The last days of the French monarchy

PART FOUR

THE ROLE OF LAFAYETTE

INTRODUCTION

After the palace had been stormed, it seemed as though Lafayette, who was in command of the principal army toward the frontier, might change all the destinies of France. It was a moment in which discipline had been very badly shaken, and he had the best trained troops to his hand. He was trusted by the wealthier classes in Paris, and though the queen and the royal family as a whole disliked him, it was known that he would not consent to the abolition of the monarchy. Undoubtedly if Lafayette had been either a less scrupulous or a more energetic man, he would have intervened; but that would have required a certain amount of preparation. He would have had to “feel” the opinion of his subordinates, and perhaps compromise with the new Government. He did neither. He acted immediately, but too simply, refused to acknowledge the new Government, failed to resist it, and was superseded by it. Doubting his power to unite his command against the new state of affairs, he crossed the frontier and abandoned both his country and its king.

PART FOUR

THE ROLE OF LAFAYETTE

THE life of Lafayette has one supreme critical moment, which coincides with a supreme and critical moment in the story of our civilization. It was that moment in the afternoon of Sunday, the nineteenth of August, 1792, when he crossed the frontier and abandoned upon one side his king, upon the other the defence of his own country.

Both the story and the legend of Lafayette have another aspect; an aspect more familiar in the United States than in Britain. He came there as the leader to a rally of young Frenchmen who were enthusiastic for an experiment in political freedom. He was immensely wealthy and the master of his own young life, for his father and mother were long dead; there was nothing to trammel his action; and though he was only a boy not yet of age, his figure acquired, as was right, a simple and luminous quality in the eyes of those whom he had joined before they had successfully confirmed their independence.

Lafayette came back to America long after, when time had added to this conception of him nothing that was not to his advantage. He was, in that second coming of his, surrounded by younger men, who felt for him all the reverence we humans feel for an older generation of heroes (he was nearer seventy than sixty years of age). He was known to have kept himself pure from the excesses of the French Revolution—excesses which were nowhere more detested than in America, and which had not yet been made explicable by the judgment of history. He came back to them, preserving the same ideal of liberty that he had discovered among them nearly fifty years before.

It is no wonder that the view held of him in the foreign country he had served under arms should be what we know it to be.

Nevertheless, if his career be considered as a whole, his interior temperament and character, as well as the external effect of these upon his contemporaries, are best judged not by his appearance in American history, as a boy in the War of Independence, as an old man on his return, but by that conspicuous ordeal through which he passed in the vigour of his manhood, when he decided neither to defend nor to coerce the French people, but to be rid of his native soil and the obligations of his birth. This ordeal showed Lafayette under the strongest light and in his fullest development. Whether he was wrong or right then, if wrong or right, why, are final answers to the problem of his place in history.

At the moment when he deliberately abandoned the French army for exile he was within a few weeks of his thirty-fifth birthday, and the events which had led up to that final catastrophe had concerned the fullest and most active years of his career. We know him most largely and we can judge him most justly if we consider his work between the April when war first put its novel and moulding pressure upon the French Revolution and the August day in which he saw fit to surrender his command. That last crisis belongs to August, 1792. Let us turn to the origin of his political position in 1787.

Lafayette was then a man just thirty years of age, in the enjoyment of a fame which, both in character and in extent, was unexampled, when economic necessity, which is to great political changes what the trigger is to the firing of a rifle, compelled the French crown to play the experiment of summoning the Assembly of Notables.

In that futile (and necessarily barren) council he sat of right, and he found there the atmosphere which was fated to embarrass his whole effort among the French, his people, when once they were aroused. He found in that assembly the enmity of many of his equals among the very small clique of wealthy nobles of which he was a natural part, the friendship of a few, the enthusiasm of none; he found himself possessed of a greatly exaggerated popularity with the plebeian public outside, which was attached to his name and his story, and knew nothing of his character; and while he desired to erect a new state, he figured only as one of those who in that assembly proposed financial reforms irritating to the court and, to the appetite of the French for an ideal society, so much chaff.

It would be a grave error in judgment to conceive of Lafayette then, or at any subsequent period of his life, even to his extreme old age, as a man lacking in that peculiar devotion to a political theory which distinguishes the masters of national fate from the statesman or the mere politician.

He did enjoy, and throughout his life he displayed, a firm faith in a certain and definite political ideal. It was a faith so clear that it was capable of expression in a creed, and so secure that he held it without a modification from his earliest youth to his very death; and that through changes of fortune, and under the strain of a varying environment more violent than any that oppressed his contemporaries.

Unfortunately for him, his creed was a creed peculiarly unacceptable to the French people. It consisted largely of negative articles. It proposed the exact toleration of all religion that did not offend the current morality of his time (an attitude which he and many others mistook for a complete scheme of toleration). It proposed an acceptation of popular sovereignty but a popular sovereignty with Lafayette, quite unlike the mass of Frenchmen, believed could be accurately expressed by a representative system. This creed acquiesced in the political privileges of wealth. It would confine civic activity and responsibility to those citizens who happened to be possessed of certain property: no doctrine is more odious to Catholic Europe. Finally Lafayette’s creed was summed up in a curiously passionate attachment to the letter of organic laws or, as men put that foible in English, “a respect for the Constitution.”

