The Years of Endurance Read online

  Liberty to Burke had to be a practical thing. A nation in which a community of nuns could be dragged by a mob from a hospital in which they were nursing and scourged naked down the street was not redeemed from despotism because its national assembly had pronounced its own tolerance to be perfect, inalienable and absolute. Liberty to have any meaning had to be based on law, and law in its turn on morality: that is, on justice. For Burke brought to the French Revolution the historic English touchstone of every political pretension: its compatability with fair and kindly dealing. " Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice," he wrote, " neither is safe."

  Unerringly Burke put his finger on the central weakness of the French philosophy: that in its passion for logical abstractions it did not recognise the existence of religion and morality. It boldly assumed that these were identical with the General Will: the popular vote or other mechanical manifestation of democracy that in some mysterious way embodied the aggregate of human reason and virtue while discarding human folly and passion. The French reformers,, who had disestablished their Church, thought that under a perfect constitution, men would have no need for religion because the ideal State would automatically create the ideal man. Burke knew that this was putting the cart before the horse: that in practice the ideal State could only grow out of the ideal man. Good men were not to be made merely by laws which relied for their sanction on force but only by religion and morality, which appealed to the conscience. Only when the people, he wrote, had emptied themselves of all the lust of selfish will—and without religion it was impossible they should—could absolute power be safely entrusted to the State..

  Burke foresaw that by worshipping an abstract ideal of the Popular Will and calling it liberty, the revolutionary philosophers were unconsciously preparing the way for an intolerable tyranny. " If the present project of a Republic should fail," he predicted, " all security to a moderate freedom must fail with it. All the indirect restraints which mitigate despotism are removed: insomuch that, if monarchy should ever again obtain an entire ascendancy in France under this or any other dynasty, it will probably be the most completely arbitrary power that ever appeared on earth." Looking up the long avenue of promise which led through the self-worship of the State and nation to the precipitous final crag of the Dictator and the national storm-trooper, the eager, beak-nosed, bespectacled seer foretold the course of the Revolution: the pitiless elimination of everything that could withstand the will of centralised despotism, followed, after the rise of a military dictator to save the nation from its own anarchy, by an epoch of world-wide aggression. What some thought the dawn of Utopia and others a harmless exhibition of French enthusiasm, Burke denounced in 1790 as a tornado about " to burst like a levanter and sweep the earth with its hurricane."

  His contempt for the slick arrogance of what he called the " philosophy of vanity," his profound historical sense and hatred of the shallow pedantry that viewed the enduring community—the delicate and mysterious growth of centuries—as something to be constantly remodelled according to the floating fancies or fashion of the hour; his strong, masculine realisation of the necessity of some restraint on the passions 1 caused Burke to be less than just to the Revolution. He overlooked the stagnation and corruption which had given rise to the fallacies he denounced, and in an over-idealised picture of France under the ancien regime pitied, as Tom Paine said, " the plumage and forgot the dying bird." He missed the tremendous and ultimately healing power of unloosed energy. In his alarm at the dangers he foresaw, he unconsciously helped to bring them nearer. By sounding too powerful an alarm, Burke alienated his countrymen from France at the very moment when their sanity and long political experience might have exercised a restraining influence. Pitt wisely said that he wished Burke had confined himself to praising the British Constitution instead of abusing the French. There were powerful elements in the new France, particularly in the provinces, which might have responded to a generous hand from England. There were many good Englishmen who would willingly have extended it. Burke caused them to hesitate.

  For the Reflections, as almost any book of genius will when written with burning sincerity on a topical subject, had an immense success. Within a year it had sold the unprecedented number of 32,000 copies. And though at first the bulk of Englishmen continued to regard Burke as a violent Irishman apt to be run away with by his feelings and more remarkable for the vividness of his imagery than for sober statesmanship, there was something so striking in what he had written that there was no forgetting it. And as one after another of his gloomy predictions were fulfilled by events across the Channel, the conviction grew that the old Whig hack was not an unpractical visionary after all but an inspired prophet. The effect on the pragmatical English mind was tremendous.

  For moderate and liberal-minded men who felt generously towards the new France, including the majority of Burke's own Whig friends, drew back when they saw how Gallic practice of what seemed at first their own principles was accompanied by violence, illegality and cruelty. Every excess of the French mob confirmed

  1" Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. Men have a right that these wants should be provided for by this wisdom. Among these wants is to be reckoned the want, out of civil society, of a sufficient restraint upon their passions."—Reflections', 333.

  what Burke had foretold. The sympathy of educated Englishmen for the Revolution was frozen in its tracks. As it froze, the extremer elements in France seemed increasingly to prevail over the moderate. In May, 1791, Mirabeau died: the one man who possessed both the magnetism to lead assemblies and the statesmanship to avoid a violent breach with the past. Henceforward power passed from the Assembly to the irresponsible republican clubs who controlled the mob. By June King Louis, alarmed by the rising tide of anarchy, had attempted flight, only to be caught on the road to the frontier and brought back in sordid ignominy to his capital.

