The Years of Endurance Read online

  In September Leopold, hearing that his brother-in-law had accepted the new Constitution forced on him by the Assembly, informed the Powers that the obligations at Pillnitz had been achieved and that the coalition was at an end. His relief was apparent. But he had reckoned without the temper of the French politicians, the excited state of France and the increasingly provocative behaviour of an army of emigre nobles, whom the Elector of Trier had most injudiciously invited to his dominions and who, seeing in a European war their one chance of restoration, kept up a shrill chorus of threats against their countrymen. The latter's fears played into the hands of the Party extremists. The baleful influence of the exiles helped to turn an ideological into a national quarrel.

  The members of the Legislative Assembly who met under the terms of the new Constitution on October ist, 1791, were all untried men. More than half were under thirty. They tended, despite their goloshes and umbrellas, to be romantic idealists, nursed in the fashionable classicism of the time and full of windy eloquence about Aristides, Cato and other heroes of antique democracy. The most eloquent hailed from Bordeaux and were known as Girondins— sallow, excitable men hungering for applause and with a genius for self-dramatisation. There seemed no limit to the violence of their splendid enthusiasms. They at once confiscated the property of the emigres and soon afterwards passed sentence of death on all who

  1 Though, of course, British policy was viewed on the Continent as purely cynical and Machiavellian. " The worst obstacles," wrote the Austrian Ambassador in Paris, " will always come from England, which wishes to prolong the horrors of France and ruin her."

  should fail to return to France by the end of the year. A fortnight before Christmas they made Louis inform the Elector of Trier that, unless the royalists in his dominions were expelled, France would invade hi& territory.

  The Emperor Leopold could scarcely permit the invasion of any part of the Empire without going to war. Yet this, so long as Britain remained neutral, he was anxious not to do. He therefore, while warning France that he would resist if Trier was invaded, brought pressure to bear on the emigres to remove elsewhere. This evoked a renewed clamour in- the French Chamber for strong measures. For the Girondins saw their way to power on the back of a European war. It was the shortest cut to a dictatorship. Popular interest in the Revolution was beginning to flag;1 hostility was aroused by interference with religion, administrative anarchy and the inflation caused by a reckless issue of paper assignats on confiscated church lands. Only hatred of the foreigner could reunite the country behind the Revolution. A crusade against the Austrian despot was the Girondins' trump card. " War," cried their leader, Brissot, " is a national benefit: the only calamity to be dreaded is that we should have no war." On January nth, 1792, amid shouts of " Liberty or death! " the Assembly voted that the Emperor should renounce his project of a European demarche against France or face invasion.

  Confronted by this threat, the Emperor signed a defensive alliance with Prussia in which he promised to indemnify that very exacting State for its military expenses. For in view of their rivalry in the east he could not afford to act without it. Unlike Leopold, the King of Prussia had no objection to war provided it could be conducted without expense. He disliked the Revolution and, having been bribed by Russia with a promise of Polish territory at the expense of Austria, wanted to commit the latter's armies to a struggle in the west. The first brunt of war would fall on the Austrian Netherlands; it would then be easy to invent an excuse for husbanding his own armies.

  Yet so long as Leopold lived there was still hope of peace. His sudden death on March 1st destroyed it. His successor, Francis II, was a narrow, pedantic young man of reactionary views, much in

  1 In the recent mayoral election in Paris only 6,600 out of 80,000 electors had recorded their votes.

  the hands of the emigres who at once raised their tone. This was just what the war party in Paris wanted. On March 23rd the French Feuillant Government fell and was succeeded by a Girondin Ministry committed up to the hilt to war. Its leader was the vain, eloquent Brissot: its Foreign Minister a military adventurer, General Dumouriez, who had made himself the champion of a plausible but very dangerous idea—" the natural frontiers of France.,, These, ignoring the rights of her neighbours, he defined as the Pyrenees, Alps and Rhine. His first act was to dispatch agents into the Netherlands to stir up rebellion against the Austrians. His second was to send an ultimatum to Vienna demanding the immediate suspension of the Prussian alliance.

