The French Revolution

T >> Thomas Carlyle >> The French Revolution


But of those decadent ages in which no Ideal either grows or blossoms?
When Belief and Loyalty have passed away, and only the cant and false
echo of them remains; and all Solemnity has become Pageantry; and
the Creed of persons in authority has become one of two things: an
Imbecility or a Macchiavelism? Alas, of these ages World-History can
take no notice; they have to become compressed more and more,
and finally suppressed in the Annals of Mankind; blotted out as
spurious,--which indeed they are. Hapless ages: wherein, if ever in any,
it is an unhappiness to be born. To be born, and to learn only, by every
tradition and example, that God's Universe is Belial's and a Lie; and
'the Supreme Quack' the hierarch of men! In which mournfulest faith,
nevertheless, do we not see whole generations (two, and sometimes even
three successively) live, what they call living; and vanish,--without
chance of reappearance?

In such a decadent age, or one fast verging that way, had our poor Louis
been born. Grant also that if the French Kingship had not, by course of
Nature, long to live, he of all men was the man to accelerate Nature.
The Blossom of French Royalty, cactus-like, has accordingly made an
astonishing progress. In those Metz days, it was still standing with all
its petals, though bedimmed by Orleans Regents and Roue Ministers and
Cardinals; but now, in 1774, we behold it bald, and the virtue nigh gone
out of it.

Disastrous indeed does it look with those same 'realised ideals,' one
and all! The Church, which in its palmy season, seven hundred years ago,
could make an Emperor wait barefoot, in penance-shift; three days, in
the snow, has for centuries seen itself decaying; reduced even to forget
old purposes and enmities, and join interest with the Kingship: on this
younger strength it would fain stay its decrepitude; and these two will
henceforth stand and fall together. Alas, the Sorbonne still sits there,
in its old mansion; but mumbles only jargon of dotage, and no longer
leads the consciences of men: not the Sorbonne; it is Encyclopedies,
Philosophie, and who knows what nameless innumerable multitude of
ready Writers, profane Singers, Romancers, Players, Disputators, and
Pamphleteers, that now form the Spiritual Guidance of the world. The
world's Practical Guidance too is lost, or has glided into the same
miscellaneous hands. Who is it that the King (Able-man, named also Roi,
Rex, or Director) now guides? His own huntsmen and prickers: when there
is to be no hunt, it is well said, 'Le Roi ne fera rien (To-day
his Majesty will do nothing). (Memoires sur la Vie privee de Marie
Antoinette, par Madame Campan (Paris, 1826), i. 12). He lives and
lingers there, because he is living there, and none has yet laid hands
on him.

The nobles, in like manner, have nearly ceased either to guide or
misguide; and are now, as their master is, little more than ornamental
figures. It is long since they have done with butchering one another or
their king: the Workers, protected, encouraged by Majesty, have ages ago
built walled towns, and there ply their crafts; will permit no Robber
Baron to 'live by the saddle,' but maintain a gallows to prevent it.
Ever since that period of the Fronde, the Noble has changed his
fighting sword into a court rapier, and now loyally attends his king
as ministering satellite; divides the spoil, not now by violence
and murder, but by soliciting and finesse. These men call themselves
supports of the throne, singular gilt-pasteboard caryatides in that
singular edifice! For the rest, their privileges every way are now much
curtailed. That law authorizing a Seigneur, as he returned from hunting,
to kill not more than two Serfs, and refresh his feet in their warm
blood and bowels, has fallen into perfect desuetude,--and even into
incredibility; for if Deputy Lapoule can believe in it, and call for the
abrogation of it, so cannot we. (Histoire de la Revolution Francaise,
par Deux Amis de la Liberte (Paris, 1793), ii. 212.) No Charolois, for
these last fifty years, though never so fond of shooting, has been in
use to bring down slaters and plumbers, and see them roll from their
roofs; (Lacretelle, Histoire de France pendant le 18me Siecle (Paris,
1819) i. 271.) but contents himself with partridges and grouse.
Close-viewed, their industry and function is that of dressing gracefully
and eating sumptuously. As for their debauchery and depravity, it is
perhaps unexampled since the era of Tiberius and Commodus. Nevertheless,
one has still partly a feeling with the lady Marechale: "Depend upon it,
Sir, God thinks twice before damning a man of that quality." (Dulaure,
vii. 261.) These people, of old, surely had virtues, uses; or they could
not have been there. Nay, one virtue they are still required to have
(for mortal man cannot live without a conscience): the virtue of perfect
readiness to fight duels.

