. But at Strasburg a bishop was elected by a Protestant majority. In conformity with the opinion of Bossuet, the right of institution was taken away from Rome.

It was the office of the king to negotiate with the Pope, and he might have saved the Revolution, the limited monarchy, and his own life, if he had negotiated wisely. The new dioceses, the new revenues, were afterwards accepted. The denial of papal institution was in the spirit of Gallicanism; and the principle of election had a great tradition in its favour, and needed safeguards. Several bishops favoured conciliation, and wished the measure to be discussed in a National Council. Others exhorted the Pope to make no concession. Lewis barely requested him to yield something; and when it became clear that Rome wished to gain time, on August 24 he gave his sanction. At the same time he resolved on flight, relying on provincial discontent and clerical agitation to restore his throne.

On November 27 the Assembly determined to enforce acceptance of the Civil Constitution. Every ecclesiastic holding preferment or exercising public functions was required to take an oath of fidelity to the Constitution of France, sanctioned by the king. The terms implicitly included the measure regarding the Church, which was now part of the Constitution, and which a large majority of the bishops had rejected, but Rome had not. Letters had come from Rome which were suppressed; and after the decree of November and its sanction by the king on December 26, the Pope remained officially silent.

On the 4th of January 1791 the ecclesiastical deputies were summoned to take the prescribed oath. No conditions or limitations were allowed, Mirabeau specially urging rigour, in the hope of reaction. When the Assembly refused to make a formal declaration that it meant no interference with the exclusive domain of religion, the great majority of clerical deputies declined the oath. About sixty took it unconditionally, and the proportion out of doors was nearly the same. In forty-five departments we know that there were 13,426 conforming clergy. It would follow that there were about 23,000 in the whole of France, or about one-third of the whole, and not enough for the service of all the churches. The question now was whether the Church of France was to be an episcopal or a presbyterian Church. Four bishops took the prescribed oath; but only one of them continued to act as the bishop of one of the new sees. Talleyrand refused his election at Paris, and laid down his mitre and the ecclesiastical habit. Before retiring, he consecrated two constitutional bishops, and instituted Gobel at Paris. He said, afterwards, that but for him the French constitutional Church would have become presbyterian, and consequently democratic, and hostile to the monarchy.

Nobody could be more violently opposed to royalism than some of the elected prelates, such as Fauchet, Bishop of Calvados, who acted with the Girondins and perished with them, or Grégoire, the Bishop of Blois, Grégoire was the most conspicuous, and is still the best known of the constitutional clergy. He was a man of serious convictions, and as much sincerity as is compatible with violence. With much general information, he was an inaccurate writer, and in spite of the courage which he manifested throughout the Reign of Terror, an unimpressive speaker. He held fast to the doctrines of an elementary liberalism, and after the fall of the Terrorists he was active in the restoration of religion and the establishment of toleration. He was absent on a mission, and did not vote for the death of the king; but he expressed his approval, and dishonoured his later years by dissembling and denying it. Gobel, the Bishop of Paris, was far inferior to Grégoire. Hoping to save his life, he renounced his office under the Convention, after having offered his retractation to the Pope for £12,000. For a time it was believed that the clergy of the two churches could co-exist amicably, and a moderate pension was granted to the nonjurors. But there was disorder and bloodshed at Nîmes, and in other parts of France, and it was seen that the Assembly, by its ecclesiastical legislation, had created the motive and the machinery for civil war. The nonjuring clergy came to be regarded as traitors and rebels, and the mob would not suffer them to celebrate mass in the only church that remained to them at Paris. Bailly said that when the law has spoken conscience must be silent. But Talleyrand and Sieyès insisted on the principle of toleration, and succeeded in causing the formula to be adopted by the Assembly. It was not observed, and was entirely disregarded by the second legislature.