  The chief obstacle to similar French designs in the past had been the opposition of Britain. It was the belief in Paris that, if France could keep that country neutral, she could manage the rest of Europe. At the beginning of the year a French mission had therefore been sent to London. Though the Emigres had done their best to prejudice its reception by spreading atrocity stories about its members and inserting premature press notices that Pitt had snubbed it, the British Government refused to be deflected from its pacific policy. The Foreign Secretary told the Due de Biron and his unofficial adviser, Talleyrand, that both on political and commercial grounds Britain wished for nothing so much as a happy issue to France's troubles. In his Budget speech of February 17th, Pitt declared his belief that Europe was on the threshold of a long period of peace and prosperity. " I am not," he said, " presumptuous enough to suppose that, when I name fifteen years, I am not naming a period in which events may arise which human foresight cannot reach and which may baffle all our conjectures. . . . But unquestionably there never was a time in the history of this country when, from the situation of Europe, we might more reasonably expect fifteen years of peace, than we may at the present moment.' To prove his good faith he made new economies in the Fighting Services.

  For Pitt, having established his country's prosperity on peace, scouted the idea of war. It seemed to him the last refuge of unreason. Britain in his view had nothing to fear from France, which through the indiscipline of her fleets and armies had become an object of compassion rather than a rival. Her internal affairs were purely her own concern. When representatives of the royalist planters of French Santo Domingo, to avert a massacre at the hands of their slaves, offered the coveted colony to Britain, Pitt refused it as incompatible with neutrality.

  On taking office the Brissotin Ministry sent Talleyrand back to London under a new ambassador, the Marquis de Chauvelin, a vain and tactless young demagogue. Their instructions were to secure Britain's continued neutrality and to offer the return of the West Indian island of Tobago, taken during the American war, for a guaranteed loan of £4,000,000 on the London market. France, they were to explain, was bound to dominate Central Europe; should Britain throw in her weight on her side and neutralise her former allies, Prussia and Holland, the two " free " Powers of the west would " become arbiters of peace or war for the whole world." A hint was also to be dropped that France by fomenting a second transatlantic revolution had it in her power to transfer the commerce of Spanish South America to Britain.

  But the latter's most vital interest, as Dumouriez knew, was the security of the Low Countries. For this she had gone to war both against Philip of Spain and Louis XIV. The retention of Belgian and Dutch harbours in friendly hands had always been a cardinal point for England: their use by a great military power her age-long nightmare. Chauvelin and Talleyrand were therefore to impress the British Government with the idea that the invasion of the Austrian Netherlands was only a temporary measure for the security of the struggling French State.

  To the positive part of this Pitt—courteous but cold—turned a deaf ear: to the negative, still believing that France's interests were as pacific as Britain's, he tacitly agreed. The ideological war he had tried to avert was now inevitable: the only course left was to keep out of it and limit its consequences. He refused any formal declaration of neutrality lest it should encourage the French extremists. But, on the understanding given by Dumouriez that the Belgic provinces should be restored to Austria after the war, Pitt adopted a policy of non-
intervention.

  In this unknowingly he was contending against history and fate. Already the Revolution had begun to impinge on Britain's internal affairs. In Ireland the French example had aroused the Nonconformist minority of the north. The second anniversary of the Bastille's fall had been celebrated by the people of Ulster with almost military pomp. That September a young lawyer named Wolfe Tone published a pamphlet*: The Northern Whig, advocating an alliance of Protestant and Catholic Irish to shake of the rule of Dublin Castle. This was followed by the formation in Belfast of the Society of United Irishmen. Under- Tone's lead it repudiated the patriot Grattan's moderate programme of Irish reform and advocated revolutionary measures - manhood suffrage, equal electoral districts and annual elections. It even started to raise volunteers for a " National Guard " and to dress them in French uniforms;

  At this point the Government intervened and suppressed them. But the disordered state of Ireland made it a dangerous breeding-ground for revolutionary ideas. At the same time both in England and Scotland there was a marked spread of revolutionary propaganda. Working men's clubs debated such perilous matters as the price of provisions and " the lavish of the public property by placemen, pensioners, luxury and debauchery." As these petty societies multiplied there was even talk of suspending Parliament by a General Convention on the French model-—" one grand and extensive Union for all the friends of liberty."

