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Title: The French Revolution
Author: Belloc, Hilaire
Language: English
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THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
BY
HILAIRE BELLOC, M.A.
AUTHOR OF “DANTON,” “ROBESPIERRE,” “MARIE ANTOINETTE,” “THE OLD ROAD,”
“THE PATH TO ROME,” “PARIS,” “THE HILLS AND THE SEA,” “THE HISTORIC
THAMES,” ETC., ETC.
LONDON
WILLIAMS AND NORGATE
RICHARD CLAY AND SONS, LIMITED,
BRUNSWICK STREET, STAMFORD STREET, S.E.,
AND BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.
PREFACE
The object of these few pages is not to recount once more the history of
the Revolution: that can be followed in any one of a hundred text-books.
Their object is rather to lay, if that be possible, an explanation of it
before the English reader; so that he may understand both what it was
and how it proceeded, and also why certain problems hitherto unfamiliar
to Englishmen have risen out of it.
First, therefore, it is necessary to set down, clearly without modern
accretion, that political theory which was a sort of religious creed,
supplying the motive force of the whole business; of the new Civil Code
as of the massacres; of the panics and capitulations as of the
victories; of the successful transformation of society as of the
conspicuous failures in detail which still menace the achievement of the
Revolution.
This grasped, the way in which the main events followed each other, and
the reason of their interlocking and proceeding as they did must be put
forward--not, I repeat, in the shape of a chronicle, but in the shape of
a thesis. Thus the reader must know not only that the failure of the
royal family’s flight was followed by war, but how and why it was
followed by war. He must not only appreciate the severity of the
government of the great Committee, but why that severity was present,
and of the conditions of war upon which it reposed. But in so explaining
the development of the movement it is necessary to select for
appreciation as the chief figures the characters of the time, since upon
their will and manner depended the fate of the whole. For instance, had
the Queen been French either in blood or in sympathy, had the King been
alert, had any one character retained the old religious motives, all
history would have been changed, and this human company must be seen if
its action and drama are to be comprehended.
The reader interested in that capital event should further seize (and
but too rarely has an opportunity for seizing) its military aspect; and
this difficulty of his proceeds from two causes: the first, that
historians, even when they recognise the importance of the military side
of some past movement, are careless of the military aspect, and think
it sufficient to relate particular victories and general actions. The
military aspect of any period does not consist in these, but in the
campaigns of which actions, however decisive, are but incidental parts.
In other words, the reader must seize the movement and design of armies
if he is to seize a military period, and these are not commonly given
him. In the second place, the historian, however much alive to the
importance of military affairs, too rarely presents them as part of a
general position. He will make his story a story of war, or again, a
story of civilian development, and the reader will fail to see how the
two combine.
Now, the Revolution, more than any other modern period, turns upon, and
is explained by, its military history. On this account has so
considerable a space been devoted to the explaining of that feature.
The reader will note, again, that the quarrel between the Revolution and
the Catholic Church has also been dealt with at length.
To emphasise this aspect of the revolutionary struggle may seem unusual
and perhaps deserves a word of apology.
The reader is invited to consider the fact that the Revolution took
place in a country which had, in the first place, definitely determined
during the religious struggle of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries to remain in communion with Rome; and had, in the second
place, admitted a very large and important body of converts to the
doctrines of the Reformation.
The determination of the French people, in the crisis of 1572-1610, to
remain Catholic under a strong central Government, was a capital point
in the future history of France. So was the presence of a wealthy, very
large, and highly cultivated body of dissentients in the midst of the
nation. The two phenomena hardly co-existed elsewhere in Europe. Between
them they lent to the political history of France a peculiar character
which the nineteenth century, even more than the Revolution itself, has
emphasised; and it is the opinion of the present writer that it is
impossible to understand the Revolution unless very high relief is given
to the religious problem.
If a personal point may be noted, the fact that the writer of these
pages is himself a Catholic and in political sympathy strongly attached
to the political theory of the Revolution, should not be hidden from the
reader. Such personal conditions have perhaps enabled him to treat the
matter more thoroughly than it might have been treated by one who
rejected either Republicanism upon the one hand, or Catholicism upon the
other; but he believes that no personal and therefore exaggerated note
has been allowed to intrude upon his description of what is a definite
piece of objective history lying in the field of record rather than in
that of opinion.
Some years ago the paramount importance of the quarrel between the
Church and the Revolution might still have been questioned by men who
had no personal experience of the struggle, and of its vast results.
To-day the increasing consequences and the contemporary violence of that
quarrel make its presentation an essential part of any study of the
period.
The scheme thus outlined will show why I have given this sketch the
divisions in which it lies.
H. BELLOC.
_King’s Land,
January 1911._
CONTENTS
PAGE
PREFACE v
I THE POLITICAL THEORY OF THE REVOLUTION 13
II ROUSSEAU 29
III THE CHARACTERS OF THE REVOLUTION:
King Louis XVI 37
The Queen 45
Mirabeau 53
La Fayette 61
Dumouriez 65
Danton 67
Carnot 72
Marat 74
Robespierre 77
IV THE PHASES OF THE REVOLUTION:
i. From May 1789 to 17th of July 1789 83
ii. From the 17th of July 1789 to the 6th of October 1789 98
iii. From October 1789 to June 1791 102
iv. From June 1791 to September 1792 108
v. From the Invasion of September 1792 to the Establishment
of the Committee of Public Safety, April 1793 118
vi. From April 1793 to July 1794 126
V THE MILITARY ASPECT OF THE REVOLUTION 142
One 145
Two 156
Three 163
Four 179
Five 204
VI THE REVOLUTION AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 214
INDEX 255
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
I
THE POLITICAL THEORY OF THE REVOLUTION
The political theory upon which the Revolution proceeded has, especially
in this country, suffered ridicule as local, as ephemeral, and as
fallacious. It is universal, it is eternal, and it is true.
It may be briefly stated thus: that a political community pretending to
sovereignty, that is, pretending to a moral right of defending its
existence against all other communities, derives the civil and temporal
authority of its laws not from its actual rulers, nor even from its
magistracy, but from itself.
But the community cannot express authority unless it possesses
_corporate initiative_; that is, unless the mass of its component units
are able to combine for the purpose of a common expression, are
conscious of a common will, and have something in common which makes the
whole sovereign indeed.
It may be that this power of corporate initiative and of corresponding
corporate expression is forbidden to men. In that case no such thing as
a sovereign community can be said to exist. In that case “patriotism,”
“public opinion,” “the genius of a people,” are terms without meaning.
But the human race in all times and in all places has agreed that such
terms have meaning, and the conception that a community can so live,
order and be itself, is a human conception as consonant to the nature of
man as is his sense of right and wrong; it is much more intimately a
part of that nature than are the common accidents determining human
life, such as nourishment, generation or repose: nay, more intimate a
part of it than anything which attaches to the body.
This theory of political morals, though subject to a limitless
degradation in practice, underlies the argument of every man who
pretends to regard the conduct of the State as a business affecting the
conscience of citizens. Upon it relies every protest against tyranny and
every denunciation of foreign aggression.
He that is most enamoured of some set machinery for the government of
men, and who regards the sacramental function of an hereditary monarch
(as in Russia), the organic character of a native oligarchy (as in
England), the mechanical arrangement of election by majorities, or even
in a crisis the intense conviction and therefore the intense activity
and conclusive power of great crowds as salutary to the State, will
invariably, if any one of these engines fail him in the achievement of
what he desires for his country, fall back upon the doctrine of an
ultimately sovereign community. He will complain that though an
election has defeated his ideal, yet true national tradition and true
national sentiment were upon his side. If he defends the action of a
native oligarchy against the leaders of the populace, he does so by an
explanation (more or less explicit) that the oligarchy is more truly
national, that is more truly communal, than the engineered expression of
opinion of which the demagogues (as he will call them) have been the
mouthpieces. Even in blaming men for criticising or restraining an
hereditary monarch the adherent of that monarch will blame them upon the
ground that their action is anti-national, that is anti-communal; and,
in a word, no man pretending to sanity can challenge in matters temporal
and civil the ultimate authority of whatever is felt to be (though with
what difficulty is it not defined!) the general civic sense which builds
up a State.
Those words “civil” and “temporal” must lead the reader to the next
consideration; which is, that the last authority of all does not reside
even in the community.
It must be admitted by all those who have considered their own nature
and that of their fellow beings that the ultimate authority in any act
is God. Or if the name of God sound unusual in an English publication
to-day, then what now takes the place of it for many (an imperfect
phrase), “the moral sense.”
Thus if there be cast together in some abandoned place a community of a
few families so depraved or so necessitous that, against the teachings
of their own consciences, and well knowing that what they are doing is
what we call _wrong_, yet they will unanimously agree to do it, then
that agreement of theirs, though certainly no temporal or civil
authority can be quoted against it, is yet unjustifiable. Another
authority lies behind. Still more evidently would this be true if, of
say, twelve, seven decided (knowing the thing to be wrong) that the
wrong thing should be done, five stood out for the right--and yet the
majority possessed by the seven should be determined a sufficient
authority for the wrongful command.
But it is to be noted that this axiom only applies where the authority
of the moral law (God, as the author of this book, with due deference to
his readers, would prefer to say) is recognised and yet flouted. If
those twelve families do sincerely believe such and such a general
action to be right, then not only is their authority when they carry it
into practice a civil and a temporal authority; it is an authority
absolute in all respects; and further, if, upon a division of opinion
among them not perhaps a bare majority, nay, perhaps not a majority at
all, but at any rate a determinant current of opinion--determinant in
intensity and in weight, that is, as well as in numbers--declares an
action to be right, then that determinant weight of opinion gives to its
resolve a political authority not only civil and temporal but absolute.
Beyond it and above it there is no appeal.
In other words, men may justly condemn, and justly have in a thousand
circumstances condemned, the theory that a mere decision on the major
part of the community was necessarily right in morals. It is, for that
matter, self-evident that if one community decides in one fashion,
another, also sovereign, in the opposite fashion, both cannot be right.
Reasoning men have also protested, and justly, against the conception
that what a majority in numbers, or even (what is more compelling still)
a unanimity of decision in a community may order, may not only be wrong
but may be something which that community has no authority to order
since, though it possesses a civil and temporal authority, it acts
against that ultimate authority which is its own consciousness of right.
Men may and do justly protest against the doctrine that a community is
incapable of doing deliberate evil; it is as capable of such an action
as is an individual. But men nowhere do or can deny that the community
acting as it thinks right is ultimately sovereign: there is no
alternative to so plain a truth.
Let us take it, then, as indubitable that where civil government is
concerned, the community is supreme, if only from the argument that no
organ within the community can prove its right to withstand the
corporate will when once that corporate will shall find expression.
All arguments which are advanced against this prime axiom of political
ethics are, when they are analysed, found to repose upon a confusion of
thought. Thus a man will say, “This doctrine would lead my country to
abandon her suzerainty over that other nation, but were I to consent to
this, I should be weakening my country, to which I owe allegiance.” The
doctrine compels him to no such muddlement. The community of which he is
a member is free to make its dispositions for safety, and is bound to
preserve its own life. It is for the oppressed to protest and to rebel.
Similarly, men think that this doctrine in some way jars with the actual
lethargy and actual imbecility of men in their corporate action. It does
nothing of the kind. This lethargy, that imbecility, and all the other
things that limit the application of the doctrine, in no way touch its
right reason, any more than the fact that the speech of all men is
imperfect contradicts the principle that man has a moral right to
self-expression. That a dumb man cannot speak at all, but must write,
is, so far from a contradiction, a proof of the truth that speech is the
prime expression of man; and in the same way a community utterly without
the power of expressing its corporate will is no contradiction, but a
proof, of the general rule that such expression and the imposing of such
decisions are normal to mankind. The very oddity of the contrast between
the abnormal and the normal aids us in our decision, and when we see a
people conquered and not persuaded, yet making no attempt at rebellion,
or a people free from foreign oppression yet bewildered at the prospect
of self-government, the oddity of the phenomenon proves our rule.
But though all this be true, there stands against the statement of our
political axiom not a contradiction added, but a criticism; and all men
with some knowledge of their fellows and of themselves at once perceive,
_first_, that the psychology of corporate action differs essentially
from the psychology of individual action, and _secondly_, that in
proportion to the number, the discussions, the lack of intimacy, and in
general the friction of the many, corporate action by a community,
corporate self-realisation and the imposition of a corporate will,
varies from the difficult to the impossible.
On this no words need be wasted. All men who reason and who observe are
agreed that, in proportion to distance, numbers, and complexity, the
difficulty of self-expression within a community increases. We may get
in a lively people explosions of popular will violent, acute, and
certainly real; but rare. We may attempt with a people more lethargic to
obtain some reflection of popular will through the medium of a permanent
machinery of deputation which, less than any other, perhaps, permits a
great community to express itself truly. We may rely upon the national
sympathies of an aristocracy or of a king. But in any case we know that
large communities can only indirectly and imperfectly express themselves
where the permanent government of their whole interest is concerned. Our
attachment, which may be passionate, to the rights of the Common Will we
must satisfy either by demanding a loose federation of small,
self-governing states, or submitting the central government of large
ones to occasional insurrection and to violent corporate expressions of
opinion which shall readjust the relations between the governor and the
governed.
All this is true: but such a criticism of the theory in political morals
which lay behind the Revolution, the theory that the community is
sovereign, is no contradiction. It only tells us that pure right cannot
act untrammelled in human affairs and that it acts in some conditions
more laboriously than in others: it gives not a jot of authority to any
alternative thesis.[1]
Such is the general theory of the Revolution to which the command of
Jean Jacques Rousseau over the French tongue gave imperishable
expression in that book whose style and logical connection may be
compared to some exact and strong piece of engineering. He entitled it
the _Contrat Social_, and it became the formula of the Revolutionary
Creed. But though no man, perhaps, has put the prime truth of political
morals so well, that truth was as old as the world; it appears in the
passionate rhetoric of a hundred leaders and has stood at the head or
has been woven into the laws of free States without number. In the
English language the Declaration of Independence is perhaps its noblest
expression. And though this document was posterior to the great work of
Rousseau and (through the genius of Jefferson) was in some part
descended from it, its language, and still more the actions of those who
drafted and supported it, are sufficient to explain what I mean to
English readers.
Now with this general theory there stand connected on the one hand
certain great principles without which it would have no meaning, and
also on the other hand a number of minor points concerning no more than
the machinery of politics. The first are vital to democracy. The second,
in spite of their great popularity at the time of the Revolution and of
the sanction which the Revolution gave them, nay, of their universality
since the Revolution, have in reality nothing to do with the
revolutionary theory itself.
Of these two categories the type of the first is the doctrine of the
equality of man; the type of the second is the mere machinery called
“representative.”
The doctrine of the equality of the man is a transcendent doctrine: a
“dogma,” as we call such doctrines in the field of transcendental
religion. It corresponds to no physical reality which we can grasp, it
is hardly to be adumbrated even by metaphors drawn from physical
objects. We may attempt to rationalise it by saying that what is common
to all men is not _more_ important but _infinitely more_ important than
the accidents by which men differ. We may compare human attributes to
tri-dimensional, and personal attributes to bi-dimensional measurements;
we may say that whatever man has of his nature is the standard of man,
and we may show that in all such things men are potentially equal. None
of these metaphors explains the matter; still less do any of them
satisfy the demand of those to whom the dogma may be incomprehensible.
Its truth is to be arrived at (for these) in a negative manner. If men
are _not_ equal then no scheme of jurisprudence, no act of justice, no
movement of human indignation, no exaltation of fellowship, has any
meaning. The doctrine of the equality of man is one which, like many of
the great transcendental doctrines, may be proved by the results
consequent upon its absence. It is in man to believe it--and all lively
societies believe it.
It is certainly not in man to prove the equality of men save, as I have
said, by negation; but it demands no considerable intellectual faculty
to perceive that, void of the doctrine of equality, the conception of
political freedom and of a community’s moral right to self-government
disappear. Now to believe that doctrine positively, and to believe it
ardently, to go on crusade for that religious point, was indeed
characteristic of the French. It required the peculiar and inherited
religious temper of the French which had for so many hundred years
seized and defined point after point in the character of man, to grow
enamoured of this definition and to feel it not in the intellect, but as
it were in their bones. They became soldiers for it, and that enormous
march of theirs, overrunning Europe, which may not inaptly be compared
to their adventures in the twelfth century, when they engaged upon the
Crusades, was inspired by no one part of the doctrine of political
freedom more strongly than by this doctrine of equality.
The scorn which was in those days universally felt for that pride which
associates itself with things not inherent to a man (notably and most
absurdly with capricious differences of wealth) never ran higher; and
the passionate sense of justice which springs from this profound and
fundamental social dogma of equality, as it moved France during the
Revolution to frenzy, so also moved it to creation.
Those who ask how it was that a group of men sustaining all the weight
of civil conflict within and of universal war without, yet made time
enough in twenty years to frame the codes which govern modern Europe, to
lay down the foundations of universal education, of a strictly
impersonal scheme of administration, and even in detail to remodel the
material face of society--in a word, to make modern Europe--must be
content for their reply to learn that the Republican Energy had for its
flame and excitant this vision: a sense almost physical of the equality
of man.
The minor points which wove themselves into the political practice of
democracy during the Revolution, which are not of its principles, and
which would not, were they abstracted, affect its essence, are of quite
another and less noble kind. I have taken as the chief of these the
machinery of deputation or of “representation.”
The representative system had been designed for a particular purpose
under the influence of the Church and especially of the monastic orders
(who invented it) in the Middle Ages. It had been practised as a useful
check upon the national monarchy in France, and as a useful form of
national expression in times of crisis or when national initiative was
peculiarly demanded.
In Spain it became, as the Middle Ages proceeded, a very vital national
and local thing, varying from place to place. It is not surprising that
Spain (seeing that in her territory the first experiments in
representation were made) should have thus preserved it, popular and
alive.
In England Representation, vigorous as everywhere else in the true
Middle Ages, narrowed and decayed at their close, until in the
seventeenth century it had become a mere scheme for aristocratic
government.
In France for nearly two hundred years before the Revolution it had
fallen into disuse, but an active memory of it still remained;
especially a memory of its value in critical moments when a consultation
of the whole people was required, and when the corporate initiative of
the whole people must be set at work in order to save the State.
It is no wonder, therefore, that the French, on the eve of the
Revolution, clamoured for a revival of representation, or, as the system
was called in the French tongue, “the States-General.” But as a
permanent machine of government no one in Europe had the least idea how
the system might serve the ends of democracy. In England democracy was
not practised nor was representation connected with the conception of
it. The nation had forgotten democracy as completely as it had forgotten
the religion and the old ideals of the Middle Ages.
In those parts of Christendom in which this ancient Christian
institution of a parliament had not narrowed to be the mask of an
oligarchy or dwindled to be a mere provincial custom, its use had
disappeared. The ancient function of Representation, when it had been
most lively and vigorous, that is, in the Middle Ages, was occasionally
to initiate a national policy in critical moments, but more generally to
grant taxes. What a democratic parliament might do, no one in 1789 could
conceive.
There was indeed one great example of democratic representation in
existence: the example of the United States; but the conditions were
wholly different from those of Europe. No true central power yet existed
there; no ancient central institution, no Crown nor any Custom of the
City. The numbers over which American representative democracy then held
power were not to be compared to the twenty-five millions who inhabited
the French realm. And even so, most of what counted in their lives was
regulated by a system of highly local autonomy: for they were as
scattered as they were few, and the wisest and strongest and best were
dependent upon slaves. In Europe, I repeat, the experiment was untried;
and it is one of the chief faults of the French revolutionaries that,
having been compelled in the critical moment of the opening of the
Revolution to the use of election and representation, they envisaged the
permanent use of a similar machinery as a something sacred to and normal
in the democratic State.
True, they could not foresee modern parliamentarism. Nothing could be
more alien to their conception of the State than the deplorable method
of government which parliamentarism everywhere tends to introduce
to-day.
True, the French people during the revolutionary wars made short work of
parliamentary theory, and found it a more national thing to follow a
soldier (being by that time all soldiers themselves), and to incarnate
in a dictator the will of the nation.
But though the French revolutionaries could not have foreseen what we
call “Parliamentarism” to-day, and though the society from which they
sprang made short work of the oligarchic pretensions of a parliament
when the realities of the national struggle had to be considered, yet
they did as a fact pay an almost absurd reverence to the machinery of
representation and election.
They went so far as to introduce it into their attempted reform of the
Church; they introduced it everywhere into civil government, from the
smallest units to the highest. They even for a moment played with the
illusion in that most real of games which men can ever play at--the
business of arms: they allowed the election of officers. They were led
to do this by that common fallacy, more excusable in them than in us,
which confounds the individual will with the corporate. A representative
(they thought) could in some way be the permanent receptacle of his
electorate. They imagined that corporate initiative was always
sufficiently active, in no matter what divisions or subdivisions, to
react at once upon the delegate, to guide him as may be guided a driven
animal, or to command him as may be commanded a servant.
It was in vain that Rousseau, the great exponent of the democratic
theory upon which France attempted to proceed, had warned posterity
against the possible results of the representative system: they fell
into the error, and it possesses many of their descendants to this day.
