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Part XIV.
Part XIV.
Executive magistracy ought to be constituted in such a manner, that those
who compose it should be disposed to love and to venerate those whom they are
bound to obey. A purposed neglect, or, what is worse, a literal but perverse
and malignant obedience, must be the ruin of the wisest counsels. In vain will
the law attempt to anticipate or to follow such studied neglects and
fraudulent attentions. To make them act zealously is not in the competence of
law. Kings, even such as are truly kings, may and ought to bear the freedom of
subjects that are obnoxious to them. They may too, without derogating from
themselves, bear even the authority of such persons, if it promotes their
service. Louis the Thirteenth mortally hated the Cardinal de Richelieu; but
his support of that minister against his rivals was the source of all the
glory of his reign, and the solid foundation of his throne itself. Louis the
Fourteenth, when come to the throne, did not love the Cardinal Mazarin; but
for his interests he preserved him in power. When old, he detested Louvois;
but for years, whilst he faithfully served his greatness, he endured his
person. When George the Second took Mr. Pitt, who certainly was not agreeable
to him, into his councils, he did nothing which could humble a wise sovereign.
But these ministers, who were chosen by affairs, not by affections, acted in
the name of, and in trust for, kings; and not as their avowed, constitutional,
and ostensible masters. I think it impossible that any king, when he has
recovered his first terrors, can cordially infuse vivacity and vigour into
measures which he knows to be dictated by those, who, he must be persuaded,
are in the highest degree ill affected to his person. Will any ministers, who
serve such a king (or whatever he may be called) with but a decent appearance
of respect, cordially obey the orders of those whom but the other day in his
name they had committed to the Bastile? will they obey the orders of those
whom, whilst they were exercising despotic justice upon them, they conceived
they were treating with lenity; and from whom, in a prison, they thought they
had provided an asylum? If you expect such obedience, amongst your other
innovations and regenerations, you ought to make a revolution in nature, and
provide a new constitution for the human mind. Otherwise, your supreme
government cannot harmonize with its executory system. There are cases in
which we cannot take up with names and abstractions. You may call half a dozen
leading individuals, whom we have reason to fear and hate, the nation. It
makes no other difference, than to make us fear and hate them the more. If it
had been thought justifiable and expedient to make such a revolution by such
means, and through such persons, as you have made yours, it would have been
more wise to have completed the business of the fifth and sixth of October.
The new executive officer would then owe his situation to those who are his
creators as well as his masters; and he might be bound in interest, in the
society of crime, and (if in crimes there could be virtues) in gratitude, to
serve those who had promoted him to a place of great lucre and great sensual
indulgence; and of something more: for more he must have received from those
who certainly would not have limited an aggrandized creature, as they have
done a submitting antagonict.
A king circumstanced as the present, if he is totally stupefied by his
misfortunes, so as to think it not the necessity, but the premium and
privilege of life, to eat and sleep, without any regard to glory, can never be
fit for the office. If he feels as men commonly feel, he must be sensible,
that an office so circumstanced is one in which he can obtain no fame or
reputation. He has no generous interest that can excite him to action. At
best, his conduct will be passive and defensive. To inferior people such an
office might be matter of honour. But to be raised to it, and to descend to
it, are different things, and suggest different sentiments. Does he really
name the ministers? They will have a sympathy with him. Are they forced upon
him? The whole business between them and the nominal king will be mutual
counteraction. In all other countries, the office of ministers of state is of
the highest dignity. In France it is full of peril, and incapable of glory.
Rivals, however, they will have in their nothingness, whilst shallow ambition
exists in the world, or the desire of a miserable salary is an incentive to
short-sighted avarice. Those competitors of the ministers are enabled by your
constitution to attack them in their vital parts, whilst they have not the
means of repelling their charges in any other than the degrading character of
culprits. The ministers of state in France are the only persons in that
country who are incapable of a share in the national councils. What ministers!