Such are the shepherds of the people: and now how fares it with the
flock? With the flock, as is inevitable, it fares ill, and ever worse.
They are not tended, they are only regularly shorn. They are sent for,
to do statute-labour, to pay statute-taxes; to fatten battle-fields
(named 'Bed of honour') with their bodies, in quarrels which are not
theirs; their hand and toil is in every possession of man; but for
themselves they have little or no possession. Untaught, uncomforted,
unfed; to pine dully in thick obscuration, in squalid destitution
and obstruction: this is the lot of the millions; peuple taillable et
corveable a merci et misericorde. In Brittany they once rose in revolt
at the first introduction of Pendulum Clocks; thinking it had something
to do with the Gabelle. Paris requires to be cleared out periodically
by the Police; and the horde of hunger-stricken vagabonds to be sent
wandering again over space--for a time. 'During one such periodical
clearance,' says Lacretelle, 'in May, 1750, the Police had presumed
withal to carry off some reputable people's children, in the hope of
extorting ransoms for them. The mothers fill the public places
with cries of despair; crowds gather, get excited: so many women in
destraction run about exaggerating the alarm: an absurd and horrid fable
arises among the people; it is said that the doctors have ordered a
Great Person to take baths of young human blood for the restoration
of his own, all spoiled by debaucheries. Some of the rioters,' adds
Lacretelle, quite coolly, 'were hanged on the following days:' the
Police went on. (Lacretelle, iii. 175.) O ye poor naked wretches! and
this, then, is your inarticulate cry to Heaven, as of a dumb tortured
animal, crying from uttermost depths of pain and debasement? Do these
azure skies, like a dead crystalline vault, only reverberate the echo of
it on you? Respond to it only by 'hanging on the following days?'--Not
so: not forever! Ye are heard in Heaven. And the answer too will
come,--in a horror of great darkness, and shakings of the world, and a
cup of trembling which all the nations shall drink.

Remark, meanwhile, how from amid the wrecks and dust of this universal
Decay new Powers are fashioning themselves, adapted to the new time and
its destinies. Besides the old Noblesse, originally of Fighters, there
is a new recognised Noblesse of Lawyers; whose gala-day and proud
battle-day even now is. An unrecognised Noblesse of Commerce; powerful
enough, with money in its pocket. Lastly, powerfulest of all, least
recognised of all, a Noblesse of Literature; without steel on their
thigh, without gold in their purse, but with the 'grand thaumaturgic
faculty of Thought' in their head. French Philosophism has arisen; in
which little word how much do we include! Here, indeed, lies properly
the cardinal symptom of the whole wide-spread malady. Faith is gone out;
Scepticism is come in. Evil abounds and accumulates: no man has Faith to
withstand it, to amend it, to begin by amending himself; it must even
go on accumulating. While hollow langour and vacuity is the lot of the
Upper, and want and stagnation of the Lower, and universal misery
is very certain, what other thing is certain? That a Lie cannot be
believed! Philosophism knows only this: her other belief is mainly that,
in spiritual supersensual matters no Belief is possible. Unhappy! Nay,
as yet the Contradiction of a Lie is some kind of Belief; but the Lie
with its Contradiction once swept away, what will remain? The five
unsatiated Senses will remain, the sixth insatiable Sense (of vanity);
the whole daemonic nature of man will remain,--hurled forth to rage
blindly without rule or rein; savage itself, yet with all the tools and
weapons of civilisation; a spectacle new in History.