  These events, reinforced by Burke's constantly reiterated plea, thundered in the Commons, broadcast in pamphlets and repeated in every company, " to fly the French Revolution," not only split his own party but awoke the instinctive suspicion of innovation of the English people. He himself had praised their " sullen resistance of innovation,' " their unalterable perseverance in the wisdom of ancient prejudice." The dumb Tory majority, which had hitherto regarded Burke with profound distrust, now praised him with more vehemence than intelligence. The more viofent the proceedings in France, the more tightly did they shut their minds to anything savouring of novelty. The liberal tide which had been flowing in England since the American war began to ebb fast. A modest measure of electoral reform—no more than Pitt himself had advocated a few years earlier—was rejected by the Commons at the instance of the charming but alarmist William Windham, hitherto an ardent Liberal, on the ground that it was insanity to repair one's house in the hurricane season. Even Wilberforce's annual motion for the abolition of the slave trade—now at last on the verge of triumph—was unexpectedly defeated in 1791 owing to the panic caused by the rising of the French slaves in Santo Domingo.

  These alarms were fanned by the uncritical enthusiasm for the Revolution of a small but very vocal minority which identified it with its own hopes and ambitions. In England it was drawn mainly from the middle-class urban Dissenters who welcomed the French doctrine of civil and religious equality and were more accustomed to—and therefore less suspicious of—abstract generalisations than the mass of their rustic countrymen. In imitation of Parisian models these worthy people formed " Constitutional" and " Corresponding " Societies in various parts of the country which earnestly debated French principles, urged their adoption in England and exchanged fraternal greetings with their apostles across the Channel. They did little harm beyond encouraging the more foolish French politicians to imagine that they represented British opinion. But the topics they discussed so loudly -deeply alarmed their conservative neighbours. With 'King Louis a prisoner in his palace and French seigneurs and priests fleein
g for their lives from-mob violence, it was disturbing to learn that Mr. Price, the eloquent Dissenting preacher, had told the London Revolutionary Society that the British people might also depose their King and nobles and remodel the Church and State. The religious strifes of the seventeenth-century were not wholly forgotten: there were still men living whose grandfathers had suffered proscription for the Anglican faith. They viewed the harmless Dissenting controversialists of their-own day as descendants of the fanatics who had sent the King to the scaffold, plundered the cathedrals and set up the ugly tyranny of the Saints and Major Generals.

  Feeling was aggravated by a spate of pamphlets. Burke's Reflections provoked no less than thirty-eight replies.1 The most famous of these was The Rights of Man, the work of an ex-staymaker named Tom Paine who had taken part in the American rebellion and had now thrown in his lot with the French. Forcibly argued and lucidly-written, it was-suited to simple intelligences unable to grasp Burke's profounder points, with which—particularly with his high-flown passages—it made admirable sport. Much of it was good sense: " the vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave," Paine wrote of Burke's historical polemics, "is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies." One of his great points was that the Revolution, being directed not against persons but against principles, had been attended by very little bloodshed: " -among the few that fell there do not appear to be any that were intentionally singled out. ... .Whom has the National Assembly brought to the scaffold ? "; he- asked.

  Circulated by the Constitutional Societies at 6d. and-even1 less, and-dedicated to the great though—in England—suspect name-of Washington, The Rights of Man had an immense sale and helped to

  1 The most important was Sir: James Mackintosh's scholarly Vindiciae Gallicae in which he prophesied that an attempt of foreign kings to crush the revolution in France would recoil on their own heads.

  stimulate the formation of radical clubs in a lower strata of society than had hitherto been touched by political controversy. The appearance of a workmen's club in a Westminster alehouse at the beginning of 1792 and of another at Sheffield caused a stir utterly disproportionate to the numbers engaged.1 Here, solid Englishmen reflected of Paine's attack on the Constitution, was a fellow—a Radical, an atheist and perhaps worse—preaching that every violent act committed by a lot of excitable, bloodthirsty Frenchmen was right and demanding that England should throw over the sober gains of centuries, which he had the impertinence to refer to as badges of Norman servitude. The insular hackles rose.

  The unreflecting multitude, in whom anti-Gallican feeling was never far from the surface, was quick to respond. When on July 14th, 1791, some middle-class sympathisers with France organised public dinners to celebrate the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, there were riots in the provincial towns. At Birmingham, where provocative handbills had been scattered through the streets and a church chalked " This barn to let," the mob rose in all its ignorant savagery, wrecked Dissenting meeting houses and burnt the house and library of the famous scientist, Dr. Priestley. For four days the whole of the loyal, royal west midlands was in a tumult, till the 15th Dragoons, covering fifty-six miles in a day, rode into Birmingham amid multitudes shouting " Down with the Rump ! " " No philosophers ! " " Church and King! " The Government, faced by that infectious violence which revolutionary ideology always provokes in both sides and wishing to preserve order at home and peace abroad, abhorred the idea of an ideological front against the Revolution.2 But the danger of such a front, with its threat to the tranquillity of Europe, was growing.

