1792.] NATIONAL CONVENTION. CHAPTER XI. 199 Election of Representatives for the National Convention-Jacobins are very active-Right hand Party-Left hand side-Neutral Members The Girondists are in possession of the ostensible Power -They denounce the Jacobin Chiefs, but in an irregular and feeble manner-Marat, Robespierre, and Danton, supported by the Commune and Populace of Paris-France declared a Republic-Duke of Brunswick's Campaign-Neglects the French Emigrants-Is tardy in his Operations-Occupies the poorest part of Champagne-His Army becomes sickly-Prospects of a Battle-Dumouriez's Army recruited with Carmagnoles-The Duke resolves to Retreat-Thoughts on the consequences of that measure-The Retreat disastrous-The Emigrants disbanded in a great measure-Reflections on their Fate-The Prince of Condé's Army It was, of course, the object of each party to obtain the greatest possible majority in the National Convention now to be assembled, for arranging upon some new footing the government of France, and for replacing that Constitution to which faith had been so repeatedly sworn. The Jacobins made the most energetic exertions. They not only wrote missives through their two thousand affiliated societies, but sent three hundred commissaries, or delegates, to superintend the elections in the different towns and departments; to exhort their comrades not only to be firm, but to be enterprising; and to seize with strong hand the same power over the public force, which the mother society possessed in Paris. The advice was poured into willing ears; for it implied the sacred right of insurrection, with the concomitant privileges of pillage and slaughter. The power of the Jacobins was irresistible in Paris, where Robespierre, Danton, and Marat, who shared the high places in their synagogue, were elected by an immense majority; and of the twenty deputies who represented Paris, there were not above five or six unconnected with the massacres. Nor were they any where unsuccessful, where there existed enough of their adherents to overawe by threats, clamour, and violence, the impartial voice of the public. But in every state there is a great number of men who love order for itself, and for the protection it affords to property. There were also a great many persons at heart Royalists, either pure or constitutional, and all these united in sending to the National Convention deputies, who, if no opportunity occurred of restoring the monarchy, might at least co-operate with the Giron 1 Among others of the same party thus elected were David, the painter, Camille Desmoulins, Collot d' Herbois, and the Duke of Orleans, who had abdicated his titles, and was now called Philip Egalité.-See THIERS, tom. iii., p. dists and more moderate Republicans in saving the life of the unfortunate Louis, and in protecting men's lives, and property in general, from the infuriate violence of the Jacobins. These supporters of order-we know no better name to assign to them— were chiefly representatives of the departments, where electors had more time to discriminate and reflect, than when under the influence of the revolutionary societies and clubs of the towns. Yet Nantes, Bourdeaux, Marseilles, Lyons, and other towns, chiefly in the west and south, were disposed to support the Girondists, and sent deputies favourable to their sentiments. Thus the Convention, when assembled, still presented the appearance of two strong parties; and the feebleness of that, which, being moderate in its views, only sought to act defensively consisted not in want of numbers, but in want of energy. It was no good omen, that, on taking their places in the Assembly, these last assumed the Right Side; a position which seemed doomed to defeat, since it had been successively occupied by the suppressed parties of moderate Royalists and Constitutionalists. There was defeat in the very sound of the parti droit, whereas the left-hand position had always been that of victory. Men's minds are moved by small incidents in dubious times. Even this choice of seats made an impression upon spectators and auditors unfavourable to the Girondists, as all naturally shrink from a union with bad fortune. There was a considerable party of neutral members, who, without joining themselves to the Girondists, affected to judge impartially betwixt the contending parties. They were chiefly men of consciences too timid to go all the lengths of the Jacobins, but also of too timid nerves to oppose them openly and boldly. These were sure to succumb on all occasions, when the Jacobins judged it necessary to use their favourite argument of popular terror. The Girondists took possession, however, of all ostensible marks of power. Danton was dismissed from his place as minister of justice; and they were, as far as mere official name and title could bestow it on them, in possession of the authority of government. But the ill-fated regulation which excluded