Rousseau’s searching mind perceived indeed no more than the general
truth that men who consent to a representative system are free only
while the representatives are not sitting. But (as is so often the case
with intuitions of genius) though he saw not the whole of the evil, he
had put his finger upon its central spot, and from that main and just
principle which he laid down--that under a merely representative system
men cannot be really free--flow all those evils which we now know to
attach to this method of government. What a rather clumsy epigram has
called “the audacity of elected persons” is part of this truth. The
evident spectacle of modern parliamentary nations driven against their
will into economic conditions which appal them, proceeds again from the
same truth; the conspicuous and hearty contempt into which parliamentary
institutions have everywhere fallen again proceeds from it, and there
proceeds from it that further derivative plague that the representatives
themselves have now everywhere become more servile than the electorate
and that in all parliamentary countries a few intriguers are the
unworthy depositories of power, and by their service of finance permit
the money-dealers to govern us all to-day. Rousseau, I say, the chief
prophet of the Revolution, had warned the French of this danger. It is a
capital example of his talent, for the experiment of democratic
representation had not yet, in his time, been tried. But much more is
that power of his by which he not only stamped and issued the gold of
democracy as it had never till then been minted. No one man makes a
people or their creed, but Rousseau more than any other man made vocal
the creed of a people, and it is advisable or necessary for the reader
of the Revolution to consider at the outset of his reading of what
nature was Rousseau’s abundant influence upon the men who remodelled the
society of Europe between 1789 and 1794.
Why did he dominate those five years, and how was it that he dominated
them increasingly?
An explanation of Rousseau’s power merits a particular digression, for
few who express themselves in the English tongue have cared to
understand it, and in the academies provincial men have been content to
deal with this great writer as though he were in some way inferior to
themselves.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] We need not waste any time upon those who talk about such and such a
form of government being good because “it works.” The use of such
language connotes that the user of it is fatigued by the effort of
thought. For what is “working,” _i.e._ successful action, in any sphere?
The attainment of certain ends in that sphere. What are those ends in a
State? If material well-being, then there is an end to talk of
patriotism, the nation, public opinion and the rest of it which, as we
all very well know, men always have regarded and always will regard as
the supreme matters of public interest. If the end is not material
well-being, but a sense of political freedom and of the power of the
citizen to react upon the State, then to say that an institution “works”
though apparently not democratic, is simply to say that under such and
such conditions that institution achieves the ends of democracy most
nearly. In other words, to contrast the good “working” of an institution
superficially undemocratic with democratic theory is meaningless. The
institution “works” in proportion as it satisfies that political sense
which perfect democracy would, were it attainable, completely satisfy.
II
ROUSSEAU
In order to appreciate what Rousseau meant to the revolutionary
movement, it is necessary to consider the effect of style upon men.
Men are influenced by the word. Spoken or written, the _word_ is the
organ of persuasion and, therefore, of moral government.
Now, degraded as that term has become in our time, there is no proper
term to express the exact use of words save the term “style.”
What words we use, and in what order we put them, is the whole matter of
style; and a man desiring to influence his fellow men has therefore not
one, but two co-related instruments at his disposal. He cannot use one
without the other. The weakness of the one will ruin the other. These
two instruments are his idea and his style.
However powerful, native, sympathetic to his hearers’ mood or cogently
provable by reference to new things may be a man’s idea, he cannot
persuade his fellow men to it if he have not words that express it. And
he will persuade them more and more in proportion as his words are well
chosen and in the right order, such order being determined by the genius
of the language whence they are drawn.
Whether the idea of which Rousseau made himself the exponent in his
famous tract be true or false, need not further concern us in this
little book. We all know that the difficult attempt to realise political
freedom has attracted various communities of men at various times and
repelled others. What English readers rarely hear is that the triumph of
Rousseau depended not only on the first element in persuasion, which is
vision, but also upon the second of the two co-related instruments by
which a man may influence his fellows--to wit, style. It was his choice
of French words and the order in which he arranged them, that gave him
his enormous ascendancy over the generation which was young when he was
old.
I have alluded to his famous tract, the _Contrat Social_, and here a
second point concerning it may be introduced. This book which gave a
text for the Revolution, the document to which its political theory
could refer, was by no means (as foreign observers have sometimes
imagined) the whole body of writing for which Rousseau was responsible.
To imagine that is to make the very common error of confusing a man with
his books.
Rousseau wrote on many things: his character was of an exalted, nervous
and diseased sort. Its excessive sensibility degenerated with advancing
years into something not distinguishable from mania. He wrote upon
education, and the glory of his style carried conviction both where he
was right and where the short experience of a hundred years has proved
him to have been wholly wrong. He wrote upon love, and half the lessons
to be drawn from his writing will be condemned by the sane. He wrote
upon botany at vast length; he wrote also upon music--with what success
in either department I am incompetent to determine. He wrote upon human
inequality: and though the sentences were beautiful and the sentiment
just, the analysis was very insufficient and the historical conception
bad. He wrote upon a project for perpetual peace, which was rubbish; and
he wrote upon the government of Poland an essay which was a perfect
masterpiece.
But when a great writer writes, each of his great writings has a life of
its own, and it was not any of these other writings of Rousseau, on
love or botany, which were the text of the Revolution. The text of the
Revolution was his _Contrat Social_.
Now it is not too much to say that never in the history of political
theory has a political theory been put forward so lucidly, so
convincingly, so tersely or so accurately as in this short and wonderful
book. The modern publisher in this country would be ashamed to print it:
not for its views (which would now seem commonplace), nor for its
excellence, which would ensure it a failure, but for its brevity. It is
as short as a gospel, and would cover but a hundred pages of one of our
serious reviews. A modern publisher in this city would not know what
price to set upon such a work, and the modern reader in this country
would be puzzled to understand how a great thing could be got within so
narrow a compass. A debate in Parliament or the libretto of a long
pantomime is of greater volume.
Nevertheless, if it be closely read the _Contrat Social_ will be
discovered to say all that can be said of the moral basis of democracy.
Our ignorance of the historical basis of the State is presumed in the
very opening lines of it. The logical priority of the family to the
State is the next statement. The ridiculous and shameful argument that
strength is the basis of authority--which has never had standing save
among the uninstructed or the superficial--is contemptuously dismissed
in a very simple proof which forms the third chapter, and that chapter
is not a page of a book in length. It is with the fifth chapter that the
powerful argument begins, and the logical precedence of _human
association_ to any particular form of government is the foundation
stone of that analysis. It is this indeed which gives its title to the
book: the moral authority of men in community arises from _conscious
association_; or, as an exact phraseology would have it, a “social
contract.” All the business of democracy as based upon the only moral
authority in a State follows from this first principle, and is developed
in Rousseau’s extraordinary achievement which, much more than any other
writing not religious, has affected the destiny of mankind.
It is indeed astonishing to one who is well acquainted not only with the
matter, but with the manner of the _Contrat Social_, to remark what
criticisms have been passed upon it by those who either have not read
the work or, having read it, did so with an imperfect knowledge of the
meaning of French words. The two great counter arguments, the one
theoretic the other practical, which democracy has to meet, stand
luminously exposed in these pages, though in so short a treatise the
author might have been excused from considering them. The theoretical
argument against democracy is, of course, that man being prone to evil,
something external to him and indifferent to his passions must be put up
to govern him; the people will corrupt themselves, but a despot or an
oligarchy, when it has satisfied its corrupt desires, still has a wide
margin over which it may rule well because it is indifferent. You
cannot bribe the despot or the oligarch beyond the limit of his desires,
but a whole people can follow its own corrupt desires to the full, and
they will infect all government.
The full practice of democracy, therefore, says Rousseau, is better
suited to angels than to men.
As to the practical argument that men are not sufficiently conscious of
the State to practise democracy, save in small communities, that plea
also is recognised and stated better than any one else has stated it.
For there is not in this book an apology for democracy as a method of
government, but a statement of why and how democracy is right.
The silly confusion which regards a representative method as essentially
democratic has never been more contemptuously dealt with, nor more
thoroughly, than in the few words in which the _Contrat Social_
dismisses it for ever; though it was left to our own time to discover,
in the school of unpleasant experience, how right was Rousseau in this
particular condemnation.
Exiguous as are the limits within which the great writer has finally
decided the theory of democracy, he finds space for side issues which
nowhere else but in this book had been orderly considered, and which,
when once one has heard them mentioned, one sees to be of the most
excellent wisdom: that the fundamental laws, or original and particular
bonds, of a new democracy must come from a source external to itself;
that to the nature of the people for whom one is legislating, however
democratic the form of the State, we must conform the particulars of
law; that a democracy cannot live without “tribunes”; that no utterly
inflexible law can be permitted in the State--and hence the necessity
for dictatorship in exceptional times; that no code can foresee future
details--and so forth.
It would be a legitimate and entertaining task to challenge any man who
had not read the _Contrat Social_ (and this would include most academic
writers upon the treatise) to challenge any such one, I say, to put down
an argument against democratic theory which could not be found within
those few pages, or to suggest a limitation of it which Rousseau had not
touched on.
If proof were needed of what particular merits this pamphlet displayed,
it would be sufficient to point out that in a time when the problem
represented by religion was least comprehended, when the practice of
religion was at its lowest, and when the meaning, almost, of religion
had left men’s minds, Rousseau was capable of writing his final chapter.
That the great religious revival of the nineteenth century should have
proved Rousseau’s view of religion in the State to be insufficient is in
no way remarkable, for when Rousseau wrote, that revival was undreamt
of; what is remarkable is that he should have allowed as he did for the
religious sentiment, and above all, that he should have seen how
impossible it is for a selection of Christian dogma to be accepted as a
civic religion.
It is further amazing that at such a time a man could be found who
should appreciate that for the State, to have unity, it must possess a
religion, and Rousseau’s attempt to define that minimum or substratum of
religion without which unity could not exist in the State unfortunately
became the commonplace of the politicians, and particularly of the
English politicians who succeeded him. Who might not think, for
instance, that he was reading--though better expressed, of course, than
a politician could put it--some “Liberal” politician at Westminster, if
he were to come on such phrases as these with regard to what should be
taught in the schools of the country?
“The doctrines taught by the State should be simple, few in number,
expressed with precision and without explanation or commentary. The
existence of a powerful God, beneficent, providential and good; the
future life; the happiness of the good and the punishment of evil; the
sanctity of the agreements which bind society together and of laws;
while as for negative doctrines, one is sufficient, and that one is the
wickedness of intolerance.”
Rousseau’s hundred pages are the direct source of the theory of the
modern State; their lucidity and unmatched economy of diction; their
rigid analysis, their epigrammatic judgment and wisdom--these are the
reservoirs from whence modern democracy has flowed; what are now proved
to be the errors of democracy are errors against which the _Contrat
Social_ warned men; the moral apology of democracy is the moral apology
written by Rousseau; and if in this one point of religion he struck a
more confused and a less determined note than in the rest, it must be
remembered that in his time no other man understood what part religion
played in human affairs; for in his days the few who studied religion
and observed it could not connect it in any way with the political
nature of man, and of those who counted in the intellect of Europe, by
far the greater number thought political problems better solved if
religion (which they had lost) were treated as negligible. They were
wrong--and Rousseau, in his generalities upon the soul, was
insufficient; both were beneath the height of a final theory of man, but
Rousseau came much nearer to comprehension, even in this point of
religion, than did any of his contemporaries.
III
THE CHARACTERS OF THE REVOLUTION
KING LOUIS XVI
As might be expected, the character of King Louis XVI has suffered more
distortion at the hands of historians than has any other of the
revolutionary figures; and this because he combined with that personal
character of his a certain office to which were traditionally attached
certain points of view and methods of action which the historian takes
for granted when he deals with the character of the man. As any one
thinking of a judge of some standing upon the English bench cannot but
believe that he is possessed of some learning or some gravity, etc.; as
any one hearing of a famous soldier cannot but believe that he has
certain qualities associated with the business of soldiering, so
historians tend to confuse the personality and character of Louis XVI
with that of his office; they either by contrast exaggerate his unkingly
defects or by sympathy exaggerate his kingly opposition to reform.
The student will do well to avoid this error and its source, and to
think of Louis as of a man who had been casually introduced, almost
without preparation, into the office which he held. In other words, the
student will do well, in his reading of the Revolution, to consider
Louis XVI simply as a man, and his character as a private character. For
this last of the long, unbroken line of Capetians possessed a character
essentially individual. It was of a type which, no matter what accidents
of fortune might have fallen upon its possessor, would have remained the
same. Nor was ever a man possessed of high office whom high office had
less moulded.
Men thus impervious to their environment are commonly so from two
causes: either from an intense and vivid personal initiative which may
border upon madness, or from something thick and heavy in their moral
accoutrement which defends against external action the inner personal
temperament. The latter was the case with Louis.
He was very slow of thought, and very slow of decision. His physical
movements were slow. The movement of his eyes was notably slow. He had a
way of falling asleep under the effort of fatigue at the most
incongruous moments. The things that amused him were of the largest and
most superficial kind. Horse-play, now and then a little touched with
eccentricity, and very plain but unexpected jokes. One may express him
from one aspect by saying that he was one of those men whom you could
never by any chance have hoped to convince of anything. The few things
which he accepted he accepted quite simply, and the process of reasoning
in the mouth of any who approached him was always too rapid for him to
follow. But it must not be imagined on this account that the moral
integument so described was wrapped about a void. On the contrary, it
enclosed a very definite character. Louis possessed a number of intimate
convictions upon which he was not to be shaken. He was profoundly
convinced of the existence and value of a certain corporate tradition in
the organism which he ruled: the French nation. He was national. In this
he differed from many a pedant, many a courtier, many an ecclesiastic,
and many a woman about him, especially his wife.
He was, again, possessed of all the elements of the Catholic faith.
It was, indeed, a singular thing for a man of his position at such a
time to hold intimately to religion, but Louis held to it. He confessed,
he communicated, he attended mass, he performed his ordinary
devotions--not by way of tradition or political duty, or State function,
to which religious performance was now reduced in the vast majority of
his wealthy contemporaries, but as an individual for whom these things
had a personal value. Had he, with precisely the same interior spirit,
woken in his bed some morning to find himself a country squire, and to
discover that all his past kingship had been a dream of the night, he
would have continued the practice of his religion as before.
Now this is a sufficiently remarkable point, for the country squire, the
noble, the lawyer, the university professor of the generation
immediately preceding the Revolution had, as a rule, no conception of
the Catholic Church. With them the faith was dead, save in the case of a
very few who made it, if one may say so without disrespect, a mania, and
in their exaggerations were themselves the proofs of the depth of decay
into which the Church of Gaul had fallen.
Louis XVI was possessed, then, of religion: it appeared in many of his
acts, in his hesitation to appoint not a few of the many atheist bishops
of the time, in his real agony of responsibility upon the Civil
Constitution of the clergy, and in nothing more than the peculiar
sobriety and solid ritual whereby he prepared for a tragic, sudden, and
ignominious death.
It is next to be observed that though he was a man not yet in middle
age, and though he was quite devoid of ardour in any form, he had from
the first matured a great basis of courage. It is well to admit that
this quality in him was connected with those slow processes of thought
and action which hampered him, but it is not to be explained by them. No
man yet has become brave through mere stupidity.
It was not only the accidents of the Revolution that proved this quality
in him: his physical habits proved it long before. He was a resolute and
capable rider of the horse: an aptitude in that exercise is impossible
to the coward. Again, in those by-products of courage which are
apparent, even where no physical danger threatens, he was conspicuous;
he had no hesitation in facing a number of men, and he had aptitude in a
mechanical trade--a business by no means unconnected with virility.
Now in mentioning his virility, it is of prime importance for the
student to remember, though the matter can be touched upon but lightly,
that Louis, in this department of physical life, suffered from a
mechanical impediment which gravely distorted the first years of his
marriage, which undoubtedly wounded his self-respect, and which was
perhaps the only thing that caused him permanent anxiety. He was cured
by medical aid in the summer of the year 1777, but he was already three
years a king and seven years a husband before that relief came to him.
The tragedy affected his whole life, and, I repeat, must never be
forgotten when one considers either him or Marie Antoinette in their
intimate character, and in their effect as actors in the great drama.
For the rest, the character of Louis betrayed certain ineptitudes (the
word ineptitude is far more accurate in this connection than the word
weakness), which ineptitudes were peculiarly fatal for the military
office which he held and for the belligerent crisis which he had to
meet.
Few men are possessed of the eye, the subtle sympathy, the very rapid
power of decision, and the comprehension of human contrasts and
differences which build up the apt leader of an armed force great or
small. Most men are mediocre in the combination of these qualities. But
Louis was quite exceptionally hopeless where they were concerned. He
could never have seen the simplest position nor have appreciated the
military aspects of any character or of any body of men. He could ride,
but he could not ride at the head of a column. He was not merely bad at
this trade, he was nul. Drafted as a private into a conscript army, he
would never have been entrusted with the duties of a corporal. He would
have been impossible as a sergeant; and, possessed of commissioned rank,
ridicule would have compelled him to take his discharge.
This lack did not only, or chiefly, betray itself in his inability to
meet personally the armed crisis of a revolution; it was not only, or
chiefly, apparent in his complete breakdown during the assault upon the
palace on the 10th of August: it was also, and much more, the disastrous
cause of his inability to oversee, or even to choose, military advisers.
Those who propose in the early part of the Revolution to check the mob
in Paris, are excellent commanders: but Louis does not know it. Those
who succeed each other at the Ministry of War, or at the head of the
armies during the active part of the revolution are various in the
extreme: but they all seem one to him. Between a fop like Narbonne and a
subtle, trained cavalry man like Dumouriez, Louis made no distinction.
The military qualities of La Fayette (which were not to be despised)
meant no more to him than does music, good or bad, to a deaf man. From
the beginning to the end of the movement, the whole of the military
problem escaped him.
Another hole in his character, which was of prime importance at such a
time, was his inability to grasp in a clear vision any general social
problem. Maps he could well comprehend, and he could well retain
statistics; but the landscape, as it were, of the Revolution his
protuberant and lethargic eyes completely missed. He was quite unable to
see where lay danger and where support, in what large masses such and
such forces were grouped, and the directions in which they were
advancing, or upon which they must retreat. In this matter he was, as
will be seen in a moment, the very opposite of Mirabeau, and it was on
account of this weakness, or rather this form of nullity, that all
Mirabeau’s vision was wasted upon Louis.
Finally, he had no working comprehension of Europe. He did not even
exaggerate the powers of the allies in the later phases of the
Revolution when they were marching upon France. He did not either
under-estimate or over-estimate the policy and naval force of Great
Britain, the military resources of his own subjects, the probable
sympathies of the Netherlands (anti-Austrian but Catholic), the decay of
Spain, the division and impotence of the Italian Peninsula. Louis saw
nothing of all these things.
One may conclude the picture (for the purposes of such a short study as
this) by saying that only one coincidence could have led him through the
labyrinth of the time with success. That coincidence would have been the
presence at his side of a friend fully trusted from childhood, loved, as
religious as himself, and yet possessing precisely those qualities which
he himself lacked. Had Louis found to hand such a lieutenant, the
qualities I have mentioned would have been a sort of keel and ballast
which would have secured the monarchy, for he was not weak, he was not
impulsive, he was not even foolish: he was only wretchedly alone in his
incapacities. Certainly such a nature could trust and rely upon no one
who was not of this intimate kind, and he possessed no such intimate,
let alone an intimate who could command the qualities I have suggested.
Being what he was, his character is among the half-dozen which
determined the Revolution to take the course which it did.
THE QUEEN
Marie Antoinette presents to history a character which it is of the
highest interest to regard as a whole. It is the business of her
biographers to consider that character as a whole; but in her connection
with the Revolution there is but one aspect of it which is of
importance, and that is the attitude which such a character was bound to
take towards the French nation in the midst of which the Queen found
herself.
It is the solution of the whole problem which the Queen’s action sets
before us to apprehend the gulf that separated her not only from the
French temperament, but from a comprehension of all French society. Had
she been a woman lacking in energy or in decision, this alien character
in her would have been a small matter, and her ignorance of the French
in every form of their activity, or rather her inability to comprehend
them, would have been but a private failing productive only of certain
local and immediate consequences, and not in any way determining the
great lines of the revolutionary movement.
As it was, her energy was not only abundant but steadfast; it grew more
secure in its action as it increased with her years, and the initiative
which gave that energy its course never vacillated, but was always
direct. She knew her own mind, and she attempted, often with a partial
success, to realise her convictions. There was no character in touch
with the Executive during the first years of the Revolution comparable
to hers for fixity of purpose and definition of view.
It was due to this energy and singleness of aim that her
misunderstanding of the material with which she had to deal was of such
fatal importance.
It was she who chose, before the outbreak of the Revolution, the
succession of those ministers both Liberal and Reactionary, whose unwise
plans upon either side precipitated violence. It was she who called and
then revoked, and later recalled to office the wealthy and
over-estimated Necker; she who substituted for him, and then so
inopportunely threw over Calonne, the most national of the precursors of
the Revolution, and ever after her most bitter enemy; it was she who
advised the more particularly irritating details of resistance after the
meeting of the first revolutionary Parliament; it was she who presided
over (and helped to warp) the plans for the flight of the royal family;
it was she who, after this flight had failed, framed a definite scheme
for the coercion of the French people by the Governments of Europe; it
was she who betrayed to foreign chanceries the French plan of campaign
when war had become inevitable; finally, it was she who inspired the
declaration of Brunswick which accompanied the invasion of French
territory, and she was in particular the author of the famous threat
therein contained to give over Paris to military execution, and to hold
all the popular authorities responsible with their lives for the
restoration of the pre-revolutionary state of affairs.
As research proceeds, the capital effect of this woman’s continual and
decided interference will be more and more apparent to historians.
Now Marie Antoinette’s conception of mankind in general was the
conception that you will find prevalent in such societies as that
domestic and warm centre which had nourished her childhood. The romantic
affection of a few equals, the personal loyalty of a handful of personal
servants, the vague histrionic content which permeates the poor at the
sight of great equipages and rich accoutrements, the cheers of a crowd
when such symbols accompanying monarchy are displayed in the
streets--all these were for Marie Antoinette the fundamental political
feelings of mankind. An absence of them she regarded with bewilderment,
an active opposition to them she hated as something at once
incomprehensible and positively evil.