This last article in the political faith of Lafayette was certainly that which most strongly possessed him, and that which he most tenaciously defended to the end. He had in his feeling for it something of religion. Indeed, it was in part the absence of other religion from his character which must account for so singular and so unnational an intellectual weakness. His passion for a constitution was as little based on reason, as unanswerable and as strong, as is the passion of any worshipper for the object of his worship. He did not postulate a constitution as something necessary to any state,—which it is,—nor did he accept it as one accepts any other inevitable mechanical condition of national life: he adored it. And he gave to his idol, as men always must to any idol, concrete form.

He was enthusiastic for a particular and visible scheme which he associated with the ideal of liberty: a representative assembly of politicians, an executive cabinet nominally responsible to that assembly, a judicature nominally independent of either: in a word he blindly worshipped what (to speak disrespectfully) we may call to-day the whole discredited business of parliamentarians. If the love of country interfered with such a scheme, or a burning zeal for equality, or deep personal love for a military leader; if an almost physical appetite for the ancient customs of the state rooted in the very heart of men interfered with it, if any of these human accidents were at issue with his idol, why, then, according to him, they must be broken at the idol’s feet.

It is this strange, and, to French eyes, grossly insufficient ideal of a “constitution,” which explains all that was to follow.

When the National Assembly met in May, 1789, Lafayette sat in that one of the three separate houses which represented the nobility. The mere presence of a parliament or congress, with a crown in its neighbourhood, was a beginning for his dream. To the rising flood of egalitarian feeling he gave no aid. He was not a prime mover in that prime current of the early Revolution which drew many members of the privileged orders—the nobles and the clergy—to sit frankly with the Commons. But when that current was in full flood he did not resist it; when it had conquered, and when the privileged were merged in the general flood, he found himself a vice-president of the united assembly just before the fall of the Bastille. Of course he drew up a Declaration of Rights, which, equally of course, concerned taxation as the chief concern of a Statesman, took seriously “redress before supply,” and all the rest of the parliamentary sawdust. It was removed a thousand miles from the temper of that Gaul which had been at hard war for two thousand years, which had made the orthodox religion of the West, the Crusades, the Gothic, and was now about to make the epic of Napoleon.

The capture of the Bastille was the chief incident in a group of three days that showed suddenly, as lightning shows things on a dark night, those national characteristics which Lafayette so completely misunderstood that he could not serve them: the extreme rapidity of Gallic organization, its automatic and spontaneous growth from below, its high military aptitude, the twin growths of exaltation upon the one hand and ferocity upon the other, the effect of song and of blood upon the populace, the temper that made it impossible for the two massed divisions of foreign mercenaries to coerce Paris, the supreme importance of Paris itself when in those days Paris recaptured its secular leadership of the French people—all this was to Lafayette no more than a violent and incomprehensible change of condition: the levelling of a platform, as it were, upon which the constitution was to rise.

Rise it did, and on its rising he appeared in another and greater character than he had hitherto borne; for it was more under his direction than is commonly allowed that the New Régime took shape. It was he who framed the armed militia which was the physical basis of the whole construction. He was the head and the designer of that great force in Paris, well armed, more or less trained, but remaining wholly civic and domestic in character, which took the name of the National Guard.

A man might do worse than examine and fix finally for history the rôle of this force during the first two years in which the Revolution was permitted to develop its rapid progress within the frontiers of the French monarchy, without assault from the commercial oligarchy of England, the ancient privileges of the German states, the despotism of Prussia, or the heterogeneous, but enormous, might of Austria and the empire. In the opinion of the present writer the National Guard of Paris, with Lafayette, as its commander-in-chief, was not only an indispensable adjunct to the first phase of the French Revolution, but was, on the material side, the instrument of it. The voluntary quality of that force, its association with the political debates of the moment, its long agreement with the people and its lack of opportunity for display, its final collapse when the Revolution became a truly military and French thing and a crusade, have tended to obscure for posterity its true character up to the outbreak of the great war.

Had the Revolution reached its term in the Constitution of 1791, and had war with Europe been avoided, the National Guard of Paris would easily be apparent as the chief factor in that achievement: and Lafayette made it. It was he who impressed it with its particular character, he who, in consonance with his theory of the state, made it a middle class, or, as we should say to-day, a capitalist organization; he who forbade it to develop as such French institutions normally develop, into a powerful military instrument, and yet he who, with his considerable talent for command, made it strong enough to act as a powerful police and to be in his hands a real weapon of authority that gave him a permanent and high direction in all that followed its enrolment and formation.

It is true to say that Lafayette and his National Guard saved the monarchy in the days of October, 1789, when Paris marched upon Versailles. It is still truer to say that throughout 1790 and early ’91 it and he were physically the masters of Paris.

