As
to preventing the return of confusion, for this the administration
(says he) cannot be answerable to you as long as they see the
municipalities arrogate to themselves an authority over the troops
which your institutions have reserved wholly to the monarch. You
have fixed the limits of the military authority and the municipal
authority. You have bounded the action which you have permitted to the
latter over the former to the right of requisition, but never did
the letter or the spirit of your decrees authorize the commons in
these municipalities to break the officers, to try them, to give
orders to the soldiers, to drive them from the posts committed to
their guard, to stop them in their marches ordered by the king, or, in
a word, to enslave the troops to the caprice of each of the cities
or even market towns through which they are to pass.
Such is the character and disposition of the municipal society
which is to reclaim the soldiery, to bring them back to the true
principles of military subordination, and to render them machines in
the hands of the supreme power of the country! Such are the distempers
of the French troops! Such is their cure! As the army is, so is the
navy. The municipalities supersede the orders of the Assembly, and the
seamen in their turn supersede the orders of the municipalities.
From my heart I pity the condition of a respectable servant of the
public like this war minister, obliged in his old age to pledge the
Assembly in their civic cups, and to enter with a hoary head into
all the fantastic vagaries of these juvenile politicians.
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