PREFACE

TO THE

ADDRESS OF M. BRISSOT TO HIS CONSTITUENTS.

TRANSLATED

BY THE LATE WILLIAM BURKE, ESQ.

1794.

THE French Revolution has been the subject of actor in all the scenes which he presents. Νο various speculations, and various histories. As man can object to him as a royalist: the royal might be expected, the royalists and the repub-party, and the Christian religion, never had a licans have differed a good deal in their accounts of the principles of that Revolution, of the springs which have set it in motion, and of the true character of those who have been, or still are, the principal actors on that astonishing scene.

They, who are inclined to think favourably of that event, will undoubtedly object to every state of facts which comes only from the authority of a royalist. Thus much must be allowed by those who are the most firmly attached to the cause of religion, law, and order, (for of such, and not of friends to despotism, the royal party is composed,) that their very affection to this generous and nanly cause, and their abhorrence of a Revoluion, not less fatal to liberty than to government, nay possibly lead them in some particulars to a nore harsh representation of the proceedings of heir adversaries, than would be allowed by the old neutrality of an impartial judge. This sort of errour arises from a source highly laudable; out the exactness of truth may suffer even from he feelings of virtue. History will do justice to he intentions of worthy men; but it will be on ts guard against their infirmities; it will examine, with great strictness of scrutiny, whatever appears from a writer in favour of his own cause. On the other hand, whatever escapes him, and akes against that cause, comes with the greatest weight.

In this important controversy, the translator of he following work brings forward to the English ribunal of opinion the testimony of a witness vond all exception. His competence is unHoubted. He knows every thing which concerns his Revolution to the bottom. He is a chief

more determined enemy. In a word it is BRISsor.-It is Brissot, the republican, the jacobin, and the philosopher, who is brought to give an account of jacobinism, and of republicanism, and of philosophy.

It is worthy of observation, that this his account of the genius of jacobinism, and its effects, is not confined to the period in which that faction came to be divided within itself. In several, and those very important, particulars, Brissot's observations apply to the whole of the preceding period, before the great schism, and whilst the jacobins acted as one body; insomuch, that the far greater part of the proceedings of the ruling powers, since the commencement of the Revolution in France, so strikingly painted, so strongly and so justly reprobated by Brissot, were the acts of Brissot himself and his associates. All the members of the Girondin subdivision were as deeply concerned as any of the Mountain could possibly be, and some of them much more deeply, in those horrid transactions which have filled all the thinking part of Europe with the greatest detestation, and with the most serious apprehensions for the common liberty and safety.

A question will very naturally be asked, what could induce Brissot to draw such a picture? He must have been sensible it was his own. The answer is the inducement was the same with that which led him to partake in the perpetration of all the crimes, the calamitous effects of which he describes with the pen of a master-ambition. His faction having obtained their stupendous and unnatural power, by rooting out of the minds of his unhappy countrymen every principle of religion,

morality, loyalty, fidelity, and honour, discovered, that, when authority came into their hands, it would be a matter of no small difficulty for them to carry on government on the principles by which they had destroyed it.

The rights of men, and the new principles of liberty and equality, were very unhandy instruments for those who wished to establish a system of tranquillity and order. They who were taught to find nothing to respect in the title and the virtues of Louis the Sixteenth, a prince succeeding to the throne by the fundamental laws, in the line of a succession of monarchs continued for fourteen hundred years, found nothing which could bind them to an implicit fidelity, and dutiful allegiance, to Mess. Brissot, Vergniaux, Condorcet, Anacharsis Cloots, and Thomas Paine.

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Amongst his colleagues were Claviere and Servan All the three have, since that time, either lost ther heads by the axe of their associates in rebellion. or to evade their own revolutionary justice, bare fallen by their own hands.

These ministers were regarded by the king as a conspiracy to dethrone him. Nobody who cosiders the circumstances which preceded the deposition of Louis the Sixteenth, nobody who attends to the subsequent conduct of those ministers, ca: hesitate about the reality of such a conspiracy The king certainly had no doubt of it; he foun himself obliged to remove them; and the neces sity, which first obliged him to choose such reg cide ministers, constrained him to replace the by Dumourier the jacobin, and some others of L tle efficiency, though of a better description.

