French Directory between Extremes 557
But the constitutional Right was repeatedly outflanked by the extreme Right.
French royalism, so far as it was a significant force supported by numbers of peo-
ple, was far from arising from affection for the French royal family, for which re-
spect had died in the crisis of revolution and war, but rested rather upon dissatis-
faction with the republic and the republicans, and was constitutionalist and
reformist in relation to the Old Regime. This moderate royalism was weakened by
association with extreme royalism and with British or other foreign interests.
The outflanking had occurred at least as early as June 1792, at Frankfurt, when
Mallet du Pan had found his proposal for a manifesto to the French people thrust
aside, and replaced by the more intransigent Brunswick Manifesto. It occurred
again in 1795. At this time the British government and the more liberally minded
French émigrés desired the Count of Provence to issue a conciliatory statement, in
which, while proclaiming himself as Louis XVIII, he would offer assurances to
Frenchmen involved in the Revolution. Grenville, the British Foreign Secretary,
gave McCartney, his representative at the Pretender’s court, very specific instruc-
tions: His Highness was to be persuaded to promise an amnesty, refrain from
alarming the sympathizers with the Revolution, and reassure those whose wealth
was in former Church lands and in assignats, while agreeing to get the French out
of Belgium and to make certain colonial concessions to the British. The Pretender,
outmaneuvering all such advice, issued instead his Declaration of Verona.^26
The Declaration of Verona irritated the British, threw the French moderate
monarchists into consternation, and delighted those French republicans who paid
any attention to it. Avoiding all specific issues, it dwelt on that “masterpiece of
wisdom,” the “ancient and wise constitution” of France before 1789. It adopted the
condescending tone in which Kings in former days had thought it suitable to ad-
dress their peoples. “You proved faithless to the God of your fathers.... Your ty-
rants have destroyed the altars of your God and the throne of your king.” Such
fatherly reproof, mixed with ostensibly religious admonitions, was hardly the right
accent to strike in the France of 1795.
Moderates were again embarrassed by extremists, in 1795, when an armed force
of excited émigrés, urged on by the Count of Artois, financed by the British trea-
sury and supported by the British fleet, attempted to land at Quiberon Bay, in-
tending to proclaim Louis XVIII in Brittany and raise civil war against the Re-
public. These émigrés were destroyed by General Hoche’s republican army. The
Republic appeared, even to many moderates, as the only defender of France and
the Revolution. Soon thereafter came the uprising of Vendémiaire in Paris. The
leaders were mainly constitutional monarchists, and theirs was the party that the
British government preferred to help, financially and otherwise; but the “absolute”
royalists, for whom the constitutional royalists were more detestable than the re-
publicans, persuaded the British agent, Wickham, that the constitutionalists were
both anti- British and without strong followers in France. Wickham was tricked
26 Wa lter, Comte de Provence, 234–38. The text of the Declaration seems not to have been pub-
lished in the French press, but may be found in English in the Annual Register for 1795, 254–62. The
French text is given in A. Antoine, Histoire de sa Majesté Louis XVI (Paris, 1816), 114–36.