Had Lafayette loathed, as the king loathed, the religious quarrel in which the parliament of the Revolution engaged, had he with his armed force supported the crown in its resistance to the attempted schism with Rome, it is conceivable, or even probable, that the Revolution would have found a peaceable futile and ignoble termination. But to Lafayette the religious policy of the Assembly seemed the most natural of things. Of the enduring vigour of Catholicism he knew nothing. Catholicism was for him, as for most well-to-do and educated men of that time, a venerable superstition, still pleasant to many women and to crowds of the rural poor, worthy, therefore, of a comfortable decline and of decent burial, but quite incapable of provoking a civil war. That same violence of popular instinct which had made the St. Bartholomew in Paris and which was now about to make a furious assault upon the priesthood, was alien to him in either of its diverse and contradictory forms. Even in the end of its life, when contemporary fashion gave Lafayette some idea of religion, it was the written gospel, not the living Church, of which he spoke; and in this early part of the Revolution he could neither conceive the strength of the old national vision in its obscure remnant nor the corresponding strength of the exasperation which the resistance of the hierarchy to the revolutionary “Constitution of the Clergy” would arouse.

The first sign that Lafayette’s middle-class “constitutional” ideal (and the militia force which was the backing of it) might fail was his inability to secure for the king a free passage from the Tuileries to the suburb of St. Cloud on the Monday of Holy Week in 1791. The populace was already half in power, the National Guard and their leader no longer wholly masters of the

capital. The next much graver evidence of this change was in the flight of the royal family upon the night of the twentieth of June immediately succeeding; and in this the two elements fatal to Lafayette’s future in the Revolution appeared with equal clarity. On the one hand he had proved unable, with all his militia, to prevent the escape of the king; on the other hand, he thought it his duty—his duty to the Constitution—to recapture the fugitives. The king’s flight, despite Lafayette’s presence at the head of the National Guard, despite his personal activity in ordering the force at the palace doors and seeing upon that very night to the position of the sentinels, made him a suspect in the eyes of revolutionary Paris; his activity in recapturing the king and queen made him odious to all that growing opinion in Europe and in France which had ceased to see in the Revolution a political experiment and had begun to see in it only a drama—a tragedy, the pitiful victims of which were Louis and the royal family.

It is further characteristic of Lafayette’s fate that all this activity of his counted for nothing. It was not he that effected the recapture of the flying king; that was done, as much had hitherto been done, by the energy of what was popular, plebeian, and, to him, incomprehensible, in France. But as much blame as a man could gather from the issue Lafayette most unfortunately reaped; and when the captives were brought back again after those torturing three days of heat, it was Lafayette who, as the general of the armed force in the capital, must ask Marie Antoinette to give him the keys of the palace. She threw them at him; he caught them as a man catches a ball in a game.

Of the many things he did in those days, one is sufficiently characteristic, and marks his attitude in all that rising anger.

There was in Auvergne a family of squires called Romeuf; they were neighbours of the powerful and wealthy Lafayettes, whose chief estate lay at Chavagniac, close by, and Lafayette had taken one of the young Romeufs to be his aide-de-camp when he was put at the head of the National Guard. As one might imagine of poor squires, the Romeufs were intensely and personally loyal to the king; yet, whether through negligence or because his devotion to his constitutional ideal made him forget what personal affections might mean, or from a love of power, or from whatever cause, it was this young Romeuf whom Lafayette sent off post-haste along the eastern road to recapture the king and queen.

From the moment of the royal family’s flight and its enforced return to Paris, war with Europe was apparent, and the Revolution moved toward it as toward an approaching goal. The nearer that huge and novel thing approached, the more did Lafayette’s conception of a perfect state and Lafayette’s militia weapon for its achievement shrivel and lose staff. The populace demanded the disenthronement of a king who was certainly allied with the foreigner. This threat of popular violence was militarily suppressed by Lafayette and his middle-class militia on the seventeenth of July, 1791, and the few dead who had been shot by Lafayette’s guard became the symbols of an intense hatred between the old declining Constitutionalists and the new order that was to be established when once the cannons had begun. From that moment, despite all his ideals, he was merged with the privileged and the few in the eyes of his countrymen.

A month later, at Pillnitz, the Emperor of Austria and the King of Prussia met the French emigrants to issue their threat of a coalition against the new democracy and of armed intervention in the affairs of France; and when at last the accomplished Constitution of 1791, bourgeois, satisfactory, a strict deduction from principles which nothing so vital as the French blood has ever accepted, was compiled and sworn to, it seemed, in the presence of approaching exultation and war, like some merchant’s villa carefully put in order in the suburbs of our great industrial towns—a villa just settled by some careful housewife, bound to a narrow life—but about to receive a company of soldiers, of poets, of gods, and of demons, very ill-suited to such furniture! Even to the men of its own time this new Constitution, the supposed fruit of the Revolution, seemed oddly colourless as it stood contrasted against that great dark cloud of history which was rising upon the sky. But to Lafayette it was a perfected ideal.

Upon the last day of September, 1791, at four o’clock in the afternoon, the National Assembly dissolved, and the speaker of it read out these words:

“The National and Constituent Assembly declares that it has fulfilled its mission, and that its sessions are at an end.”

A week later Lafayette resigned his command at the head of the National Guard. Shortly afterward the three armies upon the frontier were drawn up, and the real game, the struggle with armed and foreign conquerors, pledged to destroy the Revolution, had begun.

