The old regime was destroyed in principle, but most of its institutions and administrative staff remained until new laws should replace them. For long months the Constituent Assembly continued the foundation work it had begun in September. As they laboured, the members of the Assembly paid close attention to aristocratic intrigue and popular unrest. This period was well characterized by the popularity accorded Lafayette, idol of the partisans of this bourgeois revolution that had turned into a constitutional monarchy—Lafayette who, like those partisans, thought to reconcile opposing forces.
Judging that he had saved the king and queen on October 6, Lafayette thereafter styled himself their mentor. To gain time the royal couple pretended to approve of the ‘mayor of the palace’, but privately they despised him. When the Favras plot to restore the king and suppress the Constituent with aid from abroad was revealed on February 4, 1790, Louis let himself be led to the Assembly, and there he swore loyalty to the constitution. The ‘hero of two worlds’ seduced the bourgeoisie with his chivalric generosity; the citizenry was overcome to have such a leader. As a great lord, magnanimous and liberal, he impressed the people; his ascendancy seemed to guarantee order. He aspired to be the George Washington of France, to rally king and nobility to the Revolution and the Assembly to a strong and energetic government. Filled with naïve optimism and, moreover, confident of his ability, he walked out on a tightrope. Jefferson, back in America, feared for Lafayette’s future, while the new United States representative, Gouverneur Morris, sardonically predicted his downfall.
As a good ‘American’ Lafayette stated that his power was based upon popular will, but he manipulated that will with a sense of realism. A few newspapers—the Moniteur, Brissot’s Patriote français, Condorcet’s Chronique de Paris—yielded to his prestige. He was handicapped by lack of oratorical skill, but with the help of Sieyes set up for his followers a centre, the Society of ’89, where plans could be concerted and specific measures decided. There deputies and journalists mingled with nobles and bankers. He did not disdain hired supporters: when the democrats grew vehement he put out inflammatory news-sheets and filled the Assembly galleries with a hired audience. But his main chance of success would have been to mould the Patriots into a disciplined group capable of controlling and speeding the Assembly’s debates and to form their leaders into an active, stable cabinet. The Assembly’s majority could not reach complete agreement on any single issue; revolutionary individualism rejected party discipline with horror. Nor could the deputies agree upon fixed rules to govern their business. Besides the obstructions continually placed in their path by the opposition and by circumstances, the urgent need to maintain contact with public opinion led to constant interruptions for hearing petitions and receiving hordes of delegations which filed up to the speaker’s desk, facing the president.
The opportunity to form a new cabinet was at hand. With bankruptcy imminent, Necker’s star was fading. The two loans he floated in August had failed, and the ‘patriotic contribution’ of September 29, calling for 25 per cent of each person’s income, would not replenish the treasury for some time. Lafayette began to bargain with Duport, Lameth, and Mirabeau. He had got rid of the duc d’Orléans by sending him to London, and now intended to dispose of Mirabeau, reputed to be his accomplice, by offering him the post of ambassador to Constantinople. Far from swallowing the bait, the orator carried the debate into the Assembly on October 24. He argued that the only way to reconcile constitutionalism with an effective executive was to have the king select his ministers from the Assembly, thus guaranteeing co-operative confidence between the two powers. This was a defensible thesis, directed towards a parliamentary system and already practised in England. But it also set forth undisguised his ministerial ambitions. The Patriots thenceforth regarded him as more than suspect and, realizing that the lure of cabinet positions would encourage other deserters, proposed that deputies be prohibited from accepting ministerial posts. This measure was achieved on November 7. Lafayette’s plan fell through; the ambitions of others were frustrated. With the comte de La Marck interceding for him, Mirabeau entered the pay of the court, and on May 10, 1790, sent the king and queen the first in a series of advisory notes, all of which went unheeded. At the beginning Louis paired Mirabeau with Lafayette in trying to have the right of declaring war or peace made a royal prerogative. Their partnership was of short duration:
Mirabeau, who envied this simpleton Caesar (expressed in the pun ‘Gilles-César’), began to disparage him to the royal couple and tried to weaken his popularity with the people. He advised Louis to set up an extensive organization for propaganda and bribery in order to form his own party, then to leave Paris, dissolve the Assembly, issue an appeal to the nation, and if necessary resort to civil war, but under no circumstances to go near the border or arouse the least suspicion of conspiring with foreign powers. The triumvirate of Duport, Barnave, and Lameth envied Lafayette no less, though there was basically nothing to distinguish their position from his. But, to annoy him, they sometimes went to extremes.