There was in all this illusion, of course, a great element of what the
English call middle class, and the French bourgeois. To be quite
ignorant of what servitors will say of their masters behind their backs;
not to appreciate that heroic devotion is the faculty of a few; never
to have imagined the discontents of men in general, and the creative
desire for self-expression which inspires men when they act politically;
not to know that men as a whole (and particularly the French people) are
not deceived by the accidents of wealth, nor attach any real inferiority
to poverty; to despise the common will of numbers or to doubt its
existence; to see society established in a hierarchy not of office but
of leisure: all this may seem to the democrat a very unnatural and
despicable mood. But it was not despicable, still less unnatural; in the
case of Marie Antoinette: it was the only experience and the only
conception of society which had ever been given her. She had always
believed, when she gazed upon a mass of the populace, that the
difference between the crowd and herself was a moral reality. The
contrast in external habits between the wealthy, the middle class, and
the poor--a contrast ultimately produced by differences in the
opportunity and leisure which wealth affords--she thought to be
fundamental. Just as children and certain domestic pet animals regard
such economic accidents in society as something real which
differentiates men, so did she;--but she happened to nourish this
illusion in the midst of a people, and within a day’s walk of a capital,
where the misconception had less hold than in any other district of
Europe.
Of the traits peculiar to the French she knew nothing, or, to put it
more strongly, she could not believe that they really existed.
The extremes of cruelty into which this people could fall were
inconceivable to her, as were also the extremes of courage to which they
can rise under the same excitements as arouse them to an excess of
hatred. But that character in the French which she most utterly failed
to foresee or to comprehend, was their power of _corporate
organisation_.
That a multitude could instruct and order themselves for a common
purpose, rapidly acquire and nominate the officers who should bring that
purpose to fruition, and in general pass in one moment from a mere
multitude to an incipient army--that was a faculty which the French had
and have to a peculiar degree, and which she (like so many of our own
contemporaries, and especially those of German blood) could not believe
to be real. This faculty in the French, when it took action and was
apparent in the physical struggles of the Revolution, seemed to her, to
the very end, a sort of nightmare; something which, by all the laws of
reality, _ought not_ to be happening, but somehow or other _was_
happening in a manner evilly miraculous. It was her ignorance upon this
main point of all that caused her to rely so continually upon the use of
the regular forces, and of those forces in insufficient numbers. She
could not but believe that a few trained soldiery were necessarily the
masters of great civilian bodies; their uniforms were a powerful
argument with her, and mere civilian bodies, however numerous, were
always, in her conception, a dust of disparate and inchoate humanity.
She believed there was nothing to attack or resist in popular numbers
but the opinion, the fear, or the cupidity of the individual. In this
error of judgment concerning the French people she was not peculiar: it
is an error repeated over and over again by foreigners, and even by some
native commentators when they seek to account for some national movement
of the Gauls. The unlearning of it is the first lesson which those who
would either administrate or resist the French should learn.
In the matter of religion (which the reader may see in these pages to be
of such moment in the revolutionary story), the queen was originally far
more indifferent than her husband, though she observed a certain measure
of personal practice. It was not until her heavy misfortunes came upon
her that any degree of personal devotion appeared in her daily life,
though it must be admitted that, by a sort of premonition of disaster,
she turned to religion in the months immediately preceding the outbreak
of the reform.
It remains to describe the personal effect she had upon those who were
in her immediate presence. Most of the French aristocracy she repelled.
The same misfortune which made her unable to understand the French
temperament as a whole divorced her from that particular corner of it
which took the shape of French aristocratic tradition. She did not
understand its stiffness, its exactitude, its brilliancy or its
hardness: and she heartily disliked all four.
On this account she produced on the great families of her court, and
especially upon the women of them, an effect of vulgarity. Had she
survived, and had her misfortunes not been of so tragic an intensity,
the legend she would have left in French society would certainly have
been one of off-handed carelessness, self-indulgence, and lack of
dignity which have for the French of that rank the savour that a loud
voice, a bad accent, an insufficient usage in the rules of daily
conduct, leave upon what is left of a corresponding rank in England
to-day.
She was, on the other hand, easily deceived by the flattery of place
seekers, and the great power which she wielded in politics just before
the Revolution broke out made her, as it were, a sort of _butt_ of the
politicians.
They haunted her presence, they depended upon her patronage, and, at the
same time, they secretly ridiculed her. Her carriage, which was designed
to impress onlookers and did have that effect upon most foreigners,
seemed to most of the French observers (of a rank which permitted them
to approach her familiarly) somewhat theatrical and sometimes actually
absurd. The earnestness which she displayed in several lines of conduct,
and notably in her determined animosity to certain characters (as that
of La Fayette, for instance), was of an open and violent sort which
seemed to them merely brutal and unintelligent; her luxury, moreover,
was noticed by the refined world of Versailles to be hardly ever of her
own choosing, but nearly always practised in imitation of others.
In connection with that trait of luxury, the reader must appreciate at
the outset that it was grievously exaggerated by her contemporaries, and
has been still more exaggerated by posterity. She was not a very
frivolous, still less a dissipated, woman. She was woefully loose in
tongue, but she was certainly virtuous.
She gambled, but as the times went, and the supposed unlimited fortune
of the Crown, her gambling was not often excessive; her expenditure upon
jewellery and dress would be thought most moderate to-day in the case of
any lady of our wealthier families. On the other hand, her whims were
continual and as continually changing, especially in the earlier part of
her life.
Since that surrounding world of the Court which she misunderstood and
which had no sympathy with her was ready to find some handle against
her, that handle of dissipation was the easiest for them to seize; but
the accusation was not a just one.
Had fortune made her the wife of a poor man in a lower class of society,
Marie Antoinette would have been a capable housewife: her abundant
energy would have found a proper channel, and she was in no way by
nature extravagant.
She had a few very passionate and somewhat too sentimental friendships,
some of which were returned, others of which their objects exploited to
their own advantage. The two most famous were her friendship for the
Princess de Lamballe and for Madame de Polignac. These moved her not
infrequently to unwise acts of patronage which were immediately seized
by the popular voice and turned against her. They were among the few
weaknesses apparent in her general temper. They were certainly ill
balanced and ill judged.
She indulged also in a number of small and unimportant flirtations which
might almost be called the routine of her rank and world; she had but
one great affection in her life for the other sex, and it was most
ardently returned. Its object was a Swedish noble of her own age, the
very opposite of the French in his temper, romantically chivalrous,
unpractical in the extreme, gentle, intensely reserved; his name Count
Axel de Fersen. The affair remained pure, but she loved him with her
whole heart, and in the last months of her tragedy this emotion must be
regarded as the chief concern of her soul. They saw each other but very
rarely, often they were separated for years; it was this, perhaps, which
lent both glamour and fidelity to the strange romance.
MIRABEAU
Mirabeau, the chief of the “practical” men of the Revolution (as the
English language would render the most salient point in their political
attitude), needs a very particular examination. His influence upon the
early part of the Revolution was so considerable, the effect of his
death was so determinant and final, the speculation as to what _might_
have happened had he survived is so fruitful, so entertaining, and so
common, and the positive effect of his attitude upon the development of
the Revolution after his death was so wide, that to misunderstand
Mirabeau is in a large measure to misunderstand the whole movement; and
Mirabeau has unfortunately been ill or superficially understood by many
among now three generations of historians; for a comprehension of this
character is not a matter for research nor for accumulated historic
detail, but rather a task for sympathy.
Mirabeau was essentially an artist, with the powers and the frailties
which we properly associate with that term: that is, strong emotion
appealed to him both internally and externally. He loved to enjoy it
himself, he loved to create it in others. He studied, therefore, and was
a master of, the material by which such emotion may be created; he
himself yielded to strong emotion and sought it where it might be found.
It is foolish alike to belittle and to exaggerate this type of
temperament. Upon it or upon its admixture with other qualities is based
the music, the plastic art, and in a large measure the permanent
literature of the world. This aptitude for the enjoyment and for the
creation in others of emotion clothes intellectual work in a manner
which makes it permanent. This is what we mean when we say that _style_
is necessary to a book; that a great civilisation may partly be judged
by its architecture; that, as Plato says, music may be moral or immoral,
and so forth. The artist, though he is not at the root of human affairs,
is a necessary and proper ally in their development.
When I say that Mirabeau was an artist I mean that wherever his energies
might have found play he would there have desired to enjoy and to create
enjoyment through some definite medium. This medium was in part
literary, but much more largely oral expression. To be a _tribune_, that
is the voice of great numbers, to persuade, nay, to please by his very
accents and the very rhythm of his sentences, these things occupied the
man; but he also brought into his art that without which no great art
can exist: mere intellect.
He believed in the main principles at least which underlay the
revolutionary movement, he understood them and he was prepared to
propagate them; but his power over men was not due to this conviction:
his power over men was wholly that of the artist, and had he by some
accident been engaged in maintaining the attack against democracy, he
would have been nearly as famous as he became under the title of its
defender. We must then always consider Mirabeau as an orator, though an
orator endowed with a fine and clear intelligence and with no small
measure of reasoned faith.
Much else remains to be said of him.
He was a gentleman; that is, he both enjoyed and suffered the
consequences which attach to hereditary wealth and to the atmosphere
that surrounds its expenditure. On this account, he being personally
insufficiently provided with wealth, he was for ever in debt, and
regarded the sums necessary to his station in life and to his large
opportunities as things due to him, so to speak, from society. We are
right when we say that he took bribes, but wrong if we imagine that
those bribes bound him as they would bind a man meaner in character or
less lucky in his birth. He stooped as gentlemen will to all manner of
low intrigues, to obtain “the necessary and the wherewith”; that is,
money for his _rôle_. But there was a driving power behind him, bound up
with his whole character, which made it impossible for any such sums to
control his diction or to make of such a man a mere advocate. He was
never that dirtiest of political phenomena, the “party man.” He would
never have been, had he been born a hundred years later and thrust into
the nastiness of modern parliamentary life, “a parliamentary hand.”
Mirabeau had behind him a certain personal history which we must read in
connection with his temperament.
He had travelled widely, he knew Englishmen and Germans of the wealthier
classes well. The populace he knew ill even in his own country; abroad
he knew it not at all. He had suffered from his father’s dislike of him,
from the consequence of his own unbridled passions, also not a little
from mere accidental misfortune. Capable of prolonged and faithful
attachment to some woman, the opportunity for that attachment had never
been afforded him until the last few months before his death. Capable of
paying loyal and industrious service to some political system, no
political system had chosen him for its servant. It is a fruitful matter
of speculation to consider what he might have done for the French
monarchy had Fate put him early at Court and given him some voice in the
affairs of the French Executive before the Revolution broke out. As it
was, the Revolution provided him with his opportunity merely because it
broke down old barriers and conventions and was destructive of the
framework of the State in which he lived. He was compelled to enter the
Revolution as something of a destroyer, for by no other avenue could he
be given his chance; but by nature he detested destruction. I mean
(since this phrase is somewhat vague) he detested that spirit which will
disendow a nation of certain permanent institutions serving definite
ends, without a clear scheme of how those institutions should be
replaced by others to serve similar ends. It was on this account that he
was most genuinely and sincerely a defender of the monarchy: a permanent
institution serving the definite ends of national unity and the
repression of tendencies to oligarchy in the State.
Mirabeau had none of the revolutionary Vision. In mind he was
prematurely aged, for his mind had worked very rapidly over a very
varied field of experience. The pure doctrine of democracy which was a
religion to many of his contemporaries, with all the consequences of a
religion, he had never thought of accepting. But certain consequences of
the proposed reforms strongly appealed to him. He loved to be rid of
meaningless and dead barriers, privileges which no longer corresponded
to real social differences, old traditions in the management of trade
which no longer corresponded to the economic circumstances of his time,
and (this is the pivotal point) the fossils of an old religious creed
which, like nearly all of his rank, he simply took for granted to be
dead: for Mirabeau was utterly divorced from the Catholic Church.
Much has been said and will be said in these pages concerning the
religious quarrel which, though men hardly knew it at the time, cut
right across the revolutionary effort, and was destined to form the
lasting line of cleavage in French life. There will be repeated again
and again what has already been written, that a reconciliation between
the Catholic Church and the reconstruction of democracy was, though men
did not know it, the chief temporal business of the time, and the reader
of these pages will be made well acquainted in them with the degradation
to which religion had fallen among the cultivated of that generation.
But in the case of Mirabeau this absence of religion must be
particularly insisted upon. It would no more have occurred to Mirabeau
that the Catholic Faith had a future than it could occur to (let us say)
an English politician of thirty years ago that the Irish might become a
wealthy community or that an English Government might within his own
lifetime find itself embarrassed for money. I use this parallel for the
sake of strengthening my contention, but it is indeed a weak parallel.
No contemporary parallel in our strange and rapidly changing times
corresponds to the fixed certitude which permeated the whole of the end
of the eighteenth century that the Catholic Faith was dead. Mirabeau had
perhaps never engaged in his life in intimate conversation a single man
who took the Catholic sacraments seriously, or suffered a moment’s
anxiety upon the tenets of the creed.
He knew, indeed, that certain women and a much smaller number of
insignificant men wrapped themselves up in old practices of an odd,
superstitious kind; he knew that great, dull areas of ignorant
peasantry, in proportion to their poverty and isolation, repeated by
rote the old formulae of the Faith. But of the Faith as a living thing
he could have no conception.
He saw on the one hand a clerical institution, economic in character,
providing places and revenues for men of his own rank; he met those men
and never discovered them to have any religion at all. He saw on the
other hand a proposed society in which such a fossil, unjust and
meaningless, must relinquish its grip upon those large revenues. But of
the Faith as a social force, as a thing able to revive, he could have
no conception. It would have seemed to him a mere folly to suggest that
the future might contain the possibility of such a resurrection. The
dissolution of the religious orders, which was largely his work, the
civil constitution of the clergy which he presided over, were to him the
most natural acts in the world. They were the mere sweeping away of a
quantity of inorganic stuff which cumbered the modern State. He felt of
them as we might feel of the purchase of waste spaces in our cities, of
the confiscation of some bad landlords’ property in them. The Church
served no kind of purpose, no one who counted believed in it, it was
defended only by people who enjoyed large revenues from the survival of
what had once been, but was now no longer, a living, social function.
In everything of the Revolution which he understood Mirabeau was upon
the side of caution. He was not oblivious to the conception of popular
government, he was not even mistrustful of it, but he could not conceive
of it save as acting through the established strength of the wealthier
classes. Of military power he judged very largely through Prussian eyes.
And in long and enthusiastic passages he described the Prussian army as
invincible. Had he lived to see the military enthusiasm of the
Republicans he would utterly have distrusted it. He favoured in his
heart an aristocratic machinery of society--though not an aristocratic
theory of the State; he was quite determined to preserve as a living
but diminished national organ the traditional monarchy of France; he was
curious upon a number of details which were present and close to his
eyes: methods of voting, constitutional checks, commercial codes and the
rest of it. The little equilibriums of diplomacy interested him also,
and the watching of men immediately under his eye in the Parliament.
It was in the Parliament that his whole activity lay, it was there that
he began to guide the Revolution, it was his absence from the Parliament
after his death that the Revolution most feels in the summer of 1791.
This very brief sketch does not present Mirabeau to the reader. He can
only be properly presented in his speeches and in the more rhetorical of
his documents. It is probable as time proceeds that his reputation in
this department will grow. His constitutional ideas, based as they were
upon foreign institutions, and especially upon the English of that time,
were not applicable to his own people and are now nearly forgotten: he
was wrong upon English politics as he was wrong upon the German armies,
but he had art over men and his personality endures and increases with
time.
LA FAYETTE
The character of La Fayette has suffered chiefly from his own aloofness
towards his contemporaries on the one hand, and from his rigid adherence
to principle upon the other. Both these causes are clearly connected.
The same quality in him which made him so tenacious of principle made
him contemptuous of the run of men about him. Fundamentally, he was
nearer the extreme Republicans than any other class, from the very fact
of his possessing a clear political creed and a determination to follow
it out to its logical consequence. But there was no chance of his
comprehending the concrete side of the movement or the men engaged upon
it, for his great wealth, inherited in very early life, had cut him off
from experience. His moral fault was undoubtedly ambition. It was an
ambition which worked in the void, as it were, and never measured itself
with other men’s capacities or opportunities. He made no plans for
advancement, not because he would have despised the use of intrigue in
reason, but because he was incapable of working it. He was exceedingly
attached to popularity, when it came he thought it his due; unpopularity
in its turn seemed to him a proof of the vileness of those who despised
him. He made himself too much the measure of his world.
Undoubtedly a very great part in the moulding of his character proceeded
from his experience in the United States of America. He was then at the
most impressionable and formative period of human life, little more than
a boy, or at least just entering early manhood. He had just married, he
had just come into the administration of his vast fortune. At such a
moment he took part in the victorious rebellion of the English colonies,
and it may be imagined how powerful was the effect of this youthful
vision upon the whole of the man’s future life; because there was no
proletariat in the colonies, he never saw or comprehended the
dispossessed classes of Paris--for that matter he never saw or
comprehended the French peasantry upon his own lands; because a chance
and volunteer soldiery had, under the peculiar conditions of the
half-populated Atlantic seaboard in conjunction with the French fleet
and with the aid of French money and arms, got the better of the small
and heterogeneous forces of George III, he believed that a military
nation like the French, in the midst of powerful enemies, could make
something of an amateur civic force; because a certain type of ease in
social relations was the ideal of many, perhaps of most, of those with
whom he had served in America, he confused so simple and mundane an
ideal with the fierce crusading blast and the sacred passion for
equality which was stirring his own nation when his opportunity for
leadership came.
It may be said of La Fayette with justice that he never upon a single
occasion did the right thing. It may also be said with justice that he
never did politically any major thing for which his own conscience would
later reproach him. It is noticeable that the Queen held him in
particular odium. He had been a wealthy young noble about the Court, the
friend of all her women friends, and his sympathy with the revolutionary
movement at its inception therefore seemed to her nothing better than
treason. There was also undoubtedly something in his manner which
grievously repelled her; that it was self-sufficient we cannot doubt,
and that it was often futile and therefore exasperating to women, events
are sufficient to show. But Marie Antoinette’s violent personal
antagonism towards La Fayette was not common, though several ardent
spirits (Danton’s, for instance) shared it. The mass of those who came
across La Fayette felt in connection with him a certain irritation or a
certain contempt or a certain rather small and distant respect; he
inspired no enthusiasms, and when he timidly attempted a rebellion
against the new Government after the fall of the monarchy, no one would
sacrifice himself or follow him.
It may be affirmed of La Fayette that if he had not existed the
Revolution would have pursued much the same course as it did, with this
exception: that there would not have been formed a definitely middle
class armed guard to provoke friction in Paris: the National Guard would
have been more open to all ranks.
In religion the man was anodyne, Catholic of course by baptism, but
distinctly Protestant in morals and in general tone, in dogma (until the
end of his life) freethinking, of course, like all his contemporaries.
He was personally courageous but foolishly despised the duel. One
anecdote out of many will help to fix his nature in the mind of the
reader. Mirabeau, casting about as usual for aid in his indebtedness,
sent urgently to him as to a fellow noble, a fellow politician and a
fellow supporter of the Crown, begging a loan of £2000. La Fayette
accorded him £1000.
DUMOURIEZ
Dumouriez presents a character particularly difficult for the modern
Englishman to comprehend, so remote is it in circumstance and
fundamentals from those of our time.
Of good birth, but born in a generation when social differences had
become a jest for intelligent and active men (and he was intelligent and
active), courageous, with a good knowledge of his trade of soldiering,
of rapid decision and excellent judgment where troops or _terrain_ were
concerned, he was all at sea in the comprehension of men, and he bore no
loyalty to the State.
It is this last feature which will particularly surprise the English
reader, for it is the singular and permanent advantage of oligarchic
communities such as the British that they retain under any stress and
show throughout the whole commonwealth the sense of the State. To betray
the State, to act against its interests, to be imperfectly conscious of
its existence, are crimes or weaknesses unknown to the citizens of an
oligarchy, and a citizen of this country cannot easily conceive of them
to-day. In democracies and despotisms, on the other hand, to forget
one’s duty to the State, to be almost oblivious of its corporate
existence, is a common weakness. There is here a compensation, and by
just so much as despotism and democracy permit rapid, effective and
all-compelling action on the part of the State, by just so much as they
permit sudden and sometimes miraculous enthusiasms which save or which
confirm a State, by that also do they lack the quiet and persistent
consciousness of the State which oligarchy fosters and determines.
Dumouriez’ excellence as a general can only be appreciated by those who
have looked closely into the constitution of the forces which he was to
command and the adversaries with whom he had to deal. It is the prime
quality of a great commander that his mind stands ready for any change
in circumstances or in the material to his hand, and even when we have
allowed for the element of luck which is so considerable in military
affairs, we must not forget that Dumouriez saved without disaster the
wretched and disorganised bands, inchoate and largely mutinous as to
their old units, worthless and amateur as to their new, which had to
meet, in and behind the Argonne, the model army of Prussia.
We must not forget that his plan for the invasion of the Low Countries
was a just and sensible one, nor with what skill, after the inevitable
defeat and retreat of the spring of 1793, he saved his command intact.
As a subordinate to an armed executive, to the Government of Napoleon,
for instance, the man would have been priceless. Nay, had circumstances
permitted him to retain supreme command of civil as of military power,
he would have made no bad dictator. His mere technical skill was so
considerable as to make the large sums paid him by the English
Government seem a good bargain even at our distance of time, and his
plans for the defence of England and for the attack on Napoleon are a
proof of the value at which he was estimated.
But Dumouriez was quite unable to act under the special circumstances in
which he happened to be placed at the moment of his treason. A mere
ambition had carried him from intrigue to intrigue among the
politicians. He despised them as an active and capable soldier was
compelled to despise them; he was too old to share any of their
enthusiasms, even had his temperament permitted him to entertain any
vision, political or religious. He certainly never felt the least moral
bond attaching him to what was in his eyes the chance anarchy of the
last six months of French Government under which he served, and if he is
to be branded with the title of traitor, then we must brand with the
same title all that multitude of varied men who escaped from the country
in the Emigration, who left it in disgust, or even who remained in
France, but despaired of French fortunes, in the turmoil of 1793.
