Louis XVI. then earnestly desiring the disarming, sent to Coblentz the Baron Viomenil and the Chevalier de Coigny to command his brothers and the Prince de Conde to disarm and disperse the emigrants.  They received his orders as coming from a captive, and disobeyed without even sending him a reply.  Prussia and the empire showed more deference to the king’s intentions.  These two courts disbanded the army collected by the princes, and ordered to be punished in their states all insults offered to the tricolour cockade; but at the very moment when the emperor thus gave evidence of his desire to maintain peace, war was about to involve him in spite of himself.  What human wisdom sometimes refuses to the greatest causes, it sees itself compelled to accord to the smallest.  Such was Leopold’s situation.  He had refused war to the great interests of the monarchy, and the strong feelings of the family which asked it from him, and yet was about to grant it to the insignificant interests of certain princes of the empire, whose possessions were in Alsace and Lorraine, and whose personal rights were violated by the new French constitution.  He had refused succour to his sister, and was about to accord it to his vassals.  The influence of the diet, and his duties as head of the empire, led him on to steps to which his personal feelings would never have urged him.  By his letter of 3d December, 1791, he announced to the cabinet of the Tuileries the formal resolution on his part “of giving aid to the princes holding lands in France, if he did not obtain their perfect restoration to all the rights which belonged to them by treaty.”

XVIII.

This threatening letter, secretly communicated in Paris, (before it was officially sent,) by the French ambassador in Vienna, was received by the king with much alarm, and with joy by certain of his ministers, and the political party of the Assembly.  War cuts through every thing.  They hailed it as a solution to the difficulties which they felt were crushing them.  When there is no longer any hope in the regular order of events, there is in what is unknown.  War appeared to these adventurous spirits a necessary diversion to the universal ferment; a career to the Revolution; a means for the king again to seize on power by acquiring the support of the army.  They hoped to change the fanaticism of liberty into the fanaticism of glory, and to deceive the spirit of the age by intoxicating it with conquests instead of satisfying it with institutions.

The Girondist deputies were of this party.  Brissot was their inspiration.  Flattered by the title of statesmen, which they already assumed from vanity, and which was used towards them with irony, they were desirous to justify their pretensions by a bold stroke, which would change the scene, and disconcert, at the same time, the king, the people, and Europe.  They had studied Machiavel, and considered the disdain of the just as a proof of genius.  They little heeded the blood of the people, provided that it cemented their ambition.