What councils! What a nation! - But they are responsible. It is a poor service
that is to be had from responsibility. The elevation of mind to be derived
from fear will never make a nation glorious. Responsibility prevents crimes.
It makes all attempts against the laws dangerous. But for a principle of
active and zealous service, none but idiots could think of it. Is the conduct
of a war to be trusted to a man who may abhor its principle; who, in every
step he may take to render it successful, confirms the power of those by whom
he is oppressed? Will foreign states seriously treat with him who has no
prerogative of peace or war; no, not so much as in a single vote by himself or
his ministers, or by any one whom he can possibly influence? A state of
contempt is not a state for a prince: better get rid of him at once.
I know it will be said that these humours in the court and executive
government will continue only through this generation; and that the king has
been brought to declare the dauphin shall be educated in a conformity to his
situation. If he is made to conform to his situation, he will have no
education at all. His training must be worse even than that of an arbitrary
monarch. If he reads - whether he reads or not, some good or evil genius will
tell him his ancestors were kings. Thenceforward his object must be to assert
himself and to avenge his parents. This you will say is not his duty. That may
be; but it is nature; and whilst you pique nature against you, you do unwisely
to trust to duty. In this futile scheme of polity, the state nurses in its
bosom, for the present, a source of weakness, perplexity, counteraction,
inefficiency, and decay; and it prepares the means of its final ruin. In
short, I see nothing in the executive force (I cannot call it authority) that
has even an appearance of vigour, or that has the smallest degree of just
correspondence or symmetry, or amicable relation with the supreme power,
either as it now exists, or as it is planned for the future government.
You have settled, by an economy as perverted as the policy, two ^49
establishments of government; one real, one fictitious. Both maintained at a
vast expense; but the fictitious at, I think, the greatest. Such a machine as
the latter is not worth the grease of its wheels. The expense is exorbitant;
and neither the show nor the use deserve the tenth part of the charge. Oh! but
I don`t do justice to the talents of the legislators: I don`t allow, as I
ought to do, for necessity. Their scheme of executive force was not their
choice. This pageant must be kept. The people would not consent to part with
it. Right; I understand you. You do, in spite of your grand theories, to which
you would have heaven and earth to bend, you do know how to conform yourselves
to the nature and circumstances of things. But when you were obliged to
conform thus far to circumstances, you ought to have carried your submission
farther, and to have made, what you were obliged to take, a proper instrument,
and useful to its end. That was in your power. For instance, among many
others, it was in your power to leave to your king the right of peace and war.
What! to leave to the executive magistrate the most dangerous of all
prerogatives? I know none more dangerous; nor any one more necessary to be so
trusted. I do not say that this prerogative ought to be trusted to your king,
unless he enjoyed other auxiliary trusts along with it, which he does not now
hold. But, if he did possess them, hazardous as they are undoubtedly,
advantages would arise from such a constitution, more than compensating the
risk. There is no other way of keeping the several potentates of Europe from
intriguing distinctly and personally with the members of your Assembly, from
intermeddling in all your concerns, and fomenting, in the heart of your
country, the most pernicious of all factions; factions in the interest and
under the direction of foreign powers. From that worst of evils, thank God, we
are still free. Your skill, if you had any, would be well employed to find out
indirect correctives and controls upon this perilous trust. If you did not
like those which in England we have chosen, your leaders might have exerted
their abilities in contriving better. If it were necessary to exemplify the
consequences of such an executive government as yours, in the management of
great affairs, I should refer you to the late reports of M. de Montmorin to
the National Assembly, and all the other proceedings relative to the
differences between Great Britain and Spain. It would be treating your
understanding with disrespect to point them out to you.
[Footnote 49: In reality three, to reckon the provincial republican
establishments.]
