Critical Miscellanies | Page 5

lightning and went like the
wind.
At the end of 1788 the King of France found himself forced to summon
the States-General. It was their first assembly since 1614. On the
memorable Fourth of May, 1789, Robespierre appeared at Versailles as
one of the representatives of the third estate of his native province of
Artois. The excitement and enthusiasm of the elections to this
renowned assembly, the immense demands and boundless expectations
that they disclosed, would have warned a cool observer of events, if in
that heated air a cool observer could have been found, that the hour had
struck for the fulfilment of those grim apprehensions of revolution that
had risen in the minds of many shrewd men, good and bad, in the
course of the previous half century. No great event in history ever
comes wholly unforeseen. The antecedent causes are so wide-reaching,
many, and continuous, that their direction is always sure to strike the
eye of one or more observers in all its significance. Lewis the Fifteenth,
whose invincible weariness and heavy disgust veiled a penetrating
discernment, measured accurately the scope of the conflict between the

crown and the parlements: but, said he, things as they are will last my
time. Under the roof of his own palace at Versailles, in the apartment of
Madame de Pompadour's famous physician, one of Quesnai's economic
disciples had cried out, 'The realm is in a sore way; it will never be
cured without a great internal commotion; but woe to those who have
to do with it; into such work the French go with no slack hand.'
Rousseau, in a passage in the Confessions, not only divines a speedy
convulsion, but with striking practical sagacity enumerates the political
and social causes that were unavoidably drawing France to the edge of
the abyss. Lord Chesterfield, so different a man from Rousseau,
declared as early as 1752, that he saw in France every symptom that
history had taught him to regard as the forerunner of deep change;
before the end of the century, so his prediction ran, both the trade of
king and the trade of priest in France would be shorn of half their glory.
D'Argenson in the same year declared a revolution inevitable, and with
a curious precision of anticipation assured himself that if once the
necessity arose of convoking the States-General, they would not
assemble in vain: qu'on y prenne, garde! ils seraient fort sérieux!
Oliver Goldsmith, idly wandering through France, towards 1755,
discerned in the mutinous attitude of the judicial corporations, that the
genius of freedom was entering the kingdom in disguise, and that a
succession of three weak monarchs would end in the emancipation of
the people of France. The most touching of all these presentiments is to
be found in a private letter of the great Empress, the mother of Marie
Antoinette herself. Maria Theresa describes the ruined state of the
French monarchy, and only prays that if it be doomed to ruin still more
utter, at least the blame may not fall upon her daughter. The Empress
had not learnt that when the giants of social force are advancing from
the sombre shadow of the past, with the thunder and the hurricane in
their hands, our poor prayers are of no more avail than the unbodied
visions of a dream.
The old popular assembly of the realm was not resorted to before every
means of dispensing with so drastic a remedy had been tried. Historians
sometimes write as if Turgot were the only able and reforming minister
of the century. God forbid that we should put any other minister on a
level with that high and beneficent figure. But Turgot was not the first

statesman, both able and patriotic, who had been disgraced for want of
compliance with the conditions of success at court; he was only the last
of a series. Chauvelin, a man of vigour and capacity, was dismissed
with ignominy in 1736. Machault, a reformer, at once courageous and
wise, shared the same fate twenty years later; and in his case revolution
was as cruel and as heedless as reaction, for, at the age of ninety-one,
the old man was dragged, blind and deaf, before the revolutionary
tribunal and thence despatched to the guillotine. Between Chauvelin
and Machault, the elder D'Argenson, who was greater than either of
them, had been raised to power, and then speedily hurled down from it
(1747), for no better reason than that his manners were uncouth, and
that he would not waste his time in frivolities that were as the breath of
life in the great gallery at Versailles and on the smooth-shaven lawns of
Fontainebleau.
Not only had wise counsellors been tried; consultative assemblies had
been tried also. Necker had been dismissed in 1781, after publishing
the memorable