Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/636

 GOO F R A N C E [HISTORY. 1789. The Ver sallies banquet, The triumph of Paris. The Ja cobins Club. The emi gration. vehement disturbances ; the royal veto was in their eyes the old regime restored. The excitement of Paris grew ; famine reigned ; distrust and irritation followed. It was seen that the royal family were surrounding themselves with troops ill-affected towards the Revolution, and with a great number of devoted officers. Humours flew through the town ; plans of vengeance were supposed, communications with foreign powers and emigrant nobles. The king s reception of the Declaration of the Eights of Man had been cold and partial ; the new journals of the time threatened fresh disturbances. At this moment (3d October 1789) the amazing folly of Versailles showed itself in a great banquet given to the soldiers, in which royalist songs, white cockades, ladies smiles, and plenty of food goaded the hungry &quot; patriots &quot; of Paris to madness. A vast crowd, chiefly of women, with the national guard, headed unwillingly enough by Lafayette, streamed out of the gates, and marched to Versailles, insulted the Assembly then sitting, and swarmed round the palace gates. When the king came back from his hunting,- his one solace in these difficult days, he spoke them fair ; but a struggle having begun, in which some blood was shed, he became in fact their prisoner. In an interview with Lafayette, he showed his wonted obstinacy, and practically refused to send away his Swiss guards. Things became very threaten ing, and Louis at last consented to go to Paris. The queen and the dauphin refused to leave his side ; a deputa tion of 100 members of the Assembly also accompanied him. Thus Paris at one blow gained the ascendant over both king and Assembly, and the Revolution entered at once on a new phase. Changes will become easier, the seat of government and movement being narrowed to one city. The vehement eagerness for discussion of political questions, already so prominent a feature of the time, will increase greatly; crowds will frequent the meetings of the Assembly, interfere with its discussions, sway its fears and wishes. &quot; There is a gallery,&quot; says Arthur Young, an eye-witness (12th January 1790), &quot;at each end of the saloon, which is open to all the world. . . . The audience in these galleries are very noisy ; they clap when anything pleases them, and they have been known to hiss an indecorum which is ut terly destructive of freedom of debate.&quot; The press became more active than ever, with countless pamphlets on the questions of the day ; and lastly, the influence of the clubs, especially of that of the &quot; Friends of the Constitution,&quot; the Jacobins Club, now began to take the chief direction of affairs for the more thorough revolutionists. With its affiliated clubs throughout France, it formed an all-power ful confederacy, and became the rival of the Assembly itself. The virtual imprisonment of the royal family at the Tuil- eries frightened the royalist gentry ; a second and more numerous emigration now took place. Suspicion and dis trust reigned ; all held their breath, and thought they felt beneath them the muffled mining of some plot. Royalists accused the ambitious and unsteady Philip of Orleans of making disturbances for his own purposes in Paris : repub licans felt sure that the queen and her party were plotting the overthrow of the new order of things with the emi grants and her German relations. The duke of Orleans, a silly and stupid giggler, as Arthur Young found him, was driven by Lafayette to take refuge in England. The two chief parties of the Assembly, the Right and the Left, repre sented those who hoped, as Mirabeau did or Lafayette, to secure a modified and constitutional monarchy in France, and those who desired to see a republic. Independent of these, who were intent on the framing of the constitution, was the court party, which hoped to restore things to their ancient form, and to bring back the monarchy and the system of the past. The Assembly now set itself to frame the constitution, i; the task to which it had solemnly dedicated itself. In Th( ] France herself there were no precedents to go on, no healthy in s institutions to be worked in. The clergy were powerless ; ~* the nobles, who might have modified and influenced matters, were contemptuous and careless. Arthur Young specially notices their flippant treatment of the crisis they were in ; they did not really believe that the new order of things could last, and even expected a counter-i evolution. Some of them thought that by pushing the innovators on ward they would secure an earlier reaction ; doing so, they worked their own ruin and the king s death. The active leaders of the Assembly had then no help at home ; they spurned the example of the English constitution, which was often urged on them, for they considered it with truth far too monarchical and far too aristocratic for their princi ples. It was then almost from a &quot; tabula rasa &quot; that they had to start, without institutions to use, without experience to warn, or examples to guide them. They were sincere, and knew their own minds, fearlessly pushing the principles they held to their results. Their first achievement was to carry out the Declaration of the Rights of Man in terri torial matters, by totally rearranging the soil of France. They would consolidate and centralize, and show that unity pervaded all. With this end in view they swept away all Tl the ancient historic provinces, which one misses so much S r * on the map of France. No more duchies and counties, re: pays d etats and pays Selection ; no local rights or specialties p, t were preserved ; the local parliaments were swept off, the local administrations abolished ; the very names of Breton or Provencal, it was hoped, would be absorbed in the greater name of Frenchmen. Instead of the old divisions, the country was distributed into 83 portions, as nearly as might be of one size, and these were named departments ; each jbj department was subdivided into districts, and each district into cantons or communes. This done, the political struc ture was at once begun in accordance with it : each department should have a council of thirty-six members and an executive directory of five ; the districts similarly should have officers, subordinated to those of the department ; the Communes also, in like wise, under the districts. Then came the distinction between active and passive citizenship, as a base for the franchise. Active citizens, who paid taxes -4 equivalent to three days labour and upwards, alone had a * ? vote ; there was a higher property-qualification for the ^ electors whom they had to choose. The passive citizens were excluded from all share of power. The electors were charged to choose deputies for the National Assembly, ad ministrators of departments, districts, and commuues, and eventually judges, bishops, and parish priests. The judicial I system was entirely recast. In place of the local parliaments f there were to be three orders of tribunals, cantonal, J district, and departmental ; and above all, at Paris, a great supreme court. The system of trial by jury was intro duced for criminal cases. The National Assembly should 1. be the fountain of legislation, should be permanent, and f of one chamber only; it should be renewed by biennial*] elections. Its number should be 745, distributed among v departments according to the proportions of land, of popu lation, and of taxation. The Assembly also laid down a definition of the citizenship, and marked out the position of the king. It next considered the state of the finances; 1 * for now, even as under the old regime, France was threatened with imminent bankruptcy. Loans were not taken up, taxes fell short, patriotic contributions ran dry. In this great peril, Talleyrand-Perigord, bishop of Autuu, proposed to apply the lands of the clergy for the purpose of meeting the deficiency. The committee of finance declared by his voice that the clergy were not proprietors but ad ministrators only, and that the nation could take on itself