Page:Readings in European History Vol 2.djvu/453

 The FrencJi Revolution 415 Several methods present themselves, but there are those which would entail the most terrible evils, and which I only mention to deter the king from a course which would mean certain destruction. To withdraw to Metz — or upon any other frontier — would be to declare war upon the nation and abdicate the throne. A king, who is the only safeguard of his people, does not fly before his people. . . . He does not excite all manner of suspicion against himself, nor does he place himself in a position where he can only reenter his possessions with arms in his hands, or be reduced to suppli- cate foreign aid. Who can say to what a state of frenzy the French nation might be aroused if it saw its king abandoning it in order to join a group of exiles, and become one of them himself, or how it would prepare for resistance and oppose the forces he might collect? Even I should denounce the monarch after such an act. To withdraw into the interior of the kingdom and call together the entire nobility would be a policy no less hazard- ous. Justly or not, the whole nation, which in its ignorance confuses nobility and aristocracy, has long looked upon the gentry en masse as their implacable enemies. The abolition of the feudal system was the expiation of ten centuries of mad- ness. The disturbance might have been lessened, but now it is too late, and the decree is irrevocable. To join the nobility would be worse than for the king to throw himself into a foreign and hostile army. He has to choose between a great nation and a few individuals, between peace and civil war carried on upon exceedingly unequal terms. . . . It is certain, in short, that a great revolution is necessary to save the kingdom ; that the nation has rights, that it is on the way to recover them all, and that it is not sufficient simply to reestablish them, but they must be consolidated; that a national convention can alone regenerate France; that the Assembly has already made several laws which it is indis- pensable to adopt ; and that there is no safety for the king and for the state except in the closest alliance between the monarch and his people. The king should on no account flee to the boundary. The populai distrust of the riobility.