It is perhaps a worthy excuse for Dumouriez’ failure to point out that
he also was one of those whom the Court might have used had it known how
to use men; but the Court had no such knowledge.
DANTON
The character of Danton has more widely impressed the world than that of
any other revolutionary leader, because it contained elements
permanently human, independent of the democratic theory of the time, and
necessary neither to the support of that theory nor to the criticism of
it.
The character of Danton appeals to that sense in man which is interested
in action, and which in the field of letters takes the form of drama.
His vigour, his personal strength of mind and body, the individuality of
his outline, arrest equally the man who loves the Revolution, and the
man who hates it, and the man who is quite indifferent to its success or
failure.
It is on this very account that historians, especially foreign
historians, have tended to misinterpret the man. Thus Carlyle, who has
great intuition in the matter, yet makes him out farmer-like--which he
certainly was not; Michelet, fascinated by his energy, presents him as
something uncouth, and in general those who would describe Danton stand
at a distance, as it were, where his loud voice and forcible gesture may
best be appreciated; but a man to be seen truly must be seen in
intimacy.
Danton was essentially a compound of two powerful characters in man. He
was amative or constructive, and at the same time he not only possessed
but liked to exercise lucidity of thought. The combination is among the
strongest of all those that go to build up human personalities.
That which was amative and constructive in him, his virility if you
will, brought him into close touch with reality; he knew and loved his
own country, for instance, and infinitely preferred its happy survival
to the full development of any political theory. He also knew and loved
his fellow countrymen in detail and as persons; he knew what made a
Frenchman weak and what made him strong. The vein of Huguenotry, though
he did not know it for what it was, he disliked in his compatriots. On
the other hand, the salt and freshness of the French was native to him
and he delighted in it; the freedom of their expression, the noise of
their rhetoric, and the military subsoil of them, were things to all of
which he immediately responded. He understood their sort of laughter,
nor was he shocked, as a man less national would have been, at their
peculiarly national vices, and in especial their lapses into rage. It is
this which must account for what all impartial judgment most blames in
him, which is, his indifference to the cruelties, his absorbed interest
in foreign and military affairs, at the moment of the Massacres of
September.
This touch with reality made him understand in some fashion (though only
from without) the nature of the Germans. The foolish mania of their
rulers for mere territorial expansion unaccompanied by persuasion or the
spread of their ideas, he comprehended. The vast superiority of their
armies over the disorganised forces of the French in 1792 he clearly
seized: hence on the one hand his grasp of their foreign policy, and on
the other his able negotiation of the retreat after Valmy. He also
understood, however, and more profoundly, the rapid self-organisation of
which his own countrymen were capable, and it was upon this knowledge
that his determination to risk the continuance of the war reposed. It
should be remarked that both in his military and in his quasi-military
action he was himself endowed in a singular degree with that power of
immediate decision which is characteristic of his nation.
His lucidity of thought permitted him to foresee the consequences of
many a revolutionary decision, and at the same time inclined him to a
strong sympathy with the democratic creed, with the doctrine of
equality, and especially with the remoulding of the national
institutions--particularly his own profession of the law--upon simple
lines. He was undoubtedly a sincere and a convinced revolutionary, and
one whose doctrine more permeated him than did that of many of his
contemporaries their less solid minds. He was not on that account
necessarily republican. Had some accident called his genius into play
earlier in the development of the struggle, he might well, like
Mirabeau, with whom he presents so curious a parallel, have thought it
better for the country to save the Monarchy.
It must always be remembered that he was a man of wide culture and one
who had achieved an early and satisfactory professional success; he was
earning a sound income at the moment of his youthful marriage; he read
English largely and could speak it. His dress was not inexpensive, and
though somewhat disordered (as it often is with men of intense energy
and constant gesture) it never gave an impression of carelessness or
disarray. He had many and indifferent intellectual interests, and was
capable, therefore, of intelligent application in several fields. He
appreciated the rapid growth of physical science, and at the same time
the complexity of the old social conditions--too widely different from
contemporary truths.
To religion he was, of course, like all men of that time, utterly
indifferent, but unlike many of them he seized the precise proportion of
its remaining effect upon certain districts and certain sections of the
countrysides. There has been a tendency latterly to exaggerate the part
which Freemasonry played in the launching of him; he was indeed a member
of a masonic lodge, as were, for that matter, all the men, conspicuous
or obscure, democratic or utterly reactionary, who appeared upon the
revolutionary stage: probably the king, certainly old aristocrats like
the father of Madame de Lamballe, and the whole host of the middle
class, from men like Bailly to men like Condorcet. But it is reading
history backwards, and imagining the features of our own time to have
been present a century ago, to make of Masonry the determining element
in his career.
Danton failed and died from two combined causes: first his health gave
way, secondly he obtruded his sanity and civilian sense into the heated
fury and calculated martial law of the second year of the Republic. To
both that fury and that calculation he was an obstacle; his opposition
to the Terror lost him the support of the enthusiasts, but it was the
interference which such a judgment made in the plans of the soldiers,
and notably of Carnot, that determined his condemnation and death. He
also, like Mirabeau, will undoubtedly increase as the years proceed,
and, if only as a representative of the national temper, become more and
more the typical figure of the Revolution in action.
CARNOT
Carnot, the predecessor of Napoleon, and the organising soldier of the
early revolutionary wars, owed his power to backbone.
He had not only a good solidity of brain, but an astonishing power of
using it for hours and hours on end. This he owed perhaps to the
excellent physical stock of which he came, the eldest of a very large
family born to a notable lawyer in Burgundy.
It was Carnot’s pride to hold a commission in the learned arms which
were to transform at that moment the art of war: for as Bonaparte, his
successor, was a gunner, so he was a sapper. His practice of exact
knowledge in application, and the liberal education which his career
demanded, further strengthened the strong character he had inherited.
More important still, in his democratic views he was what none of the
older officers had been, convinced and sincere. He had not come within
the influence of the very wealthy or of the very powerful. He was
young, and he knew his own mind not only in matters of political faith
but in the general domain of philosophy, and in the particular one of
military science.
It has been said of him that he invented the revolutionary method of
strategical concentration and tactical massing in the field. There is
some truth in this; but the method would not have been possible had he
not also invented, in company with Danton, and supported after Danton
left power, a universal system of conscription.
Carnot understood, as only trained soldiers can, the value of numbers,
and _he depended with great sagacity upon the national temper_; thus at
Wattignies, which was a victory directly due to his genius, though it
was novel in him to have massed troops suddenly upon the right after a
check on the extreme left of the field, yet the novelty would have been
of no effect had he not comprehended that, with his young fellow
countrymen as troopers, he could depend upon a charge delivered after
thirty-six hours of vigil.
He used not only the national but also the revolutionary temper in war.
One of the chief features, for instance, of the revolutionary armies
when they began to be successful, was the development of lines of
skirmishers who pushed out hardily before the main bodies and were the
first in the history of modern warfare to learn the use of cover. This
development was spontaneous: it was produced within and by each unit,
not by any general command. But Carnot recognised it at Hoondschoote
and used it ever after.
The stoical inflexibility of his temper is the noblest among the many
noble characters of his soul. He never admitted the empire, and he
suffered exile, seeming thereby in the eyes of the vilest and most
intelligent of his contemporaries, Fouché, to be a mere fool. He was as
hard with himself as with others, wholly military in the framework of
his mind, and the chief controller of the Terror, which he used, as it
was intended to be used, for the military salvation of the republic.
MARAT
Marat is easily judged. The complete sincerity of the enthusiast is not
difficult to appreciate when his enthusiasm is devoted to a simple human
ideal which has been, as it were, fundamental and common to the human
race.
Equality within the State and the government of the State by its general
will: these primal dogmas, on the reversion to which the whole
Revolution turned, were Marat’s creed.
Those who would ridicule or condemn him because he held such a creed,
are manifestly incapable of discussing the matter at all. The ridicule
and condemnation under which Marat justly falls do not attach to the
patent moral truths he held, but to the manner in which he held them. He
did not only hold them isolated from other truths--it is the fault of
the fanatic so to hold any truth--but he held them as though no other
truths existed. And whenever he found his ideal to be in practice
working at a friction or stopped dead, his unnourished and acute
enthusiasms at once sought a scapegoat, discovered a responsible agent,
and suggested a violent outlet, for the delay.
He was often right when he denounced a political intriguer: he often
would have sacrificed a victim not unjustly condemned, he often
discovered an agent partially responsible, and even the violent
solutions that he suggested were not always impracticable. But it was
the prime error of his tortured mind that beyond victims, and sudden
violent clutches at the success of democracy, there was nothing else he
could conceive. He was incapable of allowing for imperfections, for
stupidities, for the misapprehension of mind by mind, for the mere
action of time, and for all that renders human life infinitely complex
and infinitely adjustable.
Humour, the reflection of such wisdom, he lacked;--“judgment” (as the
English idiom has it) he lacked still more--if a comparative term may be
attached to two such absolute vacuities.
It must not be forgotten that so complete an absence of certain
necessary qualities in the building up of a mind are equivalent to
madness. Marat was not sane. His insanity was often generous, the creed
to which it was attached was obvious enough, and in the eyes of most of
us it is a creed to be accepted. But he worked with it as a madman who
is mad on collectivism, let us say, or the rights of property, might
work in our society, thinking of his one thesis, shrieking it and
foaming at the mouth upon it, losing all control when its acceptance was
not even opposed but merely delayed. He was valueless for the
accomplishment of the ends of the Revolution. His doctrine and his
adherence to it were so conspicuously simple and sincere that it is no
wonder the populace made him (for a few months) a sort of symbol of
their demand.
For the rest, his face, like his character, was tortured; he carried
with him a disease of the skin that irritated perpetually his wholly
unbalanced temper.
Some say (but one must always beware of so-called “Science” in the
reading of history) that a mixture of racial types produced in him a
perpetual physical disturbance: his face was certainly distorted and
ill-balanced--but physical suggestions of that sort are very
untrustworthy.
Those who met him in the management of affairs thought him worthless
enough; a few who knew him intimately loved him dearly; more who came
across him continually were fatigued and irritated by his empty
violence. He was, among those young revolutionaries, almost an elderly
man; he was (this should never be forgotten) a distinguished scholar in
his own trade, that of medicine; and he effected less in the Revolution
than any man to whom a reputation of equal prominence happened to
attach. He must stand responsible for the massacres of September.[2]
ROBESPIERRE
No character in the Revolution needs for its comprehension a wider
reading and a greater knowledge of the national character than
Robespierre’s.
Upon no character does the comprehension of the period more depend, and
none (for reasons I will give in a moment) has been more misunderstood,
not only in the popular legend but in the weighed decisions of competent
historians.
So true is this that even time, which (in company with scholarship)
usually redresses such errors, has not yet permitted modern authors to
give a true picture of the man.
The reason of so conspicuous a failure in the domain of history is this:
that side by side with the real Robespierre there existed in the minds
of all his contemporaries _save those who actually came across him in
the junctions of government_, a legendary Robespierre--a Robespierre
popularly imagined; and that this imaginary Robespierre, while it (or
he) has proved odious to posterity, seemed, while he lived, a
fascinating portrait to the man himself, and therefore he accepted it.
For Robespierre, though just, lacked humility.
The problem is an exceedingly subtle as well as an exceedingly difficult
one. The historian, as he reads his authorities, has perpetually to
distinguish between what is strong and what is weak evidence, and to
recall himself, as he reads, to reality by a recollection of what
Robespierre himself was. If he does not do so he falls at once into the
legend; so powerful is that legend in the numbers that supported it, and
so strongly did Robespierre himself support it by his own attitude. The
legendary Robespierre may be described in a very few lines.
Conceive a man sincerely convinced of the purest democratic theory, a
man who cared for nothing else but the realisation of that theory, and
who had never sacrificed his pursuit of its realisation in the State to
any personal advantage whatsoever. This man, trusted by the people and
at last idolised by them, becomes more and more powerful. He enters the
governing body (the Committee of Public Safety), he is the master both
within and without that body, and uses his mastery for establishing an
ideal democracy which shall recognise the existence of God and repose
upon civic virtue; and to establish this ideal he has recourse to
terror. He finds that human defections from his ideal are increasingly
numerous: he punishes them by death. The slaughter grows to be enormous;
the best of Democrats are involved in it; at last it can be tolerated no
longer, his immediate subordinates revolt against him in the Committee,
he is outlawed, fails to raise a popular rebellion in his favour in
Paris, is executed, and his system of terror falls to the ground.
This picture, though purely legendary in tone, contains not only much
truth, but truth of precisely that sort which conspires to make credible
what is false in the whole.
Robespierre was sincerely attached to the conception of an ideal
democracy; he was incorruptible in the pursuit of it--and to be a
politician and incorruptible amounts to something like what the Church
calls heroic virtue in a man. He _did_ enter the Committee of Public
Safety; he _did_ support the Terror, and when he was overthrown the
Terror _did_ come to an end. Where, then, does the legend differ from
the truth?
In these capital points, which change it altogether: that Robespierre
was not the chief influence in the Committee of Public Safety, _i.e._
the all powerful executive of the Republic; that he did not desire the
Terror, that he did not use it, that he even grew disgusted with it, and
that, in general, he was never the man who governed France.
It need hardly be pointed out how such a truth destroys such a legend.
The whole nature of the twelve months between the summer of 1793 and the
summer of 1794 must vary according as we regard them as Robespierrean or
no: and they were not Robespierrean.
What were they then, and why has the error that Robespierre was then
master, arisen?
Those months, which may be roughly called the months of the Terror,
were, as we shall see later in this book, months of martial law; and the
Terror was simply martial law in action--a method of enforcing the
military defence of the country and of punishing all those who
interfered with it or were supposed by the Committee to interfere with
it.
No one man in the Committee was the author of this system, but the one
most determined to use it and the one who had most occasion to use it,
was undoubtedly the military organiser, Carnot. Side by side with him
one man, such as Barrère, supported it because it kept up the Committee
of Public Safety which gave him all his political position. Another,
such as Saint-Just, supported it because he believed that the winning of
the war (in which he took an active part) would secure democracy
everywhere and for ever. Another, such as Jean Bon, supported it from
the old sectarian bitterness of the Huguenot. But of all men in the
Committee, Robespierre supported the Terror least, and was most
suspected by his colleagues--and increasingly suspected as time went
on--of desiring to interfere with the martial system of the Terror and
to modify it.
Why, then, was Robespierre popularly identified with the Terror, and
why, when he was executed, did the Terror cease?
Robespierre was identified with the Terror because he was identified
with the popular clamour of the time, with the extreme democratic
feeling of the time, and its extreme fear of a reaction. Robespierre
being the popular idol, had become also the symbol of a popular frenzy
which was supposed to be ruling the country. But that frenzy was not
ruling the country. What was ruling the country was the Committee of
Public Safety, in which Carnot’s was the chief brain. Robespierre was
indeed the idol of the populace; he was in no way the agent of their
power or of any power.
Why, when he fell, did the Terror cease if he were not its author?
Because the Terror was acting under a strain; it was with the utmost
difficulty that this absolute, intolerant and intolerable martial system
could be continued when once the fear of invasion was removed. For some
weeks before Robespierre fell the victories had begun to render it
unnecessary. When the Committee saw to it that Robespierre should be
outlawed by the Parliament, they knocked away, without knowing it, the
keystone of their own policy; it was _his_ popular position which made
_their_ policy possible. When he was destroyed they suddenly found that
the Terror could no longer be maintained. Men had borne with it because
of Robespierre, falsely imagining that Robespierre had desired it.
Robespierre gone, men would not bear with it any more.
Now, finally, if Robespierre himself had always felt opposed to the
system of the Terror, why did he not take the lead in the popular
reaction against it?
He had his opportunity given him by Danton in December 1793--seven
months before his own catastrophe. The Committee determined to put
Danton out of the way because Danton, in appealing for mercy, was
weakening the martial power of their government. Robespierre might have
saved Danton: he preferred to let him be sacrificed. The reason was that
Robespierre wrongly believed popularity to lie upon the side of the
Terror and against Danton; he was in no way a leader (save in rhetoric
and in rhetoric directed towards what men already desired), and his own
great weakness or vice was the love of popular acclaim.
Later on, in the summer of 1794, when he actually began to move against
the Terror, he only did so privately. He so misread men that he still
believed the Terror to be popular, and dared not lose his popular name.
A man by nature as sincere as crystal, he was tempted to insincerity in
this major thing, during the last months of his life, and he yielded
completely to the temptation. For the sake of his memory it was
deplorable, and deplorable also for history. His weakness has been the
cause of an historical error as grave as any that can be discovered in
modern letters, and at the same time has wholly maligned him to
posterity.
A factor in Robespierre’s great public position which is often forgotten
is the great effect of his speeches. That men should still debate, after
so vast a change in taste, whether those speeches were eloquent or no,
is a sufficient proof of their effect. He spoke in an ordered and a
reasoned manner, which bored the fine spirits of the earlier
Parliaments, but well suited the violent convictions of the later
Revolution. His phraseology, his point of view, just jumped with that of
his audience. He could express what they felt, and express it in terms
which they knew to be exact, and which they believed to be grand. For
his manner was never excessive, and those excessive men who heard him in
an excessive mood, were proud to know that their violence could be
expressed with so much scholarship and moderated skill.
By birth he was of the smaller gentry, though poor. It is an indication
of his character that he had thought of taking Orders, and that in early
youth literary vanity had affected him. He has left no monument; but
from the intensity of his faith and from his practice of it, his name,
though it will hardly increase, will certainly endure.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] There is but one trustworthy monograph on Marat. It will interest
the student as a proof of the enthusiasm which Marat can inspire. It is
by Champfleury.
IV
THE PHASES OF THE REVOLUTION
I
_From May 1789 to 17th of July 1789._
The first point which the reader must hold in the story of the
Revolution is the quarrel between its first Parliament and the Crown.
Of what nature was that quarrel?
It was not, as it has sometimes been represented, a simple issue between
privilege and a democratic demand for equality, or between traditional
organs of government and a democratic demand for self-government by the
nation. To imagine this is to read history backwards, and to see in the
untried conditions of 1789 the matured results which only appeared after
years of struggle.
The prime issue lay between legality and illegality.
The forms of French law and all the inherited method of French
administration demanded a certain form of authority; a centralised
government of unlimited power. The King was absolute. From him proceeded
in the simplest fashion whatever will was paramount in the State. He
could suspend a debtor’s liabilities, imprison a man without trial,
release him without revision of his case, make war or peace, and in
minor details such as the discipline and administration of public
bodies, the power of the Crown was theoretically and legally equally
supreme. It was not exercised as the enormous power of modern government
is exercised, it did not perpetually enter into every detail of the life
of the poor in the way in which the power of a modern English Government
enters into it; it is in the very nature of such autocratic power that,
while unlimited in theory, it is compelled to an instinctive and
perpetual self-limitation lest it break down; and autocracy maybe
compared in this to aristocracy, or more properly speaking to oligarchy,
the government of a few: for where a few govern they know that their
government reposes upon public opinion or public tolerance; they are
very careful not to exceed certain limits the transgression of which
would weaken the moral foundation of their power; they welcome allies,
they recruit themselves perpetually from other classes in the community.
In the same way an autocracy always has the desire to be popular. Its
strokes affect the great and the powerful, and are hardly ever aimed at
the mass of the community. The intellectual, the wealthy, the privileged
by birth, fortune or exceptional personal powers, are suspect to it. As
for the mass of men an Autocracy attempts to represent and, in a certain
sense, to obey them.
Now the French autocracy (for it was no less) erred not in the will to
act thus popularly in the early part of the Revolution, but in the
_knowledge_ requisite for such action.
The Parliament, shortly after it had met in May 1789, began to show, in
the Commons part of it, the working of that great theory which had
leavened all France for a generation. The Commons said, “We are the
people; at once the symbols of the people, the direct mandatory servants
of the people, and” (though this was a fiction) “we are of the people in
our birth and origin. We are therefore the true sovereign; and the
prince, the head of the Executive, is no more than an organ of
government, morally less in authority than ourselves, who are the true
source of government.” This attitude, which was at the back of all men’s
minds, and which was concentrated, of course, in the Commons, clashed
with legality. It could not express itself in the terms of law, it could
not act save in a fashion which should be, in the strictest sense of the
word, _revolutionary_.
Now the Crown, on the whole national in sympathy, and comprehending this
new theory well (I mean by the Crown the general body of advisers round
the King, and the King himself), was offended at the illegality not of
the theory or of the pretence (for these were not illegal), but of the
action of the Commons. And this comparatively small source of friction
was the irritant upon which we must fix as the cause of what followed.
The Nobles, by 108 to 47, decided, the day after the opening of the
Parliament, to sit as a separate House. The Clergy, by a much smaller
majority, 133 to 114, came to the same decision, but carefully qualified
it as provisional. The Commons declared that the hall in which they met
should be regarded as the hall of the National Assembly, and later made
it their business (to quote the phrase of the motion) “to attempt to
unite in common all the deputies of the nation in that hall and never to
abandon the principle of voting individually” (that is, not by separate
Houses) “or the principle that the States-General formed one undivided
body.” This attitude was qualified and compromised with to some extent
in the days that followed, but it held the field, and while the Commons
were insisting upon this attitude as a moral right, the Nobles countered
by a reaffirmation of the right of each House to a separate judgment
upon public matters. The Nobles were standing upon legal precedent: the
Commons had nothing in their favour but political theory; if the orders
sat all together and voted as individuals, the Commons, who were in
number equal to the two other Houses combined, would, with their noble
and clerical sympathisers, have a majority.
