Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/518

Rh 496 MIRABEAU The Comte de la Marck was a Flemish lord of the house of Aremberg, who had been proprietary colonel of a regiment in the service of France; he was a close friend of the queen, and had been elected a member of the states- general. His acquaintance with Mirabeau, commenced in 1788, ripened during the following year into a friendship, which La Marck hoped to turn to the advantage of the court. After the events of the 5th and 6th of October he consulted Mirabeau as to what measures the king ought to take, and Mirabeau, delighted at the opportunity, drew up an admirable state-paper, which was presented to the king by Monsieur, afterwards Louis XVIII. The whole of this Memoire should be read to get an adequate idea of Mira- beau s genius for politics; here it must be merely sum marized. The main position is that the king is not free in Paris ; he must therefore leave Paris and appeal to France. &quot; Paris n en veut que 1 argent; les provinces demandent cles lois. &quot; But where must the king go ? &quot; Se retirer a Metz ou sur toute autre frontiere serait declarer la guerre a la nation et abdiquer le trone. Un roi qui est la seule sauvegarde de son peuple no fuit point devant son peuple ; il le prend pour juge de sa conduite et de ses principes.&quot; He must then go towards the interior of France to a provincial capital, best of all to Rouen, and there he must appeal to the people and summon a great convention. It would be ruin to appeal to the noblesse, as the queen advised : &quot;un corps de noblesse n est point une armee, qui puisse combattre.&quot; When this great convention met, the king must show himself ready to recognize that great changes have taken place, that feudalism and absolutism have for ever disappeared, and that a new relation between king and people has arisen, which must be loyally observed on both sides for the future. &quot; II est certain, d ailleurs, qu il faut une grande revolution pour sauver le royaume, que la nation a des droits, qu elle est en chemin de les recouvrer tous, et qu il faut non seulement les retablir, mais les con- solider.&quot; To establish this new constitutional position between king and people would not be difficult, because 1 indivisibilite du monarque et du peuple est dans le coeur de tous les Franyais ; il faut qu elle existe dans Faction et le pouvoir.&quot; Such was Mirabeau s programme, which he never diverged from, but which was far too statesmanlike to be understood by the poor king, and far too positive as to the altered condition of the monarchy to be palatable to the queen. Mirabeau followed up his Memoire by a scheme of a great ministry to contain all men of mark, Necker as prime minister, &quot; to render him as powerless as he is incapable, and yet preserve his popularity for the king,&quot; the archbishop of Bordeaux, the Due de Liancourt, the Due de la Rochefoucauld, La Marck, Talleyrand bishop of Autun at the finances, Mirabeau without portfolio, Target mayor of Paris, Lafayette generalissimo to reform the army, Segur (foreign affairs), Mounier, and Chapelier. This scheme got noised abroad, and was ruined by a decree of the Assembly of November 7, 1789, that no member of the Assembly could become a minister ; this decree destroyed any chance of that necessary harmony between the ministry and the majority of the representatives of the nation exist ing in England, and so at once overthrew Mirabeau s present hopes and any chance of the permanence of the constitution then being devised. The queen utterly refused to take Mirabeau s counsel, and La Marck left Paris. However, in April 1790 he was suddenly recalled by the Comte de Mercy-Argenteau, the Austrian ambassador at Paris, and the queen s most trusted political adviser, and from this time to Mirabeau s death he became the medium of almost daily communications between the latter and the queen. Mirabeau at first attempted again to make an alliance with Lafayette by a letter in which he says, &quot; Les Barnave, les Duport, les Lameth ne vous fatiguent plus de leur active inaction ; on singe longtemps 1 adresse, non pas la force.&quot; But it was useless to appeal to Lafayette ; he was not a strong man himself, and did not appreciate &quot; la force &quot; in others. From the month of May 1790 to his death in April 1791 Mirabeau remained in close and suspected but not actually proved connexion with the court, and drew up many admirable state-papers for it. In return the court oaid his debts; but it ought never to be said that he was Dribed, for the gold of the court never made him swerve ?rom his political principles never, for instance, made him a royalist. He regarded himself as a minister, though an unavowed one, and believed himself worthy of his hire. Undoubtedly his character would have been more admirable if he had acted without court assistance, but it must be remembered that his services deserved some reward, and that by remaining at Paris as a politician he had been unable to realize his paternal inheritance. Before his in fluence on foreign policy is discussed, his behaviour on everal important points must be noticed. On the great question of the veto he took a practical view, and seeing that the royal power was already sufficiently weakened, declared for the king s absolute veto, and against the ompromise of the suspensive veto. He knew from his English experiences that such a veto would be hardly ever used unless the king felt the people were on his side, in which case it would be a useful check on the representatives of the people, and also that if it was used unjustifiably the power of the purse possessed by the representatives and the very constitutional organization of the people would, as in England in 1688, bring about a bloodless revolution, and a change in the person entrusted with the royal dignity. He saw also that much of the inefficiency of the Assembly arose from the inexperience of the members, and their incurable verbosity ; so, to establish some system of rules, he got his friend Romilly to draw up a detailed account of the rules and customs of the English House of Commons, which he translated into French, but which the Assembly, puffed up by a belief in its own merits, refused to use. On the great subject of peace and war he supported the king s authority, and with some success. What waa the good of an executive which had no power ? Let it be responsible to the representatives of the nation by all means ; but if the representatives absorbed all executive power by perpetual interference, there would be six hundred kings of France instead of one, which would hardly be a change for the better. Again Mirabeau almost alone of the Assembly understood the position of the army under a limited monarchy. Contrary to the theorists, he held that the soldier ceased to be a citizen when he became a soldier ; he must submit to be deprived of his liberty to think and act, and must recognize that a soldier s first duty is obedience. With such sentiments, it is no wonder that he approved of Bouille s vigorous conduct at Nancy, which was the more to his credit as Bouille was the one hope of the court influences opposed to him. Lastly, in matters of finance he showed his wisdom : he attacked Necker s &quot; caisse d escompte,&quot; which was to have the whole control of the taxes, as absorbing the Assembly s power of the purse ; and he heartily approved of the system of assignats, but with the important reservation that they should not be issued to the extent of more than one-half the value of the lands to be sold. This restriction was not observed, and it was solely the enormous over-issue of assignats that caused their great depreciation in value. Of Mirabeau s attitude with regard to foreign affairs it is necessary to speak in more detail. He held it to be just that the French people should conduct their Revolution as they would, and that no foreign nation had any right to interfere with them, so long as they kept themselves strictly to their own affairs. But he knew also that neighbouring nations looked with unquiet eyes on the progress of affairs in France, that they feared the influence of the Revolution on their own peoples, and that foreign monarchs were being prayed by the French emigres to interfere on behalf of the French monarchy. To prevent this interference, or rather to give no pretext for it, was his guiding thought as