Carnot gave his opinion upon public affairs in a "Memorial to his most Christian Majesty," made public in October, 1814, which was at once an apology for the Jacobin party, and a direct attack on the reigning dynasty. This document we must necessarily consider at some length, as it conveys the ostensible reasons on which the author, and many thousands besides, having in their anxious consideration the interests of the freedom of France, thought these interests would be best provided for by destroying the sway of a mild and somewhat feeble monarch, whose reign was identified with peace and tranquillity, in order to recall to the throne an absolute sovereign, ruling on military principles only, and whose first step under the canopy of state must necessarily be followed by war with all Europe.
In this singular, and, as it proved, too effective production, every fault committed by the restored family is exaggerated; and they, with the nobles, their personal adherents, are, under a thin and contemptuous veil of assumed respect towards the King, treated alike as fools, who did not understand how to govern France, and as villains, who meditated her ruin. The murder of the King is, with irony as envenomed as unjust, stated to have been occasioned, not by the violence and cruelty of his persecutors, but by the pusillanimity of his nobility, who first provoked the resentment of the nation, and then fled from the kingdom, when, if they had loved their sovereign, they should have rallied around him.[85] This plea, in the mouth of a regicide, is as if one of a band of robbers should impute an assassination not to their own guilty violence, but to the cowardice of the domestics of the murdered, by whom that violence might have been resisted.
No one also knew better than Carnot by what arts Louis XVI. was induced by degrees to abandon all means of defence which his situation afforded him, and to throw himself upon the sworn faith and allegiance of those by whom he was condemned to death. As whimsical and unlogical were the examples and arguments referred to by Carnot in support of the condemnation of Louis. Cicero, it seems, says in his Offices, "We hate all those we fear, and we wish for the death of those we hate." On this comprehensive ground, Carnot vindicates the orator's approbation of the death of Cæsar, notwithstanding the clemency of the usurper; "and Cato, indeed" (continues the colleague of Robespierre,) "went farther, and did not think it possible there should be a good king." Of course, not Louis XVI. alone, but all monarchs, might be justly put to death in Carnot's estimation; because they are naturally the objects of fear to their subjects--because we hate those we fear--and because, according to the kindred authority of Shylock, no man "hates the thing he would not kill."[86] The doctrine of regicide is said to be confirmed in the Old Testament; families were massacred--monarchs proscribed--intolerance promulgated, by the ministers of a merciful deity: Wherefore, then, should not the Jacobins put Louis XVI. to death? If it was alleged, that the persons of Kings were inviolable by the laws of all civil governments, those of usurpers certainly were not so protected; and what means were there, said Carnot, for positively distinguishing between an usurper and a legitimate king?--The difficulty of making such a distinction was no doubt a sufficient vindication of the judges of Louis XVI.