A little before this removal, and evidently as a part of the conspiracy, Roland put into the king's hands, as a memorial, the most insolent, seditions and atrocious libel, that has probably ever bee penned. This paper Roland a few days after de

published and dispersed it all over France; an in order to give it the stronger operation they de clared, that he and his brother ministers had carried with them the regret of the nation. None the writings, which have inflamed the jacobin sp rit to a savage fury, ever worked up a fiercer te ment through the whole mass of the republicans in every part of France.

In this difficulty, they did as well as they could. To govern the people, they must incline the people to obey. The work was difficult, but it was necessary. They were to accomplish it by such materials and by such instruments as they had in their hands. They were to accomplish the pur-livered to the National Assembly, who instantposes of order, morality, and submission to the laws, from the principles of atheism, profligacy, and sedition. If, as the disguise became them, they began to assume the mask of an austere and rigid virtue; they exhausted all the stores of their eloquence (which in some of them were not inconsiderable) in declamations against tumult and confusion; they made daily harangues on the blessings of order, discipline, quiet, and obedience to authority; they even shewed some sort of disposition to protect such property as had not been confiscated. They, who on every occasion had discovered a sort of furious thirst of blood, and a greedy appetite for slaughter, who avowed and gloried in the murders and massacres of the four-chief objects of a malignity and rancour that teenth of July, of the fifth and sixth of October, and of the tenth of August, now began to be squeamish and fastidious with regard to those of the second of September.

In their pretended scruples on the sequel of the slaughter of the tenth of August, they imposed upon no living creature, and they obtained not the smallest credit for humanity. They endeavoured to establish a distinction, by the belief of which they hoped to keep the spirit of murder safely bottled up, and sealed for their own purposes, without endangering themselves by the fumes of the poison which they prepared for their enemies.

Roland was the chief and the most accredited of the faction :-his morals had furnished little matter of exception against him ;-old, domestick, and uxorious, he led a private life sufficiently blameless. He was therefore set up as the Cato of the republican party, which did not abound in such characters.

This man, like most of the chiefs, was the manager of a newspaper, in which he promoted the interest of his party. He was a fatal present made by the revolutionists to the unhappy king, as one of his ministers under the new constitution.

Presented to the king June 13, delivered to him the preceding

Under the thin veil of prediction, he stro recommends all the abominable practices whi afterwards followed. In particular he inflar the minds of the populace against the respectal and conscientious clergy, who became the ch objects of the massacre, and who were to him the

could hardly think to exist in a human heart.

We have the relicks of his fanatical persecu here. We are in a condition to judge of the me of the persecutors and of the persecuted-I do! say the accusers and accused; because, in al: 1 furious declamations of the atheistick fact against these men, not one specifick charge ha been made upon any one person of those who fered in their massacre, or by their decree of en

The king had declared that he would s perish under their axe (he too well saw what preparing for him) than give his sanction to iniquitous act of proscription, under which th innocent people were to be transported.

On this proscription of the clergy a prin part of the ostensible quarrel between the i and those ministers had turned. From the of the authorized publication of this libel, so the manoeuvres long and uniformly pursued the king's deposition became more and more dent and declared.

The tenth of August came on, and in the ra ner in which Roland had predicted; it was f lowed by the same consequences.-The kin deposed, after cruel massacres, in the courts a Monday.-Translator.

the apartments of his palace, and in almost all parts of the city. In reward of his treason to his old master, Roland was by his new masters named minister of the home department.

formed for a massacre of the people of Paris, and which, he more than insinuates, was the work of his late unhappy master; who was universally known to carry his dread of shedding the blood of his most guilty subjects to an excess.

"marked for their destruction, and rendered it fatal to the conspirators." He then proceeds, in the cant which has been applied to palliate all their atrocities from the fourteenth of July, 1789, to the present time;" It is in the nature of "things," continues he, " and in that of the human "heart, that victory should bring with it some excess. The sea, agitated by a violent storm, roars long after the tempest; but every thing has bounds, which ought at length to be ob"served."

