Marie Antoinette

A MAN, callous or wearied by study, might still discover in the pursuit of History one last delight: the presence in all its record of a superhuman irony.

In Padua, where the Polignacs had taken refuge with their loot, the Emperor Leopold, returning from Tuscany, was at that moment their host and guest. With them and their circle he discussed the enormities of the French and the approaching escape of his sister and the King; for he was cognisant of their plan: he knew that since the death of Mirabeau the idea of relying upon French arms against the Parliament had been abandoned, and that an invasion by foreign allies was the scheme of the Court.

Leopold certainly designed, when the first part of that scheme was accomplished and the King was in safety on the frontier, to strengthen the royal armies with his own and to advance upon the Revolution. Varennes, I repeat, was everything. The King once free of Paris, and the armies would have been over the frontier. The King a captive in Paris, and compelled to pose as the acting and national Executive, war was another matter. The French nation could act as one force.

So insecure and dilatory were the communications of the time that for a whole fortnight nothing but guesses reached Padua. Upon the 2nd of July these guesses urged Leopold to write; but at last upon the 5th, a fortnight after the flight, came definite and official news. The King had succeeded. He was safe in Metz with the army of Bouillé. The Queen was safe beyond the frontier in Luxemburg.

Leopold sat down and wrote at once a sort of pæan, a cry of triumph and of immediate action, and offered his treasury, his army, his everything to his sister for the immediate march against the French people.

She, in Paris, watched and guarded every way, had found it possible to write to Fersen two notes which, when he destroyed these many monuments of her love for him, he copied with his own hand. Her main preoccupation is that he should not return by stealth. She tells him he is discovered, and that his part in the flight is known; she begs him to keep safe. But it is probable or certain from one phrase in these notes that in the bitter anger of the moment she desired to be rescued by a chivalry under arms, and would appeal to war.

That determination in turn she abandoned, and from the month of August onwards, until nine months later the armed struggle began, one plan, lucid, and especially lucid when one considers that it proceeded from so imperfect a judgment as hers, possessed her and was continually expressed: she demanded an International Congress backed by arms, the immediate threat of a vast but silent force, and no word of hostilities. Nevertheless and largely, as we shall see, through her war came. It came with the spring, and these few months after Varennes are but the lull before the noise of the first guns.

I would here admit into the text of this book one of those discussions which, in History of a living sort, should but rarely be admitted, and belong rather to an appendix. I admit it because a conclusion upon it is vital to any comprehension of the Queen and of the European position which ended in the struggle between France and Europe.

No historical quarrel has been more warmly debated than this. Did the old society, notably the Germanies, and at last all the privileged of Europe, down to the very merchants of the city of London, attack the Revolution to destroy it? Or did the Revolution break out in a flame against them, and compel them to the action they took and to the generation of war which ended in Waterloo?

In the current negation of morals the question has been thought by many to lack reality. Yet such is the nature of man that if he cannot give a human answer upon the matter of right and wrong, and a decision upon motive, all his action turns to dust, and he can neither approve nor disapprove any human act. Now when man can neither approve nor disapprove, things cease to be, so far as his intelligence is concerned; and without morals even his senses are dead. Therefore is it, and has it always been, of supreme importance to every great conflict of History that the one side or other should justify itself in motive. And therefore has this discussion raged around the origins of the Great War.

There is one sense in which the debate can never be resolved. It can be argued for ever as a metaphysical proposition, just as a man may argue whether a spherical surface is concave or convex, and fall at last into mere legomachy, so it may be eternally debated as to which of the two combatants was legitimately defending his existence. It is evident that both were in this position.

