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S-PP5 S p^ P H q;
ESSAYS
THE EARLY PERIOD
i
OF
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.
BY THE LATE
RIGHT HON. JOHN WILSON CROKER.
REPRINTED FROM ' THE QUARTERLY REVIEW,' WITH ADDITIONS AND CORRECTIONS.
LONDON: JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET.
1857.
j'U^3
LONDON: PKINTED BY W. CLOWES AND SONS, STAMFORD STREET, AND CHARING CROSS.
PREFACE.
I HAVE been requested to revise and collect into one volume the half-dozen Essays which I contributed to the ' Quarterly Eeview' on the earlier period of the French Eevolution : and I am the more willing to do so, because I believe those Essays contain a good deal of curious, and what is rarer and of more importance, authentic, informa- tion on that subject that is not, as far as I know, to be found in any single pubhcation.
My memory and observation of public affairs are about coeval with that event. I was in my ninth year when the Bastille was taken ; it naturally made a great im- pression on me, and the bloody scenes that so rapidly followed rendered that impression unfavourable. Such also was the feeling of my wise and excellent parents, and an alliance between our family and that of Mr. Burke helped to confirm us in that great man's prophetic opinions, which every event from that day to this appears to me to have wonderfully illustrated and fulfilled.
I have thought it fair to say thus much of my own personal feeling, that the reader may be aware of the bias under which I may be suspected of writing, but 1 must at the same time most conscientiously protest that I have not knowingly allowed it to warp my judgment, nor, as I still more confidently affirm, to misrepresent either by attenuation or aggravation any personal motive or any historical fact. I have endeavoured to be jiLst —
vi PREFACE.
I am sure that I have not written a word that I do not believe to be the truth !
The early attention which I was thus led to pay to the Eevolution has been actively sustained through a long life, and made me a collector (I believe to a much greater extent than any other person in England) of the innu- merable pamphlets and periodical and other publications that I may say deluged France as long as anything like a freedom of opinion existed, as well as of those which were afterwards published under the corrupt and in- timidating influence of the successive tyrannies, which found little difficulty in converting a licentious and dis- graced press into a rigorous and shameless engine of despotism. These publications, however ephemeral in interest, or apocryphal as authorities, are still valuable and important as contemporaneous evidence, both positive and negative, for what they tell, and, for what they do not, are often as instructive in their falsehood as in their truth. From my acquaintance, imperfect as it must be, with this enormous mass of documents, I am satisfied that no accurate idea of the real springs and interior workings of the great revolutionary machine can be formed without a much deeper and more diligent exami- nation than any historian that I have read appears to have made of them.
Under this persuasion, but feeling myself in every way unequal to undertake a more extensive work, I was glad to take the opportunities that my connection with the * Quarterly Review ' presented, of examining some isolated but important points of the early period of the Eevolution, in more detail, and with a more critical reference to con- temporaneous documents, than had been, as far as I
PREFACE. vii
knew, hitherto attempted ; and in the humble hope of inducing others to consult those documents of which the British Museum now contains a large collection, I have consented to the present publication.
I have made a few alterations in my original text, chiefly for the purpose of adapting it to the new shape and order in which it now appears, by the omission of explanatory observations which were necessary when the articles were published separately and at considerable intervals, but, when brought together, would be useless repetitions. I have also made a few corrections and additions on points concerning which I have found more recent information.
The first events that I have treated of — those of 1789 — were included in the first livraison of M. Thiers' History of the Revolution ; and finding myself forced to deny the accuracy, to contest the details, and to question the good faith of that work, I was led into a preliminary inquiry as to the circumstances of M. Thiers' life and character, which had led him to take views that I consider so pre- ^ judiced and so unjust. His Histories, however, by the personal and political successes and eminence of their author — not certainly by the historical merit of the works themselves — have attained such general cii'culation and such an appearance of authority, that, even if my article concerning liim had not heen Jirst in. chronological order, I should have thought it an appropriate introduction to the consideration of any portion or period of the Revolu- tion of which he seems now to be the most popular, and I fear the most influential historian.
[1856.] J. W. C.
NOTICE.
The lamented Author of this work, in the process of seeing it through the press, bestowed more time and greater pains on it, and made larger additions to one or two of the Essays, than he appears to have originally contemplated.
The latter portion of this volume had not received the advantage of his final revision at the moment of his death. Pains have been taken, as far as possible, to supply the want of his editorial care, and it is hoped that the work will be found free from any serious error.
October, 1857.
CONTENTS.
ESSAY I.
Pagr
Thiers' Histories i
1. Histoire de la Reoolution Frangaise. Par A. Thiers et F. Bodin.
8vo. Paris. Vols. 1 and 2, 1823 ; vols. 3 and 4, 1824 ; vols. 5 and 6, 1825 ; vols. 7, 8, 9, 10, 1827.
2. Histoire de la Reoolution de France. Par A. Thiers. 10 vols.
8vo. 2nd ed. Paris, 1828.
3. Histoire du Consulat et de V Empire. Par A. Thiers, Ancien
President du Conseil des Ministres, Membre de la Chambre des De'putes, et de I'Acade'mie Frangaise. Vols. 1, 2, 3, 4. 8vo. Paris, 1845.
ESSAY II. Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette 72
1. Memoirs of the Private Life -of Marie Antoinette, Queen of
France and Navarre : to which are added, Recollections, Sketches, and Anecdotes, illustrative of the Reigns of Louis XIV., Louis XV., and Louis XVI. By Madame Campan, First Femme-de-Chambre to the Queen. 2 vols. 8vo. London, 1823.
2. Foreign Reminiscences by Henry Richard Lord Holland. Edited
by his Son, Henry Edward Lord Holland. Pp. 362. London, 1850.
ESSAY IIL The Journeys to Varennes and Brussels, June, 1791 . 105
1. Royal Memoirs. A Narrative of the Journey to Varennes. By
H.R.H. the Duchess of AngoulSme. A Narrative of the Journey to Brussels and Coblentz in 1791. By Monsieur, now Louis XVIII. King of France. Murray, 1823.
2. M^moires sur V Affaire de Varennes. Paris, 1823.
b
X CONTENTS.
ESSAY IV.
Pagb
On the 20th June and 10th August, 1792 IGI
Chronique de Cinquante Jours — du 20 Juin au 10 Aout, 1792, rddiyie sur Pieces authentiques. Par P. L, RcBderer. Paris, 1832.
ESSAY V. The Captivity in the Temple 241
1. Private Memoirs of what passed in the Temple from the Imprison-
ment of the Boyal Family to the Death of the Dauphin. By Madame Royale, Ducbess of Angouleme. 1853,
2. Louis X VII., sa Vie, son Agonie, sa Mort ; Captivite de la
Famille Poyale au Temple, ouvrage enrichi d'' Autographes, de Portraits, et de Plans. Par M. A. de Beauchesne. 2 vols. Paris, 1852.
ESSAY VI. Egbespierre 299
1. Memoires autJientiques de Maximilien Bdbesjaierre. 2 tomes.
Paris, 1830.
2. Memoires de Charlotte Robespierre sur ses deux Freres. Paris, 1835.
ESSAY VII. The Eevolutionary Tribunals 431
1. Souvenirs d^un Demi-Siecle ; Vie Publique — Vie In time — Mouve-
ment Litteraire — Portraits, 1787-1836. Public par G. Touchard-Lafosse, Auteur des Chroniques de ffiil-de-Bceuf, de I'Histoire de Paris, &c. &c. 4 vols. 8vo. Paris, 1836.
2. Souvenirs de la Terreur de 1788 a 1793. Par M. G. Duval, pr6-
ced6s d'une Introduction Historique, par M. Cbarles Nodier, de I'Acad^mie Fran9aise. 4 vols. 8vo. Paris, 1841.
3. Souvenirs Thermidoriens. Par Georges Duval. 2 vols. Bvo.
Paris, 1844.
ESSAY VIII. The Guillotine 519
1 . Notice Historique et Physiologique sur le Supplice de la Guillo-
tine. Par G. D. F. [i.e. Guyot de Fere.] pp. 16. Paris, 1830.
2. Becherches Historiqv£S et Physiologiques sur la Guillotine ; et
Details sur Sanson, ouvrage redige sur pieces officielles. Par M. Louis du Bois, Ancien Bibliothdcaire de PEcole centrale de I'Ome. pp. 35. Paris, 1843.
ESSAY I.
[Qdarterly Review, September, 1845.]
THIERS' HISTORIES.
1. Histoire de la Bevolution Frangaise. Par A, Thiers et F. Bodin. 8vo. Paris. Vols. 1 and 2, 1823; vols. 3 and 4, 1824; vols. 5 and 6, 1825; vols. 7, 8, 9, 10, 1827.
2. Histoire de la Revolution de France. Par A. Thiers. 10 vols. 8vo. 2nd ed. Paris, 1828.
3. Histoire du Constilat et de T Empire. Par A. Thiers, Ancien President du Conseil des Ministres, Membre de la Chambre des Deputes, et de rAcademie Fran9aise. Vols. 1, 2, 3, 4. 8vo. Paris, 1845.
M. Tliiers — Sketch of his life illustrative of his credit as an historian — First events of the Bevolution — The influence of the Duke of Orleans — Tlie Affaire- Reveillon — The affair of the Prince de Lamhesc — 'JTie Capture of the Bastile — The ensuing Massacres — The 5th and Gth October.
1789.
We believe that we shall be able — we are sure that there are abundant materials — to demolish utterly and irretrievably M. Thiers' credit as an historian. Whatever of praise may be due to lively talents and artistic skill, unscrupulously employed to misrepresent and falsify en gros et en detail every subject he touches, we will not deny him : but we deliberately believe, and shall, we trust, produce sufficient evidence to convince our readers, that never was there a writer less entitled to confidence or who has more shamelessly sacrificed historical truth to his private opinions, and, what is worse, his personal interests.
Of his work, under the successive titles of Histories of the
2 THIERS' HISTORIES.
*• Revolution' and of the * Consulate and Empire' fourteen* octavo volumes have already appeared, others are announced, and it is probable that he will bring them down even to the later times in which he has had so prominent and so profitable a share in alternately reviving and repressing the revolutionary spirit to which his first Essays were devoted.
Of a work so various and so voluminous, yet still incomplete, we do not pretend to give our readers even a general view. We mean to confine ourselves to an examination of the earlier portion of it — the facade or portico, as it were, from which we may form a reasonable estimate of the spirit and the style in which the rest of the edifice has been planned and constructed.
We may seem to owe an apology to our readers for not having sooner undertaken this task — but our most popular Parisian contemporary — La Revue des Deux Mondes — prefaces an article of the current year on M. Thiers' historical works, written by M. Sainte-Beuve, of the Academie Frangaise, an avowed friend and panegyrist of M. Thiers, with the confession of a similar neglect. And the truth is that, in spite of its lively style and a certain air of originality and pretence of candour which M. Thiers had the tact and talent to assume, the peculiar circumstances and patronage under which the work originally appeared and the spirit in which it was written, gave it the character — not of a serious and conscien- tious History — but of a bookseller's speculation on the state of political parties. No one looked upon it in any other light than as a branch of the general conspiracy then at work against the elder Bourbons — a paradoxical apology for the old Revolution, and a covert provocation to a new one ; and this was, we are satisfied, its chief motive — though there was of course something of literary ambition and something more of pecuniary speculation mixed up with it.
It appeared, too, with a very ambiguous aspect — the first livraison of two volumes bore the joint names of ' A. Thiers and Felix Bodin ' — Bodin being a young litterateur employed by the booksellers in manufacturing a series of historical abridgments, who was willing to introduce his still younger and more obscure friend Thiers into this species of handicraft. The account given
They now amount to twenty-four (1855).
k
ORIGIN OF THE WOEK— M. BODIN. 3
by M. Quevrard, in his elaborate ' History of French Biblio- graphy,' is as follows : —
' The two first volumes were written in common with M. Bodin, but, M. Thiers ha"ving subsequently retouched them, the name of M. Bodin was omitted from the title-pages of the later editions. We are assured by a well-informed authority that this work was originally composed on a much smaller scale, and was comprised at first in four small volumes in eighteen s, which were to have formed part of the series of Historical Abridgments published by Le Cointe and Durey. But these booksellers, thinking that a better thing might be made of the book, cancelled the four volumes in 18mo. as waste paper, and it re-appeared with large additions, in an 8vo. shape, as the " History of the Revolution." ' — Quevrard, tit. Thiers.
M. Sainte-Beuve, in the article which we have just alluded to, gives an account of the origin of the work, and of the merit of these first volumes, substantially similar but still less flatter- ing:—
' The idea was Bodin's — who urged it upon Thiers, and seeing him working so well at it, resigned his co-operation with a good grace. Bodin's name therefore was thus associated vdth that of M. Thiera in the first volumes, but disappeared from the third. In those two first volumes it is evident that the young historian was only a tyro, and had not yet attained either method or originality. Like most historians, after a study more or less adequate of the facts, after inquiries soon and easily satisfied, and having said at once " man siege est fait," he gets out of the scrape by his style — by the dramatic interest of the narrative, and by some brilliant portraits. The publication of these two volumes over, M. Thiers felt (and he him- self confesses it with that candour which is one of the charms of superior minds) that he had almost everything to learn on the sub- ject he had omdertaken, and that a cuisory perusal and a lively arrangement of materials and memoirs already published — was not history — such as he was capable of conceiving it.' — p. 223.
The character of a work thus described by a friend, and under- taken and carried on — not as serious history, but as a pecuniary and party speculation, and to serve accidental and personal pur- poses— is so necessarily blended with the writer's individual cir- cumstances, that both M. Thiers' admirers and adversaries have thought it necessary to preface their reviews of his book with a sketch of his life.
We, in following this example, shall avoid as much as possible any mere personality, and shall only observe on those circum-
B 2
4 THIEES' HISTOEIES.
stances which appear to have influenced his soi-disant historical labours.
Marie-Joseph Louis Adolphe Thiers was born at Marseilles on the 16th of April, 1797, of very poor parents* — his father being, we are told, a working locksmith. This topic has been handled in- vidiously by his detractors, and eulogistically by his admirers, to an extent which we cannot adopt in either sense. In revolutionary times sudden, and even brilliant, successes are not always the proof of merit : they are sometimes the very reverse, and more frequently the result of accident ; and however honourable it may be to the individual to have raised himself to eminence from a low origin, it rarely happens that he can emancipate himself altogether from the feelings and habits in which he was brought up. Buonaparte himself, notwithstanding his education in the military, and therefore noble, school of Brienne, never, even in his highest elevation, could get rid of the instincts of his early humility ; and though a con- queror and an emperor, he never was a gentleman. So M. Thiers — advocate, journalist, historian, minister, nay, prime minister — has always been and will be essentially un pen gamin ; and we think that we can trace throughout his career a want of that con- sistency, decorum, and mesure, as the French call it — that discipline of mind, manners, and principles, which can rarely be acquired under the precarious and reckless habits of low life. Whatever favourable training the young mind receives in such a case may be generally traced to maternal care ; so in this case, we are told that the mother of M. Thiers, though fallen into extreme poverty, was of a decent bourgeois family, related, it is said, though distantly, to the two poets C%emer— Joseph, the Jacobin Tyrtseus, and Andre, his victim brother. By her connexions she was enabled to obtain for her boy a bourse, that is, gratuitous education, in the public school of Marseilles : so that it must be admitted that M. Thiers may naturally remember with gratitude the Imperial regime. Here his progress is said to have been from the first satis- factory, and towards the conclusion of the course brilliant, though of the details no more is told than that he was a tolerable Latinist,t
* They appear on the register of their + We have some doubts as to his
son's birth as ' Pierre Louis Marie Thiers classical attainments. In all the edi-
et Marie Magdalaine Amic, m:iries.' The tions that we have seen of his History
Christian names and the emphatic addi- we find the egregious blunder of con-
tion mari^s imply that the parents were founding Machines, the rival of De-
of the good old-fashioned school, mosthenes, with iEschylus, the tragic
M. THIERS' BIOGllAPHY. 5
and that he studied geometry with that taste for the military profession with which Buonaparte inoculated the rising generation. We cannot now forbear to smile at the idea of M. Thiers en mili- taire ; but we recollect that the ' Historian of the Decline and Fall ' professes to have learned something from his services in the Hampshire militia — and from the superabundant diligence with which the Historian of the French Revolution loves to dwell on the detciils of the War, it is evident that he fancies that he had a vocation in that direction, and he dreams, perhaps, that if the peace had not imposed upon him the inferior necessity of being only a Prime Minister, he might, himself, have been another First Cmisul
But in 1814-15 the military despot fell, and Thiers, like thou- sands of other embryo heroes, had to look out for another pro- fession ; and it was natural that the activity and ambition of his mind, as well perhaps as an instinctive literary taste, should have led him to the bar. In 1815 he removed to Aix, the seat of the chief tribunal of the department and of the schools of law, where he seems to have looked into codes and digests no more than was just necessary to pass a slight examination, while his real occupation was writing literary essays and getting up political mutinies against the existing government — a road that led so many of the literary heroes of the Revolution to the Tarpeian rock, but carried him in triumph to the Capitol.
' M. Thiers, whose ardent and ambitions spirit seems to have had the presentiment of a brilliant futurity, already played in the law schools the part of the leader of a party : he harangued, ranted,
poet ; which blunder is repeated in was then in high vogue) the Jacobins the English translation. Again : of the determined to suppress, and a red cap ' bonnet rouge ' of the Jacobins, he says, on apique was the standard under which * a new kind of ornament borrowed from they marshalled their party. The the Phrygians, and now become [devenu^ rioters were successful, one of their the emblem of Liberty.' It was neither opponents was killed, and the red cap new nor borrowed from the Phrygians. came immediately into general use as It had been in all classical antiquity the the distinction of a patriot. It is re- emblem of Liberty. Its first appear- markable that this signal alarmed even ance as an emblem of the French Kevolu- the Ultra-Patriots, who at first endea- tion was on Friday, the 24th of Febru- voured to check the title Jacobin and ary, 1792, at the representation of a emblem of the Bonnet rouge, both of piece at the Theatre des Vari^te's, called which in a few weeks they so zealously L'Auteur du Moment, which (being sup- adopted. See Bevolutions de Paris, Nos. posed to ridicule Joseph Chenier, 1:39-141; Feuille Villageoise, No. 28 j whose patriotic play of Charles IX. Bertrand, An7ials, vi. 11.
6 THIERS' HISTORIES.
and roared against the restored government — invoked the recol- lections of the Eepublic and the Empire — became an object of sus- picion to his professors — of alarm to the police — and of enthusiasm to his fellow-students.'— (zoZenie des Contemporains Illustres.
At Aix he formed what our classical neighbours call a Pylades- and- Orestes friendship with Mignet, a young man whose circum- stances were very similar to his own — cultivating, like him, small literature, and propagating ultra-liberalism under the guise of studying the law — like him producing a ' History of the Revolu- tion,' and like him, and chiefly we believe by his patronage, re- warded— though not in so eminent a degree — by the July dynasty, with honours and offices.
About this time the Academy of Aix proposed a prize for the best ' Eloge of Vauvenargues,' a metaphysical and deistical writer of the last century, and a native of that town. Thiers contributed an Essay — which, though applauded, was not, any more than its competitors, thought worthy of the subject, and the adjudication of the prize was adjourned to the next year. It is said that Thiers owed this mortification to his having allowed the secret of his authorship to transpire, and to the reluctance of the Academy to encourage the turbulent young lawyer, ' le petit Jacobin.' Not disheartened, however, he next year sent in his former Essay ; but one from an unknown hand had in the mean while arrived from Paris, which was so decidedly superior to all the others, that the Academicians hastened to give it the prize — though they awarded Thiers the second place. On opening the sealed packets that contained the names of the authors, Thiers was found to be the author of both the first and the second — to the mortification, it is said, of the Academicians and the triumph of the Liberals. This work seems, from the extracts which we have seen, to be a re- spectable coup d'essai^ written with some thought, in an easy style, and peculiarly free from the affectation and bombast which are the common characteristics of the French ' Eloge.'
Meanwhile M. Thiers had been called to the bar ; and practised, or rather endeavoured to practise, but with, as might be expected from his temper and his studies, very little success ; and so, im- patient of an obscure and humble position, he and his bosom friend Mignet set out in September, 1821, to try their fortunes in Paris — ' rich in hope and talents, but very low in cash.' Their expedition to the capital reminds us of that of Johnson and Garrick
MIGNET— MANUEL— LAFITTE. 7
to London, and, like our moralist, their chief if not only resource was a recommendation from some friend in the provincial city to a fellow-townsman resident in Paris.
This patron was the then celebrated deputy Manuel, who, like themselves, had been a barrister at Aix. Elected for the violence of his liberalism into Buonaparte's chamber of the 100 days, and subsequently re-elected by the same party, he was now the boldest and most eloquent orator of the Opposition, of which Lafitte, then thought one of the wealthiest bankers of Europe, was the patron, paymaster, and, we believe, chief manager. There can be little doubt that, even at this time, Lafitte must have suspected, if he had not actually begun to feel, those commercial embarrassments which, some years later, ended in a great and somewhat scan- dalous bankruptcy ;* but, as always happens in such desperate cases, he was not on that account the less profuse of what was really other people's money, in endeavouring to bring about another revolution, for the purpose — such was his predominant and almost avowed idea — of raising the Duke of Orleans to the throne.
