The Years of Endurance (11 page)

Thus the first act of the new deal or Revolution which was to restore France to its primitive basis of national virtue was not one of reasoned agreement but of unilateral violence. The next was the storming of the Bastille. For, confronted by delays and contradictions,
the
People grew impatient and suspicious. Some malignant influence was keeping them back from the paradise they had been promised. In Paris they were not only distrustful but hungry. The monopolists of grain saw to that. And the politically ambitious and the speculators who thrive by fluctuation and uncertainty

¹
" The Tiers Etat by their nature and their occupations must ever be strangers to political passions. Their intelligence and goodness of disposition are a sufficient guarantee against all the apprehensions at present entertained at their excesses."—Mem. de Necker, cited Alison, I, 404
.

whenever the ordinary processes of production cease to be profitable saw to it that the people had plenty of rumours and provocations to make
them
restless. With the summer heats came vague unaccountable fears—tales of bands of robbers and murderers pouring in from the provinces and of military massacres planned by an Austrian Queen. They were the presage of revolutionary change; of society dragging at its anchors. On July nth, on news that the King had dismissed Necker, the mob rose. On the 13th, joined by many of the soldiers, it seized the arms in the gr
eat arsenal of the Invalides. N
ext day it stormed the Bastille.

The submerged tenth of Paris bore little resemblance to that shining and virtuous Humanity acclaimed by the Philosophers. It was obscene, destructive and, once it had tasted blood, sadistically cruel. But there was no mistaking the terrible authenticity of its voice. Before it the easy-going, good-natured King surrendered. He rode humbly into Paris and made his peace with the illegally constituted Municipality. On the balcony of the Hotel de Ville he donned the revolutionary tricolour.

" Sire," cried an onlooker,
with that cockade and the Third Estate, you will conquer Europe."

A confused period of fear and popular tumult followed. The anchor of the
ancien
regime
had gone. In the provinces reactionary noblemen were chased by mobs down sunlit streets or fled across the frontiers while behind them the funeral pyre of their chateaux and muniment rooms, stuffed with ancient servile charters, lit up the August sky. All one delirious night in the National Assembly an excited handful of nobles and churchmen who had thrown in their lot with the Third Estate rose amid cheering and weeping to propose the surrender $f one after another of their venerable privileges. In
the
colder light of dawn a new France of social and political equality was born. The feudal system had been abolished overnight.

France in those autumn months of 1789 seemed like a giant awakening from sleep. Her people were gripped by a strange fanatic fervour. " The public highways were crowded with enthusiasts, some shouting the watchwords of
the
Revolution, others disputing on the most abstract principles of the universal constitution which they fully believed that all
the
nations of the earth were sho
rtly
to adopt: the most ignorant among them confident of his fitness for the highest duties of a legislator and all prepared to shed their blood in the defence of the
inalienable sovereignty of the
self-governed people."
¹
Nothing like it had been seen on earth since the day when the English Fifth Monarchists had hailed the imminent advent of Christ. " We desire," cried one deputy, " to make a Declaration for all men, for all times, for every country, that will be an example to the whole world." The first of the human species outside France to acclaim the Rights of Man were the negro slaves of Santo Domingo, who under its influence rose and massacred their French masters.

For from the start the Revolution was dogged by an evil fatality. It arose from an inherent conflict between the ideal the revolutionary theorists pursued and the human reality in which their lot was cast. The men who orated so splendidly at Versailles or debated in the Paris democratic clubs on how to make a new France were not statesmen carefully navigating the ship of state through the shifting political and economic facts of the hour. They were dreamers who had seen a vision, sleepwalkers without eyes for the obstacles at their feet. They thought that men were just and rational instead of violent, unreasoning and passionate creatures; that they were swayed solely by love of the commonwealth instead of by greed and self-interest. But the ignorance of the multitude and harsh economic reality did not disappear merely because the representatives of
the
People had abolished a few irrational laws.

During the summer and autumn of 1789 Paris, its population

swollen by political excitement, became ever shorter of bread. The

forestallers of wheat, aided by the we
akening of the executive power,
drove the price up to new and dangerous levels. On October
5th
an
armed mob, incited by the orators of the Pa
lais Royal, set out to
cover the thirteen miles to Versail
les. It was partly composed of
women, many of them showing
masculine legs striding beneath
their petticoats. The King retur
ning from hunting in the forest
found his Palace surrounded. While the Co
urt debated the pros
and cons of flight, the Guard w
as relieved by the half-trained
Citizen Army which under the l
iberal Marquis de Lafayette had
followed the crowd out from the cap
ital. In the early hours of the
6th
a mob broke into the Queen's bedchamber
: hurried flight down
a secret passage alone averted tragedy. Prese
ntly
an unappeasable

¹
S, T. Coleridge,
The Friend,
Section I, Essay III. In the light of later experience this early adherent of the Revolution gave it as his opinion that a " constitution equally suited to China and America or to Russia and Great Britain must be equally unfit for both."

clamour arose demanding the seizure of the Royal Family—the " baker " and the " baker's wife." A little before two, the King's coach, surrounded by drunken fishwives and mysteriously followed by laden grain waggons, set out for the capital. For seven hours the bacchanalian rout continued amid obscene jests and threats of
" A la lanterne"
until the sweating captives were deposited at the Hotel de Ville. Thence they were consigned by the city fathers to the palace of the Tuileries.

