BOOKS.
MALOUET.* MALOUET, who was what we should call a useful working Whig, and who played an honourable part as Deputy from his native town of Riom to the States-General of 1789, is less known in England than he deserves to be, both from his intrinsic worth, and from his friendship with many of our own distinguished statesmen, with whom he was brought in contact during the Emigration. But in the great shock of passions amidst which the ancient monarchy of France broke up ; with the blind poetic loyalty of
* Manoinv 4 Malouet. Publids par son Petit-Fils Le Baron Malone. Paris Didier et Cie.
the old Royalists, on the one hand (a loyalty justified in its more intimate and domestic sense by the true Christian excellence of the chief victims), and the equally poetic humanitarian aspirations of the leading Republicans, who themselves soon became victims in their turn, on the other, a calm reasonable man like Malouet was from the first outvoted and disbelieved, while in the wild orgies of the third party, which shortly swung itself into power by a mad momentum of which no sufficient explanation has ever or probably ever will be given, Malouet disappears as completely as would Mr. Mill or Mr. Bruce in a system of non-government carried into effect by honourable deputies from Bermondsey and St. Giles.
But it is just because he is so like one of ourselves, and stands in such a calm light of contrast to the glowing figures with whom he was surrounded, that it is peculiarly, nay, painfully, instructive to read what he thought of his time and his contemporaries, and Baron Malouet has done excellent service to the history of the Revolution in putting forth his grandfather's notes and manu- scripts.
Pierre Victor Malouet was not young when he entered upon the stormy scene of the States-General. He was born in 1740, at Rion), in Auvergne, of which town his father was bailli, and where his grandfather had occupied the same post, and also that of procurear au siege presidial. Pierre Victor's mother was also of a family which had from generation to generation occupied posts of civic importance, and his cousin, Pierre Louis, was professeur de physiologie, and physician to the daughters of Louis XV. Malouet thus came of an intellectual stock, and inherited the practical abilities which he displayed in the Departement de la Marine, in which he occupied posts of importance during the best years of his life. He gives a short but interesting account of his youth ; telling us how he had an uncle at the Oratorian college of Juilly, and had been early placed under his care, and as a boy fancied himself to be called to the religious habit ; but how, changing his mind in early youth, he left his uncle, studied law, in which he passed with some success, and at the age of eighteen fell to writing a tragedy and two comedies, and to frequenting the theatres and their very indifferent company with passion. He tells us, this grave and honourable statesman, with a quiet candour which is part of his character, that at twenty he had picked up an amiable but dissipated friend, fifteen years older than hiiiiself ; and fallen in love with a charming cousin, who had brought herself into disrepute with her family. Under these circumstances, his uncle, who loved him tenderly, thought the boy was going to ruin, and coming up to Paris sought one M. de Mores, whose brother- in-law, the Comte de Merle, just named ambassador to Portugal, was leaving within the week. Young Malouet was appointed chancelier du consulat at Lisbon, and set off forthwith, in company with the Comte and Comtesse de Merle, leaving the delightful Parisian theatres and the charming but disreputable cousin behind him ; and, morally speaking, for ever. The uncle had judged 'wisely; and from thenceforth the clear practical intelligence of the young man awoke, and he gives us a series of observations on Portugal and the famous Marquis de Pomba], which we have no space to do more than indicate.
After a sojourn in Portugal which was not of long duration, Malouet was sent to the army of the Marechal du Broglie, in the commissary department. He saw two campaigns, but made no money ; and when peace was restored he found much more con- genial occupation in the Departement de la Marine, being sent successively, to St. Domingo and French Guyana, where he was for some years occupied in the gravest questions of colonization and cultivation ; all that he writes of these colonial posts is exceedingly well worth reading. He was actively opposed to the abuses of his generation, and far in advance of his time. He became honestly enriched by the pains he took with estates he had purchased in St. Domingo ; and when he returned to Europe he was named Intendant de la Marine at Toulon, where he passed eight of the happiest years of his life. This short sketch of his occupations up to nearly fifty years of age is necessary, to make us understand what manner of man he was when called to the States-Genera].
All that Malouet has written of the four eventful years, from 1789 to 1793, deserves to be read with the closest attention by anyone who seeks to disengage the truth from that wild seething cauldron. How was it that in a generation which lacked neither in- struction, nor political ideas taken from the living examples of Eng- land andAmerica, nor in the elementary notions of political economy (it was the generation of Adam Smith), nor, in the majority of all classes, the most excellent intentions,—how was it, asks the student, that naught ensued save a deadly duel between the two extremes of national life, between the Court and nobility and the utter scum of the people, while all that was solid, reasonable, and thoughtful in France sank, as it were, into a gulf of destruction? It is a curious reflection that in 1789 there existed a great mass of liberal intentions and wise projects which have never revived to any purpose. The old Catholic and Legitimist affections still linger in the clergy and in certain districts ; the old spirit of the Revolution crops up day by day, and a new element, not a century old, of determined, far-seeing Imperialism holds both in check. But the men like Malouet, like Lafayette, like Necker, and a host of others less known in England, where are they? Under the government of Louis Philippe they had their chance, which they were not strong enough to keep and to use ; and when at this hour one plunges into the arid waste of French political articles, one asks oneself in amazement if the great masters of political and economical thought, from Montesquieu, Burke, Mirabeau (whose head went right, though his passions went wrong), Fox, Pitt, Bentham, Thiers, Guizot, or Mill downwards, ever existed, so little bottom is there in the discussions of to-day.