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The massacres of the second of September were begotten by the massacres of the tenth of August. "Without the day of the tenth," says he, "it They were universally foreseen and hourly ex“is evident that we should have been lost. The pected. During this short interval between the "court, prepared for a long time, waited for the two murderous scenes, the furies, male and female, "hour which was to accumulate all treasons, to cried out havock as loudly and as fiercely as ever. display over Paris the standard of death, and to The ordinary jails were all filled with prepared "reign there by terrour. The sense of the people, victims; and, when they overflowed, churches were "(le sentiment,) always just and ready when their turned into jails. At this time the relentless Ro-"opinion is not corrupted, foresaw the epoch land had the care of the general police; he had for his colleague the bloody Danton, who was minister of justice-the insidious Petion was mayor of Paris-the treacherous Manuel was procurator of the Common-hall. The magistrates (some or all of them) were evidently the authors of this massacre. Lest the national guards should, by their very name, be reminded of their duty in preserving the lives of their fellow citizens, the common council of Paris, pretending that it was in vain to think of resisting the murderers, (although in truth neither their numbers nor their arms were at all formidable,) obliged those guards to draw the charges from their musquets, and took away their bayonets. One of their journalists, and, according to their fashion, one of their leading statesmen, Gorsas, mentions this fact in his newspaper, which he formerly called the Galley Journal. The title was well suited to the paper and its author. For some felonies he had been sentenced to the gallies; but, by the benignity Yesterday," says he, "the ministers were of the late king, this felon (to be one day ad- "denounced: vaguely indeed as to the matter, vanced to the rank of a regicide) had been par- "because subjects of reproach were wanting; doned and released at the intercession of the am-"but with that warmth and force of assertion, bassadors of Tippoo Sultan. His gratitude was such as might naturally have been expected; and it has lately been rewarded as it deserved. This liberated galley-slave was raised, in mockery of all criminal law, to be minister of justice: he became from his elevation a more conspicuous object of accusation, and he has since received the punishment of his former crimes in proscription and death.

It will be asked, how the minister of the home department was employed at this crisis? The day after the massacre had commenced, Roland appeared; but not with the powerful apparatus of a protecting magistrate, to rescue those who had survived the slaughter of the first day: nothing of this. On the third of September (that is, the day after the commencement of the massacre) he writes a long, elaborate, verbose epistle to the Assembly, in which, after magnifying, according to the bon ton of the Revolution, his own integrity, humanity, courage, and patriotism, he first directly justifies all the bloody proceedings of the tenth of August. He considers the slaughter of that day as a necessary measure for defeating a conspiracy, which (with a full knowledge of the falsehood of his assertion) he asserts to have been

Letter to the National Assembly, signed-The Minister of

In this memorable epistle, he considers such excesses as fatalities arising from the very nature of things, and consequently not to be punished. He allows a space of time for the duration of these agitations and lest he should be thought rigid and too scanty in his measure, he thinks it may be long. But he would have things to cease at length. But when, and where ?-When they may approach his own person.

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"which strike the imagination and seduce it for a moment, and which mislead and destroy confi"dence, without which no man should remain in place in a free government. Yesterday again, in an assembly of the presidents of all the sections, "convoked by the ministers, with a view of con"ciliating all minds, and of mutual explanation, "I perceive that distrust which suspects, interro"gates, and fetters operations."

In this manner (that is, in mutual suspicions and interrogatories) this virtuous minister of the home department, and all the magistracy of Paris, spent the first day of the massacre, the atrocity of which has spread horrour and alarm throughout Europe. It does not appear that the putting a stop to the massacre had any part in the object of their meeting, or in their consultations when they were met. Here was a minister tremblingly alive to his own safety, dead to that of his fellow-citizens, eager to preserve his place, and worse than indifferent about its most important duties. Speaking of the people, he says, "that their hidden "enemies may make use of this agitation” (the tender appellation which he gives to horrid massacre)" to hurt their best friends, and their most able defenders. Already the example begins;

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the interior, ROLAND, dated Paris, Sept. 3d, 4th year of Liberty.

