Half a century had elapsed since that meal in the peasant’s house and the royal colloquy with the villager in the forest of Senard, when the Nemesis that holds sleepless vigil over the affairs of men stirred her pinions and, like a strong angel with glittering sword, prepared to avenge the wrongs of a people whose rulers had outraged every law, human and divine, by which human society is held together. King, nobles, and prelates had a supreme and an awful choice. They might have led and controlled the Revolution: they chose to oppose it, and were broken into shivers as a potter’s vessel.

After the memorable cannonade at Valmy, a knot of defeated German officers gathered in rain and wind moodily around the circle where they durst not kindle the usual camp-fire. In the morning the army had talked of nothing but spitting and devouring the whole French nation: in the evening everyone went about alone; nobody looked at his neighbour, or if he did, it was but to curse and swear. “At last,” says Goethe, “I was called upon to speak, for I had been wont to enliven and amuse the troop with short sayings. This time I said, ‘From this day forth, and from this place, a new era begins in the history of the world and you can all say that you were present at its birth.’” This is not the place to write the story of the French Revolution. Those who would read the tremendous drama may be referred to the pages of Carlyle. As a formal history, that work of transcendent genius may be open to criticism. Indeed to the present writer the magnificent and solemn prosody seems to partake of the nature of a Greek chorus—the comment of an idealised spectator, assuming that the hearer has the drama unfolding before his eyes. Recent researches have supplemented and modified our knowledge. It is no longer possible to accept the more revolting representations of the misery[156] of the French peasantry as true of the whole of France, for France before the Revolution was an assemblage of many provinces of varying social conditions, subjected to varying administrative laws. Nor can we accept Carlyle’s portraiture of Robespierre as history, after Louis Blanc’s great work. So far from Robespierre having been the bloodthirsty protagonist of the later Terror, it was precisely his determination to make an end of the more savage excesses of the extreme Terrorists and to chastise their more furious pro-consuls, such as Carrier and Fouché, that brought about his ruin. It was men like Collot d’Herbois, Billaud Varenne and Barrère, the bloodiest of the Terrorists, who, to save their own skins, united to cast the odium of the later excesses on Robespierre, and to overthrow him. During the forty-five days that preceded his withdrawal from the sittings of the Committee of Public Safety, 577 persons were guillotined: during the forty-five days that succeeded, 1285 went to their doom. Of the twelve decrees that have been discovered signed by Robespierre during the four last decades, only one had any relation to the system of terror. But whatever defects there be in Carlyle, his readers will at least understand the significance of the Revolution, and why it is that the terrible, but temporary excesses which stained its progress have been so unduly magnified by reactionary politicians, while the cruelties of the White Terror[157] are passed by.

Few of the buildings associated with the Revolution remain at Paris. The Salle du Manège, the Feuillants and Jacobin clubs were swept away by Napoleon’s Rue de Rivoli. But at Versailles little is changed; the broad Avenue de Paris, once filled with double uninterrupted files of brilliant equipages, racing with furious speed from morning to evening along the five leagues between Versailles and Paris, is now silent and deserted. Here, outside the gates of the château were seen in 1775 that vast “multitude in wide-spread wretchedness, with their sallow faces, squalor and winged raggedness, presenting in legible, hieroglyphic writing their petition of grievances, and for answer two were hanged on a new gallows forty feet high.” Here the traveller may see at the corner of the Rue St. Martin in the Avenue de Paris, that Hôtel des Menus Plaisirs, where the States-General sat, 5th May 1789, and where the Commons took the bit in their mouths by declaring themselves the National Assembly, whether the two privileged orders sat with them or not, and decided to set about the task of regenerating France. Here under the elm trees on the Paris road stood the Deputies in the drizzling rain when they found the doors of the hall closed, by royal order, against them, while giggling courtiers looked mockingly on. We may trace their footsteps as they angrily paced to the Rue St. François; we may stand in the very tennis-court whose walls echoed to the solemn oath sworn by their 700 voices never to separate until they had given a constitution to France. Hard by, in the Rue Satory, is the church of St. Louis, where they met the next day on finding the court retained for a tennis-party by the king’s brother, the Count of Artois. We may return to the Menus Plaisirs, where the king’s messenger, de Brézé, ordering them to disperse after the famous royal sitting, heard Mirabeau’s leonine voice bidding him go back to his master and tell him that they were there by the people’s will, and that nothing but the force of bayonets should drive them forth.[158] We may enter the royal apartments, the famous ante-room of the Œil de Bœuf with its oval ox-eyed windows, the king’s bed-chamber, and the council hall; we may look on the foolish faces of the later Bourbons, of the princesses his daughters whom Louis XV. dubbed Rag, Tatter, Snip, and Pig. In the opera-house built for Mesdames Pompadour and Du Barry, we may recall that mad scene of 1st October, when the officers of the bodyguard, having invited their comrades of the Regiment of Flanders to a dinner on the stage, were shaking the roof with cries of “Vive le roi!” while the orchestra played the air, “O Richard! O mon roi! l’univers t’abandonne,” the king suddenly appeared in the royal box facing them, leading the queen, who bore the Dauphin in her arms. Then was the air repeated, and amid a scene of wild enthusiasm the royal family were rapturously acclaimed with clapping of hands and deafening shouts of “Vive le roi! Vive la reine! Vive le dauphin!” Ladies distributed white cockades, the Bourbon colour, and the tricolor was trodden underfoot. Intoxicated soldiers danced under the king’s balcony, and next morning it was discussed at a breakfast given at the hôtel of the bodyguards whether they should march against the National Assembly. And this within three months of the taking of the Bastille and when Paris was in the grip of famine!

