clear that the intellectual quality was not the element likely to quell the tempest that had now arisen.

Let it be said, however, that Condorcet showed himself no pedantic nor fastidious trifler with the tremendous movement which he had contributed to set afoot. The same practical spirit which drove him into the strife, guided him in the midst of it. He never wrung his hands nor wept nor bewailed the unreason of the multitudes to whom he in vain preached reason. Unlike the typical man of letters, for he was without vanity, he did not abandon the cause of the Revolution because his suggestions were often repulsed. "It would be better," he said to the Girondins, "if you cared less for personal matters and attended only to public interests." Years ago, in his Eloge on l'Hôpital, he had praised the famous Chancellor for incurring the hostility of both of the two envenomed factions, the League and the Huguenots, and for disregarding the approbation or disapprobation of the people. "What operation," he asked, "capable of producing any durable good, can be understood by the people? How should they know to what extent good is possible? How judge of the means of producing it? It must ever be easier for a charlatan to mislead the people, than for a man of genius to save it." Remembering this law, he never lost patience. He was cool and intrepid, if his intrepidity was of the logical sort rather than physical; and he was steadfast to one or two simple aims, if he was on some occasiors too rapid in changing his attitude as to special measures. He was never afraid of the spectre, as the incompetent revolutionist is. On the contrary, he understood its whole internal history; he knew what had raised it, what passion and what weakness gave it substance, and he knew that by-and-by reason would banish it and restore men to a right mind. The scientific spirit implanted in such a character as Condorcet's, and made robust by social meditation, builds up an impregnable fortitude in the face of incessant rebuffs and discouragements. Let us then picture Condorcet as surveying the terrific welter from the summer of '89 to the summer of '93, from the taking of the Bastille to the fall of the Girondins, with something of the firmness and self-possession of a Roman Cato.

After the flight of the king in June, and his return in what was virtually captivity to Paris, Condorcet was one of the party, very small in numbers and entirely discountenanced by public opinion, then passing through the monarchical and constitutional stage, who boldly gave up the idea of a monarchy and proclaimed the idea of a republic. In July (1791) he published a piece strongly

(1) Œuvres, iii. 533. As this was written in 1777, Condorcet was perhaps thinking of Turgot and Necker. Of the latter, his daughter tells us repeatedly, without any consciousness that she is recording a most ignominious trait, that public approbation was the very breath of his nostrils, the thing for which he lived, the thing without which he was wretched.-See vol. i. of De Staël's Considerations.

arguing for a negative answer to the question whether a king is necessary for the preservation of liberty. In one sense, this composition is favourable to Condorcet's foresight; it was only a very few who with him saw that the destruction of the monarchy was inevitable after the royal flight. This want of preparation in the public mind for every great change as it came, is one of the most extraordinary circumstances of the Revolution, and it explains the violent, confused, and inadequate manner in which nearly every one of these changes was made. It was proposed at that time to appoint Condorcet to be governor to the young Dauphin. But Condorcet, in this piece, took such pains to make his sentiments upon royalty known, that in the constitutional frame of mind in which the Assembly then was, the idea had to be abandoned. It was hardly likely that a man should be chosen for such an office who had just declared the public will to be "that the uselessness of a king, the needfulness of seeking means of replacing a power founded on illusions, should be one of the first truths offered to his reason; the obligation of concurring in this himself, one of the first of his moral duties; and the desire not to be freed from the yoke of law by an insulting inviolability, the first sentiment of his heart. People are well aware that at this moment the object is much less to mould a king, than to teach him not to wish to be one.' As all France was then bent on the new Constitution, king and all, Condorcet's republican assurance was hardly warranted, and was by no means well received.