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"let it restrain and arrest a just rage. Indigna- | to call the murder of the unhappy priests in the "tion carried to its height commences proscrip- Carmes, who were under no criminal denunciation ، tions which fall only on the guilty, but in which | whatsoever, a vengeance mingled with a sort of 66 errour and particular passions may shortly in- justice;" he observes that "they had been a long "volve the honest man.' time spared by the sword of the law," and cals He saw that the able artificers in the trade and by anticipation all those, who should represent this mystery of murder did not choose that their skill effervescence" in other colours, villains and trashould be unemployed after their first work; and tors: he did not then foresee, how soon himself that they were full as ready to cut off their rivals and his accomplices would be under the necessity as their enemies. This gave him one alarm, that of assuming the pretended character of this new was serious. This letter of Roland in every part sort of" villany and treason," in the hope of ob of it lets out the secret of all the parties in this literating the memory of their former real villanis revolution. Plena rimarum est; hac, atque | and treasons : he did not foresee, that in the illac, perfluit. We see that none of them con- course of six months a formal manifesto on the demn the occasional practice of murder; provided part of himself and his faction, written by his conit is properly applied; provided it is kept within federate Brissot, was to represent this "effertes the bounds which each of those parties think pro- cence" as another " St. Bartholomew;" and speak per to prescribe. In this case Roland feared, that, of it as having made humanity shudder, and if what was occasionally useful should become sullied the Revolution for ever.* habitual, the practice might go farther than was convenient. It might involve the best friends of the last revolution, as it had done the heroes of the first revolution: he feared that it would not be confined to the La Fayettes and ClermontTonnerres, the Duponts and Barnaves; but that it | might extend to the Brissots and Vergniauxs, to the Condorcets, the Petions, and to himself. Under this apprehension there is no doubt that his humane feelings were altogether unaffected.

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His observations on the massacre of the preceding day are such as cannot be passed over :Yesterday," said he, "was a day upon the " events of which it is perhaps necessary to leave a veil; I know that the people with their vengeance mingled a sort of justice; they did not "take for victims all who presented themselves to "their fury; they directed it to them who had for a long time been spared by the sword of the "law, and who they believed, from the peril of "circumstances, should be sacrificed without delay. But I know that it is easy to villains and "traitors to misrepresent this effervescence, and “ that it must be checked: I know that we owe "to all France the declaration, that the executive power could not foresee or prevent this excess. I know that it is due to the constituted authori"ties to place a limit to it, or consider themselves as abolished.

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In the midst of this carnage he thinks of nothing but throwing a veil over it: which was at once to cover the guilty from punishment, and to extinguish all compassion for the sufferers. He apologizes for it; in fact, he justifies it. He, who (as the reader has just seen in what is quoted from this letter) feels so much indignation at vague "denunciations" when made against himself, and from which he then feared nothing more than the subversion of his power, is not ashamed to consider the charge of a conspiracy to massacre the Parisians brought against his master upon denunciations as vague as possible, or rather upon no denunciations, as a perfect justification of the monstrous proceedings against him. He is not ashamed * See p. 12, and p. 13, of this translation.

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It is very remarkable that he takes upon himsel to know the motives of the assassins, their policy, and even what they" believed." How could the be if he had no connexion with them? He praises the murderers for not having taken as yet all the lives of those who had, as he calls it, “ presented themselves as victims to their fury." He paints the miserable prisoners who had been forcibly piled upon one another in the church of the Carmelites, by his faction, as presenting themselves as victis to their fury; as if death was their choice; o (allowing the idiom of his language to make this equivocal,) as if they were by some accide presented to the fury of their assassins: whereas he knew, that the leaders of the murderers sought these pure and innocent victims in the plac where they had deposited them, and were sure find them. The very selection, which he prases as a sort of justice tempering their fury, proves beyond a doubt, the foresight, deliberation, a method, with which this massacre was mad He knew that circumstance on the very day of t commencement of the massacres, when, in all pr bability, he had begun this letter, for he presen'n' it to the Assembly on the very next.

Whilst, however, he defends these acts, he s conscious that they will appear in another l to the world. He therefore acquits the execut power, that is, he acquits himself (but only b his own assertion) of those acts " of vengean mixed with a sort of justice,” “as an excess whom he could neither foresee nor prevent." He c not, he says, foresee these acts; when he tea us, the people of Paris had sagacity so well foresee the designs of the court on the tenth f August; to foresee them so well, as to mark the precise epoch on which they were to be execute and to contrive to anticipate them on the we day: he could not foresee these events, though declares in this very letter that victory must braz with it some excess ;-" that the sea roars after the tempest.' So far as to his foresight A to his disposition to prevent, if he had foreseen, !** massacres of that day; this will be judged by s

Under the cover of these artifices, Roland, Brissot, and their party, hoped to gain the bankers, mer-denomination.