The Online Library of Liberty

A project of Liberty Fund, Inc.

• Foreword
• Preface to the Liberty Fund Edition
• Introduction
• I: Before 1789
• II: The Revolution and the Rôle of History
• III: From 1789 to the Trial of Louis Xvi
• IV: The Trial of “le Stuart Français”
• V: The Aftermath

III

From 1789 to the Trial of Louis XVI

1

Prophetic Parallels and the Counter-revolutionary Lessons of Hume

Abbé Maury figures most appropriately at the beginning of this chapter dealing in part with examples of Hume’s influence on some of the early counter-revolutionary leaders. Maury, generally recognized as the leading orator of the Right in the Assemblée Constituante, had been since 1785 a member of the French Academy and was eventually to be named a cardinal of the Church. He seems to have been a witty, rather forceful person and an extemporary speaker of some brilliance. It is not too inappropriate to contrast him, as contemporaries often did, with Mirabeau, his opposite number on the Left.

Like his personal friends Gerdil and Bergier, Maury was fond of quoting Bossuet in defence of the ancien régime but, like them too, he occasionally found it useful to invoke also the authority of that new Bossuet, the historian David Hume. Long before the Revolution he had commended Hume as a loyal and impartial historian worth using to attack the “English bias” of the philosophe Voltaire. In 1777, for example, he quite happily pointed out that the Scottish historian disagreed with the great Voltaire on the quality of English eloquence.1 Voltaire had devoted one of his famous philosophical letters to praising Bacon, and Maury points out at this time—as Joseph de Maistre was to later—that Hume had attacked the inflated reputation of this culture hero of the encyclopédistes and had rightly put him well below Galileo in importance. On at least one occasion we even find the Abbé adducing proofs from Hume in his sermons, as in his panegyric of Saint Louis delivered to the assembled members of the French Academy in the chapel of the Louvre on 25 August 1772.2

Hume is not infrequently mentioned in Abbé Maury’s speeches delivered during the early revolutionary debates. Defending the rights of the throne in 1790, he accused the National Assembly of an illegitimate attempt to deprive the Crown of its traditional prerogative to declare war and make treaties. The rôle of the Assembly, as Maury saw it, was not to establish a new constitution but to correct with the help of the king any current abuses in government and to revive, to that end, the ancient constitution of France. History, he asserted, provides a warning to those who dare to attempt more radical reforms and who, wishing to extend illegitimately the powers of popular representatives, reduce the monarch’s importance to that of being merely a “republican” figurehead:

A reader of the Political Discourses as well as the History, Maury cited Hume in July 1790 against the fiscal policies of Necker:

Abbé Maury had already quoted Hume’s testimony in his maiden speech of September 1789 on the question of the royal veto, again to the effect that the king’s authority must not be weakened, that revolutions are basically futile, that Charles II, for example, had found the source of his restored power in the after-effects of his unfortunate father’s execution.5 Maury’s greatest Hume-inspired parliamentary triumph was to come, however, in 1790 during a verbal exchange with his noted enemy Mirabeau concerning the sovereignty of the people.6

Maury began his attack on the concept of the people’s sovereignty with an appeal to the traditional arguments of Fénelon and Bossuet on the subject. The theory of contract is a fiction. Society took its origins in man’s natural, that is, God-given, sociability. Authority and subordination are thus also divine in origin. Express or tacit consent of a primitively “free” people may seem at times to have been the source of government, but this is a fallacious appearance. Free consent is sometimes the channel of authority, it is not the source. “The consequence of this theory,” Maury continues, “is that religion gives us a notion of authority that is both true and inspiring when it shows how it emanates originally from God. By presenting the Supreme Being as the direct author of sovereignty, the protector and avenger of the laws, it illustrates clearly in this perspective that every human society is a theocracy. . . .”7

Preparing to go on with the practical applications of this pious theory, Maury, as he tells the story, was interrupted by that foolish fellow Mirabeau who shouted:

—“You are making a mockery of the Assembly when you come here and peddle your lessons in theology. Only fanatical and ignorant theologians have ever professed such a doctrine regarding the supposed origins of sovereignty. I defy you to cite the name of even one person of sense who has ever argued such nonsense!”

Quite unruffled and wisely prepared in advance to answer such an impertinence, Abbé Maury took up the challenge:

—“I accept your generous challenge, Monsieur de Mirabeau, first, by pointing out that we should in no way be surprised that the human mind is obliged to have recourse to God in order to find an unshakeable support for sovereignty, since without divine intervention even a solid foundation for morality would be lacking. I shall therefore cite among the defenders of my doctrine, not a theologian but one of the most celebrated political writers of this century, an English philosopher whom no one has yet suspected of believing in pious superstitions. Here is what I read in the twenty-fifth moral and political essay of David Hume:. . .”

If we are to believe Maury’s account, he then recited to the assembled representatives of the French nation the “theocratic” passage already used for a similar purpose in 1769 by his friend Cardinal Gerdil,8 omitting, however, and hardly because of its length, the last half. His conclusion is triumphant:

—“Have you had enough, Monsieur de Mirabeau? I’ll spare you ten other quotations just like that one. As you can see, even the greatest authorities support my opinion and have joined in these incontrovertible arguments, while you are left with making assertions that I disprove and issuing challenges that only advance my cause.

“Along with Mr. Hume, then, I say to all short-sighted philosophers that sovereign power emanates not from the people, but only from God. The magnificent and fertile nature of God which has created in the immensity of his thought all of his decrees has also created this tutelary authority by summoning mankind to the social state. . . .”9

Abbé Maury leaves it to be understood that after such a complete answer his opponent Mirabeau was, momentarily at least, struck dumb with defeat. Of course, at least in this last example, Maury is merely continuing the practice of retortion in the tradition of Gerdil, Bergier, Nonnotte, and others, and it would be a mistake to imagine on his part anything more than a polemical attachment to Hume’s statement. His perhaps more sincere opinion of Hume he confided privately years later to another counter-revolutionary ideologist, Count Joseph de Maistre, when they met in Venice during the winter of 1799. There they had an extensive conversation on various literary subjects and one of these was the question of Hume’s merit as an historian. De Maistre notes without comment that Maury judged Hume to be “a mediocre historian who gained a reputation for impartiality by what he said of the Stuarts.” The English were really superior only in their novels, of which Clarissa Harlowe and Tom Jones seem to have been the good Cardinal’s favourites.10

It is not difficult to find other counter-revolutionary figures who make at this time less spectacular but undeniably influential use of Hume’s writings. In this regard, his statements on the empirical nature of the British constitution, denying that before the seventeenth century it formed a “regular plan of liberty,” were found of special interest.