The work of the Constituent Assembly gradually began to take shape. A decree of November 7 made it clear that social orders had ceased to exist, another, on February 28,1790, that venality in office was abolished from the army and that any soldier could be promoted from the ranks. A third on September 23, 1790, reserved one-fourth of the sublieutenants’ places for non-commissioned officers. In February of 1790 each commune elected its municipal council in accordance with the law of December 14, 1789: manorial authority over the villages was destroyed. From November to February new territorial divisions were drawn and the administration was reorganized; early in the summer councils and directories in departments and districts began to function. According to a decree of May 14, the sale of church lands was to begin, and in September the assignats became non-interest-bearing notes. On July 12 the Civil Constitution of the Clergy was voted, climaxing clerical legislation. Finally, on August 16, transformation of the judiciary was completed.
Meanwhile the Patriots improved their organization and expanded their propaganda. Many of them were members of the National Guard, more belonged to various clubs. In November of 1789 the Breton Club was reconstituted in Paris at the Saint-Honoré monastery of Dominicans, who were more popularly known as Jacobins, under the name Society of Friends of the Constitution. Following its example, such clubs sprang up in all towns and were soon affiliated with the mother society. The group known as ‘Brothers and Friends’ was composed of liberal nobles and affluent bourgeois who followed Lafayette and the Assembly. They were moderate, essentially cautious, but loyal to the Revolution. Their loyalty often caused strained relations with administrative bodies, for a number of official positions were quietly being filled by aristocrats or lukewarm partisans who often resented the fact that these clubs acted as watchdog committees and urged them to take action. The number of publications multiplied—Loustalot’s Révolution de Paris, Camille Desmoulins’s Révolutions de France et de Brabant, Gorsas’ Courrier, Carra’s Annales.
The chief success of Patriot activity was the formation of ‘federations’, or provincial leagues. These groups gave convincing evidence of the nation’s adherence. The first dated from 1789: Valence formed one on November 29. More were organized in 1790, at Pontivy and Dole in February, at Lyon on May 30, at Strasbourg and Lille in June. All of them joined to celebrate a National Federation on July 14, 1790, an event which gave solemn and definitive expression to the unity of France. Lafayette appeared in all his glory and, after a Mass celebrated by Talleyrand at the Altar of the Fatherland, took an oath in the name of the people’s army. The king was obliged to imitate his act. Unmindful of the showers which marked the occasion, the enthusiastic crowd showed its confidence by singing Ça ira.
There were, however, shadows marring the picture. It was obvious that the Third Estate’s civic education was nonexistent, that its members were wedded to the benefits they anticipated from the Revolution but were not eager to expend the efforts it required; nine-tenths of the active citizens had not taken part in the elections, and the National Guards were rapidly tiring of service. Passive citizens were nevertheless bitter at being denied municipal office. Indifferent to universal suffrage, which Robespierre and a few democrats vainly defended, petty bourgeois and members of the liberal professions were annoyed with property qualifications that prevented them from holding elective office. Finally, the citizens interested in public life leaned towards direct democracy and harried their representatives. In Paris the districts opposed Bailly and Lafayette; the district of the Cordeliers Club, led by Danton, rose in rebellion to protect Marat from judicial prosecution in January of 1790. In June the Assembly reorganized the Paris administration, replacing the sixty districts with forty-eight ‘sections’. The new divisions soon proved equally troublesome.