The Civil Constitution injured the Revolution not only by creating a strong current of hostile feeling in the country, but by driving the king to seek protection from Europe against his people. The scheme of negotiation which led to the general war in 1792, having been delayed by disunion among the powers and the extreme caution of the Emperor Leopold, began in the midst of the religious crisis in the autumn of 1790. The problem for us is to discover why the National Assembly, and the committee that guided it, did not recognise that its laws were making a breach in the established system of the Church, whether Gallican or Roman, that they were in flagrant contradiction with the first principles of the Revolution; and why, in that immense explosion of liberal sentiment, there was no room for religious freedom. They believed that there was nothing in the scheme to which the Pope would not be able to consent, to avoid greater evils, if the diplomacy of the king was conducted wisely. What was conceded by Pius VII. to Bonaparte might have been conceded by Pius VI. to Lewis XVI. The judgment of Italian divines was in many instances favourable to the decree of the National Assembly, and the College of Cardinals was not unanimous against it. Their opinions found their way to Paris, and were bought up by Roman agents. When the Concordat of 1801 was concluded, Consalvi rejoiced that he had done so well, for he was empowered, if necessary, to make still greater concessions. The revolutionary canonists were persuaded that the Pope, if he rejected the king's overtures, would be acting as the instrument of the aristocratic party, and would be governed by calculated advantage, not by conscience. Chénier's tragedy of Charles IX. was being played, and revived the worst scenes of fanatical intolerance. The hatred it roused was not allayed by the language of Pius VI. in the spring of 1791, when, too late to influence events, he condemned the Civil Constitution. For he condemned liberty and toleration; and the revolutionists were able to say that there could be no peace between them, and that Rome was the irreconcilable adversary of the first principles on which they stood. The annexation of the papal dominions in France was proposed, in May 1791, when the rejection of the Civil Constitution became known. It was thrown out at first, and adopted September 14. We shall see, later on, that the conflict thus instituted between the Revolution and the Church hastened the fall of the throne, and persecution, and civil war.

I have repeatedly pointed to the jealousy of the executive as a source of fatal mischief. This is the greatest instance of the harm it did. That the patronage could not be left in the hands of the king absolutely, as it was by the Concordat of Leo X., was obvious; but if it had been given to the king acting through responsible ministers, then much of the difficulty and the danger would have been overcome, and the arrangement that grew out of the Concordat of Napoleon would have been anticipated. That idea was consistently rejected, and, stranger still, the idea of disestablishment and separation was almost unperceived. A whole generation later, under the influence of American and Irish examples, a school of Liberals arose among French Catholics who were as distinct from the Gallicans as from the Ultramontanes, and possessed the solution for the perpetual rivalry of Church and State. For us, the great fact is that the Revolution produced nothing of the sort, and went to ruin by its failure in dealing with the problem.

XII

THE FLIGHT TO VARENNES

The direct consequence of the ecclesiastical laws was the flight of the king. From the time of his removal to Paris, in October 1789, men began to study the means by which he might be rescued, and his ministers were ready with the necessary passports. During the summer of 1790, which he spent at St. Cloud, various plans were proposed, and constantly rejected. The queen was opposed to them, for she said: "What can the king do, away from Paris, without insight, or spirit, or ascendancy? Say no more about it." But a change came over them on August 24, when the Civil Constitution was sanctioned. As soon as it was voted in July, Mirabeau informed Lewis that he undertook to convey him, publicly, to Rouen, or Beauvais, or Compiègne, where he would be out of reach, and could dissolve the Assembly and proclaim a better system of constitutional laws. Civil war would inevitably follow; but Mirabeau believed that civil war would lead to the restoration of authority, if the king put himself in the hands of the Marquis de Bouillé, the general commanding at Metz. Bouillé had acquired a high reputation by his success against the English in the West Indies, and he increased it at this moment by the energy with which he suppressed a mutiny in the garrison of Nancy. For the service thereby rendered to the State and the cause of order, he received, under pressure from Mirabeau, the thanks of the Assembly. The king begged him to nurse his popularity as he was reserved for greater things. This is the first intimation of the secret; and it is confirmed by the Princess Elizabeth, within a week of the sanction given to the Civil Constitution. But although, in that month of September, Lewis began to meditate departure from Paris, and accepted the general proposed to him, he did not adopt the rest of the scheme which would have made him dependent on Mirabeau. At that moment his strongest motive was the desire to be released from the religious entanglement; and he hoped to restore the Church to its lost position on condition of buying up the assignats with the property of the suppressed orders. It had been computed that the Church would be able to save the public credit by a sacrifice of forty millions, or to ruin the revolutionary investor by refusing it. Therefore the king would not entertain the proposals of Mirabeau, who was not the man to execute a policy favourable to the influence of the priesthood. It was committed to a different politician.

Breteuil, the rival of Necker, was the man preferred to Mirabeau. He was living at Soleure as the acknowledged head of the Royalists who served the king, and who declined to follow the princes and the émigrés and their chief intriguer Calonne. Breteuil was now consulted. He advised the king to depart in secret and to take refuge in a frontier fortress among faithful regiments, within reach of Austrian supports. In this way Breteuil, not Mirabeau, would be master, and the restoration would have been in favour of the old régime, not of the constitutional monarchy. On one point only the two advisers agreed: Breteuil, like Mirabeau, recommended Bouillé as the man of action. His reply was brought by the Bishop of Pamiers, an eighteenth-century prelate of the worldly sort, who was afterwards selected to be the minister of finance if Brunswick had conquered. On October 23 the bishop was sent to Metz to initiate Bouillé.

