Critical Miscellanies | Page 7

parliament for
twelve years: he had lost patience with the Short Parliament; finally, he
was driven without choice or alternative to face as he best could the
stout resolution and the wise patriotism of the Long Parliament. Men
sometimes wonder how it was that Lewis, when he came to find the
National Assembly unmanageable, and discovering how rapidly he was
drifting towards the thunders of the revolutionary cataract, did not
break up a Chamber over which neither the court, nor even a minister
so popular as Necker, had the least control. It is a question whether the
sword would not have broken in his hand. Even supposing, however,
that the army would have consented to a violent movement against the
Assembly, the King would still have been left in the same desperate
straits from which he had looked to the States-General to extricate him.
He might perhaps have dispersed the Assembly; he could not disperse
debt and deficit. Those monsters would have haunted him as
implacably as ever. There was no new formula of exorcism, nor any
untried enchantment. The success of violent designs against the
National Assembly, had success been possible, could, after all, have
been followed by no other consummation than the relapse of France
into the raging anarchy of Poland, or the sullen decrepitude of Turkey.
This will seem to some persons no better than fatalism. But, in truth,
there are two popular ways of reading the history of events between
1789 and 1794, and each of them seems to us as bad as the other.
According to one, whatever happened in the Revolution was good and
admirable, because it happened. According to the other, something

good and admirable was always attainable, and, if only bad men had
not interposed, always ready to happen. Of course, the only sensible
view is that many of the revolutionary solutions were detestable, but no
other solution was within reach. This is undoubtedly the best of
possible worlds; if the best is not so good as we could wish, that is the
fault of the possibilities. Such a doctrine is neither fatalism nor
optimism, but an honest recognition of long chains of cause and effect
in human affairs.
The great gathering of chosen men was first called States-General; then
it called itself National Assembly; it is commonly known in history as
the Constituent Assembly. The name is of ironical association, for the
constitution which it framed after much travail endured for no more
than a few months. Its deliberations lasted from May 1789 until
September 1791. Among its members were three principal groups.
There was, first, a band of blind adherents of the old system of
government with all or most of its abuses. Second, there was a Centre
of timid and one-eyed men, who were for transforming the old
absolutist system into something that should resemble the constitution
of our own country. Finally, there was a Left, with some differences of
shade, but all agreeing in the necessity of a thorough remodelling of
every institution and most of the usages of the country. 'Silence, you
thirty votes!' cried Mirabeau one day, when he was interrupted by the
dissents of the Mountain. This was the original measure of the party
that in the twinkling of an eye was to wield the destinies of France. In
our own time we have wondered at the rapidity with which a Chamber
that was one day on the point of bringing back the grandnephew of
Lewis the Sixteenth, found itself a little later voting that Republic
which has since been ratified by the nation, and has at this moment the
ardent good wishes of every enlightened politician in Europe. In the
same way it is startling to think that within three years of the beheading
of Lewis the Sixteenth, there was probably not one serious republican
in the representative assembly of France. Yet it is always so. We might
make just the same remark of the House of Commons at Westminster
in 1640, and of the Assembly of Massachusetts or of New York as late
as 1770. The final flash of a long unconscious train of thought or intent
is ever a surprise and a shock. It is a mistake to set these swift changes

down to political levity; they were due rather to quickness of political
intuition. It was the King's attempt at flight in the summer of 1791 that
first created a republican party. It was that unhappy exploit, and no
theoretical preferences, that awoke France to the necessity of choosing
between the sacrifice of monarchy and the restoration of territorial
aristocracy.
Political intuition was never one of Robespierre's conspicuous gifts.
But he had a doctrine that for a certain time served the same purpose.
Rousseau had kindled in him a fervid democratic enthusiasm, and