William Pitt and the Great War. J. Holland Rose
out the insidious notion that the course of events was inevitable. Nine persons out of ten have recourse to that easy but fallacious way of explaining events. The whole war, they say, or think, was inevitable. It was fated that the Duke of Brunswick should issue his threatening manifesto to the Parisians if violence were offered to Louis XVI; that they should resent the threat, rise in revolt, and dethrone the King, and thereafter massacre royalists in the prisons. The innate vigour of the democratic cause further required that the French should stand their ground at Valmy and win a pitched battle at Jemappes, that victory leading to an exaltation of soul in which the French Republicans pushed on their claims in such a way as to bring England into the field. History, when written in this way, is a symmetrical mosaic; and the human mind loves patterns.
But events are not neatly chiselled; they do not fall into geometrical groups, however much the memory, for its own ease, seeks to arrange them thus. Their edges are jagged; and the slightest jar might have sent them in different ways. To recur to the events in question: the Duke of Brunswick objected to issuing the manifesto, and only owing to the weariness or weakness of old age, yielded to the insistence of the émigrés at his headquarters: the insurrection at Paris came about doubtfully and fitfully; the issue on 10th August hung mainly on the personal bearing of the King; the massacres were the work of an insignificant minority, which the vast mass regarded with sheer stupefaction; and even the proclamation of the French Republic by the National Convention on 21st September was not without many searchings of heart.[83]
Meanwhile Pitt and Grenville had not the slightest inkling as to the trend of events. The latter on 13th July 1792 wrote thus to Earl Gower at Paris: "My speculations are that the first entrance of the foreign troops [into France] will be followed by negotiations; but how they are to end, or what possibility there is to establish any form of government, or any order in France, is far beyond any conjectures I can form."[84] This uncertainty is illuminating. It shows that Pitt and Grenville were not farseeing schemers bent on undermining the liberties of France and Britain by a war on which they had long resolved, but fallible mortals, unable to see a handbreadth through the turmoil, but cherishing the hope that somehow all would soon become clear. As to British policy during the summer of 1792, it may be classed as masterly inactivity or nervous passivity, according to the standpoint of the critic. In one case alone did Pitt and Grenville take a step displeasing to the French Government, namely, by recalling Gower from the embassy at Paris; and this was due to the fall of the French monarchy on 10th August, and to the danger attending the residence of a noble in Paris. Only by a display of firmness did Gower and his secretary, Lindsay, succeed in obtaining passports from the new Foreign Minister, Lebrun.[85]
That follower of Dumouriez had as colleagues the former Girondin Ministers, Clavière, Roland, and Servan. Besides them were Monge (the physicist) for the Navy, and Danton for Justice, the latter a far from reassuring choice, as he was known to be largely responsible for the massacres in the prisons of Paris early in September. Little is known about the publicist, Lebrun, on whom now rested the duty of negotiating with England, Spain, Holland, etc. It is one of the astonishing facts of this time that unknown men leaped to the front at Paris, directed affairs to momentous issues, and then sank into obscurity or perished. The Genevese Clavière started assignats and managed revolutionary finance; Servan controlled the War Office for some months with much ability, and then fell; Pétion, Santerre, the popular Paris brewer, and an ex-hawker, Hanriot, were successively rulers of Paris for a brief space.