Again, there is a fruitless and eternal debate opened if we are to consider separately every chief personality concerned. Did Brissot really want war? Did Danton want it? Did the Emperor want it? Did Berlin want it? Did Spain? Did the King, Louis? Did Dumouriez? The varying ignorance of each character named, the varying intensity of the emotions and necessities of each, the divergence of particular objects in each individual case make such a synthesis impossible. But if one looks at the field in general and considers the common action of men between the return from Varennes and that April day when Louis was compelled to read out the Declaration of War before the French Parliament, a true picture, I think, arises in the mind, which—when, if ever, the Revolution ceases to incline the judgment—will be the final judgment of History. It is as follows:—

All desired war: all feared it. All attempted to postpone it. But, as all energy of its nature polarises, these energetic hatreds and fears gathered round two centres. The one in France had for its heart the young men from the south and all their group, soon to be called the “Girondins,” who, when the new Parliament gathered at the close of the summer of Varennes, rapidly came to lead it. These men, Gallic in temper, more and more desired to bring to the issue of arms sooner rather than later what they thought must end—could not but end—in war. Round this clear opinion, by the time winter had come, what was living and active in France increasingly gathered. It is a phenomenon repeated a hundred times in the history of the French people. We shall certainly see an example of it in our own generation. The hand once upon the hilt of the sword draws it.

Over against this current of opinion the Emperor (Marie Antoinette’s brother), the King of Prussia, the English oligarchy, the Spanish Bourbons also tended to war; their decision was not due to an increase of determination—they were determined on the main question all along—but to the gradual settlement of details long in negotiation between them. These details settled, and the mutual suspicions and jealousies of the Allies sufficiently though partially appeased, the privileged bodies of Europe certainly marched against France, and to the Girondin crusade was opposed something which was intended not to be resistance but rather a rapid and successful act of police. The thing had got to end, and, though the Powers only crossed the frontier in the succeeding summer, all the Courts of Europe and all the privileged bodies of the old Society were contented and glad that the fight was on. Nor were any more contented than the governing class in England, who had helped to engineer the campaign and who could not but reap the fruit of it, though it was profoundly to their interest not to bring into the field the insufficient armed forces at their command.

In the appreciation of this situation an element must be remembered without which the modern student goes all astray. The Allies seemed bound to win. We to-day, looking back upon those amazing twenty years, forget that truth. Valmy, though still almost inexplicable, has happened, and we take it for granted. The long straggling regiments of Napoleon, the butchers’ boys turned generals, the vulgarian dukes and marshals, the volunteer gunners and the rest of it, won; and their victory is now part of the European mind. In that winter before the war broke out, as ’91 turned into ’92, it was not so.

The elements obvious to every thinking man, especially to the cold and therefore profoundly insufficient judgment of alien observers in Paris itself (of such coxcombs as Gouverneur Morris, for instance), were elements which made the final and rapid defeat of the Revolution certain, and gave that approaching defeat all the qualities of what I have called it, an act of police. The Allies might be jealous and suspicious one of the other, but there can be no doubt once an accord was come to—and it was reached in the early months of ’92—that against the anarchy into which the French people had fallen, and the hopeless indiscipline of their swollen armies, the operations of the invaders would soon become but a series of executions and a summary and severe suppression of armed mobs. The enthusiasm of the Girondins, and soon of all France, was the enthusiasm of rhetoricians and that self-doubting expectation of the impossible which is proper to inebriate moods. Nor was there one commander of experience west of the Rhine who anticipated victory for the French, nor one commander east of the Rhine who dreaded the failure of the kings. It was mere sound—as poetry and music are mere sound—that urged the French to war. And those who in theory combated the policy of war, of whom Robespierre was the most remarkable, those who, from their concrete experience, desired to fend it off (with the army in such a state! with the military temper of the people so hopelessly wild!)—that is, you may say, every general officer—foresaw at the best some sort of compromise whereby the Revolution would end, after some few battles lost, in some sort of Limited Monarchy. It was the appetite for a Limited Monarchy which made so many acquiesce in such a campaign in spite of the certainty of defeat. It was the fear that the great ideal of the Revolution might tail off into a Limited Monarchy that made the most ardent democrats oppose the policy of what could not but be a disastrous war.

Meanwhile, during the earlier months of this development, the French nobles who had crossed the frontier (the Émigrés), and notably the brothers of the King, were an element of peril to either side, lest, a small and irresponsible body, they should provoke hostilities before either side demanded them. The Émigrés were active because they had nothing to lose, and careless of the moment because for them negotiation was unnecessary. To restrain this activity was the chief anxiety of the great interests which were slowly coalescing into that invincible instrument of war whose mission it was to restore order under the King of Prussia and the Duke of Brunswick. As the months proceed, as the coalition forms, this disturbing element is of less and less importance. In the early summer of ’92, when war is once declared, the Émigrés fall into line with the rest of the Allies; and when the invading army crosses the frontier, the Émigrés cross with it in the natural course of things and merge in the advancing flood.

