4. Evolution of Monarchical Feeling during the
Revolution.
Despite the slow evolution of the affective elements, it is
certain that during the Revolution the sentiments, not of the
people only, but also of the revolutionary Assemblies with regard
to the monarchy, underwent a very rapid change. Between the
moment when the legislators of the first Assembly surrounded
Louis XVI. with respect and the moment when his head was cut off
a very few years had elapsed.
These changes, superficial rather than profound, were in
reality a mere transposition of sentiments of the same order.
The love which the men of this period professed for the king was
transferred to the new Government which had inherited his power.
The mechanism of such a transfer may easily be demonstrated.
Under the ancien régime, the sovereign,
holding his power by Divine right, was for this reason
invested with a kind of supernatural power. His people looked up
to him from every corner of the country.
This mystic belief in the absolute power of royalty was
shattered only when repeated experience proved that the power
attributed to the adored being was fictitious. He then lost his
prestige. Now, when prestige is lost the crowd will not forgive
the fallen idol for deluding them, and seek anew the idol without
which they cannot exist.
From the outset of the Revolution numerous facts, which
were daily repeated, revealed to the most fervent believers the
fact that royalty no longer possessed any power, and that there
were other powers capable, not only of contending with royalty,
but possessed of superior force.
What, for instance, was thought of the royal power by the
multitudes who saw the king held in check by the Assembly, and
incapable, in the heart of Paris, of defending his strongest
fortress against the attacks of armed bands?
The royal weakness thus being obvious, the power of the
Assembly was increasing. Now, in the eyes of the crowd weakness
has no prestige; it turns always to force.
In the Assemblies feeling was very fluid, but did not
evolve very rapidly, for which reason the monarchical faith
survived the taking of the Bastille the flight of the king, and
his understanding with foreign sovereigns.
The royalist faith was still so powerful that the Parisian
riots and the events which led to the execution of Louis XVI.
were not enough finally
to destroy, in the provinces, the species of secular piety which
enveloped the old monarchy.
8
It persisted in a great part of France during the whole of
the Revolution, and was the origin of the royalist conspiracies
and insurrections in various departments which the Convention had
such trouble to suppress. The royalist faith had disappeared in
Paris, where the weakness of the king was too plainly visible;
but in the provinces the royal power, representing God on earth,
still retained its prestige.
The royalist sentiments of the people must have been
deeply rooted to survive the guillotine. The royalist movements
persisted, indeed, during the whole of the Revolution, and were
accentuated under the Directory, when forty-nine departments sent
royalist deputies to Paris, which provoked the Directory to the
coup d'État of Fructidor.
This monarchical-feeling, with difficulty repressed by the
Revolution, contributed to the success of Bonaparte when he came
to occupy the throne of the ancient kings, and in great measure
to re-establish the ancien régime.