The news of the mad orgy goaded the people to fury, and on 5th October an insurrectionary army of 10,000 women advanced on Versailles and encamped on the vast open space in front of the gates. As we stand in the Cour de Marbre, we may lift our eyes to that balcony of the first floor where, on 6th October, Marie Antoinette stood bravely forth, holding her two children by the hand and confronting the vociferating people. At their cry, “No children!” she gently pushed the little Dauphin and his sister back into the room, and with folded arms, for she at least lacked not courage, gazed calmly at them in regal dignity, to be answered by shouts of “Vive la reine!” It was the last time she trod the palace of Versailles. The same day king, queen and children went their way amid that strange procession to Paris, the women crying: “We need not die of hunger now. Here are the baker, the baker’s wife and the baker’s boy.” The palace of the Tuileries was hastily prepared for their reception and for the first time Louis XVI. entered its gates.

Camille Desmoulins has described in his Memoirs how on 11th July he was lifted on a table in front of the Café Foy, in the garden of the Palais Royal, and delivered that short but pregnant oration which preceded the capture of the Bastille on the 14th, warning the people that a St. Bartholomew of patriots was contemplated, and that the Swiss and German troops in the Champ de Mars were ready for the butchery. As the crowd rushed to the Hôtel de Ville, shouting “To arms!” they were charged by the Prince de Lambesc at the head of a German regiment, and the first blood of the Revolution in Paris was shed.

The Bastille, like the monarchy, was the victim of its past sins. That grisly fortress, with the jaws of its cannon opening on the most populous quarter of Paris, and its sinister memories of the Man in the Iron Mask,[159] embodied in the popular mind all that was hateful in the old régime, though it had long ceased to be more than occasionally used as a state prison. If we would restore its aspect we must imagine the houses at the ends of the Rue St. Antoine and the Boulevard Henri IV. away and the huge mass erect on their site and on the lines marked in white stone on the present Place de la Bastille. A great portal, always open by day, yawned on the Rue St. Antoine and gave access to the first quadrangle which was lined with shops: then came a second gate, with entrances for carriages and for foot passengers, each with its drawbridge. Beyond these a second quadrangle was entered, to the right of which stood the Governor’s house and an armoury. Another double portal gave entrance across the old fosse once fed by the waters of the Seine, to the prison fortress itself, with its eight tall blackened towers and its crenelated ramparts.

Montmartre from Buttes Chaumont.
Montmartre from Buttes Chaumont.

The Bastille, first used in Richelieu’s time as a permanent state prison, was filled under Louis XIV. with Jansenists and Protestants, who were thus separated from the prisoners of the common jails; and, later, under Louis XV. by a whole population of obnoxious pamphleteers and champions of philosophy. Books as well as their authors were incarcerated, and released when considered no longer dangerous; the tomes of famous Encyclopédie spent some years there. From the opening of the eighteenth century the horrible, dark and damp dungeons, half underground and sometimes flooded, formerly inhabited by the lowest type of criminals, were reserved as temporary cells for insubordinate prisoners, and since the accession of Louis XVI. they were no more used. The Bastille during the reigns of the three later Louis was the most comfortable prison in Paris, and detention there rather than in the other prisons was often sought for and granted as a favour; the prisoners might furnish their rooms, have their own libraries and food. In the middle of the seventeenth century certain rooms were furnished at the king’s expense for those who were without means. The rooms were warmed, the prisoners well fed, and sums varying from three francs to thirty-five francs per day, according to condition,[160] were allotted for their maintenance. A considerable amount of personal liberty was allowed to many and indemnities were in later years paid to those who had been unjustly detained. But a prison where men are confined indefinitely without trial and at a king’s arbitrary pleasure is none the less intolerable, however its bars be gilded. Prisoners were sometimes forgotten, and letters are extant from Louvois and other ministers, asking the governor to report how many years certain prisoners had been detained, and if he remembered what they were charged with. In Louis XIV.’s reign 2228 persons were incarcerated there; in Louis XV.’s, 2567. From the accession of Louis XVI. to the destruction of the prison the number had fallen to 289. Seven were found there when the fortress was captured—four accused of forgery, two insane; one, the Count of Solages, accused of a monstrous crime, was detained there to spare the feelings of his family. The Bastille, some time before its fall, was already under sentence of demolition, and various schemes for its disposal were before the court. One project was to destroy seven of the towers, leaving the eighth standing in a dilapidated state. On the site of the seven a pedestal formed of chains and bolts from the dungeons and gates was to bear a statue of Louis XVI. in the attitude of a liberator, pointing with outstretched hand towards the remaining tower in ruins. But Louis XVI. was always too late, and the Place de la Bastille, with its column raised to those who fell in the Revolution of July, 1830, now recalls the second and final triumph of the people over the Bourbon kings. Some stones of the Bastille were, however, built into the new Pont Louis Seize, subsequently called Pont de la Revolution and now known as Pont de la Concorde: others were sold to speculators and were retailed at prices so high that people complained that Bastille stones were as dear as the best butcher’s meat. Models of the Bastille, dominoes, inkstands, boxes and toys of all kinds were made of the material and had a ready sale all over France.

Far to the west and on the opposite side of the Seine is the immense area of the Champ de Mars, where, on the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, was enacted the fairest scene of the Revolution. The whole population of Paris, with their marvellous instinct of order and co-operation, spontaneously set to work to dig the vast amphitheatre which was to accommodate the 100,000 representatives of France, and 400,000 spectators, all united in an outburst of fraternal love and hope to swear allegiance to the new Constitution before the altar of the Fatherland. The king had not yet lost the affection of his people. As he came to view the marvellous scene an improvised bodyguard of excavators, bearing spades, escorted him about. When he was swearing the oath to the Constitution, the queen, standing on a balcony of the Ecole militaire, lifted up the dauphin as if to associate him in his father’s pledge. Suddenly the rain which had marred the great festival ceased, the sun burst forth and flooded in a splendour of light, the altar, Bishop Talleyrand, his four hundred clergy, and the king with upraised hand. The solemn music of the Te Deum mingled with the wild pæan of joy and enthusiasm that burst from half a million throats.