Now the King and his advisers, notably Necker, who still had great
weight, were by no means “Impossiblists” in this struggle. They desired
an understanding, and through the last days of May and the first days of
June the attempt at an understanding was made. But the attempt dragged,
and as it seemed that nothing would come of it, on the 10th of June
Sièyes moved that the Assembly should “verify its powers” (a French
phrase for admitting and registering the presence of each member as
acceptable to the whole body, and to the theory of its Constitution),
and that this should be done “in the case of each member” (meaning
members of all the three orders and _not_ of the Commons alone),
“whether the members of the two privileged Houses were present or
absent.” The roll was called and completed upon the 15th. None of the
nobles attended the common roll-call, three of the parish clergy (they
were from the province of Poitou) did so, and thus admitted the right of
the Commons so to act. A dozen of their colleagues joined them later;
but that was all.
So far there had been no action which could be precisely called illegal
or revolutionary. The Commons had affirmed a right based upon a
political theory which the vast majority of the nation admitted, and the
legal depositary of power, the King, had not yet reproved. One may draw
a parallel and compare the action of the Commons so far to some action
which a trade union, for instance, may take in England; some action the
legality of which is doubtful but upon which the courts have not yet
decided.
It was upon the 17th of June, two days after the completion of the
roll-call by the Commons, that the first revolutionary act took place,
and the student of the Revolution will do well to put his finger upon
that date and to regard it not indeed as the moral origin of the
movement, but as the precise moment from which the Revolution, as a
Revolution, begins to act. For upon that day the Commons, though in fact
only joined by a handful of the Clerical House, and by none of the
nobility, _declared themselves to be the National Assembly_; that is,
asserted the fiction that Clergy, Nobles and Commons were all present
and voted together. To this declaration they added a definite act of
sovereignty which trespassed upon and contradicted the legal authority
of the Crown. True, the motion was only moved and passed
“provisionally,” but the words used were final, for in this motion the
self-styled “National Assembly” declared that “provisionally” taxes and
dues might be raised upon the old authority but that only until the
National Assembly should disperse; “after which day”--and here we reach
the sacramental formula, as it were, of the crisis--“the National
Assembly _wills and decrees_ that all taxes and dues of whatever nature
which have not been specifically formally and freely granted by the said
Assembly shall cease in every province of the kingdom no matter how such
that province may be administered.” (This is an allusion to the fact
that in some provinces there was a representative machinery, in others
nothing but the direct action of the Crown.) “The Assembly declares that
when it has _in concert with_ (not in obedience to) the King laid down
the principle of a national re-settlement, it will busy itself with the
examination and ordering of the public debt.” Etc., etc.
Such was the point of departure after which sovereignty was at issue
between the Crown and the States-General; the Crown a known institution
with its traditions stretching back to the Roman Empire, and the
National Assembly a wholly new organ according to its own claims, basing
its authority upon a political theory stretching back to the very
origins of human society.
Two days later, on the 19th of June, the “National Assembly,” still only
self-styled and possessing only the powers which it had ascribed to
itself beyond all forms of law, set to work, nominated its committees,
and assumed the sovereignty thus claimed. The Nobles protested (notably
the Bishops), and the King, on the advice of Barentin, keeper of the
Seals, determined upon immediate resistance. The excuse was taken that
the Royal Session, as it was called, in which the King would declare his
will, needed the preparation of the hall, and when the Commons presented
themselves at the door of that hall on the next day, the 20th, they
found it shut against them. They adjourned to a neighbouring tennis
court, and took a solemn corporate oath that they would not separate
without giving France a Constitution. They continued to meet, using a
church for that purpose, but on the 23rd the Royal Session was opened
and the King declared his will.
The reader must especially note that even in this crisis the Crown did
not offer a complete resistance. There was an attempt at compromise.
Necker would have had a more or less complete surrender, the Queen and
her set would have preferred an act of authority which should have
annulled all that the Commons had done. What actually happened was a
permission by the Crown that the three Orders should meet as one body
for certain common interests, but should preserve the system of voting
as separate Houses in “all that might regard the ancient and
constitutional rights of the three Orders, the Constitution to be given
to future Parliaments, feudal property, and the rights and prerogatives
of the two senior Houses.” As a mere numerical test, such a conclusion
would have destroyed the power of the Commons, since, as we have seen,
numbers were the weapon of the Commons, who were equal to the two other
Houses combined, and if all sat together would, with the Liberal
members of the clergy and the nobility, be supreme. But apart from this
numerical test, the act of sovereignty affirmed by the National Assembly
when it declared itself, and itself only, competent to vote taxes, was
annulled. Moreover, the royal declaration ended with a command that on
the next day the three Orders should meet separately.
Now at this critical point the King was disobeyed. The current of the
time chose the revolutionary bed, and as it began to flow deepened and
confirmed its course with every passing day and event. Already the
majority of the clergy had joined the National Assembly when it had
affirmed its right to sit in spite of the check of the 20th of June.
There was a half-hour on that decisive day of the Royal Session, the
23rd of June, when armed force might have been used for the arrest and
dispersion of the Deputies. They declared themselves inviolable and
their arrest illegal, but there was, of course, no sanction for this
decree. As a fact, not a corporal’s file was used against them. The next
day, the 24th, the majority of the clergy again joined the Commons in
their session (in flat defiance of the King’s orders), and on the 25th,
forty-seven of the nobles followed their example. The King yielded, and
on the 27th, two days later, ordered the three Houses to meet together.
The National Assembly was now legally constituted, and set out upon its
career. The Crown, the old centre of authority, had abandoned its
position, and had confirmed the Revolution, but in doing so it had acted
as it were in contradiction with itself. It had made technically legal
an illegality which destroyed its own old legal position, but it had
done so with ill-will, and it was evident that some counter-stroke would
be attempted to restore the full powers of the Crown.
At this point the reader must appreciate what forces were face to face
in the coming struggle. So far, the illegal and revolutionary act of the
17th of June, the Royal Session which replied to that act upon the 23rd,
the King’s decree which yielded to the Commons upon the 27th, had all of
them been but words. If it came to action, what physical forces were
opposed?
On the side of the Crown was the organised armed force which it
commanded. For it must never be forgotten that the Crown was the
Executive, and remained the Executive right on to the capture of the
palace three years later, and the consummation of the Revolution on the
10th of August, 1792. On the side of the National Assembly was without
doubt the public opinion of the country (but that is not a force that
can be used under arms), and, what was much more to the point, the
municipal organisation of France.
Space forbids a full description of the origins and strength of the
French municipal system; it is enough to point out that the whole of
Gallic civilisation, probably from a moment earlier than Cæsar’s
invasion, and certainly from the moment when Roman rule was paramount
in Gaul, was a _municipal_ one. It is so still. The countrysides take
their names mainly from their chief towns. The towns were the seats of
the bishops, whose hierarchy had preserved whatever could be preserved
of the ancient world. In the towns were the colleges, the guilds, the
discussion and the corporations which built up the life of the nation.
The chief of these towns was Paris. The old systems of municipal
government, corrupt and varied as they were, could still give the towns
a power of corporate expression. And even where that might be lacking it
was certain that some engine would be found for expressing municipal
action in a crisis of the sort through which France was now passing. In
Paris, for instance, it was seen when the time came for physical force
that the College of Electors, who had chosen the representatives for
that city, were willing to act at once and spontaneously as a municipal
body which should express the initiative of the people. It was the
towns, and especially Paris, prompt at spontaneous organisation, ready
to arm, and when armed competent to frame a fighting force, which was
the physical power behind the Assembly.
What of the physical power behind the King? His power was, as we have
said, the Regular Armed forces of the country: the army. But it is
characteristic of the moment that only a part of that armed force could
be trusted. For an army is never a mere weapon: it consists of living
men; and though it will act against the general opinion of its members
and will obey orders long after civilians would have broken with the
ties of technical and legal authority, yet there is for armies also a
breaking point in those ties, and the Crown, I repeat, could not use as
a whole the French-speaking and French-born soldiery. Luckily for it, a
very great proportion of the French army at that moment consisted of
foreign mercenaries.
Since the position was virtually one of war, we must consider what was
the strategical object of this force. Its object was Paris, the chief of
the towns; and round Paris, in the early days of July, the mercenary
regiments were gathered from all quarters. That military concentration
once effected, the gates of the city held, especially upon the north and
upon the west, by encamped regiments and by a particularly large force
of cavalry (ever the arm chosen for the repression of civilians), the
Crown was ready to act.
On the 11th of July, Necker, who stood for Liberal opinions, was
dismissed. A new ministry was formed, and the counter-revolution begun.
What followed was the immediate rising of Paris.
The news of Necker’s dismissal reached the masses of the capital (only
an hour’s ride from Versailles) on the afternoon of the 12th, Sunday.
Crowds began to gather; an ineffectual cavalry charge in one of the
outer open spaces of the city only inflamed the popular enthusiasm, for
the soldiers who charged were German mercenary soldiers under the
command of a noble. Public forces were at once organised, arms were
commandeered from the armourers’ shops, the Electoral College, which had
chosen the members of the Assembly for Paris, took command at the Guild
Hall, but the capital point of the insurrection--what made it
possible--was the seizure of a great stock of arms and ammunition,
including cannon, in the depot at the Invalides.
With such resources the crowd attacked, at the other end of the city, a
fortress and arsenal which had long stood in the popular eye as the
symbol of absolute monarchy, the Bastille. With the absurdly
insufficient garrison of the Bastille, its apparent impregnability to
anything the mob might attempt, the supposed but doubtful treason of its
governor in firing upon those whom he had admitted to parley, we are not
here concerned. The Bastille was rushed, after very considerable efforts
and an appreciable loss in killed and wounded. By the evening of that
day, Tuesday, the 14th of July, 1789, Paris had become a formidable
instrument of war. The next news was the complete capitulation of the
King.
He came on the morrow to the National Assembly, promising to send away
the troops; he promised to recall Necker, a municipal organisation was
granted to the city, with Bailly for its first mayor, and--a point of
capital importance--an armed militia dependent upon that municipality
was legally formed, with La Fayette at its head. On the 17th Louis
entered Paris to consummate his capitulation, went to the Guild Hall,
appeared in the tricoloured cockade, and the popular battle was won.
It behoves us here to consider the military aspect of this definitive
act from which the sanction of the Revolution, the physical power behind
it, dates.
Paris numbered somewhat under a million souls: perhaps no more than
600,000: the number fluctuated with the season. The foreign mercenary
troops who were mainly employed in the repression of the popular feeling
therein, were not sufficient to impose anything like a siege. They could
at the various gates have stopped the provisioning of the city, but then
at any one of those separate points, any one of their detachments upon a
long perimeter more than a day’s march in circumference would certainly
have been attacked and almost as certainly overwhelmed by masses of
partially armed civilians.
Could the streets have been cleared while the ferment was rising? It is
very doubtful. They were narrow and tortuous in the extreme, the area to
be dealt with was enormous, the tradition of barricades not forgotten,
and the spontaneous action of that excellent fighting material which a
Paris mob contains, had been quite as rapid as anything that could have
been effected by military orders.
The one great fault was the neglect to cover the Invalides, but even had
the Invalides not been looted, the stock of arms and powder in the city
would have been sufficient to have organised a desperate and prolonged
resistance. The local auxiliary force (of slight military value, it is
true), the “French Guards,” as they were called, were wholly with the
people. And in general, the Crown must be acquitted of any considerable
blunder on the military side of this struggle. It certainly did not fail
from lack of will.
The truth is (if we consider merely the military aspect of this military
event) that in dealing with large bodies of men who are (a) not
previously disarmed, (b) under conditions where they cannot be
dispersed, and (c) capable by a national tradition or character of some
sort of rapid, spontaneous organisation, the issue will always be
doubtful, and the uncertain factor (which is the tenacity, decision and
common will of the civilians, to which soldiers are to be opposed) is
one that varies within the very widest limits.
In massing the troops originally, the Crown and its advisers estimated
that uncertain factor at far too low a point. Even contemporary educated
opinion, which was in sympathy with Paris, put it too low. That factor
was, as a fact, so high that no armed force of the size and quality
which the Crown then disposed of, could achieve its object or hold down
the capital.
As for the absurd conception that any body of men in uniform, however
small, could always have the better of civilian resistance, however
large and well organised, it is not worthy of a moment’s consideration
by those who interest themselves in the realities of military history.
It is worthy only of the academies.
So ends the first phase of the Revolution. It had lasted from the
opening of the States-General in May to the middle of July 1789.
II
_From the 17th of July 1789 to the 6th of Oct. 1789._
We have seen the military conditions under which the attempt at an armed
counter-revolution failed. There follows a short phase of less than
three months, whose character can be quickly described.
It was that moment of the Revolution in which ideas had the freest play,
in which least had been done to test their application, and most scope
remained for pure enthusiasm. That is why we find in the midst of that
short phase the spontaneous abandonment of the feudal rights by the
nobility. And that is why the violent uprisings all over France
continued. It is the period in which the Declaration of the Rights of
Man and of the Citizen, a document which may fittingly stand side by
side with the Declaration of Independence (for together they form the
noblest monuments of our modern origins), was promulgated. In the same
period were the elements of the future Constitution rapidly debated and
laid down, and notably that national policy of a _Single Chamber_ which
the modern French have imprudently abandoned. In that same period,
however, appeared, and towards the close of it, another form of
resistance on the part of the Crown and of those who advised the Crown.
The King hesitated to accept the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and
similarly hesitated to promulgate the Decree of the 4th of August in
which the nobility had abandoned their feudal dues. It would be foolish
to exaggerate the military aspect of what followed. Louis did call in
troops, but only in numbers sufficient for personal defence, and we can
hardly believe that he intended anything more than to police the
surroundings of his throne. But the brigade (for it was no more, nor was
it of full strength) which he summoned was sufficient to kindle
suspicion; and the determinedly false position of the Queen (who all her
life was haunted by the idea that the regular soldiers, especially if
they were well dressed and held themselves rigidly, were a sort of
talisman) provoked an explosion. A feast was given in which the officers
of the Regiment of Flanders, which had just reached Versailles, were
entertained by the officers of the Guard. It was made the occasion for a
good deal of drunkenness and a violent Royalist manifestation, at which
the Queen was present, which she approved, and which some thought she
had designed.
The failure of the harvest to relieve the scarcity of bread in Paris,
the permanent state of alarm in which Paris had remained, and of
suspicion for the safety of the Parliament which it continually
entertained since the early part of the summer, needed no more to
provoke an outbreak. It is an error to imagine that that outbreak was
engineered or that such a movement could have been factitious. Great
masses of women (in whom the movement originated), and after them a
whole flood of the populace, marched upon Versailles.
There was no direct attack upon the palace, though the palace feared
such an attack at any moment. The troops present were sufficient to
prevent violence.
La Fayette followed in the night at the head of his new Parisian militia
force.
Too much reliance was placed upon the military character of this force;
the palace was invaded in the early morning, an attempt to assassinate
the Queen on the part of the mob failed, though two of the Guards were
killed. And after scenes whose violence and apparent anarchy only masked
the common determination of the populace, the royal family were
compelled to abandon Versailles and to take up their place in the
Tuileries; the Parliament followed them to Paris, and neither King nor
Parliament returned again to the suburban palace.
This recapture of the King by Paris is much more significant than a mere
impulse of the mob. The King in Paris, the unison of his person with the
capital city, had been the very sacrament of French life for century
upon century. It was precisely a hundred years since Paris had been
abandoned by Louis XIV for Versailles. The significance of that error
may be understood by the citizens of an aristocratic country if they
will imagine the abandonment of their countrysides by the squires, or,
again, the future historian of our modern industrial civilisation may
understand it when he describes how the wealthy manufacturers abandoned
the cities in which their wealth was made, to dwell outside and apart
from the living interests of their people.
With the return of the royal family to Paris, and with the presence of
the Assembly within the heart of the national life, one prime factor
appears, which is this: that while the National Assembly proceeds step
by step to what it imagines to be a complete attainment of democracy
(though how partial will soon be seen), the resistance of the Crown is
transformed into a resistance of the mere Court. The attack on the
Revolution becomes a personal thing. The King is still wholly the chief
of the Executive; he can give what commands he wills to the armed force;
he controls receipts and payments; he is for all active purposes the
Government. But he is no longer considering that prime function of his,
nor even using it to restore his old power. He acts henceforward as an
individual, and an individual in danger. The Queen, whose view of the
Revolution and its dangers had always been a purely personal one, is the
directing will in the court-group from this moment, October 1789,
onwards; and the chief preoccupation of that group for eighteen months
is personal safety. Surrounded by the pomp of the Tuileries and amid all
the external appearances of a power still greater than that of any other
monarch in Europe, Louis and his wife and their very few immediate and
devoted friends and followers thought of the palace as a prison, and
never considered their position save as one intolerable.
III
_From October 1789 to June 1791._
It is this which must explain all that followed in the succeeding phase,
which lasted from these early days of October 1789 to the last week of
June 1791. Throughout that period of twenty-one months the King is
letting the Revolution take its course, with the fixed idea of thwarting
it at last by flying from it, and perhaps conquering it by foreign aid.
But even this policy is not consecutively followed. The increasing
repugnance of the Court and of the King himself to the revolutionary
development forbids a consecutive and purely hypocritical acceptation of
the National Assembly’s decrees.
Deliberate and calculated intrigue might yet have saved the monarchy and
the persons of the royal family. Oddly enough, an ally in the struggle,
an excellent intriguer, a saviour of the monarchical institution and a
true defender of the royal persons was at hand: it was at hand in the
person of Mirabeau.
This man had more and more dominated the Assembly; he had been
conspicuous from its first opening days; he had been its very voice in
the resistance to the King at Versailles; it was he who had replied to
the Master of Ceremonies on June 23, that the Commons would not
disperse; it was he who had moved that the persons of the Commons were
privileged against arrest. He was of a family noble in station and
conspicuous before the people by the wealth and eccentricities of its
head, Mirabeau’s father. He himself was not unknown even before the
Revolution broke out, for his violence, his amours, his intelligence and
his debts. He was a few years older than the King and Queen: his
personality repelled them; none the less his desire to serve them was
sincere; and it was his plan, while retaining the great hold over the
National Assembly which his rhetoric and his use of men furnished him,
to give to the Court and in particular to the Queen, whom he very
greatly and almost reverently admired, such secret advice as might save
them. This advice, as we shall see in a moment, tended more and more to
be an advice for civil war. But Mirabeau’s death at the close of the
phase we are now entering (on April 2, 1791), and the increasing fears
of the King and Queen, between them prevented any statesmanship at all;
they prevented even the statesmanship of intrigue; and the period
became, on the side of the Revolution, a rapid and uncontrolled
development of its democratic theory (limited by the hesitation of the
middle class), and on the side of the Court an increasing demand for
mere physical security and flight, coupled with an increasing
determination to return, and to restore as a popular monarchy the scheme
of the past.
The eighteen months that intervened between the fixing of the Assembly
and the royal family in Paris, and the death of Mirabeau, are remarkable
for the following points, which must all be considered abreast, as it
were, if we are to understand their combined effects.
1. This was the period in which the constructive work of the National
Assembly was done, and in which the whole face of the nation was
changed. The advising bodies of lawyers called “Parliaments” were
abolished (eleven months after the King had come to Paris), the Modern
Departments were organised in the place of the old provinces, the old
national and provincial militia was destroyed; but (as it is very
important to remember) _the old regular army was left untouched_. A new
judicature and new rules of procedure were established. A new code
sketched out in the place of “Common Law” muddle. In a word, it was the
period during which most of those things which we regard as
characteristic of the revolutionary work were either brought to their
theoretic conclusion or given at least their main lines.
2. Among these constructive acts, but so important that it must be
regarded separately, was the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which
will be dealt with at length further in this book; it was the principal
work (and the principal error) of that year and a half.
3. The general spirit of the Revolution, more difficult to define than
its theory but easy to appreciate as one follows the development of the
movement, increased regularly and enormously in intensity during the
period. The power of the King, who was still at the head of the
Executive, acted more and more as an irritant against public opinion,
and--
4. That public opinion began to express itself in a centralised and
national fashion, of which the great federation of the 14th of July
1790, in Paris, on the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, was the
nucleus and also the symbol. This federation consisted in delegates from
the National Guard throughout the country, and it was of this capital
importance: that it introduced into the revolutionary movement a feature
of soldiery which made even the regular troops for the most part
sympathetic with the enthusiasm of the time.
5. These eighteen months were, again, filled with the movement of the
“Emigration.” That movement was, of course, the departure of many of the
more prominent of the privileged orders and of a crowd of humbler
nobles, as also of a few ecclesiastics, from France. The King’s brothers
(one fled at the beginning of the emigration, the younger, the Comte
d’Artois; the other, the elder, at its close, and coincidently with the
flight of the King) must especially be noted in this connection; they
formed in company with the more notable of the other emigrants a regular
political body, which intrigued continually beyond the frontiers, in
Germany and Italy, against the Revolution. And--
6. It was therefore during these months that the ultimate origins of the
large European war must be found. The armed body of the emigrants under
Condé formed an organised corps upon the Rhine, and though there was not
yet the semblance of an armed movement in Europe besides theirs against
the French, yet by the _émigrés_, as they were called, were sown the
seeds the harvest of which was to be the war of 1792.
I have said that during these months in which most of the constructive
work of the Revolution was done, in which the seeds of the great war
were sown, and in which the absolute position of the Crown as the head
of the Executive was increasingly irritating to the public opinion of
the French, and especially of the capital, Mirabeau was the one man who
might have preserved the continuity of national institutions by the
preservation of the monarchy. He received money from the Court and in
return gave it advice. The advice was the advice of genius, but it was
listened to less and less in proportion as it was more and more
practical. Mirabeau also favoured the abandonment of Paris by the King,
but he would have had the King leave Paris openly and with an armed
force, withdraw to a neighbouring and loyal centre such as Compiègne,
and thence depend upon the fortunes of civil war.