I hear that the persons who are called ministers have signified an
intention of resigning their places. I am rather astonished that they have not
resigned long since. For the universe I would not have stood in the situation
in which they have been for this last twelvemonth. They wished well, I take it
for granted, to the Revolution. Let this fact be as it may, they could not,
placed as they were upon an eminence, though an eminence of humiliation, but
be the first to see collectively, and to feel each in his own department, the
evils which have been produced by that revolution. In every step which they
took, or forbore to take, they must have felt the degraded situation of their
country, and their utter incapacity of serving it. They are in a species of
subordinate servitude, in which no men before them were ever seen. Without
confidence from their sovereign, on whom they were forced, or from the
Assembly who forced them upon him, all the noble functions of their office are
executed by committees of the Assembly, without any regard whatsoever to their
personal or their official authority. They are to execute, without power; they
are to be responsible, without discretion; they are to deliberate, without
choice. In their puzzled situation, under two sovereigns, over neither of whom
they have any influence, they must act in such a manner as (in effect,
whatever they may intend) sometimes to betray the one, sometimes the other,
and always to betray themselves. Such has been their situation; such must be
the situation of those who succeed them. I have much respect, and many good
wishes, for M. Necker. I am obliged to him for attentions. I thought when his
enemies had driven him from Versailles, that his exile was a subject of most
serious congratulation - sed multae urbes et publica vota vicerunt. He is now
sitting on the ruins of the finances, and of the monarchy of France.
A great deal more might be observed on the strange constitution of the
executory part of the new government; but fatigue must give bounds to the
discussion of subjects, which in themselves have hardly any limits.
As little genius and talent am I able to perceive in the plan of
judicature formed by the National Assembly. According to their invariable
course, the framers of your constitution have begun with the utter abolition
of the parliaments. These venerable bodies, like the rest of the old
government, stood in need of reform, even though there should be no change
made in the monarchy. They required several more alterations to adapt them to
the system of a free constitution. But they had particulars in their
constitution, and those not a few, which deserved approbation from the wise.
They possessed one fundamental excellence; they were independent. The most
doubtful circumstance attendant on their office, that of its being vendible,
contributed however to this independency of character. They held for life.
Indeed they may be said to have held by inheritance. Appointed by the monarch,
they were considered as nearly out of his power. The most determined exertions
of that authority against them only showed their radical independence. They
composed permanent bodies politic, constituted to resist arbitrary innovation;
and from that corporate constitution, and from most of their forms, they were
well calculated to afford both certainty and stability to the laws. They had
been a safe asylum to secure these laws, in all the revolutions of humour and
opinion. They had saved that sacred deposit of the country during the reigns
of arbitrary princes, and the struggles of arbitrary factions. They kept alive
the memory and record of the constitution. They were the great security to
private property; which might be said (when personal liberty had no existence)
to be, in fact, as well guarded in France as in any other country. Whatever is
supreme in a state, ought to have, as much as possible, its judicial authority
so constituted as not only not to depend upon it, but in some sort to balance
it. It ought to give a security to its justice against its power. It ought to
make its judicature, as it were, something exterior to the state.
These parliaments had furnished, not the best certainly, but some
considerable corrective to the excesses and vices of the monarchy. Such an
independent judicature was ten times more necessary when a democracy became
the absolute power of the country. In that constitution, elective, temporary,
local judges, such as you have contrived, exercising their dependent functions
in a narrow society, must be the worst of all tribunals. In them it will be
vain to look for any appearance of justice towards strangers, towards the
obnoxious rich, towards the minority of routed parties, towards all those who
in the election have supported unsuccessful candidates. It will be impossible
to keep the new tribunals clear of the worst spirit of faction. All
contrivances by ballot we know experimentally to be vain and childish to
prevent a discovery of inclinations. Where they may the best answer the
purposes of concealment, they answer to produce suspicion, and this is a still
more mischievous cause of partiality.