The unconscionable folly, the feeble-minded vacillation and miserable trickery by which this magnificent popularity was muddled away is one of the saddest tragedies in the stories of kings. The people, with unerring instinct, had fixed on the queen as one of the chief obstacles to what might have been a peaceful revolution. Neither Marie Antoinette nor Louis Capet comprehended the tremendous significance of the forces they were playing with—the resolute and invincible determination of a people of twenty-six millions to emancipate itself from the accumulated and intolerable wrongs of centuries. The despatches and opinions of American ambassadors during this period are of inestimable value. The democratic Thomas Jefferson, reviewing in later years the course of events, declared that had there been no queen there would have been no revolution. Governor Morris, whose anti-revolutionary and conservative leanings made him the friend and confidant of the royal family, writes to Washington on January 1790: “If only the reigning prince were not the small beer character he is, and even only tolerably watchful of events, he would regain his authority,” but “what would you have,” he continues scornfully, “from a creature who, in his situation, eats, drinks and sleeps well, and laughs, and is as merry a grig as lives. He must float along on the current of events and is absolutely a cypher.” But the court would not forego its crooked ways. “The queen is even more imprudent,” Morris writes in 1791, “and the whole court is given up to petty intrigues worthy only of footmen and chambermaids.” Moreover, in its amazing ineptitude, the monarchy had already toyed with republicanism by lending active military support to the revolutionists in America, at a cost to the already over-burdened treasury of 1,200,000,000 livres.

The American ambassador, Benjamin Franklin, was crowned at court with laurel as the apostle of liberty, and in the very palace of Versailles medallions of Franklin were sold, bearing the inscription: “Eripui coelo fulmen sceptrumque tyrannis” (“I have snatched the lightning from heaven and the sceptre from tyrants”). The revolutionary song, Ça ira, ça ira (“That will go, that will go”), owes its origin to Franklin’s invariable response to inquiries as to the progress of the American revolutionary movement. There was explosive material enough in France to make playing with celestial fire perilous, and while the political atmosphere was heavy with the threatening change, thousands of French soldiers returned saturated with enthusiasm and sympathy for the American revolution. Already before the Feast of the Federation the queen had been in secret correspondence with the émigrés at Turin and at Coblenz who were conspiring to throttle the nascent liberty of France. Plots had been hatched to carry off the royal family. Madame Campan relates that the queen made her read a confidential letter from the Empress Catherine of Russia, concluding with these words: “Kings ought to proceed in their career undisturbed by the cries of the people, as the moon pursues her course unimpeded by the howling of dogs.” Mirabeau was already in the pay of the monarchy; soon after the return of the court to St. Cloud the queen had a secret interview with him in the park, and boasted to Madame Campan how she had flattered the great tribune.

As early as December 1790 the court had been in secret communication with the foreigner. Louis’ brother, the Count of Artois (afterwards Charles X.), with the queen’s and king’s approval, had made a secret treaty with the house of Hapsburg, the hereditary enemy of France, by which the sovereigns of Austria, Prussia and Spain agreed to cross the frontier at a given signal, and close on France with an army a hundred thousand strong. It was an act of impious treachery, and the beginning of the doom of the French monarchy. Yet if but some glimmer of intelligence and courage had characterised the preparations for the flight of the royal family to join the armed forces waiting to receive them near the frontier, their lives at least had been saved.

The incidents of the four months’ “secret” preparations to leave the Tuileries as described by Madame Campan read like scenes in a comic opera. The disguised purchases of elaborate wardrobes of underlinen and gowns; the making of a dressing-case of “enormous size, fitted with many and various articles from a warming-pan to a silver porringer”; the packing of the diamonds; the building of the new berline, that huge, lumbering Noah’s ark which was to bear them swiftly away! The story of the pretended flight of the Russian baroness and her family; the start delayed by the queen turning into the Carrousel instead of into the Rue de l’Echelle, where the king and her children were awaiting her in the glass coach; the colossal folly of the whole business has been told by Carlyle in one of the most dramatic chapters in history.

The Assembly declared on hearing of Louis’ flight that the government of the country was unaffected and that the executive power remained in the hand of the ministers. After voting a levy of three hundred thousand National Guards to meet the threatened invasion, they passed calmly to the discussion of the new Penal Code.

The king returned to Paris through an immense and silent multitude. “Whoever applauds the king,” said placards in the street, “shall be thrashed; whoever insults him, hung.” The idea of a republic as a practical issue of the situation was now for the first time put forward by the extremists, but met with little sympathy, and a Republican demonstration in the Champ de Mars was suppressed by the Assembly by martial law at the cost of many lives. Owing to the aversion felt by Marie Antoinette to Lafayette, who with affectionate loyalty more than once had risked his popularity and life to serve the crown, the court made the fatal mistake of opposing his election to the mayoralty of Paris and paved the way for the triumph of Petion and of the Dantonists. To the famous manifesto of Pilnitz by the Emperor of Austria and the King of Prussia in August 1791, calling on the sovereigns of Europe to support them in an armed intervention to restore the rights and prerogatives of the French king, the Assembly replied that, while they must regard as enemies those who tolerated hostile preparations against France, they offered good neighbourship, the amity of a free and puissant country to the nations of Europe. They desired no conquests and would respect the laws and constitutions of others if they evinced the same respect towards those of France: if the German princes favoured military preparations directed against the French, the French would carry among them, not fire and sword, but liberty. “Let them ponder on the consequences of an awakening of the nations.”

Meanwhile the Assembly renewed some laws of the ancien régime against émigrés, who were threatened with the confiscation of their property without prejudice to the rights of their wives and children and lawful creditors if they did not return within a definite time. The foreign monarchies reasserted the lawfulness of their acts and war became inevitable.