ministers from seats in the Assembly, and consequently from any right save that of defence, proved as fatal to those of the new system, as it had done to the executive government of Louis. Our remarks upon the policy of the great change from Monarchy to a Republic, will be more in place elsewhere.1 Indeed, violent as the change sounded in words, there was not such an important alteration in effect as to produce much sensation. The Constitution of 1791 was a democracy to all intents and purposes, leaving little power with the King, and that little subject to be so much cramped and straitened in its operation, that the royal au 1 "The first measure of the Convention was to abolish Monarchy and proclaim a Republic. The calendar was changed; it was no longer the fourth year of Liberty, but the first of the French Republic."-MIGNET, tom. i., p. 212. 1792.] FRANCE DECLARED A REPUBLIC. 201 thority was even smaller in practice than it had been limited in theory. When to this is added, that Louis was a prisoner amongst his subjects, acting under the most severe restraint, and endangering his life every time he attempted to execute his constitutional power, he must long have been held rather an incumbrance on the motions and councils of the state, than as one of its efficient constituted authorities. The nominal change of the system of government scarcely made a greater alteration in the internal condition of France, than the change of a sign makes upon a house of entertainment, where the business of the tavern is carried on in the usual way, although the place is no longer distinguished as the King's Head. While France was thus alarmed and agitated within, by change, by crime, by the most bitter political factions, the dawn of that course of victory had already risen on the frontiers, which, in its noonday splendour, was to blaze fiercely over all Europe. It is not our purpose to detail military events at present; we shall have but too many of them to discuss hereafter. We shall barely state, that the Duke of Brunswick's campaign, considered as relative to his proclamation, forms too good an illustration of the holy text, "Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall." The duke was at the head of a splendid army, which had been joined by fifteen thousand emigrants in the finest state of equipment, burning with zeal to rescue the King, and avenge themselves on those by whom they had been driven from their country. From what fatality it is hard to conceive, but the Duke of Brunswick seems to have looked with a certain degree of coldness and suspicion on those troops, whose chivalrous valour and high birth called them to the van, instead of the rear, in which the generalissimo was pleased to detain them. The chance of success that might justly have been expected from the fiery energy which was the very soul of French chivalry, from the fear which such an army might have inspired, or perhaps from the friends whom they might have found, was altogether lost. There was something in this extraordinary conduct, which almost vindicated the suspicion, that Prussia was warring on her own account, and was not disposed to owe too much of the expected success to the valour of the emigrants. And it escaped not the remark, both of the emigrants and the French at large, that Longwy and Verdun were ostentatiously taken possession of by the allies, not under the name of the King of France, or the Comte d'Artois, but in that of the Emperor; which appeared to give colour to the invidious report, that the allies were to be indemnified for the cost of their assistance, at the expense of the French line of frontier towns. Neither did the duke use his fine army of Prussians, or direct the motions of the Austrians under Clairfait, to any greater advantage. He had, indeed, the troops of the Great Frederick; but under the command of an irresolute and incapable leader, it was the sword of Scanderbeg in the hands of a boy. This tardiness of the Duke of Brunswick's movements intimated a latent doubt of his own capacity to conduct the campaign. The superiority of his veteran and finely disciplined forces over the disorganized army of Dumouriez, reinforced as it was by crowds of Federates, who were perfect strangers to war, would have been best displayed by bold and rapid movements, evincing at once activity and combination, and alarming raw troops by a sense of danger, not in front alone, but on every point. Each day which these new soldiers spent unfought, was one step towards military discipline, and what is more, towards military confidence. The general who had threatened so hard, seemed to suspend his blow in indecision; and he remained trifling on the frontiers, "when Frederick, had he been in our front," said the French general, "would long since have driven us back upon Chalons." 