SELECT DOCUMENTS ILLUSTRATIVE OF THE HISTORY OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION THE CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY EDITED BY L. G. WICKHAM LEGG, M.A. NEW COLLEGE VOL. I OXFORD AT THE CLARENDON PRESS 1905 INTRODUCTION THIS work is an attempt to tell the story of the French Revolution almost in the words of the Frenchmen of the time. Many works have been written on the causes of the Revolution, and on the philosophy which guided it; but, so far as I am aware, no attempt similar to this has been made to show the impression left by events on contemporary Frenchmen. That such an effort is highly presumptuous, I readily acknowledge; and, consequently, a few words on the plan of the book may not be out of place, in view of the excessive abundance of material, necessitating a somewhat arbitrary selection of the different branches of the subject. It may possibly be no extreme exaggeration to say that the knowledge of the French Revolution possessed by the majority of English people is ultimately derived from the profuse output of memoirs which appeared under the Empire and the Restoration. Valuable as these collections undoubtedly are, they scarcely come within the scope of a book which is composed of extracts from strictly contemporaneous writings; and in all cases such memoirs have been used only for the sake of reference. Even of memoirs of persons who perished in the Revolution itself, the same may be said. Written often a twelve-month or more after the events which they describe, they are naturally coloured by the sufferings of their authors at the time of their composition; but a more serious objection to the use of memoirs in general for this book arises from the fact that the writers frequently refreshed their memories from the old newspapers, as for example did Ferrières, who copied out whole paragraphs of articles from the Mercure de France; or Bailly, who, from the minutes of the Commune, transcribed with tolerable exactness the account of events at which he was not present. Even when we restrict the scope of our inquiry to contemporaneous evidence, the embarras de richesses is 348768 but too perceptible. The publication of the speeches of the leaders of the Assemblies by M. Aulard in France and by Mr. Morse Stephens in England has been thought a sufficient excuse for omitting material of undoubted importance, but of unwieldy bulk. Further, these speeches have been used by many historians as material for their work; and the forty volumes of MM. Buchez and Roux's Histoire parlementaire de la Révolution française are decisive of the impossibility of any attempt to include the debates in a volume of extracts. One exception to this rule has been made: the speeches of the King, who could not be called an orator,' have occasionally been inserted on account of their historical and constitutional importance. Consideration of space has led also to the rejection of pamphlets. To what bulk the work might have grown, had a selection of pamphlets been included, may be imagined if reference be made to Mr. Fortescue's catalogue of the French Revolution pamphlets in the British Museum. Our only extracts from pamphlets are, first, the valuable account by the watchmaker Humbert of the part he played at the fall of the Bastille, and, secondly, the passages from C'en est fait de nous. This production, which at the time caused universal horror, is a good specimen of the extreme type of writing which appeared above the name of Marat. Attention has recently been paid to the private correspondence of the leading figures of the period. Letters admirably represent the opinions of the writers, but from the fact that they were private it may be doubted whether they can have had more than a small influence, and that indirect, on the history of the Revolution. The best known letters, the correspondence of Mirabeau with the Court, are those most likely to have affected the course of events, yet it is notorious how ineffectual were that politician's attempts to instil any settled policy into the minds of the King and Queen. The result of the letters was but to give their author a quantity of ready cash, some of which was spent with laudable intentions, but with imperceptible consequences. The letters of Madame INTRODUCTION Roland, which have been recently edited by M. Perroud, are not of great importance for the present volumes. Further, the few collections of letters that have been published are those of men or women of great eminence or ability. They show how events appeared to the writers, and from their reflexions their political foresight and judgement can, no doubt, be estimated by the student of character. But, after all, for us the important fact to be ascertained is not what the extraordinary individual foresaw or imagined, but the opinion of the ordinary person. That some of the catastrophes of the Revolution were brought about by the machinations of single individuals cannot be denied, but what made those catastrophes possible was the political creed of the average Parisian. What the Parisian of normal ability, or of less than normal ability, thought, or, rather, was made to think, is to be found, not in private letters, nor even in the speeches of the National Assembly, so much as in the periodical literature, which, in conjunction with the clubs and sections, guided and influenced public opinion, in its inexperience of politics, far more widely, and far more strongly, than does the press of modern times. It is therefore to the newspapers that attention has been mainly directed, and it will be found that extracts from the periodical literature of the time form the bulk of the present volume. If MM. Buchez and Roux in their enormous work have printed some copious extracts from the French gazettes, yet the debates in the Assembly have been given the prior place, and the number of journals which they used was limited. M. Tourneux, in his Bibliographie de l'histoire de Paris, mentions nearly five hundred newspapers that appeared in Paris alone during the period of twenty-nine months covered by this volume. Of these, the vast majority were ephemeral papers. Of such journals it may be said that the investigation soon becomes profitless as well as wearisome; and, as the purpose of this book is to give a representative selection from the most influential papers, these obscure periodicals, whose short lives are a testimony to their |