The Press, which had been so long and so utterly enslaved by Buonaparte, had, like the prototype of Mind in the heathen mythology, started at once into life, full grown and full armed ; and challenging not liberty merely, but sovereignty, it be- came the chief engine to overthrow the only French government that had ever allowed it anything like freedom. Opposition newspapers were founded with the double object of influencing public opinion and of enlisting and rewarding the young and clever literary adventurers with whom the system of cheap educa- tion and the sudden limitation of the military profession had overstocked society. Manuel recommended his two young patriots to Lafitte, who very soon provided for them by employing them in two opposition journals — Mignet in the Courrier, and Thiers in the Constitutionnel. One of M. Thiers' young friends, Loeve Vemars, gives the following account of the ' very modest* habi- tation— even after he had obtained some reputation amongst his associates — of the future Prime Minister of France : —
' I clambered up the innumerable steps of the dismal staircase of
* It was proved in a subsequent suit the amount of about 400,000/. How
between the Bank of France and the long this deficit had been growing
house of Lafitte and Co., that in 1828 up did not appear. — Deux Ans de Regne,
the latter were already insolvent to p. 422.
8 THIERS' HISTORIES.
a lodging-house situated at the bottom of the dark and dirty Passage Montesquieu, in one of the most crowded and noisy parts of Paris. It was with a lively feeling of interest that I opened, on the fourth story, the smoky door of a little room which is worth describing — its whole furniture being an humble chest of drawers — a bedstead of walnut-tree, with white calico curtains — two chairs, and a little black table with rickety legs.' — Hommes d'Etat de France,
This was probably as good accommodation as either Johnson or Goldsmith were able to afford themselves on their first arrival in London — and we are induced to notice it only from the rapidity with which this humble scenery was changed, and its striking contrast with the singular elegance of M. Thiers' private residence in the Place St. George, and still more with the splendour of the ministerial palace of the Boulevard des Capucines.
The first publication of M. Thiers, of which we have any notice, will appear to an English reader an odd dSbut for a poli- tician and historian of such eminence. It was a biographical essay on the life of Mrs. George Anne Bellamy, en tete of the 'Memoires' of that actress (1822). This we have never seen, and it is now, we suppose, a curiosity. He must also at this period have been writing his ' History,' of which the first volumes were published in 1823, in less, it seems, than two years after his arrival in Paris. But his chief employment and resource was the Gonstitutionnel, in the columns of which he soon distinguished himself by the vivacity and taste of his literary contributions, and by the vigour and boldness of his political articles. The Consti- tutionnel rose in 1825 to 16,250 subscribers, the greatest number of any journal in Paris : while the Journal des Debats, written in a moderating and conservative spirit, had only 13,000 — a number, however, equal to that of all the other journals of Paris put together. At the July revolution the Constitutionnel had reached near 20,000, while the Debats had fallen off to 12,000 ; and the most popular of the pure Royalist journals did not exceed 5000. This is a sufficient indication of the political feeling of the reading public. M. Thiers' growing value was duly appreciated. M. Lafitte saw that he had made a prize : he introduced him into the higher circles and confidence of his party ; and this not only flattered M. Thiers' vanity and taste, but it extended his sphere of know- ledge and of thought, and stimulated at once his diligence and his energy.
LAFITTE. 9
Lafitte was a light and giddy man, with a great flux of plausible talk, and an ultra-Gascon vanity. It was no uncommon thing to hear him tell Englishmen, ' Je suis le Fox de ce pays-cV His position as a great banker gave him a reputation for solid talents which he never possessed, and a degree of weight and authority which he never deserved. Whether from his secret financial trans- actions with Buonaparte, which were very extensive — or from some pique against the restored family — or from higher motives of political conviction — or from some lower and discreditable influ- ences which were subsequently imputed to him — it is certain that he had very early ' affiche ' his enmity to the Restoration : — so much so that in 1814 an eminent Englishman — to whom he was declaiming in that strain — pleasantly told him ' that he was sorry to find that the House of Lafitte had declared war against the House of BourhonJ When subsequently his neglect of his business and the expenses of his political intrigues had involved him in pecuniary difficulties, it was very natural that he should become more and more anxious to merge — or excuse — or perhaps repair his own insolvency in a general confusion : and he was not, in such circumstances, likely to forget that the Duke of Orleans was the richest subject in Europe, and in a condition, if he should become King of France, to be magnificently grateful.* It is, however, within our own knowledge that as early as 1818, when his great pecuniary difficulties were not yet suspected, the ex- amples of James II. and William III. were frequently in his mouth — and we have little doubt that from this source gradually flowed all the allusions and analogies which the opposition press was in the habit of drawing from the English proceedings in 1688. It must indeed be admitted that there had been, throughout the whole course of the French Revolution, a chain of very remarkable coincidences with corresponding events in English history, which
* When Louis-Philippe found him- that he had guaranteed a loan from
self obliged to dismiss the Lafitte mi- the Bank of France to M. Lafitte of
nistry in March, 1831, the extent of 240,000/. These amounts were dis-
his pecuniary gratitude to M. Lafitte puted ; but whatever may have been
was the subject of an angry discussion. the degree of the royal liberality, what
It was alleged, on the part of the King, honest claim could M. Lafitte have for
that he had paid in 1831 for M. Lafitte any liberality at all, unless, indeed, he
12,000^. — that he had given him thought himself entitled to extort from
400,000/. for the forest of Breteuil, Louis-Philippe the humiliating confes-
which, as it produced only 8000/. a year, sion that, like old Didius, he had bought
was considerably above its value — and the crown ?
10
THIERS' HISTORIES.
we have before incidentally noticed, but which we think it is worth while to exhibit more clearly in the following synopsis : —
Charles I.
Unpopularity of the Queen. The Long Parliament. Flight to the Isle of Wight. Trial and execution. Government by the Parliament. Cromwell.
Expels the Parliament. Military despotism. Eichard Cromwell set aside. Restoration of Charles II. Amnesty to all but regicides. Popish and Ryehouse plots. Unpopularity of the Duke of York. Outcry against the Jesuits. James II., late King's brother. Suspected birth of the Pretender. Eoyal Declarations of indulgence. Convention Parliament. Flight and abdication of the King. Expulsion of him and his family. They take refuge in France.
Louis XVI.
Unpopularity of the Queen.
The self-constituted Assembly.
Flight to Varennes.
Trial and execution.
Government by the Convention.
Buonaparte.
Expels the Assemblies.
Military despotism.
Napoleon II. set aside.
Restoration of Louis XVIII.
Amnesty to all but regicides.
Conspiracies of Berton, Bories, &c.
Unpopularity of Count d'Artois.
Outcry against the Jesuits.
Charles X., late King's brother.
Suspected birth of D. of Bordeaux.
Royal Ordinances.
Meeting of the dissolved Chamber.
Flight and abdication of the King.
Expulsion of him and his family.
They take refuge in England.
And, finally, both Revolutions arrived at the same identical result — the calling to the vacant throne the late King's cousin, being the next male heir after the abdicating branch.
These leading coincidences, and some collateral ones too com- plicated for a synopsis, are very curious, and at first sight surprising — but they are not unnatural nor even accidental — they only prove, when closely examined, that the rule of ' like causes pro- ducing like effects' is almost as certain in the moral and political as in the physical world. But there were in France stronger incentives to the change of dynasty than existed in England. The English rebellion had not essentially disturbed the great founda- tions of society — and the English Restoration endangered no private rights, and rather satisfied than alarmed public principle. But in France everything had been subverted — houleverse — not merely the face of things, but the things themselves ; — property.
HISTORICAL COINCIDENCES. 11
above all, had changed hands to an extent infinitely wider than the Commonwealth confiscations in England, and that too under the operation of such cruel and unjustifiable illegalities as could not but render the new possessors very sensitive as to their titles. The usurping government of France had moreover created an exten- sive nobility and gentry of its own : — now all those interests and feelings were offended, and pretended to be alarmed, by the return of those whom, if they did not really fear as claimants of their properties, they certainly hated as antagonists of their principles, and rivals to their new-fangled aristocracy. Many even of those who most wished for peace and quiet under the shelter of a monarchy were not sorry to have a monarch whose own revolutionary title to the crown should be a guarantee for all the interests that had grown out of the Revolution.
This was no doubt the basis and reasoning of M. Lafitte's project, which artfully allied itself with and assumed the direction of all other dissatisfactions and disturbances as they successively appeared. One instance, out of many, too little noticed at the time and since almost forgotten, is worth recalling : —
' On the morning of the 11th of March, 1821, an insurrection broke out in Grenoble, the leader of the mob proclaiming " that a revolution had been effected in Paris — that the King had abdicated — that the Duke of Orleans had been placed at the head of a provisional government — that the tri-coloured flag had been hoisted, and the constitution of 1791 restored" ' — Lacretelle, Restor., iii. 31.
This singular anticipation of the events of July, 1830, proves at least what were the predominant ideas of the Movement party. In the trial of Bertin, in 1822, the law-officers of the crown dis- tinctly charged these and similar disturbances upon a directinif committee in Paris, and by name on its leading members, Generals Lafayette and Foy, and MM. Lafitte and Manuel. This grave imputation was denied at the time — rather faintly, because the parties were afraid of daring the ministry to the proof; but since the July revolution it has been boasted of. Sarrans makes it a new claim for Lafayette on the gratitude of his country, that his own head and that of his son were risked on this occasion. And M. Thiers, in his pamphlet ^ La Monarchie de 1830,' published in 1831, states that the idea of the Duke of Orleans' eleva- tion ' dated from fifteen years before, and that every intelligent mind had already designated him for King.' This probably was
12 THIERS' HISTORIES.
true only of M. Lafitte and the ' intelligent minds ' of his special friends and followers ; but it is — like the more celebrated phrase of ' la eomedie de quinze arts ' — an admission that such were the sentiments and doctrines into which the patronage of M. Lafitte had enlisted, amongst a great many others, MM. Mignet and Thiers.*
At first their co-operation was confined to their respective newspapers, but it soon overflowed into other channels, and pro- duced, as we think, a very strange occurrence. These two young men, bosom friends — inhabiting, together it seems {Gal. des Contemp.), the poor apartment before described and working for a precarious livelihood — suddenly came before the public as rival authors, each with a ^History of the French Revolution.'' The works are no doubt very dififerent in their styles — Mignet's being a kind of post mortem anatomical lecture, which exhibits little more than the skeleton of the subject : — while Thiers' presents the Revolution dressed up like a stage-player, with the most elaborate endeavour to conceal its deformities, and to give it, by theatrical illusion, an air of grace or of grandeur. But, notwithstanding this marked difference in the execution of the works, it still seems very strange that two young men, in such very peculiar circumstances, should have simultaneously under- taken tasks so nearly identical — so likely to force them into a kind of rivalry or collision, and to spoil in some degree each other's market. Finding no explanation of this odd concurrence in the reviews or biographies, we are driven to our own con- jectures; and the following appears to us to be at least a plausible solution of the enigma.
We have just stated M, Lafitte's fixed and passionate desire to place the Duke of Orleans on the throne, and we have sufficient indications of the indefatigable intrigues and profuse expenditure
* The Duke of Orleans, however, nalist, as Thiers then was, not ^o see
was too prudent to mix himself per- the Duke of Orleans'? What could
sonally in these matters, and it seems Thiers have had to do with the Duke
that he had never seen M. Thiers till of Orleans ? We, however, in spite of
the night between the 30th and 3lst M. Sainte-Beuve's unlucky suggestion,
July, 1830. But M. Saint-Beuve, in persist in our doubt that the Duke
stating this, adds a fact, which entirely was ever directly concerned in any of
contradicts his own inference ; he says M. Lafitte's earlier intrigues. He may
that ' Manuel advised Thiers early not have had some notion of his design, but
to see the Duke of Orleans.' Why probably kept himself clear of all guilty
should Manuel have thus early ad- participation, vised an obscure and subaltern jour-
LAFITTE— THE HOUSE OF OBLEANS. 13
with which he pursued that object ; but he met little sympathy — in fact, the great difficulty he found in accomplishing it, even after the July revolution had vacated the throne, proves that there was no public opinion with him or the Duke ; and so — with that con- fidence which financiers are apt to have in their power to influence public credit — he resolved to bring his candidate into fashion, and raise the character of the House of Orleans, as he might do the price of Bank Stock ; but the antecedens of that house were not favourable to this speculation : all former historians had joined in a chorus of indignation against the crimes of the Revolution, and even the most liberal amongst them had a tendency to keep alive and sharpen the feelings of shame and horror with which the majority of the French people looked back on those disastrous and disgraceful days, and in an especial degree on the most odious cause and accomplice of all those atrocities — Philippe Egalite. Now, towards producing the son — little known to the public except as the son of such a man — the first step would natu- rally be an attempt to efi'ace or extenuate the crimes of the father. It was therefore, as we suspect, decided by the leaders that, in addition to the light troops of newspapers and pamphlets, the heavy artillery of regular history should be brought into action, and that, while the inestimable benefits and the immortal glory conferred on France by the Revolution should be blazoned to the highest, its crimes and horrors should be palliated and excused ; and, as an important corollary to the general design, that the case of IJgalite should be kindly yet cautiously handled — keeping him in a shadowy background — not wholly unnoticed, lest it should be said that the Revolution was ashamed of him — not altogether whitewashing him, lest outraged truth should rise up and remonstrate too loudly — but just mentioned where he could not well be omitted, with a charit- able ambiguity — the precursor of that bolder insult to the feeling and common sense of all mankind, which, when M. Lafitte's plot had ripened into success, proclaimed him ' le plu% honnete homme de la France.' Of course it would add greatly to the effect if all this should be done in two solemn and substantial His- torical Works, so different in size, style, general arrangement, and artistic character, that they never could be suspected of being con- certed fabrications of the same shop. We do not venture to say that these twin Histories were concocted solely for this Orleanist project. There were, no doubt, as we before said, the concur-
14 THIERS' HISTORIES.
rent objects of literary profit and fame, and a powerful share of the old revolutionary impulse in the minds of the writers ; but we do believe, and think we could show from a concurrence of minute circumstances, that they were written in concert — that Thiers is only an amplification of Mignet, and Mignet a table of contents to Thiers ; and that both, whether spontaneously or by the suggestion of the leader of the party, were made subservient to the general views of the new revolutionists, and collaterally to their designs in favour of the Duke of Orleans. It is at least cer- tain that if the works had been undertaken with that special object, they could hardly have fulfilled it better. We shall examine in due course M. Thiers' mode of handling these matters ; but in order to have done with M. Mignet, we shall at once produce all the passages of his philosophical History in which this primum mobile of the Revolution, the Egalite Duke of Orleans, is mentioned — and they are but three !
The first introduces that prince — very much a jpropos de bottes — for the purpose of denying that he had any party or real influence in the Revolution : —
' The Duke of Orleans, to whom they [that is, all mankind, except MM. Mignet and Co.] have imputed a party, had very little influence in the Assembly — he voted with the majority and not the majority with him. The personal attachment of some few members — his name — the fears of the Court — the popularity with which his opi- nions were rewarded— Aqpes much more than plots — gave him the cha- racter of factious ; but he had neither the qualities nor even the defects of a conspirator ; he may have helped, with his purse and his name, popular movements which woiQd have equally happened without him, and which had a very diff'erent object from his elevation.' — Mignet, 108.
We need not stop to expose the confusion, self-contradictions, and general falsehood of this passage ; but our readers will con- trast the hesitating hypothesis that the ' Duke might have helped with his purse,' with the bold assertion that, whether he did or noty it produced no result.
Again : in the relation of the frightful events of the 5th and 6th of October, 1789 — the real pivot on which the Revolution turned from good to irretrievable evil,* and which was the indis-
* Whatever of permanent good, either from the Bevolution of 1789, was begun political or social, France has derived and in principle irrevocably ratified,
MIGNET'S HISTORY. 15
putable movement of the Duke of Orleans-r-his name is not even alluded to ; but by and bye, on occasion of his subsequent visit to England, it is thus mentioned : —
' The Duke of Orleans — who mrongly or rightly was considered the planner of the insurrection — consented to go on a mission to Eng- land.'—/^>. 131.
' Wrongly or rightly.^ And this complaisant doubt is expressed by a philosophical historian of a fact as notorious as the sun, and admitted by the pusillanimous evasion of the culprit, which broke up the confederacy between him and the more daring Mirabeau.
The third direct mention of him is in a general attempt of M. Mignet to varnish over some of the most atrocious murders of the Convention by a kind of classification motivee :—
' The Dictatofial Government [the Committees of the Convention] struck at all the parties with which it was at war in their highest and most sensitive places. The condemnation of the Queen was directed against Europe — that of the Twenty-two [Brissot, ^c] against the Girondins — that of the wise \le sage!] Bailly against the old Con- stituant party — and, finally, that of the Duke of Orleans against certain members of the Montague, who were suspected of plotting his elevation.' — Ih. 405.
This exceeds the former passage in absurdity and falsehood, and deserves a few words of fuller exposure. That bloody mockery of justice, the Revolutionary Tribunal, is kept altogether out of sight, and M. Mignet endeavours indirectly to palliate its murders by thus presenting them as the acts of a Government invested by the perilous circumstances of the country with a dicta- torial right of war against its public enemies — a nefarious prin- ciple, too bad to have been alleged even by the original murderers. He would have us believe — contrary to all evidence, contrary to the knowledge of all — not a few — surviving witnesses — that the murder of the prostrate and helpless Queen was a stroke of public policy against Europe ; as if the previous execution of the King, and declaration of war against the very name of monarchy through- out Europe, had not rendered the death of the Queen a mere insulated, wanton, and unmeaning cruelty :— that * the murder of
with the full concurrence of the King October ; after that, all was violence and of the sounder portion of the and terror — alternate anarchy and des- people, prior to the outrages of the 6th potism !
16 THIERS' HISTORIES.
the Twenty-two was directed against the Grirondins f as if the Twenty-two were not themselves the Grirondins : — that the ' mur- der of Bailly was meant to intimidate the old Constituants ;' as if any one at that time cared, or even thought of the old Constituants ; as if it were not one of the most striking and notorious facts of the whole revolutionary tragedy that the poor morosoph Bailly was rather tortured to death than executed, in the Champ de Mars, in personal vengeance of his share in repressing a riot on that very spot three years before : and, finally, that ' the murder of the Duke of Orleans was a demonstration against certain members of the Mountain who had plotted his elevation ; ' as if it were not the Mountain and the plotters themselves who put him to death ; as if the historian had not just before told us that the Duke had no party and no plots ; and as if he had been a victim of the same innocent and interesting class as the QUeen, or Bailly, or the Girondins : — for the crimes of the latter, great as they were, can never be justly placed in the same category with those of Egalite. We have been led to notice these passages, not by selection, but because they comprise the whole of what M. Mignet thinks proper to tell us of the share of the Duke of Orleans in the Revo- lution— he does not so much as allude to his vote for the death of the King, nor even to the assumption of the name Egalite — a most significant silence : to which we may add, as an appropriate pendant — that no description, nor, as we recollect, any mention of that revolutionary Saint, whose influence worked so large a portion of M. Mignet's miracles — the Gruillotine — is allowed to sully the pages of his philanthropic History : and the stupendous horrors of the Revolutimiary Tribunal of Paris, with its 2700 victims — the Noyades of Nantes — the Mitraillades of Lyons — the proconsular massacres in all the great towns of France — are huddled together, and rather concealed than recorded in these few vague words — ' Death became the only rule of. governing^ and the Republic was delivered over to daily and systematic executions:^ to which the impartial historian takes care to append a gentle hint that, for whatever mischief was done, the sufferers themselves were really the guilty parties by the resistance with which the Revolu- tion had been originally met : all that followed, he thinks, was natural — inevitable : and if we were to push this philosopher's reasoning to its obvious conclusion, we should find that poor Louis XVI. was guilty not only of his own murder, but of cutting
MIGNET'S HISTORY. 17
off the heads of the thousands of all ranks and parties that fol- lowed him to the scaffold. We shall see by-and-by that M. Thiers' ' History ' is also composed on exactly the same absurd and mischievous falsification of facts and perversion of reasoning.
We are not reviewing M. Mignet — though we confess we ought to have done so long ago ; but all the French biographers and critics admit that he and M. Thiers were so identified in principle, and so evidently '■fingers of the same liand^ that we could not overlook the connexion and mutual elucidation of their Histories — coming from the same workshop — at the same period of tim.e — under the same patronage — and, as we think the result shows, for the same ultimate purpose. Besides, we are not sorry to have an opportunity of expressing, however late and however cursorily, our very unfavourable opinion of Mignet's work— for his skeleton style and method have obtained for him a kind oi prima facie reputation of accuracy and impartiality which he assuredly does not deserve. An ordinary reader may sometimes suspect that Thiers is too brilliant to be trusted, while Mignet seems too dry to be doubted ; whereas, in truth, they are, though by different processes, equally deceptive. Thiers' portrait flatters the Revolution by altering the details ; Mignet's coarser and colourless hand falsifies the outline.
Here, in strict chronological order, we should pursue our obser- vations on M. Thiers' first History ; but it will be more convenient, we think, to complete our slight sketch of his life before we pro- ceed to the fuller examination of his work.
