Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, comte de
Mirabeau
born
March 9, 1749, Bignon, near Nemours,
France
died April 2, 1791, Paris
French politician and orator, one of the
greatest figures in the National
Assembly that governed France during the
early phases of the French Revolution. A
moderate and an advocate of
constitutional monarchy, he died before
the Revolution reached its radical
climax.
Troubled youth
Mirabeau was the elder son of the noted
economist Victor Riqueti, marquis de
Mirabeau, by his unhappy marriage to
Marie-Geneviève de Vassan. Disfigured by
smallpox at age three, the precocious
Honoré-Gabriel suffered even in early
childhood the disfavour of his
formidable father. At age 15 he was sent
as a pupil to the strict Abbé Choquard
in Paris, and at 18 he went as a
volunteer to serve in a cavalry regiment
at Saintes, where his father hoped that
military discipline would curb him. His
misbehaviour, however, led to his
imprisonment on the Île de Ré, under a
lettre de cachet, a written order
permitting imprisonment without trial.
Released to serve in Corsica with the
rank of sublieutenant in the army, he
distinguished himself there in 1769.
Reconciled with his father, he married a
rich Provençal heiress, Émilie de
Marignane, in 1772, but his heavy
spending and further misconduct led his
father to have him imprisoned under
another lettre de cachet in order to put
him out of reach of his creditors. He
was detained first at the Château d’If
(1774), then at the Fort de Joux, near
Pontarlier. Having obtained permission
to visit the town of Pontarlier, he
there met his “Sophie”—who, in fact, was
the marquise de Monnier, Marie-Thérèse-Richard
de Ruffey, the young wife of a very old
man. He eventually escaped to
Switzerland, where Sophie joined him;
the couple then made their way to
Holland, where Mirabeau was arrested in
1777.
The
tribunal at Pontarlier had meanwhile
sentenced him to death for seduction and
abduction, but Mirabeau escaped
execution by submitting to further
imprisonment under a lettre de cachet.
In the château of Vincennes he composed
the Lettres à Sophie, some erotic works,
and his essay Des lettres de cachet et
des prisons d’état (“Of Lettres de
Cachet and of State Prisons”). Released
in December 1780, he finally had to
surrender himself to arrest at
Pontarlier in order to have the death
sentence revoked, but by August 1782 he
was entirely free. He now became
involved in a lawsuit against his wife,
who wanted a judicial separation.
Pleading on his own behalf, he gained
the sympathy of the public but lost his
case (1783). Rejected by his wife and by
his father, he had to renounce the
aristocratic society into which he had
been born.
For the
next five years Mirabeau lived the life
of an adventurer. He was employed
sometimes as a hired pamphleteer,
sometimes as a secret agent. He came
into contact with Louis XVI’s ministers
Charles-Alexandre de Calonne; Charles
Gravier, comte de Vergennes; and
Armand-Marc, comte de
Montmorin-Saint-Hérem. He also made an
enemy of the Swiss banker Jacques
Necker, at that time director of the
finances, and engaged the playwright
Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais in
controversy.
His
activities necessitated much traveling.
In London he was introduced into the
best Whig society by Gilbert Elliot
(later 1st earl of Minto), who had been
his fellow pupil under the Abbé Choquard;
he had to take refuge in Liège when his
Dénonciation de l’agiotage (against
stockjobbing) annoyed Calonne; and he
undertook a secret mission to Berlin in
1786. With the active assistance of a
Brunswick friend, Jakob Mauvillon, he
wrote De la monarchie prussienne sous
Frédéric le Grand (1788; “The Prussian
Monarchy Under Frederick the Great”),
which he dedicated to his father; but
Histoire secrète de la cour de Berlin
(“Secret History of the Court of
Berlin”), in which he made unscrupulous
use of material derived from his mission
in Germany, created a scandal in 1789.
Election to the Estates-General
Within France, affairs were moving
toward a crisis. The country, bankrupted
by its 18th-century wars, was burdened
with an archaic system of taxation and
social privilege. The Estates-General,
an assembly of the three estates of the
realm—the clergy, the nobility, and the
commons—was summoned to meet in Paris in
May 1789 in an attempt to implement the
necessary reforms. It was that meeting
that set in motion the great French
Revolution of 1789.
