3. The Constituent Assembly.
The power of a political assembly resides, above all, in the
weakness of its adversaries. Astonished by the slight resistance
encountered, and carried away by the ascendancy of a handful of
orators, the Constituent Assembly, from its earliest sessions,
spoke and acted as a sovereign body. Notably it arrogated to
itself the power of decreeing imposts, a serious encroachment
upon the prerogatives of the royal power.
The resistance of Louis XVI. was feeble enough. He simply
had the hall in which the States assembled closed. The deputies
then met in the hall of the tennis-court, and took the oath that
they would not separate until the Constitution of the kingdom was
an established fact.
The majority of the deputies of the clergy went with them.
The king revoked the decision of the Assembly, and ordered the
deputies to retire. The Marquis de Dreux-Brézé,
the Grand Master of Ceremonies, having invited them to obey the
order of the sovereign, the President of the Assembly declared
“that the nation assembled cannot receive orders,” and
Mirabeau replied to the envoy of the sovereign that, being united
by the will of the people, the Assembly would only withdraw at
the point of the bayonet. Again the king gave way.
On the 9th of June the meeting of deputies took the title
of the Constituent Assembly. For the first time in centuries the
king was forced to recognise the existence of a new power,
formerly ignored—that of the people, represented by its elected
representatives. The absolute monarchy was no more.
Feeling himself more and more seriously threatened, Louis
XVI. summoned to Versailles a number of regiments composed of
foreign mercenaries. The Assembly demanded the withdrawal of the
troops. The king refused, and dismissed Necker, replacing him by
the Marshal de Broglie, reputed to be an extremely authoritative
person.
But the Assembly had able supporters. Camille Desmoulins
and others harangued the crowd in all directions, calling it to
the defence of liberty. They sounded the tocsin, organised a
militia of 12,000 men, took muskets and cannon from the
Invalides, and on the 14th of July the armed bands marched upon
the Bastille. The fortress, barely defended, capitulated in a
few hours. Seven prisoners were found within it, of whom one was
an idiot and four were accused of forgery.
The Bastille, the prison of many victims of arbitrary
power, symbolised the royal power to many minds; but the people
who demolished it had not suffered by it. Scarcely any but
members of the nobility were imprisoned there.
The influence exercised by the taking of this fortress has
continued to our days. Serious historians like M. Rambaud assure
us that “the taking of the Bastille is a culminating fact in
the history, not of France only but of all Europe, and
inaugurates a new epoch in the history of the world.”
Such credulity is a little excessive. The importance of
the event lay simply in the psychological fact that for the first
time the people received an obvious proof of the weakness of an
authority which had lately been formidable.
When the principle of authority is injured in the public
mind it dissolves very rapidly. What might not one demand of a
king who could not defend his principal fortress against popular
attacks? The master regarded as all-powerful had ceased to be
so.
The taking of the Bastille was the beginning of one of
those phenomena of mental contagion which abound in the history
of the Revolution. The foreign mercenary troops, although they
could scarcely be interested in the movement, began to show
symptoms of mutiny. Louis XVI. was reduced to accepting their
disbandment. He recalled Necker, went to the Hôtel de
Ville, sanctioned by his presence the accomplished facts, and
accepted from La Fayette, commandant of the National Guard, the
new cockade of red, white, and blue which allied the colours of
Paris to those of the king.
Although the riot which ended in the taking of the
Bastille can by no means be regarded as “a culminating fact
in history,” it does mark the precise moment of the
commencement of popular government. The armed people thenceforth
intervened daily in the deliberations of the revolutionary
Assemblies, and seriously influenced their conduct.
This intervention of the people in conformity with the
dogma of its sovereignty has provoked the respectful admiration
of many historians of the Revolution. Even a superficial study
of the psychology of crowds would speedily have shown them that
the mystic entity which they call the people was merely
translating the will of a few leaders. It is not correct to say
that the people took the Bastille, attacked the Tuileries,
invaded the Convention, &c., but that
certain leaders—generally by means of the clubs—united armed
bands of the populace, which they led against the Bastille, the
Tuileries, &c. During the Revolution the same crowds attacked or
defended the most contrary parties, according to the leaders who
happened to be at their heads. A crowd never has any opinion but
that of its leaders.
Example constituting one of the most potent forms of
suggestion, the taking of the Bastille was inevitably followed by
the destruction of other fortresses. Many châteaux
were regarded as so many little Bastilles, and in order to
imitate the Parisians who had destroyed theirs the peasants began
to burn them. They did so with the greater fury because the
seigneurial homes contained the titles of feudal dues. It was a
species of Jacquerie.
The Constituent Assembly, so proud and haughty towards the
king, was, like all the revolutionary assemblies which followed
it, extremely pusillanimous before the people.