Such was the general development of the European situation between the month of July 1791 and the month of April 1792.

What, during that period, was the particular disposition of the Queen?

She was very active. She had determined upon a lucid plan, and of all the brains that were thinking out how and when, if ever, the struggle should come, hers was perhaps the most tenacious of its purpose.

We have a dozen letters of hers between the return from Varennes and the end of the year. One of great length, written to her brother in September, is accompanied by a memorandum and exactly details her plan. With the exception of two which were written, as a blind, for publication, and which in a private note she ridicules and disowns, every word she writes is consistent with her thesis. She proposes again that the International Congress should be called. In her later letters she begs that it may be called near the frontier, as, for instance, at Cologne. Before it is summoned, and during its session, there must be gathered an overwhelming military force ready to invade at once. But not a syllable must be breathed that could be taken as menace. In this plan Marie Antoinette was considering the personal safety of her husband and her child; and the whole theory of the action she advised pivoted upon a certain conception of the French people which was now so fixed in her mind that nothing could dissolve it; her theory was the French were not a military people; that they spent energy in words, and that before a plain evidence of force they would always give way; she carried that theory of hers, little as it later accorded with the brute facts of actual war, unmodified to the scaffold.

I have repeatedly insisted in this book upon the inability of Marie Antoinette to perceive the French mind. As a young woman her misconception of her husband’s people dealt with no more than personalities, ladies’ maids, duchesses, and the rest. When Gaul moved, and when she began her attempt at power in 1787, along through the communal millioned action of the Revolution, this misconception became a strong creed, a vision, as it were. She saw the French people intensely active, cruel, cowardly, and unstable: much in them of the cat and the fox, nothing of the eagle. She perceived their great mobs and their sudden united actions—but these phenomena were to her sporadic; she saw them—she did not reason upon them nor argue from them some peculiar regimental talent in the populace; and if you had told her that these appearances of marching thousands were due to a power of organisation from below—a national aptitude for the machinery necessary to arms and to diplomacy—the words would have seemed to her simply meaningless. She could not so much as conceive humanity to be capable of organisation save by the direct action of a few placed above it.

Of military qualities she understood nothing. She confused order, silence, and similarity of buttons with discipline. She had no conception of ferocity as the raw material of valour. Safe out of Paris she would without a moment’s hesitation have ordered the invasion, and she would have expected its successful issue in less than six weeks. Even in Paris she would have bargained to conquer with a “whiff of grape-shot” or some such rubbish; but in Paris, without one regiment to hand and without regular artillery, she felt that the very bodies of her family were in peril from “monsters and from tigers”—the words are her own: hence only did she hesitate and demand an armed congress rather than an invasion. To that armed congress and its menace she had no doubt at all that the French would yield.

A metaphor will explain the situation clearly. A human being, caught by some fierce animal but not yet mauled, appeals in a whisper to a comrade near by to load, and, if possible, by some demonstration of human force and of intelligent will to make the wild beast loose its hold; he begs that comrade to do nothing merely provocative lest the animal should rend him upon whom it has pounced: but, of course, that comrade is to fire at the first active gesture of attack the brute may deliver. Of the ultimate victory of his armed comrade the man in peril feels there can be no doubt at all; he only advises a particular caution on account of his own situation and impotence.

Moreover, she was convinced, and says it in so many words, that the French would give way at once before the presence of a great and silent but determined force upon their frontier.

So clear is the plan in her mind that she is bitterly impatient of the necessary caution and delay of diplomacy, and of the long process of negotiation whereby Berlin is brought into the agreement, the tergiversations of Madrid are discounted and the exact balance between desire for war and power to wage it are sounded. Here and there the peevishness of her early womanhood appears in the complaints she makes, almost as though she had been abandoned by her brother and his armies.

