322 Chapter XIII
In France the revolutionaries, who had now been remaking France for two
years, at first hailed the Polish revolution with delight. The sections of the revolu-
tionary Paris municipality sent their congratulations. Lyons did likewise, and little
Marenne and Neuf- Brisach and Valognes and many others. The first reports of the
Warsaw correspondent of the Moniteur were enthusiastic.^21 In France, in May
1791 (a month before Varennes), there was a growing fear of a conspiracy of kings,
including Louis XVI, against the Revolution. The journalists of Paris therefore
brandished the virtuous King of Poland in the face of his royal brothers. The mon-
archs of Europe, declared Prudhomme in his Révolutions de Paris, had better make
haste to issue a constitution to their peoples, like the King of Poland, before their
peoples rebelled against them as in France.^22 Camille Desmoulins took a less
elated but still menacing tone. In 1789 he had founded a newspaper called the
Révolutions de France et de Brabant, which in April 1791 he significantly reentitled
the Revolutions of France and other Kingdoms which by demanding a National Assem-
bly... will deserve a place in the annals of Liberty. He observed scornfully that the
new Polish constitution confirmed the nobles in their old privileges, and that in
the admission of burghers to the army an exception was made for the cavalry, “the
horse being so noble an animal that it can be constitutionally mounted only by a
gentleman.” “Still,” he concluded, “we must be fair. Considering where the people
of Poland began, they have made as great a leap toward liberty as we have. Doubt-
less they will come closer to the Declaration of Rights, for il n’y a quelIe premier pas
qui coüte.”^23
Such praises from the revolutionary direction, such intimations that events in
Poland were a mere first step, had many disturbing repercussions. They were em-
barrassing to King Stanislas and the Polish reformers. They proved, so to speak, the
worst that the Russian tsarina and the unreconstructed Polish magnates could say
about Jacobinism in Poland. And they induced other admirers of the Polish Revo-
lution (as, indeed, of the American) to dismiss any such association with France
with a shudder, and to argue that in reality, and strictly speaking, there had been no
revolution in Poland at all, or at least to dwell with approval on its great modera-
tion. The purpose in this line of argument was to discredit the French Revolution.
The editor of a German- language paper at Warsaw, the Warschauer Wochenschrift,
found the new Polish arrangements far more to his taste than the French. “In both
countries the burgher estate feels more fortunate, but how different the way in
which it has become so! There, the burgher drives the noble out of the temple.
Here, the noble offers the burgher his hand. There, discord, women and democrats.
Here, friends, men, substance.”^24 Mallet du Pan and others of conservative disposi-
tion throughout Europe amplified essentially this same simple message. Most no-
table among them was Edmund Burke. In the words of a modern French scholar,
Burke assumed a “philosophical protectorate over the Polish revolution.”^25 He had
21 Fabre, Stanislas- Auguste, 526–30; Moniteur, May 7, 1791.
22 Révolutions de Paris, May 14–21, 1791, VIII, 274.
23 Révolutions de France... , number 79 (April, 1791), 33–37.
24 Grossbart, as in note 15 above, 190.
25 Fa bre , 527.