In such a France, as in a Powder-tower, where fire unquenched and now
unquenchable is smoking and smouldering all round, has Louis XV. lain
down to die. With Pompadourism and Dubarryism, his Fleur-de-lis has been
shamefully struck down in all lands and on all seas; Poverty invades
even the Royal Exchequer, and Tax-farming can squeeze out no more;
there is a quarrel of twenty-five years' standing with the Parlement;
everywhere Want, Dishonesty, Unbelief, and hotbrained Sciolists for
state-physicians: it is a portentous hour.

Such things can the eye of History see in this sick-room of King Louis,
which were invisible to the Courtiers there. It is twenty years, gone
Christmas-day, since Lord Chesterfield, summing up what he had noted of
this same France, wrote, and sent off by post, the following words, that
have become memorable: 'In short, all the symptoms which I have ever
met with in History, previous to great Changes and Revolutions in
government, now exist and daily increase in France.' (Chesterfield's
Letters: December 25th, 1753.)



Chapter 1.1.III.

Viaticum.

For the present, however, the grand question with the Governors of
France is: Shall extreme unction, or other ghostly viaticum (to Louis,
not to France), be administered?

It is a deep question. For, if administered, if so much as spoken of,
must not, on the very threshold of the business, Witch Dubarry vanish;
hardly to return should Louis even recover? With her vanishes Duke
d'Aiguillon and Company, and all their Armida-Palace, as was said;
Chaos swallows the whole again, and there is left nothing but a smell
of brimstone. But then, on the other hand, what will the Dauphinists and
Choiseulists say? Nay what may the royal martyr himself say, should he
happen to get deadly worse, without getting delirious? For the present,
he still kisses the Dubarry hand; so we, from the ante-room, can note:
but afterwards? Doctors' bulletins may run as they are ordered, but
it is 'confluent small-pox,'--of which, as is whispered too, the
Gatekeepers's once so buxom Daughter lies ill: and Louis XV. is not a
man to be trifled with in his viaticum. Was he not wont to catechise his
very girls in the Parc-aux-cerfs, and pray with and for them, that they
might preserve their--orthodoxy? (Dulaure, viii. (217), Besenval, &c.)
A strange fact, not an unexampled one; for there is no animal so strange
as man.

For the moment, indeed, it were all well, could Archbishop Beaumont but
be prevailed upon--to wink with one eye! Alas, Beaumont would himself so
fain do it: for, singular to tell, the Church too, and whole posthumous
hope of Jesuitism, now hangs by the apron of this same unmentionable
woman. But then 'the force of public opinion'? Rigorous Christophe de
Beaumont, who has spent his life in persecuting hysterical Jansenists
and incredulous Non-confessors; or even their dead bodies, if no better
might be,--how shall he now open Heaven's gate, and give Absolution with
the corpus delicti still under his nose? Our Grand-Almoner Roche-Aymon,
for his part, will not higgle with a royal sinner about turning of the
key: but there are other Churchmen; there is a King's Confessor, foolish
Abbe Moudon; and Fanaticism and Decency are not yet extinct. On the
whole, what is to be done? The doors can be well watched; the Medical
Bulletin adjusted; and much, as usual, be hoped for from time and
chance.

The doors are well watched, no improper figure can enter. Indeed,
few wish to enter; for the putrid infection reaches even to the
Oeil-de-Boeuf; so that 'more than fifty fall sick, and ten die.'
Mesdames the Princesses alone wait at the loathsome sick-bed; impelled
by filial piety. The three Princesses, Graille, Chiffe, Coche (Rag,
Snip, Pig, as he was wont to name them), are assiduous there; when all
have fled. The fourth Princess Loque (Dud), as we guess, is already in
the Nunnery, and can only give her orisons. Poor Graille and Sisterhood,
they have never known a Father: such is the hard bargain Grandeur must
make. Scarcely at the Debotter (when Royalty took off its boots) could
they snatch up their 'enormous hoops, gird the long train round their
waists, huddle on their black cloaks of taffeta up to the very chin;'
and so, in fit appearance of full dress, 'every evening at six,' walk
majestically in; receive their royal kiss on the brow; and then walk
majestically out again, to embroidery, small-scandal, prayers, and
vacancy. If Majesty came some morning, with coffee of its own making,
and swallowed it with them hastily while the dogs were uncoupling for
the hunt, it was received as a grace of Heaven. (Campan, i. 11-36.) Poor
withered ancient women! in the wild tossings that yet await your fragile
existence, before it be crushed and broken; as ye fly through hostile
countries, over tempestuous seas, are almost taken by the Turks; and
wholly, in the Sansculottic Earthquake, know not your right hand from
your left, be this always an assured place in your remembrance: for the
act was good and loving! To us also it is a little sunny spot, in that
dismal howling waste, where we hardly find another.

