Historical Characters. Henry Bulwer
voice, he had no right to sit among the nobles, he became the successful candidate of the tiers-état for Aix; and at the meeting of the States-General stood before the ministry which had accused, and the aristocracy which had repudiated him, a daring and formidable enemy.
But, though made a desperate man by circumstances, he was not so either by inclination or by ideas.
His views for France were limited to the procuring it a representative government; and his views for himself were those which frequently lead ambitious men under such a government to adopt opposition as a road to power. “Tribun par calcul,” as was justly said of him by a contemporary,19 “aristocrat par goût.” He aimed at obtaining for his country a constitution, and being minister of the crown under that constitution.
M. de Talleyrand had the same wish, and probably the same ambition. These two statesmen, therefore, would naturally, at the meeting of the States-General, have acted together as two private friends who thought the same on public matters. But the publication of “The Secret History of the Court of Berlin,” offensive to the minister who had employed Mirabeau, could not be otherwise than painful and disagreeable to M. de Talleyrand, at whose intercession Mirabeau had been employed, and to whom, indeed, Mirabeau’s correspondence had been principally addressed. This circumstance had, therefore, produced a cessation of all private intimacy between these two personages who were about to exercise so great an influence over approaching events. It is difficult, however, for two men to act a prominent part on the same side for any length of time in a popular assembly, and this at a great national crisis, without relapsing into an old acquaintance, or forming a new one. To what extent the old relations between Mirabeau and M. de Talleyrand were thus renewed, it is difficult to say, but that on the 21st of October, 1789, they already talked together with some degree of intimacy is evident from a letter of Mirabeau to the Comte de la Marck, in which letter Mirabeau states that he had been told the history of a secret political intrigue by the Bishop of Autun.20
About this time, too, it is now known that Mirabeau projected a ministry to which I have already alluded, and in which he and M. de Talleyrand were to be united. Had this ministry been formed, it is very possible that the history of France during the next sixty years would have been different.
But the most fatal measure adopted by the Assembly was that (November 9, 1789) which prevented any of its members from being minister during its continuance, and from entering the service of the crown for two years after its dissolution. The consequences of this resolution, aimed at those who, like Mirabeau and Talleyrand, were hoping to erect a constitutional government, and to have the direction of it, were incalculable. The persons at that time who had most influence in the Assembly were men with moderate opinions, great talents, and great ambition. Had such men been placed as the head of affairs they might have controlled them and established a government at once popular and safe. But this new regulation prevented those who were powerful as representatives of the people from using their influence in supporting the executive power of the crown. It drove them, moreover, if their passions were violent and their positions desperate, to seek for power by means hostile to the constitution which annihilated their hopes.
It had this effect upon Mirabeau; and his sentiments becoming known to the court, a sort of alliance established itself between them in the spring of 1790; – an alliance entered into too late (since most of the great questions on which Mirabeau’s influence might have been useful were already decided) and most absurdly carried on; for whilst the King opened to Mirabeau his purse, he shut from him his confidence, and at first, and for a long time, exacted that the compact he had entered into with the great orator for the defence of his throne should be kept altogether secret, even from his own ministers.21
Mirabeau was to advise the King in secret, to help him indirectly in public; but he was not to have the King’s countenance, and he was to be thwarted and opposed by the King’s friends.
The error which both parties to this arrangement committed was the result of the feeble and irresolute character of the one, who never did anything wholly and sincerely, and of the over-bold and over-confident character of the other, who never doubted that whatever he attempted must succeed, and who now easily persuaded himself that having vanquished the difficulty of opening a communication with the court, he should promptly vanquish that of governing it. Indeed, the desire of Mirabeau to serve the crown being sincere, and his ability to do so evident, he (not unnaturally perhaps) felt convinced that his sincerity would be trusted, and his talents given fair play.
But it is clear that the King thought of buying off a dangerous enemy, and not of gaining a determined ally. Thus he went on supplying Mirabeau’s wants, receiving Mirabeau’s reports, attending little to Mirabeau’s counsels, until matters got so bad that even the irresolution of Louis XVI. was vanquished (this was about the end of 1790), and then, for the first time, was seriously entertained a plan which the daring orator had long ago advised, but which the King had never, up to that period, rejected nor yet sanctioned.
This plan consisted in withdrawing the King from Paris; surrounding him with troops still faithful, and by the aid of a new assembly, for which public opinion was to be prepared, reforming the constitution – now on the point of being completed – a constitution which, while it pretended to be monarchical, not only prevented the monarch from practically exercising any power without the express permission of a popular assembly, but established, as its fundamental theory, that the King was merely the executor of that assembly’s sovereign authority: an addition which, at first sight, may seem of small importance, but which, as it was calculated daily to influence the spirit of men’s actions, could not but have an immense effect on the daily working of their institutions. Nor was this all. Nations, like individuals, have, so to speak, two wills: that of the moment – the result of passion, caprice, and impulse; and that of leisure and deliberation – the result of foresight, prudence, and reason. All free governments possessing any solidity (whatever their appellation) have, for this reason, contained a power of some kind calculated to represent the maturer judgment of the people and to check the spontaneous, violent, and changeful ebullitions of popular excitement. Even this barrier, however, was not here interposed between a chamber which was to have all the influence in the State, and a chief magistrate who was to have none.
The constitution about to be passed was, in short, an impracticable one, and no person saw this more clearly than Mirabeau; but, whilst ready and desirous to destroy it, he by no means lent himself to the ideas, though he was somewhat subjugated by the charms of Marie-Antoinette.
“Je serai ce que j’ai été toujours,” he says in a letter to the King, 15th December, 1790, “défenseur du pouvoir monarchique réglé par les lois; apôtre de la liberté garantie par le pouvoir monarchique.”22
Thus he undertook the difficult and almost impossible enterprise of rescuing liberty at the same time from a monarch in the hands of courtiers enthusiastic for absolute power, and from a mob under the influence of clubs, which intended to trample constitutional monarchy under the feet of a democratical despotism.
I have narrated what had undoubtedly been Mirabeau’s projects; for we have to consider what were probably his thoughts when, in acute suffering but with an unclouded mind and a clear prescience of his approaching dissolution, he summoned his former friend, with whom, it is said, he was never till that instant completely reconciled, to the couch from which he was no more to rise.
Must we not suppose that Mirabeau in this, his last conversation with M. de Talleyrand, spoke of the schemes which then filled his mind? And does it not seem probable that he at that hour conceived the Bishop of Autun to be the person best fitted to fill the difficult position which he himself was about to leave vacant, and amidst the various intrigues and combinations of which it required so much skill to steer?
For this supposition there are many plausible reasons. M. de Talleyrand, like Mirabeau, was an aristocrat by birth, a liberal by circumstances and opinion; he was also one of the members of the Assembly, who possessed the greatest authority over that portion of it which Mirabeau himself influenced; and likewise one of a very small number of members upon whom M. de Montmorin, the
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When M. Mercy, the Austrian ambassador, and for a long time the intermediate agent between the court and Mirabeau, left Paris, M. de Montmorin, the minister of foreign affairs, was, without the knowledge of his colleagues, admitted into the secret of the court’s engagements, and authorised to correspond with Mirabeau concerning their execution.
“I shall be what I have always been, the defender of the monarchical power, regulated by the laws; the apostle of liberty, guaranteed by the monarchical power.”