Hilaire Belloc

“ There are two avenues of approach westward into the heart of Gaul and two only. The great marches of the French eastward, which are the recurrent flood-tides of European history, pour up by every channel, cross the Alps at every pass, utilise the narrow gate of Belfort, the narrower gate of the Rhone, the gorge of the Meuse, the Cerdagne, the Somport, Roncesvalles. But in the ebb, when the outer peoples of Europe attempt invasion, two large ways alone satisfy that necessity at once for concentration and for a wide front which is essential to any attack upon a people permanently warlike. ”

“ Before that uneven crowd the long shadows of morning stood out sharply, thrown along the uneven paving of the narrow quays. They sang or jested; they jostled and could not order themselves. There were no soldiers among this first batch of the insurrection, nor even a body of the half-trained Militia, nor had they any guns. So they swarmed through the public archways under the Long Gallery, so they packed and surged in the square of the Carrousel. Before them were the walls of the central courtyard of the palace and a great gate shut against them. ”

“ In ten days all the delegates would meet upon the Champ de Mars for the anniversary of the Bastille: the change in men was to be confirmed in a vast meeting of friendship: the King was to swear and a world quite renewed was to arise. Even in London the blaze of the triumph had struck the street, and the common shows were preparing pictures and models of the feast. Upon this all Europe was turned as the delegates came swarming daily into the simmering July of Paris and as the altar rose upon the great open field by the river. ”

“ There was no guard, no decent covering for royalty, no dignity of pace or 97even of ornament; its pace was a flash, and its high gilding a theatrical décor; mixing with that flash and that gilding was the jangling of a hundred little bells.
The streets were all aghast at such a sight. Sèvres and the villages round Versailles had stared, bewildered, to see a Queen go by in such a fashion; but Paris was too great to be merely bewildered, and Paris grew angry, as might an individual at a personal insult offered. ”

“ The fatal name of “Autrichienne,” the foreign label that clung to her at the scaffold, originated in the drawing-rooms of the three old maids, and all around her, as her power to order or to fascinate increased, there increased also new hatreds which attained to permanence, because her German memories, her eager action, her crude and single aspect of the multitudinous and subtle French character, her rapid turning from this pleasure to that, her ignorance of books and of things, lent her no power to wear these courtiers down or to play a skilful game against them. ”

“ The simple and sincere expression which Versailles had never shown her, the quiet manliness which, in Northerners, is so often allied to courage and which stands in such contrast to the active virility of Gaul—all that which, in the secret places of her German heart, unknown to herself, she thought proper to a man, all that whose lack (though she could not analyse it) had disturbed and wounded her in the French palace, was apparent in the face before her. She asked his name, and heard that it was Fersen. ”

“ It might have been transformed into something of lower vigour than itself, it might have grown to forget action, and the nineteenth century, which was to see our civilisation ploughed by the armies and sowed by the ideas of Napoleon—so that it became a century enormous with French energy and has left us to-day under a necessity still to persevere—might have been a time of easy reaction: an Europe without Germany, without Italy: an Europe having in its midst the vast lethargic body of the French Monarchy and dominated wholly by the mercantile activity of England. ”

“ He had been but a chance visitor to Paris—a Swedish lad on his Grand Tour—when they had thus met for ever; during the critical first three years of her reign he had been away in his own country. He had returned, as I have said, in the summer of 1778. The worst of her torments was settled then: she was to be a mother; she might expect an heir to the throne; the adventure, the successful adventure, of America had begun. A position of womanhood and of rule, such dignities and such repose, might have paled or rendered ridiculous the chance passion of extreme youth: they did neither. ”

“ THE DIPLOMATIC REVOLUTION EUROPE, which carries the fate of the whole world, lives by a life which is in contrast to that of every other region, because that life, though intense, is inexhaustible. There is present, therefore, in her united history a dual function of maintenance and of change such as can be discovered neither in any one of her component parts nor in civilisations exterior to her own. Europe alone of all human groups is capable of transforming herself ceaselessly, not by the copying of foreign models, but in some creative way from within. ”

