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

he had given his word and meant to keep it.

      Forty years later Charles X. declared that his brother had mounted the scaffold because, at this juncture, he would not mount his horse. In truth Lewis believed that the deputies, cut off from Paris by visible battalions, would be overawed, that the army of waverers would be accessible to influence, to promises, remonstrances, and rewards, that it would be safer to coerce the Assembly by intimidation than to dissolve it. He had refused to listen to Talleyrand; he still rejected the stronger part of his scheme. By judicious management he hoped that the Assembly might be brought to undo its own usurping and unwarranted work, and that he would be able to recover the position he had taken up on June 23, the last day on which his policy had been that of a free agent.

      Necker knew no more than everybody else of the warlike array. On July 7 thirty regiments were concentrated; more were within a few days' march, and the marshal, surrounded by an eager and hurried staff, surveyed his maps of suburban Paris at his headquarters at Versailles.

      The peril grew day by day, and it was time for the Assembly to act. They were defenceless, but they relied on the people of Paris and on the demoralisation of the army. Their friends had the command of money, and large sums were spent in preparing the citizens for an armed conflict. For the capitalists were on their side, looking to them to prevent the national bankruptcy which the Court and the nobles were bringing on. And the Palais Royal, the residence of the Duke of Orleans, was the centre of an active organisation. Since the king had proved himself incompetent, helpless, and insincere, men had looked to the Duke as a popular prince of the Blood, who was also wealthy and ambitious, and might avail to save the principle of monarchy, which Lewis had discredited. His friends clung to the idea, and continued to conspire in his interest after the rest of the world had been repelled by the defects of his character. For a moment they thought of his son, who was gifted for that dangerous part as perfectly as the father was unfit, but his time was to be in a later generation.

      The leading men in the Assembly knew their position with accuracy, and did not exaggerate the danger they were in. On July 10 their shrewd American adviser, Morris, wrote: "I think the crisis is past without having been perceived; and now a free Constitution will be the certain result." And yet there were 30,000 men, commanded by a marshal of France, ready for action; and several regiments of Swiss, famed for fidelity and valour, and destined, in the same cause, to become still more famous, were massed in Paris itself under Besenval, the trusted soldier of the Court.

      On July 8, breaking through the order of debate, Mirabeau rose and the action began – the action which changed the face of the world, and the imperishable effects of which will be felt by every one of us, to the last day of his life. He moved an address to the king, warning him that, if he did not withdraw his troops, the streets of Paris would run blood; and proposing that the preservation of order should be committed to a civic guard. On the following day the Assembly voted the address, and on the 10th the Count de Clermont Tonnerre, at the head of a deputation, read it to the king. On the morning of Saturday, 11th, his reply was communicated to the Assembly. He had had three days to hasten his military preparations. At Paris, the agitators and organisers employed the time in arranging their counter measures.

      The king refused to send away troops which there had been good reason to collect, but he was ready to move, with the Assembly, to some town at a distance from the turbid capital. The royal message was tipped with irony, and the deputies, in spite of Mirabeau, resolved not to discuss it. After this first thrust Lewis flung away the scabbard. That day, at council, it was noticed that he was nervous and uneasy, and disguised his restlessness by feigning sleep. At the end, taking one of the ministers aside, he gave him a letter for Necker, who was absent. The letter contained his dismissal, with an order for banishment.

      Necker, who for some days had known that it must come, was at dinner. He said nothing to his company, and went out, as usual, for a drive. Then he made for the frontier, and never stopped till he reached Brussels. Two horsemen who had followed, keeping out of sight, had orders to arrest him if he changed his course. He travelled up the Rhine to his own country, on the way to his home by the lake of Geneva. At the first Swiss hotel he found the Duchess de Polignac. He had left her at Versailles, the Queen's best friend and the heart of the intrigue against him; and she was now ruined and an exile, and the forerunner of the emigration. From her, and from the letters that quickly followed, forwarded by the Assembly, he learned the events that had happened since his fall, learned that he was, for one delirious moment, master of the king, of his enemies, and of the country.

      The astounding news that Necker heard at "The Three Kings" at Bâle was this. His friends had been disgraced with him, and the chief of the new ministry was Breteuil, who had been the colleague of Calonne and Vergennes, and had managed the affair of the Diamond Necklace. He had directed the policy of those who opposed the National Assembly, holding himself in the twilight, until strong measures and a strong man were called for. He now came forward, and proposed that the nobles should depart in a body, protesting against the methods by which the States-General had been sunk in the National Assembly. In one day he brought round twenty-six of the minority to his views. A few remained, who would make a light day's work for a man of conviction and resource. But resolute as Breteuil was, the Parisian democracy acted with still greater quickness and decision, and with a not less certain aim. On the 12th it became known that Necker had been sent out of the country, and that the armaments were in the hands of men who meant to employ them against the people. Paris was in disorder, but the middle class provided a civic guard for its protection. There were encounters with the troops, and some blood was shed.

      New men began to appear who represented the rising classes: Camille Desmoulins, a rhetorical journalist, with literary but not political talent, harangued the people in the garden of the Palais Royal; and one of the strong men of history, Danton, showed that he knew how to manage and to direct the masses.

      The 13th was a day wasted by Government, spent by Paris in busy preparation. Men talked wildly of destroying the Bastille, as a sign that would be understood. Early on July 14 a body of men made their way to the Invalides, and seized 28,000 stand of arms and some cannon. At the other extremity of Paris the ancient fortress of the Bastille towered over the workmen's quarter and commanded the city. Whenever the guns thundered from its lofty battlements, resistance would be over, and the conquered arms would be unavailing.

      The Bastille not only overshadowed the capital, but it darkened the hearts of men, for it had been notorious for centuries as the instrument and the emblem of tyranny. The captives behind its bars were few and uninteresting; but the wide world knew the horror of its history, the blighted lives, the ruined families, the three thousand dishonoured graves within the precincts, and the common voice called for its destruction as the sign of deliverance. At the elections both nobles and commons demanded that it should be levelled with the ground.

      As early as the 4th of July Besenval received notice that it would be attacked. He sent a detachment of Swiss, that raised the garrison to one hundred and thirty-eight, and he did no more. During the morning hours, while the invaders of the Invalides were distributing the plundered arms and ammunition, emissaries penetrated into the Bastille, under various pretexts, to observe the defences. One fair-spoken visitor was taken to the top of the dreaded towers, where he saw that the guns with which the embrasures had bristled, which were beyond the range of marksmen, and had Paris at their mercy, were dismantled and could not be fired.

      About the middle of the day, when this was known, the attack began. It was directed by the Gardes Françaises, who had been the first to mutiny, and had been disbanded, and were now the backbone of the people's army. The siege consisted in efforts to lower the drawbridge. After several hours the massive walls were unshaken, and the place was as safe as before the first discharge. But the defenders knew that they were lost. Besenval was not the man to rescue them by fighting his way through several miles of streets. They were not provisioned, and the men urged the governor to make terms before he was compelled. They had brought down above a hundred of their assailants, without losing a man. But it was plain that the loss neither of a hundred nor of a thousand would affect the stern determination of the crowd, whilst it might increase their fury. Delauney, in his despair, seized a match, and wanted to fire the magazine. His men remonstrated and spoke of the dreadful devastation that must follow the explosion. The man who stayed the hand of the despairing commander, and whose name was Bécard,