1 The result of so many false steps began soon to appear. Brunswick, whose army was deficient in battering guns, though entering France on a frontier of fortifications, was arrested by the obstinate defence of Thionville. Having at length decided to advance, he spent nine days in marching thirty leagues, but omitted to possess himself of the defiles of Argonnes, by which alone the army of Luckner could co-operate with that of Dumouriez. The allied general now found himself in the most elevated part of the province of Champagne, branded for its poverity and sterility with the unseemly name "La Champagne Pouilleuse," where he found difficulty to subsist his army. Meantime, if corn and forage were scarce, grapes and melons were, unfortunately, plenty. These last fruits are so proverbially unwholesome, that the magistrates of Liege, and some other towns, forbid the peasants to bring them to market under pain of confiscation. It was the first time such delicacies had been presented to the hyperborean appetites of the Prussians; and they could not resist the temptation, though the same penalty was annexed to the banquet, as to that which produced the first transgression. They ate and died. A fatal dysentery broke out in the camp, which swept the soldiers away by hundreds in a day, sunk the spirits of the survivors, and seems to have totally broken the courage of their commander.2 Two courses remained to the embarrassed general. One was, to make his way by giving battle to the French, by attacking them in the strong position which they had been permitted to occupy, notwithstanding the ease with which they might have been anticipated. It is true, Dumouriez had been very strongly reinforced. France, from all her departments, had readily poured forth many thousands of her fiery youth, from city and town, village and grange and farm, to protect the frontiers, at once, from the invasion of foreigners, and the occupation of thousands 1 Dumouriez, vol. ii., p. 387. 2 Jomini, tom. ii., p. 133. 1792.1 DUKE OF BRUNSWICK'S CAMPAIGN. 203 of vengeful emigrants. They were undisciplined, indeed, but full of zeal and courage, heated and excited by the scenes of the republic, and inflamed by the florid eloquence, the songs, dances, and signal-words with which it had been celebrated. Above all, they were of a country, which, of all others in Europe, has been most familiar with war, and the youth of which are most easily rendered amenable to military discipline. But to these new levies the Duke of Brunswick might have safely opposed the ardent valour of the emigrants, men descended of families whose deeds of chivalry fill the registers of Europe; men by whom the road to Paris was regarded as that which was to conduct them to victory, to honour, to the rescue of their King, to reunion with their families, to the recovery of their patrimony; men accustomed to consider disgrace as more dreadful by far than death, and who claimed as their birth-right, military renown and the use of arms. In one skirmish, fifteen hundred of the emigrant cavalry had defeated, with great slaughter, a column of the Carmagnoles, as the republican levies were called. They were routed with great slaughter, and their opponents had the pleasure to count among the slain a considerable number of the assassins of September. But the French general had more confidence in the Carmagnole levies, from which his military genius derived a valuable support, than Brunswick thought proper to repose in the chivalrous gallantry of the French noblesse. He could only be brought to engage in one action, of artillery, near Valmy, which was attended with no marked consequence, and then issued his order for a retreat. It was in vain that the Comte d'Artois, with a spirit worthy of the line from which he was descended, and the throne to which he has now succeeded, entreated, almost implored, a recall of this fatal order; in vain that he offered in person to head the emigrant forces, and to assume with them the most desperate post in the battle, if the generalissimo would permit it to be fought. But the duke, obstinate in his desponding in proportion to his former presumption, was not of that high mind which adopts hazardous counsels in desperate cases. He saw his army mouldering away around him, beheld the French forming in his rear, knew that the resources of Prussia were unequal to a prolonged war, and, after one or two feeble attempts to negotiate for the safety of the captive Louis, he was at length contented to accept an implied permission to retreat without molestation. He raised his camp on the 29th of September,' and left behind him abundant marks of the dreadful state to which his army was reduced.2 When we look back on these events, and are aware of Du 1 Dumouriez, vol. iii., p. 63; Jomini, tom. ii., p. 138. 2 "All the villages were filled with dead and the dying; without any considerable fighting, the allies had lost, by dysentery and fevers, more than a fourth of their numbers."-TOULONGEON, tom. ii., p. 357. |