We have said that his articles in the Constitutionnel had given him a political position ; and his ' History,' written in the sense of the prevailing public opinion, and hardly less a measure of Oppo- sition than his newspaper articles — which it resembled in many respects —obtained him, at least with his own party, a more deter- mined and permanent reputation. But still the wished-for revo- lution did not arrive : the respectable and not unpopular ministry of M. de Martignac seemed even to adjourn any immediate pro- bability of it ; and the activity and ambition of M. Thiers seem to have become somewhat impatient of the fruitless conflict he was engaged in. ' He began,' says M. Sainte-Beuve, 'to contemplate a " General History." ' He does not say of what ; but adds, ' that for this new object M. Thiers thought it necessary to prepare him- self by a diligent study of the higher sciences.'
c
18 THIERS' HISTORIES.
' Those who have had the pleasure of a long acquaintance with M, Thiers remember — not without charm — this, as 1 may call it, scientific phase of M. Thiers' life. He studies Laplace, Lagrange — studies them pen in hand — smitten with the love of the higher calculs, and making them. He traces meridians (des meridiem') at his window, and arrives in the evening at a party of friends, reciting, with an accent of enthusiasm, those noble and simple last words of the Systeme de la Nature — " Let us preserve, nay, carefully augment, the storehouse of these high pursuits, the delights (deuces') of thinking beings." '
Whatever doubts this high-flown passage may excite as to the scientific acquirements of either M. Sainte-Beuve or M. Thiers, it would be uncivil to doubt the facts : we, therefore, must believe that M. Thiers actually makes his calculations ' pen in hand ;' and that he has accomplished that heretofore undiscovered problem of finding more than one meridian for the same window. The meri- dian of a window every schoolboy can find with two pins and two half-hours of sunshine.
About the time that M. Thiers was thus in his ' scientific phase,^ it happened that M. Hyde de Neuville, the Minister of Marine, was preparing a voyage of discovery under Captain Laplace. The scheme attracted M. Thiers' active and inquisitive propensities : he asked, says M. Sainte-Beuve, and obtained, the consent of the minister and the commandant to his joining the expedition ; and M. Hyde de Neuville even proposed to him the office of historian {redacteur) of the voyage. All was arranged : M. Thiers had taken leave of his friends, and was on the point of embarking, when the Martignac ministry was overthrown, and, on the accession of M. de Polignac, M. Thiers or his advisers foresaw the approach of a political tempest, in which he should be more in his element than in the storms of the ocean. He unpacked his trunks, and resumed his pen. The story has been doubted, and we ourselves do not believe it: but it affbrds his panegyrist an occasion to remind us of Oliver Cromivell about to sail for New England, when turned back by a proclamation of the royalty that he Was destined to overthrow. M. Sainte-Beuve candidly adds that he does not compare Adolphe Thiers to Oliver Cromwell ; though, ' bon gr4, mal grS, ce souvenir saute tout cCabord a V esprit.^ By one of those turns of fortune which revolutions only can produce, and the hope of which has been the chief incentive of all the revo-
THE NATIONAL— ARMAND CARREL. 19
lutions of France, M. Thiers, as Minister, gave Captain Laplace a complimentary dinner on his return from this expedition, which M. Thiers had (according to M. Sainte-Beuve) so narrowly and for himself so luckily escaped.
But M. Thiers' revived zeal, and the importance of the crisis, now required another and more vehement organ than the mea- sured, and somewhat monotonous essayism of the Constitutionnel ; and with funds supplied from the same source as all the other ex- penses of this opposition, * les sommites financieres de la Gauche,'' — that is, M. Lafitte — he, with his old friend Mignet, and a younger and more dashing one, Armand Carrel, founded the National. The principles and character of Carrel reflect some light on those of his associate. Educated in the Royal Military School of St Cyr, he was remarked for his early turbulence. In 1819 he joined the army as a sub-lieutenant, and being in garrison at Befort, became involved in the military conspiracy of 18'22, in which Lafayette and the Comite directeur of Paris were so seriously implicated. On this occasion Carrel withdrew or was removed from the army ; and on the French invasion of Spain he joined the Spanish insurgents, and served under Mina against his own countrymen. Being taken prisoner in the course of this aflair, he was tried and twice condemned to death, but the sen- tences were successively set aside for technical irregularities ; and on a third trial, as is usual in such cases, indulgence prevailed, and he was acquitted. He then came to Paris, and fell into the same course of literature, and, we suppose, under the same patronage, as Thiers and Mignet. He was a regular contributor to the Constitutionnel, and published abridgments of the Histories of Scotland and Modern Greece ; and in more direct furtherance of the grand conspiracy, a History of the Counter-revolution in England under Charles II. and James II. This work was sup- pressed by the Government, and we have never seen it ; but we presume it was an amplification of the heads of our preceding synopsis. When the July revolution removed Thiers and Mignet to ministerial office. Carrel was rewarded, more obscurely and scantily, with a secret mission into Belgium, and was subsequently offered a prefecture. These, we believe, seemed to him an inade- quate recompense, and he continued in the chief direction of the National, in which he showed not a little mortification and depit at the inconsistency and ingratitude of the Citizen-Monarchy ; and
c 2
20 THIERS' HISTORIES.
in 1838 was killed in a half personal, half journalist duel by M. Emile Girardin, who had just started La Presse, at half the usual price of its contemporaries.
The earlier days of the National, to which we must return, were brilliant and successful, M. Thiers' conception of his subject and object — the principle, so to call it, of his warfare — was as saga- cious as its execution was bold and able. It was to paralyze the Government, and push it eventually to its own destruction, by affecting to lay down as the inexorable and only rule for the con- duct of affairs — ' the Charter — the ivhole Charter, and nothing but the Charter ;' to employ against the Government every power and means that were not expressly forbidden in the Charter, and to deny them every power and means of resistance that were not specifically recognized. ' Confine,' said M. Thiers, ' these Bour- bons within the four walls of their Charter ; shut the doors, stop the chimneys, and we shall soon force them to jump out of the windows.' This was logical ; it was bringing to practical proof Mr. Burke's philosophical objections to pen-and-ink constitutions, whose theories can never provide for the incalculable contingencies of human affairs ; but it is equally applicable to the Charter of Louis-Philippe,* or any other extemporized paper constitution, as to that of Louis XVIIL ; and it is, in fact, the best excuse that can be made for Charles X. and his ministers ; for it is an admission on the part of M. Thiers that government, under such a formula as ' nothing hut the Charter,^ was impracticable. So M. Thiers himself found it when he became, under the revised Charter, Louis- Philippe's minister. The mitraille of St. Mery, the bloody scenes of the Rue Transnonain, and the ' laws of Sep- tember,^ forced on the new monarchy by the ungovernable violence of its former partizans, now become its victims, were no more than successful imitations of what the Ministry of Charles X. had been driven to attempt, without having either head or hand to
* ' Oui ; apres deux ans de r^gne, surrection against Charles X. — the
Louis-Philippe a d^chir^ la Charte aussi denouement of the comedie de quinze ans
manifestement que Charles X., et bien — seems to us to differ only in degree,
plus manifestement encore, car il I'a and not at all in principle, from the
dechire apr^s la revolution, apres Tin- various insurrections against Louis-
troduction dans la Charte de disposi- Philippe; indeed, the latter seem in
tions destinees k prevenir de pareilles one respect more excusable, as they
violations.' — Cahet, E^v.de\%ZO, t^A^I. had the example of the July insur-
M. Thiers, no doubt, sees a great dif- rection for attempting to take the law
ference between the cases; but the in- into their own hands.
THE NATIONAL— THE ORDONNANCES. 21
execute. We have never changed our opinion on the extreme rashness and folly — fool-hardiness alternating with faint-hearted- ness — of the Polignac Government ; but the best excuse we can find for it is the sagacious principle on which M. Thiers con- ducted, as journalist, the opposition of the National, and the energetic measures by which he subsequently, as minister, quelled the insurrections of his former friends, associates, and admirers. M. Thiers is the best apologist for M. de Polignac*
The National had a large share in preparing men's minds for a change ; but on the appearance of the Ordonnances M. Thiers took a more active part in deciding the new Revolution. The Ordonnances on their first appearance produced little efiect, and would probably not have occasioned an insurrection, but that the editors of the newspapers whose presses were next morning seized were convoked at the office of the National, where they agreed to and signed the celebrated protest drawn up by M. Thiers, which was instantly printed and published all over Paris, and became the immediate signal for revolt. Then came the Three Days — during which, as in the beginning of the Revolution, the working hands showed so much courage in the streets, and their insti- gators so much doubt and hesitation — not to say personal weakness — in their councils. M. Thiers himself, though he had had the courage to set fire to the train, did not wait for the explosion. We should have expected from his temper, his energy, and the peculiar taste which he professes for military affairs, to have seen him prominent in the conflict which he had taken so forward a part in exciting. But no ! — Immediately after signing the protest he retired to Montmorency, a village a few miles from Paris, and did not re-appear till early on the morning of the 30th, when the victory had been won, and when Deputies and Journalists were seen hastening from their respective retreats to divide the spoil. This part of M. Thiers' history no longer reminds M. Sainte-Beuve of Oliver Cromwell, and he jumps a pieds joints over the Three Great Days — with a dexterity worthy of the historical school which he eulogises : —
' M. Thiers' conduct in these critical and decisive moments, from the 26th to the Slat July, may be comprised in two facts — he con-
* Still more recent events, Feb. 1848, account in any impartial view of the and Dec. 1850, should be taken into policy of M. de Polignac. — 1855.
22 THIERS' HISTORIES.
tributed 7nore than any one to the opening act — the protest — and as much as any one to the dosing one,'
This mode of covering M, Thiers' latebration during the Three Days — by ' comprising his conduct in two facts,' which occurred, one before and the other after them, is admirable. In regular war it would be very presumptuous and foolish for a civilian, acci- dentally present, to intrude his co-operation — and even in his History, M. Thiers would have escaped some strange blunders if he had been less confident in his own military skill — but in such a conflict as that of the Three Dai/s, and under his very peculiar circumstances, M. Thiers' absence from a resistance which he had so directly instigated, reminds us, involuntarily, of the ' relictd non bene parmula ' of another little Epicurean — for whom, how- ever, it may be said that Horace never professed to be Brutus, nor ventured to criticise the campaigns of Csesar. This circumstance is rendered the more piquant, by M. Thiers' own observations on ' Robespierre's having — during the three days of the insurrection of the 10th of August — stood aside {reste a Temri) till the revolu- tion had been accomplished ; and then coming forward to claim the merit and recompense of the victory, of which he had been the trumpeter, not the soldier.' This is certainly a curious coinci- dence : — M. Thiers little thought that he was anticipating his own history under the name of Robespierre !
We do not, however, attribute M. Thiers' disappearance to a want of physical courage — neither his countrymen in general, nor those particularly of the province to which he belongs, have ever been deficient in personal bravery, and M. Thiers in some subsequent emeutes, in which he happened to be personally exposed, showed sufficient firmness. We attribute it rather to political prudence — a ramification of the same system which induced the Duke of Orleans to retire, at the same period, to a summer-house in his park. There were, in our view, three parties to the July movement. First, the Republicans and the mob, who thought of nothing but the over- throw of the existing authority : — these took the field thoughtlessly, instinctively, and boldly. Secondly, the Constitutional Conser- vatives— at the head of whom were the Duke de Broglie and M. Guizot, and, with a shade more of democracy, Casimir Perier ; — their wishes did not go beyond a change of ministry, or perhaps, by way of guarantee, an abdication of Charles X. in favour of the Duke of Bordeaux : — naturally and rationally disapproving of so
THE JULY MOVEMENT. 23
violent a proceeding as the ordonnanees^ they would have preferred a parliamentary solution, and therefore regretted the insurrection, or at least its extent and violence, and to the last possible moment would have gladly compromised the dispute. Thirdly, Lafitte and his satellites, Thiers, &c., who may be called the Orleanists — who had prepared the mischief, and assembled, bribed, and intoxicated the populace, but, doubtful both of their cause and of tlieir candidate, kept aloof, watching events and waiting their opportunity. It seems to us that they were playing the same game as the Orleanists of the first Revolution. They had calculated on just so much commotion as should intimidate the King into a transfer of the crown to the Duke of Orleans, and were surprised and alarmed to find that the populace, victorious beyond calculation or expecta- tion, was not very ready to devolve the sovereign power, of which it had— to the tune of ' a bas les Bourbons ' — possessed itself, upon the first Prince of the Bourbon blood. Our reviews of the works of Sarrans, Mazas, Berard, and Bonnellier * have informed our readers of the difficulty that M. Lafitte eventually found in accomplishing his object ; and it may have been, and probably was, this uncertainty that determined M. Thiers' triduan retreat into the valley of Montmorency. Fortunately, however, for France and the world, a strange combination of accident, common sense, and legerdemain, placed Louis-Philippe on the throne of those whom, however, he did not dare to call his ancestors ; and after some ministerial experiments at a more comprehensive administration, M. Lafitte was declared first minister with a cabinet of his demo- cratic friends. M. Thiers was at once admitted into the Conseil d'Etat and the Legion of Honour, and soon after became Under Secretary of State for the Finance Department — while his Pylades, M. Mignet —
' after the remarkable days that overthrew the Eestoration, received the rewards to which his enlightened liberalism — his talents and his patriotism justly entitle him : — He is a Counsellor of State extraordinary— Director of the Archives of the Foreign Department — and decorated with the Star of the Legion of Honour.' — Biog. des Contemporains, tit. Mignet.
Of M. Thiers' brilliant career we shall say no more than is
•Quarterly Review, Sarrans, vol. Berard, vol. lii. p. 262 j Bonnellier, vol. xlviii. p. 523 ; Mazas, vol. xlix. p. 464 ; Iv. p. 416.
24 THIERS' HISTORIES.
necessary to our view of his literary character. He was imme- diately elected to the Chamber by his native Department, the Bouches du Rhone — but his first speeches were not successful. His appearance was mean, and his voice disagreeable ; and the tone and temper of his harangues seemed, says one of his bio- graphers, ' copied from the Convention : — the violence of his doctrine frightened the moderate ; the bombast * of his style offended everybody.' He, however, soon discovered his double error, and began to moderate his opinions and improve his rhetoric. When, after a four months' ministry, M. Lafitte was dismissed by the wise, and indeed necessary, ingratitude of Louis-Philippe, M. Thiers was subjected to much obloquy for not following his friend and patron into opposition : instead of which he took occasion to express his strong dissent from his former associates, and to applaud the prudential policy of Casimir Perier. With an equal share of sagacity and versatility, he knew, as well as the Roman patriot, that
There is a tide in the afifairs of men,
Which taken at the flood leads on to fortune ;
and he turned his knowledge to better account than poor Brutus, by throwing himself boldly into the inviting current of royal favour. It was, we think, on the question of the hereditary peerage that he first distinguished himself as an orator: — betook, contrary to all expectation and in opposition to the whole course of his life, the aristocratic side, and made a speech of mingled argument and eloquence that at once established his character as a speaker, and opened to him immediately the Cabinet, and eventually, twice over, the Presidency of the Council. As a minister, we have already stated that he was now as vigorous and decided in sup- pressing incendiary articles in the press and revolutionary move- ments in the streets, as he had been while a journalist zealous in provoking them j and he showed on all occasions a flexibility of principle, a levity of personal conduct, a contempt for political consistency, with a firmness of purpose and a power of debate, which created more of wonder than respect, more conviction of his talents than confidence in his principles or esteem for his cha-
* Our own impression was that the vagueness and confusion rather than fault of his early oratory might be called bombast.
THE FRENCH ACADEMY. 25
racter. He proposed, for instance, severe laws against unauthorized assemblages ; and resisted with great pertinacity the amnesty for political oflFences — towards both of which the author of the meeting and protest of the Journalists on the 26th of July might have been expected to show some sympathy. He was close to Louis-Philippe at the Fieschi attentat, and, elevated perhaps by the noble example of the King, showed on that occasion no deficiency in personal courage ; — he defended with more than his usual zeal and ability the unconstitutional and rigorous but necessary laws of September ; and signalised himself in forwarding the erection of the sixteen Bastilles,* which replace on the whole circumference of Paris the single and inoffensive bugbear whose capture and destruction he so triumphantly celebrates. His constant expression while minister used to be, ' Nous sommes le ministere de la resistance,' that is, in opposition to the movement party, of which he had been the chief trumpeter.
We must for a moment interrupt our political narrative to state that, a year or two after his appointment as Minister of the Interior, M. Thiers was elected into the French Academy : — This, however, considering that his History of the Revolution had been eight or ten years published, and that in the mean time such men as Ponger- ville and Viennet, Jay and Tissot had been elected — this, we say, looks as if the compliment had been paid rather to the minister than the historian. Indeed there is this peculiarity in M. Thiers' literary history, that, whereas in most cases the success of a book makes the reputation of the writer, in his the success of the writer has made the reputation of the book.
But while M. Thiers was thus ready to advocate, adopt, and enforce a repressive and even despotic system of internal ad- ministration, he was not insensible to the decline of his popu- larity, and endeavoured to retrieve it by the aggressive violence of his foreign policy, and by not only pandering to, but actively ex- citing the worst passions and prejudices of the French people. As the surest mode of regaining the favour of the movement party, he endeavoured to revive the revolutionary fever of hostility to England ; and was, in 1840, on the point of indulging the Jacobins
* It seems surprising that in the re- prudently contrived, to defeat such volt of February, 1848, no use should attempts ; but the truth is that Louis- have been made of these strongholds, so Philippe was taken as much by surprise well fitted, and (as it was thought) so as Charles X. had been. — 1855.
26 THIERS' HISTORIES.
and Buonapartists with a new struggle against the ^perfide Albmi.' War, in short, a revolutionary war, was now the programme of M. Thiers : — so says a writer whom that very design has evidently propitiated —
' That is the predominant idea of M. Thiers — the great object to w^hich all his political alliances and all his parliamentary policy are now subordinate. " There must be," he lately said, " another twenty years' war in Europe before it can be settled on its true basis, and / hope that I shall live to make at least Jialf of it." When that time comes, we shall probably see that he again will be found the man of the crisis.' — Gal. des Horn. Illus.
In adopting and pursuing this course, M. Thiers was probably influenced by a combination of motives : — first, his natural inclina- tions (we cannot call them principles) are revolutionary — secondly, he was the more inclined to take this line because his rival, M. Guizot, had adopted, with all the firmness and consistency of his pure, and honourable character, the conservative and peaceful line of policy for France and for Europe —and thirdly, because, fore- seeing that he could not long, as the proverb says, ' run with the hare and hold with the hound,' M. Thiers was, in prudent antici- pation of a difference with the King, preparing the elements of a reunion with the popular and agitating party. His previsions were accomplished ; he has ceased to be the King's minister, and has now, we believe, pretty well regained — not the confidence — no one has anything like confidence in him — but the co-operation of the party which he had not only abandoned, but for a season persecuted.
We said we should only deal with M. Thiers' political life as it affected his authorship ; and some of our readers, who have not minutely watched M. Thiers' proceedings and publications, may ask what then all this detail has to do with his Histories? We answer, a great deal — everything: — the fruit of his involuntary leisure has been the ' History of the Consulate ;' and we are con- vinced that — as his first History was written in a spirit of hostility to the elder Bourbons, with probably some ulterior view td the elevation of the Duke of Orleans — so this second History is written, not in fact from any love of Buonaparte's principles or memory, but to electrify France with a galvanic exhibition of his false glory — to collect round M. Thiers all the old malcontents and all the young enthusiasts, and, renouncing Louis-Philippe as quasi-legitimate, to amalgamate — in opposition to him, M. Guizot,
HISTORY OP THE CONSULATE. 27
and the Conservative party throughout Europe — all the various discontents and ambitions that may choose to adopt the recollec- tions of either the Republic or the Empire as their stalking-horse of faction.* The History of the Consulate is therefore as decidedly a political manoeuvre as the History of the lievolution ; — it is, we admit, a soberer work ; the political position that M. Thiers had acquired afforded him opportunities of better information, and imposed on him more public responsibility, but it is still grossly inaccurate and partial, and influenced by personal views and motives ; and we do not believe that there is in Europe any politician or any man of letters at all acquainted with public affairs, who regards either of these works in any other light than as — what Lord Brougham is said to have called them — ' pamphlets monstres.'
Having thus stated what we believe to be the real motives and objects of these publications and their author, we shall now com- mence our examination of the first of them in its historical cha- racter.
Of a work so extensive — of which every line betrays a fraudulent spirit, and every page some perversion of fact — which, by a com- plication of petty artifice and by the accumulation of discoloured details, has arrived at the dignity of being the most monstrous system of deception that, we believe, the annals of literature can exhibit— of such a work, we say, it is obviously impossible that the limits of a review can afford any suflBicient exposure, or anything like a pedetentous refutation : — a lie is conveyed by a word, or even by the omission of a word, which it would take pages to dis- prove ; or it may be spread over an extensive surface like a varnish, which it would be endless to endeavour to pick off bit by bit : — and yet we feel it to be absolutely necessary that we should support our heavy charge against M. Thiers by distinct evidence, which may, as far as it goes, wash off the foul matter like a solvent, and satisfy our readers that it would have the same effect if applied to the parts to which we have not room to extend it. Had we time and space in any proportion to the abundance of our materials, the task would be easy enough — the proofs overflow ; our only difficulty is the embarras du choix ; and the danger, on the one hand, of prolixity and tediousness — or, on the other, of
* I beg to remind my readers that them to the hifttory of the few follow - this was written in 1845, and to refer ing years for its illustration. — 1855.
