The Issues and the Adversaries 379
between new and old—between “democratic” and “aristocratic” forms of society in
the sense explained in the preceding volume.
It is a complex story, in which not everything can be told. Something must be
said of a dozen European countries and of America. In the following pages the
method will vary from the expository to the impressionistic. Let us begin with a
tale of two cities, involving ceremonial events in Frankfurt and Paris on July 14,
- It was, of course, Bastille Day, but it was also the date of the imperial coro-
nation of Francis II, a young man of twenty- four who proved to be the last Holy
Roman Emperor.
BASTILLE DAY, 1792“Those concerned seem to attach importance to the appropriateness of the day, in
crowning the Emperor on the very day of the anniversary of the taking of the Bas-
tille, that is in choosing for the destruction of the Revolution in France the very
day on which it began.” It was the Abbé Maury, cardinal designate, papal nuncio at
Frankfurt, who thus reported to the Curia a few days before the coronation. Or, as
the correspondent of the Leyden Gazette remarked, writing from Frankfurt, “The
date of this solemnity did not pass unnoticed, being the very day of another at
Paris with the honors inverted.”^4
The free city of Frankfurt had for centuries been the site of the imperial corona-
tion. Most of the old city was destroyed by bombing in 1944. Into its now van-
ished hive of crooked streets, churches, and public buildings, in July 1792, there
converged a variety of great or important persons in whom the Old Order was
ostentatiously represented.
There were the young Emperor Francis and his wife. There was the brother of
the French king, the Count of Artois, leader of the most irreconcilable of the
French émigrés, expecting to return momentarily to France now that the Allied
armies were about to invade it. With him were three generations of the princely
house of Condé, and Marshals de Broglie and de Castries. Calonne, Louis XVI’s
reforming minister of 1786, was in close attendance; as “prime minister of the emi-
gration” he expected to be prime minister of the new government which the Allied
victory would make possible in France.
The three ecclesiastical Electors of the Holy Roman Empire were present for
the coronation in person. So was Prince Esterhazy, the great Hungarian magnate.
The Swedish count Axel de Fersen was there, the secret correspondent and per-
sonal devotee of Marie Antoinette, whom he had tried and failed to spirit out of
France a year before. He had just received another note from her, in cypher, telling
how Lafayette and other French generals meant to get the king out of Paris within
the next few days. The Swiss Mallet du Pan was among those present; he had lived
for years in Paris, and brought secret messages from Louis XVI himself. He made
little impression, since he was lacking in rank for the circles now assembled in
4 J. S. Maury, Correspondance diplomatique et Mémoires inédits, 2 vols. (Paris, 1891), 1, 68; Gazette
de Leyde for July 27, 1792.