Beacon Lights of History, Volume 09 | Page 3

humiliating disappointments.

It might have been possible for the Government to contend successfully
with the various elements of discontent among the people, intoxicated
with those abstract theories of rights which Rousseau had so eloquently
defended, if it had possessed a strong head and the sinews of war. But
Louis XVI., a modest, timid, temperate, moral young man of
twenty-three, by the death of his father and elder brothers had
succeeded to the throne of his dissolute grandfather at just the wrong
time. He was a gentleman, but no ruler. He had no personal power, and
the powers of his kingdom had been dissipated by his reckless
predecessors. Not only was the army demoralized, and inclined to
fraternize with the people, but there was no money to pay the troops or
provide for the ordinary expenses of the Court. There was an alarming
annual deficit, and the finances were utterly disordered. Successive
ministers had exhausted all ordinary resources and the most ingenious
forms of taxation. They made promises, and resorted to every kind of
expediency, which had only a temporary effect. The primal evils
remained. The national treasury was empty. Calonne and Necker
pursued each a different policy, and with the same results. The
extravagance of the one and the economy of the other were alike fatal.
Nobody would make sacrifices in a great national exigency. The nobles
and the clergy adhered tenaciously to their privileges, and the Court
would curtail none of its unnecessary expenses. Things went on from
bad to worse, and the financiers were filled with alarm. National
bankruptcy stared everybody in the face.
If the King had been a Richelieu, he would have dealt summarily with
the nobles and rebellious mobs. He would have called to his aid the
talents of the nation, appealed to its patriotism, compelled the Court to
make sacrifices, and prevented the printing and circulation of seditious
pamphlets. The Government should have allied itself with the people,
granted their requests, and marched to victory under the name of
patriotism. But Louis XVI. was weak, irresolute, vacillating, and
uncertain. He was a worthy sort of man, with good intentions, and
without the vices of his predecessors. But he was surrounded with
incompetent ministers and bad advisers, who distrusted the people and
had no sympathy with their wrongs. He would have made concessions,
if his ministers had advised him. He was not ambitious, nor unpatriotic;

he simply did not know what to do.
In his perplexity, he called together the principal heads of the
nobility,--some hundred and twenty great seigneurs, called the Notables;
but this assembly was dissolved without accomplishing anything. It
was full of jealousies, and evinced no patriotism. It would not part with
its privileges or usurpations.
It was at this crisis that Mirabeau first appeared upon the stage, as a
pamphleteer, writing bitter and envenomed attacks on the government,
and exposing with scorching and unsparing sarcasms the evils of the
day, especially in the department of finance. He laid bare to the eyes of
the nation the sores of the body politic,--the accumulated evils of
centuries. He exposed all the shams and lies to which ministers had
resorted. He was terrible in the fierceness and eloquence of his assaults,
and in the lucidity of his statements. Without being learned, he
contrived to make use of the learning of others, and made it burn with
the brilliancy of his powerful and original genius. Everybody read his
various essays and tracts, and was filled with admiration. But his moral
character was bad,--Was even execrable, and notoriously outrageous.
He was kind-hearted and generous, made friends and used them. No
woman, it is said, could resist his marvellous fascination,--all the more
remarkable since his face was as ugly as that of Wilkes, and was
marked by the small-pox. The excesses of his private life, and his
ungovernable passions, made him distrusted by the Court and the
Government. He was both hated and admired.
Mirabeau belonged to a noble family of very high rank in Provence, of
Italian descent. His father, Marquis Mirabeau, was a man of liberal
sentiments,--not unknown to literary fame by his treatises on political
economy,'--but was eccentric and violent. Although his oldest son,
Count Mirabeau, the subject of this lecture, was precocious
intellectually, and very bright, so that the father was proud of him, he
was yet so ungovernable and violent in his temper, and got into so
many disgraceful scrapes, that the Marquis was compelled to discipline
him severely,--all to no purpose, inasmuch as he was injudicious in his
treatment, and ultimately cruel. He procured lettres de cachet from the

King, and shut up his disobedient and debauched son in various
state-prisons. But the Count generally contrived to escape, only to get
into fresh difficulties; so that he became a wanderer and an exile,
compelled