The total forces at the disposal of the French crown—and it must be remembered that the crown, not the parliament, was still master of the armies—were, along the whole frontier from the Alps to the sea, a trifle over 80,000 men. They were arranged in three armies. When war was declared in the following April, all three, the army of the north, that of the centre, and that of the Rhine, were each under the command of a general who would certainly defend the monarchy against the revolutionary spirit which had its centre in the populace of Paris.

The smallest army, that of the centre, a force of somewhat less than 20,000 men, was under the direct command of Lafayette, but he was also the chief of the three commanders. At this moment therefore he is the pivot upon which everything turns; nor is it possible to grasp the nature of what follows save through an appreciation of how Lafayette broke down.

Two-thirds of the regimental officers had emigrated, certain of the cavalry regiments had crossed the frontier in a body; even the artillery had suffered the loss of one-third of its commissioned ranks in this fashion. The forces were not homogeneous, the numerous volunteers among them were an element of weakness and disorder, the discipline was deplorable and daily weakening. It was a general opinion throughout Europe that the French line could not perform its task, and the first weak attempts of the army of the north to invade the enemy’s territory in what is now Belgium, and was then the Austrian Netherlands, resulted in a miserable rout and a disgraceful and murderous mutiny. The Prussian and the Austrian forces were slowly gathering for an invasion. That the crown, still in command of those ill-equipped regiments and guns, desired the success of the invasion was morally certain to the populace of Paris; and the populace of Paris was right.

The king was manifestly party to a moral compact with the enemy, his chief city was already holding him answerable for treason, when, in June, long before the invading army had reached the frontier, but when the terror of it was already rising high in the masses of the capital, Lafayette moved. His move was in favour of the king.

His army was the smallest of the three, but the best provided; what was more important in the temper of that moment, it was really attached to its chief; for though Lafayette was prepared to defend the king against Paris, yet the king had a traditional value in the soldiers’ eyes which Paris had not gained, and they knew that, in the midst of much intrigue the general’s character had nothing in it at all of intrigue; he was known and still approved by his soldiery. Lastly, and most important, he was, as we have seen, superior over the other generals in command.

In reply to the growing menace of the populace in Paris the king dismissed his liberal ministers. The parliament declared that they carried with them the regrets of the nation.

It was on the thirteenth of June, I say, that this grave act was accomplished and that the final resistance of Louis and his wife to the Revolution was undertaken. This premature act on the part of the monarchy, of itself a rupture with the popular forces of Paris, was suddenly given a new and much more violent complexion, by the decision which Lafayette, at the head of his frontier army, awaiting the invader, took when he heard of it.

It was on the thirteenth of June, I say, that the king so acted; the news of it reached the army on the fifteenth; on the sixteenth Lafayette wrote his famous letter to the parliament, denouncing the Jacobin Club, which was, so to speak, the Headquarters-staff of the new popular movement against the foreign intrigues of the crown.

Parliament was seized of that letter and debated it on the eighteenth, and parliament, as “constitutional” in its mediocre and null professional mediocrity as the parliaments of a time of peace must always be, approved of Lafayette’s intervention.

Here let the reader pause to appreciate how decisive Lafayette’s move was bound to be. Let him remember that the future, known to us, was unknown to the men of that time; that their past alone was known to them. Let him recall how widely circulated—more circulated than the name of any other man at that moment—was the name

of Lafayette; let him appreciate the reputation for integrity which he had enjoyed with the mass of the nation, and the consequent trust which they had therefore justly placed in his liberal principles; let him further see the foreign forces, a hundred thousand strong, marching, at last, against the French, and the nominal head of the French state in league with them; let him retain the master-point that Lafayette was the military chief; finally let him not forget that a French army is to the French, as a Roman army was to the Romans, the most living thing in the nation, the most vital of its organs,—it is an essential point,—and he will perceive what an enormous business must have arisen, and did arise, about this letter. It was virtually a pronunciamento.

Lafayette talked of “his brave soldiers.” A note of menace ran throughout the document, and it was this which kept the parliament, despite its sympathy with the constitutional policy and its dread of a popular rebellion, doubtful as to its vote. At first it decreed the printing of the letter and its distribution; then Guadet, eloquent and merciless, changed that attitude by a speech. The Assembly referred the letter to a committee, and Robespierre that night roused the Jacobins.

This letter of Lafayette’s fell at the very moment when the king, having dismissed his liberal ministry, chose to oppose his formal veto to the two measures wherein the parliament was most in sympathy with the populace—the decree against the non-juring clergy and the decree for forming a great camp of volunteers. The reply of Paris to both was the huge and peaceable, but very menacing, rising which is called “the Day of the twentieth of June.” For hour after hour the radical masses poured through the king’s palace; blood was not shed, and no actual insult was offered, but, to use a military metaphor, Paris had proved itself capable of mobilization in those hours, and armed conflict between it and the court seemed as near and as inevitable as would armed conflict between two regular forces mobilized and in contact upon the field.

A courier to the frontier, leaving Paris upon the morning of the twenty-first, would normally reach the ultimate posts of the army late upon the twenty-second; but Lafayette, at this moment always an active and even officious commanding officer, was passing from post to post. The news of the insurrection did not reach him in the camp outside Maubeuge, where was for the moment his station, but at Bavay, an hour or two off to the west.