At last, in February 1792, this long correspondence is ended. The French nation has, upon the whole, accepted, its young rhetoricians have enthusiastically acclaimed, the approach of war. She, true to her plan, proposes that her brother shall meet this growing enthusiasm by positive demands, definitely formulated, dealing with the internal affairs of the French people, proceeding from Vienna and demanding instant reply. We now know that she herself drafted these demands, and on the 16th of February Mercy writes to tell her that the Emperor will order the French Parliament to maintain the French Monarchy in its full rights and liberty, to withdraw the French armies from the frontier, to respect the imperial rights of the Alsatian feudatories; and that he will at once back up this ultimatum with an additional force, beyond that already gathering, of 40,000 men. She acknowledges the plan and confirms it. A fortnight later, upon the 1st of March, Mercy can give her the last great news: Prussia has formally consented to move, though demanding, of course, from the French Monarchy after its victory compensation for the cost of the campaign—which will surely be willingly accorded.

It was on the 1st of March, I say, that this final news was written, when, as so continually chances throughout Marie Antoinette’s life, a special fate appears and intervenes.

On the 1st of March the King of Prussia has agreed to march with Leopold, and all is ready for that armed demonstration which would, as she was convinced, calm this great storm about her. On that same day, the 1st of March, Leopold lay dead. Doctors assure us that he was not poisoned.

Two things followed upon that death: first, the heir, her nephew, a sickly boy of twenty-four, now held in Vienna all the power that in those days accompanied a Crown, and he in his weakness was now the master of the armies his father had summoned.

Secondly, there must be a long delay for the business and the trapping of his election and his crowning.

Her plan meanwhile had failed. It was to be not a silent threat of arms, but war. The French temper had taken Leopold’s command as a challenge. The ultimatum she had suggested or drafted was met by a total change in the Executive of France. Dumouriez was made the chief man in the new Ministry and was put personally in charge of Foreign Affairs. The guns were certainly ready. For ten days after Dumouriez’ nomination the Queen drew from him his designs; and on the tenth day wrote secretly to Mercy in cipher betraying the French plan of campaign upon the Meuse. Three days later the last of her friends who could command an army, the King of Sweden, stabbed a fortnight earlier, died; and on the 20th of April her husband, as “the Head of the French Executive,” read out in a firm voice a declaration of war against her nephew “the King of Hungary”—for he was not yet crowned Emperor. Having so read it in a firm voice he went back home, and Marie Antoinette and he must now bethink themselves how the madness of the Parisians, when the invasion should begin, might be fended off—at least from their own persons and from their heir, until their saviours should show the white Austrian uniforms in Paris and march the grotesque Prussian march within sight and hearing of the Tuileries. On the 30th of the month she advised Mercy that the first proclamation of the invaders had best be mild.

Such had been the plan of the Queen, and such its fortune; and by such a fate had she been shadowed. For the sake of clarity I have omitted during this recital all save her negotiation. I will briefly return to the drift of the Revolutionary progress around her, and show how this also led up to that fatal conclusion, from the failure of the flight to Varennes at the end of June 1791 to the declaration of war in the following April.

When spirits are at high tension and in full vision, as it were, often a shock brings back the old, sober, and incomplete experience of living. Such a shock the flight to Varennes had afforded. While the royal family were yet absent there had been talk against the very institution of the Crown; some rich men had spoken of the Republic; the Revolutionary exultation ran very high. The flight was arrested: the royal family were brought back, and in a sort of mechanical, unconscious way reaction gathered force; after all (the politicians thought) the nation must not lose, could not afford to lose, might lose its very soul in losing, the web of inheritance which had come to it from so many centuries.

This force of reaction exploded when, during the Feasts of the Federation, three weeks after the return of the royal family, a popular outbreak upon the Champ de Mars was repressed by the declaration of martial law, the use of the Militia under La Fayette, and the authority of the Mayor of Paris.

The Revolution, going the way we know it did, the hatreds, the threats of vengeance covertly growing from that day (which the poor and their champions had already christened among themselves the “Massacre of the Champ de Mars”), take on a great importance; but to the people of the time the tumult and its armed repression did not seem of any great consequence save as the beginning of quieter things. The end of the summer was principally occupied in some speculation as to what the new Parliament would do when it should be convened in the autumn. That Parliament was restricted in power: the National Assembly which had made the Revolution was to be dissolved. This second body was to do no more than elaborate the details of laws; it was called, and remains to history, “The Legislative.”