If the parliaments had been preserved, instead of being dissolved at so
ruinous a change to the nation, they might have served in this new
commonwealth, perhaps not precisely the same, (I do not mean an exact
parallel,) but nearly the same, purposes as the court and senate of Areopagus
did in Athens; that is, as one of the balances and correctives to the evils of
a light and unjust democracy. Every one knows that this tribunal was the great
stay of that state; every one knows with what care it was upheld, and with
what a religious awe it was consecrated. The parliaments were not wholly free
from faction, I admit; but this evil was exterior and accidental, and not so
much the vice of their constitution itself, as it must be in your new
contrivance of sexennial elective judicatories. Several English commend the
abolition of the old tribunals, as supposing that they determined everything
by bribery and corruption. But they have stood the test of monarchic and
republican scrutiny. The court was well disposed to prove corruption on those
bodies when they were dissolved in 1771. - Those who have again dissolved them
would have done the same if they could - but both inquisitions having failed,
I conclude, that gross pecuniary corruption must have been rather rare amongst
them.
It would have been prudent, along with the parliaments, to preserve their
ancient power of registering, and of remonstrating at least, upon all the
decrees of the National Assembly, as they did upon those which passed in the
time of the monarchy. It would be a means of squaring the occasional decrees
of a democracy to some principles of general jurisprudence. The vice of the
ancient democracies, and one cause of their ruin, was, that they ruled, as you
do, by occasional decrees, psephismata. This practice soon broke in upon the
tenour and consistency of the laws; it abated the respect of the people
towards them; and totally destroyed them in the end.
Your vesting the power of remonstrance, which, in the time of the
monarchy, existed in the parliament of Paris, in your principal executive
officer, whom, in spite of common sense, you persevere in calling king, is the
height of absurdity. You ought never to suffer remonstrance from him who is to
execute. This is to understand neither council nor execution; neither
authority nor obedience. The person whom you call king, ought not to have this
power, or he ought to have more.
Your present arrangement is strictly judicial. Instead of imitating your
monarchy, and seating your judges on a bench of independence, your object is
to reduce them to the most blind obedience. As you have changed all things,
you have invented new principles of order. You first appoint judges, who, I
suppose, are to determine according to law, and then you let them know, that
at some time or other, you intend to give them some law by which they are to
determine. Any studies which they have made (if any they have made) are to be
useless to them. But to supply these studies, they are to be sworn to obey all
the rules, orders, and instructions which from time to time they are to
receive from the National Assembly. These if they submit to, they leave no
ground of law to the subject. They become complete and most dangerous
instruments in the hands of the governing power, which, in the midst of a
cause, or on the prospect of it, may wholly change the rule of decision. If
these orders of the National Assembly come to be contrary to the will of the
people, who locally choose those judges, such confusion must happen as is
terrible to think of. For the judges owe their places to the local authority;
and the commands they are sworn to obey come from those who have no share in
their appointment. In the mean time they have the example of the court of
Chatelet to encourage and guide them in the exercise of their functions. That
court is to try criminals sent to it by the National Assembly, or brought
before it by other courses of delation. They sit under a guard to save their
own lives. They know not by what law they judge, nor under what authority they
act, nor by what tenure they hold. It is thought that they are sometimes
obliged to condemn at peril of their lives. This is not perhaps certain, nor
can it be ascertained; but when they acquit, we know they have seen the
persons whom they discharge, with perfect impunity to the actors, hanged at
the door of their court.
The Assembly indeed promises that they will form a body of law, which
shall be short, simple, clear, and so forth. That is, by their short laws,
they will leave much to the discretion of the judge; whilst they have exploded
the authority of all the learning which could make judicial discretion (a
thing perilous at best) deserving the appellation of a sound discretion.
It is curious to observe, that the administrative bodies are carefully
exempted from the jurisdiction of these new tribunals. That is, those persons
are exempted from the power of the laws, who ought to be the most entirely
submitted to them. Those who execute public pecuniary trusts, ought of all men
to be the most strictly held to their duty. One would have thought that it
must have been among your earliest cares, if you did not mean that those
administrative bodies should be real, sovereign, independent states, to form
an awful tribunal, like your late parliaments, or like our king`s bench, where
all corporate officers might obtain protection in the legal exercise of their
functions, and would find coercion if they trespassed against their legal
duty. But the cause of the exemption is plain. These administrative bodies are
the great instruments of the present leaders in their progress through
democracy to oligarchy. They must therefore be put above the law. It will be
said, that the legal tribunals which you have made are unfit to coerce them.