Traditionalists were disturbed from the very beginning of the revolutionary debates by the radicals’ claim that France had no constitution. It was of no use to speak, as Fénelon, for example, had spoken years before, of an ancient “unwritten” constitution. A constitution, as Thomas Paine wrote in 1791, “is not a thing in name only, but in fact. It has not an ideal, but a real existence; and wherever it cannot be produced in a visible form, there is none.”11 A constitution, in short, had to be something that one could roll up and put in one’s pocket. The English had no constitution until Magna Carta; France in 1789 was in rather the same position as England before the granting of the Great Charter.

Along with others on the Right, the extreme royalist de Montjoie took exception to this view. The revolutionists, he jeered, talked endlessly about constitutions without having even the most elementary understanding of what that word meant. Constitutions are not theoretical a priori constructions, they are as natural as gravity itself. It is impossible for a nation not to be “constituted” and France was no exception:

What de Montjoie and others who took this position are really doing, of course, is rejecting the contract theory of the origin of government in one of its various manifestations. Hume’s political empiricism helped to support this anti-a priori line of argument. His History, de Montjoie pointed out, underlines the fact that constitutions are nothing more than the products of time and circumstance. One cannot say that the British nation had a fixed constitution in all the years of its political existence following Magna Carta. The British constitution had been a fluctuating and ill-defined thing throughout the ages. Hume had in fact viewed the “usurpations” of the Stuart kings with more leniency than most historians precisely because of his belief in the extenuating circumstances provided by such constitutional variation. Speaking, for example, of the constitution under James I, de Montjoie asserts:

From the tabula rasa political view of France without a constitution naturally followed for many revolutionary theoreticians the conclusion that the National Assembly was invested with the primary status of a convention nationale representing all the authority of the nation in its pre-constituted state. Radical attempts to grace the National Assembly with this title were of course vigorously opposed by members of the Right. Citing Hume on the question, both Calonne and Lally-Tollendal14 insisted that to call the National Assembly a Convention would be to imply with impudence and quite erroneously that all preceding government had been entirely dissolved, whereas France’s national parliament had in fact been convoked by the king in conformity with the “constitution” and with all the ordinary formalities “as have all of the National Assemblies since the time of Charlemagne. Consequently, we were not a Convention Nationale.”15

The details of the semantic controversy just noted may seem trivial in retrospect. What was certainly not trivial, however, was the nature and amount of political power being hotly disputed, and it is significant, I think, that Hume’s authority was brought into the question by two such important members of the Right. Also wishing to show that France before the Revolution was not entirely without legal foundation, another noted traditionalist, Jean-Joseph Mounier, quoted Hume’s opinion that the privileges of English peers and the liberty of the English Commons had in fact originated in France. Consequently, Mounier asserted in 1792, if the French had adopted the British constitution they would only have repatriated what was to begin with their own.16

It can be easily seen that, with the parties of the Right, Hume’s reputation and authority as an historian are in this period perhaps even greater than they were during the thirty years preceding the Revolution, when he was so widely read under very different circumstances. Barnave in 1792, for example, called Hume “the best of modern historians,”17 and Lally-Tollendal in the same year recited Hume-inspired political lessons to Burke.18

Hume’s interpretation of the Long Parliament’s activities as a series of cunning usurpations seems to have been particularly useful to those rightists who at this time wished to attack the National Assembly’s claim that it fully represented the true wishes of the nation. What was this nation, royalists liked to ask, this fantastic creature whose mandate was always being invoked, which was presumably all of France but which apparently made its wishes known only to a few and at the bidding of a few? Attacking a current practice of some parties in the National Assembly, the Comte d’Antraigues, who was later to play an active cloak-and-dagger rôle in the counter-revolution, quoted Hume against the demagogic use of adresses or petitions:

In a three-page note attached to this passage, d’Antraigues reproduces Hume’s description of the similar abuse of petitions by the Long Parliament. The petitions were, Hume tells us, a fraudulent device of popularity, accepted only from groups favourable to the Puritan faction and used to incite the people to civil discord. All petitions favouring the monarchy or the Church were, on the other hand, immediately rejected. D’Antraigues concludes with the darkly prophetic comment: “I shall add no observations to the quoted passage but prudence alone requires that I prove it exists, that I did not invent it; and if presenting such tableaux is a crime, it is Mr. Hume who is guilty: see his History of the Stuarts for the year 1642 . . . seven years before the murder of Charles I, eleven years before Cromwell was declared Protector.”20

Comparisons such as that by d’Antraigues, viewing at the same time the activities of the Long Parliament and those of the revolutionary assembly, form the basis of most parallels drawn between the English and French revolutions published by conservatives at this time.

Fairly typical of these are the tableaux which appeared in the ultra royalist journal Les Actes des Apôtres in 1790. Beginning in January of that year and with a studied light-heartedness (since at first the apôtres seemed to believe that it would take no more than a timely dose of Hudibras to push back the Revolution),21 the editors presented their readers with the “Tableau parlant, Fragment de l’histoire d’Angleterre.”22 Although it is an account largely from Hume of the seventeenth-century revolution in England, the tableau is presented as an exact depiction of events taking place in revolutionary France: “. . . the plan was formed to do away with the Church and the monarchy. The monarch’s council had acted in bad faith; the nation was irritated, and its representatives were ambitious and corrupt. The minister parleyed, the abyss grew deeper, and thickening clouds of blood darkened the horizon.”23

At the end of this historical sketch the editors state its purpose and promise more of the same:

Volume III followed with the “Comparison Tableau” continuing the account of Stuart history from 1641. Written in April 1790, and still inspired by the wise prophet David Hume, the new sketch pictures the unfortunate king “struggling to defend his royal prerogative against a parliament made up of factious persons determined to build a republic on the ruins of the monarchy and the Church.”25 In Volume IV we are presented with the “Royal Tableau,” which quotes in full Hume’s portrait of Hampden, now seen as describing perfectly the typical French revolutionist: “We must only be cautious, notwithstanding his generous zeal for liberty, not hastily to ascribe to him the praises of a good citizen. Through all the horrors of civil war, he sought the abolition of monarchy and subversion of the constitution; an end which, had it been attainable by peaceful measures, ought carefully to have been avoided by every lover of his country.”26 Hampden’s portrait is then contrasted with that of the virtuous Falkland whom another Hume disciple, Lally-Tollendal, had already seen himself as imitating when he resigned from the Assembly in 1789. In addition, the apôtres note the existence in both countries of a “national assembly simulacrum” which, “contemptuous of the existing constitution, did not fail, in order to shore up its authority, to decree as a principle that all sovereignty emanates from the people.”27 Finally less concerned with pointing out parallels, the editors optimistically attempt a number of predictions. They meditate without sorrow on the fate of Charles I’s judges: “It is not without a certain secret pleasure that we anticipate events by announcing that twenty-seven of them were hanged when, ten years later, Charles II regained the throne of his ancestors.”28 Of course, bringing attention to this last fact was somewhat gratuitous. If the inexorable parallel between the two revolutions seemed to waver in one respect it was that the French in 1790 were too wise to rush headlong into the crimes of seventeenth-century England: “Louis XVI has already triumphed over the wicked; we hope that the monarchy will likewise triumph over the republic, and that one day we shall have a translation into French of the constitutional hieroglyphics that are being randomly engraved on the national obelisk.”29