By an ironical accident, this very Parliament of one year, from which the great and by this time well-known leaders of the early Revolutionary movement were specifically excluded (for no man might sit in it who had sat in the National Assembly), had thrust upon it the duty or the burden of the Great War. Such was the Revolutionary time and air, that from anywhere genius sprang; and through these men of the Legislative—so many of them young, nearly all of them unknown, chosen only to sit in an ephemeral assembly for a year—there blew such inspiration as Plato thought to blow through poets, but which, in times of social creation, blows through rhetoricians too, Chief among these was the group of men from the South who were later called the Gironde. It was their business to demand and to withstand the first assault of Europe, and indeed before the Parliament met at all, it was certain that the assault would come, for in the August of 1791, in the midst of the reaction which overshadowed Paris, and while the principal leaders of the Revolution were exiled or in hiding, there was drawn up that compact between the German monarchs which is called the Declaration of Pillnitz.

This document has too often been put forward as an example of the hesitation and moderation of the Kings. Such a view of it is an academic reaction from the old, popular, and vague but in the main just conception that privilege made deliberate war upon the Revolution: a conception which often took Pillnitz for the inception of that counter-crusade.

The matter can be presented quite simply to the reader. The Emperor, Marie Antoinette’s brother, whom we have seen so eager, had the flight to Varennes succeeded, to move his armies at once, combined at Pillnitz with the King of Prussia in an appeal to all monarchical governments that they should use such strength as might give back to the King of France his old arbitrary power, and re-establish him therein. The two allies swear publicly that they will use all necessary force, when such an appeal bears fruit, to support this universal assault upon the French people, and meanwhile they will direct their troops to the best striking points from which the military action of that people may be paralysed.

There is the Declaration of Pillnitz in a few words; and while one partisan may insist upon its caution or nullity, another upon its insolence and provocation, all must agree who read history quietly and without a brief, that it was a violent and public declaration of hostile intention as it was also the first definite public act from which hostilities sprang.

The Parliament met in September. Its proposed secondary value soon proved to be primary; the splendid definition, rapidity and precision of the National Assembly was well reflected among these younger and less tried men: but much more powerful than Parliament was the growing exaltation of the populace.

That had many roots: the oblivion of the French (after forty years) of what war might mean, the impatient passion for any solution which all feel during a moment of strain, most of all the moral certitude (and how well founded!) that if the enemy delayed they delayed only for their own purpose, and that war must certainly come—all these pressed to the final issue: the noise of the cataract could already be heard.

As to the acceptation of the Constitution by the royal family, their reluctance, the Queen’s anger, it but little concerns the story of her fate. At bottom she and Louis also were willing enough by this time to sign anything and to swear anything. The war must come, and the war would solve all. The Queen herself, who was now, as I have shown, in the thick of the intrigue, put it simply enough to the man she most loved, to Fersen, in a note that has been preserved and which she wrote before the end of September. “It would have been more noble to refuse (the Constitution) ... it is essential to accept (it), in order to destroy any suspicion that we are not acting in good faith.”

So far as concerns that unhappy and devoted life, one incident deserves a very special mention. Twice in the autumn there had been talk of yet another flight: the plan was not impossible, but it had been dropped, partly because the King might have had to fly alone, partly because the Queen was confident that a show of strength and a vigorous menace upon the frontier would be enough to change all. In the new year the proposal for their escape took on a more serious form, and Fersen reappeared for the last time, and for the last time saw the Queen.

It was upon Saturday morning, the 11th of February 1792, that he started upon that perilous journey, and it was his business to discuss in detail and by word of mouth whether escape were still possible. Upon Monday, the 13th, at evening, he passed the barrier of Paris. He saw the Queen before he slept, and next day at midnight spoke secretly to her and to her husband together. He carefully noted before them the routes that might be followed: the method of escape: perhaps (as had appeared in several plans) the string of forests that runs up from Paris north-eastward toward the marches of Flanders.

The King and the Queen wasted no little time in that midnight hurried parley in reproaches against the ingratitude of all and in bewailing their isolation. The next day Fersen left with nothing done. He returned indeed to Paris four days later, but he dared not enter the palace. The whole thing was futile and every plan had broken down.