28 THIERS' HISTORIES.
being charged with the blunder of the Greek Pedant in producing a brick or two as a specimen of his house. We shall endeavour to avoid these opposite dangers, and yet to do substantial justice to the case, by taking — we cannot call it choosing — for special examina- tion some of those events and passages, whose transcendent pro- minence and importance would naturally require and excite M. Thiers' best diligence and highest talents, and which every reader will allow to be the most obvious, and, to the historian, the most favourable, tests that could be adopted ; and at least above all suspicion of being, by us, invidiously selected.
Before we enter into details, we must, in order that our readers may understand their import and effect, apprise them generally of the tactics by which M. Thiers conducts his narrative. He was well aware that former Jacobin writers had defeated their own purpose by their blind violence and incredible calumnies. Many recent publications, and a calmer retrospect of all the facts, had conciliated public opinion towards Louis XVI. and the still more slandered Queen, and had dissipated the monstrous delu- sions under which these innocent, and now lamented victims, had been dethroned and murdered. M. Thiers' own sagacity, or perhaps the prudence of the bookseller for whom the goods were originally manufactured, saw that though Qa ira and the Carmagnole might still make a riot in the streets, they would not, in the year 1823, sell a work of ten volumes octavo. Men's minds had gradually recovered — under the severe though opposite disciplines of the Republic and the Empire — from revolu- tionary delusions, and were shocked at revolutionary recollections ; and it was clear that a revival of revolutionary principles could be neither politically nor commercially successful, unless accompanied and recommended by some profession and appearance of candour and justice. This idea, however, was more wise in the concep- tion than easy in the execution ; for, in truth, the whole Revolu- tion was, from beginning to end, such a mass of fraud, tyranny, cruelty, and terror, that anything like real candour or substa:ntial justice was quite incompatible with the apologetical design. M. Thiers' principles, temper, and time of life made the mask of moderation peculiarly awkward and irksome to him ; — and accord- ingly nothing can be more flimsy and ill-sustained than his pretence of impartiality and fair dealing. If he states anything favourable to the Royalist party, he never fails to throw in some
r
LOUIS XVI. AND MAKIE-ANTOINETTE. 29
doubt of its truth, some suspicion of its motive, or some counter- balancing merit in their opponents. On the other hand, when he is forced to describe some crime of the Revolutionists, it is in a mitigated and apologetical tone : the unhappy veces8ity is deplored, but asserted ; its cause is traced back to those whose resistance produced it ; and the Royalists are everywhere impli- cated, by some strange legerdemain, in all the atrocities committed against themselves by their Jacobin persecutors. In short, during the whole course of the Revolution the Royalists never did any one thing that was unexceptionally right — nor the Revolutionists any one thing that was inexcusably wrong.
This is the leading principle and constant effort of the whole work, as it was of M. Mignet's — suggestio falsi — suppressio veri. Of the mode in which M. Thiers elaborates it, we now proceed to give a few prominent examples.
We shall begin with his representations of the conduct of Louis XVI. and Marie-Antoinette, JSgalite-Orleains, and inci- dentally M. de la Fayette — the main and most important topics of his earlier volumes. He felt himself, as we have said, forced, by the state of public opinion and the notorious evidence of facts, to admit — which he does, however, like a reluctant and equivocating witness — the King's benevolent disposition, good intentions, and when the Constitution was established, his constitutional and con- scientious execution of his duties ; and he does something of the same sort of lame and imperfect justice to the Queen. This looks at first sight like a gleam of candour — but not at all — it is only a faux-fuyant — a device to enable him with more effect, and less risk of offence or of direct contradiction, to calumniate the victims whom he professes to absolve ; for while he seems to acquit them individually, he collects and repeats all the lies and libels of those dismal times, as against an imaginary ' Court.' Now every man of common sense and common information must know that this phantom of a Court, as distinct from the King, is not only absurd in theory, but contradicted by every kind of evidence. The poor King was not only scrupulously cautious to do nothing but in communication with his responsible ministers, but in truth there was — at the period at which these calumnies about ' the perfidious machinations of the Court ' were most rife - no such thing as a Court — no persons of such a class as could furnish secret political
30 THIERS' HISTORIES.
advisers, even had the King been bold enough to consult them. The first massacres in July, 1789, had driven into emigration most of the personal friends and favourites of both the King and Queen — the 5th and 6th October, which led them captives to the Tuileries, completed their destitution, and there remained near their persons no one of any political weight or consequence who could have ventured to advise the King, much less — as M. Thiers sometimes asserts, and more frequently insinuates — to control and overbear him. This M. Thiers, with that inconsistency from which falsehood can never entirely guard itself, incidently admits. As early as the close of 1789 he confesses the very fact we have just stated : —
' There was no longer any possibility of attempting any serious conspiracy in favour of the King, since the aristocracy had been put to flight, and the Court was encompassed by the Assembly, the People, and the National Guards.'
And yet after this confession he continues, even more glibly than before, his insinuations against the counter-revolutionary conspi- racies of the Court.
And here we have to notice one of the many variations between M. Thiers' first and subsequent editions — small but significant. In his first edition (i. 200) M. Thiers had said that the aristocracy had been ' chassee,^ driven out by force* — which was quite true ; but M. Thiers on reconsideration felt that this truth would have ex- culpated the Emigration, and he altered ' chassee ' into ' eloignee.^
We have, indeed, a striking and melancholy proof of how early the King was deprived of anything that could be called a Court even in the least invidious sense of the word. Three days after the capture of the Bastille the King was advised to make his celebrated and humiliating visit to the Hotel de Ville in Paris, in which the newly elected mayor, Bailly, insulted him, even in the presentation of the keys of the city. He returned 'heart-broken' to Versailles, whither M. de Bezenval, General of the Swiss Guards, who had commanded the troops in the late crisis, but had now resigned his military command, followed- him, unbidden, and he has left us the following short
Chasser, metlre dehors par violence' — Dictionnaire de VAcad€mie.
LOUIS XVI.— THE COURT. 31
but affecting statement of what he then witnessed at the Court of Versailles : —
' The unhappy King on his return to Versailles found himself almost alone. For three whole days there was no one near him but M. de Montmorin [one of the ministers] and me [who had no ofl&cial character]. Even his menial attendants waited upon him with dis- respectful negligence, and I myself was a witness of this insolence.' — Mem. de Bezenval, ii. 568.
And so early and so entirely was the ' unhappy King ' convinced of the perils of his own situation, and his total want of power to protect any one who was attached to him, that he forced M. de Bezenval to leave Versailles and to seek his safety in a hasty retreat to his native country. Such was the Court which the pages of M. Thiers represent as being at this very time in formidable activity against the safety of Paris which was garrisoned by 60,000 new-raised National Guards, and the liberties of France which was in a state of triumphant anarchy from Dunkirk to Marseilles.
There is one great fact which, if M. Thiers had given himself the least trouble about either historical truth or logical consistency, would have warned him, as it must convince all the rest of mankind, that his device of seeming to separate the innocent King from the guilty Court is, by the admission of his own idols, utterly futile. The King was executed for the very circumstances imputed by M. Thiers to the Court ! — and Messrs, Vergniaud and Guadet —
* eourageux nobles et zllustres citoi/ensj' as M. Thiers delights to call them — and his Highness Citizen and Prince Cambaceres
* homme savant et sage,^ and Citizen and Count Carnot ' homme probe et eourageux,' and Citizen and Count Treilhard '"Ticmnete homme reunissant les lumieres a la probite^ and Letourneur ' bon homme^ and Lareveilliere Lepeaux ' le plus honnete et le meilleur des hommes^ and so many others of M. Thiers' transcendent specimens of talents, probity, and justice, who all voted for the death of the King, made no such exculpatory distinction, and sent him to the scaffold as guilty of those imaginary crimes which M. Thiers— not now daring to produce against him personally, and yet reluctant to disavow his ' illustrious ' regicides — imputes to the phantom Court.
But may not the Queen be suspected of having favoured coun-
32 THIERS' HISTORIES.
ter-revolutionary intrigues, and might not she be aptly desig- nated as the Courts in contradistinction to the King? This M. Thiers, though he does not venture directly to affirm, often insinuates ; but here again we have abundant evidence that the Queen never separated herself from the determinations of the King. The testimony of two constitutional ministers, Dumou- riez and Bertrand de Moleville, unquestionable on this point, as M. Thiers admits — and that of Madame Campan, not so autho- ritative, but as authentic— leave, as he professes, even in his mind no doubt of the Queen's participation in the conciliatory and constitutional views of her husband. We ourselves have heard from Dumouriez, in many frank and confidential 'conversations, his full conviction of the sincerity and good faith of both the King and Queen, and the utter falsehood and nonsense of all the imputations of the secret and interior Court and the imaginary ' conspiracies against the people ' with which the agitations of Paris were at the moment excited and fed.*
The Feuillants, or Constitutional party — Lafayette, Lameth, &c. — wished, says M. Thiers, — •
' to save the King without altering the Constitution, Their means vxre feeble. In the first place, the Court that they w^ished to save would not be saved by them. The Queen, who readily gave her confidence to Barnave [a reclaimed Jacobin, now a Constitutionalist], had always taken the greatest precautions in seeing him, and never received him but in secret. The Emigrants and the Court would never have forgiven her for even seeing a Constitutionalist, They in fact advised her not to treat with them, and rather to prefer the Jacobins,' &c.
Here then we have a Court in contradistinction not only to the
* On the subject of the King's scrupu- observes on the King's observance of
lous observance of the Constitution, v:e the constitution (p, 55) — ran as fol-
can add an original, and, we think, lows : — ^Eh! le pauvre Sire; ll la por-
curious anecdote. After the death of tait tovjours en poche, et la produisait
M. Ecederer, his books were sold by qvelqnefois avec vne naivete pitoyahle.'
auction, and amongst them was the This anecdote is doubly curious when
historical work of M. Maton de Va- we recollect that Kocderer was one of
rennes, of which Roederer had made the chief manufacturers of this absurd
great use in the compilation of his own constitution, and afterwards one of the
' CJivonique.' In the margin he had superior magistrates named to execute
made several MS. notes, and one of it. We shall see hereafter {Essay IV.)
them— on a passage in which Maton how /te performed this duty, — 1855.
MAEIE ANTOINETTE— THE COURT. 33
King, but the Queen also — a Court that, in league with the Emigrants, never would forgive the Queen for even seeing a Constitutionalist ; and for this extraordinary statement M. Thiers refers us, in a marginal note, to the authority of Madame Campan. We turned to the passage with eagerness : we supposed that at last we were about to learn who and what this mysterious Court could be, that thus, in concert with the JEmigrants, overawed the constitutional dispositions of the Queen. We found in Madame Campan no mention of — not the slightest allusion to — the Court, nor anything like it. She speaks of the Emigrants alone, and does not say that they advised the Queen, or that the Queen listened (as M. Thiers himself admits she did not) to their advice. What Madame Campan does say is simply that —
' the Emigrants showed \J'aisaient entrevoir~\ great apprehensions of any approaches towards the Constitutional party, which they described as existing only in idea, and having no longer the means of repairing the mischief they had done; they would have preferred the Jacobins,' &c. — Mem. de Campan.
Not a word about the Court — and the opinion concerning the Feuillant party thus attributed to the Emigrants is precisely that which M. Thiers himself had just said, ' that their means were too feeble ;' and which he reiterates immediately after in almost the same words, ' the feebleness of their means of making head against the Revolutionists.'
The sequel of this affair is an additional proof of M. Thiers' bad faith and self-contradiction. The King having been forced, in March, 1792, to replace a Feuillant ministry by a Jacobin one, Lafayette came forward to support his displaced friends by writing a kind of dictatorial manifesto to the Assembly, in which he denounced the proceedings and objects of the Jacobin& Of this celebrated, foolish, and, as it turned out, unfortunate letter, M. Thiers (now a flatterer of Lafayette) gives large extracts ; but by a petty trick habitual to him, and indeed to all falsifiers, he chooses to suppress the date both of time and j^lace — circumstances essential to any letter, but on which, in respect to this letter, every- thing turned. It was, in fact, dated ' IQth June, 1792, from the ijitrenched camp at Maubeuge ; and the indignation it produced in the Assembly arose on two main points : it was urged, in the first place, that it was most unconstitutional and dangerous that a General at the head of an army should presume to lecture the National
D
34 THIERS' HISTORIES.
Assembly — and, secondly — on which ground indeed they affected to treat it as a forgery — though dated at Mauheuge on the \^th, it began by alluding to the resignation of Dumouriez, which had hap- pened in Paris only that same day — the 16th. These two egregious blunders of his hero, Lafayette, M. Thiers thinks that he in some degree veils by suppressing the dates. But he had also another object — still more fraudulent. The letter was dated the 16th ; read in the Assembly on the 18th — on the 19th it occasioned the greatest agitation in Paris, and it became the pretext of the infamous Girondin attack on the Tuileries of the following day, the celebrated 20^A of June. It was necessary to M. Thiers' system of calumny to implicate in some way the King and Queen in these ill-managed proceedings of Lafayette and their lamentable consequences, and he thus goes about it : —
' The Feuillants got about Lafayette, and concerted with him the draft of a letter to the Assembly. His friends were divided on this subject — some excited, others dissuaded. But he, only thinking of how to serve the King to whom he had sworn fidelity, wrote the letter, and braved all the dangers which were about to tkreaten his life.'
Now there is nothing in M. Thiers' relation to explain that all this might not have happened at Paris — though, obviously, who- ever got about (entourat) Lafayette, must have been at Maubeuge ; and then M. Thiers reaches the real object of all this manoeuvring : —
' The King and the Queen (though resolved not to avail them- selves of his services) allowed him to write the letter, becatise they wire delighted to see ths friends of liberty at variance.^
Thus creating an impression that the King and Queen were in personal communication with Lafayette, and encouraged him to write the letter — not expecting or intending that it should do any good — but with the perfidious design of injuring their gallant defender and rendering him suspicious and odious to the friends of liberty ! And the better to carry on this fraud, M, Tliiers makes another remarkable suppression. The King was really so far from having had any share in this letter to the Assembly, that Lafayette thought it necessary to send his Majesty a copy of it in a private letter, which Bertrand de Moleville has preserved, but which M. Thiers totally suppresses — and for two reasons — first, because it disproves any treacherous intrigue on the part of the
LAFAYETTE— GARDES-DU-CORPS. 35
King as to the first letter ; and also because it bears testimony to the honest and constitutional dispositions of the calumniated monarch.
Even while forced in all substantial cases to admit the King's personal sincerity, he takes the opportunity of every obscure or doubtful incident to insinuate a suspicion of perfidy — and some- times draws this ingenious conclusion from facts that should have had a quite contrary effect. For instance — towards the close of 1789, he says that
' tho King would not recall his Gardes-du-corps, who had been removed on the 5th and 6th of October, and preferred to intrust himself to the National Guard.'
What could be more prudent or more natural ? If the King had been so rash and so unfeeling as to bring forward again those of the Gardes-du-corps who had escaped the massacre of the 6th of October, what charges of conspiracy and perfidy would not the revolutionists of the time have raised, and M. Thiers reiterated ? — a new massacre must have been the inevitable result. But *the King confided himself to the National Guards ' — the soldiers of the people. Has M. Thiers no expression of approbation for that conciliatory sacrifice of the royal feeling ? Quite the contrary : he proceeds to throw over the King's humane reluctance to expose the Gardes-du-corps to fresh danger, and his misplaced confidence in the National Guard, the most ijdious discolour : —
' His design icas to appear a prisoner. The Municipality of Paris defeated this paltry trick (trop petite ruse) by begging the King to re- call his Gardes-du-corps — which he still refused, under idle preteocts, and throicgh the medium of the Queen.'
To appear a prisoner ? Alas I who but M. Thiers ever doubted that ever since the 5th of October he was one ? The fear of a new massacre of the Gardes-du-corps is called a ' paltry trick ' and an ' idle pretext,' on no other authority than M. Lafayette's having, as he said, seen one of those gentlemen walking in the Palais Royal in uniform ; as if (supposing that small fact to be true, which we entirely disbelieve *) a single person venturing to wear an old uniform proved that the whole body-guard would have been allowed to resume the custody of the King, and deprive the National Guards of the posts which they had usurped amidst the
* Seei)os<, p. 82.
D 2
36 THIERS' HISTORIES.
butchery of the 6th of October ! But cannot M. Thiers imagine that, besides these cogent reasons, the King might have a consti- tutional reluctance to acknowledge the humiliating authority that M. Lafayette and the Municipality of Paris thus assumed to exercise over his household ? And then, that the Queen might, as usual, be implicated in this perfidy, it is said that the King employed her — ' a laquelle on [we suppose the Court] confiait Us eommissions difficiles ' — as the medium of his communications ; when in truth it appears, even by M. Thiers' own explanatory note, that M, de Lafayette had made the proposition to the Queen, and of course received the answer through the medium that he, and not the King, had chosen. And, finally, after thus making this a direct and personal charge against the King and Queen, he falls back upon his old device of secret and anony- mous advisers, and tells us that the King and Queen would have accepted the proposition, but that ' On leur jit refuser,^ &c. There assuredly needed no adviser to enable any person of the most ordinary understanding to see that such a proposition could have had no other prospect than that of a new and general massacre, and an earlier and more complete overthrow of the monarchy. M. Thiers, in thus attempting to calumniate the King and Queen, has in truth produced against his friend and patron Lafayette one of the heaviest charges, either of deplorable folly or detestable treachery, that ever yet had been made against him. Another case bearing on nearly the same points affords an instance of still more flagitious falsehood : —
' On the 18th of April [1791],' says M. Thiers, ' the King attempted to pay a visit to St. Cloxid. It wkb immediately reported that, being unwilling to employ a priest who had taken the oath [to the new constitution of the clergy] , he had determined to absent himself daring Easter week. Others declared that he designed to make his escape. The people assembled in crowds and stopped his horses. Lafayette hastened to his rescue, entreated the King to remain in his earrings, and assured him that he was about to opefn a passage for his departure. The King, however, according to his old policg of not appearing free, got out of the caiTiage, and would not permit him to make the attempt.'
Now the fact is, that Lafayette (whether sincerely or collusively we know not) did make the attempt, and totally failed. ' The very soldiers he had brought to protect the King's passage,' says
LOUIS XVI.— ATTEMPT TO VISIT ST. CLOUD. 37
Bertrand de Moleville, * turned against him.' But admitting that he did all that he could do, his efforts only proved his own want of power : the feeble voice of the popular general was drowned in the vociferations of the mob ; and although M. de Lafayette offered, if the King should persist in going, to endeavour to force a passage at the risk of his life, the King (as the Gene- ral might and probably did anticipate) declined a conflict of which he and his wife and children — whose presence in the besieged carriages M. Thiers fraudulently conceals — would no doubt have been the first victims, and — after having been an hour and a half in the carriage, exposed to the grossest insults, ribaldry, and menaces of the populace — was at length forced to alight. And instead of this being a dishonest trick of the King's — as M. Thiers asserts — he went next day in state to the National Assembly and complained of the outrage in these words : —
' Gentlemen — Yoii are infoiTaed of the opposition given yesterday to my departure from St. Cloud. I was unwilling to overcome it by force, because I feared to occasion acts of severity against a mis- guided multitude — but it is of importance to the nation to prove that I am free. Nothing is so essential to the authority of the sanction I have given to your decrees.— Governed by this powerful motive I persist in my plan of going to St. Cloud, and the National Assembly must perceive the necessity of it.'
This appeal was as fruitless, as the forcible-feeble efforts of Lafayette had been. The municipality of Paris decreed that the King should not go to St. Cloud* — the cowardly Assembly declined to interfere, and the humiliated monarch was as it were remanded back to his prison. The conduct of all the authorities of the day was execrable — but what can be said of M. Thiers ? — what ? but that his narrative is not merely calumnious, but elaborately false.
In the critical interval between the outrages of the 20th of June and the 10th of August M. Thiers says —
' It was rumoured {on repandaii) in fact that the Chdteau t was endeavouring to provoke the people to a second rising, in order that it might have an opportunity of slaughtering them. So that the
* Danton, on his trial, avowed that Tuileries, was often used in an invi-
he conducted this ^ineute. dious sense for what in the same sense
f Our readers know that then, as noio, was and is also called the Court. — Thiers,
the term Chdteau, meaning the roj-al ii. 177. residence, whether at Versailles or the
38 THIERS' HISTORIES.
Chateau supposed that there was an intention of assassinating the King, and the Faubourgs one of massacring the people.'
Thus again endeavouring to place some imaginary conspiracy of the Court in the same category with the real atrocities of the 20th of June and 10th of August, and hinting, with his usual insidious inconsistency, that the aggressions of the people were prompted by an impulse of self-defence, although he in antecedent and subsequent passages admits that both these deplorable riots were the work not of the people, but of a dozen leaders of the Gironde and Jacobin parties, who even found some difficulty in rousing the Parisian mob into the necessary state of frenzy, and were obliged to adjourn the last and decisive insurrection, at first intended for the 26th of July, to the lO^A of August, that they might have the co-operation of the bolder Marseillais.
