Louis XVI. put him in command at Cherbourg, and it was he who conceived the plan of making that town a station for the French marine. He was fifty years old when the Revolution of 1789 broke out. At once he saw in it an opportunity for success and glory. Full of confidence in his own superiority, he merely awaited the hour when events should second his ambition. He said to himself that the emigration, by making a void in the upper ranks of the army, was going to leave him free scope, and that he would be commander-in-chief of the French troops under the new régime. To attain this end he decided to serve the King, the Assembly, and the factions; to assume all parts and all masks, and to be in turn, and simultaneously if need were, the courtier of Louis XVI. and the favorite of the Jacobins.
As has been very well said by M. Frédéric Masson { 98} in an excellent book, as novel as it is interesting, _Le Département des affaires étrangères sous la Revolution_, Dumouriez had been accustomed to make his way everywhere, to eat at all tables, and listen at all doors. One of the agents of Count d'Artois brought him into relations with Mirabeau. He was protected by the minister Montmorin. He drew up plans of campaign for Narbonne. He used the intimate "thou" to Laporte, the King's confidant and intendant of the civil list. He made use of women also. Separated from his lawful wife, he lived in marital relations with a sister of Rivarol, the Baroness de Beauvert, a charming person who had much intercourse with aristocratic society, who speculated in arms, and who was pensioned by the Duke of Orleans, as appears from a letter of Latouche de Tréville, the prince's chancellor, dated April 17, 1789. Dumouriez, who had expensive tastes, sought at the same time for gold and honors. Either by means of the court or the Revolution, he desired to gain a great fortune and much glory, to become a statesman, a minister, commander-in-chief, and realize his great military plan, the conquest of the natural frontiers of France. He said to himself: He who wills the end wills the means, and managed as adroitly with parties as with soldiers. At Niort, where he was in command at the beginning of the Revolution, he made himself remarkable by his enthusiasm for the new ideas, and became president of the club and honorary citizen of the town. He contracted an intimacy with Gensonné, { 99} whom the Assembly had sent into the departments of the west to observe their spirit. In January, 1792, the emigration of general officers had become so considerable that he rose by seniority to the rank of lieutenant-general. Thereafter, he believed his hour had come, and threw himself boldly into the political arena. The Gironde and the Jacobins were the two powers then in vogue; he flattered both the Jacobins and the Gironde. Brissot was the corypheus of the diplomatic committee and the chief of the war party. He became the familiar of Brissot. Already, in 1791, he had prepared a memoir on the subject of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs which he dedicated and read to the Jacobins. In it he announced (singular prediction for the future minister of a king!) that before fifty years had passed, Europe would be republican. He demanded an immediate and radical change in the diplomatic personnel. "It is of small importance," said he in the same memoir, "that our representatives would lack experience. In the first place, our interests are greatly simplified; moreover, our former representatives were young men belonging to the court who had had no political education. In a word, it is the majesty of the nation which gives our negotiations weight. The minister," he added, "should be a man of approved patriotism, above all suspicion, like the wife of Cæsar. Absolute integrity, great knowledge of men, great firmness, a broad and upright mind, should complete his character." Dumouriez perhaps imagined that all these qualities { 100} of an ideal minister were reunited in his person. However that may be, he accepted, without any mistrust of his own abilities, the portfolio of Foreign Affairs, confided to him March 15, 1792, on account of his relations with the Gironde and his popularity with the Jacobins. He had a high opinion of himself, and, even after his cruel disappointments, he was to write in his Memoirs, in 1794: "Dumouriez sometimes laughs sardonically in his retreat over the judgments passed upon him. When he arrived at the ministry, the courtiers said and published that he was only a soldier of fortune, incapable of conducting political affairs, in which he would make nothing but blunders. When he commanded an army, they told the Prussians and the German Emperor's troops that he was a mere writer, who had never made war and understood nothing about it.