Lafayette never acted with a Gallic fugue, though often with a reasonable promptitude. He did not, as legend will have it, take horse and make for Paris, booted and spurred. He communed with himself for some hours before arriving at any decision, and then took, with no particular rapidity, the road for Paris.

He did not, as legend will again have it, dash into the Assembly, splashed and sweating, at the end of a hot ride; on the contrary, he first carefully visited and sounded those authorities in the capital who were in sympathy with his views, and not until the twenty-eighth did he present himself at the bar of the Assembly; the excitement was already a week old.

When he did appear before the parliament thus in person, it was with singular effect. A majority, challenged by Guadet, refused to condemn him for leaving the army without permission; he again urged the parliament by voice and presence, as he had formerly urged it by letter, to suppress the popular societies and especially the democratic focus of the Jacobins. He was applauded as he walked past the members after his speech; and it seemed for a moment as though this dramatic, but not theatrical, intervention had achieved something.

But it was the fate of that strict character to effect nothing at all in all his long and sterile life! A Frenchman in touch with France, finding himself, as Lafayette found himself, cheered by numbers of his old National Guard when leaving the parliament, would have gone straight with the mob to the Jacobins and destroyed them, taking such consequences as might have followed. But Lafayette loved order, apparently for its own dull sake, and that day ended in nothing but a further accentuation of the breach between himself and the new Revolutionary group in Paris.

Of that group the now rising name, soon to be the leading name, was that of Robespierre; and if you will turn to Robespierre’s writing and speaking during those days you will find how accurately he judged the temper of his own people despite his Picard coldness. The cruellest and the

truest thing said against Lafayette in those days of failure was Robespierre’s phrase: “Lafayette, to succeed, must first win a victory over the enemy.”

Lafayette stayed the following day, the twenty-ninth of June, Friday, in Paris, discovered how bitterly the old constitutional position had made him hated at court, and learned the truth of the phrase he had heard—the queen’s phrase—“We will not be saved twice by M. de Lafayette.” On Saturday, the thirtieth, he took his way back to his army.

Now, note that throughout all this, that army was still closely bound to its general, and that Lafayette, upon his return to his camp, was still secure in the loyalty of his regiments. It was consonant with his character that, without caring in the least for the insults of the court, he still worked to secure the safety of the king, for the king was part of the Constitution. He suggested—what had long been a commonplace—the retirement of the court to Compiègne, “a town,” he pathetically writes, “within the limits to which the Constitution allows the king to travel from the capital”; he promised to lend the authority of his name and the active aid of his old National Guard to the monarch if such an evasion were attempted. He was ready, in a word, to do all that a soldier could do for the saving of Louis and for the crushing of the Paris radicals—just short of acting “in an unconstitutional manner.” That he would never do! And meanwhile Fate and Europe and the French people between them were moving with no more care for the Constitution than right and anger and love ever have for a letter or a precedent.

All that first fortnight of July was full of three great things in motion: the pomp of Austria going to the coronation of the Emperor at Frankfort before the forces of Austria should be launched upon France; the Federates from all the French departments (and notably the armed battalion from Marseilles) coming up to Paris to take part in the great feast-day of the nation; the gathering of the Prussian forces upon the Rhine. Meanwhile two other things waited: Lafayette and his army waited to save the crown in Paris; the court in Paris waited for the success of the invader and for its own deliverance.

Upon Saturday, the fourteenth of July, the Federates from all over France held their great national feast in the capital. On that same day the emperor was crowned in Frankfort; upon the following Tuesday (it was the anniversary of the Massacre of the Champ-de-Mars!), with Paris in full effervescence from the arrival of the Federates, the Jacobins took their opportunity, Robespierre leading them, and petitioned the parliament to impeach Lafayette for treason. The parliament temporized. Upon the nineteenth, when the question was again raised, it refused to condemn the general. Old Dückner came from his frontier command to Paris; he was publicly accused in Parliament of having conspired with Lafayette to march upon the capital in favour of the king. That charge was disproved so far as letters could disprove it; but in the midst of the excitement which it raised yet another step was taken by Destiny.

The Army of the Allies being at last concentrated at Coblenz, the Duke of Brunswick, its commander-in-chief, signed and issued upon the twenty-fifth of July the manifesto which had been largely dictated from the French court, and of which the most violent clause proceeded from the queen herself; it threatened the parliament and the town of Paris with military execution if the king were not restored to his pre-revolutionary power.

That document was known in Paris upon the twenty-eighth, and for the next few days only the time and the conditions of the last conflict between the Royal Guards, their allied volunteers and militia upon the one hand, and the populace upon the other, were in doubt.

The armed battalion of Federates from Marseilles had marched in upon the thirtieth of July. Upon the eighth of August one last attempt was made to get the parliament to impeach Lafayette, and for the last time the parliament, in its sympathy with the crown and against the Paris populace, refused. The motion was rejected by 406 to 224.

Robespierre had never given a better example of his sharp and piercing judgment than when he had said at the Jacobins, “The parliament will not save the nation; the nation must save itself.”

All the night of the ninth of August Paris watched in a vigil. We have seen how the windows were

full of lights, how the hot darkness was filled with the sound of bells and of the royal troops marching in to occupy their post of garrison in the Tuileries. We have seen the assault on the palace and how the populace conquered. The monarchy was swept away, the royal family imprisoned, and all the power of parliament passed at the same moment into the hands of its extreme and most democratic party.