Nevertheless, the greatest source of concern was security of person and property. The Assembly had scarcely arrived in Paris when a baker was put to death near the archbishop’s palace, where its sessions were held. The deputies were so alarmed by this that they immediately voted, on October 21, the famous Martial Law: in case of disturbance, municipalities were authorized to proclaim the law, hoist a red flag, issue three warnings, and then give the order to fire. But would the National Guard obey? Lafayette relied on them in Paris, not without delusion. He had reduced the Guard to 24,000 men, necessarily recruited from those who had money, because they were required to buy their own uniforms. He reinforced the Guard with hired companies to form a permanent body of 6,000 men drawn chiefly from the old French Guard. But outside Paris, and especially in the villages, the situation was different. Furthermore, there were not enough muskets: the minister of war, who would gladly have disarmed the people, as it is thought, declared his arsenals empty and cut back orders for supplies. Municipal authorities could request aid from the army, yet were reluctant to do so. The Right asked that the military be permitted to intervene whenever it saw fit, but the Assembly never consented to this—the implications were obvious. As to the provost courts, they had been suppressed in principle on October 9, 1789; the following March all prosecutions by them were forbidden.
Disturbances at market-places and interference with grain distribution continued. The excellent harvest of 1790 helped the situation in general, but did not bring relief to local crises. Agrarian revolt persisted. Some intimidated peasants paid their manorial fees, but redemption, confirmed by the law of March 15, 1790, caused unrest. Jacqueries broke out in the Quercy and Périgord regions in January and swept through upper Brittany, from Ploërmel to Redon. In May others plagued the Bourbonnais and surrounding areas. When the harvest came, peasants throughout the Gâtinais refused to pay the tithe and the champart. At the end of the year Quercy and Périgord again witnessed uprisings. Finding itself threatened with increasing violence, the aristocracy hardened its resistance. Retaliatory action led by the nobility and sometimes accompanied by bloodshed added to general disorder, bitterly intensifying class antagonism. Lafayette’s cherished hope of compromise was becoming an illusion.
The Blacks (reactionary aristocrats) scorned the Monarchicals for having compacted with the Revolution. Of their orators, the abbé Maury confined his efforts to obstruction, and Cazalès, who was more shrewd, had a poor following. Of their journalists, Montjoie, Rivarol, and the abbé Royou in L’Ami du roi attacked all reforms, extolled the Old Regime, and disavowed even the aristocratic revolution; Suleau in the Actes des apôtres and the Petit Gautier expressed contempt for the Patriots and ridiculed patrouillotisme (playing on the words for patrol and patriot). In October and November of 1789 the Blacks tried to make use of the parlements and provincial estates of the Dauphiné and Cambrésis. They demanded new elections, and during the following spring the Third Estate accused royal commissioners charged with installing the new administrative staff of intending to carry out this plan. When Dom Gerle unsuccessfully proposed, on April 13, that Catholicism remain the state religion, a protest was drawn up and signed by 249 deputies. Among them was the comte de Virieu, president of the Assembly, who afterwards had to resign. Later in the year aristocrats discredited the assignats and tried to obstruct sale of Church lands. They told the impoverished that ruin of the privileged classes deprived the poor of work and alms. Throughout the nation counterrevolutionary clubs of ‘friends of peace’ sprang into being.
