Mirage of the Moderates 541
investigation would be in order) that neither the Dutch Reformed pastors, nor the
Anglican episcopate, nor the Puritan pontiffs of New England showed much ten-
dency to moderation on these subjects. The minority churches, which might be
more likely to do so (and whose importance in the Dutch revolution has been
seen), lacked the organization through which public statements attracting public
attention might be made.^20
Among the hundred thousand French émigrés there were some who were mod-
erate, and who are best represented by a group settled in London. This group in-
cluded P. V. Malouet, who had been a naval official before 1789 and had signed the
Oath of the Tennis Court; the Marquis de Lally- Tollendal, who had been a lead-
ing liberal nobleman in the Constituent Assembly; the Marquis de Bouillé, a pro-
fessional army officer, who had tried to save Louis XVI at the time of Varennes;
the Count de Montlosier, a conservative of 1789 who had now become more pli-
able; the publicist Mallet du Pan and his son, Louis Mallet; the three archbishops
of Aix, Bordeaux, and Toulouse; and, in 1796, Calonne, the reforming minister of
1786–1787, who had moved away from his absolutist views. All regarded the Ter-
ror with horrified aversion, all considered the extreme revolutionaries to be no
better than criminals, and all believed that the Revolution was a destructive men-
ace to all Europe. What made them moderate was their conviction that mere reac-
tion was impossible; that the new property owners and other beneficiaries of the
Revolution must be dealt with on some basis of compromise; and that the future
government of France must be constitutional, allowing for a modern form of
elected representatives, and taking account of the principles enunciated in the rev-
olutionary declarations of rights. They shared also in a kind of theory of the French
Revolution, which they did not attribute to the philosophes, or to conspiracy, propa-
ganda, or “abstract ideas,” believing, instead, that it had arisen from actual and
weighty causes and moved forward by real considerations of politics. They did not
think, as the extreme Right did, that the whole Revolution was a fateful force, in
which small initial concessions had led on inevitably to convulsions of violence
and fanaticism. That the Revolution had become violent and fanatical they agreed,
but for this development they blamed the unyielding obstinacy of the extreme
conservative opposition, which, they thought, gave the mass of Frenchmen no ef-
fective choice. Frenchmen in France, according to this view, were thrown on the
mercy of revolutionary extremists, seeing no other defense for even moderate gains
of the Revolution, so long as they believed, or were told by reactionary publicists,
that any restoration meant a total and punitive restoration of the Old Order. These
moderate or liberal- conservative émigrés therefore detested the royalist purs, in
whom they saw, after the Terror, the main obstacle to conciliatory arrangements.^21
20 Being negative, this statement on Protestantism is hard to document. Note the impatience of
Erskine, View of the Causes... (p. 55), where the war, he observes, “is said to save religion and its holy
altars from profanation and annihilation. Of all the pretences by which the abused zeal of the people
of England has been hurried on to a blind support of ministers, this alarm for the Christian religion
is the most impudent and preposterous.... Who ever heard of the Christianity of the French court
and its surrounding nobles?”
21 The best source is P. V. Malouet, Mémoires, 2 vols. (Paris, 1874), containing correspondence
with and references to the others named in this paragraph.