Meanwhile, what shall an impartial prudent Courtier do? In these
delicate circumstances, while not only death or life, but even sacrament
or no sacrament, is a question, the skilfulest may falter. Few are so
happy as the Duke d'Orleans and the Prince de Conde; who can themselves,
with volatile salts, attend the King's ante-chamber; and, at the same
time, send their brave sons (Duke de Chartres, Egalite that is to be;
Duke de Bourbon, one day Conde too, and famous among Dotards) to wait
upon the Dauphin. With another few, it is a resolution taken; jacta est
alea. Old Richelieu,--when Beaumont, driven by public opinion, is at
last for entering the sick-room,--will twitch him by the rochet, into a
recess; and there, with his old dissipated mastiff-face, and the oiliest
vehemence, be seen pleading (and even, as we judge by Beaumont's change
of colour, prevailing) 'that the King be not killed by a proposition
in Divinity.' Duke de Fronsac, son of Richelieu, can follow his father:
when the Cure of Versailles whimpers something about sacraments, he will
threaten to 'throw him out of the window if he mention such a thing.'

Happy these, we may say; but to the rest that hover between two
opinions, is it not trying? He who would understand to what a pass
Catholicism, and much else, had now got; and how the symbols of
the Holiest have become gambling-dice of the Basest,--must read the
narrative of those things by Besenval, and Soulavie, and the other Court
Newsmen of the time. He will see the Versailles Galaxy all scattered
asunder, grouped into new ever-shifting Constellations. There are nods
and sagacious glances; go-betweens, silk dowagers mysteriously gliding,
with smiles for this constellation, sighs for that: there is tremor,
of hope or desperation, in several hearts. There is the pale grinning
Shadow of Death, ceremoniously ushered along by another grinning Shadow,
of Etiquette: at intervals the growl of Chapel Organs, like prayer by
machinery; proclaiming, as in a kind of horrid diabolic horse-laughter,
Vanity of vanities, all is Vanity!



Chapter 1.1.IV.

Louis the Unforgotten.

Poor Louis! With these it is a hollow phantasmagory, where like mimes
they mope and mowl, and utter false sounds for hire; but with thee it is
frightful earnest.

Frightful to all men is Death; from of old named King of Terrors. Our
little compact home of an Existence, where we dwelt complaining, yet as
in a home, is passing, in dark agonies, into an Unknown of Separation,
Foreignness, unconditioned Possibility. The Heathen Emperor asks of his
soul: Into what places art thou now departing? The Catholic King
must answer: To the Judgment-bar of the Most High God! Yes, it is a
summing-up of Life; a final settling, and giving-in the 'account of the
deeds done in the body:' they are done now; and lie there unalterable,
and do bear their fruits, long as Eternity shall last.