They are undoubtedly. They are unfit for any rational purpose. It will be said
too, that the administrative bodies will be accountable to the General
Assembly. This I fear is talking without much consideration of the nature of
that Assembly, or of these corporations. However, to be subject to the
pleasure of that Assembly, is not to be subject to law either for protection
or for constraint.
This establishment of judges as yet wants something to its completion. It
is to be crowned by a new tribunal. This is to be a grand state judicature;
and it is to judge of crimes committed against the nation, that is, against
the power of the Assembly. It seems as if they had something in their view of
the nature of the high court of justice erected in England during the time of
the great usurpation. As they have not yet finished this part of the scheme,
it is impossible to form a right judgment upon it. However, if great care is
not taken to form it in a spirit very different from that which has guided
them in their proceedings relative to state offences, this tribunal,
subservient to their inquisition, the committee of research, will extinguish
the last sparks of liberty in France, and settle the most dreadful and
arbitrary tyranny ever known in any nation. If they wish to give to this
tribunal any appearance of liberty and justice, they must not evoke from or
send to it the causes relative to their own members, at their pleasure. They
must also remove the seat of that tribunal out of the republic of Paris. ^50
[Footnote 50: For further elucidations upon the subject of all these
judicatures, and of the committee of research, see M. de Callone`s work.]
Has more wisdom been displayed in the constitution of your army than what
is discoverable in your plan of judicature? The able arrangement of this part
is the more difficult, and requires the greatest skill and attention, not only
as the great concern in itself, but as it is the third cementing principle in
the new body of republics, which you call the French nation. Truly it is not
easy to divine what that army may become at last. You have voted a very large
one, and on good appointments, at least fully equal to your apparent means of
payment. But what is the principle of its discipline? or whom is it to obey?
You have got the wolf of the ears, and I wish you joy of the happy position in
which you have chosen to place yourselves, and in which you are well
circumstanced for a free deliberation, relatively to that army, or to anything
else.
The minister and secretary of state for the war department is M. de la
Tour du Pin. This gentleman, like his colleagues in administration, is a most
zealous assertor of the Revolution, and a sanguine admirer of the new
constitution, which originated in that event. His statement of facts, relative
to the military of France, is important, not only from his official and
personal authority, but because it displays very clearly the actual condition
of the army in France, and because it throws light on the principles upon
which the Assembly proceeds, in the administration of this critical object. It
may enable us to form some judgment, how far it may be expedient in this
country to imitate the martial policy of France.
M. de la Tour du Pin, on the fourth of last June, comes to give an
account of the state of his department, as it exists under the auspices of the
National Assembly. No man knows it so well; no man can express it better.
Addressing himself to the National Assembly, he says, "His Majesty has this
day sent me to apprize you of the multiplied disorders of which every day he
receives the most distressing intelligence. The army (le corps militaire)
threatens to fall into the most turbulent anarchy. Entire regiments have dared
to violate at once the respect due to the laws, to the king, to the order
established by your decrees, and to the oaths which they have taken with the
most awful solemnity. Compelled by my duty to give you information of these
excesses, my heart bleeds when I consider who they are that have committed
them. Those, against whom it is not in my power to withhold the most grievous
complaints, are a part of that very soldiery which to this day have been so
full of honour and loyalty, and with whom, for fifty years, I have lived the
comrade and the friend.