The causes of the great catastrophe, as Malonet conceived them to exist, may be shortly summed up, though he takes great pains to develop them at length. He says that ampng his colleagues in the States-General were a crowd of earnest, laborious, intelligent men, but no leader. Mirabeau's bad character deprived him of the position which his high intelligence seemed to claim, and his early death prevented that possible rehabilitation which might have saved so much. Lafayette,—excellent, sincere, and in intention a moderate Liberal,—was always, through some fault of head, favouring principles and parties which were sure to lead to grief. Lafayette, who had learnt his lesson in the American War of Independence, never seems to have understood what his own countrymen were like. In America at that time existed no mob, and Lafayette, who had fought side by side with New England farmers and Virginian proprietors, never seemed to suspect the existence of a Denton, a Marat, or a Robespierre until the day when they loomed up from the depths. Necker exaggerated the extent of his own influence, and was by nature equally incapable of understanding devilry. The Girondins, such as Barnave, had good intentions ; as to the Due d'Orleans, his conduct is qualified by Malouet as being " d'une scleratesse absurde," but his actual influence was overrated. In fact, there were some hundreds of men, intelligent, tolerably disinterested, and quite incapable of any act they would have recognized as crime, who, had there been no populace beneath them, might have fought out their political battles as did the framers of the American constitution ; but who were victims to the blindest ignorance of what was really at work beneath them, and who bowled at each other with parliamentary nine-pins while Guy Fawkes was piling barrel upon barrel in the cellars beneath their arena.
To these observations Malouet adds another, on which he insists to a greater degree than any author we remember to have read. He says that up to the very last moment the key of the situation was really in the hands of the King ; whose fatal weakness, added to the peculiar characters of the two women who stood on either side the monarch, rendered all efforts to save the Government vain. Malouet knew Louis XVI., Marie Antoinette, and Madame Elizabeth as we know those with whom we are in constant contact and deliberation. He was not noble by birth, and he was a moderate Liberal by conviction. He went to Versailles as Mr. Gladstone or Mr. Bright goes to Windsor. He tells us that all three heads of the Royal Family were honest, well-educated, noble-minded ; but that none of the three could make up their minds to a definite course. They only half-trusted their best friends, and they had a blind idea that their worst enemies might be bought off by money. In the man it was a certain weakness, mixed up with resigned Christian courage. He dared shed no blood save his own, and conceived that he might be a sort of vicarious sacrifice for his people. The women had more sense and more decision ; but their political education was too limited for either the one or the other to conceive the situation. Both had been brought up in the narrow atmosphere of a court, and neither Marie Antoinette's brilliant ability, nor Madame Elizabeth's calm good sense had been ripened by the common sunshine and the free air. Malouet, looking back after many years upon their lack of prudence and their grievous fate, speaks of them with a sort of agony quite at variance with the calmness of his general tone.
Of the final days of suspense ; of the night when, a proscribed man, he quitted his house in the Rue d'Enfer, and took refuge with his sister-in-law at her apartment in the Place de l'Odeon ; of the evening walk in the direction of the Abbaye, when, hearing the cries of the victims, he hurried back to the house to find his stocking stained with blood, we need not speak ; nor yet of his escape with a false passport, and the protection given him by a republican cook in the environs of Paris because the man's mistress was an old friend. The story is interesting, but a thousand such are told of the days of August and September, and the special point of Malouet's memoirs lies elsewhere. For many years he was an exile in England, but returned in 1801, and in 1802 was made Commissaire-Gen6ral de in Marine, and shortly after Prefet Maritime at Antwerp. He was too valuable and too practical a man to be neglected by Napoleon. However, he fell into disfavour by opposing the expedition to Russia, and retired to Touraine until 1814, when Louis XVIIL immediately recalled him to Paris, and made him Ministre de la Marine. But the term of Malouet's life had come. He lived just long enough to see the inauguration of the constitutional monarchy, a form of government in which he believed with all his heart, and which he doubtless hoped was now assured to France. His seventy-four years suited ill with the reassuming of onerous public duties, and he died before the expira- tion of 1814. He was honoured by a public funeral ; and left behind him the reputation of a useful, consistent, and honourable life.
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