France in eighteen hundred and two

Some months ago Lady Sykes accidentally came across a very rare work—Henry Redhead Yorke’s “Letters from France, written in 1802.” She immediately became its possessor, and a perusal of its contents suggested the excellent idea of editing the book for modern publication: for, although intensely interesting, Yorke’s “Letters” were written in the verbose style characteristic of his day. By judicious pruning and omissions Lady Sykes has reduced the volume by about a third, without, however, omitting anything of the least importance; whereby she enables in a concise manner students of French history to bridge over the important though little known period which elapsed between the downfall of Robespierre and the Consulate.

Many imagine that immediately after the Reign of Terror ended things settled down very quickly in France, and that whatever benefits accrued from the Revolution soon blossomed and bore abundant fruit. It was, however, very much otherwise; and the prevalent idea, that the prosperity of modern France is due to the great Revolution, is a fallacy; for, independently of the chaos created by the Reign of Terror, we must take into consideration the decade of Napoleonic despotism which separates the Revolution from the beginning of what is known as la France moderne.

Henry Redhead was born in 1772, most probably in the West Indies, whence he was fetched as a child, and brought up at Little Eaton, near Derby. He was evidently a youth of considerable observation and studious habits, and before he was twenty had written a pamphlet against negro emancipation, which, however, he recalled a couple of years later as the result of a visit to Paris, then in the early throes of the Revolution. Redhead threw himself heart and soul with the enthusiasm of youth into a popular movement which he believed was to liberate humanity from every sort of bondage, and bring about a period of quite utopian peace and prosperity. Whilst under the influence of the buoyant rhetoric that marked the first period of the Revolution, he was privileged to witness many of the most striking events and scenes in that momentous drama; including the trial of Louis XVI., in connection with which he gives in these “Letters” several facts omitted by general historians. There were at this time several other British enthusiasts in Paris, amongst them Robert and John Sheares, with whom he became acquainted, and who induced him to join the British Club, an association at which were discussed such subjects as the advantage of liberating England by the assassination of that harmless monarch George III. Redhead would not, however, hear of any such project, and, after a violent quarrel with the Sheares, left the Club, being denounced to the Convention by Robert Rayment. He now concluded it were wiser to put the frontier between himself and the disorderly and fanatical horde of informers and informed who had, with surprising rapidity, seized the reins of administration in Paris. He changed his name, assumed that of Yorke, and, travelling through Holland, reached England in 1793, where he joined a liberal debating society in Derby, and became distinguished for his rhetorical eloquence. It was soon alleged against him, however, that he had, amongst other revolutionary ebullitions, declared, “You have before you, young as I am (about twenty-two years of age), a man who has been concerned in three revolutions already, who essentially contributed to serve the Republic in America, who contributed to that of Holland, who materially assisted in that of France, and who will continue to cause revolutions all over the world.” This striking boast did not receive the support Redhead imagined it would; for he was promptly arrested, and at the York Spring Assizes in 1795, true bills were found against him for conspiracy, sedition and libel. His trial took place on July 23, 1795, at York, but his co-defendant, Joseph Gales, printer of the “Sheffield Register,” and Richard Davison, compositor, absconded. Although he repudiated the violent words imputed to him, and declared himself to be a loyal citizen, Redhead was none the less sentenced to two years’ imprisonment in Dorchester Castle, whence he was not released until March 1799. Whilst in prison his views, political and otherwise, became greatly modified, and, although he remained a staunch Liberal, he conceived an abhorrence of revolutionary methods, considering them as the most unlikely to conduce to true freedom or to the prosperity of the peoples who employed them. In 1802 he revisited France, the result of his observations on this occasion being embodied in the “Letters from France.” He remained in Paris three months, making notes of all he saw, visiting such old friends as had survived the Terror, and seeing for himself all the havoc the Revolution had wrought. On his return to England Redhead continued to place his talents at the disposal of the Liberal party. In 1811 he appeared in London, and delivered a series of lectures on historical and political subjects; but his health completely broke down, and although he had been induced by Richard Valpy to undertake the continuation of John Campbell’s “Lives of British Admirals,” he was too ill to finish that work, and died at Chelsea, after a brief illness, on January 28, 1813. Mr. Redhead married in 1800 the accomplished daughter of Mr. Andrews, keeper of Dorchester Castle, by whom he had four children. This lady accompanied him, and together with her friend, Mrs. Cosway, the wife of the celebrated painter and herself a fine artist, was his companion on most of his excursions in that city and its neighbourhood.