Here is another specimen of the same masquerade of candour. When the unhappy Queen deplored the undeserved animosity of the people, M. Thiers sympathises with her in the following strain : —
' Thus, by a kind of fatality, the supposed ill intention of tiie Chateau excited the suspicions and fury of the people, and the vociferations of the people increased the sorrows and imprudences of the Chateau. Why did not the Chateau understand the fears of the people— why did not the people understand the sorrows of the Chateau — -Why ? but because men are men.'
To this disgusting affectation of a humane impartiality we answer No — it was because the Revolutionists were not men, but monsters ! Sorrows there were, and fear there was — but not divided as in M. Thiers' invidious partition ; the fear, as well as the sorrow, was the bitter portion of the Chateau — the people had nothing to fear, and feared nothing. Their leaders were the only conspirators, and in every case the aggressors and assailants ; while the humbled and defenceless Chateau was doomed to suffer at first all the humiliation of insult, and ultimately the last excesses of outrage. We have no doubt that there may have been, must have been, about the Court — while there was a Court — as there was in every other class of French, as well as of European, society,, a diversity of opinion about the Revolution — that the Anti-revolutionists must have predominated in the Court circle — that, as the authority and person of the King were progressively assailed, insulted, and endangered, the opinions of the cour-
THE COURT— THE ORLEANS CONSPIRACY. 39
tiers became more unanimous — that they may have talked what M. Thiers calls * imprudently/ and even sometimes acted impru- dently. This may have been so, and no doubt any such incident would be exaggerated and promulgated by every nefarious art to inflame and ulcerate the public mind. But that anything like a conspiracy or combination against the people, or even the new order of things, was ever formed — but above all formed under any approbation or connivance of either the King or the Queen — may be most confidently denied. And what ratifies our argu- ment is, that M. Thiers, who makes these insinuations as to secret anti-national councils on every page, never once attempts to esta- blish them by facts ; and whenever he happens to produce a fact at all approaching the subject, it is invariably found to contradict the insinuation.
In short, it seems to us that in all this portion of his work — and a most important portion it is — M. Thiers is as utterly regard- less of truth, or even of vraisemblance, as if he were writing La Tour de Nesle or the Mysteres de Paris — and we have little doubt that, if taxed in the private society of his early days with this elaborate suggestio falsi^ the gay and insouciant manufacturer of M. Le Cointe's octavos would have laughed and shrugged his shoulders with a ' Mais, que voulez-vous P — without this phantom of a Court I could nqt have carried mi/ panegyrical theory of the Revolution through a single page.'
His management of the case of the unfortunate EgalitS takes the other of the two modes of deception, on which his whole scheme proceeds — the suppressio veri ; and as he invents, even beyond the libellists of the day, machinations for an imaginary Court, so, for the same purpose, he attenuates and envelops in ambiguity and doubt every indication of the real conspiracy of the Duke of Orleans. The detailed plan of his work did not allow him to get rid of the Duke of Orleans in the summary style of Mignet ; but we have not been able to find a single passage in which the most serious, the most notorious, the most undeniable charges against EgalitS are not either passed over altogether, or treated as the mere on dits of the town, or as the suggestions of enemies, or as accidents which, even if true, were of no substantial influence. Here are a few instances, not selected, but taken as they occur in the first pages.
The Abbe Sieyes is introduced, with his ' pamphlet ' the precursor,
40 THIERS' HISTORIES.
his ' motion ' which constituted the National Assembly, — but not a hint is given that he had, or was supposed to have, any con- nexion with the Duke of Orleans — nor is any mention made of the celebrated cahiers of the Orleans bailliages, attributed to Sieyes. And why this concealment ? Because it is M. Thiers', as it was M. Mignet's, and no doubt M. Lafitte's, object to repre- sent the Duke as a giddy, dissipated, mere man of pleasure, with no plan, no party, no influence — a fly on the wheel of the Revo- lution ; — and this hypothesis would be defeated by a confession that he was acting in close and intimate concert with ' the com- prehensive, philosophical, and systematic mind of one of the greatest geniuses of the age.' (Thiers, vol. i. pp. 28, 60.) So when he first mentions the Duke of Orleans as connected with party, it is thus : —
' AMien parties began to form themselves, he Imd suffered his name to be employed, and even, it is said, his wealth also. Flattered ■with the vague prospect before him, he was active enough to draw accusations on himself, but not to ensure success ; and he must have sadly distressed his partisans, if thvj really had any projects, by his inconstant ambition.'
' Inconstant ambition ' — ' vague prospect ' — of what ? M. Thiers does not say ; and even doubts whether ' ' anybody had really any projects ' ! But by-and-by M. Thiers becomes a little more particular : —
' The garden of the Palais Royal, forming an appurtenance to the palace of the Duke of Orleans, was the rendezvous of the most vehement agitators ; there the boldest harangues were delivered ; there might be seen an orator mounted on a table collecting a crowd around him, and exciting them by the most ferocious language — language always unpunished — for there the mob reigned sovereign. Here men, supposed to be devoted to the Duke of Orleans, were the most forward. The wealth of that prince — his well-known prodi- gality— the enormous sums he borrowed — his residence on the spot — his ambition, though vagus, all served to point accusation agaiilst him.'
Here, in spite of the qualifying and ambiguous phraseology, we have something that looks like a candid admission that there was a presumption against the Duke of Orleans ; but M. Thiers makes a sharp turn, and, being unable either to conceal or deny the notorious fact that the mobs of the Palais Royal were bribed, he hastens to
THE ORLEANS CONSPIRACY.
41
throw a veil over the name of Duke of Orleans, and to rescue the immaculate Revolution from the reproach of having been in any degree influenced by these hireling agitators. The mode in which he executes this is very remarkable and admirably characteristic.
It appears, on a comparison of M. Thiers' first edition with those that followed, that he altered certain passages of his original text, and that these alterations seem chiefly designed to remove some slight traces of truth or candour which had inadvertently escaped him. We have already given one example (p. 30) ; but this revision is peculiarly observable in several passages relating to the delicate subject of the Duke of Orleans ; and from many instances of this dishonest manipulation we submit to our readers the specimen of the case before us.
b
. . FIRST EDITION.
' The Historian \i. e. M. Thiers himself], without mentioning any name, can at least assert that money was profusely distributed. For if the sound part of the nation was ardently desirous of liberty ; if the restless and suf- fering multitude resorted to agi- tation for the sake of bettering its condition, there were instigators who excited this multitude, and who often directed its blows and its pillage. It is, certainly, not with money and secret manoeu- vres that one can set in move- ment an entire nation, hut ones excited, it is often by this means that it is directed and led astray (e'gare'a).'
SUBSEQUENT EDITIONS.
^History, without mentioning any name, can at least assert that money was profusely distributed. For if the sound part of the nation was ardently desirous of liberty ; if the restless and suffering multi- tude resorted to agitation for the sake of bettering its condition, there were instigators who some- times excited that multitude, and ■ directed perhaps some of its blows. In other respects this influence is not to be reckoned among the causes of the Revolution ; for it is not with a little money and with secret manoeuvres that you can convulse a nation of twenty-five millions of menJ
Our readers see the art with which these changes are made and the object to which they are directed. In the first version the
* Historian ' admits the fact that money was instrumental in those tumults ; in the second he endeavours to discredit it In the first version he says the Historian himself can assert the fact — as if from personal investigation and conviction — in the second version he slips out of this responsibility, and turns it over to the Muse of
* History ' — 'tis Clio and not Thiers that suspects the integrity of
42 THIERS' HISTORIES.
the Duke of Orleans. In the first version he confesses ' blows and pillage ' — but ' pillage ' would have reminded his reader of an affair which M. Thiers had, as we shall more fully see by-and-by, a strong desire to suppress — the pillage of the house of M. Reveillon ; and so the word ' pillage ' disappears from the second version. In the first version it is said positively that ' there were instigators who excited and often directed these blows and pillage.' In the second version the positive assertion is lowered to a ' per- haps,^'' peut-etre^ — the '■ ojten'' to '■sometimes^ — and *" the blows and pillage ' attenuated to ' some {qnelques-U7is) of its blows.'' And finally, the last admission, that when a nation is once in a state of excitement, money can influence and misguide it, is totally merged in an assertion of a directly opposite tendency — that ' it is NOT by a little money that a nation of twenty-five millions of people can be convulsed.'
We have gone into these verbal details on this point that it may serve as a specimen of the low and dishonest arts with which M. Thiers falsifies not merely the historical facts, but — when he had happened, in the hurry of early composition, to deviate into any thing like truth — his own recorded evidence and opinion. All this patching and plastering does little towards defending the Duke of Orleans ; but it proves all we want to show — M. Thiers' reluctance to tell what he knows to be the truth, and the miserable shifts with which he endeavours to evade it.
But then come the 5th and 6th October, 1789, when the guilt of the Duke of Orleans became so audacious and flagrant, that even M. Thiers was forced — on pain of a complete literary dis- credit and commercial failure — to notice it distinctly ; but he does so in a way that exhibits, most strikingly, his aflfected candour, mingled with his inveterate partiality and untruth. Our readers need not be reminded of the frightful yet romantic horrors of those dreadful days — the most extraordinary, and exciting, and touching scenes, we think, of the whole revolutionary tragedy. They ended — after a series of brutalities and massacres, paid for and directed by the Duke of Orleans in person — in the assault and capture of the palace by a mob, led by women, and men in women's clothes, and the carrying off the Royal Family, in bloody triumph, prisoners to Paris ; the heads of the faithful Gardes-du-corps, massacred in trying to protect them, being carried in the van of the procession of murderers and furies. . Yet of these fatal horrors the King and
THE COURT— THE ORLEANS CONSPIRACY. 43
Queen themselves were, in M. Thiers' narrative, joint projectors and accomplices.
•Public excitement was at its height; and the most sinister events were to be apprehended. A movement was equally desired by the People and the Court ! — By the people, that they might seize the King's person; the Court, that tenor might induce him to retire to Metz.'
We pause with disgust and wonder at such audacious nonsense. The Court desiring and assisting in the siege and sack of Versailles ! We have already exposed this phantom of a Court. We need here only add that, of the poor and scanty remains of what had been a Court, some on that day sacrificed, with de- liberate heroism, their own lives, in order that, while the mob were butchering them, the Queen might have time to escape half-naked from her bed. Others were massacred in various acts of duty. Every soul within the palace had reason to believe their last hour was come. This, forsooth, was the Court which invited the mob to * frighten the King!' Next follows one of those admissions on which M. Thiers builds his reputation for candour and impar- tiality : —
' A movement was also desired by the Duke of Orleans, who hoped to obtain the Lieutenant-Generalship [Kegency] of the kingdom, if the King should go off.' ' It has even been said that the Duke of Orleans went so far as to' hope for the Crown ; but this is hardly credible, for — '
we think no reader would have ever guessed the reason,
' for — he had not sufficient audacity of spirit for so high an ambition.'
Though M. Thiers had admitted in the preceding line that the movement was desired by the Duke to drive the King away, and to obtain for himself the Regency of the kingdom : surely the audacity and ambition that sufficed for the scheme that M. Thiers confesses, would have been equally adequate to the scheme he discredits. What follows is still more surprising. M. Thiers all of a sudden discovers that the Duke is totally innocent of the whole affair — of what he had planned, as well as of what he had not !
' The advantages which the Duke might expect from this new insurrection have occasioned his being accused of having participated
44 THIERS' HISTORIES.
in it ; but it was no such thing. He could not have given tliis im- pulsion— for — '
another reason which no one would ever have guessed,
' for it arose out of the nature of things.'
So, all M. Thiers has been propounding for the last two or three pages turns out to be mere lies or reveries. It was neither the People, nor the Court, nor the DuJce of Orleans, that made this insurrection — not at all ; it was impossible that they — and particu- larly 7/e — could have had anything to do with it ; it resulted from an altogether different and higher power — the natiire of things I — Fudge !
But M. Thiers suspects that this solution might not be quite satisfactory ; and then he produces another scrap of candour : —
' The utmost the Duke of Orleans could have had to do with it was to forward (seconder) it; and even in that view, the immense judicial inquiry which afterwards ensued, and time, which reveals all things, afford no trace of any concerted plan.'
What ! though he himself had just told us that the People had a plan of seizing the King, and the Court another, of frightening, and the Duke a third, of dethroning him ?
But the assertion that the Duke of Orleans did not ^participate^ in this movement, and that ' the immense judicial inquiry afforded no trace of any concerted plan ' — is as daring and monstrous a misrepresentation as we have ever seen in print. All the arts, the powers, and the audacity of the Revolutionary party were em- ployed to protract, embarrass, and stifle that inquiry — but in spite of their efforts the main facts were put beyond doubt. Upwards of three hundred witnesses spoke to a vast variety of the incidents connected with these long and mysterious machinations, and esta- blished by a thousand concurrent facts that there was a conspiracy against the King — that the Duke of Orleans paid for and coun- tenanced, and even personally directed it — and that the object was the Regency or even the Throne for him, according as events might turn out. We shall produce half a dozen of this cloud of witnesses — whose evidence is beyond all question, and who state in general terms what all the rest support by innumerable details.
First, M. Mounier, a liberal, one of the men of '89 -who was President of the National Assembly during those eventful days
5th and 6th OCTOBER. 46
and, as M. Thiers admits, one of the most respectable of the popular party : —
' I know that long before the 5th of October there was a design to force the King to Paris — that M. Lafayette apprised the Ministers of this intention, and advised them to bring the regiment of Flanders to Versailles to prevent it. M. de Lusignan, colonel of this regi- ment, acquainted me soon after its arrival that every means of seduction — even money and women — were employed to debauch his soldiers. About four o'clock in the evening of the 5th the women aiTived, led by two men [one of them Maillard, a hero of the Bastille, of whom we shall see more presently], and endeavoured to force their way into the Palace, but failing there, came into and filled the hall of the National Assembly. About midnight, M. de Lafayette an-ived with the Parisian army. He told me, — Tlds is afresh trick of the faction. Never before was so much money distributed to the people — the deamess of bread and the banquet given by tlie Gardes-du- Corps [a customary dinner of welcome to the regiment of Flanders] are mere pretexts.^ — Procedure du Chdtelet.
M. Bergasse, the celebrated advocate and deputy to the National Assembly, also an advanced liberal, deposed —
' Several days before the 5tli and 6th of October, it was publicly announced at Versailles, that there was to be an insurrection against the Royal Family ; — that on the morning of the day on which the mob came, there was a great fermentation in Versailles itself; — that it was said that the time was come for cutting the Queen's throat, and getting rid of the Cabal of which she was the leader ; — that for a long time previous to this, many persons seemed occupied with the project of making the Duke of Orleans regent of the kingdom ; — that deponent does not permit himself, without further proof, to assert that this was with the consent of that Prince . . . but truth obliges him to declare that he had heard [early in July] the Comte de Mirabeau declare that no effectual step towards liberty would be made until they had made a Revolution at Court, and that the revolution must be the elevation of tlie Duke of Orleans to the Regency ;— that one of those present asking whether the Duke of Orleans would consent, M. de Mirabeau answered that the Duke of Orleans had said everything that was satisfactory on that point.'
M. de Masse, captain-commandant of the regiment of Flanders, declared —
' That he was at the head of the regiment when the women arrived — that he and the other officers used every exertion to pre-
46 THIERS' HISTORIES.
vent these women getting amongst the soldiers, but in vain — and that amongst these women there were several that from their voices, air, and manner, he supposed were men in disguise.''
He and other officers of the regiment deposed that money was distributed to debauch the soldiers from their duty, and adduced several instances.
Joseph Bernard, one of the Cent-Sulsses of the Royal Guard, attested that —
' The iron gate of the Chateau [entrusted to the care of Lafayette's army] was opened at four o'clock in the morning of the 6th, though the custom is that it is never opened till the King rises ; that it was by this gate that most of the populace entered — some entered by other gates — but all directed themselves towards the Queens apartments, and seemed to he led hy some one acquainted with the interior of the palace.^
M. Groux, one of the Gardes-du-corps, related —
' That between six and seven o'clock in the morning of the 6th he saw the Duke of Orleans in a grey frock-coat unbuttoned, so as to show his star, followed by a great mob crying, " Vive le Eoi d^ Orleans ! " and that he pointed out to the people the great stairs of the Chateau, and made a motion with his arm to indicate that they should turn to the right.'
— the QueerCs apartments being on the rigJit of the great stairs, whither, in pursuance of this indication, the mob directed itself, and massacred the Gardes-du-corps that attempted to defend her apartment.
Le Vicomte de la Chatre, deputy to the National Assembly, deposed —
* I had been up all night in the tumultuous sitting of the Assembly, where the women and mob of Paris had taken their places amongst us. At half-past three in the morning we adjourned, exhausted with fatigue. I attempted to get into the Chateau, but found it closed and guarded all roimd. I then went to my own lodging, and lay down on my bed. I had hardly got to sleep when I was roused by the Comte de la Chatre, who lodged in a room of the same house, which overlooked the front court of the Palace and the Place d' Armes, calling me to see that the mob had seized two of the Gardes-du-corps, and were beheading them under our windows. While at the window I heard loud cries of " Vim le Eoi d' Orleans !" and looking out, I saw that prince coming along towards the spot where the Gardes-du-corps had been murdered. He passed close under the window — followed by a great crowd — with a large cockade
THE OELEANS CONSPIRACY. 47
in his hat, and a switch in his hand which he flourished about, laughing heartily. Shortly after the appearance of the Duke of Orleans, the man with the great beard who had cut oflf the heads of the Gardes-du-corps — [the celebrated Jourdani-Coupetete] — passed our door with his hatchet on his shoulder, and with his bloody hands took a pinch of snuff from the porter, who was afraid to refuse him.*
It was also proved (and this M. Thiers could not venture to deny, because Mirabeau repeated it in the Assembly), that when Mirabeau quarrelled with the Duke of Orleans for his pusillani- mity in running away from this inquiry, he exclaimed — ' The cowardly scoundrel does not deserve the trouble that we have taken for him.'' But M. Thiers, with his usual bad faith, con- ceals the equally proved fact that Mirabeau had said to Mounier, in reply to an expression he had used in some arguments ab6ut the Constitution in favour of a king, ' Eh, my God, good man that you are I who said that we were not to have a King ? But what can it matter whether it he a. Louis or a Philippe f Would you have that brat of a child [the Dauphin] ? '
It is in the face of these and hundreds of other concurring witnesses that M. Thiers has the effrontery to assert that this inquiry afforded ' no trace of any concerted plan^ nor of any * participation ' on the part of the Duke of Orleans, and that there was not any concert on this occasion between that prince and Mirabeau ! Mignet, though, carefully abstaining from men- tioning the Duke of Orleans, falls into the same scheme of general misrepresentation ; but he falls short of M. Thiers' bolder falsifications.
We have been thus minute in our exposure of M. Thiers' dealing with the character of the Duke of Orleans, for it is the pivot on which the whole of this very important portion of his History turns ; and our readers will judge whether they ever before read, even in the lowest party pamphlet, a more contemp- tible affectation of candour — more shameless partiality — more gross inconsistency — more thorough want of principle, and a more audacious defiance of common sense and of truth.
We must make room for his further endeavours to attenuate these horrors and at the same time flatter old Lafayette, one of his patrons, whose conduct during this whole affair was at best contemptibly pusillanimous and blundering. The first movement on the morning of the 6th he thus describes :
48 THIEES' niSTOEIES.
' A quarrel {an rixs) took place with one of the Gardes-du-corps, ■who fired from the windows.'
This is an utter falsehood, invented, as far as our recollection serves us, by M. Thiers himself, to make the Gardes-du-corps appear the aggressors. There was no rixe — no shot was fired from the windows — no shot was fired by a Garde- du-corps any- where. This our readers see is the old suggestio falsi ; then follows the concomitant sujjpressio veri. The Historian does not relate the wanton butchery of several of these unfortunate gentle- men, who were only overpowered because they would not fire on the mob. On the contrary, he says in general terms that ' La- fayette saved the Gardes-du-corps from massacre,' and it is only by an allusion in a subsequent page, introduced to do Lafayette an honour he did not deserve, that we discover that any of the Gardes-du-corps had been murdered : —
' Lafayette gave orders to disarm [strange phrase !] the two ruffians who carried at the tops of their pikes the heads of the Gardes-du- corps. This horrible trophy was forced from them ; and it is not true that it preceded the King's coach.'
This is a mixture of falsehood and equivocation. The ruffians were not disarmed of their horrid trophies ; on the contrary, they carried them to Paris — not indeed immediately in front of the King's carriage, but in the van of the procession, which of course had begun to march before the King set out. This first detach- ment stopped half-way at Sevres, where they forced the village hair- dresser to dress the hair of the two bloody heads {Bertrand de Mokville, vol. i. p. 144), And finally, M. Thiers' impartiality sup- presses one of the noblest and most striking traits of the Queen's character. When the officers of the Chatelet wished to obtain her evidence on these transactions, she replied that ' she would not appear as a witness against any of the King's subjects,' adding nobly, ' tTai t&at vu — tout su — et tout ouhlie ! '
All xVI. Thiers' other characters are treated in the same style : every Royalist is depreciated and libelled directly and indirectly, by misrepresentation, by sneer, by calumny ; and not a crime or horror is mentioned without, sometimes, an insidious suggestion, but generally a downright assertion, that the King, the Court, or the Royalists were themselves the cause of it ; while, on the other hand, every Revolutionist is a patriot, a sage, or a hero ; and from the equivocating imbecility of Lafayette up to the bloody audacity
PERSONAL MISREPRESENTATIONS.