Place de la Concorde
Place de la Concorde

At the news of the first defeats the king added to his amazing tale of follies by vetoing the formation of a camp near Paris and by turning a deaf ear to the earnest entreaties of the brave, loyal and sagacious Dumouriez and accepting his resignation. He sent a secret agent with confidential instructions to the émigrés and the coalesced monarchies, and when Lafayette, after the first demonstration against the Tuileries, hastened to Paris and strove to stir the ill-fated king to resolute action he was coldly received, and with bitterness in his heart returned to his army at the frontier. The ill-starred proclamation[161] of the Duke of Brunswick completed the destruction of the monarchy. While the French were smarting under defeat and stung by the knowledge that their natural defender, the king, was leagued with their enemies, this foreign commander warned a high-spirited and gallant nation that he was come to restore Louis XVI. to his authority, and threatened to treat as rebellious any town that opposed his march, to shoot all persons taken with arms in their hands, and in the event of any insult being offered to the royal family to take exemplary and memorable vengeance by delivering up the city of Paris to military execution and complete demolition. When the proclamation reached Paris at the end of July 1792, it sounded the death knell of the king and the triumph of the Republicans. Paris was now to become, in Goethe’s phrase, the centre of the “world whirlwind”—a storm centre launching forth thunderbolts of terror. After the Assembly had twice refused to bring the king to trial, the extremists were able to organise and direct an irresistible wave of popular indignation towards the Tuileries, and on 10th August the palace was stormed. While a band of brave and devoted Swiss guards was being cut to pieces in hundreds, the feeble and futile king had fled to the Assembly and was sitting safely with his wife and children in a box behind the president’s chair. Thorwaldsen’s monument to the fallen Swiss, carved in the granite rock at Lucerne, recalls that piteous scene at the Tuileries when these poor Republican mercenaries, true to their salt, stood faithful unto death in defence of an empty palace.

No room for compromise now. The printed trial of Charles I. was everywhere sold and read. “This,” people said, “was how the English dealt with an impossible king and became a free nation.” Old and new were in death-grapple, and the lives of many victims, for the people lost heavily,[162] had sealed the cause of the Revolution with a bloody consecration. Unhappily, the city of Paris, like all great towns in times of scarcity (and since 1780 scarcity had become almost permanent), had been invaded by numbers of starving vagabonds—the dregs that always rise to the surface in periods of political convulsion, ready for any villainy. When news came of the capture of Verdun, of the indecent joy of the courtiers, and that the road to Paris was open to the avenging army of Prussians, the horrors of the Armagnac massacres were renewed during four September days at the prisons of Paris, while the revolutionary ministry and the Assembly averted their gaze and, to their everlasting shame, abdicated their powers. The September massacres were the application by a minority of desperate and savage revolutionists of the ultima ratio of kings to a desperate situation. The tragedy of King Louis is the tragedy of a feeble prince called to rule in a tremendous crisis where weakness and well-meaning folly are the fatalest of crimes. How pathetic are the incidents of the penalty of wrong! The dreadful heritage of the sins of the later French monarchy had fallen on the head of one of the best-intentioned and least guilty, though most foolish and feeblest of men.

On 21st September 1792 royalty was formally abolished, and on the 22nd, when “the equinoctional sun marked the equality of day and night in the heavens,” civil equality was proclaimed by the representatives of France.

CHAPTER XVIII

EXECUTION OF THE KING—PARIS UNDER THE FIRST REPUBLIC—THE TERROR—NAPOLEON—REVOLUTIONARY AND MODERN PARIS

There, on Wednesday, 16th January 1793, began the solemn judgment of Louis XVI. by 721 representatives of the people of France. The sitting opened at ten o’clock in the morning, but not till eight in the evening did the procession of deputies begin, as the roll was called, to ascend the tribune, and utter their word of doom. All that long winter’s night, and all the ensuing short winter’s day, the fate of a king trembled in the balance as the judgment, death—banishment: banishment—death, with awful alternation echoed through the hall. Amid the speeches of the deputies was heard the chatter of fashionable women in the boxes, pricking with pins on cards the votes for and against death, and eating ices and oranges brought to them by friendly deputies. Above, in the public tribunes, sat women of the people, greeting the words of the deputies with coarse gibes. Betting went on outside. At every entrance cries hoarse and shrill were heard of hawkers selling “The Trial of Charles I.” Time-serving Philip Egalité, Duke of Orleans, voted la mort, but failed to save his skin. An Englishman was there—Thomas Paine, author of the Rights of Man and deputy for Calais. His voice was raised for clemency, for temporary detention, and banishment after the peace. “My vote is that of Paine,” cried a member, “his authority is final for me.” One deputy was carried from a sick-bed to cast his vote in the scale of mercy; others slumbering on the benches were awakened and gave their votes of death between two yawns. At length, by eight o’clock on the evening of the 17th, exactly twenty-four hours after the voting began, the President rose to read the result. “A silence most august and terrible reigns in the Assembly as President Vergniaud rises and pronounces the sentence ‘Death’ in the name of the French nation.” The details of the voting as given in the Journal de Perlet, 18th January 1793, are as follows: “Of the 745 members one had died, six were sick, two absent without cause, eleven absent on commission, four abstained from voting. The absolute majority was therefore 361. Three hundred and sixty-six voted for death, three hundred and nineteen for detention and banishment, two for the galleys, twenty-four for death with various reservations, eight for death with stay of execution until after the peace, two for delay with power of commutation.” Three Protestant ministers and eighteen Catholic priests voted for death. Louis’ defenders were there and asked to be heard: they were admitted to the honours of the sitting. At eleven o’clock the weary business of thirty-seven hours was ended, only, however, to be resumed the next morning, for yet another vote must decide between delay or summary execution. Again the voice of Paine was heard pleading for mercy, but without avail. At three o’clock on Sunday morning the final voting was over. Six hundred and ninety members were present, of whom three hundred and eighty voted for death within twenty-four hours.