To celebrate this anticipated happy change in the course of the French revolution, a fourth and final tableau was prepared, the “Tableau of Resurrection,” depicting, of course, the restoration of the monarchy in England. Events in France at the end of 1790 stubbornly refused, however, to follow true to form. The apôtres ruefully concede in Volume V that the promised last instalment would have to be postponed for a time; the task, it seems, was even beyond the strength of Hudibras and renewed meditation on the darker parallels was necessary:

We have in the last quotation a good average view of Stuart history as interpreted by the French of the Right. Important to note also, it is seen as David Hume’s view. Even when the parallels do not quote him explicitly—and this is exceptional—his tremendous hold over French conservative opinion is still felt and his explanation of events a century and a half old also becomes the explanation of what is seen as the eighteenth-century French version of a similar evil cycle in the course of human history. The apôtres have suffered only a temporary delay in their presentation. The “Tableau of Resurrection” is already prepared; its turn would come, just as day follows night: “history has already presented the same causes, the same effects.”31

Very similar to the tableaux of the Actes des Apôtres are the parallels drawn also in 1790 by Angélique-Marie Darlus du Taillis, Comtesse de Montrond, in her work Le Long Parlement et ses crimes, rapprochemens faciles à faire. The book is a 143-page history of the Long Parliament, again summarized from Hume and illustrating the harmony of his account with a royalist interpretation of “equivalent” events in France. With regard to the causes of the two revolutions, in both cases the antecedent actions of the reigning monarch are exonerated. The Countess underlines, for example, Hume’s statement that the allegedly unconstitutional levy of ship-money by Charles I proved subsequently to be very useful to the British navy in its encounters with the Dutch. As for the individual members of the Puritan parliament, Countess Montrond affirms that “the majority were ambitious schemers and hypocrites who called not for the renewal of the state but for humiliation of the king and abasement of the crown.”32 Later her work draws a further parallel between the English patriots and the French revolutionary leaders: “These diabolical impostors laid claim to saintliness, just as our demagogues pretend to humanity.”33

The suffering multitude is deceived by such unintelligible slogans: “Happy the English! writes Mr. Hume, had the commons proceeded with moderation and been contented in their plenitude of usurped power to make blessed use of it. Happy the French! one day the Tacitus of our misfortunes will say; but who today can judge these misfortunes heaped on a deceived people!”34

Holding to a cyclical view of history, the Countess invites her French readers to compare events in both revolutions and to reflect seriously on them. The results of France’s upheaval must inevitably be the same: “The misguided French will feel remorse, soon to be followed by a resurgence of love for the best and most courageous of kings; with mingled feelings of repentance and love they will rush to throw themselves at the feet of this Monarch, so sensitive, so self-denying, and their very error will fortify the ties that shall forever bind their devotion to their generous Sovereign.”35

Rarely, if ever, do the people gain anything from revolution; the new government is likely to be worse than the old one: “On no occasion,” writes Monsieur Hume, “was the truth of this maxim more sensibly felt, than in the present state of England.”36 The English had managed to pull down the throne but, far from finding themselves happy, they were soon crushed with an unprecedented burden of taxes and subjected to a tyrannical administration in which there was not even the shadow of justice and liberty.

History cannot be deceived. Inevitably the French revolution too would go the full circle and a Cromwell would appear on the scene. A deadly experiment had proved that to the English. Again she quotes from Hume: “By recent, as well as ancient example, it was become evident that illegal violence, with whatever pretences it may be covered, and whatever object it may pursue, must inevitably end at last in the arbitrary and despotic government of a single person.”37

Comtesse de Montrond’s rapprochements clearly illustrate how the parallels were not just idle works of analysis and prediction. Hers is a work heavily charged with emotion:

There is even some hint in her book that if Louis were to choose, as Charles had chosen earlier, to raise the Royal Standard against these vile usurpers, he would not be lacking in support: “Remember, oh! remember always, that thousands of Frenchmen adore you, that they are silent only to be united with you in your resignation and in that of your companion whom they honour and cherish; that if your interests required it, or even allowed it, countless legions would fly to your rescue. . . .”39

Another of the “écrivains noirs,” François-Louis Suleau, published more rapprochements in 1791 and 1792, again with the intention of rousing the French and especially Louis XVI to more vigorous counter-revolutionary action.

Side by side, in two columns of his journal, he compared what he called the “English drama” and the French “Imitation that exceeds the bounds of parody.” Throughout the running account of the “Imitation” column we find added comments such as the following: “These parallels are striking,” “Exactly the same has happened here,” “The circumstances are precisely parallel,” “The very same verbiage.” Suleau seems, in fact, to believe in an almost complete identification of the two revolutions: “Our demagogues,” he wrote, “have slavishly copied all of these stratagems and I need not add that they have obtained the same results. Nil sub sole novum. [There is nothing new under the sun.]”40 We are not surprised to learn, even, that the Puritans had their own Faubourg St. Antoine: “The comparison holds up with amazing exactness, even in the most wretched details. . . .”41

As he draws his parallel, Suleau is no less explicit and no more innocent of purpose than the Comte d’Artois had been in performing the portrait antics to which we have already referred. His is a hawkish warning to princes “who, when they believe themselves to be following only the advice of prudence, are in fact giving in to the ever deadly vertigo of bewilderment and faint-heartedness.”42 Pointing to Charles I’s initial “co-operation” with the Puritans, Suleau warns:

Citing Bossuet rather than Hume but delivering essentially the same message, the Abbé Marie-Nicolas-Silvestre Guillon published in 1792 his Parallèle des Révolutions—a work which went through at least four editions during that year.