Meanwhile the Queen was determined upon a very different and much more
personal plan, into which no conception of statesmanship entered. She
was determined to save the persons of her children, herself and her
husband. Plans of flight were made, postponed and re-postponed. It was
already agreed at the Court that not Mirabeau’s plan should be followed,
but this plan of mere evasion. The army which Bouillé commanded upon the
frontier was to send small detachments along the great road from Paris
to the east; the first of these were to meet the royal fugitives a
little beyond Chalôns and to escort their carriage eastward; each armed
detachment in the chain, as the flight proceeded, was to fall in for its
defence, until, once the town of Varennes was reached, the King and
Queen should be in touch with the main body of the army.
What was then intended to follow remains obscure. It is fairly certain
that the King did not intend to pass the frontier but to take refuge at
Montmédy. The conflict that would have inevitably broken out could
hardly have been confined to a civil war: foreign armies and the German
mercenaries in the French service were presumably to be organised, in
case the flight succeeded, for a march upon Paris and the complete
restoration of the old state of affairs.
Had Mirabeau lived this rash and unstatesmanlike plan might yet have
been avoided; it so happened that he died upon April 2, 1791, and soon
after we enter the third phase of the Revolution, which is that leading
directly to the great war, and to the fall of the monarchy.
Shortly after Mirabeau’s death a tumult, which excessively frightened
the royal family, prevented the King and Queen from leaving the palace
and passing Easter at St. Cloud, in the suburbs. Though further
postponements of their flight followed, the evasion actually took place
in the night of the 20th to 21st of June. It very nearly succeeded, but
by a series of small accidents, the last of which, the famous ride of
Drouet to intercept the fugitives, is among the best-known episodes in
history, the King and Queen and their children were discovered and
arrested at Varennes, within a few hundred yards of safety, and were
brought back to Paris, surrounded by enormous and hostile crowds. With
the failure of this attempt at flight in the end of June 1791, ends the
third phase of the Revolution.
IV
_From June 1791 to September 1792._
To understand the capital effect both of this flight and of its failure,
we must once more insist upon the supreme position of the monarchy in
the traditions and instinct of French polity. The unwisdom of the flight
it would be difficult to exaggerate: it is impossible to exaggerate the
moral revolution caused by its failure. It was regarded as virtually an
abdication. The strong body of provincial, silent, and moderate opinion,
which still centred on the King and regarded it as his function to lead
and to govern, was bewildered, and in the main divorced, in the future,
from the Crown.
It is an excellent proof of what the monarchy had for so long been to
France, that even in such a crisis barely the name of “a republic” was
mentioned, and that only in the intellectual circles in Paris. All the
constitutional and standing forces of society conspired to preserve the
monarchy at the expense of no matter what fictions. The middle class
Militia Guard under La Fayette repressed, in what is known as the
Massacre of the Champ-de-Mars, the beginnings of a popular movement. The
more Radical leaders (among whom was Danton) fled abroad or hid. The
Duke of Orleans utterly failed to take advantage of the moment, or to
get himself proclaimed regent: the monarchical tradition was too strong.
Immediately after the second anniversary of the taking of the Bastille,
in July, the decrees of Parliament created the fiction that the King was
not responsible for the flight, that he “had been carried off,” and in
the following September, though until then suspended from executive
power, the King, on taking the oath to the Constitution, was once more
at the head of all the forces of the nation.
But all this patching and reparation of the façade of constitutional
monarchy (a fiction whose tawdriness is more offensive to the French
temper than its falsehood) had come too late. Already the Queen had
written to her brother, the Emperor of Austria, suggesting the
mobilisation of a considerable force, and its encampment on the
frontier, to overawe the revolutionary movement. Her action coincided
within a few days with the end of that great Parliament, which had been
chosen on the most democratic suffrage, and which had transformed the
whole of society and laid the basis of the revolutionary Constitution.
With the meeting of the National Assembly’s successor on the 1st of
October, 1791, war was already possible; that possibility was to be
transformed very soon into probability, and at last into actuality.
In the new Parliament the weight, not of numbers but of leadership, fell
to a group of enthusiastic and eloquent men who, from the fact that
certain of their principal members came from the Gironde, were called
_The Girondins_. They represented the purest and the most enthusiastic
ideal of democracy, less national, perhaps, than that advocated by men
more extreme than they, but of a sort which, from that time to this, has
been able to rouse the enthusiasm of historians.
Vergniaud and Isnard were their great orators, Brissot was their
intellectual intriguer, and the wife of Roland, one of their members,
was, as it were, the soul of the whole group. It was the fact that these
men desired war which made war certain, once the temper of this new
second Assembly should be felt.
The extremists over against them, to whom I have alluded (known as “the
Mountain”), were especially Parisian in character. Robespierre, who had
been first an obscure, and later a sectarian orator of the National
Assembly, though not sitting in this second Parliament, was perhaps the
most prominent figure in that group, for he was the public orator of
Paris; and indeed the Mountain was Paris; Paris, whether inside or
outside the Parliament; Paris acting as the responsible brain of France.
Later, it was the Mountain (that had first opposed the war) which was to
ensure the success of the French arms by a rigidity and despotism in
action such as the purer and less practical minds of the Girondins
abhorred.
On the 3rd of December, 1791 (to quote a fundamental date in the rapid
progress towards the war which was to transform the Revolution), the
King--writing in a manner which betrays dictation by his wife--begged
the King of Prussia (as _she_ had begged the Emperor) to mobilise an
armed force, and with it to back a Congress that should have for its
object the prevention of the spread of the Revolution. That letter was
typical of the moment. From both sides tension was rapidly proceeding to
the breaking point. Nor was the tension merely upon generalities. The
Revolution had broken a European treaty in the annexation of the Papal
State of Avignon, and it had broken European conventions when it had
abolished in Alsace feudal rights that were possessed by the princes of
the empire. It was as though some State to-day, attempting Collectivism,
should confiscate, along with other property, securities lying in its
banks, but held by the nationals of a foreign State.
On the revolutionary side also there was a definite point at issue,
which was the permission accorded within the empire for the emigrants to
meet in arms and to threaten the French frontier.
But these precise and legal points were not the true causes of the war.
The true causes of the war were the desire of the unreformed European
Governments (notably those of Prussia and Austria) that the Revolution
should, in their own interests, be checked, and the conviction that
their armed forces were easily capable of effecting the destruction of
the new French _régime_.
The Court of Vienna refused to accept a just indemnity that was offered
the princes of the empire in Alsace for the loss of their old feudal
rights; Leopold, the emperor, who was one of the same generation as the
French King and Queen, died upon the 1st of March, 1792, and was
succeeded by a son only twenty-four years of age and easily persuaded to
war.
On the French side, with the exception of the Mountain and notably of
Robespierre, there was a curious coalition of opinion demanding war.
The Court and the reactionaries were sufficiently certain of the victory
of the Allies to find their salvation in war.
The revolutionary party, that is, the mass of public opinion and the
“patriots,” as they called themselves, the Girondins, also, and
especially, desired war as a sort of crusade for the Revolution; they
suffered grievous illusions, as enthusiasts always must, and believed
the French armed forces capable of sustaining the shock. The plans had
already been drawn up for the campaign (and promptly betrayed to the
enemy by the Queen); Dumouriez, an excellent soldier, had from the
middle of March 1792 been the chief person in the ministry, and the
director of foreign affairs, and a month later, on the 20th of April,
war was declared against Austria, or, to be accurate, against “the King
of Hungary and Bohemia.”
Such was still the official title of Marie Antoinette’s nephew, who,
though now succeeded to the empire, had not yet been crowned emperor. It
was hoped to confine the war to this monarch, and, indeed, the German
princes of the empire did not join him (the Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel
was an exception). But the one German power that counted most, the
kingdom of Prussia, which Dumouriez had especially hoped to keep
neutral, joined forces with Austria. The royal letters had done their
work.
At this critical moment the French armed forces and the French
strongholds were at their worst. The discipline of the army was
deplorable. The regular soldiers of the old _régime_ had lost from six
to nine thousand officers by emigration, and mixed no better than water
and oil with the revolutionary volunteers who had been drafted (to the
number of over two hundred battalions) into the ranks of the army;
moreover, these volunteer battalions were for the most part ill
provided, far below their establishment, some only existed on paper;
none were trained as soldiers should be trained. In a more orderly time,
when the decrees of the Government corresponded with reality, four
hundred thousand men would have held the frontier; such a number was in
the estimates. As it was, from the Swiss mountains to the English
Channel, the French could count on no more than _one-fifth_ of that
number. Eighty thousand alone were under arms. The full Prussian army
was, alone, apart from its allies, close upon treble the size of this
disorganised and insufficient force.
Panics at once ludicrous and tragic opened the campaign upon the French
side. The King took advantage of them to dismiss his Girondin Ministry
and to form a reactionary Government. The Parliament replied by measures
useless to the conduct of war, and designed only to exasperate the
Crown, which was betraying the nation. It ordered the dismissal of the
royal Guard, the formation of a camp of revolutionary Federals outside
Paris, the transportation of the orthodox priests; in pursuit of the
Court’s determination to resist the Assembly and to await the victorious
allies, Louis vetoed the last two decrees. La Fayette, who was now in
command of the army of the centre, with his headquarters at Sedan, right
upon the route of the invasion, declared for the King.
Had the armies of Austria and Prussia moved with rapidity at this
moment, the Revolution was at an end. As it was, their mobilisation was
slow, and their march, though accurate, leisurely. It gave time for the
populace of Paris to demonstrate against the palace and the royal family
on the 20th of June. It was not until the first days of August that the
main force of the combined monarchs, under the generalship-in-chief of
the Duke of Brunswick (who had the reputation of being the best general
of his time), set out for the march on Paris. It was not until the 23rd
of August that the invaders took the first French frontier town, Longwy.
Meanwhile two very important things had lent to the French, in spite of
the wretched insufficiency of their armed force, an intensity of feeling
which did something to supply that insufficiency. In the first place,
the third anniversary of the Fall of the Bastille, the 14th of July, had
called to Paris deputations from all the provinces, many of them armed;
this gave the national feeling unity. In the second place, Brunswick had
issued from Coblentz, which was his base, upon the 25th of that same
month of July, a manifesto which was known in Paris three days later,
and which (though certain modern historians have questioned this)
undoubtedly set revolutionary opinion ablaze.
This manifesto demanded, in the name of the Allied Army, a complete
restoration of the old _régime_, professed to treat the French and their
new authorities as rebels subject to military execution, and contained a
clause of peculiar gravity, which excited an immediate and exasperated
response from Paris. The authorship of this clause lay with Marie
Antoinette, and it threatened, if there were any attack upon the palace,
to give the capital over to military execution and total subversion.
Two days later the Federals from Marseilles, a middle-class body of
excellent citizens, though merely amateurs at soldiering and small in
numbers, marched into the city. Their marching song has become famous
under the title of the “Marseillaise.” They had accomplished the
astonishing feat of traversing France, drawing cannon with them, at the
rate of eighteen miles a day, in the height of a torrid summer, for
close upon a month on end. There is no parallel to such an effort in the
history of war, nor did contemporary opinion exaggerate when it saw in
the battalion of Marseilles the centre of the coming fight.
The shock between the palace and the populace was joined in the morning
of the 10th of August. The palace was held by about six thousand men,[3]
of whom some twelve hundred were regulars of the Swiss Guard. The palace
(the Tuileries) was, or should have been, impregnable. The popular
attack, we may be certain, would have been beaten back had the
connection between the Tuileries and the Louvre on the south been
properly cut. The flooring had indeed been removed at this point for
some distance, but either the gap was not wide enough or the post was
insufficiently guarded; the populace and the Federals, badly beaten in
their main attack upon the long front of the palace, succeeded in
turning its flank where it joined on to the Louvre; they thus enfiladed
the suites of rooms and utterly put an end to the resistance of its
garrison.
Meanwhile the King and Queen, the Dauphin and his little sister, with
others of the royal household, had taken refuge during the fighting in
the hall of the Parliament.
After the victory of the populace their fate was debated and decided
upon; they were imprisoned in the Tower of the Temple, a mediæval
fortress still standing in the north-east of Paris, and though monarchy
was not yet formally abolished, the most extreme spirits which the
Revolution then contained, and the most vigorous, stepped into the place
of the old Executive, with Danton at their head. With them appeared in
the seat of Government the spirit of military action, its contempt for
forms and its rapid decision. The known accomplices of the supporters of
the Court’s resistance and alliance with the invaders were arrested by
the hundred. The enrolment of volunteers, already enthusiastic
throughout France, was supported with the new vigour of official aid;
and the Revolution left at once all its old moorings to enter an extreme
phase. At the same moment the frontier was crossed and the national soil
invaded on the 19th of August.
It is possible that the delay of the Prussians until that moment had
been calculated, for the position in France was complicated and their
decision to fight had been tardily arrived at. It was the news of the
fall of the palace that seems to have decided them. The place, like the
date, of this grave event, deserves to be more famous than it is.
Brunswick touched what was then French soil, in that little triangle
where now German and French Lorraine and Luxembourg meet. The village is
called Redange: thence did the privileged of Europe set out to reach
Paris and to destroy democracy. The first task occupied them for full
twenty-two years, upon the latter they are still engaged.
What forces the French could there bring against Brunswick were
contemptuously brushed aside. Four days later he had, as we have seen,
taken the frontier stronghold of Longwy; within a week he was in front
of Verdun.
Verdun had no chance of resistance, no garrison to call a garrison, and
no opportunity for defence. The news that it must fall reached Paris on
the morning of a fatal date, the 2nd of September; after its fall there
would lie nothing between it and the capital; and from that moment the
whole nature of the Revolution is wholly transformed by the
psychological effect of war.
V
_From the invasion of September 1792 to the establishment of the
Committee of Public Safety, April 1793._
The fifth phase of the French Revolution may be said to date from these
first days of September 1792, when the news of the successful invasion
was maddening Paris, and when the revolutionary Executive, established
upon the ruins of the old dead monarchy and in its image, was firmly in
the saddle, up to the establishment of the yet more monarchical
“Committee of Public Safety,” seven months later. And these seven months
may be characterised as follows:--
They were a period during which it was attempted to carry on the
revolutionary war against the Governments of Europe upon democratic
principles. The attempt failed. In the place of discipline and
comprehension and foresight the rising and intense enthusiasm of the
moment was depended upon for victory. The pure ideal of the Girondin
faction, with the model republic which it hoped to establish, proved
wholly insufficient for the conduct of a war; and to save the nation
from foreign conquest and the great democratic experiment of the
Revolution from disaster, it was necessary that the military and
disciplined side of the French, with all the tyranny that accompanies
that aspect of their national genius, should undertake the completion of
the adventure.
This period opens with what are called the Massacres of September. I
have said upon a former page that “the known accomplices and supporters
of the Court’s alliance with the invaders were arrested by the hundred,”
upon the fall of the palace and the establishment of a revolutionary
Executive with Danton at its head.
These prisoners, massed in the jails of the city, were massacred to the
number of eleven hundred by a small but organised band of assassins
during the days when the news of the fall of Verdun was expected and
reached the capital. Such a crime appalled the public conscience of
Europe and of the French people. It must never be confused with the
judicial and military acts of the Terror, nor with the reprisals
undertaken against rebellion, nor with the gross excesses of mob
violence; for though votes in favour of the immediate execution of those
who had sided with the enemies of the country were passed in certain
primary assemblies, the act itself was the mechanical, deliberate and
voluntary choice of a few determined men. It had, therefore, a character
of its own, and that character made it stand out for its contemporaries
as it should stand out for us: it was murder.
The prisoners were unarmed--nay, though treasonable, they had not
actually taken arms; their destruction was inspired, in most of those
who ordered it, by mere hatred. Those who ordered it were a small
committee acting spontaneously, and Marat was their chief.[4]
It was under the impression of these massacres that the Deputies of the
new or third Assembly of the Revolution, known to history as _The
Convention_, met in Paris.
This Parliament was to be at first the actual, later the nominal
governing power in France during the three critical years that followed;
years which were the military salvation of the Revolution, and which
therefore permitted the establishment of the democratic experiment in
modern Europe.
It was on the 20th of September that the Convention met for its first
sitting, which was held in the palace of the Tuileries. During the hours
of that day, while it was electing its officials, choosing its Speaker
and the rest, the French Army upon the frontier, to its own astonishment
and to that of its enemy, managed to hold in check at the cannonade of
_Valmy_ the allied invaders.
Upon the morrow the new Assembly met in the riding school (the Manège),
where the two former Assemblies had also sat. It was about to separate
after that day’s sitting when one of the members proposed the abolition
of Royalty; the Convention voted the reform unanimously and dispersed.
On the third day, the 22nd of September, it was decreed that the public
documents should henceforward bear the date “First Year of the
Republic”; but there was no solemnity on the occasion; the idea of “No
King” was novel and untried; there was as yet no enthusiasm for any save
the monarchic form of government. It was not until the title “Republic”
began to connote in men’s minds political liberty, and had become also
the flag, as it were, for the victorious national defence, that the
Republican name acquired in our Europe, and from France, that strong and
almost religious force which it has since retained.
The check given to the invaders at Valmy (again to the astonishment of
both soldiers and statesmen!) determined the campaign. Sickness and the
difficulty of communications made the further advance of the invaders
impossible. They negotiated for and obtained an unmolested retreat, and
a few weeks later they had re-crossed the frontier.
Meanwhile, in Paris the great quarrel had begun between the Municipal
and the National Government, which, because Paris was more decided, more
revolutionary, and, above all, more military in temper than the
Parliament, was destined to terminate in the victory of the capital. The
Girondins still stood in the Assembly for an ideal republic; a republic
enjoying to the utmost limit individual liberty in its citizens and the
autonomy of local government in every city and parish; but opposed to
this ideal, and far more national, was that of the revolutionary
extremists, called in the Convention “the Mountain,” who had the support
of the Municipal Government of Paris (known as “the Commune”), and were
capable of French victories in the field. These stood for the old French
and soldierly conception of a strong central Government, wherewith to
carry on the life-and-death struggle into which the Revolution had now
entered: therefore they conquered.
All that autumn the quarrel between France and Europe remained doubtful,
for though the armies of the Republic under Dumouriez won the battle of
Jemappes, swept across the north-eastern frontier and occupied Belgium,
while to the south another French army swept right up to the Rhine,
Dumouriez himself knew well enough that a campaign undertaken merely
upon enthusiasm, and with troops so mixed in character and many of them
so undisciplined, would end fatally. But until the advent of the new
year public opinion was not instructed upon these lines, and the
revolutionary war seemed to have passed suddenly from the defence of the
national territory to a crusade against the kings and the aristocratic
Governments of Europe. Enthusiasm, and enthusiasm alone, was the force
of the moment. Violent decrees such as the Declaration of Fraternity
(which decreed an alliance with all people struggling to be free) and
the opening of the Scheldt (a direct violation of treaty rights to which
England, among other nations, was a partner) were characteristic of the
moment; chief act of all, the King was put upon his trial at the bar of
the Parliament.
It was upon the 4th of January, 1793 (the King had already made his will
upon Christmas Day), that the chief orator of the Girondins moved that
the sentence should be referred to the people for ratification. The fear
of civil war more than anything else forbade this just suggestion to
pass. Upon the 15th of January the question was put to the Parliament,
“whether the King had been guilty of conspiring against public liberty
and of attempting the general safety of the State.” Many were absent and
many abstained: none replied in the negative; the condemnation of Louis
was therefore technically almost a unanimous one.
The voting on these grave issues was what the French call “nominal”:
that is, each member was called upon “by name” to give his vote--and an
expression of opinion as well if he so chose. A second attempt to appeal
to the people was rejected by 424 to 283. On the third question, which
was the decisive one of the penalty, 721 only could be found to vote,
and of these a bare majority of 53 declared for death as against the
minority, of whom some voted for the death penalty “conditionally”--that
is, not at all--or voted against it. A respite was lost by a majority of
70; and on the 21st of January, 1793, at about ten in the morning, Louis
XVI was guillotined.
Then followed war with England, with Holland, and with Spain; and almost
at that moment began the inevitable reflux of the military tide. For the
French eruption up to the Rhine in the Low Countries and the Palatinate,
had no permanent military basis upon which to depend. Dumouriez began to
retreat a month after the King’s execution, and on the 18th of March
suffered a decisive defeat at Neerwinden. It was this retreat, followed
by that disaster, which decided the fate of the Girondin attempt to
found a republic ideally, individually, and locally free. Already,
before the battle of Neerwinden was fought, Danton, no longer a
minister, but still the most powerful orator in the Convention, proposed
a special court for trying cases of treason--a court which was later
called “the Revolutionary Tribunal.” The news of Neerwinden prepared the
way for a stronger measure and some exceptional form of government; a
special Parliamentary committee already formed for the control of
ministers was strengthened when, on the 5th of April, after some
negotiation and doubt, Dumouriez, despairing of the armies of the
Republic, thought to ally his forces with the invaders and to restore
order. His soldiers refused to follow him; his treason was apparent;
upon the morrow the Convention nominated that first “Committee of Public
Safety” which, with its successor of the same name, was henceforward the
true despotic and military centre of revolutionary government. It was
granted secrecy in deliberation, the virtual though not the theoretic
control of the Ministry, sums of money for secret expenditure, and, in a
word, all the machinery necessary to a military executive. Rousseau’s
_Dictator_ had appeared, the great mind which had given the _Contrat
Social_ to be the gospel of the Revolution had also foreseen one of the
necessary organs of democracy in its hardest trial; his theory had been
proved necessary and true in fact. Nine members formed this first
Committee: Barère, who may be called the clerk of it, Danton its genius,
and Cambon its financier, were the leading names.