When the Constitution was accepted and the Legislative Assembly came to be chosen, Condorcet proved to have made so good an impression as a municipal officer, that the Parisians returned him for one of their deputies. The Declaration of Pilnitz in August (1791), had mitigated the loyalty which had even withstood the trial of the king's flight, and when the Legislative Assembly met it was found to contain an unmistakable element of republicanism of marked strength. Condorcet was chosen one of the secretaries, and he composed most of those multitudinous addresses in which this most unfortunate and least honoured of all parliamentary chambers tried to prove to the French people that it was actually in existence and at work. Condorcet was officially to the Legislative, what Barrère afterwards was to the Convention. But his addresses are turgid, labouring, not effective for their purpose. They have neither the hard force of Napoleon's bulletins nor the flowery eloquence of the

(1) xii. 227. It was followed by a letter, nominally by a young mechanic, offering to construct an automaton sovereign, like Kempel's chess-player, who would answer all constitutional purposes perfectly.-Pp. 239-41.

(2) xii. 236.

Anacreon of the guillotine. To compose such pieces well under such circumstances as those of the Assembly, a man must have much imagination and a slightly elastic conscience. Condorcet had neither one nor the other, but only reason-a hard anvil, out of which he laboriously struck isolated flashes and sounds.

Perhaps, after all, nobody else could have done better. The situation of the Assembly, between a hostile Court and a suspicious and distrustful nation, and unable by its very nature to break the bonds, was from the beginning desperate. In December, 1791, the Legislative, through its secretary, informs France of the frankness and loyalty of the king's measures in the face of the menaces of foreign war. Within eight months, when the king's person was in captivity and his power suspended, the same secretary has to avow that from the very beginning the king had treated the Assembly with dissimulation, and had been in virtual league with the national enemies. The documents issued by the Assembly after the violent events of the Tenth of August are not edifying, and imply in Condorcet, who composed them, a certain want of eye for revolu tionary methods. They mark the beginning of that short but most momentous period in the history of the Revolution, when formulas, as Mr. Carlyle says, had to be stretched out until they cracked--a process truly called, "especially in times of swift change, one of the sorrowfullest tasks poor humanity has." You might read the Exposition of the Motives from which the National Assembly have proclaimed the Convention, and suspended the Executive Power of the King, without dreaming that it is an account of a revolution which arose out of distrust or contempt for the Assembly, which had driven the king away from his palace and from power, and which had finally annihilated the Chamber itself, that was thus exposing its motives for doing what the violence of Paris had really done in defiance of it. The power, in fact, was all outside the Chamber, in Danton and the Commune. Under such circumstances, it is of no interest to men to learn that "in the midst of these disasters the National Assembly, afflicted but calm, took its oath to maintain equality and liberty, or to die at its post; took the oath to save France, and looked about for means."3 Still more impotent and hollow, because still more pompous, is the address of six days later.* A few days after this occurred the massacres of prisoners in September-scenes very nearly, if not quite, as bloody and monstrous as those which attended the suppression of the rebellion in Ireland six years afterwards by English troops. The Assembly, the day but one before its final session, issued an address denouncing these

5

(1) Déclaration de l'Assemblée Nationale, 29 Dec., 1791. Œuvres, xii. 255.)

(2) August 13, 1792.

(3) Euvres, x. 560.

Œuvres, x. 547.

(4) 19 Aug., x. 565.

(5) 19 Sept., x. 581.

infamous crimes; and on the whole, the fact that this and the other addresses appealing to law should have been issued, and that the Chamber should have continued to sit and transact business, shows to a certain extent that in France at any rate, if not in Paris, the characteristic national respect for authority had not been so entirely blotted out as we are commonly led to suppose.

The Parisians assuredly, or the unbreeched portion of them then dominant, were no lovers of such order as the Assembly could provide; and when the Convention was chosen, the electors of Paris rejected Condorcet. He was elected, however (Sept. 6), for the department of the Aisne, having among his colleagues in the deputation Tom Paine, and—a much more important personage-the youthful Saint-Just, who was so soon to stupefy the Convention by exclaiming, with mellow voice and face set immovable as bronze, "An individual has no right to be either virtuous or celebrated in your eyes. A free people and a national assembly are not made to admire anybody." The electors of the department of the Aisne had unconsciously sent two typical revolutionists-the man of intellectual ideas, and the man of passion heated as in the pit. In their persons the Encyclopædia and the guillotine met. Condorcet, who had been extreme in the Legislative, but found himself a moderate in the Convention, gave wise counsel as to the true policy towards the new members: "Better try to moderate them than quarrel." But the quarrel between water and fire is irreconcilable.