Guillon praises Charles I as a just, moderate, and magnanimous prince, perhaps the most honest man of his century and one whose only fault was an excess of clemency. He minutely notes parallels between the French and English revolutions, using a highly emotional, breathless style, reminiscent, not of Bossuet, but of a bad eighteenth-century drame:

Abbé Guillon makes parallels with other revolutions as well as with that of the Puritans, but all his evidence is chosen to prove the cyclical nature of such violent occurrences. Like the Comtesse de Montrond, he predicts the eventual replacement of popular anarchy by a dictatorship. History shows no exceptions to the rule that the usurpations of the multitude are followed by the tyranny of one man.45 There is nothing new in the French revolution. It is a base imitation from start to finish:

One critical detail of the French parallel with the English revolution was still seen as different in 1792, but Guillon, with a certain grisly tenacity (for most of the “Stuart prophets” avoided before January 1793 going this far), does not fail to note it: “the records of Whitehall,” he writes, “will indicate that to complete the resemblance, the revolution needs one additional crime, and that this crime is perhaps not far off.”47

We shall deal later with other specific rapprochements made for various purposes by counter-revolutionary writers during the trial of Louis XVI and after the Reign of Terror. Those that we have noted for the period from 1789 to 1792 by no means exhaust the bibliography on the subject but they are fairly indicative of the sort of thing commonly done at this time.48

Perhaps the entire spirit of the parallels can be best summed up iconographically. The frontispiece of an anonymous work entitled L’Angleterre instruisant la France ou Tableau historique et politique du règne de Charles Ier et de Charles II, published in Paris early in 1793, provides a good contemporary example. The legend of the engraving reads: “England teaching France, 8 February 1649,” followed by:

• Je commis un grand crime.
• Prenez bien garde de suivre mon exemple.
• Si du Dieu de bonté vous voulez implorer la clémence,
• Ouvrez les cachots, et brisez les fers de l’innocence.

Pictured are two women standing; one is showing the other a book on which can be read the words “Read and tremble.”

It is an irony of history that this same idea of England teaching France could have changed so much in meaning in the sixty years since Voltaire’s Lettres philosophiques. At that time, England’s “lessons” were feared by traditionalists in France. These were the lessons of Voltaire. Now traditionalists almost religiously sought out other examples from across the Channel. These were the lessons of David Hume.

2

The Long Parliament: Brissot Versus Clermont-Tonnerre

To illustrate the intensity of the revolutionary debates provoked by differing views of Stuart history and, what is more important, to show how Stuart history influenced in an immediate sense the formulation by both sides of many political problems of the day, let us examine at some length a controversy on the subject which raged during the summer of 1790 between the two important figures, Clermont-Tonnerre and Brissot.

Brissot is a particularly good example to choose here as representing the Left, since he was probably influenced more than any other French revolutionary strategist by the examples of English civil-war history. We have already noted in our chapter on Hume’s pre-revolutionary fortunes that the Girondin leader was one of the first in France to reject Hume’s royalist interpretation of that period. His own admiration for English parliamentary heroes knew no bounds. His very name, Brissot de Warville—anglicized from the French place name Ouarville where his family held property—is a youthful tribute to his long-standing political anglomania. In its essentials, this anglomania remained as one of his most notable characteristics until his death by decapitation in Paris in 1793.

Also destined to be a victim of the Revolution, Stanislas Clermont-Tonnerre represents equally well, as a constitutional monarchist, that section of the rightist opposition most strongly influenced by the familiar Hume version of Stuart history.

A dispute over the famous Comités de recherches, the new tribunals that Burke would also attack as likely to extinguish the last traces of liberty in France and bring about “the most dreadful and arbitrary tyranny ever known in any nation,” was the original issue that sparked their important debate, especially valuable to us as an illustration of how the lines of battle on the current significance of the English revolution were drawn up. The controversy also shows the extent to which Hume’s account for many traditionalists had come to be more than merely one man’s history of that revolution but rather a body of essential, undeniable political facts, the profound appreciation of which was absolutely necessary for a correct understanding of the revolution in France.

The Comité de recherches of which Brissot was a member had been established by the Assembly in October 1789 and authorized to receive denunciations and evidence of conspiracies as well as to arrest, to question, and to hold suspects. Brissot had already defended his committee on several occasions against the accusations of various critics.49 In August 1790 he found it necessary to return once more to this defence against charges made by Clermont-Tonnerre that such committees represented an inquisitorial device of despotism and had a public effect rather similar to what might be expected from a re-establishment of the Bastille.

Quite to the contrary, Brissot maintained, the powers of the committee were legal and constitutional, the popular party approved of them, they did not in any way resemble those of the Inquisition or the horrors of the Bastille and, finally, such extraordinary measures of security were necessary in a time of crisis when the Revolution had so many enemies. “How could you have believed,” he asks Clermont-Tonnerre, “that men stripped of their ill-gotten privileges which they had been enjoying for many centuries would, with heroic patience, simply submit to the will of those they had formerly oppressed? How could you not have seen that they would rebel against an equality of rights that brought them down to the level of other men? . . .”50

Brissot continued his self-apology by giving Clermont-Tonnerre one of those classically familiar revolutionary lessons on how people sometimes have to be forced to be free and even killed to be made equal: “Remember the axiom, so trivial and so true: if you desire the end you must also accept the means.”51 Then, having on other occasions already told his readers that there was great merit in the English idea of defining the crime of lèse-nation, that the Long Parliament had many salutary lessons to teach the National Assembly on how to choose its ambassadors, deal with king’s ministers, et cetera,52 he proceeded to justify the Comités de recherches on the same authority: “And the Long Parliament of England, during a time when it was inspired by the purest form of patriotism, did it not also have its committee of safety or committee of investigations? More than once, the republic would owe its salvation to that committee. And so I ask you, was France in 1789, is France today, not caught up in a sufficiently violent crisis to justify the institution of these committees of safety?”53

Clermont-Tonnerre’s answer, the Nouvelles Observations sur les comités des recherches,54 was not long in making itself heard:

Brissot in a prompt reply showed that he had long since been emancipated from such a view of the English revolution, that he had read historians other than Hume:

We remember that Brissot in 1784 had expressed the wish that the history of this new republic in America would be written by that most patriotic of English historians, Catherine Macaulay. It is with her account of the English revolution that he now answers Clermont-Tonnerre:

After setting his opponent straight on that all-important point, Brissot gives the radical view of Stuart history and a litany of answers to Clermont-Tonnerre’s accusations:

To praise the next accomplishment of the Long Parliament was still a matter of some delicacy in France in October 1790, but Brissot, who at this time was recommending hair-cuts à la roundhead61 as superior even to the coiffure à la Brutus, does not hesitate in the slightest:

Before going on to defend the Long Parliament’s actions under Cromwell, Brissot adds a note on the supposed inviolability of kings: A king, he maintains, can be judged—as Milton, Sidney, Locke, Mrs. Macaulay, and other patriots have shown.63 As for Cromwell, the French republican maintained that one had to make distinctions between the victor at Naseby and the usurper. To be added to Brissot’s current recommendations on hair-styles are his revolutionary toasts. One of these is: “To the rights of man and to the true friends of liberty who tried to establish republican government in England in the last century; to Ludlow, to Ireton, to Saint-John!”; it is followed, however, by an equally clear “Anathema to the Cromwells and to all the hypocritical scoundrels who would disguise their ambitious designs under a cloak of sham popularity. May they all, like him, devoured by remorse and terror, descend into the darkness of the tomb amid the execrations of the people.”64 In concluding his answer to Clermont-Tonnerre, Brissot feels he can do no better than once more cite Mrs. Macaulay, now to the effect that it was precisely because the Long Parliament had been doing so well in its reform programmes that Cromwell, fearing a possible loss in his military prestige, decided to dissolve that assembly. If Clermont-Tonnerre were to read Mrs. Macaulay instead of Hume, he would no longer be surprised that men exist “who cite as a model (not in everything) this long parliament. Oh! woe betide humanity, woe betide liberty if such men, consumed with a burning passion for freedom, do not multiply; if everywhere we do not renounce the ideas—so degrading to men, so offensive to God—of those vile courtiers who raise up the grandeur of one man on the backs of the oppressed millions. . . .”65