Such was the day known in history as the Tenth of August. The army of Brunswick was within a day’s ride of the frontier. Lafayette, whose command stood barring Brunswick’s way, was instantly called upon by his own conscience to determine whether he should save the soil of his country or his constitutional king.

It was a gendarme flying from Paris, and later an officer also flying from the capital, that brought him the news of the Tenth of August; he so received it, probably late upon Sunday, the twelfth of August. He guessed that a provisional, and therefore, to him, a usurping, government had been set up in the place of the old constitutional ministry. News came through slowly, but Lafayette learned certainly by Monday that it was so. The old dismissed ministry had been “unconstitutionally” recalled by the parliament, acting, of course, under the pressure of the populace of Paris, and to these had been added most “unconstitutionally” certain ultra-revolutionary names, notably Danton’s. This new government and its creature, the purged and diminished parliament, was sending out commissioners, post-haste, who should bear its orders to the armies upon the frontiers, and obtain their allegiance to the new and quasi-republican system which Paris and the Jacobins had established by hard fighting upon the Friday before. Upon Tuesday, August 14th, the three commissioners, members of the parliament bearing such orders, arrived at Lafayette’s headquarters in Sedan; but Lafayette had already made up his mind.

When the three members of the parliament presented their message to the municipality of Sedan, the mayor and corporation of that town, in agreement with Lafayette and perhaps under his orders, arrested them, and imprisoned them in the citadel of the place; Lafayette himself provided a guard.

On Tuesday the whole army was mustered in

the meadows which lie beyond the river before the town, the scene of the worst sufferings after the defeat of 1870, and an oath to obey the old Constitution was administered to them.

Three corps refused the oath; one company of grenadiers, one of the new volunteer battalions,—that raised by the Department of the Allier,—and most notably the gunners. They swore to obey “the representatives of the nation and no other.” Certain, though not all, of these were put under arrest by Lafayette, and his act of rebellion against the new government was completed.

Here is the critical moment: here is the hour in which he might have directed all the future.

The mass of his army was still intact, and would still have followed him had he then broken camp and marched on Paris. But in that decisive moment also comes the final and most characteristic act of all: Lafayette did not march upon Paris. He “put himself at the disposition of the civil authority of the Department of the Ardennes”; he asked the neighbouring departments in which troops of his command were stationed for their orders; he refused to use military force save at the orders of authorized civilian government; he preferred his political idea and creed to every practical necessity of the situation; or, as he would have put it, to every temptation the situation might offer him. He did more: he allowed letters, pamphlets, and even emissaries from Paris to circulate freely among his men; he allowed one of the battalions in revolt against him, and even the commander of the guns in revolt against him, to write freely to the new government in Paris, swearing their adhesion to it. He sent to department after department submitting the military to the civil power and awaiting their decision, when any other man would have marched straight upon the capital. Paris and the new order learned how its commissioners had been treated; new commissioners were at once sent out; upon Sunday, the nineteenth of August, the parliament impeached the general. Meanwhile he had decided upon his own fate.

Lafayette upon that morning judged, first, that he would not join in an enterprise against its fellow-citizens; next, that his own conscience would not allow him to serve the new régime.

Taking with him a handful of friends (a few who joined him against his will raised the total of the commissioned officers with him to twenty-three), he proceeded through the forest of Ardennes to the little town of Bouillon, then in French territory, now in Belgian. He first left minute orders for the disposition of his army, notably for the safety of the outposts to prepare them against the shock of the immediate invasion; he also left behind him all his official papers, sealed and in good order for use of his successor, whoever that might be. Before sunset he crossed the bridge in front of the famous little forest town, with its enormous castle and crusading legend, and rode out northward with his companions, twelve miles and more through the gathering darkness, toward Rochefort, all the way in foreign land.

To that road he was compelled. Did he deviate to the left he would fall among the French outposts in the valley of the Meuse beyond the woods; upon his right was the line of the Austrian advance.

He did not even know whether Rochefort itself was occupied or not. He hoped it was not, for he intended to make his way up through the Netherlands to England, and so to America. At the very gates of Rochefort a great fire burning warned him of an outpost, and he knew that the place was held. Nevertheless, he hoped against hope to pass through free. The commander of that post, a French noble who had gone over to the enemy, gave him so much liberty as to permit him to ride on with his companions toward Namur, or, rather, to send a messenger on before him to obtain the passports. But Lafayette was already recognized and known.

In Namur the Austrian commander, Motielle, was beside himself with joy on hearing the name. He shouted and repeated to himself aloud, “Lafayette! Lafayette!” as though he held in his power not the last sad exile from a soil too violently in love with freedom, but the most active of the new revolutionaries themselves; for the name of Lafayette, execrated by all the Nationalists as that of a traitor in league with the king, was also execrated throughout the privileged classes of Europe as that of a rebel who had destroyed the majesty of the French crown. Between these opposing camps he had no body of friends. It must ever be so with principle. It was to be so with Robespierre himself at last.

The governor of Namur held him and sold him, a valuable prey, and he passed into the prisons of the allies.