“ To cultivate such a soil, exactly one hour a day was spared when the Court was at Vienna—somewhat more when it was in the country—and these few minutes were consumed in nothing more methodical than a dialogue, little talks in which Vermond was fatally anxious to bring before his pupil (with her head full of those new French head-dresses of hers, the prospect of Versailles, and every other distraction of mind) only such subjects as might amuse her inattention. ”

“ WATTIGNIES Monday, the 14th of October:—
Oct. 14, 1793. 6 a.m. The fate of the Queen and of the Republic had each come to a final and critical issue when the light broke, dully in either place, over Paris and over the pastures of the frontier. There the army lay to arms in the valley, with Coburg entrenched upon the ridge above them, and beyond him the last famine of Maubeuge: from dawn the French lines could hear, half a day’s march to the northward, the regular boom of the bombardment. But Carnot was now come. ”

“ The roaring of voices in the Carrousel beyond the walls of the courtyard increased continually; the outer noise of the sea of Paris rose with it every moment, and on the first floor, where the Royal Family and some few advisers sat, all this gathering crowd outside the courtyard walls was watched by those who were responsible for the unity of the nation in face of the advancing invasion, and for the person of what was still the King. ”

“ Through the great windows the sky could be seen lowering for a storm. As she entered the private apartments to receive homage the darkness increased; the ceremony was not over before a first loud clap of thunder startled them; the rain fell with violence upon the populace that had crowded the gardens, the fireworks set out for that evening were drenched, the fine dresses of the Paris shop-women were spoiled: all the grandeur in front of the palace was lost in umbrellas. ”

“ Three armed bodies thus guarded the sweep of the railings and the approach to the palace in parallel order, and beyond them, right into the depths of the landscape, stretched a vast and confused mob filling up the three great avenues and crowding half the Place d’Armes; in that mob many of the armed Militia of Versailles, met at first in formation but now mingled with the populace, could be distinguished. ”

“ Yet no one was astonished—save perhaps the child to whom so vast a change was the climax of all that had bewildered her since she had first spoken to the French Court.
Maria Theresa and Mercy, her ambassador to Versailles, had that knowledge of the world which permitted each to find footing, even in such a welter. Each from a long experience knew well that the depth of political life moves slowly for all the violent changes of machinery or of names. Each felt the alliance—the object of all their solicitude—to be still standing, in spite of Choiseul’s fall ”

“ All these things were passing in the minds of the French peasants there, and Choiseul, who was also French, knew what was passing in their minds. There was something more: the country-side was armed. The Revolution had made of every village a tiny, ill-trained but furnished military post; of every market-town a section, with two guns and a team of gunners; of every city a rough volunteer garrison, with ammunition and with arms, without discipline for a campaign, but in a momentary scuffle possessed of the power to wound. ”

“ The Parisian crowd surrounded the Parlement in Paris and applauded: not for this or that, nor for the nature of the taxes protested, nor for anything but for that prime principle—that the States-General should be summoned. The Queen ordered economies: they came into force at once, that very week. Those who lost their posts became new enemies of hers: the economies were nothing to the crowd: she gained nothing with the public: she lost more with Versailles. ”

“ But in those moments when one jest perhaps might have put the King at the head of popular emotion again, he and his wife remained no more than what the decline of the Monarchy had made them; individuals in peril, and courageous; not the Nation incarnate.
If any Angel had for its function the preservation of the French Crown and Nation, that Angel, watching such a gulf between the people and the Monarchy, must have despaired of the latter’s hope and of the former’s survival: nevertheless, despite that divorce, the French people after grievous wounds have survived. ”

“ If it is asked why, with so little influence, the Queen’s perpetual interference was none the less permitted, and why this girl of eighteen, vivacious as she was ignorant, might ceaselessly bustle in and out of the council chamber, the answer is not that she was Queen—for no Queen had yet acted thus at Versailles, nor would any woman conscious of power have done so—but first that her whole self was now restless beyond bearing, and next that the King was ashamed to withstand her whom, afflicted as he was, he could hardly propose to command or regulate. ”