These events caused much astonishment in England. The meeting of the States General had at first been greeted with general sympathy. France, it was felt, was following the British example. Whig magnates and parliamentary lawyers imagined they were witnessing a repetition of the "glorious" Revolution of 1688: Dissenters and Protestants hailed an end of Popish superstition and wooden shoes. The age of reason which William III had established in England seemed to be dawning across the Channel: henceforward the two great nations of the West would lead the world hand in hand. A treaty of commerce with France concluded a few years before by the young Tory Prime Minister, William Pitt, which had been much criticised by the Whigs—a party traditionally hostile to Bourbon and military France—was now universally acclaimed as a far-sighted act of statesmanship. Pitt assured the new French Ambassador " that France and England had the same principles, namely, not to aggrandise themselves and to oppose aggrandisement in others."

Some went further. The leader of the Opposition, Charles James Fox, in his generous enthusiasm described the fall of the Bastille as the greatest and best event that had ever happened. And all who felt that the libertarian tradition of England was not yet liberal enough—Dissenters who wanted the last religious disabilities repealed, parliamentary reformers who wished to see Manchester and Birmingham enfranchised, freethinkers and Unitarians who hated the Church monopoly of education—applauded the lofty sentiments of French orators who in the course of a few weeks seemed to have advanced further on the democratic road than slow-moving England in a century. Most enthusiastic of all were
the
young: those who like Wordsworth " approached the shield of human nature from the gold
en side" and sensed the love of
humanity that was coursing like an intoxication through the veins of a great people waking from sleep:

" France standing on the top of golden hours And human nature seeming born again."

Many, unwisely as it afterwards turned out, crossed the Channel and imbibed at the source new and generous sympathies.

But, when the Paris mob threatened the life of the Queen and insulted the King, sober Britons began to have their doubts. The King of England was no genius. But his people were genuinely fond of him and looked on a decent respect for the throne as a sign of good citizenship. Old Nobbs, as they called him, had been reigning for nearly thirty years, and, though he had had his full and often deserved share of unpopularity and troubles, his natural friendliness and good humour and the personal integrity of his life had finally turned him into a national institution. Since the end of the American War and the revival of prosperity under the brilliant young Minister whom he had so bol
dly placed in office, George III
's popularity had risen by leaps and bounds. Not even the extravagance and indiscretions of his eldest son were able to detract from it: indeed by contrast they enhanced it. When in the autumn of 1788 the King's natural " rapid and rambling volubility " degenerated under the strain of insomnia into insanity, there was widespread grief and alarm.

He recovered suddenly at a time when hope had been almost abandoned. While the States General was meeting at Versailles, England was giving itself up to a round of thanksgiving services,, illuminations and roasted oxen. That summer the royal holiday pilgrimage to Weymouth became a triumph, his Majesty driving through flower-strewn villages and grassy forest rides lined with cheering multitudes: the country folk turning out with artless loyalty in their broadcloth, loose white frocks and neckcloths, while chariots, chaises, landaus, carts, waggons, gigs and phaetons, drawn up in democratic disarray under the trees, shimmered with fluttering handkerchiefs. At Lyndhurst the King on an evening walk was accompanied by the entire village repeatedly singing the National Anthem.

This loyalty of the rustic English to the Crown afforded a curious contrast to the uneasy splendours of the French monarchy. At the time of the storming of the Bastille, Britain's sovereign was peacefully taking the sea waters under the delighted eyes of a proprietary multitude, a band concealed in a bathing machine striking up " God save great George our King " as the " Royal one entered the water."
¹
Wherever he went the same spontaneous acclamations attended him: " the greatest conqueror," wrote Fanny Burney, " could never pass through his dominions with fuller acclamations of joy from his devoted subjects than George III experienced, simply from having won their love by the even tenor of an unspotted life." It was a loyalty founded on nature by a people who gave him their hearts, not because he was their sovereign but because, being what they wanted their sovereign to be, he deserved them.

For he was as natural as they. In his familiar Windsor uniform— the broadskirted blue frockcoat with its scarlet collar and cuffs—and round hat he looked what he was, an English country gentleman. He liked farming, the routine of his duties, but most of all the human beings about him. He talked incessantly, to every one, pouring out good-humoured comments and questions, such as how the apple got into the dumpling, and answering them mostly himself with a volley of hoarse "Tut! Tuts!" and "What! Whats! " which somehow removed all sense of ceremony and superiority.

Like his " cousin " of France, King George was a family man, but, unlike Louis, happy in being so since this was what the English, with their strong sense of the realities of life, wanted their sovereign to be. The Queen might be an over-frugal
hausfrau,
but Royal George was a faithful husband and a devoted father, and in his feckless eldest son an injured one, and his subjects loved him for it. They knew that he had a good heart. Nothing so won their affection as his manifest delight in children. When middle-class Dorothy Wordsworth accompanied her uncle and his family to one of the familiar summer evening parades on the terrace at Windsor, the old King stopped in front of little Christopher and Mary Wordsworth and allowed them to play with his stick. And when a day or two later Mary was wearing a new hat, the old man was quick to

¹
D'Arblay,
II, 316.

notice it. " Ah, Mary," says he, " that's a pretty hat! that's a pretty hat!"