"What incomprehensible spirit of delirium and delusion has all at once
led them astray? Whilst you are indefatigable in establishing uniformity in
the empire, and moulding the whole into one coherent and consistent body;
whilst the French are taught by you at once the respect which the laws owe to
the rights of man, and that which the citizens owe to the laws, the
administration of the army presents nothing but disturbance and confusion. I
see in more than one corps the bonds of discipline relaxed or broken; the most
unheard-of pretensions avowed directly and without any disguise; the
ordinances without force; the chiefs without authority; the military chest and
the colours carried off; the authority of the king himself [risum teneatis?]
proudly defied; the officers despised, degraded, threatened, driven away, and
some of them prisoners in the midst of their corps, dragging on a precarious
life in the bosom of disgust and humiliation. To fill up the measure of all
these horrors, the commandants of places have had their throats cut, under the
eyes, and almost in the arms, of their own soldiers.
"These evils are great; but they are not the worst consequences which may
be produced by such military insurrections. Sooner or later they may menace
the nation itself. The nature of things requires that the army should never
act but as an instrument. The moment that, erecting itself into a deliberative
body, it shall act according to its own resolutions, the government, be it
what it may, will immediately degenerate into a military democracy; a species
of political monster, which has always ended by devouring those who have
produced it.
"After all this, who must not be alarmed at the irregular consultations,
and turbulent committees, formed in some regiments by the common soldiers and
non-commissioned officers, without the knowledge, or even in contempt of the
authority, of their superiors; although the presence and concurrence of those
superiors could give no authority to such monstrous democratic assemblies
[comices]."
It is not necessary to add much to this finished picture: finished as far
as its canvas admits; but as I apprehend, not taking in the whole of the
nature and complexity of the disorders of this military democracy, which, the
minister at war truly and wisely observes, wherever it exists, must be the
true constitution of the state, by whatever formal appellation it may pass.
For, though he informs the Assembly that the more considerable part of the
army have not cast off their obedience, but are still attached to their duty,
yet those travellers, who have seen the corps whose conduct is the best,
rather observe in them the absence of mutiny, than the existence of
discipline.
I cannot help pausing here for a moment, to reflect upon the expressions
of surprise which this minister has let fall, relative to the excesses he
relates. To him the departure of the troops from their ancient principles of
loyalty and honour seems quite inconceivable. Surely those to whom he
addresses himself know the causes of it but too well. They know the doctrines
which they have preached, the decrees which they have passed, the practices
which they have countenanced. The soldiers remember the 6th of October. They
recollect the French guards. They have not forgotten the taking of the king`s
castles in Paris and Marseilles. That the governors in both places were
murdered with impunity, is a fact that has not passed out of their minds. They
do not abandon the principles laid down so ostentatiously and laboriously of
the quality of men. They cannot shut their eyes to the degradation of the
whole noblesse of France, and the suppression of the very idea of a gentleman.
The total abolition of titles and distinctions is not lost upon them. But M.
de la Tour du Pin is astonished at their disloyalty, when the doctors of the
Assembly have taught them at the same time the respect due to laws. It is easy
to judge which of the two sorts of lessons men with arms in their hands are
likely to learn. As to the authority of the king, we may collect from the
minister himself (if any argument on that head were not quite superfluous)
that it is not of more consideration with these troops, than it is with
everybody else. "The king," says he, "has over and over again repeated his
orders to put a stop to these excesses: but, in so terrible a crisis, your
[the Assembly`s] concurrence is become indispensably necessary to prevent the
evils which menace the state. You unite to the force of the legislative power,
that of opinion still more important." To be sure the army can have no opinion
of the power or authority of the king. Perhaps the soldier has by this time
learned, that the Assembly itself does not enjoy a much greater degree of
liberty than that royal figure.