Redhead was a man of very keen perception, generous impulse, and, having the courage of his opinions, was never ashamed to own that circumstances had occasionally compelled him to change them. The best known of his numerous publications is this volume of “Letters from France,” written with the object of exposing the fruits of a tyrannical and corrupt form of government, whose wires were pulled by unscrupulous miscreants in the oft-blasphemed names of “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.” These “Letters” were not published until after the author’s death, when Mrs. Redhead found copies of them amongst her husband’s effects, and a very limited edition was printed; so that at present the work is exceedingly scarce.

The value of Redhead Yorke’s “Letters from France” consists not only in the remarkable picture he gives of Paris eight years after the Reign of Terror, but in the fact that, as he was intimately acquainted with many of those who played a prominent part in that tragedy, he was frequently able to give an account of their latter years. In 1802 the majority, however, of those with whom he had lived on terms of fairly good fellowship on the occasion of his first visit to France, had been guillotined; and, on the other hand, not a few who had been but little known in his earlier years had now risen to conspicuous official positions—which, more often than not, they did not fill so much for their country’s good as for their own. He gives us a very interesting account of a conversation which he had with Tom Paine, whom he had known and admired previously, but whom he now discovered in a state of abject poverty on the very day that the American Republic determined to bring him back to his own country, where, however, he lived, after all his sufferings and misery in France, only two years. Our author was also well acquainted with that remarkable woman, Miss Helen Williams; and he supplies many unedited anecdotes of other Revolutionary celebrities, including Théroigne de Mirecourt; David, the celebrated painter, and his wife; the partially insane English revolutionary, Colonel Oswald; Joseph Le Bon, and the brothers Sheares. One of them was the son of that unhappy Amazon, Théroigne de Mirecourt.

The perusal of these “Letters” will probably convince many readers that this Revolution did not benefit humanity to a quarter of the extent which its enthusiasts would have us believe it did. In fact, Redhead, like most travellers in France at that period, soon came to the conclusion, from personal and unprejudiced observation, that the much-vaunted great Revolution had been a failure. The class which was to have more especially benefited by it was reduced to a greater depth of degradation and poverty in the first decade of the nineteenth century than ever it had been under the ancien régime: the peasantry and the working classes in general were for the most part out of employment; and the pernicious forced recruiting system which Napoleon had introduced was draining the country of useful men, whose place in the fields and manufactories had to be filled by incompetent lads, old men, and even by girls and women. At least a third of the arable land had gone out of cultivation, and French manufactures had sunk to the utmost insignificance. The rich landowners who had hitherto helped the peasantry were either dead, in exile or else bankrupt. The village school, like the village church, was generally closed; and the rustic population were endeavouring to escape the conscription which weighed so heavily on the country. Higher education was also at a standstill: the richly endowed universities, colleges, and public schools which had been founded in the eighteenth century, had been pillaged, many of their buildings were in ruins, and their libraries confiscated by the Revolutionaries, had not yet been restored. So it was with the scientific and literary institutions in the capital and larger towns, though in 1802 some of these were beginning to slowly revive. The Revolution was, in short, an orgy of brute force, a destroyer producing nothing great either in art, literature, or science. David was the representative painter, and his pictures, when put up for auction in a modern sale-room, now fetch scarcely the price of the canvas and frames on which they are painted and stretched. The exquisite highly finished art-work of the eighteenth century in bronze, furniture, and ceramic, which still sells for fabulous prices at Christie’s and the Hôtel Drouet, was lost; and it was not until the Empire was well established that it began gradually to improve, a proof, if one were needed, that the artistic taste of the nation had not been entirely extinguished in the general disorder that had overwhelmed the capital and country. The utmost licentiousness reigned supreme in Paris at this period; and Redhead’s description of the nightly and indecent scenes in the Palais Royal, which proved so attractive to British and other foreign bachelors, shows that they were not unlike those that draw crowds of tourists to the heights of Montmartre in 1906. The shop windows in 1802, as at present, were filled with abominable and blasphemous prints: and the whole atmosphere of Parisian life was charged with an unwholesome miasma which filled Redhead with horror and disgust, despite his fiery advocacy of the Revolution in its earlier stages.