But of all the puzzles of this time Lebrun is perhaps the chief. In his thirtieth year he was Foreign Minister of France, when she broke with England, Holland, Spain, and the Empire. He is believed by many (e.g., by W. A. Miles, who knew him well) to be largely responsible for those wars. Yet who was this Lebrun? Before the Revolution he had to leave France for his advanced opinions, and took refuge at Liége, where Miles found him toiling for a scanty pittance at journalistic hack-work. Suffering much at the hands of the Austrians in 1790, he fled back to Paris, joined the Girondins, wrote for them, made himself useful to Dumouriez during his tenure of the Foreign Office, and, not long after his resignation, stepped into his shoes and appropriated his policy. In order to finish with him here, we may note that he voted for the death of Louis XVI, and, as President of the Executive Council at that time, signed the order for the execution. He and other Girondins were driven from power on 2nd June 1793 (when Hanriot's brazen voice decided the fate of the Girondins) and he was guillotined on 23rd December of that year, for the alleged crime of conspiring to place Philippe Egalité on the throne. Mme. Roland, who helped Lebrun to rise to power, limns his portrait in these sharp outlines: "He passed for a wise man, because he showed no kind of élan; and for a clever man, because he was a fairly good clerk; but he possessed neither activity, intellect, nor force of character." The want of élan seems to be a term relative merely to the characteristics of the Girondins, who, whatever they lacked, had that Gallic quality in rich measure.
Chauvelin, the French ambassador in London, is another of these revolutionary rockets. Only in fiction and the drama does he stand forth at all clearly to the eye. History knows him not, except that he had been a marquis, then took up with the Girondins, finally shot up among the Jacobins and made much noise by his intrigues and despatches. With all his showiness and vanity he had enough shrewdness to suit his language at the French embassy in Portman Square to the Jacobin jargon of the times. After the September massacres the only hope for an aristocratic envoy was to figure as an irreproachable patriot. Chauvelin's dealings with the English malcontents therefore became more and more pronounced; for indeed they served both as a life insurance and as a means of annoying Pitt and Grenville in return for their refusal to recognize him as the ambassador of the new Republic. Londoners in general sided with the Ministry and snubbed the French envoys. Dumont describes their annoyance, during a visit to Ranelagh, at being received everywhere with the audible whisper, "Here comes the French embassy"; whereupon faces were turned away and a wide space was left around them.[86]
Such, then, were the men on whom largely rested the future of Europe. Lebrun mistook fussiness for activity. At a time when tact and dignity prescribed a diminution of the staff at Portman Square, he sent two almost untried men, Noël and, a little later, Benoît, to help Chauvelin to mark time. Talleyrand also gained permission to return to London as adjoint to Chauvelin, which, it appears, was the only safe means of escaping from Paris. Chauvelin speedily quarrelled with him. But the doings of the French embassy concern us little for the present, as Pitt and Grenville paid no attention to the offers, similar to those made in April, which Lebrun charged his envoys to make for an Anglo-French alliance. It is not surprising, after the September massacres, that Ministers should hold sternly aloof from the French envoys; but we may note that Miles considered their attitude most unwise. He further remarked that the proud reserve of Grenville was almost offensive.[87] We made the acquaintance of Miles as British agent at Paris in 1790 and noted his consequential airs. In 1792 they were full blown.
The opinions of George III and Pitt on the events of that bloody harvest-time in Paris are very little known. The King's letters from Weymouth to Pitt in August–September are few and brief. On 16th September, after the arrival of news of the massacres, he writes to say that his decision respecting the Prince of Wales's debts is irrevocable. After that there is a long silence. Pitt's reserve is equally impenetrable. We know, however, from the letters of Burke that the conduct of Ministers deeply disappointed him. Writing to Grenville on 19th September he says that the crisis exceeds in gravity any that is recorded in history; and he adds these curious words: "I know it is the opinion of His Majesty's Ministers that the new [French] principles may be encouraged, and even triumph over every interior and exterior resistance, and may even overturn other States as they have that of France, without any sort of danger of their extending in their consequences to this Kingdom."[88] Can we have a clearer testimony to the calm but rigid resolve with which Pitt and his colleague clung to neutrality? On the following day (the day of the Battle of Valmy) Pitt frigidly declined the request of the Austrian and Neapolitan ambassadors, that the British Government would exclude from its territories all those who should be guilty of an attack on the French royal family. On 21st September Grenville issued a guarded statement on this subject to the corps diplomatique; but it was far from meeting the desires of the royalists.[89]
Reticence is a virtue over-developed in an aristocracy—"that austere domination," as Burke terms it. The virtue is slow in taking root among democracies.