Eiffel Tower.
Eiffel Tower.

To the guillotine on the fatal Place de la Révolution, formerly Place Louis XV., the very scene of a terrible panic at his wedding festivities which cost the lives of hundreds of sightseers, the sixteenth Louis of France was led on the morning of 21st January 1793. As he turned to address the people, Santerre ordered the drums to beat—it was the echo of the drums reverberating through history which had smothered the cries of the Protestant martyrs sent to the scaffold by the fourteenth Louis a century before. This was the beginning of that année terrible, into which was crowded the most stupendous struggle in modern history. Threatened by the monarchies of Europe, who were united in an unholy crusade to crush the Revolution, France, in the tremendous words of Danton, flung to the coalesced kings the head of a king as gage of battle. A colossal energy, an unquenchable devotion were evoked by the supreme crisis, and directed by a committee of nine inexperienced young civilians, sitting in a room of the Tuileries at Paris, to whom later Carnot, an engineer officer, was added. “The whole Republic,” they proclaimed, “is a great besieged city: let France be a vast camp. Every age is called to defend the liberty of the Fatherland. The young men will fight: the married will forge arms. Women will make clothes and tents: children will tear old linen for lint. Old men shall be carried to the market-place to inflame the courage of all.” In twenty-four hours 60,000 men were enrolled; in two months fourteen armies organised. Saltpetre for powder failed; it was torn from the bowels of the earth. Steel, too, and bronze were lacking: iron railings were transmuted into swords, and church bells and royal statues into cannon. Paris became a vast armourer’s shop. Smithy fires in hundreds roared and anvils clanged in the open places—one hundred and forty at the Invalides, fifty-four at the Luxembourg. The women sang as they worked:—

The smiths chanted to the rhythm of their strokes:—

“Forgeons, forgeons, forgeons bien!”

On the new standards waving in the breeze ran the legend: “The French people risen against Tyrants.” Toulon was in the hands of the English; Lyons in revolt. With enemies in her camp, with one arm tied by the insurrection in La Vendée, the Revolution hurled her ragged and despised sans-culottes, shod in pasteboard or straw bands, mantled in a piece of matting skewered above their shoulders, against her enemies. How vain is the wisdom of the great! Burke thought that the Revolution had expunged France in a political sense out of the system of Europe, and his opinion was shared by every statesman in Europe, but before the year closed the proud and magnificently accoutred armies of kings were scattered over the borders, civil war was crushed at home, the Revolution triumphant. The Convention fixed the day of victory. It ordered its generals to end the war of La Vendée by 20th October: by the 17th four defeats had been inflicted on the insurgents, and 60,000 men, women and children were driven over the Loire. Soon the “dwarfish, ragged sans-culottes, the small, black-looking Marseillaise dressed in rags of every colour,” whom Goethe saw tramping out of Mayence “as if the goblin king had opened his mountains and sent forth his lively host of dwarfs,” had forced Prussia, the arch-champion of monarchy, to make peace and leave its Rhine provinces in the hands of regicides. Meanwhile terror reigned in Paris. In the frenzy of mortal strife the Revolution struck out blindly and cut down friend as well as foe; the innocent with the guilty. At least the guillotine fell swiftly and mercifully. Gone were the days of the wheel, the rack, the boiling lead and the stake. Under the ancien régime the torture of accused persons was one of the sights shown to foreigners in Paris. Evelyn, when visiting the city in 1651, was taken to see the torture of an alleged thief in the Châtelet, who was “wracked in an extraordinary manner, so that they severed the fellow’s joints in miserable sort.” Then, failing to extort a confession, “they increased the extension and torture, and then placing a horne in his mouth, such as they drench horses with, poured two buckets of water down, so that it prodigiously swelled him.” There was another “malefactor” to be dealt with, but the traveller had seen enough, and he leaves reflecting that it represented to him “the intolerable sufferings which our Blessed Saviour must needs undergo when His body was hanging with all its weight upon the nailes of the Crosse.”

Too much prominence has been given by historians to the dramatic and violent activities of the men of ’93, to the exclusion of acts of peaceful and constructive statesmanship. Among the 11,210 decrees issued by the National Convention in Paris from September ’92 to October ’95, the following are cited by Louis Blanc:—

It appointed a Commission to examine and report upon works relating to the moral and physical education of children and opened a competition for the composing of elementary books.

It systematised the teaching of the French language.

It ordered an inventory to be taken of collections of works of art.

It fulminated against the degradation of public monuments.

It founded national rewards for great discoveries.

It gave lavish help to artists and savants.

It offered a prize for the perfecting of the art of spinning.

It ordered the publication of a translation of Bacon’s works found among the papers of one of the condemned on the 9th of Thermidor.

It decided that scientific voyages should be organised at the expense of the State, and that the Republic be charged with the maintenance of artists sent to Rome.

It decreed the adoption, began the discussion, and voted the most important articles of the civil code.

It inaugurated the telegraph and the decimal system, established the uniformity of weights and measures, the bureau of longitudes, reformed the calendar, instituted the Grand Livre, increased and completed the Museum of Natural History, opened the Museum of the Louvre, created the Conservatoire of the Arts and Crafts, the Conservatoire of Music, the Polytechnic School and the Institute.

The truly great work of education initiated by the Convention can only be appreciated by recalling its previous condition. The old colleges were utterly neglected. In such as survived, little more than Latin (and that inefficiently) and a few scraps of history were taught. The natural sciences were wholly neglected; the children of the noblesse were educated by private tutors, and only in showy accomplishments. Madame Campan relates that the Princess Louise had not even mastered the alphabet at twelve years of age.