Some of the malcontents emigrated to find peaceful asylum, while others did so to arm themselves in preparation for foreign intervention. The comte d’Artois, at Turin, was soliciting aid for invasion from every possible source. Still others, in collusion with Artois, were fomenting civil war in the Midi. Their first plot, called the Languedoc Plan, included among its helpers Imbert-Colomès, former mayor of Lyon, Monnier de La Quarrée in the Comtat, Pascalis at Aix, Lieutaud, commander of the National Guard at Marseille, and Froment, from Nîmes, who wanted to pit Catholic workers against Protestant manufacturers. The conspiracy resulted not in war but in bloody fights at Montauban on May 10 and at Nîmes on June 13. Next came the Lyon Plan, since a riot in the city to protest toll collections on July 25 had given La Tour du Pin, minister of war, an excuse to send out loyal regiments under a trustworthy commander. The comte de Bussy was in charge of stirring up the Beaujolais; the brothers Allier were assigned the Gevaudan; and in August Malbos assembled the Catholics of Vivarais at Jalès. Nobles of Poitou and Auvergne formed leagues, or ‘coalitions’, which promised to march on Lyon, where the comte d’Artois hoped to meet them with Sardinian troops. They wanted the king to join them there.
After the October Days first Augeard and then Mahy de Favras, on behalf of Monsieur, the king’s brother, had tried to arrange for Louis to flee. In 1790, as summer drew near, the royal family was permitted to move to the château at Saint-Cloud. Escape from it appeared possible, and the French Salon, a club of Blacks, proposed that it be carried out. In this connection the Lyon insurrection was fixed for December 10. But Louis rejected the plan as well as Mirabeau’s proposal—in October he had begun his own preparations. The Patriots were on the alert: word of the king’s departure was constantly being announced; in February, Favras had been convicted and hanged. A number of conspirators were arrested—Bonne de Savardin in April, Trouard de Riolles in July, Bussy in September. Finally in December, a police dragnet cleaned out Lyon. The nobles of Auvergne who were already on their way to the city emigrated. Artois left Turin and after an interview with Leopold at Mantua (May, 1791) headed for Coblenz.
Alarms among the people led to new fears in Thiérache, Champagne, and Lorraine, particularly in the area of Varennes when, during July and August of 1790, it was rumoured that Austrian troops sent to Belgium were entering France. The masses remained prepared for a defensive reaction. Marat, in July, urged them to take the offensive. Punitive reaction at any rate was not absent: Pascalis was killed at Aix.
Unfortunately for Lafayette, dissension reached the army. Some of the noble officers gave their entire allegiance to the Revolution, but the majority of them, at first reticent, became more openly hostile as the Constituent’s reforms started to affect them. Their soldiers also split into opposing groups, some scorning the National Guard, ‘blue porcelain that can’t bear firing’, others frequenting clubs and turning against their commanders. Agitation among sailors and ship-workers at the naval bases also began. The Patriots, extremely distrustful of aristocratic officers, who began to emigrate in large numbers, either criticized them or on occasion defended the rebellious soldiers. But, faced with a hostile Europe, the Assembly did not dare dismiss officers and start a military purge, as Robespierre demanded. Soldiers were recruited from the poor and were of little interest to the deputies; nor did the representatives accept the proposal of Dubois-Crancé that the royal army be made into a national military organization by means of the draft. The Assembly well knew what popular hostility the militia under the Old Regime had inspired. It seemed sufficient to raise pay and pass several administrative and disciplinary reforms.
The naval ports and garrisons mutinied one after another. To Lafayette, a professional soldier, discipline was a serious matter. By August of 1790 he wanted to put an end to all revolt: when the Nancy garrison rose up, he supported his colleague, the marquis de Bouillé, who subdued the rebels in a pitched battle, had several insurgents executed, and sent forty-one Swiss from Châteauvieux to the galleys. The Assembly at first approved his action. Lafayette had nevertheless stained his hands and injured his popularity. A few of the Patriots protested immediately, and soon most of the Constituent was bewildered to learn that at Nancy, Bouillé was treating all partisans of the Revolution as suspects. In October the baron de Menou proposed to indict the ministers. The Constituent limited its reproof to a declaration that the ministers, excepting Montmorin, no longer enjoyed the nation’s confidence. They resigned; their successors seemed little better. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy was by this time threatening to open another schism, and Louis was appealing to foreign powers. The Revolution was headed towards a new eruption.