The Considerations sur l'ordre de Cincinnatus which Romilly translated was the only important work Mirabeau wrote in the year 1785. He now turned his thoughts to employment from the French foreign office, either in writing or in diplomacy. He first sent Mme. de Nehra to Paris to make peace with the authorities and then returned himself, hoping to be employed as a political pamphleteer, but he ruined his chances by a series of writings on financial questions. On his return to Paris he had become acquainted with Etienne Claviere, the Genevese exile, and a banker named Panchaud. From them he heard plenty of abuse of stock-jobbing, and seizing their ideas he began to regard stock jobbing, or agiotage, as the source of all evil, and to attack in his usual vehement style the Banque de St. Charles and the Corn pagnie des Eaux. This last pamphlet brought him into a contro versy with Beaumarchais, who certainly did not get the best of it, but it lost him any chance of literary employment from the government. But after a preliminary tour to Berlin at the be ginning of 1786 he was despatched in July 1786 on a secret mission to the court of Prussia, from which he returned in January 1787, and of which he gave a full account in his Histoire secrete de la tour de Berlin (1789). He was in Berlin at the time of the death of Frederick the Great. He failed to conciliate the new king Frederick William ; and thus ended Mirabeau's one attempt at diplomacy. During his journey he had made the acquaintance of Jakob Mauvillon (1743-1794), whom he found possessed of a great number of facts and statistics with regard to Prussia ; these he made use of in his De la monarchie prussienne sous Frederic le Grand (London, 1788). He had offered himself as a candidate for the office of secretary to the Assembly of Notables which the king had just convened, and to bring his name before the public published the Denonciation de l'agiotage. The violence of this book ruined his chance of election, and he had to retire to Tongres; he further injured his prospects by publishing the reports he had sent in during his secret mission at Berlin. But 1789 was at hand; the states-general was summoned; Mirabeau's period of probation was over.
On hearing of the king's determination to summon the states general, Mirabeau started for Provence, and offered to assist at the preliminary conference of the noblesse of his district. They rejected him; he appealed to the tiers etat, and was returned both for Aix and for Marseilles. He elected to sit for Aix. At every important crisis his voice was heard in the Assembly, though his advice was not always followed. He possessed at the same time great logical acuteness and the most passionate enthusiasm. From the beginning he recognized the need of strong government. At the same time he thoroughly comprehended that for a govern ment to be strong it must be in harmony with the wishes of the majority of the people. He had carefully studied the English con stitution in England, and he hoped to establish in France a system similar in principle but without any slavish imitation of the details of the English constitution. In the first stage of the history of the states-general Mirabeau's part was very great. He always knew his own mind, and was prompt in emergencies. To him is to be attributed the successful consolidation of the National Assembly. When the taking of the Bastille had assured the success of the Revolution, he warned the Assembly of the futility of passing fine-sounding decrees and urged the necessity for action. He declared that the famous night of Aug. 4 was but an orgy, giving the people an immense theoretical liberty while not assisting them to practical freedom, and overthrowing the old regime before a new one could be constituted. His failure to control the theorizers showed Mirabeau, after the removal of the king and the Assembly to Paris, that his eloquence would not enable him to guide the Assembly by himself, and that he must therefore try to get some support. He wished to establish a strong ministry, which should be responsible like an English ministry, but to an assembly chosen to represent the people of France better than the English House of Commons at that time represented England. The duchesse d'Abrantes states in her
Memoires that he thought of becoming a minister of the crown as early as May 1789, but the queen rejected the idea. He tried in vain to work with Lafayette, and then with Necker, for whose financial scheme he obtained the assent of the Assembly. After the events of the 5th and 6th of October the comte de la Marck consulted Mirabeau as to what measures the king ought to take, and Mirabeau, delighted at the opportunity, drew up an admirable state paper, which was presented to the king by Monsieur, after wards Louis XVIII. The whole of this Memoire should be read to get an adequate idea of Mirabeau's genius for politics; here it must be summarized.
The main position is that the king is not free in Paris; he must there fore leave Paris and appeal to France. "Paris n'en vent que l'argent ; les provinces demandent des lois." But where must the king go ? "Se retirer a Metz ou sur toute autre frontiere serait declarer la guerre a la nation et abdiquer le trone. Un roi qui est la seule sauvegarde de son peuple ne fuit point devant son peuple ; it le prend pour juge de sa conduite et de ses principes." He must then go towards the interior of France to a provincial capital, best of all to Rouen, and there he must appeal to the people and summon a great convention. It would be ruin to appeal to the noblesse, as the queen advised: "un corps de noblesse nest point une armee, qui puisse combattre." When this great conven tion met the king must show himself ready to recognize that great changes have taken place, that feudalism and absolutism have for ever disappeared, and that a new relation between king and people has arisen, which must be loyally observed on both sides for the future. "Il est certain, d'ailleurs, qu'il faut une grande revolution pour sauver le royaume, que la nation a des droits, qu'elle est en chemin de les recouvrer tous, et qu'il faut non seulement les retablir, mais les con solider." To establish this new constitutional position, between king and people would not be difficult, because "Pindivisibilite du monarque et du peuple est dans le coeur de tous les Francais ; it faut qu'elle existe dans l'action et le pouvoir." Such was Mirabeau's programme, from which he never di verged, but which was far too statesmanlike to be understood by Louis, and far too positive to be palatable to the queen. Mirabeau followed up his Memoire by a scheme of a great min istry to contain all men of mark—Necker as prime minister, "to render him as powerless as he is incapable, and yet preserve his popularity for the king," the duc de Liancourt, the due de la Rochefoucauld, La Marck, Talleyrand, bishop of Autun, at the finances, Mirabeau without portfolio, G. J. B. Target, mayor of Paris, Lafayette generalissimo to reform the army, Louis Philippe, comte de Segur (foreign affairs), Mounier and I. R. G. le Chapelier. This scheme got noised abroad, and was wrecked by a decree of the Assembly of Nov. 7, 1789, that no member of the Assembly could become a minister. The queen utterly refused to take Mirabeau's counsel, and La Marck left Paris. In April 1790 he was suddenly recalled by the comte de Mercy-Argenteau, the Austrian ambassador at Paris, and the queen's most trusted political adviser, and from this time to Mirabeau's death he be came the medium of almost daily communications between the latter and the queen. Mirabeau at first attempted again to make an alliance with Lafayette, but it was useless, for Lafayette was not a strong man himself and did not appreciate "la force" in others. From the month of May 1790 to his death in April 1791 Mirabeau remained in close and suspected, but not actually proved, connection with the court, and drew up many admirable state papers for it. In return the court paid his debts; but it ought never to be said that he was bribed, for the gold of the court never made him swerve from his political principles. He regarded himself as a minister, though an unavowed one, and be lieved himself worthy of his hire.