With the establishment of this truly national and traditional thing,
whose form alone was novel, but whose power and method were native to
all the military tradition of Gaul, the Revolution was saved. We have
now chiefly to follow the way in which the Committee governed and in
which it directed affairs in the great crisis of the war. This sixth
phase lasts for nearly sixteen months, from the beginning of April 1793
to the 28th of July 1794, and it is convenient to divide those sixteen
months into two divisions.
VI
_From April 1793 to July 1794._
The first division of this period, which ends in the height of the
summer of 1793, is the gradual consolidation of the Committee as a new
organ of government and the peril of destruction which it runs, in
common with the nation it governs at the hands of allied Europe.
The second period includes part of August and all the rest of 1793, and
the first seven months of 1794, during which time the Committee is
successful in its military effort, the nation is saved, and in a manner
curiously dramatic and curiously inconsequential, the martial _régime_
of the Terror abruptly ceases.
The first step in the consolidation of the power of the Committee was
their letting loose of the Commune of Paris and the populace it governed
against the Girondins.
Looked at merely from the point of view of internal politics (upon
which most historians have concentrated) the attack of the populace of
Paris and their Commune against the Parliament seems to be no more than
the end of the long quarrel between the Girondins with their ideal
federal republic, and the capital with its instinct for strong
centralised government. But in the light of the military situation, of
which the Committee of Public Safety were vividly aware, and which it
was their business to control, a very different tale may be told.
When the defeats began the Parliament had voted a levy of three hundred
thousand men. It was a mere vote which came to very little: not enough
in numbers and still less in moral, for the type of troops recruited
under a system of money forfeit and purchased substitutes was wholly
beneath the task of the great war.
This law of conscription had been passed upon the 24th of February. The
date for its first application was, in many villages, fixed for the 10th
of March. All that country which borders the estuary of the Loire, to
the north and to the south, a country whose geographical and political
peculiarities need not here detain us, but which is still curiously
individual, began to resist. The decree was unpopular everywhere, of
course, as military service is everywhere unpopular with a settled
population. But here it had no ally, for the Revolution and all its
works were grossly unpopular as well. The error of the Civil
Constitution of the Clergy was a powerful factor in this revolt. The
piety and the orthodoxy of this district were and are exceptional. Some
such resistance in some such quarter was perhaps expected: what was not
expected was its military success.
Four days before the defeat of Neerwinden itself, and four days after
the decree of conscription in the villages, a horde of peasantry had
taken possession of the town of Chollet in the southern part of this
district, Vendée. Three days before the Committee of Public Safety was
formed the insurgents had defeated regular forces at Machecoul, and had
tortured and put to death their prisoners. The month of April, when the
Committee of Public Safety was first finding its seat in the saddle, saw
the complete success of the rebels. The forces sent against them were
worthless, for all military effort had been concentrated upon the
frontier. Most of them were not even what we should call militia. A
small force of regulars was to have moved from Orleans, but, before they
could attack, Thouars, Parthenay, and Fontenay fell into the power of
the rebels. These posts afforded an advanced triangle right into the
regularly administered territory of the Republic: the great town of
Nantes was outflanked. Even in such a moment the Girondins still clung
to their ideal: an individually free and locally autonomous republic. It
is little wonder that the temper of Paris refused to support them, or
their influence over the Parliament, and we can easily understand how
the new Committee supported Paris in its revolt.
That revolt took place on the 31st of May. The forces under the command
of the capital did not march, but a deputation of the sections of Paris
demanded the arrest of the leading Girondins. The body of the debating
hall was invaded by the mob. The Committee of Public Safety pretended to
compromise between Paris and the Parliament, but a document, recently
analysed, sufficiently proves that their sympathy was with the Parisian
attack. They proposed, indeed, to put the armed force of Paris at the
disposition of the Assembly: that is, in their own hands.
That day nothing of moment was done, but the Parliament had proved of no
strength in the face of the capital. On the frontier the advance of the
invaders had begun. The great barrier fortress of Valenciennes relied
for its defence upon the neighbouring camp of Famars. The garrison of
that camp had been compelled to evacuate it by the advance of the Allied
Army upon the 23rd of May, and though some days were to be spent before
the heavy artillery of the Austrians could be emplaced, Valenciennes was
henceforward at the mercy of its besiegers. There was news that La
Vendée was not the only rebellion. Lyons had risen three days before.
There had been heavy fighting. The Royalists and the Girondins had
combined and had carried the town hall and established an
insurrectionary and unelected Municipal Government. Such news, coming
immediately after the 31st of May, roused the capital to action. This
time the Parisian forces actually marched against the Parliament. The
demand for the suspension of the twenty-two named Girondin deputies was
made under arms. Much has been written, and by the best historians, to
make of this successful day a mere conquest by the Commune of Paris over
the Parliament. Though Barère and Danton both protested in public, it
was in reality their politics that conquered with Paris. To the
twenty-two names that the forces of Paris had listed, seven were added.
The great Girondins, Brissot, Vergniaud and the rest, were not indeed
imprisoned, they were considered “under arrest in their houses.” But the
moral authority of the Convention as an administrative machine, not as a
legislative one, was broken on this day, the 2nd of June, 1793. Paris
had ostensibly conquered, but the master who was stronger than ever and
whom Paris had served, was the Committee of Public Safety.
This first Committee of Public Safety endured to the 10th of July. In
the midst of such a war and of such an internal struggle the Convention
had voted (upon the initiative of the Committee of Public Safety) the
famous Constitution of ’93, that prime document of democracy which, as
though to mock its own ideal, has remained no more than a written thing
from then until now. Therein will be found universal suffrage, therein
the yearly Parliament, therein the referendum, therein the elected
Executive--a thing no Parliament would ever give us to-day. The
Constitution was passed but three weeks after the successful
insurrection of Paris. A fortnight later still, on the 10th of July, the
first of the Committees of Public Safety was followed by its successor.
All this while the Vendeans were advancing. Nantes, indeed, had held out
against the rebels, but as we shall see in a moment, the Republican
troops had not yet made themselves good. The rebellion of Lyons was
fortifying itself, and a week later was to execute the Radical Chalier.
Marseilles was rising. On the 10th of July the Convention summoned to
its bar Westermann, the friend of Danton, who had just suffered defeat
at the hands of the western rebels.
It is well to note at this point one of those small individual factors
which determine the fate of States. Danton, the master of all that first
movement towards centralisation, the man who had made the 10th of
August, who had negotiated with the Prussians after Valmy, who had
determined upon and formed a central government against the Girondin
anarchy--had broken down. His health was gone. He was a giant in body,
but for the moment he had tired himself out.
The renewing of his Committee was proposed: he was thrust out from the
new choice. Barère remained to link the old Committee with the new. A
violent sectarian Calvinist pastor, Jeanbon Saint-André, among the
bravest and most warped of the Revolutionaries; Couthon, a friend of
Robespierre; Saint-Just, a still more intimate friend (a young,
handsome, enormously courageous and decisive man), entered, with others
to the number of nine, the new Committee. Seventeen days later, on the
27th of July, Robespierre replaced one of the minor members thus chosen.
He had precisely a year to live, and it is the moment for fixing before
the reader’s mind the nature of his career.
Robespierre was at this moment the chief figure in the eyes of the
crowd, and was soon to be the chief revolutionary figure in the eyes of
Europe: that is the first point. The second is of equal importance, and
is far less generally recognised. He was not, and was never destined to
be, the chief force in the revolutionary Government.
As to the first point, Robespierre had attained this position from the
following combination of circumstances: first, alone of the
revolutionary personalities, he had been continually before the public
eye from the beginning; he had been a member of the first Parliament of
all and had spoken in that Parliament in the first month of its
sessions. Though then obscure in Versailles, he was already well known
in his province and native town of Arras.
Secondly, this position of his in the public eye was maintained without
a break, and his position and reputation had increased by accumulation
month after month for the whole four years. No one else was left in the
political arena of whom this could be said. All the old reactionaries
had gone, all the moderate men had gone; the figures of 1793 were all
new figures--except Robespierre; and he owed this continued and steady
increase of fame to:--
Thirdly, his conspicuous and vivid sincerity. He was more wholly
possessed of the democratic faith of the _Contrat Social_ than any other
man of his time: he had never swerved from an article of it. There is no
better engine for enduring fame than the expression of real convictions.
Moreover--
Fourthly, his speeches exactly echoed the opinions of his audience, and
echoed them with a lucidity which his audience could not have commanded.
Whether he possessed true eloquence or no is a matter still debated by
those who are scholars in French letters. But it is certain that he had
in his own time all the effects of a great orator, though his manner was
precise and cold.
Fifthly, he was possessed of a consistent body of doctrine: that is, he
was not only convinced of the general democratic creed which his
contemporaries held, and he not only held it unswervingly and
uncorruptedly, but he could supplement it with a system of morals and
even something which was the adumbration of religion.
Sixthly, he had, as such characters always can, but not often do, gather
round themselves, a group of intensely devoted personal admirers and
supporters, chief of whom was the young and splendidly courageous
Saint-Just.
It was the combination of all these things, I say, which made
Robespierre the chief personality in the public eye when he entered the
Committee of Public Safety on the 27th of July, 1793.
Now let it be noted that, unlike his follower Saint-Just, and
exceedingly unlike Danton, Robespierre possessed none of those military
qualities without which it is impossible to be responsible for
government over a military nation--especially if that nation be in the
act of war: and such a war! The Committee of Public Safety was the Cæsar
of revolutionary France. Robespierre as a member of that Cæsar was
hopeless. His popularity was an advantage to his colleagues in the
Committee, but his conception of action upon the frontiers was vague,
personal, and futile. His ambition for leadership, if it existed, was
subordinate to his ambition to be the saviour of his people and of their
democratic experiment, and he had no comprehension of those functions of
leadership by which it can co-ordinate detail and impose a plan of
action. Robespierre, therefore, in every crisis of the last year we are
about to study, yielded to his colleagues, never impressed them and
never led them, and yet (it was the irony of his fate) was imagined by
his fellow countrymen and by the warring Governments of Europe to be the
master of them all.
The first weeks after his appearance in the Committee of Public Safety
were the critical weeks of the whole revolutionary movement. The
despotic action of Paris (which I have concluded to be secretly
supported by the Committee)[5] had provoked insurrection upon all sides
in the provinces. Normandy had protested, and on the 13th of July a
Norman girl stabbed Marat to death. Lyons, as we have seen, had been
some weeks in revolt; Marseilles had rebelled in the first week of June,
Bordeaux and the whole department of the Gironde had of course risen,
for their men were at stake. Later Toulon, the great naval depot of
France, revolted: a reactionary municipal provincial Government was
formed in that port, the little boy imprisoned in the Temple, heir to
the kingdom, was proclaimed under the title of Louis XVII, and before
the end of August the English and Spanish fleets had been admitted into
the harbour and an excellent foreign garrison was defending the town
against the national Government.
Meanwhile the Allies upon the Belgian frontier were doing what they
could, taking fortress after fortress, and while Mayence was falling on
the Rhine, Valenciennes and Condé were capitulating on the north-eastern
border, and a portion of the Allied Army was marching to besiege
Dunquerque. The insurrection in Vendée, which had broken out in the
early part of the year, though checked by the resistance of Nantes, was
still successful in the field.
It was in the month of August that a successful effort was made. Carnot,
who soon proved the military genius of the Revolution, entered the
Committee of Public Safety. On the 23rd of the month a true levy, very
different from the futile and insufficiently applied attempt of the
spring, was forced upon the nation by a vote in Parliament. It was a
levy of men, vehicles, animals and provision, and soon furnished
something not far short of half a million soldiers. With September the
tide turned, the first victory in this crisis of the struggle,
Hoondschoote, relieved Dunquerque in the early days of September. By
mid-October a second and decisive victory, that of Wattignies, relieved
Maubeuge. Lyons had been taken, Normandy was pacified long before; by
the end of the year Toulon was reoccupied, and at the same time the last
cohesive force of the Vendeans destroyed.
But meanwhile the crisis had had a double effect, moral and material.
The moral effect had been a sort of national madness in which the most
extreme measures were proposed and many of them carried through with
what one may call a creative audacity. The calendar itself was changed,
the week itself abolished, the months re-named and re-adjusted. Such an
act sufficiently symbolises the mental attitude of the Revolutionaries.
They were determined upon a new earth.
There went with this the last and most violent attack upon what was
believed to be the last remnants of Catholicism in the country, a
hideous persecution of the priesthood, in which an uncounted number of
priests died under the rigours of transportation or of violence. The
reprisals against the rebels varied from severity of the most awful kind
to cruelty that was clearly insane, and of which the worst examples took
place at Arras and at Nantes.
In all this turmoil the governing centre of the country, the Committee
of Public Safety, not only kept its head but used the enormous forces of
the storm for the purposes of achieving military success, under that
system known as “the Terror,” which was for them no more than martial
law, and an engine of their despotic control. Of the two thousand and
more that passed before the revolutionary tribunal and were executed in
Paris, the large majority were those whom the Committee of Public Safety
judged to be obstacles to their military policy; and most were men or
women who had broken some specific part of the martial code which the
Government had laid down. Some were generals who had failed or were
suspected of treason; and some, among the most conspicuous, were
politicians who had attempted to check so absolute a method of
conducting the war.
Of these the greatest was Danton. Before the end of 1793 he began to
protest against the system of the Terror; he believed, perhaps, that the
country was now safe in the military sense and needed such rigours no
more. But the Committee disagreed, and were evidence available we should
perceive that Carnot in particular determined that such opposition must
cease. Danton and his colleagues--including Desmoulins, the journalist
of the Revolution and the chief publicist who promoted the days of July
1789--were executed in the first week of April 1794.
Parallel to this action on the part of the Committee was their sudden
attack upon men of the other extreme: the men whose violence, excessive
even for that time, threatened to provoke reaction. Hébert was the chief
of these, the spokesman of the Commune of Paris; and he also perished.
Meanwhile the Committee had permitted other persecutions and other
deaths, notably that of the Queen. A sane policy would have demanded
that she should be kept a hostage: she was sacrificed to the desire for
vengeance, and her head fell on the same day on which the decisive
battle of Wattignies was won. Later the King’s sister, Madame Elisabeth,
was sacrificed to the same passions, and with her must be counted a
certain proportion of the victims whose destruction could be no part of
the Committee’s scheme, and proceeded purely from the motives of an
ancient hatred, though in the case of many of these who were of
aristocratic birth or of influence through their wealth, it is not easy
to determine how far the possibility of their intrigue with the
foreigner may not have led them to the scaffold.
In the last four months of the period we are considering in this book,
through April, that is, after the execution of Danton, through May and
June and almost to the end of July, Robespierre appears with a
particular prominence. Fads or doctrines of his own are admitted upon
the Statute Book of the Revolution, notably his religious dogmas of a
personal God and of the immortality of the soul. Nay, a public solemnity
is arranged in honour of such matters, and he is the high priest
therein. The intensity of the idolatry he received was never greater;
the numbers that shared it were, perhaps, diminishing. It is certain
that he did not appreciate how far the supports of his great popularity
were failing. It is certain that he saw only the increasing enthusiasm
of his immediate followers. The Committee still used him as their
tool--notably for an increase of the Terror in June, but it is possible
that for the first time in all these months he began to attempt some
sort of authority within the Committee: we know, for instance, that he
quarrelled with Carnot, who was easily the strongest man therein.
In the past they had permitted him to indulge a private policy where it
did not interfere with the general military plan. He was largely
responsible, not through his own judgment but from his desire to voice
opinion, for the trial and execution of the Queen. He had temporised
when Danton was beginning his campaign against the Terror at the end of
1793, and it is an ineffaceable blot upon his memory and his justly
earned reputation for integrity and sincerity, that he first permitted
and then helped towards Danton’s execution. We may presume from the few
indications we have that he protested against it in the secret counsels
of the Committee, but he had yielded, and what is more, since Saint-Just
desired to be Danton’s accuser he had furnished Saint-Just with notes
against Danton. Though it was the Committee who were morally responsible
for the extreme extension of the Terror which proceeded during those
last few months, Robespierre had the unwisdom to act as their
instrument, to draft their last decrees, and, believing the Terror to be
popular, to support it in public. It was this that ruined him. The
extreme Terrorists, those who were not yet satiated with vengeance, and
who hated and feared a popular idol, determined to overthrow him.
The mass of those who might be the next victims and who, knowing nothing
of the secret councils of the Committee, imagined Robespierre to be what
he posed as being, the master of the Committee, were eager for his
removal. In his fictitious character as the supposed chief power in the
State, all the growing nausea against the Terror was directed against
his person.
Coincidently with such forces, the Committee, whom, relying upon his
public position, he had begun to interfere with, and probably to check
in their military action (he certainly had attempted unsuccessfully to
save certain lives against the decision of his colleagues), determined
to be rid of him. The crisis came in the fourth week of July: or as the
revolutionary calendar then went, in the second week of Thermidor. He
was howled down in the Parliament, an active and clever conspiracy had
organised all the latent forces of opposition to him; he still so
trusted in his popularity that the scene bewildered him, and he was
still so beloved and so ardently followed, that when at that same
sitting he was outlawed, his brother sacrificed himself to follow him.
Saint-Just was included in the sentence, and his strict friend Lebas
voluntarily accepted the same doom.
What followed was at first a confusion of authority; put under arrest,
the governor of the prison to which Robespierre was dispatched refused
to receive him. He and his sympathisers met in the Hôtel de Ville after
the fall of darkness, and an attempt was made to provoke an
insurrection. There are many and confused accounts of what immediately
followed at midnight, but two things are certain: the populace refused
to rise for Robespierre, and the Parliament, with the Committee at its
back, organised an armed force which easily had the better of the
incipient rebellion at the Hôtel de Ville. It is probable that
Robespierre’s signature was needed to the proclamation of insurrection:
it is certain that he did not complete it, and presumable that he would
not act against all his own theories of popular sovereignty and the
general will. As he sat there with the paper before him and his
signature still unfinished, the armed force of the Parliament burst into
the room, a lad of the name of Merda aimed a pistol from the door at
Robespierre, and shot him in the jaw. (The evidence in favour of this
version is conclusive.) Of his companions, some fled and were captured,
some killed themselves, most were arrested. The next day, the 10th
Thermidor, or 28th of July, 1794, at half-past seven in the evening,
Robespierre, with twenty-one others, was guillotined.
The irony of history would have it that the fall of this man, which was
chiefly due to his interference with the system of the Terror, broke all
the moral force upon which the Terror itself had resided; for men had
imagined that the Terror was his work, and that, he gone, no excuse was
left for it. A reaction began which makes of this date the true term in
that ascending series of revolutionary effort which had by then
discussed every aspect of democracy, succeeded in the military defence
of that experiment, and laid down, though so far in words only, the
basis of the modern State.
FOOTNOTES:
[3] The reader should be warned that these numbers are hotly disputed.
The latest authority will allow no more than 4000. After a full
consultation of the evidence I can reduce the garrison to no less than
6000.
[4] The legend that Danton was connected with the massacres is based on
insufficient historical foundation. There are several second or third
hand stories in support of it, but the chief positive evidence brought
forward in this connection is the stamped paper of the Minister of
Justice which, it has been amply proved by Dr. Robinet, was taken by a
subordinate and without Danton’s knowledge or complicity. To the much
stupider story that the Federals of Marseilles took part in the
massacres, the modern student need pay no attention; it has been
destroyed piecemeal and on indefeasible documentary evidence in the
monograph of Pollio and Marcel.
[5] On p. 403 of my monograph on Danton (Nisbet & Co., 1899) the reader
will find an unpublished report of the Committee of Public Safety, drawn
up immediately before the destruction of the Girondins on the 31st of
May. It forms, in my view, conclusive evidence, read in the light of
their other actions, of the Committee’s determination to side with
Paris.
V
THE MILITARY ASPECT OF THE REVOLUTION
The Revolution would never have achieved its object: on the contrary, it
would have led to no less than a violent reaction against those
principles which were maturing before it broke out, and which it carried
to triumph, had not the armies of revolutionary France proved successful
in the field; but the grasping of this mere historic fact, I mean the
success of the revolutionary armies, is unfortunately no simple matter.
We all know that as a matter of fact the Revolution was, upon the whole,
successful in imposing its view upon Europe. We all know that from that
success as from a germ has proceeded, and is still proceeding, modern
society. But the nature, the cause and the extent of the military
success which alone made this possible, is widely ignored and still more
widely misunderstood. No other signal military effort which achieved its
object has in history ended in military disaster--yet this was the case
with the revolutionary wars. After twenty years of advance, during which
the ideas of the Revolution were sown throughout Western civilisation,
and had time to take root, the armies of the Revolution stumbled into
the vast trap or blunder of the Russian campaign; this was succeeded by
the decisive defeat of the democratic armies at Leipsic, and the superb
strategy of the campaign of 1814, the brilliant rally of what is called
the Hundred Days, only served to emphasise the completeness of the
apparent failure. For that masterly campaign was followed by Napoleon’s
first abdication, that brilliant rally ended in Waterloo and the ruin of
the French army. When we consider the spread of Grecian culture over
the East by the parallel military triumph of Alexander, or the conquest
of Gaul by the Roman armies under Cæsar, we are met by political
phenomena and a political success no more striking than the success of
the Revolution. The Revolution did as much by the sword as ever did
Alexander or Cæsar, and as surely compelled one of the great
transformations of Europe. But the fact that the great story can be read
to a conclusion of defeat disturbs the mind of the student.
Again, that element fatal to all accurate study of military history, the
imputation of civilian virtues and motives, enters the mind of the
reader with fatal facility when he studies the revolutionary wars.
He is tempted to ascribe to the enthusiasm of the troops, nay, to the
political movement itself, a sort of miraculous power. He is apt to use
with regard to the revolutionary victories the word “inevitable,” which,
if ever it applies to the reasoned, willing and conscious action of men,
certainly applies least of all to men when they act as soldiers.