The Convention abolished negro slavery in the French colonies, and Wilberforce reminded a hostile House of Commons that infidel and anarchic France had given example to Christian England in the work of emancipation. In 1793 it was reported to the Convention that the aged Goldoni had been in receipt of a pension from the ancien régime and was now dependent on the slender resources of a compassionate nephew: the Convention at once decreed as an act of justice and beneficence that the pension of 4000 livres should be renewed, and all arrears paid up. This is but one of many acts of grace and succour among the records of the Convention. The same day, 7th February, an artist of Toulouse was awarded 3000 livres. It is curious to read in the journals of early ’93 how fully assured the revolutionists were of the sympathy of England, “that proud and generous nation, whose name alone, like that of Rome, evokes ideas of liberty and independence,” their appeals to the English nation, whose example they had followed, not to allow the quarrels of kings to embroil them in a conflict fatal to humanity. At the meetings of the Jacobins, flags of England, America and France were unfurled, with cries of “Vivent les trois peuples libres.”

The closing months of ’95 were sped with those whiffs of grape shot from the Pont Royal and the Rue St. Honoré, that shattered the last attempt, this time by the Royalists, at government by insurrection. The Convention closed its stupendous career, and five Directors of the Republic met in a room furnished with an old table, a sheet of paper and an ink-bottle, and set about organising France for a normal and progressive national life. But Europe had by her fatuous interference with the internal affairs of France sown dragons’ teeth indeed. A nation of armed men had sprung forth, nursing hatred of monarchy and habituated to victory. “Eh, bien, mes enfants,” cried a French general before an engagement when provisions were wanting to afford a meal for his troops, “we will breakfast after the victory.” But militarism invariably ends in autocracy. The author of those whiffs of grape shot was appointed in 1796 Commander-in-Chief of the army of Italy, and a new and sinister complexion was given to the policy of the Republic. “Soldiers,” cries Napoleon, “you are half-starved and almost naked; the Government owes you much but can do nothing for you. Your patience, your courage do you honour, but win for you neither glory nor profit. I am about to lead you into the most fertile plains of the world; you will find there great cities and rich provinces; there you will reap honour, glory and riches. Soldiers of Italy, will you lack courage?” This frank appeal to the baser motives that sway men’s minds, this open avowal of a personal ambition, was the beginning of the end of Jacobinism in France. Soon the wealth of Italy streamed into the bare coffers of the Directory:—20,000,000 of francs from Lombardy, 12,000,000 from Parma and Modena, 35,000,000 from the Papal States, an equally large sum from Tuscany; one hundred finest horses of Lombardy to the five Directors, “to replace the sorry nags that now draw your carriages”; convoys of priceless manuscripts and sculpture and pictures to adorn the galleries of Paris. So persistent were these raids on the collections of art in Italy that Napoleon is known there to this day as il gran ladrone. The chief duty of the new French officials in Italy, said Lucien Bonaparte, is to supervise the packing of pictures and statues for Paris. No less than 5233 of these works of art were confiscated by the Allies in 1815, and returned to their former owners.

In less than a decade the rusty old stage properties and the baubles of monarchy were furbished anew, sacred oil from the little phial of Rheims anointed the brow of a new dynast, and a Roman Pontiff blessed the crown with which a once poor, pensioned, disaffected Corsican patriot crowned himself lord of France in Notre Dame. The old pomposities of a court came strutting back to their places:—Arch Chancellors, Grand Electors, Constables, Grand Almoners, Grand Chamberlains, Grand Marshals of the Palace, Masters of the Horse, Masters of the Hounds, Madame Mère and a bevy of Imperial Highnesses with their ladies-in-waiting. Only one thing was wanting, as a Jacobin bitterly remarked—the million of men who were slain to end all that mummery. The fascinating story of how this amazing transformation was effected cannot be told here. The magician who wrought it was possessed of a soaring, visionary imagination, of a mental instrument of incomparable force and efficiency, of an iron will, a prodigious intellectual activity, and a piercing insight into the conditions of material success, rarely, if ever before, united in the same degree in one man. Napoleon Bonaparte was of ancient, patrician Florentine blood, and perchance the descendant of one of those of Fiesole—

He cherished a particular affection for Italy, and, so far as his personal aims allowed, treated her generously. His descent into Lombardy awakened the slumbering sense of Italian nationality. In more senses than one, says Mr Bolton King, the historian of Italian unity, Napoleon was the founder of modern Italy.

The reason of Napoleon’s success in France is not far to seek. Two streams of effort are clearly traceable through the Revolution. The earlier thinkers, such as Montesquieu, Voltaire, D’Alembert, Diderot and the Encyclopedists, whose admiration for England was unbounded, aimed at reforming the rotten state of France on the basis of the English parliamentary and monarchical system. It was a middle-class movement for the assertion of its interests in the state and for political freedom. The aim of the Jacobin minority, inspired by the doctrines of the Contrat Social of Rousseau, was to found a democratic state based on the principle of the sovereignty of the people. If the French crown and the monarchies of Europe had allowed the peaceful evolution of national tendencies, the Constitutional reformers would have triumphed, but in their folly they tried to sweep back the tide, with the result we have seen. For when everything is put to the touch, when victory is the price of self-sacrifice, it is the idealist who comes to the front. As the nineteenth century prophet Mazzini taught, men will lay down their lives for principles but not for interests.

Let us not forget that it was the Jacobin minority which saved the people of France. Led astray by their old guides, abandoned in a dark and trackless waste, their heads girt with horror, menaced by destruction on every side, they groped, wandering hither and thither seeking an outlet in vain. At length a voice was heard, confident, thrilling as a trumpet call: “Lo this is the way! follow, and ye shall emerge and conquer!” It may not have been the best way, but it was a way and they followed.

Arc de Triomphe—Place du Carrousel.
Arc de Triomphe—Place du Carrousel.