  The more timorous souls in Church" and State, confronted with this radical fermentation, became increasingly agitated. There was no police force, the manners of the people were rough and violent, and the blood-stained example of France was fresh in every mind. The language of the Corresponding Societies was ominously reminiscent of the Jacobin clubs which had terrorised the French Assembly and roused the Paris mob. Englishmen recalled what their own mob had done at the time of the Gordon riots—a; glimpse into the abyss which had shaken even their strong, nerves. And the artificial concentration of a new kind of population in the industrial towns presented social problems which Government had not even begun to tackle, John Byng, uncompromising champion of the rights of the rustic poor, travelling through the manufacturing districts that summer, was filled with foreboding.

  Not every aristocrat shut his eyes to' the virtues of the new France. A little group, conspicuous in Parliament and the fashionable Whig salons, shut theirs to her vices. To the supercilious, dashing old Etonians who gambled all night at Brooks's, shared the dubious intimacy of the Prince of Wales and worshipped at Fox's political shrine, the red cap of Liberty became the symbol of an imaginary Utopia—the more attractive because it so enraged respectable opponents. In April, 1792, a Whig group formed a club at the Freemason's Tavern called The Friends of the People. Among its members were Charles Grey, Erskine, John Lambton, Lord Lauderdale, Sheridan, Lord Edward Fitzgerald and the young brewer, Sam Whitbread. Their idol Fox would neither join nor disown them. With characteristic irresponsibility he allowed them to drift into what later became, an impossible position and in which, being then unable to extricate them, he was out of equally characteristic good nature to join them. Burke and the more mature Whigs, who under the Duke of Portland had till now followed Fox's brilliant star, were horrified.

  Pitt as a good politician accepted the growing conservatism of the country. In April he opposed Grey's motion for electoral reform which that ardent young man was to carry forty years later as Prime Minister, declaring it to be productive at such a time only of " anarchy and confusion." In May he spoke against any relaxation of the penal laws against Nonconformity. He also modified his plans for making concessions to the Irish Catholics. Pitt took his stand on the necessity for giving, as he put it, " permanence to that winch we actually enjoy rather than to remove subsisting grievances." His policy, after eight years of liberalising reform, now shrank to a single word—security.

  For the English instinct, confronted by something new and violent in the world, was ceasing to be tolerant: it sensed danger. Subconsciously it narrowed its vision, and bent its energies to screwing down the hatches before the hurricane. " I shuddered at Grey's motion," wrote the historian Gibbon from Lausanne, " disliked the half-support of Fox, and excused the usual intemperance of Burke. . . . Do not suffer yourselves to be lulled into a false security; remember the proud fabric of the French Monarchy. Not four years ago it stood founded, as it might seem, on the triple Aristocracy of the Church, the Nobility and the Parliaments. They are crumbled into dust; they are vanished from the earth. If this tremendous warning has no effect on the men of property in

  England; if it does not open every eye and raise every arm, you will deserve your fate."

  Yet though Pitt put away his dreams of reform at home, he stubbornly refused to abandon his policy of peace abroad. If France and her eastern neighbours chose to waste their blood and substance in war, that was their concern, not Britain's. When Burke, accorded an interview, urged intervention, he found as always a certain " deadness." The Prime Minister seemed more concerned in saving Poland from Russia, even in dispatching a commercial embassy to China, than in nipping world revolution in the bud. For his policy of security was as dependent on keeping the country out of Continental adventures as on averting doctrinal revolution.