Louis XV. had always the kingliest abhorrence of Death. Unlike that
praying Duke of Orleans, Egalite's grandfather,--for indeed several of
them had a touch of madness,--who honesty believed that there was no
Death! He, if the Court Newsmen can be believed, started up once on
a time, glowing with sulphurous contempt and indignation on his poor
Secretary, who had stumbled on the words, feu roi d'Espagne (the late
King of Spain): "Feu roi, Monsieur?"--"Monseigneur," hastily answered
the trembling but adroit man of business, "c'est une titre qu'ils
prennent ('tis a title they take)." (Besenval, i. 199.) Louis, we say,
was not so happy; but he did what he could. He would not suffer Death to
be spoken of; avoided the sight of churchyards, funereal monuments, and
whatsoever could bring it to mind. It is the resource of the Ostrich;
who, hard hunted, sticks his foolish head in the ground, and would fain
forget that his foolish unseeing body is not unseen too. Or sometimes,
with a spasmodic antagonism, significant of the same thing, and of
more, he would go; or stopping his court carriages, would send into
churchyards, and ask 'how many new graves there were today,' though it
gave his poor Pompadour the disagreeablest qualms. We can figure the
thought of Louis that day, when, all royally caparisoned for hunting, he
met, at some sudden turning in the Wood of Senart, a ragged Peasant with
a coffin: "For whom?"--It was for a poor brother slave, whom Majesty had
sometimes noticed slaving in those quarters. "What did he die of?"--"Of
hunger:"--the King gave his steed the spur. (Campan, iii. 39.)

But figure his thought, when Death is now clutching at his own
heart-strings, unlooked for, inexorable! Yes, poor Louis, Death has
found thee. No palace walls or life-guards, gorgeous tapestries or gilt
buckram of stiffest ceremonial could keep him out; but he is here,
here at thy very life-breath, and will extinguish it. Thou, whose whole
existence hitherto was a chimera and scenic show, at length becomest a
reality: sumptuous Versailles bursts asunder, like a dream, into void
Immensity; Time is done, and all the scaffolding of Time falls wrecked
with hideous clangour round thy soul: the pale Kingdoms yawn open; there
must thou enter, naked, all unking'd, and await what is appointed
thee! Unhappy man, there as thou turnest, in dull agony, on thy bed of
weariness, what a thought is thine! Purgatory and Hell-fire, now all-too
possible, in the prospect; in the retrospect,--alas, what thing didst
thou do that were not better undone; what mortal didst thou generously
help; what sorrow hadst thou mercy on? Do the 'five hundred thousand'
ghosts, who sank shamefully on so many battle-fields from Rossbach to
Quebec, that thy Harlot might take revenge for an epigram,--crowd round
thee in this hour? Thy foul Harem; the curses of mothers, the tears
and infamy of daughters? Miserable man! thou 'hast done evil as thou
couldst:' thy whole existence seems one hideous abortion and mistake of
Nature; the use and meaning of thee not yet known. Wert thou a fabulous
Griffin, devouring the works of men; daily dragging virgins to thy
cave;--clad also in scales that no spear would pierce: no spear but
Death's? A Griffin not fabulous but real! Frightful, O Louis, seem these
moments for thee.--We will pry no further into the horrors of a sinner's
death-bed.

And yet let no meanest man lay flattering unction to his soul. Louis was
a Ruler; but art not thou also one? His wide France, look at it from the
Fixed Stars (themselves not yet Infinitude), is no wider than thy narrow
brickfield, where thou too didst faithfully, or didst unfaithfully. Man,
'Symbol of Eternity imprisoned into 'Time!' it is not thy works, which
are all mortal, infinitely little, and the greatest no greater than
the least, but only the Spirit thou workest in, that can have worth or
continuance.

But reflect, in any case, what a life-problem this of poor Louis, when
he rose as Bien-Aime from that Metz sick-bed, really was! What son
of Adam could have swayed such incoherences into coherence? Could he?
Blindest Fortune alone has cast him on the top of it: he swims
there; can as little sway it as the drift-log sways the wind-tossed
moon-stirred Atlantic. "What have I done to be so loved?" he said then.
He may say now: What have I done to be so hated? Thou hast done nothing,
poor Louis! Thy fault is properly even this, that thou didst nothing.
What could poor Louis do? Abdicate, and wash his hands of it,--in favour
of the first that would accept! Other clear wisdom there was none for
him. As it was, he stood gazing dubiously, the absurdest mortal extant
(a very Solecism Incarnate), into the absurdest confused world;--wherein
at lost nothing seemed so certain as that he, the incarnate Solecism,
had five senses; that were Flying Tables (Tables Volantes, which vanish
through the floor, to come back reloaded). and a Parc-aux-cerfs.