The grounds which history possesses upon which to base its conception of Lafayette and therefore of this crucial refusal he made in the very balance of the monarchy’s destiny differ from those which suffice for most characters, and especially for most military characters, because two divergent traditions have arisen with regard to him: the one American, the other of Europe.

Of these two traditions, the one which sprang in the United States of America concerns a young, enthusiastic man, so young as to be almost a boy, but reinforced by an independent position, a brilliant fortune, and very solid talents, who voluntarily led the rally of young Frenchmen in support of the new republic and who differed for the better in American eyes from most of his contemporaries in the point that he did sincerely and from the bottom of his soul admire those main principles upon which the Revolution in America proceeded.

The other tradition is that of a man in the flower of his age concerned with a vast transformation of European Society—a transformation springing directly from the energy of his own people, and one who so undervalued or misjudged it that, after appearing continually in places of capital importance and as continually failing to do more than preserve his principles, he ended by neither saving the institutions to which he was attached nor so much as delaying their destruction. At last, equally condemned by each section of contemporary opinion and power, he abandoned his high command upon the frontier in the first crisis of the great war between the Revolution and the kings, and subsequently appeared neither in the one camp nor in the other, neglected by both in common, a prisoner in the hands of foreigners. One picture is that of a hero; the other that of a pale figure almost guilty of a double treason and certainly a prig.

These two traditions are easily reconcilable if we draw for ourselves from the many sources available to us a true picture of the man. We shall then perceive why Marie Antoinette, with her ardent, but unsympathetic, temperament, was violently repelled by him, especially in his maturity; we shall understand how Carlyle,—allowing for his grossly insufficient reading—was capable of drawing only the pale caricature which is among the worst failures of his great study; and above all, we shall understand how, in what is for European history the crisis of his life, Lafayette neither led nor attacked the civilian forces of his own people, but deliberately effaced himself; and as a consequence of his action, though not of his own volition, suffered those years of effacement and prison. It is fortunately possible to us, though it is not easy, to reconstruct the character which lay at the root of these varied actions and especially of these singular inactions.

Other great names of the French Revolution are obscured by the heat of the main struggle in 1793 by the fact that they perished or fell into oblivion or betrayed their original convictions. The violent prejudices that attach to the passions of such moments have made it difficult for the chief men of 1789-95 to be rightly judged. For whether we seek the testimony of friends or of enemies, we are aware of worthless exaggeration. In the case of Lafayette we do not suffer from these causes of distortion. He was indeed most bitterly denounced,—in the crisis of his life when he abandoned his army there was hardly anyone to praise him,—but he was not present among the French in those moments of superhuman exaltation which followed upon the great war, and therefore he escaped unbalanced praise and blame therein. On the other hand, he did not perish in that storm as did countless others, nor did he deserve or receive oblivion upon its close. On the contrary, he entered public life again and played a great part in it. Added to such opportunities for being rightly judged, his own rigid adherence to his original principles has gained him the reward which always attaches to such fidelity—an untroubled place in history. From all these causes he can, if we take the trouble to watch him narrowly, be seen clearly by posterity.

Let us then attempt a summary judgment of his character. The central axis upon which that character turned may readily be perceived and defined, for it was at once so simple and fixed within so slight an accretion of secondary qualities that it is plainly visible through them.

Lafayette was essentially of that type which has had for its philosophy, perhaps from the beginning of society, the scheme to which antiquity gave the title of “stoic.” He was immovable in the service of those truths which he perceived; but the truths which he perceived were few, obvious, and though of vast, yet not of the very last, importance. He conceived that an adhesion to such truths was sufficient for man and still more certainly sufficient for himself.

An absolute and unswerving demeanour, drawn from so strict an adherence to so limited a creed, lent him those qualities which are not more admirable, though they are more popular, when they are produced by convictions larger and more comprehensive. These are, first, courage of that rare and indomitable sort which meets with precisely the same rigidity physical danger, corporal pain, public shame, the accidents of loss in affection or fortune, the change of environing things, the default of human support even where it seemed most sure; secondly, a minute attention to duty where duty is commanded by the logical consequences of one’s faith rather than suggested by the affections; thirdly, a generosity in action which proceeds not from charity of any warmth of temperament, but from an apprehension of what a creed demands, so that if the creed demand in certain circumstances such and such a sacrifice, the sacrifice, however great, is unhesitatingly and immediately made.

In such adherence to fixed principle and in the consequences of that tenacity lay the core of Lafayette’s nature; beyond that core there was little else. We must add to it certain extraneous details not proceeding from it, but merely aggravated to it. He was vain after that fashion of vanity which is certainly not a vice and is almost a virtue, since it betrays a great carelessness of power and an indifference to anything less noble than praise. Again—what has nothing to do with his vanity—he loved to find himself leading men, though he did not love the act of leadership.

This last passion, the love of leadership, one might ascribe to an energetic activity in him were such activity discoverable in other relations of his life; but it is not so discoverable; for in conversation, in the emission of ideas, in the criticism of others, in writing, planning, or doing, he was not conspicuously active, nor was he conspicuously active in the things of the body. He was not laborious; he neither liked nor understood the expression of high energy; nor, conversely, was he prone to be exhausted or to be tempted to lassitude in any form.

