370 Chapter XV
even by moderate partisans of the new order. Yet his very existence made it impos-
sible for the French to create a new executive office as the Americans had done.
Never during the Revolution, if indeed after it, were the French quite to solve the
problem of the relation of the executive to the national representation.
Mounier and his followers immediately resigned from the constitutional com-
mittee. There followed the October Days, when rioters invaded Versailles and
obliged the King and the Assembly to remove to Paris. Disgusted by such vio-
lence, believing that the Assembly was now at the mercy of city mobs, and being
actually in some danger of his own life, Mounier returned to Dauphiny. Here he
found opinion divided, some favoring the National Assembly, the August decrees,
the Declaration, the steps taken toward a new constitution—and some opposed.
The former gathered in a popular club to uphold the Assembly—a future Jacobin
club of the provinces. The latter Mounier tried to rally in the Provincial Estates,
which he himself had helped to bring into being at Vizille the year before. The
Provincial Estates became the organized center for opposition to the National As-
sembly, even threatening civil war. The National Assembly thereupon prohibited
the meeting of all Provincial Estates and all “assemblies by Orders” throughout
France. Thus another line was drawn between Revolution and Counterrevolution,
and another step taken toward concentration of sovereignty in the Assembly at
Paris. Mounier then went abroad. Two years later, from his place of exile, in a book
explaining why the French had failed to “become free,” he was denouncing the
new France as impossibly “democratic,” and urging royal dictatorship as the only
solution for France’s troubles.^24
It is important, most especially perhaps for American readers, to explain how J.
J. Mounier, the merchant’s son, the enemy of noble privilege, the hero of the Ten-
nis Court, the coauthor of the great Declaration, the moderate revolutionary of
1789 whose ideas were in so many ways close to those of Americans, passed as
early as the end of 1789 into the Counterrevolution. For I believe that Mounier
was tragically mistaken. His position was untenable. The existence of monarchy
and aristocracy in France, as they really were, made his system unworkable and
unacceptable. It was not even desired by the King and nobility. If the French were
to carry out the principles that they shared with Americans and with men else-
where in Europe, as described in preceding chapters—principles set forth notably
in the Declaration—they would have to do so by concentrating sovereign power,
the power to destroy and to create, in a single assembly somewhat as outlined by
the Abbé Sieyès—and which wielded, in principle, that awful “supreme, sovereign,
absolute and uncontrollable power” ascribed in 1776 by the General Court of
Massachusetts to the people. They would have to take account of the wishes of
peasants and workers; the Revolution could not succeed if “bourgeois” alone. It
could not, as Mounier preferred, be only a revolution of respectable men. Lawyers,
businessmen, lesser officeholders, writers, and humanitarians could not, by them-
selves, defeat the interests of monarchy and aristocracy which were now allied.
Moderate revolution was eminently desirable, but it was not one of the possible
24 Recherches sur les causes qui ont empêché les Français de devenir libres, et sur les moyens qui leur restent
pour acquérir la liberté (2 vols., Geneva, 1792), II, 203.