tion has exceeded a certain number of ages? At most, their greatest longevity may be fixed at twelve or fourteen centuries; whence it may be inferred that a monarchy which had already lasted thirteen hundred years without having received any deadly attack, was not far from a catastrophe. Of what consequence is it, if rising from its ashes and reorganized, it has subjected Europe to the yoke and terror of its arms? Should its power again escape, again will it decline and perish. Let us not inquire what may be the new metamorphoses to which it is destined. The geographical configuration of France ensures us a distinguished part in the ages yet to come. Gaul, when conquered by the masters of the world, remained subjected only for three hundred years. Other invaders are now forging, in the north, the chains which shall enslave Europe. The revolution erected a bulwark which might have arrested them for a time-it was being demolished piecemeal: but though destroyed, it will again be raised, for the present age is powerful; it carries along with it men, parties, and governments.

You who exclaim so furiously against the prodigies of the revolution-you who have gone through it without daring to look upon it-you have submitted to it, and perhaps may submit to it once more.

Who provoked it, and whence did we first see it rise! From the salons of the great, from the cabinets of the ministers. It was invited, provoked, by the parliaments, and by those about the king,-by young colonels, by court mistresses, by pensioned men of letters, whose persons were protected, and sentiments reëchoed by duchesses.

I have seen the nation blush at the depravity of the higher classes, the licentiousness of the clergy, the ignorant blunders of the ministers, and at the picture of the disgusting dissoluteness of the modern Babylon.

Was it not those that were considered the flowers of France, who, for forty years, established a worship in honor of Voltaire and Rousseau? Was it not among the higher classes that the mania of democratical independence, transplanted from the United States into the French soil, first took root? Dreams of a republic were already afloat, while corruption was at its height in the monarchy! Even the example of a

monarch exemplary and strict in his morals could not arrest the torrent. During this demoralization of the upper classes, the nation increased in knowledge and intellect. By continually hearing emancipation represented as a duty, it at length believed it as such. History itself can here attest that the nation was unacquainted with the arts which prepared the catastrophe. It might have been made to have advanced with the times; the King, and all men of intellect desired it. But the corruption and avarice of the great, the errors of the magistrates and of the court, and the mistakes of the ministry, dug the pit of destruction. It was, besides, so easy to urge to extremities a petulant and inflammable nation, one which, on the slightest provocation, would rush into excesses! Who fired the train? Did the Archbishop of Sens, did Necker the Swiss, Mirabeau, La Fayette, D'Orleans, Adrian Duport. Chauderlos Laclos, the Staëls, the Larochefoucaulds, the Beauveaus, the Montmorencys, the Noailles, the Lameths, the La-Tour du Pin, the Lefrancs de Pompignan, and so many other promoters of the triumphs of 1789 over the royal authority-did these belong to the tiers-état? But for the meetings of the Palais Royal and Mont Rouge, the Breton Club had been harmless. There would have been no 14th of July, if on the 12th the troops and generals of the King had done their duty. Besenval was a creature of the Queen's; and Besenval, at the decisive moment, in spite of the King's orders, sounded a retreat, instead of advancing against the insurgents. Marshal Broglie himself was paralyzed by his staff. These are incontrovertible facts.

It is well known by what arts the common people were roused to insurrection. The sovereignty of the people was proclaimed by the defection of the army and the court. Is it surprising, that the factious and their leaders should have got the revolution into their hands? The impulse of innovation, and the exaltation of ideas, did the rest.

The revolution was commenced by a prince who might nave mastered it, changing the dynasty, but his cowardice permitted it to proceed at random, and without an object. In the midst of this storm, some generous hearts and enthusiastic spirits, joined with some strong minds, sincerely imagined that a social regeneration was practicable, and, trusting to

protestations and oaths, employed themselves in its accomplishment.

It was under these circumstances that we, obscure men of the tiers-état, and inhabitants of the provinces, were carried away and seduced by the dreams of liberty, by the intoxicating fiction of the restoration of the state. We pursued a chimera with the fever of the public good; we had, at that time, no secret objects, no ambition, no views of sordid interest.

Opposition, however, soon inflaming the passions, party spirit gave rise to implacable animosities. Everything was carried to extremities. The multitude alone then gave the impulse. For the same reason that Louis XIV. had said, "I am the state," the people said, "We are the sovereign; the nation is the state;"-and the nation went alone.