Clermont-Tonnerre’s reaction, which followed in print within only a few days, was one of complete horror. The extent to which Brissot’s unheard-of views on Stuart history must have seemed politically insane to him is made clear by the fact that he obviously felt it more necessary to reproduce without alteration Brissot’s defence of the Long Parliament than he did to attempt a detailed refutation of the republican’s “principles, as dangerous as they are culpable”:66

After citing Brissot’s text in full, a text which he obviously feels is enough to hang any man politically, Clermont-Tonnerre concludes:

For Clermont-Tonnerre the debate ended with the postscript just quoted, which Brissot immediately interpreted as a sign of defeat: “To those who are not deceived by fine words, it must be clear that he has demonstrated his inability to answer me.”69 After ironically thanking his royalist opponent for helping to advertise the merits of the Long Parliament, Brissot concluded with words that forewarned of things to come:

3

A Republican Antidote: Catherine Macaulay-Graham

If the debate between Clermont-Tonnerre and Brissot gives proof of the continuing importance of Hume’s Stuarts in France at this time, it also makes clear the fact that the History of his republican rival, Catherine Macaulay-Graham, had begun to play an equally important role in countering its conservative effect.

Five years before the Revolution Brissot had already expressed the hope that Mrs. Macaulay’s work would one day be translated into French,71 and in his Mémoires he speaks of having discussed at that time the feasibility of such a project with Mirabeau.72 In fact, although there are some few doubts still remaining in the matter, it seems clear that Mirabeau undertook the initial responsibility for the translation, the first five volumes of which were published in the years 1791 and 1792 after his death.73

Even before the appearance of this long-delayed translation other notable revolutionary figures had commented favourably on Mrs. Macaulay’s views. Condorcet, in July 1790, for example, contrasts the reactionary activity of Pitt and Burke with the potentially great rôle this republican historian could have played were she herself a member of the British House of Commons: “Although as enthusiastically in favour of liberty as Mr. Burke is of tyranny, would she, in defending the French constitution, have come anywhere near the absurd and disgusting gibberish this celebrated rhetorician has just employed in attacking it? . . .”74

Hume rather than Burke, however, soon became the political writer whose villainy was most often opposed to the virtue of this female patriot. The Journal des Savants, announcing in 1791 the appearance in translation of her first two volumes, stated quite explicitly that they represented a “corrective” to Hume.75 The Moniteur, giving notice of the History in the same month, added the promise to publish a full review of the work which it called “one of the most important that has been undertaken since the start of the revolution.”76 Mirabeau himself is quoted by the editor of the Macaulay History as having stated in the following terms that he considered its translation to be a task of patriotism and good citizenship: “In our present circumstance, this translation is no ordinary work. There are so many points of contact, so many connections between those events, those personages and us, that merely by pointing these out in simple notes becomes in a sense the equivalent of writing the history of both revolutions.”77 We see that republicans were given to making parallels too, but to do this they needed a different historian, one who could avenge the “outrages” of Hume.78

Mirabeau’s “Discours préliminaire” underscores some of these. The French parliamentary leader begins by attacking Hume’s outrageously conservative premises:

A passage from Hume, already cited enthusiastically by the royalist de Montjoie80 and showing very little admiration for political innovators but recommending a warm attitude of understanding toward their opponents, provokes another burst of indignant eloquence from the great French orator:

We see that in this frankly hostile but not entirely unflattering passage Hume’s famous impartiality is not questioned; what is impugned is impartiality itself. Revolutions, of course, have little use for impartiality and the French revolution was no exception. Fairness to all sides would have implied a criminal indifference not to truth, for that was a secondary consideration, but to justice. Neutrality as such was scorned. Robespierre was to sum up his chief accusation against the philosophes of the eighteenth century with the words lâche neutralité (cowardly neutrality). Brissot, attacking Clermont-Tonnerre’s professed love of moderation, made the comment that “moderation, impartiality, in these troubled times means, in gaming terms, seeing all the hands, or betting on certainties. The words also mean,” he added, “protecting ancient abuses from useful innovations.”82 Mercier too shows his contempt for this once-honoured attribute, the one most often attached in the prerevolutionary period to Hume’s History and which had now come to be associated with the monarchist party. His anecdote on the subject is worth quoting:

So much for the impartiaux, monarchistes, monarchiens, and moyennistes. So much too for Hume’s proud claim—recognized as just by so many until then—to being neither Whig nor Tory, neither patriot nor courtier. With Catherine Macaulay there was no room for doubt on these matters, and the Moniteur, reviewing her History at length in February 1792, gratefully elaborates in her defence an intricate dialectic of partiality. The historian must show more than just that imaginative sympathy which makes the past intelligible to the present. Imaginative sympathy must be one of his characteristics but he must also show himself able to preach the good cause:

The Moniteur concludes by noting that not only was Catherine Macaulay’s work important in itself, it had also been transmitted to the French by one of the founding fathers of their liberty; together these two facts formed a sufficient reason for all amateurs of history and all lovers of liberty to read the work carefully.

That the lovers of liberty did read it and that Catherine Macaulay played an important rôle in supporting, against Hume, the ideology of the revolutionaries is beyond any doubt. Let us examine one last example of her revolutionary success which we find to be notably important especially among the Girondins: her influence on Madame Roland.

A letter of November 1790 from Madame Roland to Bancal illustrates again the fact that Catherine Macaulay was being read in English by patriots in France before the appearance of the Mirabeau translation: “If I can devote a few moments this winter to the study of English,” she writes, “it will be in order to read Madame Macaulay’s History. After the historians, I shall turn to Rousseau’s moral writings which are in such perfect conformity with civic duty. . . .”85 It is probably fairly safe to assume also that Catherine Macaulay’s History was being discussed at this time in the influential Roland salon.