Hoping to put an end to the disorders of the night of
August 4th, it voted, on the proposition of a member of the
nobility, the Comte de Noailles, the abolition of seigneurial
rights. Although this measure suppressed at one stroke the
privileges of the nobles, it was voted with tears and embracings.
Such accesses of sentimental enthusiasm are readily explained
when we recall how contagious emotion is in a crowd, above all in
an assembly oppressed by fear.
If the renunciation of their rights had been effected by
the nobility a few years earlier, the Revolution would doubtless
have been avoided, but it was now too late. To give way only
when one is forced to do
so merely increases the demands of those to whom one yields. In
politics one should always look ahead and give way long before
one is forced to do so.
Louis XVI. hesitated for two months to ratify the
decisions voted by the Assembly on the night of the 4th of
August. He had retired to Versailles. The leaders sent thither
a band of 7,000 or 8,000 men and women of the people, assuring
them that the royal residence contained great stores of bread.
The railings of the palace were forced, some of the bodyguard
were killed, and the king and all his family were led back to
Paris in the midst of a shrieking crowd, many of whom bore on the
ends of their pikes the heads of the soldiers massacred. The
dreadful journey lasted six hours. These events constituted what
are known as the “days” of October.
The popular power increased, and in reality the king, like
the whole assembly, was henceforth in the hands of the people—
that is, at the mercy of the clubs and their leaders. This
popular power was to prevail for nearly ten years, and the
Revolution was to be almost entirely its work.
While proclaiming that the people constituted the only
sovereign, the Assembly was greatly embarrassed by riots which
went far beyond its theoretical expectations. It had supposed
that order would be restored while it fabricated a Constitution
destined to assure the eternal happiness of mankind.
We know that during the whole duration of the Revolution
one of the chief occupations of the assemblies was to make,
unmake, and remake Constitutions. The theorists attributed to
them then, as they do to-day, the power of transforming society;
the
Assembly, therefore, could not neglect its task. In the meantime
it published a solemn Declaration of the Rights of Man which
summarised its principles.
The Constitution, proclamations, declarations, and
speeches had not the slightest effect on the popular movements,
nor on the dissentients who daily increased in number in the
heart of the Assembly. The latter became more and more subjected
to the ascendancy of the advanced party, which was supported by
the clubs. Danton, Camille Desmoulins, and later Marat and
Hébert, violently excited the populace by their harangues
and their journals. The Assembly was rapidly going down the
slope that leads to extremes.
During all these disorders the finances of the country
were not improving. Finally convinced that philanthropic
speeches would not alter their lamentable condition, and seeing
that bankruptcy threatened, the Assembly decreed, on the 2nd of
November, 1789, the confiscation of the goods of the Church.
Their revenues, consisting of the tithes collected from the
faithful, amounted to some £8,000,000, and their value was
estimated at about £120,000,000. They were divided among
some hundreds of prelates, Court abbés, &c., who owned a
quarter of all France. These goods, henceforth entitled is
“national domains,” formed the guarantee of the
assignats, the first issue of which was for 400,000,000
francs (£16,000,000 sterling). The public accepted them at
the outset, but they multiplied so under the Directory and the
Convention, which issued 45,000,000,000 francs in this form
(£1,800,000,000 sterling), that an assignat of 100 livres
was finally worth only a few halfpence.
Stimulated by his advisers, the feeble Louis
attempted in vain to struggle against the decrees of the Assembly
by refusing to sanction them.
Under the influence of the daily suggestions of the
leaders and the power of mental contagion the revolutionary
movement was spreading everywhere independently of the Assembly
and often even against it.
In the towns and villages revolutionary municipalities
were instituted, protected by the local National Guards. Those
of neighbouring towns commenced to make mutual arrangements to
defend themselves should need arise. Thus federations were
formed, which were soon rolled into one; this sent 14,000
National Guards to Paris, who assembled on the Champ-de-Mars on
the 14th of July, 1790. There the king swore to maintain the
Constitution decreed by the National Assembly.
Despite this vain oath it became more evident every day
that no agreement was possible between the hereditary principles
of the monarchy and those proclaimed by the Assembly.
Feeling himself completely powerless, the king thought
only of flight. Arrested at Varennes and brought back a prisoner
to Paris, he was shut up in the Tuileries. The Assembly,
although still extremely royalist, suspended him from power, and
decided to assume the sole charge of the government.
Never did sovereign find himself in a position so
difficult as that of Louis at the time of his flight. The genius
of a Richelieu would hardly have extricated him. The only
element of defence on which he could have relied had from the
beginning absolutely failed him.
During the whole duration of the Constituent
Assembly the immense majority of Frenchmen and of the Assembly
remained royalist, so that had the sovereign accepted a liberal
monarchy he could perhaps have remained in power. It would seem
that Louis had little to promise in order to come to an agreement
with the Assembly.
Little, perhaps, but with his structure of mind that
little was strictly impossible. All the shades of his forbears
would have risen up in front of him had he consented to modify
the mechanism of the monarchy inherited from so many ancestors.