“ Necker, the symbol of the new claims, was to go—booted out at a moment’s notice, and over the frontier as well. A man of the Queen’s, a man who had been ambassador at Vienna, a very trusted servant of over fifty years continually with the Monarchy, a man of energy, strong stepping, loud, Breteuil was in one sharp moment to take his place. Old Broglie, brave and renowned, was to grasp the army—and the thing was done: the Assembly gone to smoke: the debating over: silence and ancient right restored. ”

“ Close on a million souls, say two hundred thousand men, capable of bearing arms, almost homogeneous in opinion, lay twelve miles down the valley, as full of rumour as a hive—at the sound of a musket they might rise and swarm. It was not a calculable thing; Paris might after half-an-hour of scuffle turn into a mere scattered crowd; there might be a fierce resistance, prolonged, bleeding authority to death unless a sufficient force contained Paris also, as the debaters at Versailles were already contained. ”

“ The Radicals, the Mountain, were at once the most enthusiastic and the most practical of the Revolutionary groups. They were not in power, they had not a permanent majority in the Parliament though they had Paris behind them, but they saw clearly that France was in to win: they saw clearly (first Danton, then in succession to him Carnot) that every general action lost, every fortress in a chain surrendered, was the approach not of some neutral or balancing arrangement, but of a full, complete and ruthless reaction in Europe without and in France within. ”

“ The ambitions of Joseph were the ambitions of a philosopher; they were at least as empty and by no means as thorough as the soldierly ambitions of his opponent the King of Prussia: the injury was mutual, the contempt of justice equal, for Joseph was a pupil of Frederick’s in wrong-doing. To each, however, the complex little territorial quarrel seemed of secular magnitude. Maria Theresa was maddened with anxiety, and wrote, so maddened, despairing appeals to her daughter at Versailles. Mercy moved all his persuasion to persuade the intervention of France. ”

“ The crowd pressed against the railings as a strong escort hurried the King and Queen across a little corner of the gardens to the deserted monastery next door. There were large candles thrust into the barrels of chance muskets: the night was calm and they could burn. By that faint and smoky light, which but just caught the faces of the crowd beyond, they hurried into the door of the Feuillants.
For many months no one had trodden the corridor of the place; the bricks of the flooring beneath their feet lay unevenly. ”

“ Outside, the crowd still denser but silent as ever, the berline passed, and the sections saluted—a reversed salute, on either side; it was within a furlong of its goal when, from a platform outside the Parliament building, a young member of the Royalist right, drawing himself well up that he might be observed, lifted his hat and very gravely and pronouncedly made obeisance to the Crown.
The spell was broken. There was a scuffle, a hubbub, a general war; the slowly-moving crowd crested into weapons as a deep swell at sea will crest into foam. The postillions of the berline urged their horses ”

“ A complete defeat of British regulars at the hands of the varied and uncertain minority of colonists, and the acknowledgment of American independence by a Britain unembarrassed in Europe, was an absurdity conceivable only to such enthusiastic boys as was then the young La Fayette, to such wholly unpractical minds as that of Turgot, or to popular journalists of the type which then, as to-day, are uninstructed whether in historical or in military affairs. ”

“ The rattle of new guns one morning woke from sleep the unknown Robespierre, who watched them from his window passing interminably under the July dawn; they baited their horses in the stables of the Queen. Of nearly all the troops so gathering one little portion, the half-irregular militia body (militia, but permanently armed) called “the French Guards,” was other than foreign. The “French Guards” might not indeed be reliable; but, as it was thought, they hardly counted. The rest were for the most part German-speaking mercenaries, the solid weapon of the Crown: and still they gathered. ”

“ The singular happiness of Maria Theresa’s wedded life was due to no greatness in Francis of Lorraine, but to his vivacity and good breeding, to his courtesy, to his refinement, and especially to his devotion. It suited her that he should ride and shoot so well. She loved the restrained intonation of his voice and the frankness of his face. She easily forgave his numerous and passing infidelities. The simplicity of his religion was her own, for her goodness was all German as his sincerity was all Western and French ”

“ The Feast of the Assumption has for centuries attracted the French by its peculiar sanctity. Even during that phase of infidelity, which, before the Revolution, covered all their intellect and still clings to the bulk of their lower middle classes, the French maintained it. Even to-day, when a fierce anti-Christian masonry has moulded groups of artisans and intellectuals into ardent champions against the Faith, the Assumption is universally observed. In the Court of Versailles, though now but a ceremony, it was the noblest ceremony of the year. ”