49
of Danton, every shade of worthlessness and crime finds in M. Thiers an admirer or an apologist.* Marat, we think, and, in some degree, Robespierre, are the only exceptions. Doomed as they already were to the part of scapegoats of all the sins of the early Revolution, M. Thiers finds it convenient to continue them in that character. As his narrative approaches later times, it is curious to observe with what evident, and sometimes gross personal flattery or personal injustice, he treats the objects of (as the case may be) his own political bias or antipathy. But it would take a Bio- graphical Dictionary to follow him into all the details of his per- sonal misrepresentations. We must content ourselves with having indicated his general practice, and pursue the more important duty of examining his narrative of events ; — and in fulfilment of the principle which we professed at the outset, we will not make what might be thought a selection to suit our own purpose ; — we shall accept the first marked events which the work presents — by them M. Thiers himself could not object to be judged.
* There is another species of par- tiality which he constantly employe, and which, petty as it is, produces a certain general effect. The yoxtn;] historian, addressing himself to the passions of La Jeune France, exagge- rates on every occasion the youth and beauty of his revolutionary heroes and heroines. For instance — ' About this time there was at Paris a young Mar- seillais, full of ardour, courage, and re- publican illusions, who was sumumed Antinous for his beauty— ^«'on nomma Antinous, tant il etait beau' (vol. i. p. 303). A mere fiction : he never was 80 named. The assertion is a misre- presentation of a phrase of Madame Koland's ; who, however, says no more than that a ' painter would not have disdained to have copied his features for a head of Antinous.' A natural remark from an artist's daughter, and who was herself supposed to have a penchant for Barbaroux ; but it is far from the as- sertion that he was ' nomme Antinous tant il etait beau ! ' — for even Madame Roland does not so call him, and no one else that we can discover, except M. Thiers and his copyists, ever men- tioned him and Antinous together. The truth is, that, whatever Barbaroux's features may have been, his figure was so clumsy, that, when the Giron- dins were endeavouring to escape after
their insurrection in Normandy, his size was a serious embarrassment. ' Buzot,' says Louvet, one of the party, ' d^barrasse de ses armes, dtait encore trop pesant, Non moins lonrd, mais plus courageux, Barbaroux, a vingt-huit ans, 6tait gros et gras comme vn komme de quarante' — as bulky and as fat as a man of forty ! What an Antinous ! Of Madame Roland herself, M. Thiers says, ' Elle etait jeune et belle.' She was neither : her countenance, though very agreeable, and even engaging, had never, as she herself tells us, been what is called belle ; and she was now thirt;/- eight years old. We even read at this same epoch that it was a matter of surprise that Dulaure should have ' quiHe les charmes de la citogenne Lejay [the handsome wife of a bookseller] pour s'attacher a ceux de la vieille Bo- land.' (M^m. de Dulaure. — Rev, Ret. iii. 3, 11.) And she herself, with more good humour than is usual with her, owns that ' Cumille Desmoulins a eu raison de s'etonner qu'4 son kge, et aveo si peu de beauts, elle avait ce qu'il ap- pelle des adorateurs' {Appel a la Posterite, - iii. 61).
These are trifles in themselves, but they serve to illustrate the general sys- tem of deception — retail as well as vholesate — by which M. Thiers proceeds. E
50 THIERS' HISTORIES.
We begin with the first bloodshed of the Revolution, the 4meute of the 27th of April, 1789, called ' Vaffaire Reveillon^' in which, without any visible cause or conjectured object, and while Paris, as well as the rest of France, was still in the tranquillity and legal order of the old rSgime — when nothing like an insurrectionary Revolution was thought of — a ferocious mob of persons, unknown in the neighbourhood and evidently hired and guided by some unseen agency, suddenly emerged from the Faubourg St. Antoine, dragging along the figure of a man labelled with the name of M. Reveillon, an extensive paper-manufacturer in the Faubourg St. Antoine, one of the most blameless and respectable citizens of Paris, esteemed by all his neighbours, and particularly popular • with the working classes, of whom he employed a great number, and in the famine of the preceding year had been a large bene- factor. After parading this figure through the streets, to the great terror of their inhabitants, as far as the Palais Royal, they there held a mock court upon it, and condemned Reveillon to be hanged in effigy, which, after dragging the figure through a number of other streets, was executed on the Place de Greve. We wish we had been told whether this mock execution was a la lanteme, and a precedent of the real murders so soon perpetrated there. This band of rioters passed the night in drinking and uproar in different public-houses, and next morning, reinforced by numbers of their own description, who seemed to have come in from the country, they again paraded the streets, increasing their force, and at last proceeded to attack Reveillon's residence and manufactory. The unresisted riot grew so obstinate and serious, that the troops were at length called out, but too late to prevent the total destruc- tion of M. Reveillon's establishment, or that of M. Henriot, his neighbour and friend. The mob were so intoxicated with the plunder of the cellars of these houses, and so inflamed by their first successes and continued impunity, that they made a desperate resistance, and the riot was not eventually quelled but with a loss to the troops of nearly 100 killed and wounded, and between 400 and 500 of the mob. For this lamentable, and apparently unaccountable affair (which Mignet does not notice at all), M. Thiers assigns no motive and affords no explanation, except by repeating the notoriously false pretext of the mob — that Reveillon had pro- posed to reduce the wages of his workmen— for which there was not the slightest foundation, nor even colour ; and we have evidence
ELECTIONS FOR PARIS. 51
of all kinds, and, if it were worth anything, M. Thiers' own, that the mob were not workmen, but altogether strangers to that neigh- bourhood. That M. Thiers was aware of the truth of the case, we are convinced by the art with which he contrives to evade it. He reverses the chronology of the facts, and relates the Reveillon riot after his account of the Elections of the Deputies of Paris to the States-General, though it happened hejwe them. Of these he says that
' the elections were tumultuous in some provinces — active every- where— and very quiet in Paris, where great unanimity prevailed. Lists were distributed, and people strove to promote concord and good understanding.'
Now, M. Thiers must have known that the facts were the very reverse of this. The elections of Paris were by no means that smooth and unanimous proceeding which he repre- sents. The lists that he says were distributed were adverse lists — a strange form of unanimity. ' All parties,' he says, * con- curred :' — in fact, all parties differed, and so widely, that all the other elections of the kingdom were terminated, and the Assembly had actually met, above ten days before the Paris electors could agree on their members. Indeed, in the very next page he con- tradicts his statement as to the tranquillity and unanimity of the elections by admitting that the Duke of Orleans was accused of having been very active in procuring his own return and that of his friends. This is true, but not the whole truth. The moderate party, consisting of the most respectable citizens — of whom Reveillon was one — were anxious to prevent the election of the Orleans faction ; and, with this view, they put forward a list of candidates, at the head of which stood the popular name of ' Reveillon.' This is the key of the enigma. The Reveillon-list was to be got rid of — the electors were to be intimidated — and the Orleanist candidates returned ! and so it was : and, then, to be sure ' the elections for Paris ' became ' quiet ' enough, and exhibited the same general unanimity and good understanding that the massacres of September y 1792, afterwards produced on the elections for the Convention ! And who conducted this atrocious plot, which cost hundreds of lives at the moment, and hundreds of thousands in its consequences? M. Thiers' candour can go no further than to admit that
' the money found in the pockets of some of the rioters who were killed, and some expressions which dropped from others, led to the
E 2
52 THIERS' HISTORIES.
conjecture tliat they had been urged on by a secret hand. The enemies of the popular party accused the Duke of Orleans of a wish to try the efi&cacy of the Eevolutionary mob.'
And there the historian closes the subject — with a panegyric on the Prince, implying that the accusation was a mere party calumny, resting on those very slight circumstances. He does not choose to mention the exhibition of Reveillon's effigy the night before, nor the trial and sentence at the Palais Royal, nor to state that this riot took place on a day when the Duke of Orleans had collected the populace of Paris at a horse-race (then a great novelty) at Vincennes, on the high road to which stood Reveillon's house ; — that he, the Duke, passed through the mob before the extreme violence had begun, and addressed to them some familiar and flattering phrases ; and so passed through the crowd amidst shouts of ' Vive le Due cC Orleans I ' Later in the day, when the troops had been called out, and were just about to act against the mob, the Duchess of Orleans drove in her coach into the street in which the parties were hostilely arrayed ; and, while the troops endeavoured to persuade her to take another and less perilous route, her servants persisted in passing through, and the mob, affecting to make way for her carriage, broke with impunity the line of the troops, who of course could not offer violence to a lady — and that lady the Duchess of Orleans. This incident gave the mob additional confidence : they attacked the troops, and the result was as we have stated. This exhibition of the Duchess of Orleans in such critical circumstances has been adduced by other writers as a proof of the Duke's innocence of the riot — M. Thiers, more prudent, does not notice any of the circumstances, well aware that the rational inference is just the reverse. Who can doubt that the whole affair was concerted, and that the amiable and universally respected Duchess was thus brought forward by her profligate husband to encourage and protect his hired mob, just as in the subsequent attack of Versailles the first line of assailants were women, and men dressed in women's clothes, that the courage and fidelity of the troops might be embarrassed and neutralised by their reluctance to use violence towards anything in the semblance of a woman ?
All this elaborate suggest io falsi and suppressio veri is clearly employed on the part of M. Thiers to forward the double object of his whole ' History ' — to throw as much doubt as he could venture
THE MASSACRES OF SEPTEMBER. 53
to raise over the criminality of the Duke of Orleans, and to conceal — and where it could not be concealed, to excuse — the system of violence and terror which, from the first moment to the last, was the primum mobile of the Revolution.
Of the same kind, and for the same purpose, is one of, we suppose, the most audacious suppressions of an historical fact that any writer has ever ventured to make, which, from its resemblance to the fraud just exposed, we shall notice here, though out of its chronological order. In M. Thiers' long and laboured account of the massacres of September 1792, in his details of the state of parties and persons, and in his description of the aspect and feelings of the capital during those awful days — days of such mysterious and unaccountable slaughter as the world never before saw, and we trust never will again — M. Thiers does not notice nor even seem to know that they too just preceded and were accessary to the struggle of the Elections for the Convention. On the contrary, he attributes the massacres to the old hackneyed excuse of the terror occasioned by the advance of the Prussians, and endeavours, by what no doubt he thinks a philosophical re- flection, to palliate those atrocities as the result of an accidental and not wholly irrational panic : —
' Sad lesson for nations ! People believe in dangers ; they persuade themselves that they ought to repel them ; they repeat this ; they work themselves up into a frenzy, and vs^hile some proclaim with levity that a blow must be struck, others strike with sanguinary audacity.'
What ' lesson ' nations are to learn from this galimatias about ' terror,' ' frenzy,' * levity,' and ' sanguinary audacity ' — as if they were all the same thing, and all good excuses for massacre — we know not ; and the whole phrase, like many other of those exclamatory apophthegms with which M. Thiers gems his pages, appears to us no better than detestable principles swaddled up in contemptible verbiage. He closes the chapter with the execrable or, as he calls, * monumental ' letter of the murderous Commune of Paris, inviting the rest of France to imitate the massacres— and concludes by observing : —
' From this document the reader may form some conception of the degree of fanaticism which the approach of public danger had excited in men's minds.'
54 THIERS' HISTORIES. •
As if that ' monumental ' atrocity had even the paltry excuse of being the product of real fans^ticism, or any sincere apprehension of public danger !
We must here pause a moment to observe that this is an in- stance of one of M. Thiers' most frequent tricks — he relates with an affectation of candour and some vague and dubious epithet (such as ' monumental ') an atrocity which he could not conceal, and then he subjoins some explanation or reflection calculated to attenuate the horror. This Jesuitism is one of the most prominent and remarkable features of the whole work.
Having thus adroitly disposed of the September massacres by the plea of fanaticism and fatality, he dedicates a long and very ela- borate chapter to Dumouriez' celebrated campaign in the north ; after which he reverts to Paris, and then first mentions, as a quite dis- tinct subject, the Elections for the Convention, to tell us that they were severely contested throughout France between the Girondins and the Mountain, and that in Paris the latter were predominant ; but he makes no other allusion to the terrible circumstances that really decided that predominance than these vague words, ' that in Paris the violent faction which had prevailed since the 10th Auffust had rendered itself mistress of the elections ' without the slightest retrospect to the Massacres ; and by placing those events at such a distance from each other in his narrative, and by carefully omitting the date of the elections, he conceals their coin- cidence. That this suppression was not from either ignorance or accident, but mere had faith, is evident from the vague expressions above quoted, but still more so from an admission made, inad- vertently, we suspect, in a long subsequent passage, that the Girondins had reproached the Jacobins with ' having filled the Deputation of Paris by men only known for their participation in those horrible Saturnalia.'
The similarity of the cases has induced us to produce the latter out of its chronological order ; and we now return to see how M. Thiers treats the second great emeute of the Revolution — which was still more important than the affaire-Reveillon as it produced immediately the attack and capture of the Bastille, whence may be dated the lawless portion of the Revolution. We mean the insurrection of the 12th July, of which the dismissal of M. Necker was not, as M. Thiers with all the Jacobin historians would have us believe, the cause, but the opportunity : —
AFFAIR 12th JULY. 55
' On Sunday, July 12, a report was spread that M. Necker had been dismissed, as well as the other ministers, and that the gentle- men mentioned as their successors were almost all known for their opposition to the popular cause. The alarm spread throughout Paris — the people hurried to the Palais Eoyal. A young man, since celebrated for his republican enthusiasm, endowed with a tender heart, but an impetuous spirit, Camille Desmoulins, mounted a table, held up a pair of pistols, and shouting 2h arms ! plucked a leaf from a tree, of which he made a cockade, and exhorted the crowd to follow his example : the trees were instantly stripped. The people then repaired to a museum containing busts in wax. They seized those of Necker and the DuJte of Orleans, who was threatened, it was said, with eanle, and they spread themselves in the various quarters of Paris. This mob was passing through the Eue St. Honore when it was met near the Place Vendome by a detachment of the Royal- AUemand regiment, which rushed upon it, and wounded several persons, among whom was a soldier of the French guards. The latter, predisposed in favour of the people and against the Royal-Allemand, with whom they but a few days before had a quarrel, were in barracks near the Place Louis XV. They fired upon the Royal-Allemand. The Prince de Lambesc, who commanded this regiment, instantly fell back on the Garden of the Tuileries, charged the people who were quietly walking there, killed ' an old man amidst the confusion, and cleared the garden. Terror now becomes unbounded, and changes into fury.'
Now it is hardly possible to imagine a grosser series of mis- representations than is contaiiied in the passage we have quoted, compiled without discrimination or consistency from the herd of revolutionary libellers. Who would not think that all this move- ment on the part of the people was a sudden impulse excited by the dismissal of M. Necker, and confined to the parading two busts? But it is notorious that these commotions had actually commenced several days earlier, and it was proved before the Chatelet that the dismissal of M. Necker only accelerated by two days the insurrection which was already in preparation.
And why the bust of the Duke of Orleans? Why was he coupled with M. Necker on this occasion ? Because ' it was said he was threatened with exile.' A ridiculous pretence I — the truth is, the mob was his, and the exhibition of his bust was the signal of the intended change of dynasty. But we are further told that this procession, peaceably carrying the busts from the Palais Royal along the Rue St. Honore towards the Place Louis XV.,
56 THIERS' HISTORIES.
was rushed upon by the regiment of Royal- Allemand. M. Thiers must have known that this procession was not the accidental and unarmed movement that he chooses to describe it : we have abundant evidence that it was a preconcerted insurrection, organized and launched from that officina motuum, the Faubourg St. Antoine. Beffroy de Rigny, for instance, a patriotic writer of considerable note in his day, and an enthusiastic admirer if not an associate of the insurrectionary proceedings, gives us this account (published at the moment) of what he himself saw of the affair : —
' I heard that there was some commotion. I directed my steps to the Boulevard du Temple [on the opposite side of the town from the Place Louis XV.] ; there I saw about Jive or six thousand men marching rather quick and in no very regular order — but all armed — some with guns, some with sabres, some with pikes, some with forks, carrying wax busts of the Duke of Orleans and M. Necker, which they had borrowed from M. Curtius [a sculptor, who had an exhibition of wax figures on the Boulevard du Temple]. This little army, as it passed along the Boulevard, ordered all the theatres to be closed that evening, on pain of being burned. This armed troop received reinforcements at every street that it passed [towards the Place Louis XV.]' — Histoire de France pendant Trois Mois de 1789.
It was not, therefore, the Royal-Allemand that wantonly charged an unarmed crowd, which in a sudden effervescence had seized and paraded two busts — it was an army of five or six thousand armed men (increasing in numbers as they proceeded), which had premedltatedly borrowed the two busts (which were some days after returned to the owner), and marched from the Faubourg St. Antoine to brave, if not to attack, the troops posted, for the protection of the public peace, in the neighbourhood of the Place Louis XV., a distance of at least three miles — that is, as if a London mob were to march from Whitechapel to St. James's.
M. Thiers in his first edition described the young man ' mth the tender heart,' Camllle Desmoulins, who made the motion in, the Palais Royal, as known for his 'exaltation demagogique'' — which in his second edition he softens into ' exaltation rSpuhlieaine,' and he omits to state that he was the bloodthirsty ruffian who, two days later, assumed the title of Procureur- General de la Lanterne^ and was subsequently the ame damnee of Danton — both, as Des- moulins himself boasted, belonging to that Orleanist party which
THE PRINCE DE LAMBESC. 57
MM. Mignet and Thiers affect to believe never existed.* But we pass over these and several other gross mistakes and grosser mis- representations in M. Thiers' account, to direct particular attention to the alleged ' attack on the people quietly walking in the Tuileries Gardens by the Prince de Lambesc' This utter falsehood was the main incentive of the more extended insurrection which ensued, and in fact overturned the ancient monarchy of France : and an historian of common honesty ought to have made himself master of the facts of so important a case — which indeed happen to be better and more authentically established than almost any other event of the Revolutioa As this matter is of considerable importance, not only to history, but, specially, as a test of M. Thiers' veracity, we recall the particular attention of our readers to his assertion : —
' The Princo of Lambesc, at the head of his regiment, /aZZs lack (se replie) on the Garden of the Tuileries — charges the people who were quietly walking there — kills an old man in the midst of the confusion, and clears the Garden.'
In the whole of this statement there is not one word of truth — and there can be no doubt or question about the facts, for the matter was the subject of a long, full, and anxious judicial pro- ceeding— in the proces instituted by the rebellious Commune of Paris against the Prince de Lambesc — the report of which was officially published at the time, and is now before us. We here find from the original evidence' of a host of witnesses, that the regiment of Royal- Allemand being drawn up, with several other bodies of troops, in the Place Louis XV., was pressed upon by an armed mob, which had marched from the most distant part of the town with the avowed purpose of a conflict, and whose pressure and violence rendered the position of the troops very perilous. The Prince was therefore ordered by Baron de Bezenval, who commanded the whole, to clear away the mob that was closing round them — not, as M.Thiers says, hy falling back on the Garden, but by coming for- ward— not by charging, but by slowly advancing, and obliging the crowd to retire from the Place over the JPont-tournant or drawbridge
* Here we have to notice another of Duke of Orleans ;' but that would seem M. Thiers' variances. He had stated to attribute to the Duke of Orleans in his first edition that this faction of the command of the Dantonist party, Desmoulins and Danton ' was said to and therefore the historian, in his re- have been subjected (sonmis) to the vised copy, changes sownis into unis.
58 THIERS' HISTORIES.
into the Garden — {see the prefixed plan) — following them no farther than to occupy the interior entrance to prevent the return of the rioters. So far was the Prince from attempting to clear the Garden, or charging the peaceable promenaders, that the detachment made no attempt whatsoever to advance beyond the entrance, which is confined between two terraces ; but the mob in front and on the terraces high on both sides, soon became so numerous and violent as to force him, by an attack of stones, broken bottles, billets of wood, and even some shots, to retreat back again from the Garden into the Place. When the people saw the troops about to execute this retreat, they made a rush at the drawbridge to endeavour to turn it, and so have the small detachment at their mercy. The Prince, seeing this attempt, spurred his horse to the bridge, and just as he reached it, a man who had been endeavouring to turn it laid hold of his bridle and tried to unhorse him. The Prince thus assailed struck the man with his sabre, and, cutting through his hat, wounded him in the head, and thus intimidating the mob secured the retreat of the troops. The man, after being wounded, walked to one of the garden-seats, whence the mob took him, and, laying him out for dead on a kind of bier, paraded him through the streets to the Palais Royal (again ' the Palais Royal ! ') as a victim wantonly murdered by the Prince de Lambesc. This was the man whom M. Thiers states to have been killed — but lo ! on the trial of the Prince de Lambesc, one of the first witnesses examined was the murdered man himself— a school- master, Jean Louis Chauvel by name — who, though he denied having seized the Prince's bridle, or taken any part in the riot, admitted that he was at the edge of the bridge as the Prince was endeavouring to pass ; and he related, with a naivete and candour which, after M. Thiers' tragic version, is almost amusing, that
' after receiving the blow through his hat, he went and sat down on one of the garden-seats, whence he was removed by a troop of persons who gathered round him, and carried him to the Palais Royal and afterwards home, when he sent for his surgeon to dress the woimd, and was in about a fortnight quite well again.' — Proces du Pr. de Lambesc, p. 19.