And even had he attempted to do so, the opposition of his family,
the clergy, the nobles, and the Court could never have been
surmounted. The ancient castes on which the monarchy rested, the
nobility and the clergy, were then almost as powerful as the
monarch himself. Every time it seemed as though he might yield
to the injunctions of the Assembly it was because he was
constrained to do so by force, and to attempt to gain time. His
appeals to alien Powers represented the resolution of a desperate
man who had seen all his natural defences fail him.
He, and especially the queen, entertained the strangest
illusions as to the possible assistance of Austria, for centuries
the rival of France. If Austria indolently consented to come to
his aid, it was only in the hope of receiving a great reward.
Mercy gave him to understand that the payment expected consisted
of Alsace, the Alps, and Navarre.
The leaders of the clubs, finding the Assembly too
royalist, sent the people against it. A petition was signed,
inviting the Assembly to convoke a new constituent power to
proceed to the trial of Louis XVI.
Monarchical in spite of all, and finding that the
Revolution was assuming a character far too demagogic, the
Assembly resolved to defend itself against the actions of the
people. A battalion of the National Guard, commanded by La
Fayette, was sent to the Champ-de-Mars, where the crowd was
assembled, to disperse it. Fifty of those present were killed.
The Assembly did not long persist in its feeble
resistance. Extremely fearful of the people, it increased its
arrogance towards the king, depriving him every day of some part
of his prerogatives and authority. He was now scarcely more than
a mere official obliged to execute the wishes of others.
The Assembly had imagined that it would be able to
exercise the authority of which it had deprived the king, but
such a task was infinitely above its resources. A power so
divided is always weak. “I know nothing more terrible,”
said Mirabeau, “than the sovereign authority of six hundred
persons.”
Having flattered itself that it could combine in itself
all the powers of the State, and exercise them as Louis XVI. had
done, the Assembly very soon exercised none whatever.
As its authority failed anarchy increased. The popular
leaders continually stirred up the people. Riot and insurrection
became the sole power. Every day the Assembly was invaded by
rowdy and imperious delegations which operated by means of
threats and demands.
All these popular movements, which the Assembly, under the
stress of fear, invariably obeyed, had nothing spontaneous about
them. They simply represented the manifestations of new powers—
the clubs and the
Commune—which had been set up beside the Assembly.
The most powerful of these clubs was the Jacobin, which
had quickly created more than five hundred branches in the
country, all of which were under the orders of the central body.
Its influence remained preponderant during the whole duration of
the Revolution. It was the master of the Assembly, and then of
France, its only rival the insurrectionary Commune, whose power
was exercised only in Paris.
The weakness of the national Assembly and all its failures
had made it extremely unpopular. It became conscious of this,
and, feeling that it was every day more powerless, decided to
hasten the creation of the new Constitution in order that it
might dissolve. Its last action, which was tactless enough, was
to decree that no member of the Constituent Assembly should be
elected to the Legislative Assembly. The members of the latter
were thus deprived of the experience acquired by their
predecessors.
The Constitution was completed on the 3rd of September,
1791, and accepted on the 13th by the king, to whom the Assembly
had restored his powers.
This Constitution organised a representative Government,
delegating the legislative power to deputies elected by the
people, and the executive power to the king, whose right of veto
over the decrees of the Assembly was recognised. New
departmental divisions were substituted for the old provinces.
The imposts were abolished, and replaced by direct and indirect
taxes, which are still in force.
The Assembly, which had just altered the territorial
divisions and overthrown all the old social organisation,
thought itself powerful enough to transform the religious
organisation of the country also. It claimed notably that the
members of the clergy should be elected by the people, and should
be thus withdrawn from the influence of their supreme head, the
Pope.
This civil constitution of the clergy was the origin of
religious struggles and persecutions which lasted until the days
of the Consulate. Two-thirds of the priests refused the oath
demanded of them.
During the three years which represented the life of the
Constituent Assembly the Revolution had produced considerable
results. The principal result was perhaps the beginning of the
transference to the Third Estate of the riches of the privileged
classes. In this way while interests were created to be defended
fervent adherents were raised up to the new régime.
A Revolution supported by the gratification of acquired appetites
is bound to be powerful. The Third Estate, which had supplanted
the nobles, and the peasants, who had bought the national
domains, would readily understand that the restoration of the
ancien régime would despoil them of all their
advantages. The energetic defence of the Revolution was merely
the defence of their own fortunes.
This is why we see, during part of the Revolution, nearly
half the departments vainly rising against the despotism that
crushed them. The Republicans triumphed over all opposition.
They were extremely powerful in that they had to defend, not only
a new ideal, but new material interests. We shall see that the
influence of these two factors lasted during the whole of the
Revolution, and contributed powerfully to the establishment of
the Empire.