When
the Estates-General was summoned,
Mirabeau hoped to be elected as a deputy
for the nobility of Provence. For this
he needed his father’s support. Pleased
by the book dedicated to him, the
marquis had summoned Mirabeau to
Argenteuil in the autumn of 1788 but had
not given him any real help. Mirabeau
presented himself in the chamber of the
nobility in the estates of Provence in
January 1789 and uttered violent
diatribes against the privileged classes
but was not elected deputy, as he held
no fief. Turning reluctantly to the
Third Estate, he was elected to
represent both Marseille and
Aix-en-Provence, and he chose to
represent the latter.
Mirabeau came to the Estates-General
without any precise constitutional
doctrine. An avowed enemy of despotism
(he had written Essai sur le despotisme
[“Essay on Despotism”] before he was
25), he was, nevertheless, a firm
supporter of the monarchy and of the
executive power. Without expressly
adhering to the English system, he
wanted representative government. A
nobleman rejected by his class, he
opposed the idea of an aristocratic
second chamber. Like most of his
contemporaries, he had no political
experience, but his intelligence and his
knowledge of men made him supremely
capable of acquiring such experience
rapidly. Lack of money, however, exposed
him to pressure and to temptation.
From
May to October 1789 Mirabeau played a
decisive part in the battle between the
Third Estate and the privileged orders.
His aim was to become the spokesman of
the nation to the king and at the same
time to moderate the expression of the
nation’s wishes. Thus, on June 15 and 16
he was careful not to suggest the name
National Assembly, which was the
rallying cry of the Third Estate in its
Revolutionary debate of June 17, when it
set itself up as representative of the
whole nation. Yet, at the ending of the
“royal session” of June 23, when Henri
Évrard, marquis de Dreux-Brézé, in the
king’s name ordered the assembled
estates to return each to its separate
chamber, Mirabeau’s answer did much to
confirm the deputies in their resolution
to disobey and establish the National
Assembly, and, in the feverish
atmosphere of the early days of July,
his speeches inspired the Assembly to
demand the dispersal of the troops
concentrated around Paris.
After
the fall of the Bastille (July 14), he
urged the Assembly to demand the
dismissal of the ministers who were to
blame for the disorders. His popularity
in Paris was then considerable. On the
other hand, he disapproved of the
Assembly’s precipitate action in
abolishing feudalism (on the night of
August 4) and of the abstract
Declaration of Rights, and, while he was
openly against a second chamber, he yet
wanted the king to have an absolute
veto. In October, when the Parisians
marched on Versailles and took Louis XVI
back to Paris, Mirabeau’s attitude was
ambiguous and gave rise to the suspicion
that he might be plotting against the
king. To clear himself and to keep open
the door to the court’s favour, he
addressed a memorandum to the king,
advising him to leave Paris for Rouen,
to secure the support of a small army,
and to appeal to the provinces.
Mirabeau’s prime concern, however, was
to win “the battle of the ministry.”
Ostensibly a supporter of Necker,
Mirabeau, in fact, did his utmost to
destroy him: his brilliant speech on the
bankruptcy of the nation was a
masterstroke against this minister.
Furthermore, he tried skillfully to
induce the Assembly to grant to the king
the option of choosing members of it to
be his ministers, but the Assembly’s
decree of November 7, 1789, which
precluded all deputies from the ministry
for the duration of the session,
frustrated his hopes of ministerial
office for himself.
Intrigue with the court
From November 1789, notwithstanding his
oratorical triumphs of January–April
1790 in the cause of the Revolution,
Mirabeau was a prey to despondency and
aimlessness until his friend Auguste,
prince d’Arenberg, comte de La Marck—with
the approval of Florimund, Graf (count)
Mercy d’Argenteau, Austrian ambassador
to Paris and confidant of Queen
Marie-Antoinette—approached him with the
proposal from Louis XVI and the queen
that he should become their secret
counselor. Mirabeau accepted with
delight: “I shall make it my chief
business to see that the executive power
has its place in the constitution”
(letter of May 10). Part of the promised
remuneration was to be the paying off of
his debts.