In point both of talent and renown, Bouillé was the first man in the army as the emigration had left it. He served reluctantly under the new order, and thought of making himself a new career in Russia. But he was ambitious, for he had been always successful, and the emissary from the king and from Breteuil opened a tempting future. He proposed three alternatives. The king was to choose between Valenciennes, which would be the safest and swiftest journey; Besançon, within reach of the friendly Swiss who were under agreement to supply a large force on demand; and Montmédy, a small fortified town close to the frontier, and not far from Luxemburg which was the strongest of the imperial fortresses. All this meant plainly Montmédy. Besançon was so far that there was time to be overtaken, and Valenciennes was not in Bouillé's territory. Nothing could be done before the spring, for the emperor was not yet master of his revolted provinces; and a long correspondence was carried on between the general at Metz, and Count Fersen at Paris, who acted for Lewis XVI. and controlled the whole. At Christmas, Bouillé sent his eldest son to Paris to arrange details with him.

During the first months of 1791, which were the last of his life, the ascendancy of Mirabeau rose so rapidly that the king wavered between him and Breteuil. In February, La Marck appeared at Metz, to lay Mirabeau's bolder plan before the soldier on whose sword its execution was to depend. Bouillé at once preferred it to Breteuil's and was ready to carry it out. But Fersen was so confident in pledging himself to contrive the departure from Paris at night and in secret, he was so resolute and cool, that he dispelled all doubts, and early in March he announced that the king had finally decided for Montmédy. His hesitation was over, and Mirabeau was rejected. Lewis could not have taken his advice without surrendering his own main object, the restoration of the Gallican Church. It was the essence of Mirabeau's policy to sacrifice the priesthood. His last counsels were given on February 23, five weeks before he died. He advised that the king, when driving out, should be forced by the people to go home; or better still, that a mob should be gathered in the court of the Tuileries to prevent him from going out. He hoped that such an outrage would cause the Assembly to secure greater liberty of movement, which would serve his purpose at the proper time.

The opportunity was found on April 18, when it became known that the royal family were moving to St. Cloud. Easter was at hand; and at Easter, the king of France used to receive communion in public. But Lewis could not receive communion. He was responsible for the Civil Constitution which he had sanctioned, and for the schism that was beginning. With that on his conscience he was required to abstain, as people would otherwise infer that neither he nor the priest who absolved him saw anything to regret in the rising storm. Therefore to avoid scandal it was well to be out of the way at the time. The royal family were stopped at their very door, as Mirabeau had desired. For more than an hour they sat in the carriage, hooted and insulted by the mob, Lafayette vainly striving to clear the way. As they returned to the palace, the queen indiscreetly said to those about them: "You must admit now, gentlemen, that we are not free." The case for flight was strengthened by the events of that day, except in the eyes of some who, knowing the suggestion of Mirabeau, suspected a comedy, and wondered how much the king had paid that a howling mob might call him a fat pig to his face.

The emperor could no longer refuse aid to his sister without the reproach of cruelty. He was now requested to move troops near enough to the frontier to justify Bouillé in forming a camp in front of Montmédy, and collecting supplies sufficient for the nucleus of a royal army. He was also asked to advance a sum of money for first expenses. Leopold, who scarcely knew Marie Antoinette, showed extreme reserve. His hands were not free in the East. He sympathised with much of the work of the Revolution; and he was not sorry to see France weakened, even by measures which he disapproved. His language was discouraging throughout. He would promise nothing until they succeeded in escaping; and he believed they could not escape. The queen resolved to discover whether the gross indignity to which she had been subjected had made some softening impression on her brother; and the Count de Durfort was sent to seek him in his Italian dominions, with ample credentials. The agent was not wisely chosen. He found Leopold at Mantua, conferring with the Count d'Artois, and he fell into the hands of Calonne. On his return he produced a paper in twenty-one paragraphs, drawn up by Calonne, with the emperor's replies, showing that Leopold would invade France in the summer, with 100,000 men, that the royal family were to await his coming, and that, in effect, he had accepted the programme of the émigrés.

The queen was persuaded that she would be murdered if she remained at Paris while her brother's forces entered France. She believed that the émigrés detested her; that they were prepared to sacrifice her husband and herself to their own cause; and that if their policy triumphed, the new masters would be worse than the old. She wrote to Mercy that it would become an intolerable slavery. She resolved to incur the utmost risk rather than owe her deliverance to d'Artois and his followers. Marie Antoinette was right in her estimate of feeling in the émigré camp. Gustavus III. spoke for many when he said, "The king and queen, personally, may be in danger; but that is nothing to a danger that threatens all crowned heads."