As this trial did not take place for six months after the event, we could excuse a writer who had in the interval adopted the exaggerated rumour of the day ; but that M. Thiers should have repeated it in 1823, and in all his subsequent editions, is indis-
TAKING OF THE BASTILLE. 59
piitable evidence of either the most unpardonable negligence or the most reprehensible bad faith, and in either case would — even if it stood alone, instead of being surrounded by crowds of similar cases —irretrievably destroy the character of the historian and the credit of his History.
But we must proceed with the narrative of events. Monday the 13th and the morning of the 14th were employed by the same insurgents in seizing arras from the gunsmiths, the barracks of the troops and the Invalides, and in the afternoon of Tuesday the Bastille was taken !
' The share,' says M. Thiers, ' that secret means had in producing the insurrection of the 14th of July is unknown, and will probably remain so for ever — but 'tis little matter — [peu importe']. L'aristocratie was conspiring — the popular party might well conspire in its turn — • the means employed were the same on both sides. The question is, on which side was justice ?'
We really fear that the repetition of such outrageous instances of bad faith will become as nauseous to our readers as we have found them in perusing the pages of M. Thiers — but as they form in fact the staple of his whole work, we are obliged, with whatever contempt and disgust, to reproduce them.
Our readers will observe that the assertion that ' the secret means employed to bring about the insurrection of the 14th of July are, and will always be unknown,' is made to save M. Thiers the trouble of finding further excuses for the Duke of Orleans' notorious share in these continuous riots; — and for this purpose, as well as for that of bringing a new accusation against the Royalist party, he makes the following extraordinary statement : —
' It appears that a grand plan had been devised for the night between the 14th and 15th : — that Paris was to be attacked on seven points — the Palais Royal surrounded — the Assembly dis- solved, and the Declaration of the 23rd of June submitted to the Parliament of Paris — and finally that the wants of the Exchequer should be supplied by a bankruptcy and paper money [billets d'etat]. So much is certain — that the Commandants of the troops had received orders to advance from the 14th to the 15th — that the paper money had been prepared — that the barracks of the Swiss Guards were full of ammunition [rnunitiom — military stores in general] — and that the Governor of the Bastille had disfumished the fortress \demenage'\ , with the exception of some indispensable articles of furniture.'
60 THIERS' HISTORIES.
On this heterogeneous mass of notorious falsehood and arrant nonsense, which we copy from ShoherVs translation, we must first observe, that the statement, as above quoted, is a fraudulent variation from M. Thiers' own first edition. In that edition the attack of Paris — the dissolution of the Assembly, &c. — had been stated only as ' on a dit ' — it has been said — which was, as we shall see, true enough ; but M. Thiers in his subsequent editions expunged the (m a dit and left the naked assertion, which was utterly false. But that is a trifle. The essential fact is, not only that no such things had any existence — but, what more imme- diately concerns M. Thiers' credit and character, that there is not the smallest colour or pretence for any part of the state- ment— that every detail of it has been fully and judicially dis- proved— that in its present shape and combination it is alto- gether a wilful falsehood. While the events were still fresh in memory and hot in popular feeling, there was a regular legal inquiry into all the circumstances, by the trial — before the lately re-organized tribunal of the Chaielet^ for the new crime of Lese- Nation* or High Treason against the People — of MM. de Barentin and Puysegur, ministers at the time, of. the Marshal de Broglie, commander-in-chief, and of the Baron de Bezenval, the General of the Swiss Guards (already mentioned), who then, as he had for the eight preceding years, commanded all the troops in and around Paris, and who was peculiarly obnoxious to the Revolutionists for the confidence which the King, and particu- larly— as it was said ad invidiam — the Queen placed in him. The charges drawn up by a committee of the rebellious Commune of Paris comprised most of the absurd allegations which M. Thiers has revived — absurd, says Bezenval himself, * to the degree of a pitiable insanity^ — projects of the siege of Paris — massacre — red-hot shot, and so forth.' — {Mein. de Bez. ii. p. 380.) But there was not even a shadow of proof ; and this officer, who had three times, with great difficulty, escaped being hanged a la lanterne, was, with all his co-accused, even in those days, acquitted from the insane charges which M. Thiers has again raked up in this calumnious romance which he calls a History.
The reproduction of these charges after, and without any men-
* ' Ce mot dont s'enrichissait la rendre 1' application plus cominode.' — langue r^volutionnaire indiqua un delit Mem. de Bezenval. qu'on se garda bien de d^finir afin d'en
TAKING OF THE BASTILLE. 61
timi of, this judicial and contemporaneous disproof, is a fair test of the historian's veracity ; but it is also a specimen either of his own want of thought and judgment, or, which is more probable, his utter contempt for the understanding of his readers. There are other points, however, of this strange statement that deserve par- ticular notice.
' The barracks of the Swiss were full of munitions.^ Un- doubtedly the Swiss Guards ought to have been supplied with the necessary stores and provisions, whether they were to be moved or not ; and indeed any unusual accumulation of ' munitions ' in the barracks would prove that they rather apprehended than intended an attack ; but in truth there is the clearest evidence, and amongst others that of M. de Bezenval himself, that not only were no. pro vident measures of any kind taken, but that, on the contrary, the most obvious precautions had been inconceivably neglected — and this M. Thiers himself blindly intimates in the last and most won- derful member of this wonderful paragraph : — ' The Governor of the Bastille had unfurnished the fortress^ with the exception of some indispensable articles.' One translation says ' disfumished ;' the other, ' removed all his furniture ;' the original, ' le Gouverneur de la Bastille avait demSnage^ which, in the ordinary use of the words, would mean removed both himself and furniture. We know not whether M. Thiers, whose acquaintance with Paris dates only from 1821, and who, as it appears from other passages, was in 1823 by no means aufait of the ancient topography of the city, was aware that the Governor's residence made no part of the fortress, but was an exterior and separate building ; it seems not, as he applies the term * demenagS^ to ' la place ^ — the fortress. But in whatever sense he meant to use the ambiguous term, the result to which he comes is this — that the royal fortress of the Bastille was disfumished, because it was about to become the head- quarters of the royal army, with which it was to co-operate. Now, if the Governor had furnished the place, it might have been said that he anticipated some movements ; but to demMager, what- ever may be M. Thiers' meaning of that term, at the moment, and with the view of making the place a poi72t d'attaque on Paris, would be the grossest absurdity. But we must add a far more important fact, which M. Thiers does not mention — the fortress had been, in fact, left most strangely and suspiciously unprovided of men, ammunition, and even provisions. Out of this supposed
62 THIERS' HISTORIES.
army, which M. Thiers represents as surrounding Paris in such force as to be sufficient to attack the city on seven separate points, ' and which,' he says, ' struck horror into the minds of men ' — the Bastille was left with a garrison of 82 Invalides, and 32 of the /Swiss Guards, who had been sent there on the 7th — five days before M. Necker's dismissal — and after that day, in spite of the growing agitation in the city, not one man was added ; and to complete the incredible, apathy and negligence of the Government, they had no ' munitions ' for either attack or defence, and not one day's provisions ; and in this state of things M. Thiers does not blush to assert, and to repeat, that the Government had meditated a general attack on Paris on the very day when the Bastille was found without a second day's bread for the 114 Invalides and Swiss who formed the garrison. And there is still another circumstance, which, minute as it is, may not be thought insignificant : when the Governor was made prisoner, he was not armed nor even in uniform, but in a grey frock, and with a cane in his hand. It would be an infinitely more reasonable inference from all the known and certain facts, that treachery in some high quarter must have occasioned so strange a neglect of the most obvious and most necessary pre- cautions on the part of the Government
M. Thiers' details of the actual capture of the Bastille — though of comparatively less importance — still deserve notice as further instances of inaccuracy and misrepresentation.
' No succours arriving, the Governor seized a match with the inten- tion of blowing up the fortress, but the garrison opposed it and obliged him to surrender.'
This is a repetition of a silly rumour of the day. The Governor was one of the first, if not the very first, to think of surrendering, and exhibited no romantic point of honour as to defending — much less Mowing up the fortress. One story says that he was about to do so with his own hands, when stopped by two invalides. Another, and less improbable one, is, that not the Governor — but one of the inferior officers — wrote and threw across the ditch a note to say, ' We are willing to surrender provided we are assured that the garrison shall not be massacred ; but if you do not accept our capitulation we shall blow up the fortress and the neighbourhood.^ This menace, if employed at all (which is by no means certain), was but a weak attempt to save their lives by
TAKING OF THE BASTILLE. 63
alarming the assailants for their own ; for as to really blowing up the Bastille rather than surrender, how could it have come into any one's head ? What worse could the mob do than destroy the royal fortress and kill the garrison ?
'The besiegers approached, promising not to do any mischief; the Invalides, attacked by the populace, vxre only saved from tlieir fury by the zealous interference of the French-Guards. The Swiss found means to escape.'
Who would not imagine from this statement that the Invalides and Swiss were all saved, as the capitulation guaranteed?— now hear the fact : —
' Most of the Invalides remaining in the courts of the fortress were put to death in the most merciless manner ; two of the survivors were hanged at the Hotel de Ville a la lanterm — the Gardes Fran- ^a,ises [who had joined the mob] saved others who were fortunate enough to have escaped from their assassins.' — Bert, de MoleviHe, i. 24.
As to the Swiss, their own officer relates —
' We experienced every sort of outrage. We were threatened with massacre in all possible shapes — at length I and some of my men were taken to the Hotel de Ville. On the way I was assailed w4th all kinds of weapons, and saved only by the zeal of one of the Gardes Franfaises, who protected me. Two of my men were massacred close behind me.' — Rev. Met. ;.
The rest — the * cUhria,^ the broken remains^ as he emphatically terms the few who had accompanied him, escaped by a con- currence of fortunate accidents which deceived the ferocity of the mob : but what became of the others he does not seem to have known ; and the total number of either Swiss or Invalides mas- sacred in the Bastille, or afterwards in the streets, was never, we believe, ascertained. M. Thiers, in a subsequent passage, dis- patches the whole of this butchery in three words — ' other victims fell ' — but who these victims were — whether of the garrison or the besiegers— or whether they fell in the conflict or by subsequent mas- sacre, or what was the number of victims, M. Thiers does not afford us a hint. And yet there was a circumstance in these latter mas- sacres which M. Thiers' silence will not obliterate from the history of France. In them was first employed that new instrument of death, ' la lanteme ; ' but, wonderful to say, that watchword of murder,
64 THIERS' HISTORIES.
which had so large a share in the early Revolution — from which one of M, Thiers' pet patriots, Camille Desmoulins, ' n4 avec un cceur tendre,' took his infamous title — which has been adopted into modern editions of the Dictionnaire de V Avademie — (' Lanterne — Lantern ER — sorte de supplice que le peuple au commencement de la RSvolution faisaient subir,' &c.) — this remarkable word, we say, and the atrocity it describes, M. Thiers suppresses ; and as one closes M. Mignet's ' History ' without learning that there was such an implement as the Guillotine, so we must read M. Thiers' narrative of the 14th July without the light of the Lanterne.
We cannot refrain from adding two minute circumstances with which M. Thiers concludes his account of the capture of the Bastille. In describing the triumphal procession of its conquerors, he states —
' The keys of the Bastille were carried at the end of a bayonet. A bloody hand, raised above the crowd, exhibited a stock-bucMe — it was that of the Governor, de Launay' —
His stock-buckle ? — it was his head ! — ^This, the first of those frightful exhibitions that became so rapidly the standards and trophies of Parisian valour, was surely not undeserving the notice of the impartial historian, even if it did not excite his indignation and horror. M. Thiers indeed adds that M. de Launay was ' beheaded;^ yet even that dry and tardy statement is a miserable equivocation — he was not ' beheaded ' — he was (as we shall see presently) massacred, after a long and miserable agony, and it was after death that his head was hacked off, placed on a pike, and paraded through all Paris — though M. Thiers' historic eye rested only on his stock-buckle !
Immediately after these horrors another victim was added — M. de Flesselles, the Prevot des Marchands — chief magistrate of Paris. For this murder M. Thiers has also several palliatives, with which we will not disgust our readers. We will notice only one, common to both the cases : —
' On pretend that a letter had been found on de Launay from Flesselles, in which he said, " Hold out while I amuse the Parisians with cockades." '
M. Thiers says pretend, — it is asserted, — but M. Thiers knows very well that no one now believes — nor, indeed, ever did — such a nolo-
INTERROGATORY OF F. F. DESNOT. 65
rious absurdity, or rather indeed impossibility : he knows that, fifty years ago, M. Bertrand de Moleville — a gentleman of the highest station and character, on whose ' Annals of the ^Revolution ' M. Thiers frequently relies, though, with his usual inconsistency, he as frequently garbles and depreciates the authority to which he is so largely indebted — M. Bertrand de Moleville, we say, condescended to expose this absurd calumny ; and had, we should have supposed, extinguished it for ever.
The real character of all this series of events — their causes and concatenation — which M. Thiers so elaborately obscures, will be explained, we think, to the surprise and horror of our readers, by a document which any French historian — and, above all, those of the Revolutionary school — might be reluctant to quote, and English writers may probably not have known, but which was judicially published in Paris in January, 1790, and which we possess in a supplement to the Journal de Paris of the 26th of that month.
We have just alluded to the trials before the Chatelet, in which the Prince de Lambesc and M. de Bezenval were acquitted. As those trials were drawing to a close, an attempt was made to intimidate the judges, or, if that should fail, to massacre the prisoners, by collecting round the Chatelet the same sanguinary mobs that had committed all the former enormities. At this mo- ment, however, Lafayette and his friends being in power, he, with the National Guard, protected the tribunal ; some of the mob were arrested ; and of one of them we have before us the following extraordinary examination and confession : —
' Chatelet de Paris.
' 16^^ January, 1790. ^Interrogatory of Francis Felix Desnot,* now a prisoner in the Chatelet, aged thirty-three years, by profession a cook, out of place, and residing in the Rue St. Denis. ' Asked — How long he has been out of place, and how he has lived ?
* Desnot was well dressed, and seemed the fellow's name was differently caught
very much surprised that so useful a by different reporters. Prudhomme gave
patriot should be arrested. There is no it as Desnos. We have no means of
doubt that he was one of those habitu- tracing whether Prudhomme was cor-
ally employed in these atrocities. On rect, nor whether Desnos was the same as
the 29th of June, 1792, complaint was Desnot, but the Jacobins in the Assembly
made in the National Assembly that seemed to take a warm interest in the
the Jacobin Club had given a certificate fellow's case, of civism to a thrice-convicted gaUrien :
GG THIERS' HISTOllIES.
' Answ3rs — That he has been, six months out of place ; and that he has lived with his wife, who embroiders, and is very well able to support him.*
' Asked — Whaf he did on [Sunday] the 12th of July last, and the subsequent days ?
' Aaswsrs — That on the 12th of July last, in the afternoon, as soon as he saw the procession of the busts of M. Necker and M. d' Orleans, he joined the party that were carrying them, and crying " Vive M. Necker! " " Vive M. d' Orleans! " — that he proceeded thus as far as the Palais Eoyal ; that there four persons proposed that they should go to the Place Louis XV. to prevent the troops from massacring the people, whom they were pursuing ; that he, deponent, went with all the rest ; that the troops — amongst whom was, as he heard said, the Prince de Lambesc — dispersed and sabred them ; that he, deponent, was overset, and was struck by several stones, and heard one gunshot ; that to avoid the stones that were flying about, he lay down flat on a heap of building-stones on the Place ; that on rising ho picked up a dragoon's helmet, which he kept, and carried away ; that in returning he cried out, as he went along, " Citizens! be on your guard to-night!"— that he then went home, and did not go out again that day.
' That on the next morning, Monday [the 13th] — hearing that the citizens had taken arms — ^he joined them about nine o'clock on the Place de Greve with his helmet on his head. That he, deponent, went with the people to get the anus from the Popincourt barracks ; that he, having already a gun, marched at the hmd and prevented the people stopping by the way to take the wine of two shops ; that when they reached the barracks they armed themselves with guns, and he, deponent, took care that those only who were steady and able to use arms should have any; that, thus armed, the crowd went diiferent ways ; that he, deponent, vvdth one body came to the Hotel de Ville ; that these were told "to go home; that they were about to organise districts in order to take prudent measures ;" that he, deponent, went home, and thence to his district (St. Oppor- tune), and with other citizens formed patroles that day and others — so that in fact he, deponent, was eight days and nights continually on foot to maiutain good order. (/)
' That the morning of Tuesday [the 14th] was employed iii going to seize the arms at the Invalides ; that, being informed in the afternoon that there was a movement towards the Bastille, he went also to get, like the rest, a gun [he himself having been the day before a distributor of guns] and some powder and ball.
* The reader sees that this circum- that he was living on the tcages of his stance is thi-own in to conceal the fact terrible employment.
_INTER110GAT0RY OF F. F. DESNOT. 67
according to a message from the Governor of that fortress to the rector (cure) of St. Paul's. Soon after he had entered the Bastille he heard that the people were conducting M. de Launay to the Hotel de Ville. That he, deponent, hastened after him and over- took liim near the Arcade of St. John [one of the entrances to the Place de Greve], and never quitted him till they came to the barrier in front of the Hotel de Ville :— that then the people cried out, " Hang him, hang him ! " That M. de Launay, seeing that the people were attacking without hearing him, called out — opening his eyes and grinding his teeth — " Pict me to death at once ;" that at that moment several persons unknown to this deponent fell on M. de Launay with bayonets, guns, pistols, and other weapons; that he, deponent, who was standing near M. de Launay, received a violent kick, which forced him to fall back a little ; but after- wards the people, seeing his helmet, said, " Come, dragoon, he sti-uck you — cut off his head" that although M. de Launay had been dead a quarter of an hour, and in spite of his own repugnance, he began with a sabre that they gave him to endeavour to separate the head from the body ; but finding the sabre too blunt, he took out his pocket-knife * and Jinishsd the operation. That the head, being thus separated, was placed on the end of a pike ; and that he, deponent, still pressed and solicited by the- people, carried that head about the streets until the close of day ; that the person who carried the head of M. de Flesselles having joined him, they both came and deposited the heads at the lower jail, for which they gave him a crown ; that he had promised the people to carry about the head next day, but on getting home he reflected seriously on this event. That he so little thought that he was compromising himself in this affair, that he prepared several addresses [claiming some additional and honorary reward] ; that he even presented them to the deputies who came next day to Paris ; to some of whom he oven said that he had rid society of a monster, and hoped he might receive a medal as a reward for having gone to take the arms from the barracks and the Invalides, and particularly from the prison of La Force, where the jailer consented to deliver them, he, deponent, having politely invited him so to do. He adds, that about an hour before he cut off M. de Launay's head he had taken a small glass of brandy, into which he had poured some gunpowder, which had turned his head. He knows that several persons came to his resi- dence next morning to get from him the receipt for the two heads which he had received from the turnkey at the jail, and that, not
* On the production of the knife it that he was a cook, and had been bred ■was observed to him that it was rather a butcher, and therefore knew how to small for such an operation. He replied dissect. — Moniteur, 15th Jfrnuary, 1790.
F 2
G8 THIERS' HISTORIES.
having found him at home, they forged a receipt, by means of which he has heard that they obtained the heads, giving the receipt to the jailers.'
We must here pause a moment in this astonishing narrative to remind our readers that a week after the capture of the Bastille, Messrs. Foulon and Berthier — the first, one of the ministry named to succeed that which was dissolved by the dismissal of M. Necker, and the latter his son-in-law — were massacred in the Place de Greve on the most absurd pretexts and in the most cruel manner, and their heads, and the heart of M. Berthier, were paraded through the town. M. Thiers on this occasion says that M. Fou- lon was hanged ' a un reverbere ' — a reflector — an inoffensive synonyme which he employs to avoid using the true and technical description of a la lanterne — he even admits that M. Foulon's head was promenaded through Paris — but he does not condescend to mention the head and heart of M. Berthier ; and he sums up this new tragedy by observing, that
' these murders must have been planned (conduits) either by the personal enemies of M. Foulon or by those of the public welfare ; for though the fury of the people had been spontaneous at the sight of the victims, as most popular movements are, their original arrest must have been the result of concert.'