Several years later, in 1793, we find Madame Roland in prison, drawing up a list of books she would like to be made available to her:

With all lovers of liberty presumably following the Moniteur’s urgent advice to read this work, it is perhaps understandable that it was in short supply. The shortage was soon remedied after the Terror, however, for we find the Ministry of the Interior recommending in July 1798 that Catherine Macaulay’s History of England be included on the list of books distributed as prizes “at end-of-school ceremonies and on national holidays.”87 Meanwhile, in prison, Madame Roland must do with second best. In her Mémoires particuliers we find yet another great tribute paid to the English republican historian who, we remember, had been seen as defamatory, seditious, and criminal in France thirty years earlier: “Had I been allowed to live,” Madame Roland concedes, “I would have had but one temptation: to write the annals of the century, to be the Macaulay of my country; I was about to say, the Tacitus of France, but that would not be very modest on my part. . . .”88

Madame Roland wrote these words in prison; soon she would be condemned to die by the hatred of the Montagnards, and we remember her famous remark as she mounted the revolutionary scaffold: “O Liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name!” It is perhaps worth noting that, thirty years earlier, Hume had already expressed the identical sentiment in a letter to the Englishwoman Madame Roland had most wanted to emulate.89

[1. ]Discours choisis sur divers sujets de religion et de littérature, par M. l’Abbé Maury, Paris, 1777, p. 132. See also Oeuvres choisies du cardinal J.-Sifrein Maury, Paris, 1827, II. 142-51.

[2. ]Ibid., III. 361-62. Maury quotes Hume’s portrait of the French king.

[3. ]Opinion sur le droit de faire la guerre et de conclure les traités de paix, d’alliance et de commerce; prononcée dans l’assemblée nationale le 18 mai 1790, ibid., IV. 99-100.

[4. ]Opinion sur les finances et sur la dette publique, July 1790, ibid., IV. 172.

[5. ]Discours sur la sanction royale, ibid., V. iv.

[6. ]A note of caution is necessary here. That Maury was the only rightist orator at this time who could match the vigour of Mirabeau seems little in doubt. That such was the opinion of contemporaries is evidenced in the following not entirely biased “Anagram-Epigram concerning two very well-known party leaders,” which we find in the Actes des Apôtres, 1789, I, No. 28, p. 16:

• • Deux insignes chefs de parti
  • D’intrigue ici tiennent bureau,
  • Chacun à l’autre est assorti,
  • Même audace & voix de taureau;
  • L’on pourrait faire le pari
  • Qu’ils sont nés dans la même peau;
  • Car retournez abé Mauri,
  • Vous trouverez Mirabeau.
• • [Two distinguished party chiefs
  • Scheme and hold forth here;
  • Well-matched to one another,
  • Both are brassy, both bellow like bulls;
  • One could almost lay odds
  • They are brothers under the skin;
  • For if you shuffle abé Mauri,
  • Out comes Mirabeau.]

There are many anecdotes attesting to Abbé Maury’s quick wit. The following example of it is related by Montlosier, who describes how one day the future Cardinal was walking near the Halles market area: “Several of the local streetwalkers caught sight of him and accosted him: —‘Good-day to you, my fine sturdy fellow!’ —‘Good-day ladies.’ —‘You’ve got wit enough, ’tis true, but no matter how you kick and struggle, you’ll be f. . . . . in the end!’ —‘Oh! ladies, as you very well know, one doesn’t die from that!’ At which they burst out laughing and rushed up to hug and kiss him.” (Mémoires de M. le Comte de Montlosier sur la Révolution française, Paris, 1830, II. 314.) There is evidence to show, nevertheless, that Maury’s powerful lungs and sharp wit were not always sufficient for the task of overcoming the increasingly impatient heckling of the opposition benches (see, for example, the Journal des débats, Nos. 153 and 382). Although he remained at his post until 1791, he more than ever took to publishing dictated versions of his speeches. It is thus very likely, as Aulard points out, that “the most celebrated speeches of Abbé Maury were never delivered by him.” (F.-A. Aulard, Les Orateurs de l’Assemblée Constituante, Paris, 1882, p. 234.)

[7. ]Opinion sur la souveraineté du peuple, prononcée dans l’Assemblée Nationale en 1790 par M. l’Abbé Maury et publiée sur les manuscrits autographes de l’auteur par Louis-Sifrein Maury, son neveu, Avignon, 1852, pp. 95-96.

[8. ]See supra, pp. 43-44.

[9. ]Ibid., pp. 96-98.

[10. ]See Oeuvres complètes de J. de Maistre, VII. 503. Worth mentioning here also is the use made at about this same time of Hume’s position on divorce by another representative of the clergy in the National Assembly, the Abbé Armand de Chapt de Rastignac, in his work Accord de la Révélation et de la Raison contre le divorce, Paris, 1790, pp. 332-33, 339, 347-48.

[11. ]The Rights of Man, Part I, p. 48.

[12. ]Félix-Louis-Christophe de Montjoie, Histoire de la Révolution de France et de l’Assemblée Nationale, Paris, 1792, cinquième partie, pp. 127-28.

[13. ]Ibid., p. 127.

[14. ]De l’Etat de la France, présent et à venir, par M. de Calonne, ministre d’Etat, Londres, 1791, pp. 360-61; Mémoire de M. le Comte de Lally-Tollendal, ou Seconde Lettre à ses Commettans, Paris, 1790, pp. 107-8.

[15. ]Lally-Tollendal, op. cit., p. 109.

[16. ]Recherches sur les causes qui ont empêché les Français de devenir libres et sur les moyens qui leur restent pour acquérir la liberté, Genève, 1792, I. 210. In this same work Mounier, quoting Hume’s sentiment that despotism is preferable to popular anarchy, urges the French to rally round Louis XVI and place absolute power in his hands for the period of one year. (Ibid., II. 213-15.)

[17. ]Introduction à la Révolution Française (1792), in Oeuvres de Barnave, Paris, 1843, I. 72.

[18. ]Seconde Lettre de M. de Lally-Tollendal à M. Burke, Londres, 1792, p. 35. The French jurist J.-V. Delacroix also calls Hume “the most impartial of historians,” in his Constitutions des principaux états de l’Europe et des Etats-Unis de l’Amérique, Paris, 1791, II. 206.

[19. ]Quelle est la situation de l’Assemblée Nationale? (1790), pp. 41-44.

[20. ]Ibid., pp. 43-44. The same passage from “the wise Hume” is quoted against the Convention in December 1792 by Dugour: Mémoire justificatif pour Louis XVI, Paris, 1793, pp. 119-21.

[21. ]As in the following pastiche of the popular revolutionary song Ça ira:

• Enfin de la folie
• Le peuple guérira,
• Et de sa maladie
• Les auteurs punira.
• Je crois qu’après cela
• Tout se rétablira;
• Je crois qu’après cela,
• Ça ira, ça ira.
• (Les Actes des Apôtres, No. 173, p. 16.)

[Finally, the madness of the people will be cured, and the authors of it punished; I think after that, everything will be right again; I think after that, ’twill be fine, ’twill be fine.]Along with those of other conservative heroes, Hume’s name figures in some of the apôtres’ light verse against Robespierre. See, for example, ibid., No. 15, pp. 5-6.

[22. ]Ibid., II. 5-25.

[23. ]Ibid., II. 21.