It is easy enough to pour scorn on the Contrat Social as a political philosophy, but an ideal, a faith, a dogma are necessary to evoke enthusiasm, the contempt of material things and of death itself. These the Contrat Social gave. Its consuming passion for social justice, its ideal of a state founded on the sovereignty of the people became the gospel of the time. Men and women conned its pages by heart and slept with the book under their pillows. Napoleon himself in his early Jacobin days was saturated with its doctrines, and in later times astutely used its phrases as shibboleths to cloak his acts of despotism. But in that terrible revolutionary decade the Jacobins had spent their lives and their energies. A profound weariness of the long and severe tension, and a yearning for a return to orderly civil life came over men’s minds. The masses were still sincerely attached to the Catholic faith; the middle-classes hailed with relief the advent of the strong man who proved himself able to crush faction; the peasants were won by a champion of the Revolution who made impossible the return of the evil days of the ancien régime and guaranteed them the possession of the confiscated émigré and ecclesiastical lands; the army idolised the great captain who promised them glory and profit; the Church rallied to an autocrat who restored the hierarchy. Moreover, the brilliancy of Napoleon’s military genius was balanced by an all-embracing political sagacity. The chief administrative decrees of the Convention, especially those relating to education and the civil and penal codes, were welded into form by ceaseless energy. Everything he touched was indeed degraded from the Republican ideal, but he drove things through and imposed his own superhuman activity into his subordinates, and became one of the chief builders of modern France. “The gigantic entered into our very habits of thought,” said one of his ministers. But his efforts to maintain the stupendous twenty years’ duel with the combined forces of England and the continental monarchies, and his own over-weening ambition, broke him at length, and he fell to fret away his life caged in a lonely island in mid-Atlantic.

The new ideas were none the less revolutionary of social life. The salon, that eminently French institution, soon felt their power. The charming irresponsible gaiety and frivolity of the old régime gave place to more serious preoccupation with political movements. The fusing power of Rousseau’s genius had melted all hearts; the solvent wit of Voltaire and the precise science of the Encyclopedists were a potent force even among the courtiers themselves. The centre of social life shifted from Versailles to Paris and the salons gained what the court lost. Fine ladies had the latest pamphlet of Siéyès read to them at their toilette, and maids caught up the new phrases from their mistresses’ lips. Did a young gallant enter a salon excusing himself for being late by saying, “I have just been proposing a motion at the club,” every fair eye sparkled with interest. A deputy was a social lion, and a box for the National Assembly exchanged for one at the opera at a premium of six livres. Speeches were rehearsed at the salons and action determined. Chief of the hostesses was Madame[165] Necker: at her crowded receptions might be seen Abbé Siéyès, the architect of Constitutions; Condorcet, the philosopher; Talleyrand, the patriotic bishop; Madame de Stäel, with her strong, coarse face and masculine voice and gestures. More intimate were the Tuesday suppers at which a dozen chosen guests held earnest communion. Madame de Beauharnais was noted for her excellent table, and her Tuesday and Thursday dinners: at her rooms the masters of literature and music had been wont to meet. Now came Buffon the naturalist; Bailly of Tennis Court oath fame; Clootz, the friend of humanity. The widow of Helvetius, with her many memories of Franklin, welcomed Volney, author of the Ruins of Empires, and Chamfort, the candid critic of Academicians. At the salon of Madame Pancroute, Barrère, the glib orator of the Revolution, was the chief figure.

Julie Talma was famed for her literary and artistic circle. Here Marie Joseph Chenier, the revolutionary dramatic poet of the Comédie Française, declaimed his couplets. Here came Vergniaud, the eloquent chief of the ill-fated Gironde; Greuze, the painter; Roland, the stern and minatory minister, who spoke bitter words, composed by his wife, to the king; Lavoisier, the chemist, who begged that the axe might be stayed while he completed some experiments, and was told that the Republic had no need of chemists. Madame du Deffand, whose hotel in the Rue des Quatre Fils still exists, welcomed Voltaire, D’Alembert, Montesquieu and the Encyclopedists.

In the street, the great open-air salon of the people, was a feverish going to and fro. Here were the tub-thumpers of the Revolution holding forth at every public place; the strident voices of ballad-singers at the street corners; hawkers of the latest pamphlets hot from the Quai des Augustins; the sellers of journals crying the Père Duchesne, L’Ami du Peuple, the Jean Bart, the Vieux Cordelier. Crowds gathered round Bassett’s famous shop for caricature at the corner of the Rue St. Jacques and the Rue des Mathurins. The walls of Paris were a mass of variegated placards and proclamations. The charming signs of the old régime the Pomme rouge, the Rose Blanche, the Ami du Cœur, the Gracieuse, the Trois Fleurs-de-lys couronnées gave place to the “Necker,” the “National Assembly,” the “Tiers,” the “Constitution”—these, too, soon to be effaced by more Republican appellations. For on the abolition of the monarchy and the inauguration of the Religion of Nature, the words “royal” and “saint” disappear from the revolutionary vocabulary. A new calendar is promulgated: streets and squares are renamed: rues des Droits de l’Homme, de la Revolution, des Piques de la Lois, efface the old landmarks. We must now say Rue Honoré, not St. Honoré, and Mont Marat for Montmartre. Naturalists had written of the queen bee: away with the hated word! She is now named of all good patriots the abeille pondeuse, the egg-laying bee. No more emblems on playing cards of king, queen, and knave: allegorical figures of Genius, Liberty and Equality take their places, and since Law alone is above them all, Patriotism, as it flings down its biggest card, shall cry no longer, “Ace of trumps,” but “Law of trumps,” and “Genius of trumps.” Furniture is of Spartan simplicity. The people lie down on patriotic beds and eat and drink from patriotic mugs and platters. Silver buckles are needed by the national war chest: shoes shall now be clasped by patriotic buckles of copper. The monarchial “vous” (you) shall give place to “toi” (thou); and “monsieur” and “madame” to “citoyen” and “citoyenne.” The formal subscriptions to letters, “Your humble servant,” “Your obedient servant,” shall no more recall the old days of class subjection; we write now “Your fellow citizen,” “Your friend,” “Your equal.” Every house bears an inscription, giving the names and ages of the occupants, decorated with patriotic colours of red, white and blue, with figures of the Gallic cock and the bonnet rouge. Over every public building runs the legend, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity or Death”—it is even seen over the cages of the wild beasts at the Jardin des Plantes.