Here again M. Thiers misrepresents, and endeavours to sepa- rate this case from the other events ; the fury of the people was not spontaneous — and the concert and combination, which he admits to have existed, were no other than the same concert and combination which had been at work for the preceding ten days — for here again we find Desnot acting the same part that he had done on the 12th, 13th, and 14th, and as he boasted that he did '•for eight days after, ^ — and it was on the eighth day that these gentlemen were massacred. Thus proceeds this wretch's deposition : —
' This deponent further declares, that on the day that M. Berthier was brought to the Hotel de Ville, he, deponent, was on the Place de Greve, but he participated in no way in that assassination — but he was so close to that terrible execution, that he heard the said Berthier say to the people, " Spare me, my friends, I am innocent; I will give you a million," or several millions ; that the said Berthier was not hanged at the gallows of la lanterne, but massacred by the
INTERROGATORY OP F, F. DESNOT. 69
sabres of the soldiers ; that amongst others a soldier of the regiment of Hoy ale Cmvatte cnt open his belly with his sabre ; that the crowd was so great that ho, deponent, fell upon the body — that an indi- vidual to him unknown tore out the heart of M. Bcrthier, and placed it in his, deponent's, hand — and that the soldier took him by the collar and said, "Come, dragoon, carry this heart to the Hotel de Ville " — that he did so cany it, and obtained an awJmice of M. (k Lafayette,* and on leaving M. de Lafayette and coming down the stairs of the Hotel de Ville, the same soldier stuck the heart on the end of his sabre, and forced him, deponent, to carry it about — that they went through several streets of I'aris, and to the Palais Royal, and that at last, while he and the soldier were getting their supper in a public-house in one of the streets that lead into the Rue St. Honore, the people came and demanded the heart from them, and that deponent threw it out of the window to them, and does not know what became of the heart afterwards ; and deponent further says, that he has nothing more to reproach himself with, in all the unlucky events that have since happened : — that he accom- panied, indeed, M. Lafayette to Versailles on the 5th of October last, but took no part in the murder of the Royal Guards, but only possessed himself of a slioe belonging to one of those that were kUled, to show it in Paris.
' Asked if he was not excited to cut off M. de Launay's head, to carry M. Berthier's heart at the point of a sabre, and to attend all the mobs that have collected, and if he has not received sums of money for doing so ?
' Ansicers, that he has not been excited by any one in particular, but by the people in general, as he before stated ; that he has received nothing for these actions—that he has ten or a dozen times played the bassoon in certain processions of women to St. Gene- vieve, and that he received three or four livres for each turn.' — Sapple'mmt au Journal de Paris, 26 Jan. 1790.
Such is the real picture of the Revolution ! — the portrait ad vivum — not as outlined by Mignet or coloured by Thiers, but the living: imasre — which to aret rid of and obliterate, and to throw a veil over its authors and clouds of suspicion over its victims, is the first object of these pretended Histories. We need enter into
* 111 as we think of most parts of chief magistracy ? and stranger still that Lafayette's conduct, we do not infer the bloody trophy was not taken from from this statement that he gave any him? and strangest of all that such a countenance to this hideous visitor. But fact, solemnly stated in a court of jus- is it not strange that the wretch was not tice and published at the time, should an-ested at the H6tel do Ville, the seat never have been again noticed— at least of both the military command and the that we know of?
70 THIERS' HISTORIES.
no detailed observations on Desnot's deposition, a strange and frightful mixture of confession and concealment — but which — as is always the case when the criminal is allowed to talk — in- voluntarily reveals what it attempts to hide. Can any one believe that it was ' fatality,^ or ' accident,^ or ' spontaneous excitement,' as M. Thiers indulgently phrases it, that occasioned this cook out of place, with no means of livelihood but his wife's needle, to be an active leader in all these successive scenes — in the insurrection of the' 12th of July — in the plunder of arms on the 13th — in the attack of the Bastille on the 14th — in the patroles that filled Paris with terror for the ensuing week — in the murderous riot of the 22nd — in the attack on Versailles on the 5th of October — and in the mob of murderers that besieged the Chatelet in January 1790 : — who was the trophy-bearer of all these popular victories — who for ten days was distinguished in the streets of the capital by the plundered helmet, at once the trophy and the proof of the popular aggression — who sawed off and paraded M. de Launay's head on the 14th — who tore out and paraded the heart of M. Berthier on the 22nd — who on the same evening, after a visit to M. Lafayette, went to sup with his brother murderer, having on their table the heart of their victim, which, on the requisitions of the mob outside, they threw out of the win- dow— and who finally brought back from Versailles on the 6th of October the shoe of one of the murdered Gardes-du- corps, which he treats — just as M. Thiers does M. de Launay's stock-buckle — as if the heads of the victims were a minor incident not worth notice ? Can it be doubted that this was a chain of preconcerted emeutes ; and can M. Thiers hope to persuade any man of common sense that ' Vor rSpandu ' in preparing such scenes and in hiring such actors was ' without any influence on the Revolution ? '
This wonderful case of Desnot, though the most circumstantial that we have happened to find, is by no means a solitary proof that all these enormities were prepared by the same heads and executed by the same hands. We could produce many other indications ' that it was an organised system. One case is so flagrant that even M. Thiers cannot suppress, though, as usual, he endeavours to excuse it. He is forced to admit that a fellow of the name of Maillard {ante, p. 45), formerly a tipstaff* or bailiff in one of the courts of law, played a great part on all these occasions — that he was at the head of an organised band of assassins —that he was the
CONCLUSION. 71
most prominent leader of the attack on the Bastille — that it was the same Maillard who led the mob of women * to Versailles on the 5th of October — and again the same Maillard — still more decidedly damned to everlasting horror for having presided over and directed the Massacre at the Ahhaye. Here again we have the same man appearing and re-appearing in all these various scenes of blood. M. Thiers cannot pretend that these repeated, or we may rather say constant, coincidences could have been ' accident ' and ' spontaneous excitement' Who then were the employers and paymasters of Desnot and Maillard — who but the two main objects of M. Thiers' special protection and apology, Danton and Egalite?
Here, for the present, we conclude. We have got through little more than the first livraison of M. Thiers' first work, and have already exceeded our usual limits ; but this portion affords the most decisive and irrefragable tests of the historian's credit. We have not selected our instances ; we have, as we before said, taken what M. Thiers presented to us as his first and greatest objects; we have exhibited his mode of dealing with the t^o first and most important jt?ersawa^es of each party — the King and Queen, and the Duke of Orleans and Lafayette ; the two most remarkable elections — those of 1789 and 1792; the two first emeutes — of the 27th of April and 12th of July ; the two first massacres — of the 14th and 22nd of July ; the eventful and decisive days of the 5th and 6th of October, and of the 2nd and 3rd of September ; — all, in short, that was most striking, most important, and most influen- tial in the early Revolution ; all that required, in the highest degree, diligent research, careful investigation, and an impartial spirit ; and in all these great cases we have proved against him what we cannot — on the soberest reconsideration — call by any gentler name than a deliberate system of fraud and falsehood.
* One of M. Thiers' strange shifts who led this ' smijufar wmy ' to Ver-
and misrepresentation's is his adopting sailles against his will, to prevent their
Maillard — whom Senart, himself an doingmoremischief elsewhere— though
active Jacobin, calls ' le G enemlissime where or how they could do more the
des Brigands' — as a well-meaning man, historian does not tell.
ESSAY 11.
[Quarterly Review, January 1823— March 1851,*]
LOUIS XVI. AND MARIE ANTOINETTE.
1. Memoirs of the Private Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France ai,d Navarre ; to which are added. Recollections, Sketches, and Anecdotes, illus- trative of tlie Reigns of Louis XI V., Louis X V., and Louis X VI. By Madame Campan, First Femme-de-Chambre to the Queen. 2 vols. 8vo. London, 1823.
2. Foreign Reminiscences hy Henry Richard Lord Holland. Edited by his Son, Henry Edward Lord Holland. Pp. 362. London, 1850.
We slightly alluded in the last Essay to the work of Madame Campan, as affording an authentic contradiction of some of the misrepresentations by which the character and conduct of Marie Antoinette were so long and so unjustly assailed by the Revo- lutionary press. We now pursue the same subject in a fuller
* This Essay originally appeared in two separate articles : the first, on ' Madame Campan's Memoirs,' in January 1823, took a general view of the characters of the King and Queen and of the aspect of the Court. An Article in the preceding number on O'Meara's ' Napoleon in Exile ' had dealt shortly, but it was thought con- clusively, with some gross personal slander against the Queen, for which Buonaparte had cited the authority of Madame Campan, and which the un- expected appearance of Madame Cam- pan's own Memoirs triumphantly dis- proved. After a lapse, however, of near thirty years, the same calumnies, and on the same pretended authority, were reproduced in Lord Holland's * Foreign Reminiscences,' which ren- dered it necessary to repeat the re-
futation with more precision and detail, and with some inquiry as to the motive which could have induced Lord Holland to revive and endeavour to accredit that disgusting fable. This inquiry was, in a great measure, a re-examinatio.n of that portion of Madame Campan's Me- moirs, and it seems therefore proper to bring them together under one head.
The original Article on Lord Holland , followed him through an excursive and defamatory description of almost all the Courts in Europe, but I extract for republication only those parts that have reference to the early period of the French Revolution, to which this volume is expressly dedicated; and I reprint no more of my opinion of Lord Holland than is necessary to a fair appreciation of his historical credit. — [1855.]
SLANDERS ON MARIE ANTOINETTE. 73
account of these important, as well as interesting, Memoirs. Interesting every one will allow them to be ; but their importance will be best appreciated by those who recollect the infernal arts and assiduity with which the partizans of the Revolution in all its stages libelled the Queen of France. It was the system of the designing, and the fashion amongst the thoughtless, to attribute to her such levity, prodigality, and folly as might (in the opinion of the authors of the slander) justify the horrible extre- mities to which the royal family and the ancient institutions
of France were pre-condemned. No doubt the Queen's character has been long since re-established — the last heroic years of her life — her magnanimity, her prudence and her talents — her attach- ment to her husband's person — her generous devotion to his inte- rests— her maternal virtues — her affectionate constancy to her family and her friends— her courage in all the horrors of her long and complicated misfortunes, and, when courage could do no more, the dignified resignation and modest piety of her last moments — all have placed Marie Antoinette among the highest examples of conjugal faith, maternal duty, and Christian heroism. But the / libels against her early life still exist — repelled indeed by the character she subsequently displayed — refuted by the inference drawn from her latter conduct, but not till now so directly and authoritatively contradicted as might be wished, but, from the peculiar nature of the case, was scarcely to be hoped. Many"\ historians of the Revolution, who do ample justice to the con- duct of Marie Antoinette since 1789, have nevertheless been seduced into the belief that there was something in her earlier life which justified the public hatred ; and we have seen that, even in our own day, Buonaparte thought he might venture to renew accusations which, we know, were assiduously circu-^ lated during the obscure commencement of his career. The greater part of these calumnies — all indeed that could be reached by public discussion — have been repelled by the memoirs of per- sons who were well acquainted with the several circumstances, such as M. de Choiseul, the Baron de Bezenval, the Abbe Georgel, the Marquis de Ferrieres, M. Weber, M. Bertrand de Moleville, &c. Some of these writers were politically hostile to the queen, and some imagined that they had personal causes of resentment against her, and their works are more or less tinged with the pre-
74 MADAME CAMPAN'S MEMOIRS.
judices which would naturally accompany such feelings ; but the force of truth is too powerful for such prejudices ; and accordingly we may safely assert that the perusal and collation of the works to which we allude have, in the minds of those who have taken the trouble to follow the inquiry, completely and unanswerably cleared the character of the Queen from all those calumnies which, from her accession to the throne to the moment she ascended the scaf- fold, were propagated against her, by intriguers whose malignity was aided by the gratuitous scandal in which a profligate and gos- siping capital is always ready to indulge.
It is curious and touching to find the Queen fully alive to this painful peculiarity of her position. She was well aware of this system of calumny ; she deplored it as a public mischief, and felt it as a personal danger, but never thought that it could leave any stain on her character. When apprehensions were enter- tained of a design to poison her, she countermanded some pre- cautions that she found had been taken against it, saying to Madame Campan, J^Tis useless ; no poison will ever be employed against me. This is not an age for the Brinvilliers [a celebrated empoisonneuse of the time of Louis XIV.]. They now-a-days have calumny, which is a surer and safer mode — and it is by it that I shall be put to death/j But she did not anticipate that calumny M^ould pursue her even after death.
We repeat therefore that the work now before us, though cer- tainly not necessary, was yet desirable, to complete the evidence. So many of the accusations were directed against the interior and strictly private circumstances of the Queen's life, that, excei^t herself or her femme-de-chambre, none could, of their own knowledge, deny them. The Queen's denial would probably not have had much weight with her malignant accusers, nor even with the world at large, credulous of slander and very slow to be corrected ; but
' quod optanti Divum promittere nemo
Auderet, volvenda dies en attulit'
beyond all hope this work adduces the evidence of the femme-de- chamhre — and such evidence !
Had Madame Campan been an ordinary waiting-woman, she would not have been admitted to — nor, if admitted, could she have understood and described — those circumstances of intimate society
HISTORY OF MADAME CAMPAN. 7n
on which her evidence is so important; but she fortunately was a lady by birth, and exceedingly well educated : these qualities obtained her the Queen's favour and canfidence ; she was besides, as we now find, an accurate observer, and a very agreeable writer. Thus then she had all the opportunities of informing herself, and the capacity of informing us.
But it will be asked, was she a person of veracity ? — or, if of veracity, might she not be blinded by prejudices from seeing, or restrained by interest from telling, the whole truth on so delicate a subject? Here again the confirmatory evidence is full and satisfactory. Madame Campan's prejudices were all in favour of the Revolution ; her private friends and society were inclined to that party. Some of her family, and particularly her brother, the once famous Citizen Genet, threw themselves a corps perdu into republicanism, and these and other circumstances (which we shall presently mention) gave Madame Campan herself the reputation of being a partizan of the Revolution — nay, of having betrayed the Queen ! The charge of treachery was undoubtedly false ; but, it is certain that she was inclined to liberal opinions j that, there- fore, her judgment was not likely to be warped by courtly preju- dices, and that her defence of the Queen was not the mere effect of a blind adulation.
The other doubt which might be raised against her testimony is liable to an equally convincing answer. She could have no object of personal interest in varying from truth in her narrative. The time at which the Memoirs may have been composed does not clearly appear ; but it seems probable that they were begun about the period of Buonaparte's assuming the imperial crown. Madame Campan had been intrusted with the edu- cation of his step-daughter, and this produced intimacy with Josephine and acquaintance with her husband. In the course of the Memoirs, and still more in the notes and the Appendix, a variety of facts relative to the etiquette of the old French court are very carefully collected and systematically arranged. There is little doubt that these memoranda were written by Madame Campan (whose former situation had made her an authority in these matters) at the desire of Buonaparte, as the guide and model of the eti- quette of the Court which he was about to revive. It is, therefore, very likely that the being set upon this task obliged Madame Campan to revive her recollections of Versailles, and that these
76 MADAME CAMPAN'S MEMOIRS.
Memoirs are the indirect result of Buonaparte's inquiries into the manners of the old Court. AVhen we recollect the slander against both the Queen and Madame Campan that he subsequently dic- tated to O'Meara, we may be convinced that it could not be for the hope of Buonaparte's favour that she would extenuate any faults which could have been attributed to Marie Antoinette. Thus then on every point the credit and veracity of these Memoirs appear to be confirmed, by a concurrence of circumstances very unex- pected, and yet perfectly natural and convincing. To which we must add, that we find throughout the work an air of sincerity and an accuracy as to dates and persons (very unusual in modern French literature) which must establish, in the judgment of every attentive reader, the authenticity and truth of Madame Campan's narrative.
The circumstances, however, of Madame Campan's connexions with the revolutionary party (although now so eminently useful in establishing her credit and the character of the Queen) subjected her to the jealousy, the suspicion, and even the hatred of the royalists, who judged her too hastily by the politics of her family in 1792, and by her own subsequent connexions with Buonaparte. Madame Campan tells us that at the period of the flight to Varennes the Queen was betrayed by a 'femme suhalterne^ who belonged to her household. We find in the works of the day in- sinuations, and in a later work a direct charge, that this treacher- ous fe'mme suhalterne was no other than Madame Campan her- self, and that to this crime she owed her ultimate favour with the Jacobin emperor. If, as is very probable, Buonaparte was in the habit of repeating to others the same lie he told to O'Meara, or even a less offensive version, which, as we shall see presently, he dictated to Las Cases, it is not surprising that (not merely the zealous royalists, but) every man of honour, and woman of delicacy, should abhor the baseness attributed to her ; and ac- cordingly, when her Memoirs were announced for publication!, they were expected with considerable anxiety by all the well- disposed, and with something like hope and anticipated triumph by the Jacobin faction, which still, ' like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along.'
The work appeared, and disappointed everybody. The bed- chamber-woman shows no tinge of court prejudices ; the sister of Citizen Genet seems to have been a faithful royalist ; the
SCHOOL AT ST. GERMAIN'S. 77
supposed tool of Buonaparte is the defender of the Bourbons ; and the pretended betrayer and calumniator of Marie Antoinette will be, to the latest posterity, a faithful friend and powerful defender.
AVc must not, however, conceal from our readers that Madame Campan's character has been assailed by imputations of another kind ; which, though not directly affecting the truth of her Me- moirs, would undoubtedly tend to diminish the credit which we give, and the respect we are inclined to feel for her. Madame Campan, as we before stated, after the reign of terror, applied her talents to the education of young ladies ; and her rank, her cha- racter, and her former connexions with the court, soon placed her at the head of the most extensive and respectable seminary in France. In this situation Madame Campan became a very remark- able and not unimportant personage in society. Our readers will recollect that before the Revolution all female education was con- ducted in convents — they fell even sooner than the throne, and education fell with them. During the anarchy no two subjects were so often in men's mouths as humanity and education. The erection of a thousand scaffolds testified the love of the former, and the destruction of every kind of discipline proved the anxiety for the latter. Madame Campan's establishment, then, had not only the attraction of utility, but of novelty also ; and it was moreover regarded as the commencement of a restoration of morals and education in France.
' " A month after the fall of Eobespierre," she says, " I con- sidered of the means of providing for myself, for a mother seventy years of age, my sick husband, my child nine years old, and part of my ruined family. I now possessed nothing in the world but an assigTiat of five hundred francs (20/.). I had become responsible for my husband's debts, to the amount of thirty thousand francs. I chose St. Gei-main to set up a boarding school ; that town did not remind me, as Versailles did, both of the happy times and the first misfortunes of France, while it was at some distance from Paris, where our dreadful disasters had occurred, and where people resided with whom I did not wish to be acquainted. I took with me a nun of V Enfant- Jesus, to give an unquestionable pledge of my religious principles. I had not the means of printing my prospectus. I wrete a himdred copies of it, and sent them to those persons of my acquaintance who had survived our dreadful commotions.
' " At the year's end I had sixty pupils ; soon afterwards a
78 MADAME CAMPAN'S MEMOIRS. -
hundred.* I bought furniture, and paid my debts. I rejoiced in having met with this resource so remote from all intrigue.
' " A literary man, a friend of Madame de Beauhamais, mentioned my establishment to her. She brought me her daughter Hortense de Beauhamais, and her niece Emilie de Beauhamais. Six months afterwards she came to inform me of her marriage with a Corsicaii gentle- man, who had been brought tcp in the Military Sclwol, and was then a general. I was requested to communicate this information to her daughter, who long lamented her mother's change of name.
' " I was also desired to watch over the education of little Eugene de Beauhamais, who was placed at St. Germain, in the same school with my son.
' "My nieces, Mesdemoiselles Auguie, were with me, and slept in the same room as the Mesdemoiselles Beauhamais. A great intimacy took place between these young people. Madame de Beauhamais set out for Italy, and left her children with me. On her return, after the triumphs of Buonaparte, that general was much pleased with the improvement of his step-daughter : he invited me to dine at Malmaison, and attended two representations of Esther, at my school." '• — p. xxviii.
When Buonaparte, in imitation of Louis XIV., resolved to re- vive the establishment of St. Cyr, at Ecouen, he selected Madame Campan to be the head of his new institution. One of her nieces (Mademoiselle Auguie) married Marshal Ney; another (Madame de Broc) was lady of honour to the Queen of Holland, and, in short, she and her family were at the height at once of court favour and of popular consideration.
So much good fortune, says one of her biographers, naturally excited envy. Unpleasant reports were circulated as to the morals of the school at St. Germain's ; Buonaparte's omnipo- tence, however, silenced all complaints against those whom he protected. But on the overthrow of her supposed patron these rumours were revived. A person of the name of Revel, whose wife, educated at St. Germain's, had, to use his own phrase, ' passee des bras de Murat dans ceux de Buonaparte,' accused
* ' The brilliant and rapid success court, cherish, and show attention to
of the establishment at St. Germain any person who had been at court, was
was undoubtedly owing to the talents, to defy and humble the reigning power ;
experience, and excellent principles of and every one knows that people never
Madame Campan. Nevertheless, it denied themselves that pleasure in
must be allowed that she was wonder- France.'— (^renc/i Editor.) fully seconded by public opinion. To
CHAKACTER OF MADAME CAMPAN. 79
Madame Carapan of having contributed to the irregularities of her pupil. To the outcry which Revel's accusation produced were now superadded the charge of treachery to the Queen ; and the violent deaths of her nephew Marshal Ney, of her niece Madame de Broc,* and some other near relations, happening about the same time, reduced Madame Campan to a state of great depression and misery. She had resolved on publishing a defence of herself; but this idea she abandoned, probably because she found that justice was done to her by other hands. Amongst them was the celebrated Count de Lally-Tolendal and the Duchesse de Tourzel, whose evidence in favour of her fidelity to Marie An- toinette removed every doubt on that subject ; while the baseness and falsehoods which,