[24. ]Ibid., II. 22.

[25. ]Ibid., III. 5.

[26. ]Ibid., IV. 15-16.

[27. ]Ibid., IV. 28.

[28. ]Ibid., IV. 29.

[29. ]Ibid., IV. 31.

[30. ]Ibid., V. 43-44.

[31. ]Ibid., V. 63.

[32. ]Le Long Parlement et ses crimes, rapprochemens faciles à faire, Paris, 1790, p. 9.

[33. ]Ibid., p. 108.

[34. ]Ibid., p. 16.

[35. ]Ibid., pp. 84-85.

[36. ]Ibid., pp. 100-101.

[37. ]Ibid., p. 143.

[38. ]Ibid., p. 103.

[39. ]Ibid., p. 45.

[40. ]Journal de M. Suleau, Paris, 1792, No. XII, p. 78.

[41. ]Ibid., p. 85.

[42. ]Ibid., p. 77.

[43. ]Ibid., pp. 82-83.

[44. ]Parallèle des Révolutions, Seconde édition, Paris, 1792, p. 297. In fact, the denigrating title Cromwel had been used rather generously and indiscriminately from the very beginning of the Revolution by both the Right and the Left as the supreme political insult. Within the space of only a few years it was applied variously to, among others, Necker, Mirabeau, Lafayette, Dumouriez, Danton, Robespierre, the entire Directoire, and, of course, Bonaparte. Curiously enough, it is the royalists who most often saw Cromwell as a great genius, albeit evil, and far superior to the revolutionary leaders, the “vile lowlifes,” of the Convention. (See, for example, the Comte d’Antraigues’s Adresse à l’ordre de la noblesse de France, Paris, 1792, p. 99; also the opinion of La Harpe expressed in December 1794: “. . . Robespierre and his henchmen! You compare Cromwell to them! There is not one (and history will bear me out) that he would have wanted, even as a sergeant in his army. . . .” —Lycée ou cours de littérature ancienne et moderne, VIII. 17.)

[45. ]Ibid., p. 292.

[46. ]Ibid., p. 414.

[47. ]Ibid., p. 417.

[48. ]Mention should perhaps be made here of what seems to have been a veritable Strafford cult at this time among some French conservatives, directly inspired, I think, by Hume’s extensive and highly favourable account of Charles I’s minister. Already in 1788, Linguet, drawing the parallel between a French trial of that year and that of Strafford, had exclaimed prophetically: “God grant that subsequent events not be the same! . . .” (Annales politiques, civiles et littéraires du dixhuitième siècle, 1788, XV. 339; see also his La France plus qu’Angloise, Bruxelles, 1788). At about this same time, Lally-Tollendal with the parallel of his hapless father in mind, gave private readings of his tragedy Le Comte de Strafford at Versailles: “My tragedy became a literal prophecy; I was urged to have it performed. . . .” But his Strafford was not made, he tells us, to compete with such admonitory school-for-tyrants tragedies as Brutus, César, Guillaume Tell, or Charles IX. (See his dedicatory remarks in Le Comte de Strafford: Tragédie en cinq actes et en vers, Londres, 1795, in which Hume is praised as “especially dedicated to impartiality” and is contrasted with Rapin-Thoyras, “whose only talents lay in being a Presbyterian and a rebel”—pp. 327-28.)

It is possible that Strafford’s execution was tacitly used as a convenient euphemism symbolizing the most dreaded possible consequences of revolution for those royalists who, before Louis XVI’s close arrest, wished to avoid indelicate references to regicide. Cazalès, another faithful Hume reader, refers in 1790 to Strafford as “this minister who possessed so many talents and virtues, yet was shamefully executed; but England mourned his loss and the whole of Europe honoured his memory, and today his name is venerated by all subjects of this now peaceful empire. Such is the example that must be followed, such is the model to be imitated by those who are called upon in these difficult times to administer the affairs of state.” (Discours et opinions de Cazalès, Paris, 1821, pp. 114-15.) In 1792 Barnave in yet another parallel of the English and French revolutions wrote: “There were, in both countries, three classes of patriots. In England, Strafford, the Presbyterians, and the Independents; here, Mounier, the constitutionalists, and the republicans. M. de Lally with his tragedy Strafford seemed to have had a premonition of this analogy by the importance he gave to a man who had occupied a place corresponding to his own.” (Réflexions politiques sur la Révolution, in Oeuvres de Barnave, Paris, 1843, II. 69-70.) Lally-Tollendal tells us, however, that he saw himself as a Falkland. (See Seconde Lettre à ses Commettans, January 1790, p. 169.)

[49. ]See, for example, Le Patriote Français, 25 November 1789, 30 January and 25 February 1790.

[50. ]J.-P. Brissot, membre du Comité de Recherches de la municipalité à Stanislas Clermont (ci-devant Clermont-Tonnerre) membre de l’Assemblée Nationale . . . , Paris, 28 août 1790, p. 8.

[51. ]Ibid., p. 11.

[52. ]Le Patriote Français, 10 August 1789, 8 and 22 January 1790.

[53. ]Brissot à Stanislas Clermont, p. 7.

[54. ]See in Oeuvres complètes de Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre, Paris, An III, volume III.

[55. ]Ibid., III. 341-42.

[56. ]Réplique de J.-P. Brissot à Stanislas Clermont, Paris, 8 octobre 1790, pp. 8-9.

[57. ]Ibid., pp. 44-45.

[58. ]Two weeks after writing this, Brissot, in Le Patriote Français of 25 October 1790, attacked the paragraph (see supra, pp. 121-22, n. 48) praising Strafford in Cazalès’s speech on the dismissal of the ministers: “M. Cazalès has frequently reminded us in this speech of the history of Charles I. We know to what end royalists quote these passages: they wish to frighten the head of our nation and to compare the National Assembly to the Long Parliament. . . .” Brissot contradicts Cazalès on the following points: “(1) Strafford possessed no virtues; (2) Strafford had few talents and those that he had were disastrous for the nation; (3) England, in fact, rejoiced at his death; (4) Europe does not know his name, and veneration of this name will be found only in the brain of M. Cazalès.” Camille Desmoulins the very same day also rebutted Cazalès’s Hume-inspired account with a republican appraisal of Charles’s minister by Milton. (Révolutions de France et de Brabant, IV. 404-7, 25 October 1791.)

[59. ]“Mme Macaulay observes that everyone during that time breathed the spirit of liberty. The artisan deserted his workplace, the merchant his shop, even the women abandoned their domestic chores to engage in politics: all talk was of reform, of the destruction of tyranny. Is that not the picture of our own revolution?”—Note by Brissot.

[60. ]Ibid., pp. 45-47.

[61. ]Le Patriote Français, 31 October 1790.

[62. ]Réplique de J.-P. Brissot, pp. 48-49.