On the first great question that the Convention had to decidethe fate of the king-Condorcet voted on the two main issues very much as a wise man would have voted, knowing the event as we know it. He voted that the king was guilty of conspiring against liberty, and he voted for the punishment of exile in preference to that of death. On the intermediate question whether the decision of the Convention should be final, or should be submitted to the people for ratification, he voted, as a wise man should not have done, in favour of an appeal to the people, which must inevitably have led to violent and bloody local struggles, and laid France open to the enemy. It is a striking circumstance that, though Condorcet thus voted that the king was guilty, he had previously laid before the Convention a most careful argument to show that they were neither morally nor legally competent to try the king at all. How, he asked, can you act at the same time as legislators constituting the crime, as accusers, and as judges, without violating every principle of jurisprudence? His proposal was that Louis XVI. should be tried by a tribunal whose jury and judges should be named by the electoral body of the departments. With true respect for Condorcet's honourable anxiety that the conditions of justice should be rigorously observed-for, as he well said, "there is no liberty in a country where positive law is

1

(1) Opinion sur le jugement de Louis XVI. Nov. 1792. xii. 267-303.

not the single rule of judicial proceedings "-it is difficult to see why the Convention, coming as it did fresh from the electoral bodies, who must have had the question what was to be done with the imprisoned king foremost in their minds; why the members of the Convention should not form as legitimate a tribunal as any body whose composition and authority they had themselves defined and created, and which would be chosen by the same persons who less than a month before had invested them with their own offices. Reading this most scrupulous and juristic composition, we might believe the writer to have forgotten that France lay, mad and frenzied, outside the hall where he stood, and that in political action the question what is possible is at least as important as what is compatible with the maxims of scientific jurisprudence. It was to Condorcet's honour as a jurisconsult that he should have had so many scruples; it is to his credit as a politician that he laid them aside and tried the king after all.

It is highly characteristic of Condorcet's tenacity of his own view of the Revolution and of its methods, that on the Saturday (January 19, 1793) when the king's fate was decided against Condorcet's conviction and against his vote-the execution took place on the Monday morning-he should have appealed to the Convention, at all events to do their best to neutralise the effect of their verdict upon Europe by instantly initiating a series of humane reforms in the law which he named, including the abolition of the punishment of death. "The English ministers," he cried, "are now seeking to excite that nation against us. Do you suppose that they will venture to continue their calumnious declamations, when you can say to them: We have abolished the penalty of death, while you still preserve it for the theft of a few shillings. You hand over debtors to the greed or spite of their creditors; our laws, wiser and more humane, know how to respect poverty and misfortune. Judge between us and you, and see to which of the two peoples the reproach of inhumanity may be addressed with most justice.' This was the eve of the Terror. But let us banish the notion that the history of the Convention is only the history of the guillotine. No chamber, in the whole annals. of governing assemblies, ever displayed so much alertness, energy, and capacity, in the face of difficulties that might well have crushed them. Besides their efforts, justly held incomparable, to hurl back the enemy from their frontiers, they at once, in the spirit of Condorcet's speech, made at so strange a season, set vigorously about the not less noble task of legal reforms and political reorganisation. The unrivalled ingenuity and fertility of the French character in all the arts of compact and geometric construction never showed itself so supreme. The Civil Code was drawn up in a month.2 Con

(1) 19 Jan., 1793. Œuvres, xii. 311.

(2) See M. Edgar Quinet's remarks on this achievement.-La Révolution, ii. 110.