  In May, 1790, the new rulers of France professing peace and retrenchment—principles which naturally endeared them to Pitt—

  1 These were trifling. As Burke pointed out in his Reflections, the attention drawn to themselves by the agitators was misleading. " Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field."

  2 Grenville, the Foreign Secretary, wrote : " I do not admire riots in favour of government much more than riots against it."—Pitt and the Great War, 19.

  solemnly renounced war and aggression for ever. One deputy, Maximilien Robespierre, went so far as to declare that France regarded her existing frontiers as fixed by an eternal destiny. But those who, relying on this, hoped that the Revolution was not for export were soon disillusioned. That autumn at Avignon—a little enclave of Papal territory surviving from the Middle Ages—the people, catching the reforming fervour, rose and offered themselves to France. The Assembly accepted the offer and sent troops to take over the territory. It was argued that there was no " conquest" since the consent of the inhabitants had been secured. Yet it was significant that that consent had been expressed not by ballot but by a riot. It was still more so that the foreign sovereign dispossessed was never consulted.

  Thereafter " ambassadors of the human species "—in other words gentlemen who for some reason or another were at divergence with their own rulers—began to arrive in Paris and to offer their respective countries to France. The Assembly in its mood of boundless benevolence towards humanity applauded their flattering confidence. It all seemed innocent enough: statesmen, it was felt, need not take these Gallic ebullitions very seriously.

  Yet there were many who did. The strictures of the revolutionaries against princes and nobles were too sweeping to be comfortably received in a monarchical and aristocratic continent. Paris was not a remote academy for the discussion of abstract principles but the capital of the first military power in Europe. In Germany in particular, with its innumerable petty Courts and principalities, the democratic frenzy was regarded with acute distrust. Many of the Imperial princes, who still possessed estates in former German provinces conquered by France, had been directly hit by the abolition of feudal dues. All had a lively recollection of the French invasions of Germany during the past hundred and fifty years. It was all very well for France to renounce aggression, but Teutons brought up on stories of the Thirty Years War and the ravages of Louis XIV's armies asked incredulously if the tiger could change his stripes.

  The largest Teuton rulers, better able to protect themselves, took a calmer view of the situation. The Emperor Leopold and the King of Prussia had nothing to fear from an army whose officers were daily fleeing their country and whose discipline had been undermined by the folly of their civil rulers. As a concession to the smaller princes of the Reich and to the hysterical French refugees who were sheltering from the revolution on German soil they made a vague agreement to keep an eye on their volatile western neighbour. But they were far more distrustful of one another and interested in the situation which was developing on their eastern frontiers. For here the ancient kingdom of Poland, long torn by feudal dissensions, was on the verge of final collapse. Fifteen years before, Austria, Russia and Prussia had helped themselves to the outlying parts of its territories. Now under the lead of the Empress Catherine of Russia they were contemplating a new partition. Alarmed by an eleventh-hour attempt of the more patriotic Polish nobles to save their country by reforming its anarchical constitution, the insatiable old woman affected a violent horror of the French Revolution whose subversive influences she pretended to see at work in Poland. It was as the alleged champion of order against anarchy that she prepared to invade that country while urging Austria and Prussia to do the same thing in France.

  Such was the position at the time of the flight to Varennes in the summer of 1791. The insults to his sister, Marie Antoinette, placed Leopold of Austria—a sensible and moderate man—in a dilemma. Wishing to be free to watch Russia and Prussia, he did not want to become embroiled with France. On the other hand, he could not wholly ignore what was happening in the west. For Leopold was not only hereditary ruler of the twenty million inhabitants of the Hapsburg dominions in Austria, Hungary, Bohemia, Belgium and Lombardy. He
was also as Holy Roman Emperor the elected protector of the three hundred and fifty-eight minor German States in the centre of Europe. He could not wholly ignore the wishes and fears of their rulers. He was also a Catholic sovereign, subject to the influence of the Pope, who was deeply hurt by the annexation of Avignon, the disestablishment of the Church of France and the expulsion of his Legate from Paris. Under these influences Leopold issued on July 6th a circular letter to his fellow-sovereigns suggesting some kind of joint European action to secure the release from restraint of the Most Christian King and his Queen.

  The British Government, as was expected, declined this invitation.

  It expressed, sympathy with the French Royal Family but made the possibility of British co-operation dependent on a general European settlement guaranteeing the future integrity of Poland and Turkey —both threatened by Russia and Austria—and the restoration of the balance of power. Britain was not interested in ideological fronts or the internal affairs of other countries.1 Under these circumstances the furthest step which Leopold would take was a joint Declaration with Prussia, issued at Pillnitz on August 27th, expressing the hope that the European nations would act together to place the King of France in a position in harmony with the rights of sovereigns and the well-being of his people. But as Britain would not co-operate, the Declaration was a mere farce.