In May
1790, when the Assembly was debating the
king’s right to make war and peace,
Mirabeau successfully opposed the
left-wing orator Antoine Barnave, whom
he challenged with the words: “Tell us
that there should be no king, do not
tell us that there should only be a
powerless, superfluous king.” He impeded
the progress of the Jacobins but risked
his own popularity, and a pamphlet
accusing him of treason was circulated (Trahison
découverte du comte de Mirabeau [“The
Uncovered Treason of the Comte de
Mirabeau”]).
From
June to October he had to work to
recapture his prestige. This was the
more necessary because the king and the
queen, despite their secret interview of
July 3 with Mirabeau at Saint-Cloud,
took little notice of his advice and
continued to be influenced by his rival
for court favour, the marquis de
Lafayette, who had scorned Mirabeau’s
offer of alliance. In October 1790 the
Assembly further disappointed Mirabeau
by refusing, after more discussion, to
revoke the decree of November 1789 on
the noneligibility of its members for
the ministry.
While
the court was displeased by some of
Mirabeau’s outbursts and by his
“incurable mania of running after
popularity,” Mirabeau, for his part, was
enraged to see a new ministry formed
under the influence of his rivals
Lafayette and Alexandre, comte de Lameth.
By the end of November 1790 his
relations with the court were severely
strained. He restored them by submitting
to the king’s adviser Montmorin a “Plan”
concocted to bring pressure to bear by
various means on the Assembly, on Paris,
and on the provinces so as to coordinate
“the means of reconciling public opinion
with the sovereign’s authority.”
The
plan was perfect in theory but very
difficult to put into practice. From
January 1791 it was clear that Mirabeau
had no intention of doing anything that
might compromise his own popularity,
though he was willing enough to sabotage
the Assembly by getting it to adopt
ill-considered measures of religious
persecution, and he was eagerly and
adroitly working to discredit Lameth’s
faction at court. His popularity rose to
its zenith, and the eyes of all of
Europe were on him.
As
spokesman of the diplomatic committee,
on January 28, 1791, he made a speech
that bore the unmistakable stamp of
statesmanship. Anxious to avoid anything
that might compromise France’s relations
with neighbouring countries,
particularly with England, he yet would
not repudiate any of the Revolution’s
political victories or allow any
necessary military precautions to be
overlooked. On the following day he at
last became president of the Assembly
for a fortnight. In this office, from
which he had been so long excluded, his
control of the debates was masterly.
Mirabeau’s problem was to know how and
for how long his Machiavellian game
could be continued before his intrigue
with the court would be exposed. The
people of Paris were restless, worried
by rumours. Mirabeau’s position was made
difficult by his intervention on behalf
of the king’s aunts (who had fled from
Paris), by his hostility to the law
against the émigrés, and by his harsh
words against the Lameths and their
satellites in the Assembly (“Silence to
the factious! Silence to the 33!”). On
February 28 he was sorely pressed to
justify himself to the Jacobins after a
pitiless attack by Alexandre, comte de
Lameth. The newspapers of the left
redoubled their accusations of treason
against him, and in March he experienced
some notable reverses in the Assembly.
Death
may have saved him from political
defeat. Gravely ill since his presidency
of the Assembly, he worsened his
condition by excessive indulgence. He
took to his bed on March 27, 1791, and
died a week later. The people’s grief
for him was boundless; he was given a
magnificent funeral, and it was for him
that the new church of Sainte-Geneviève
was converted into the Panthéon, for the
burial of great men. In the insurrection
of August 10, 1792, however, papers
proving Mirabeau’s relations with the
court were found in an iron chest in the
Tuileries Palace, and on September 21,
1794, his remains were dislodged from
the Panthéon by order of the National
Convention.
Assessment
As a statesman, Mirabeau failed in his
main objective, that of reconciling the
monarchy with the Revolution and a
strong executive with national liberty.
He was too much of a monarchist for the
Revolution, too revolutionary for the
monarchy. As an orator, he was
unsurpassed. Even though his eloquence
was fed by material gathered from every
quarter and by a “workshop” of
collaborators, it was Mirabeau who found
the striking images and expressions that
give to his speeches their brilliant
individuality. Generally bad at
extemporizing, Mirabeau could be moved
by anger or by injured pride to an
impassioned tone that would carry the
Assembly with him.
Jean-Jacques Chevallier