He never saw her again.

A fortnight later he wrote his King in Sweden, detailing all that they had told him.

Before he could reply or act, the King of Sweden had been shot in a masked ball at Stockholm, and some days later, as the reader knows, he had died.

The Declaration of War had not only broken the original plan of the Queen; it had changed from a general and partly passive to a particular and active terror the life of Paris around her. Nothing had yet appeared to show as a reality what all knew in theory, the extreme peril of the nation, the military certitude inspiring the Allies, the despair increasing among what was left of the French Regulars. There had indeed been desertions immediately following the declaration of war, especially desertions of the German mercenaries, in bulk. A skirmish, or rather a panic upon the frontier, had also given evidence of the rot in the jumble of armed men whom the Revolution could summon. The first tiny action—it was hardly an action at all—had seen mutinies and the massacre of officers. Paris once more rose and fermented, and there was a surging around the walls of the palace. The enemy had not yet crossed the frontier; but in the short breathing space before he should appear, and while the royal family were holding a fortress, as it were, for their own security until that enemy should arrive, Parliament put as a sort of ultimatum to the King a demand for the execution of two decrees: one against the Clergy who would not subscribe to the Civic Oath; a second in favour of the formation of a camp of 20,000 volunteers under the walls of Paris.

The error of uniting in one requisition two such diverse pleas only posterity can recognise. For the men of the time there was a plain link between either demand, for the recalcitrant Clergy seemed to them nothing more than anti-nationalists, and it seemed to them that nothing but an anti-national desire for the occupation of Paris by the foreigner could make the King hesitate to permit the formation of the camp of volunteers.

It was upon the 19th of June that the King published his veto against both these bills or projects of the Parliament, behind which lay the violent opinion of active Paris.^[24]

What follows is well known. Paris rose, and rising poured into the palace. It was the 20th of June: the anniversary of the flight: the summer solstice fatal to the Bourbons.

It has been said that the rising was artificial and arranged. The same nonsense is talked of the St. Bartholomew. No one who has seen such things can believe them artificial. They are corporate things. There was little violence, though there were many arms among those thousands upon thousands; and as they poured through the rooms, which opened one into the other like a gallery, they were not much more (save for their rough clothes and their arms) than the same populace which had demanded for generation after generation, and had obtained, the right to see, to visit, to touch their public King.

The Court had forgotten the popular conception of the Monarchy; but the populace necessarily preserves a longer memory than the rich. The thing was a menace, upon the whole not ill-humoured: a violent recollection that the King was the servant of the common weal, and its symbol, something to be handled, met, and perhaps ordered. The mob, in whom atheists can see no more than a number of poor men, cried out its significant cries, against “Mr. and Mrs. Veto,” making a popular jest of this public power. But in those moments when one jest perhaps might have put the King at the head of popular emotion again, he and his wife remained no more than what the decline of the Monarchy had made them; individuals in peril, and courageous; not the Nation incarnate.

If any Angel had for its function the preservation of the French Crown and Nation, that Angel, watching such a gulf between the people and the Monarchy, must have despaired of the latter’s hope and of the former’s survival: nevertheless, despite that divorce, the French people after grievous wounds have survived.

The last group which that roaring torrent of the rabble saw was the Queen and her children, her friends, especially Madame de Lamballe and the governess, the Duchess of Tourzel, a soldier or two, a minister and one or two others, crowded in the recess of a window behind a great table which had been pushed into the embrasure to defend them. The little heir to that Monarchy which had failed to understand sat on the table, very much afraid, and the Queen put on his head with loathing the red cap of liberty which the mob demanded. The day was sweating with heat, the cap was thick and dirty, and Santerre, who was there, passing them forward by bands in front of the table, a popular leader of the crowd, seems to have ordered that it should be removed. It was already nearly dark; it was half-past eight before that violent but not tragic tumult had subsided, and before the last of the street people went back out of the palace, which they thought rightly a public thing, on to the public paving which at least was still certainly theirs.

Outside, during all that night, all the talk was of the war.

When would the invaders cross the frontier and when would the first shock come?