[63. ]See also Brissot’s speech of 10 July 1791 on this subject, in F.-A. Aulard, La Société des Jacobins. Recueil de documents pour l’histoire du Club des Jacobins de Paris, Paris, 1891, II. 608-26; also Le Patriote Français, 15 July 1791. In a February 1792 issue of this last work, Brissot rather gratuitously reminded his readers of the anniversary of Charles I’s execution. Later, however, his vote in the Convention on Louis’s trial was in favour of the appel au peuple (ratification by referendum) and a suspended execution of sentence.

[64. ]Le Patriote Français, 12 July 1790.

[65. ]Réplique de J.-P. Brissot, p. 51.

[66. ]Sur la dernière réplique de J.-P. Brissot, 14 October 1790, in Oeuvres complètes de Clermont-Tonnerre, III. 382-92.

[67. ]Ibid., III. 382-83.

[68. ]Ibid., III. 391-92.

[69. ]Le Patriote Français, 21 October 1790, p. 3.

[70. ]Ibid., p. 4. Brissot on another occasion (see Le Patriote Français, 11 February 1790) also complained about Lally-Tollendal’s use of Hume’s authority in his arguments against Abbé Sieyès’s theory on the powers of a convention (see supra, p. 110). There seems little doubt that Brissot consciously based some of his own political action on the precedents established by the Long Parliament. See, for example, his speech urging sterner measures against the émigrés, 20 October 1791; also his various statements of 1792 on war policy for the Republic.

[71. ]Supra, p. 65.

[72. ]Mémoires de Brissot, Paris, 1877, pp. 327-28.

[73. ]Catherine Macaulay-Graham, Histoire d’Angleterre depuis l’avènement de Jacques I, jusqu’à la révolution. Traduite en français, et augmentée d’un discours préliminaire, contenant un précis de toute l’histoire d’Angleterre, jusqu’à l’avènement de Jacques I: et enrichie de notes. Par Mirabeau.

Brissot states in his Mémoires, but somewhat unreliably, I think, that Mirabeau knew no English and that others did the work under Mirabeau’s supervision. (See preceding reference.) Marie-Joseph Chénier also expressed doubts that Mirabeau translated the first two volumes (the last three were publicly avowed by Guiraudet), since he found the style quite bad: “. . . the language in no way reveals the man of talent: perhaps Mirabeau translated this part of the work too hastily, or, more likely, perhaps he did not translate it at all and it is the result of an all too common practice whereby mediocre writers or greedy booksellers speculate fraudulently on a famous name.” (Tableau historique de l’état et des progrès de la littérature française depuis 1789, 3eme édition, Paris, 1818, pp. 186-87.) An undated letter by Mirabeau, probably written in 1784, indicates that he considered the history an important one and that he highly approved, for example, of Catherine Macaulay’s portrait of James II; it implies, nevertheless, that J.-B. Durival and Guiraudet were to do the actual work of translation whereas Mirabeau would lend his “plebeian aristocrat” name to ensure success in the undertaking which is also described as “an affair of money.” (See Mirabeau’s letters during his residence in England, London, 1832, II. 230.)

On the other hand, it seems equally clear that Mirabeau was not such a complete stranger to the English language as Brissot implies. In 1778 we find him quoting from Hume’s History in the original and complaining that the Abbé Prévost had made many alterations in his translation of the Stuarts (see supra, p. 60). The following quotation from d’Escherny also suggests that Mirabeau may have been actively involved in the translation: “I saw a good deal of the Comte de Mirabeau in Switzerland during the time that he was having his Lettres de cachet printed there. I can visualize him still, a fugitive from the prisons of France, wandering through Holland, lacking food and shelter, hiring out to a bookseller and, in order to put bread on the table, undertaking the translation of a work without understanding its language; acquiring a grammar, a dictionary, and learning English at the same time as he translated the work into French. (It is Mirabeau himself who told me this.)” F.-L. d’Escherny, Correspondance d’un habitant de Paris, Paris, 1791, p. 469.

[74. ]Sur l’admission des femmes au droit de cité, 3 July 1790, in Oeuvres de Condorcet, X. 123-24. Catherine Macaulay was herself attacking Burke at this time in England. (See Observations on the Reflections of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke on the Revolution in France, in a Letter to the Right Hon. the Earl of Stanhope, 1790.)

[75. ]October 1791, p. 627.

[76. ]Gazette Nationale, ou le Moniteur universel, No. 282, 9 October 1791.

[77. ]Histoire d’Angleterre, Avis de l’éditeur, I. ix.

[78. ]Ibid., p. vi.

[79. ]Ibid., “Discours préliminaire,” I. cv.

[80. ]Supra, p. 110.

[81. ]Histoire d’Angleterre, “Discours préliminaire,” I. cvii-cviii.

[82. ]J.-P. Brissot à Stanislas Clermont, Paris, 28 August 1790, pp. 51-52.

[83. ]Paris pendant la révolution (1789-1798) ou le nouveau Paris, Paris, 1862, I. 268-69.

[84. ]Gazette Nationale, ou le Moniteur universel, No. 45, 14 February 1792, p. 184.

[85. ]Lettres de Madame Roland (1788-93), 1ère série, Paris, 1902, II. 191.

[86. ]Mémoires de Madame Roland, Paris, 1905, I. 37-38. It was, in fact, Brissot who had lent Madame Roland the first volumes of Mrs. Macaulay’s History.

[87. ]See La Décade, lettre du 24 messidor, An VI, XVIII. 309.

[88. ]Mémoires de Madame Roland, II. 264.

[89. ]Supra, p. 69, n. 179. Not to be neglected too is the important rôle of Milton’s political writings during this period. Also translated under Mirabeau’s name and similarly the honoured recipient of Brissot’s revolutionary toasts, Milton is cited enthusiastically along with Catherine Macaulay by Camille Desmoulins as an ardent defender of liberty. (Révolutions de France et de Brabant, 12 December 1789, I. 125, 130; 19 December 1789, I. 180-81; 25 October 1790, IV. 404-7.) The Annales patriotiques of Mercier and Carra commend him as well (see No. 640, 4 July 1791, p. 1534). Administrators of the Département de la Drôme even ordered the official reprinting (Valence, 1792) of his refutation of Saumaise in anticipation of Louis XVI’s execution. It is interesting to note too that Milton figures as a virtuous republican member of Parliament opposed to another M.P., a sinister character named Burke, in M.-L. Tardy’s Cromwel ou le général liberticide of 1793. It was, of course, especially during Louis’s trial that his political writings took on the greatest significance and he is quite frequently cited in the Convention. Royalists, on the other hand, showed a very distinct tendency to denounce him as a regicide, despite his Christianity, in favour of the conservative “atheism” of Hume. Abbé Guillon, for example, points out with horror the rôle of Milton in both the English and the French revolutions. (Parallèle des Révolutions, 1792, p. 303.)