Lectures on the French Revolution. Acton John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, Baron

the belief that he was not waiting in vain. He received overtures from Mirabeau. Until that time Mirabeau had been notorious for the obtrusive scandal of his life, and the books he had written under pressure of need did not restore his good name. People avoided him, not because he was brutal and vicious like other men of his rank, but because he was reputed a liar and a thief. During one of his imprisonments he had obtained from Dupont de Nemours communication of an important memoir embodying Turgot's ideas on local government. He copied the manuscript, presented it to the minister as his own work, and sold another copy to the booksellers as the work of Turgot. Afterwards he offered to suppress his letters from Prussia if the Government would buy them at the price he could obtain by publishing them. Montmorin paid what he asked for, on condition that he renounced his candidature in Provence. Mirabeau agreed, spent the money on his canvass, and made more by printing what he had sold to the king. During the contest, by his coolness, audacity, and resource, he soon acquired ascendency. The nobles who rejected him were made to feel his power. When tumults broke out, he appeased them by his presence, and he moved from Marseilles to Aix escorted by a retinue of 200 carriages. Elected in both places by the Third Estate, he came to Versailles hoping to repair his fortune. There it was soon apparent that he possessed powers of mind equal to the baseness of his conduct. He is described by Malouet as the only man who perceived from the first where the Revolution was tending; and his enemy Mounier avows that he never met a more intelligent politician. He was always ready to speak, and always vigorous and adroit. His renowned orations were often borrowed, for he surrounded himself with able men, mostly Genevese, versed in civil strife, who supplied him with facts, mediated with the public, and helped him in the press. Rivarol said that his head was a gigantic sponge, swelled out with other men's ideas. As extempore speaking was a new art, and the ablest men read their speeches, Mirabeau was at once an effective debater – probably the best debater, though not the most perfect orator, that has appeared in the splendid record of parliamentary life in France. His father was one of the most conspicuous economists, and he inherited their belief in a popular and active monarchy, and their preference for a single chamber.

      In 1784 he visited London, frequented the Whigs, and supplied Burke with a quotation. He did not love England, but he thought it a convincing proof of the efficacy of paper Constitutions, that a few laws for the protection of personal liberty should be sufficient to make a corrupt and ignorant people prosper.

      His keynote was to abandon privilege and to retain the prerogative; for he aspired to sway the monarchy, and would not destroy the power he was to wield. The king, he said, is the State, and can do no wrong. Therefore he was at times the most violent and indiscreet of men, and at times unaccountably moderate and reserved; and both parts were carefully prepared. As he had a fixed purpose before him, but neither principle nor scruple, no emergency found him at a loss, or embarrassed by a cargo of consistent maxims. Incalculable, and unfit to trust in daily life, at a crisis he was the surest and most available force. From the first moment he came to the front. On the opening day he was ready with a plan for a consultation in common, before deciding whether they should act jointly or separately. The next day he started a newspaper, in the shape of a report to his constituents, and when the Government attempted to suppress it, he succeeded, May 19, in establishing the liberty of the press.

      The first political club, afterwards that of the Jacobins, was founded, at his instigation, by men who did not know the meaning of a club. For, he said to them, ten men acting together can make a hundred thousand tremble apart from each other. Mirabeau began with caution, for his materials were new and he had no friends. He believed that the king was really identified with the magnates, and that the Commons were totally unprepared to confront either the court or the approaching Revolution. He thought it hopeless to negotiate with his own doomed order, and meant to detach the king from them. When the scheme of conciliation failed, his opportunity came. He requested Malouet to bring him into communication with ministers. He told him that he was seriously alarmed, that the nobles meant to push resistance to extremity, and that his reliance was on the Crown. He promised, if the Government would admit him to their confidence, to support their policy with all his might. Montmorin refused to see him. Necker reluctantly consented. He had a way of pointing his nose at the ceiling, which was not conciliatory, and he received the hated visitor with a request to know what proposals he had to make. Mirabeau, purple with rage at this frigid treatment by the man he had come to save, replied that he proposed to wish him good morning. To Malouet he said, "Your friend is a fool, and he will soon have news of me." Necker lived to regret that he had thrown such a chance away. At the time, the interview only helped to persuade him that the Commons knew their weakness, and felt the need of his succour.

      Just then the expected appeal reached him from the ecclesiastical quarter. When it was seen that the nobles could not be constrained by fair words, the Commons made one more experiment with the clergy. On May 27 they sent a numerous and weighty deputation to adjure them, in the name of the God of peace and of the national welfare, not to abandon the cause of united action. The clergy this time invoked the interposition of Government.

      On the 30th conferences were once more opened, and the ministers were present. The discussion was as inconclusive as before, and, on June 4, Necker produced a plan of his own. He proposed, in substance, separate verification, the crown to decide in last instance. It was a solution favourable to the privileged orders, one of which had appealed to him. He wanted their money, not their power. The clergy agreed. The Commons were embarrassed what to do, but were quickly relieved; for the nobles replied that they had already decided simply to try their own cases. By this act, on June 9, negotiations were broken off.

      The decision had been taken in the apartments of the Duchess of Polignac, the queen's familiar friend, and it made a breach between the court and the minister at the first step he had taken since the Assembly met. Up to this point the aristocracy were intelligible and consistent. They would make no beginning of surrender until they knew how far it would lead them, or put themselves at the mercy of a hostile majority without any assurance for private rights. Malouet offered them a guarantee, but he was disavowed by his colleagues in a way that warned the nobles not to be too trusting.

      Nobody could say how far the edifice of privilege was condemned to crumble, or what nucleus of feudal property, however secured by contract and prescription, would be suffered to remain. The nobles felt justified in defending things which were their own by law, by centuries of unquestioned possession, by purchase and inheritance, by sanction of government, by the express will of their constituents. In upholding the interest, and the very existence, of the class they represented, they might well believe that they acted in the spirit of true liberty, which depends on the multiplicity of checking forces, and that they were saving the throne. From the engagement to renounce fiscal exemption, and submit to the equal burden of taxation, they did not recede, and they claimed the support of the king. Montlosier, who belonged to their order, pronounced that their case was good and their argument bad. Twice they gave the enemy an advantage. When they saw the clergy waver, they resolved, by their usual majority of 197 to 44, that each order possessed the right of nullification; so that they would no more yield to the separate vote of the three Estates than to their united vote. Evidently the country would support those who denied the veto and were ready to overrule it, against those who gave no hope that anything would be done. Again, when they declined the Government proposals, they isolated themselves, and became an obstruction. They had lost the clergy. They now repulsed the minister. Nothing was left them except their hopes of the king. They ruined him as well as themselves. It did not follow that, because they supported the monarchy, they were sure of the monarch. And it was a graver miscalculation to think that a regular army is stronger than an undisciplined mob, and that the turbulent Parisians, eight miles off, could not protect the deputies against regiments of horse and foot, commanded by the gallant gentlemen of France, accustomed for centuries to pay the tax of blood, and fighting now in their own cause.

      There was nothing more to be done. The arts of peace were exhausted. A deliberate breach with legality could alone fulfil the national decree. The country had grown tired of dilatory tactics and prolonged inaction. Conciliation, tried by the Commons, by the clergy, and by the Government, had been vain. The point was reached where it was necessary to choose between compulsion and surrender, and the Commons must either employ the means at their command to overcome resistance, or go away confessing that the great movement had broken down in their hands, and that the people had elected the wrong