Nowhere did the revolutionary ploughshare cut deeper than among the clergy and the religious orders. Nearly forty monasteries and convents were suppressed in Paris, and strange scenes were those when the troops of monks and friars issued forth to secular life, some crying, “Vive Jesus le Roi et la Revolution,” for the new ideas had penetrated even the cloister. The barbers’ shops were invaded, and strange figures were seen smoking their pipes along the Boulevards. Some went to the wars; others, especially the Benedictines, appealed for teaching appointments; many, faithful to their vows, went forth to poverty, misery and death.

The nuns and sisters gave more trouble, and the scenes that attended their expulsion and that of the non-juring clergy burned deep into the memories of the pious. “What do they take from me?” cried the curé of St. Marguerite in his farewell sermon. “My cure? All that I have is yours, and it is you they despoil. My life? I am eighty-four years of age, and what of life remains to me is not worth the sacrifice of my principles.” Descending the pulpit the venerable priest passed through a sobbing congregation to a garret in one of the Faubourgs. There were but few, however, who imitated the dignified protest of the curé of St. Marguerite. Many a pulpit rang with fiery denunciations, which recalled the savage fanaticism of the league. Some of the younger clergy and a few of the bishops were on the side of the early Revolutionists. The Abbé Fouchet was the Peter the Hermit of the crusade for Liberty, and so popular were his sermons in Notre Dame that a seat there fetched twenty-four sous. But the corruption and apostasy of the hierarchy as a whole, and their betrayal of the people, had borne its acrid fruit of popular contempt and hostility, resulting in the monstrous profanation of Notre Dame and other churches of Paris by the fanatics of the worship of Nature and the puerile Deistic theatricalities of Robespierre’s Feasts of the Supreme Being. Compromise became impossible and the Revolutionists found arrayed against them the most universal and the deepest of human sentiments, the strongest cementing force in civil life. Less than eight years after Robespierre’s solemn comedy of the Etre Suprème all the hierarchy of the old religion returned—sixty archbishops and bishops, and an army of priests. A gorgeous Easter Mass in Notre Dame celebrated the re-establishment of the Catholic faith by Napoleon, the heir of the Revolution.

It is not within the scope of the present work to deal with the later annals of France. Superficial students of her modern history have freely charged her with political irresponsibility and fickleness; no charge could be less warranted by facts. For a thousand years her people were loyal and faithful subjects of a monarchy, and endured for a century and a half an infliction of misgovernment, oppression and grinding taxation such as probably no other European people would have tolerated. With touching fidelity and indomitable steadfastness the French people have cherished the principles of the Great Revolution, in whose name they swept the shams and wrongs of the ancien régime away. There is a profounder truth than perhaps Alphonse Karr imagined in his famous epigram, Plus ça change plus c’est la même chose. Every political upheaval of the nineteenth century in Paris has been at bottom an effort to realise the revolutionary ideals of political freedom and social equality in the face of external violence or internal corruption and treachery. Twice the hated Bourbons were re-imposed on the people of Paris by the bayonets of the foreigner; twice they rose and chased them away. A compromise followed—that of a citizen king, Louis Philippe of Orleans, once a Jacobin doorkeeper and a soldier of the Revolution, who had fought valiantly at Valmy and Jemappes. But he too identified himself with reactionary ministers, and became a fugitive to England, the bourne of deposed kings. The Second Republic which followed grew distrustful of the people and disfranchised at one stroke 3,000,000 citizens: one of the causes of the success of the coup d’état of Napoleon III. was an astute edict which restored universal suffrage.

During the negation of political rectitude and decency which characterised the period of the Second Empire a little band of Republicans refused to bow the knee to the new pinchbeck Cæsar, and, inspired by Victor Hugo, their fiery poet and seer, whose Châtiments have the passionate intensity of an Isaiah, braved exile, poverty, calumny and flattery. They “stooped into a dark, tremendous sea of doubt, pressed God’s lamp to their breasts and emerged” to witness a sad and bitter day of reckoning, when the corruption and vice of the Second Empire were swallowed up in shame and disaster at Sedan. The Third Republic, with admirable energy and patriotism, rose to save the self-respect of France. The first and Imperial war, up to Sedan, was over in a month; the second national and popular war endured for five months.

The Louvre—Eastern Entrance.
The Louvre—Eastern Entrance.

Dynastic and ecclesiastical ambition die hard, and the new Republic has had to weather many a storm in her career of a third of a century. Carducci in a fine poem has imagined Letizia, mother of the Bonapartes, a wandering shade haunting the desolate house at Ajaccio and recalling the tragic fate of her children:—a Corsican Niobe standing on her threshold and fiercely stretching forth her arms to the savage Ocean, calling, calling, that from America, from Britain, from burning Africa, some one of her tragic progeny may come to find a haven in her breast. But the assegais of South African savages laid low the last hope of the Imperialists, and it may reasonably be predicted that neither the shades nor the living descendants of Bonaparte or Bourbon will ever trouble again the internal peace of France nor her people be ruled by one “regnant by right divine and luck o’ the pillow.” Throughout the whole land a profound desire of peace possesses men’s minds[166] and a firm determination to effect a material and moral recuperation from the disasters of the Empire. Two facts in modern France have impressed the present writer in his travels since 1870—the extraordinary number of new schools that have been raised and staffed throughout the length and breadth of the land and the wonderful activity of the Catholic church as shown by new churches and foundations.

The beneficent results of the Great Revolution have leavened the whole world. In no small degree may it be said of France that by her stripes we have been healed. With true insight the Revolutionists perceived that liberty is the one essential element of national progress—