  On April 20th the French Assembly declared war on Austria. The little group which under the Jacobin clubman, Robespierre, opposed hostilities on the ground that they would favour the growth of tyranny was swept aside by Girondin eloquence. " The people," cried Mailhe, " desire war; make haste to give way to its just and generous impatience. You are perhaps about to decree the liberty of the whole world."

  The demagogues of the Gironde imagined that revolutionary fervour would make their armies invincible. They were mistaken. With the inconsequence of their kind, while clamouring for war they had tampered with military discipline in order to discredit their predecessors. The red woollen nightcaps of the Nancy military mutineers, released from prison in their convicts' garb and given the honours of the Legislative Assembly, had been acclaimed as Caps of Liberty—the approved headwear henceforward of every patriot. France had now to pay the price for such folly. The troops who swarmed into Belgium were a mere rabble. At the first sight of an Austrian they ran away and murdered their own general. The greatest war in French history began, as it ended, with shouts of Sauve qui peut!

  The hideous rout that scrambled back over the frontier did not make a favourable impression. Europe breathed a sigh of relief. England laughed. " A strange reverse,' was the caption of Gillray's next cartoon:

  " The democrats display And prove the Rights of Man—to run away."

  Anti-Gallican feeling stiffened. The King was particularly contemptuous. When Chauvelin protested at a royal proclamation against seditious writings, the Foreign Secretary coldly intimated that he should mind his own business.

  The Austrians did not follow up their victory. They had more pressing concerns. That May the Russian Empress's savage soldiery marched across the Polish frontier. The Poles took up arms, some under Kosciusko to repel the invader, others according to ancient Polish custom to serve their faction at the expense of their country. Their Prussian allies, bribed in advance by Russia, threatened them from the rear. Not for the last time the waters of barbarism closed over the Polish plain.

  Meanwhile in Paris the parties of the Left were bidding against one another for the favour of the mob by the vehemence of their abuse of King and foreigner. The Clubs forced a decree through the Assembly disbanding the sovereign's Constitutional Guard. The Girondins summoned a meeting of 20,000 armed " Federates " from the provincial Cantons to the national feast on July 14th.

  In June King Louis, relying on the reviving conservatism and religious sense of the country, vetoed a bill for banishing non-juring priests and dismissed the Girondin Ministry. But the royalist counter-attack, though nearly successful, failed through the divisions of its supporters. In the face of common danger, Jacobin and Girondin united. Their self-chosen leader was a rough provincial lawyer from C
hampagne: a pock-marked, passionate, impulsive man of 32 named Danton, whose name is stained by great crimes but who loved France more than anything in the world.

  On July nth, the Left struck. The Assembly, itself assuming the government, declared the country in danger and called on every able-bodied citizen to defend the frontiers. At the national festival on the Champs de Mars the King was hooted and jostled by the assembled " Federates "—the ragged, sweat-stained, angry men of the provincial slums. " The Tarquins," the cry went up, " must be driven out!"

  Five days later the Emperor Francis and the King of Prussia met at Mainz amid a gleaming shoal of German Princes and Electors. They were still in no hurry to march for they felt certain of their prey. France, once so mighty, was dissolving into anarchy. They had only to drive the rabble before them and divide the spoil at leisure. On the 24th, having settled the question of indemnities, Prussia openly threw in her lot With Austria and declared war. The Commander-in-Chief of the Prussian Army, the veteran Duke of Brunswick, issued a manifesto to the French people. All who had " rebelled " since 1789 were to submit unconditionally and Paris was to be gutted if a hair of the King's head was touched.

  The fruits of German diplomacy never Vary. Before this masterpiece of tactlessness reached Paris on August 3rd, the Marseilles " Federates " had marched into the capital: five hundred ruffians " who knew how to die " and how to kill too, and singing a new song bearing their name. They were greeted by the Clubs with ominous enthusiasm and promptly liquidated an officer of the National Guard.