Many sober men in a phase of their early youth present this character. It is the same cast of mind which often makes such youth, in that early phase, uncompromising, constantly asserting truths apparently universal and patent, and ready to judge the enormous (and, for it, untried) complexity of human affairs.

The long process of years usually disturbs that image: for good and for evil it is changed: and men as they advance in experience tend also to suffer what the poet has nobly called the “contagion of the world’s slow stain.” But at the same time they grow to admit into their faces a humorous charity and a confession of fellowship with the uncertain and erring human millions of which they are each one tiny element. Repeated anxiety and the repeated example of the pains and dishonour that follow upon poverty make men as they grow older exaggerate the importance of wealth and they lose the just sense of proportion in mortal arrangements. Principle will be sacrificed in affection, especially if that affection be the constant and glowing affection for one’s own family involved in one’s own precarious fortune; the manifold imbecility of men in their political action will weaken interest in, though it does not in the same degree destroy intellectual conviction of, those prime political truths which make of sane and just men republicans. On the other hand, in a hundred little details which must count heavily in the fate of the soul, men so perturbed and declined from their early standing show comprehension, charity, a good individual judgment for practical affairs, and commonly, as life advances, develop virile and useful rules of action for themselves and for others. These rules are but subconscious in their origin, they are difficult to formularize; but they are wise and are proved wise by their fruits.

Why did Lafayette fail to acquire this enlargement—for it is an enlargement—of the mature mind, as he failed also to suffer those contaminations which commonly accompany it?

Interior causes were present, to preserve him unchanged. There stood in his mind a barrier against expanding emotion. The native limitation which made him a stoic (and through which he has been less justly called a prig) would in all circumstances have restrained his development, keeping him from knowing men, but also preserving intact his high conviction and his conspicuous morals. I say a personal inhibition of this kind was present from the beginning, native to him, and necessarily present in his soul; but this interior preservative constraint was powerfully aided by two external circumstances: first, he was born immensely wealthy and therefore had not in the whole of his life acquired one prolonged and educative experience of what the absence of security might effect in the character of man; secondly, the strong and moulding emotions, which come to nearly all men successively, came to him (as did the full control of his wealth) all at once and that in very early youth. He was married in his teens; he was a father before he was twenty; he was a military hero with a fame not only national, but universal, before he was of age.

In those same years he was flooded by surrounding society with every article of his political creed, and it was stamped upon him in that plastic period of life both by the overwhelming success of his own efforts in the service of that creed, and by that creed’s general success in its first undertakings.

The Declaration of Independence he had helped to make triumph; once it had triumphed he had witnessed—from a distance it is true, and with some of the too hopeful illusions of distance—the prosperous career of its principles upon its native soil. Such pressure coming at such a moment in the development of a man, crystallizes him; and for fifty mortal years, from the achievement of American independence to his death in 1834, Lafayette remained Lafayette without growth or change.

For pages so few as these a summary so short must suffice. The reader will expand for himself the consequences following upon this type of sincerity, conviction, and fixed, immutable in experience. In religion it was inevitable that such a mind should be dry. He professed, of course, the thin Deism which some may claim in old age to have turned to conceptions a trifle warmer and more full of stuff; but I confess these tinges of colour seem to me superadded from social fashions contemporary with his later years, when the Catholic Church, which in his youth nearly all the educated class in his country took to be a dying superstition, had reasserted its vitality.

In politics such a man stood also, of course, for those plain and fundamental principles which all clear thought has discovered to be the basis of just government: that sovereignty must reside with the people; that the usurpation of that sovereignty, whether effected in the name of the people or in contempt of them, must be equally resisted; that laws once fixed, having in them necessarily an element of conflicting detail, necessarily lead to dissensions, but must be obeyed by all indifferently until they are changed by the popular voice; that violence is permissible only against aggression from without or illegal action from within—and so forth.

On the other hand, through an illusion common enough in men of this type, he confounded certain modern adjuncts of these ancient truths with the truth themselves. Thus he thought there was something sacred in representation and could hardly distinguish between the nation and an electoral body proceeding from it. He believed in the equality of man without seizing the fact that this, so far from being self evident, is a tremendous and mystical dogma allied with a particular type of religion and rising or perishing with it. He took for granted the necessity in any free state of leaving the courts of justice untrammelled by the executive, but he neither devised nor thought there needed to be devised any scheme whereby the courts, thus untrammelled, should be kept pure.

The defects in such a character superficial critics ascribe to an excess of the intellectual faculties. It is truer to say that they are due, not indeed to an atrophy of these, but to a limitation of them. No man, for instance, worked in an atmosphere more purely intellectual than St. Thomas Aquinas, yet his most general judgments upon the principles of government stand as firm as Aristotle’s, upon which they are based and which they complete. That supreme intelligence also affirmed the “General Will.”

The excellences, again, of such a character as Lafayette’s are by many imagined to belong, and would certainly have been by himself ascribed, to the dominating power of reason. If we look closely, it is not so. Between his strong convictions—and they were shared by countless thousands—whether in religion or in civic theory, between such theories, I say, and the expression of them in life lies the function of the will. The great