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Mirabeau, Sieyès, Mounier, and other popular members were constantly receiving ovations and soon learnt to convert them into political weapons; while members who were suspected of reactionary tendencies, especially the higher clergy, met with hostile receptions.
As Mounier, with his friends, had dominated in the constitutional committee of thirty, and was now paramount in the new committee of eight, there was some prospect of a coalition, by which, in return for their aid in carrying the English model, the nobles would obtain easy terms in the liquidation of privilege. That is the parliamentary situation.
There were the deputies of the National Assembly- -Barnave, Mounier, Thouvet, Lafayette, and the favorite of the people, the great Mirabeau. Old France and Young France met here in this drawing-room of Josephine on neutral grounds, and the beautiful viscountess, full of grace and prudence, offered to them both the honors of her house.
He was supported by Mounier, one of the deepest minds of that day, and the most popular of the deputies. He was a magistrate of Grenoble, and had conducted the Estates of Dauphiné with such consummate art and wisdom that all ranks and all parties had worked in harmony.
Sieyès, for once in his career imprudent, proposed that the Assembly should remove to Paris. Mounier, conservative at heart, realizing that this meant civil war, temporized, and carried the Assembly with him by proposing a solemn oath whereby those present would pledge themselves not to separate until they had endowed France with a constitution. On the 23rd, the royal session was held.
The first presidents were prelates and men of rank. Out of six elections only one fell to a commoner, until the end of September, when the leader of the Liberal Conservatives, Mounier, was chosen, at what proved a moment of danger. In the same way, the thirty chairmen of the Bureaux were, with scarcely an exception, always taken from the clergy or the nobles.
"Between which extremes of grandest and meanest, so many grand and mean, roll on towards their several destinies in that procession. There is experienced Mounier, whose presidential parliamentary experience the stream of things shall soon leave stranded. A Pétion has left his gown and briefs at Chartres for a stormier sort of pleading. A Protestant-clerical St.
In any event, they would accept only "the mitigated monarchy," that which the Liberals of 1788 hoped for, that which Mounier demanded after the days of October 5 and 6, that advocated by Barnave after the return from Varennes, that which Malouet, Gouverneur Morris, Mallet-Dupan and all good observers and wise councillors of France, always recommended.
The real question at issue was whether the representatives of the people should be checked by an Upper House, by the king's power of dissolution, and by an absolute or a temporary veto. Mounier had private friends among his opponents, and they opened a negotiation with him. They were prepared to accept his two Houses and his absolute veto.
The disastrous ruin of the cause was brought on by want of management, and not by excess of conservatism. Mounier inclined to an hereditary House of Peers; and that, after August 4, was not to be thought of. But he knew the difficulty, and, however reluctantly, gave way. And he attached undue importance to the absolute veto; but that was not the point on which the conference broke up.
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