And here, let us remark a fact which will serve as a key to the events which will follow; for these events approach to the wonderful. The dissentient royalists, and the counterrevolutionists, for want of ready materials for a civil war, and disappointed of the honors they might have gathered in it, had recourse to emigration, the resource of the weak. Finding no support at home, they ran to seek it abroad. After the example of what other nations had done in similar circumstances, the French nation decreed that the property of the emigrants should be sequestrated, because they had armed against France, and were calling all Europe to arms. But how could the rights of property, the foundation of monarchy, be touched without sapping the basis of the throne? Sequestration led to spoliation; and from that moment the whole mass fell; for the mutation of property is synonymous with the subversion of the established order of things. It was not I who said, "Property must go into other hands!" This sentence was more Agrarian than all that the Gracchi could have uttered, and no Scipio Nasica was found.

From that moment the revolution was nothing but a scene of total disorganization. The terrible sanction of war was wanting to it; and the European cabinets, of their own accord, opened the temple of Janus. From the commencement of this great contest, the revolution, full of youth and ardor, triumphed over the old political system, over a des

picable coalition, and over the contemptible operations of its armies and their discord.

Another fact must also be adduced, in order to draw from it an important inference. The first coalition was repulsed, beaten, and humiliated. But let us suppose that it had triumphed over the patriotic confederacy of France; that the arms of the Prussians in Champagne had met with no serious check as far even as the capital; and that the revolution had been disorganized in its very focus: admitting this hypothesis, France would certainly have shared the fate of Poland, by a dismemberment, and by the degradation of its sovereign; for such was at that time the political theme of the cabinets and the spirit of their co-partnership diplomacy. The progress of knowledge had not yet introduced the discovery of the European confederacy, of military occupation, with subsidies. By preserving France, the patriots of 1792 not only rescued her from the hands of foreigners, but labored, though unintentionally, for the restoration of the monarchy. This is incontestible.

Much outcry has been made against the excesses of this sanguinary revolution. Could it remain calm and temperate when surrounded by enemies and exposed to invasion? Many were mistaken, but few were criminal. The cause of the 10th of August is alone to be ascribed to the advance of the combined Austrians and Prussians. If they came too late, it matters little. The suicide of France was not yet near at hand.

Undoubtedly, the revolution was violent, and even cruel in its progress; all this is historically known, nor shall I dwell upon it, such not being the object of these memoirs. It is of myself I wish to speak, or rather of the events in which I was concerned as a minister of state; but it was necessary that I should introduce the subject and describe the character of the times. Let not the generality of my readers suppose that I shall tediously recite my domestic life as a private individual or obscure citizen. Of what advantage would it be to know the first steps of my career? Minutiæ such as these can only interest the famished compilers of contemporaneous biography, or the gulls who read them; they have nothing to do in common with history, and it is to the dignity of history that my narrative aspires.

My being the son of a shipowner, and having been at first destined for the sea, can be of little consequence; my family was respectable. It is also of little interest to know-that I was brought up among the Pères de l'Oratoire, that I became a member of that College, that I devoted myself to teaching, and that the revolution found me prefect of that college of Nantes; it may, at least, be inferred that I was neither an ignoramus nor a fool. It is, likewise, entirely false that I was ever a priest or had taken orders. I make this remark to show that I was perfectly at liberty to become a free-thinker or a philosopher without being guilty of apostacy; certain it is that I quitted the oratory before I exercised any public functions, and that, under the sanction of the law, I married at Nantes, with the intention of exercising the profession of an advocate, which was much more consonant to my own inclinations and to the state of society. Besides, I was morally what the age was, with the advantage of being so, neither from imitation nor infatuation, but from reflection and disposition. With such principles, is it no subject of self-congratulation to have been nominated by my fellow-citizens, without the employment either of artifice or intrigue, a representative of the people at the National Convention?

It is in this political defile that your rats of the minister's antechamber wait to attack me. There are no exaggerations, no excesses, no crimes, either in mission or in the tribune, with which they have not loaded my historical responsibility, taking words for actions, and forced speeches for principles; neither taking into the account, time, place, nor circumstance; and making no allowance for a universal delirium, for the republican fever, of which twenty millions of Frenchmen felt the paroxysms.

At first I buried myself in the committee of public instruction, where I became acquainted with Condorcet, and through him with Vergniaud. A circumstance relating to one of the most important crises of my life must here be mentioned. By a singular chance, I had been acquainted with Maximilian Robespierre, at the time I was professor of philosophy in the town of Arras, and had even lent him money, to enable him to take up his abode in Paris when he