It is now to be seen what has been proposed in this exigency, one of the
greatest that can happen in a state. The minister requests the Assembly to
array itself in all its terrors, and to call forth all its majesty. He desires
that the grave and severe principles announced by them may give vigour to the
king`s proclamation. After this we should have looked for courts civil and
martial; breaking of some corps, decimating of others, and all the terrible
means which necessity has employed in such cases to arrest the progress of the
most terrible of all evils; particularly, one might expect, that a serious
inquiry would be made into the murder of commandants in the view of their
soldiers. Not one word of all this, or of anything like it. After they had
been told that the soldiery trampled upon the decrees of the Assembly
promulgated by the king, the Assembly pass new decrees; and they authorize the
king to make new proclamations. After the secretary at war had stated that the
regiments had paid no regard to oaths pretes avec la plus imposante solemnite
- they propose - what? More oaths. They renew decrees and proclamations as
they experience their insufficiency, and they multiply oaths in proportion as
they weaken, in the minds of men, the sanctions of religion. I hope that handy
abridgments of the excellent sermons of Voltaire, d`Alembert, Diderot, and
Helvetius, on the Immortality of the Soul, on a particular superintending
Providence, and on a Future State of Rewards and Punishments, are sent down to
the soldiers along with their civic oaths. Of this I have no doubt; as I
understand that a certain description of reading makes no inconsiderable part
of their military exercises, and that they are full as well supplied with the
ammunition of pamphlets as of cartridges.
To prevent the mischiefs arising from conspiracies, irregular
consultations, seditious committees, and monstrous democratic assemblies
["comitia, comices"] of the soldiers, and all the disorders arising from
idleness, luxury, dissipation, and insubordination, I believe the most
astonishing means have been used that ever occurred to men, even in all the
inventions of this prolific age. It is no less than this: - The king has
promulgated in circular letters to all the regiments his direct authority and
encouragement, that the several corps should join themselves with the clubs
and confederations in the several municipalities, and mix with them in their
feasts and civic entertainments! This jolly discipline, it seems, is to soften
the ferocity of their minds; to reconcile them to their bottle companions of
other descriptions; and to merge particular conspiracies in more general
associations. ^51 That this remedy would be pleasing to the soldiers, as they
are described by M. de la Tour du Pin, I can readily believe; and that,
however mutinous otherwise, they will dutifully submit themselves to these
royal proclamations. But I should question whether all this civic swearing,
clubbing, and feasting, would dispose them, more than at present they are
disiosed, to an obedience to their officers; or teach them better to submit to
the austere rules of military discipline. It will make them admirable citizens
after the French mode, but not quite so good soldiers after any mode. A doubt
might well arise, whether the conversations at these good tables would fit
them a great deal the better for the character of mere instruments, which this
veteran officer and statesman justly observes the nature of things always
requires an army to be.
[Footnote 51: Comme sa majeste y a reconnu, non une systeme d`associations
particulieres, mais une reunion de volontes de tous les Francois pour la
liberte et la prosperite communes, ainsi pour la maintien de l`ordre publique;
il a pense qu`il convenoit que chaque regiment prit part a ces fetes civiques
pour multiplier les rapports et referrer les liens d`union entre les citoyens
et les troupes. - Lest I should not be credited, I insert the words,
authorizing the troops to feast with the popular confederacies.]
Concerning the likelihood of this improvement in discipline, by the free
conversation of the soldiers with municipal festive societies, which is thus
officially encouraged by royal authority and sanction, we may judge by the
state of the municipalities themselves, furnished to us by the war minister in
this very speech. He conceives good hopes of the success of his endeavours
towards restoring order for the present from the good disposition of certain
regiments; but he finds something cloudy with regard to the future. As to
preventing the return of confusion, "for this, the administration (says he)
cannot be answerable to you, as long as they see the municipalities arrogate
to themselves an authority over the troops, which your institutions have
reserved wholly to the monarch. You have fixed the limits of the military
authority and the municipal authority. You have bounded the action, which you
have permitted to the latter over the former, to the right of requisition; but
never did the letter or the spirit of your decrees authorize the commons in
these municipalities to break the officers, to try them, to give orders to the
soldiers, to drive them from the posts committed to their guard, to stop them
in their marches ordered by the king, or, in a word, to enslave the troops to
the caprice of each of the cities, or even market town, through which they are
to pass."
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