Whereby at least we have again this historical curiosity: a human
being in an original position; swimming passively, as on some boundless
'Mother of Dead Dogs,' towards issues which he partly saw. For Louis had
withal a kind of insight in him. So, when a new Minister of Marine, or
what else it might be, came announcing his new era, the Scarlet-woman
would hear from the lips of Majesty at supper: "He laid out his ware
like another; promised the beautifulest things in the world; not a
thing of which will come: he does not know this region; he will see." Or
again: "'Tis the twentieth time I hear all that; France will never get
a Navy, I believe." How touching also was this: "If I were Lieutenant of
Police, I would prohibit those Paris cabriolets." (Journal de Madame de
Hausset, p. 293, &c.)

Doomed mortal;--for is it not a doom to be Solecism incarnate! A new
Roi Faineant, King Donothing; but with the strangest new Mayor of
the Palace: no bow-legged Pepin now, but that same cloud-capt,
fire-breathing Spectre of DEMOCRACY; incalculable, which is enveloping
the world!--Was Louis no wickeder than this or the other private
Donothing and Eatall; such as we often enough see, under the name of
Man, and even Man of Pleasure, cumbering God's diligent Creation, for
a time? Say, wretcheder! His Life-solecism was seen and felt of a whole
scandalised world; him endless Oblivion cannot engulf, and swallow to
endless depths,--not yet for a generation or two.

However, be this as it will, we remark, not without interest, that 'on
the evening of the 4th,' Dame Dubarry issues from the sick-room, with
perceptible 'trouble in her visage.' It is the fourth evening of May,
year of Grace 1774. Such a whispering in the Oeil-de-Boeuf! Is he dying
then? What can be said is, that Dubarry seems making up her packages;
she sails weeping through her gilt boudoirs, as if taking leave.
D'Aiguilon and Company are near their last card; nevertheless they will
not yet throw up the game. But as for the sacramental controversy, it is
as good as settled without being mentioned; Louis can send for his Abbe
Moudon in the course of next night, be confessed by him, some say for
the space of 'seventeen minutes,' and demand the sacraments of his own
accord.

Nay, already, in the afternoon, behold is not this your Sorceress
Dubarry with the handkerchief at her eyes, mounting D'Aiguillon's
chariot; rolling off in his Duchess's consolatory arms? She is gone;
and her place knows her no more. Vanish, false Sorceress; into Space!
Needless to hover at neighbouring Ruel; for thy day is done. Shut are
the royal palace-gates for evermore; hardly in coming years shalt
thou, under cloud of night, descend once, in black domino, like a black
night-bird, and disturb the fair Antoinette's music-party in the Park:
all Birds of Paradise flying from thee, and musical windpipes growing
mute. (Campan, i. 197.) Thou unclean, yet unmalignant, not unpitiable
thing! What a course was thine: from that first trucklebed (in Joan of
Arc's country) where thy mother bore thee, with tears, to an unnamed
father: forward, through lowest subterranean depths, and over highest
sunlit heights, of Harlotdom and Rascaldom--to the guillotine-axe, which
shears away thy vainly whimpering head! Rest there uncursed; only buried
and abolished: what else befitted thee?

Louis, meanwhile, is in considerable impatience for his sacraments;
sends more than once to the window, to see whether they are not coming.
Be of comfort, Louis, what comfort thou canst: they are under way,
those sacraments. Towards six in the morning, they arrive. Cardinal
Grand-Almoner Roche-Aymon is here, in pontificals, with his pyxes and
his tools; he approaches the royal pillow; elevates his wafer; mutters
or seems to mutter somewhat;--and so (as the Abbe Georgel, in words
that stick to one, expresses it) has Louis 'made the amende honorable to
God;' so does your Jesuit construe it.--"Wa, Wa," as the wild Clotaire
groaned out, when life was departing, "what great God is this that
pulls down the strength of the strongest kings!" (Gregorius Turonensis,
Histor. lib. iv. cap. 21.)