Less Black

A DIARY OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION, 2 vols.--GouverneurMorris--Ed!fed by Beatrix Cary Davenport--Houghton Mifflin ($9).

U. S. historians have edged past tall, sonorous-voiced, peg-legged Gouverneur Morris with only a furtive nod. Only biographer with nerve enough to write a friendly word of him was roughriding Teddy Roosevelt. And T. R.'s biography of Morris (1888) made little splash.

Never disparaged was Gouverneur Morris' earlier record. He was spokesman at 26 for Washington at the Continental Congress; brilliant assistant to the "financier of the Revolution," Robert Morris (no kin); leading framer and "stylist" of the Constitution; first U. S. minister to France. But his name has come down as the "notorious aristocrat" who intrigued with Louis XVI against the French Revolution; who deliberately let his archenemy, Tom Paine, rot in Luxembourg Prison; who speculated in U. S. lands, wheat, tobacco, the public debt.

This week, for the first time, appeared Gouverneur Morris' complete diaries (edited by his great-granddaughter) covering the years in France (1789-1793) which blackened his name for a century and a half. Therein Morris does more to clear his later reputation than others have managed to do for him. It is true that Louis XVI's ministers wore a trench to his door. "This Morning," runs a typical entry, "employ myself in preparing a Form of Government for this Country." He was mistaken in his methods, blinded by vanity and ignorance of the French common people. But Morris' Monarchist sympathies were far from enthusiastic.

Prodding Louis XVI to accept a liberal constitution he argued that the French, having no such schooling in democracy as pre-Revolution Americans, would first swing to bloody revolutionary extremes, then fall into the hands of unscrupulous dictators. French rulers, said Morris, had so corrupted the French masses that they "have no Religion but their Priests, no Law but their Superiors, no Moral but their Interest." Gouverneur Morris appears, in short, as a well-meaning liberal, preaching moderation to people who, on the Right and Left alike, wanted none of it. As for his scheme to smuggle Louis XVI to the U. S., even Tom Paine joined him in that humane intrigue.

Chiefly interesting for their light on Morris' much-maligned business and political activities in France, the diaries are also notable for their account of the Terror, their Pepysian observations on political and social intrigue among the French upper crust. Even his enemies might enjoy Gouverneur Morris' formal candor in describing his tempestuous affair with the Comtesse de Flauhaut ("As I am heavy and plagued with a Head Ache Madame will not let me give her Pleasure, as it may injure my Health. This is Kind.").

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