The man of genius who was destined eventually to re-establish order was only First Consul; but even then people were beginning to whisper that he intended to make himself King or Emperor. Naturally, Redhead, as an Englishman, has not many compliments to bestow on Napoleon; though, had he lived to see the accomplishment of the great Corsican’s work, he might have entertained a higher opinion of the “ogre.” As it was, Redhead was disgusted with Napoleon’s ostentatious display, and above all with the manner in which the spoils stolen from Italy were exhibited in Paris; one of his most interesting letters being that in which he describes the condition of the Louvre even as he saw it stuffed with the treasures of Italy, many of which bore inscriptions he considered an outrage to decency. Thus, for instance, on the Madonna del Orto might have been read, “This picture was taken from the church of Santa Maria del Orto at Venice,” or again, “This picture, one of the best that Paul Veronese ever painted, was taken from the church of the nuns of St. Zacharia at Venice,” and so on. Unfortunately, many of the pictures brought to Paris were injudiciously restored; and when, after the Treaty of Vienna, they were returned to Italy, it was found that they had been irreparably damaged. Not content with carrying off pictures, statues, and other works of art, Napoleon carted away the chief archives of the foremost Italian cities; and these were so carelessly packed that many hundreds of valuable documents were irretrievably lost. From the artistic and historical point of view, the French Revolution was especially injurious to Italy. Venice not only lost her independence, but half her art treasures. During the French occupation at the beginning of the nineteenth century, forty of her churches were closed and thirty of them destroyed, amongst the finest of them being San Gregorio, still standing though desecrated; and the Servi, one of the largest and most historical in the city, not a stone of which exists. Eugène Beauharnais, when Governor of Venice, pulled down Palladio’s Church of San Geminiano, which stood opposite St. Mark’s, to increase the Royal Palace, and over thirty of the characteristic and beautiful campanile, or church towers, which form so delightful a feature in Venetian scenery, were destroyed, their material being carted away to build the new fortifications. At Verona the magnificent church of San Zeno was desecrated (since restored), and two out of three of its splendid cloisters were wantonly laid level. Padua, and, indeed, every other city in Venetia, suffered losses. Ravenna lost three of the handsomest of her ancient basilicas, including San Agnese, whose fine mosaics are now in the Berlin Museum. Milan lost fifty churches full of fine frescoes by Leonardo, Luini, Foppa, and Proccaccino. At Genoa, thanks to the French Revolutionaries, the magnificent Church of San Domenico was demolished, as well as that of San Francesco, which contained the tombs of the Doges, not one of which was spared. Moreover, the sudden suppression of the law of primogeniture ruined half the Italian nobility, and obliged them to sell at low prices the accumulated art treasures of their ancestors. To this day Italy is covered with churches and chapels ruined during the French occupation—which was effected on the pretext of “liberating” that country from superstition.

Every subsequent Revolution which has taken place in France since 1793—in 1838, 1848, and 1870—has originated in the continuance of the Jacobin traditions, the main object of which is to substitute free-thought for Christianity. In each case the Revolution has ended in disorder and bloodshed, and has been succeeded by a more or less modified form of autocracy; yet the dawn of the twentieth century is witnessing what may be termed the most powerful combat between the Revolutionary traditions and those of the ancien régime which has taken place since the execution of Louis XVI. Europe is to-day watching with anxiety the result of the abrogation of that very Concordat in honour of the signing of which a Te Deum was sung in Notre Dame amidst the utmost ecclesiastical, civil, and military pomp, and attended by Napoleon and his Court, a function described by Redhead in a letter which is especially interesting at the present time.

It is not by religious persecution that a lasting Republic can be established. France, so generous in her impulses, so artistic, and, above all, so literary, has not yet learned that a true democracy can only be founded upon a more practical interpretation of the motto, “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity,” than the one that is now in vogue amongst the majority of Frenchmen in both camps.

At the end of this volume will be found a very interesting series of biographies, compiled by Lady Sykes, of the persons connected with the Revolution mentioned in Redhead Yorke’s “Letters,” many of whom are little known even to close students of Revolutionary history.