“ Such a shock the flight to Varennes had afforded. While the royal family were yet absent there had been talk against the very institution of the Crown; some rich men had spoken of the Republic; the Revolutionary exultation ran very high. The flight was arrested: the royal family were brought back, and in a sort of mechanical, unconscious way reaction gathered force; after all (the politicians thought) the nation must not lose, could not afford to lose, might lose its very soul in losing, the web of inheritance which had come to it from so many centuries. ”

“ There was an interval of puzzled silence about the person of the King. No one dreamt of a new power at Court. A nullity of action in the King himself, a few more stories, obscure and scandalous, the end of the reign and the accession of the heir who should bring with him such reforms as all the intellect of the country demanded: these were the expectations which followed her death, and especially were they the hope or the certitude of that group of men, mostly not noble, who had long managed both law and finance. ”

“ Consider the effect of this new manner of hers upon the public function of the French monarchy.
The French have, with their own hands, destroyed the conception of “a king”: in Europe to-day we look around and find nothing of monarchy remaining. A few impoverished symbols, a few indebted, a few insufficiently salaried men, of whose true character the public knows nothing, afford or do not afford unifying titles for a bureaucracy there, an oligarchy here: in Italy a national name, in Spain a moribund tradition. ”

“ Two sounds alone could pierce the clamour: the high bugle-call to which the French still mobilise, and the sullen fury of the drums. The horses, therefore, of the defenders in the courts of the palace, the continual clattering of their hoofs upon the paving, the clink of metal as the lines were formed, the tramp of the reinforcements arriving—all the movement of the six thousand who gathered to support the Crown, was set to this music, and the air they breathed was full of the noise of the bells. ”

“ If the Cardinal had any doubts at all they were easily dispersed. Cagliostro, who enjoyed the Illumination of the Seventh House and had powers from the other world, most strongly reassured him—for a fee; the seen and unseen powers all combined to reassure the fatuous Rohan, and he was ready, as June ended, to believe not only that he was in favour with the Queen but in very peculiar favour indeed, and that all this show of avoidance and silence upon her part was a mask necessary to conceal a deeply-rooted tenderness. ”

“ Then the Queen rose. Never until now had she abandoned before any but her husband, or perhaps in the very intimacy of the Council, the restraint which she believed her rank to demand. The violence of her blood had been apparent in many a petulant and many an undignified gesture; she had raised her voice against many a deputation; she had sneered more than once against women of a poorer kind; she had thrown at La Fayette the keys which he demanded on their return to the palace after the flight to Varennes ”

“ The Polignac clique demanded and obtained on every side. It was a double evil: a proof to the Court that the aristocracy as a whole were excluded from favour and that a faction ruled; a proof to the nation that, at a time when finance was the known burden, and when, in the midst of prosperity, a permanent crisis weighed on the impatient poor and the public forces alike, the executive, the King, could blindly spend money and endow every Polignac claim. The sums involved in this patronage of the Polignacs, as in every other public extravagance of the French, were small. ”

“ She could not so much as conceive humanity to be capable of organisation save by the direct action of a few placed above it.
Of military qualities she understood nothing. She confused order, silence, and similarity of buttons with discipline. She had no conception of ferocity as the raw material of valour. Safe out of Paris she would without a moment’s hesitation have ordered the invasion, and she would have expected its successful issue in less than six weeks. Even in Paris she would have bargained to conquer with a “whiff of grape-shot” or some such rubbish ”

“ In so determining to effect an alliance between the Hapsburgs and their secular enemy, Kaunitz equally determined, unknown to himself, the whole fortunes of Marie Antoinette; she, years later, when she came to be born to the Imperial house, was, even in childhood, the pledge he needed. It is Kaunitz who stands forever behind the life of Marie Antoinette, like a writer behind the creature in his book. It is he who designs her marriage, who uses her without mercy for the purposes of his policy at Versailles; he is the author of her magnificence and of her intrigue ”