There are three points which we must carefully bear in mind when we
consider the military history of the Revolution.
First, that it succeeded: the Revolution, regarded as the political
motive of its armies, won.
Secondly, that it succeeded through those military aptitudes and
conditions which happened to accompany, but by no means necessarily
accompanied, the strong convictions and the civic enthusiasm of the
time.
Thirdly, that the element of chance, which every wise and prudent
reasoner will very largely admit into all military affairs, worked in
favour of the Revolution in the critical moments of the early wars.
With these points fixed, and with a readiness to return to them when we
have appreciated the military story, it is well to begin our study by
telling that story briefly, and upon its most general lines. In so
doing, it will be necessary to cover here and there points which have
already been dealt with in this book, but that is inevitable where one
is writing of the military aspect of any movement, for it is impossible
to deal with that aspect save as a living part of the whole: so knit
into national life is the business of war.
ONE
When the Revolution first approached action, the prospect of a war
between France and any other great Power of the time--England, Prussia,
the Empire, or let us say Russia, or even Spain--was such a prospect as
might have been entertained at any time during the past two or three
generations of men.
For pretty well a hundred years men had been accustomed to the
consideration of dynastic quarrels supported by a certain type of army,
which in a moment I shall describe.
I have called these quarrels dynastic; that is, they were mainly
quarrels between the ruling houses of Europe: were mainly motived by
the desire of each ruling house to acquire greater territory and
revenue, and were limited by the determination of all the ruling houses
to maintain certain ideas inviolate, as, for instance, the sacredness of
monarchy, the independence of individual States, etc. Though they were
in the main dynastic, yet in proportion as a dynasty might represent a
united nation, they were national also. The English oligarchy was in
this respect peculiar and more national than any European Government of
its time. It is also true to say that the Russian despotism had behind
it, in most of its military adventures and in all its spirit of
expansion, the subconscious agreement of the people.
Still, however national, the wars of the time preceding the Revolution
moved within a fixed framework of ideas, as it were, which no commander
and no diplomatist dreamed of exceeding. A, the crowned head of a State,
would have some claims against B, the crowned head of another State,
with regard to certain territories. C, the crowned head or Government of
a third State, would remain neutral or ally himself with either of the
two; if he allied himself, then, as a rule, it was with the weaker
against the stronger, in order to guarantee himself against too great an
increase on the part of a rival. Or, again, a rebellion would break out
against the power of A in some part of his dominions; then would B,
somewhat reluctantly (as the almost unlimited right of an existing
executive was still a strong dogma in men’s minds), tend to ally
himself with the rebels in order to diminish the power of A.
Human affairs have always in them very strongly and permanently
inherent, the character of a sport: the interest (at any rate of males)
in the conduct of human life is always largely an interest of seeing
that certain rules are kept, and certain points won, according to those
rules. We must, therefore, beware of ridiculing the warfare of the
century preceding the Revolution under the epithet of “a game.” But it
is true of that warfare, and honourably true, that it attempted limited
things in a limited manner; it did not attempt any fundamental change in
society; it was not overtly--since the Thirty Years’ War at least--a
struggle of ideas; it was conducted on behalf of known and limited
interests for known and highly limited objects, and the instruments with
which it was conducted were instruments artificial and segregated from
the general life of nations.
These instruments were what have been called the “professional” armies.
The term is very insufficient, and, in part, misleading. The gentry of
the various Powers, mixed with whom were certain adventurers not always
of gentle blood, were the officers that led these forces; and for the
major part of the gentry in most European countries, the military career
was the chief field of activity. The men whom they led were not a
peasantry nor a working class, still less a civic force in which the
middle class would find itself engaged: they were the poorest and the
least settled, some would have said the dregs of European life. With the
exception here and there of a man--usually a very young man whom the
fabled romance of this hard but glorious trade had attracted--and with
the exception of certain bodies that followed in a mass and by order the
relics of a feudal lordship, the armies of the period immediately
preceding the Revolution were armies of very poor men, who had sold
themselves into a sort of servitude often exciting and even adventurous,
but not, when we examine it minutely, a career that a free man would
choose. The men were caught by economic necessity, by fraud, and in
other ways, and once caught were held. No better proof of this could be
found than the barbarous severity of the punishments attached to
desertion, or to minor forms of indiscipline. So held, they were used
for the purposes of the game, not only in what would make them
serviceable instruments of war, but also in what would make them
pleasing to their masters. Strict alignment, certain frills of parade
and appearance, all that is required in a theatre or in a pretentious
household, appear in the military regulations of the time.
I must not in all this be supposed to be belittling that great period
between 1660 and 1789, during which the art of war was most thoroughly
thought out, the traditions of most of our great European armies fixed,
and the permanent military qualities which we still inherit developed.
The men so caught as private soldiers could not but enjoy the game when
it was actively played, for men of European stock will always enjoy the
game of war; they took glory in its recital and in its memories; to be a
soldier, even under the servile conditions of the time, was a proper
subject for pride, and it is further to be remarked that the excesses of
cruelty discoverable in the establishment of their discipline were also
accompanied by very high and lasting examples of military virtue. The
behaviour of the English contingents at Fontenoy afford but one of many
examples of what I mean.
Still, to understand the wars of the Revolution we must clearly
establish the contrast between the so-called professional armies which
preceded that movement and the armies which the Revolution invented,
used, and bequeathed to the modern world.
So also, to revert to what was said above, we must recall the dynastic
and limited character of the wars in which the eighteenth century had
been engaged; at the outbreak of the Revolution no other wars were
contemplated by men.
Had you spoken, for instance, at any moment in 1789, to a statesman,
whether of old experience or only introduced to political life by the
new movement, of the position of Great Britain, he would at once have
discussed that position in the terms of Great Britain’s recent defeat at
the hands of France in the affair of the American colonies. Had you
discussed with him the position of Prussia he would at once have argued
it in connection with Prussia’s secular opposition to Austria and the
Empire. Had you asked him how he considered Spain, he would have spoken
of the situation of Spain as against France in the light of the fact
that Spain was a Bourbon monarchy allied in blood to the French throne.
And so forth. No true statesman imagined at the time, nor, indeed, for
many years, that a war of _ideas_, nor even, strictly speaking, of
_nations_, was possible. Even when such a war was actually in process of
waging, the diplomacy which attempted to establish a peace, the
intrigues whereby alliances were sought, or neutrality negotiated, were
dependent upon the older conception of things; and the historian is
afforded, as he regards this gigantic struggle, the ironic satisfaction
of seeing men fighting upon doctrines the most universal conceivable and
yet perpetually changing their conduct during the struggle according to
conceptions wholly particular, local and ephemeral, and soon to be
entirely swept away by time.
Napoleon himself must needs marry an Austrian archduchess as part of
this old prejudice, and for years brains as excellent as Danton’s or
Talleyrand’s conjecture the possibility of treating now England, now
Prussia, as neutral to the vast attempt of the French to destroy
privilege in European society!
One may say that for two years the connection of the revolutionary
movement with arms had no aspect save that of civil war. True, whenever
a considerable change is in progress in society the possibility of
foreign war in connection with it must always arise. Were some European
State, for instance, to make an experiment in Collectivism to-day, the
chance of foreign intervention would certainly be discussed by the
promoters of that experiment. But no serious danger of an armed struggle
between the French and any of their neighbours in connection with the
political experiment of the Revolution was imagined by the mass of
educated men in France itself nor without the boundaries of France
during those first two years. And, I repeat, the military aspect of
those years was confined to civil tumult. Nevertheless, that aspect is
not to be neglected. The way in which the French organised their civil
war (and there was always something of it present from the summer of
1789 onwards) profoundly affected the foreign war that was to follow:
for in their internal struggles great masses of Frenchmen became
habituated to the physical presence, millions to the discussion, of
arms.
It is, as we have seen in another part of this book, a repeated and
conspicuous error to imagine that the first revolutionary outbreaks were
not met sufficiently sternly by royal troops. On the contrary, the royal
troops were used to the utmost and were defeated. The populace of the
large towns, and especially of Paris, proved itself capable of military
organisation and of military action. When to this capacity had been
added the institution of the militia called the National Guard, there
were already the makings of a nation wholly military.
Much in this exceptional and new position must be ascribed to the Gallic
character. It may be said that from the fall of the Roman Empire to the
present day that character has been permanently and of its own volition
steeped in the experience of organised fighting. Civil tumult has been
native to it, the risk of death in defence of political objects has been
equally familiar, and the whole trade of arms, its necessary
organisation, its fatigues and its limiting conditions, have been very
familiar to the population throughout all these centuries. But beyond
this the fact that the Revolution prepared men in the school of civil
tumult was of the first advantage for its later aptitude against foreign
Powers.
It is always well in history to fix a definite starting-point for any
political development, and the starting-point of the revolutionary wars
may easily be fixed at the moment when Louis, his queen and the royal
children attempted to escape to the frontier and to the Army of the
Centre under the command of Bouillé. This happened, as we have seen, in
June 1791.
Many factors combine to make that date the starting-point. In the first
place, until that moment no actual proof had been apparent in the eyes
of European monarchs of the captivity of their chief exemplar, the king
of France.
The wild march upon Versailles, in the days of October 1789, had its
parallel in a hundred popular tumults with which Europe was familiar
enough for centuries. But the rapidly succeeding reforms of the year
1790, and even the great religious blunder of 1791, had received the
signature and the public assent of the Crown. The Court, though no
longer at Versailles, was splendid, the power of the King over the
Executive still far greater than that of any other organ in the State,
and indefinitely greater than that of any other individual in the State.
The talk of captivity, of insult and the rest, the outcries of the
emigrants and the perpetual complaint of the French royal family in its
private relations, seemed exaggerated, or at any rate nothing to act
upon, until there came the shock of the King’s attempted flight and
recapture. This clinched things; and it clinched them all the more
because more than one Court, and especially that of Austria, believed
for some days that the escape had been successful.
Again, the flight and its failure put the army into a ridiculous
posture. Action against the Revolution was never likely, so long as the
discipline and steadiness of the French army were believed in abroad.
But the chief command had hopelessly failed upon that occasion, and it
was evident that the French-speaking troops could not easily be trusted
by the Executive Government or by their own commanders. Furthermore, the
failure of the flight leads the Queen, with her vivacity of spirit and
her rapid though ill-formed plans, to turn for the first time to the
idea of military intervention. Her letters suggesting this (in the form
of a threat rather than a war, it is true) do not begin until after her
capture at Varennes.
Finally, coincident with that disaster was the open mention of a
Republic, the open suggestion that the King should be deposed, and the
first definite and public challenge to the principles of monarchy which
the Revolution had thrown down before Europe.
We are, therefore, not surprised to find that this origin of the
military movement was followed in two months by the Declaration of
Pillnitz.
With the political nature of that Declaration one must deal elsewhere.
Its military character must here be observed.
The Declaration of Pillnitz corresponded as nearly as possible to what
in the present day would be an order preparatory to mobilising a certain
proportion of the reserve. It cannot with justice be called equivalent
to an order _calling out_ all the reserves, still less equivalent to an
order mobilising upon a war footing the forces of a modern nation, for
such an action is tantamount to a declaration of war (as, for instance,
was the action of the English Government before the South African
struggle), and Pillnitz was very far from that. But Pillnitz was
certainly as drastic a military proceeding as would be the public
intimation by a group of Powers that the reserves had been warned in
connection with their quarrel against another Power. It was, for
instance, quite as drastic as the action of Austria against Servia in
1908. And it was intended to be followed by such submission as is
expected to follow upon the threat of superior force.
Such was the whole burden of Marie Antoinette’s letters to her brother
(who had called the meeting at Pillnitz), and such was the sense in
which the politicians of the Revolution understood it.
All that autumn and winter the matter chiefly watched by foreign
diplomatists and the clearest of French thinkers was the condition of
the French forces and of their command. Narbonne’s appointment to the
War Office counted more than any political move, Dumouriez’ succession
to him was the event of the time. Plans of campaign were drawn up (and
promptly betrayed by Marie Antoinette to the enemy), manifold occasions
for actual hostilities were discovered, the Revolution challenged the
Emperor in the matter of the Alsatian princes, the Emperor challenged,
through Kaunitz, the Revolution in a letter directly interfering with
the internal affairs of France, and pretending to a right of _ingérence_
therein; and on the 20th of April, 1792, war was declared against the
Empire. Prussia thereupon informed the French Government that she made
common cause with the Emperor, and the revolutionary struggle had begun.
The war discovered no serious features during its first four months: so
slow was the gathering and march of the Allies; but the panics into
which the revolutionary troops fell in the first skirmishes, their lack
of discipline, and the apparent breakdown of the French military power,
made the success of the Invasion in Force, when it should come, seem
certain. The invading army did not cross the frontier until more than a
week after the fall of the palace. Longwy capitulated at once; a week
later, in the last days of August, the great frontier fortress of Verdun
was summoned. It capitulated almost immediately.
TWO
On the 2nd of September Verdun was entered by the Prussians, and a
little outside the gates of the town, near a village bearing the name of
Regret, the allied camp was fixed. Rather more than a week later, on the
11th, the Allies marched against the line of the Argonne.
The reader will remember that this moment, with the loss of the frontier
fortresses Longwy and Verdun, and the evidence of demoralisation which
that afforded, was also the moment of the September massacres and of the
horrors in Paris. Dumouriez and the mixed French force which he
commanded had been ordered by the Ministers of War to hold the line of
the Argonne against which the Allies were marching. And here it is well
to explain what was meant in a military sense by this word “line.”
The Argonne is a long, nearly straight range of hills running from the
south northward, a good deal to the west of north.
Their soil is clay, and though the height of the hills is only three
hundred feet above the plain, their escarpment or steep side is towards
the east, whence an invasion may be expected. They are densely wooded,
from five to eight miles broad, the supply of water in them is bad, in
many parts undrinkable; habitation with its provision for armies and
roads extremely rare. It is necessary to insist upon all these details
because the greater part of civilian readers find it difficult to
understand how formidable an obstacle so comparatively unimportant a
feature in the landscape may be to an army upon the march. It was quite
impossible for the guns, the wagons, and therefore the food and the
ammunition of the invading army, to pass through the forest over the
drenched clay land of that wet autumn save where proper roads existed.
These were only to be found wherever a sort of natural pass negotiated
the range.
Three of these passes alone existed, and to this day there is very
little choice in the crossing of these hills. The accompanying sketch
will explain their disposition. Through the southernmost went the great
high road from the frontier and Verdun to Paris. At the middle one
(which is called the Gap of Grandpré) Dumouriez was waiting with his
incongruous army. The third and northern one was also held, but less
strongly. The obvious march for an unimpeded invader would have been
from Verdun along the high road, through the southern pass at “Les
Islettes,” and so to Chalôns and on to Paris. But Dumouriez, marching
down rapidly from the north, had set an advanced guard to hold that pass
and was lying himself with the mass of the army on the pass to the north
of it at Grandpré. Against Grandpré the Prussians marched, and meanwhile
the Austrians were attacking the further pass to the north. Both were
forced. Dumouriez fell back southward to St. Menehould. Meanwhile
Kellermann was coming up from Metz to join him, and all the while the
main pass at “Les Islettes,” through which the great road to Paris went,
continued to be held by the French.
[Illustration: Sketch Map, showing the turning of the positions on the
Argonne and the Cannonade at Valmy, September 1792.]
The Prussians and the Austrians joined forces in the plain known as the
Champagne Pouilleuse, which lies westward of Argonne. It will be seen
that as they marched south along this plain to meet Dumouriez and to
defeat him, their position was a peculiar one: they were nearer the
enemy’s capital than the enemy’s army was, and yet they had to fight
with their backs to that capital, and their enemy the French had to
fight with their faces towards it. Moreover, it must be remarked that
the communications of the Allied Army were now of a twisted, roundabout
sort, which made the conveyance of provisions and ammunition slow and
difficult--but they counted upon an immediate destruction of Dumouriez’
force and after that a rapid march on the capital.
On September 19 Kellermann came up from the south and joined hands with
Dumouriez near St. Menehould, and on the morning of the 20th his force
occupied a roll of land on which there was a windmill and immediately
behind which was the village of Valmy; from this village the ensuing
action was to take its name. It must here be insisted upon that both
armies had been subjected to the very worst weather for more than a
fortnight, but of the two the Prussian force had suffered from this
accident much more severely than the French. Dysentery had already
broken out, and the length and tortuousness of their communications were
greatly emphasised by the condition of the roads.
On the morning of that day, the 20th of September, a mist impeded all
decisive movements. There was an encounter, half accidental, between an
advanced French battery and the enemy’s guns, but it was not until
mid-morning that the weather lifted enough to show each force its
opponent. Then there took place an action, or rather a cannonade, the
result of which is more difficult to explain, perhaps, than any other
considerable action of the revolutionary wars. For some hours the
Prussian artillery, later reinforced by the Austrian, cannonaded the
French position, having for its central mark the windmill of Valmy,
round which the French forces were grouped. At one moment this cannonade
took effect upon the limbers and ammunition wagons of the French; there
was an explosion which all eye-witnesses have remembered as the chief
feature of the firing, and which certainly threw into confusion for some
moments the ill-assorted troops under Kellermann’s command. At what hour
this took place the witnesses who have left us accounts differ to an
extraordinary extent. Some will have it at noon, others towards the
middle of the afternoon--so difficult is it to have any accurate account
of what happens in the heat of an action. At any rate, if not
coincidently with this success, at some moment not far removed from it,
the Prussian charge was ordered, and it is here that the difficulties of
the historian chiefly appear. That charge was never carried home;
whether, as some believe, because it was discovered, after it was
ordered, to be impossible in the face of the accuracy and intensity of
the French fire, or whether, as is more probably the case, because the
drenched soil compelled the commanders to abandon the movement after it
had begun--whatever the cause may have been, the Prussian force, though
admirably disciplined and led, and though advancing in the most exact
order, failed to carry out its original purpose. It halted halfway up
the slope, and the action remained a mere cannonade without immediate
result apparent upon either side.
Nevertheless that result ultimately turned out to be very great, and if
we consider its place in history, quite as important as might have been
the result of a decisive action. In the first place, the one day’s delay
which it involved was just more than the calculations of the Allies,
with their long impeded line of communications, had allowed for. In the
next place, a singular increase in determination and moral force was
infused into the disheartened and ill-matched troops of the French
commanders by this piece of resistance.
We must remember that the French force upon the whole expected and
discounted a defeat, the private soldier especially had no confidence in
the result; and to find that at the first action which had been so long
threatened and had now at last come, he could stand up to the enemy,
produced upon him an exaggerated effect which it would never have had
under other circumstances.
Finally, we must recollect that whatever causes had forbidden the
Prussian charge forbade on the next day a general advance against the
French position. And all the time the sickness in the Prussian camp was
rapidly increasing. Even that short check of twenty-four hours made a
considerable difference. A further delay of but yet another day, during
which the Allied Army could not decide whether to attack at once or to
stand as they were, very greatly increased the list of inefficients from
illness.
For a whole week of increasing anxiety and increasing inefficiency the
Allied Army hung thus, impotent, though they were between the French
forces and the capital. Dumouriez ably entertained this hesitation, with
all its accumulating dangers for the enemy, by prolonged negotiations,
until upon the 30th of September the Prussian and Austrian organisation
could stand the strain no longer, and its commanders determined upon
retreat. It was the genius of Danton, as we now know, that chiefly
organised the withdrawal of what might still have been a dangerous
invading force. It is principally due to him that no unwise Jingoism was
permitted to claim a trial of strength with the invader, that he was
allowed to retire with all his guns, his colours and his train. The
retreat was lengthy and unmolested, though watched by the French forces
that discreetly shepherded it but were kept tightly in hand from Paris.
It was more than three weeks later when the Allied Army, upon which
Europe and the French monarchy had counted for an immediate settlement
of the Revolution, re-crossed the frontier, and in this doubtful and
perhaps inexplicable fashion the first campaign of the European Powers
against the Revolution utterly failed.
THREE
Following upon this success, Dumouriez pressed on to what had been, from
the first moment of his power at the head of the army, his personal
plan--to wit, the invasion of the Low Countries.
To understand why this invasion failed and why Dumouriez thought it
might succeed, we must appreciate the military and political situation
of the Low Countries at the time. They then formed a very wealthy and
cherished portion of the Austrian dominions; they had latterly suffered
from deep disaffection culminating in an open revolution, which was due
to the Emperor of Austria’s narrow and intolerant contempt of religion.
From his first foolish policy of persecution and confiscation he had
indeed retreated, but the feeling of the people was still strongly
opposed to the Government at Vienna. It is remarkable, indeed, and in
part due to the pressure of a strongly Protestant and aristocratic
state, Holland, to the north of them, that the people of the Austrian
Netherlands retained at that time a peculiar attachment to the Catholic
religion. The Revolution was quite as anti-Catholic as the Austrian
Emperor, but of the persecution of the latter the Belgians (as we now
call them) knew something; that of the former they had not yet learnt to
dread. It was, therefore, Dumouriez’ calculation that, in invading this
province of the Austrian power, he would be fighting in friendly
territory. Again, it was separated from the political centre of the
empire; it was, therefore, more or less isolated politically, and even
for military purposes communication with it was not so easy, unless,
indeed, Austria could count on a complete co-operation with Prussia,
which Power had been for now so long her ruthless and persistent rival.
[Illustration: Sketch Map of towns occupied by French in 1792 and
evacuated in March 1793, with sites of battles of Jemappes and of
Neerwinden, and of Dumouriez’ treason.]
Favourable, however, as the circumstances appeared for an invasion, two
factors telling heavily against the French had to be counted: the first
was the formation of their army, the second the spirit of rebellion
against any anti-Catholic Government which had given such trouble to
Joseph II.
Of these two factors by far the most important was, of course, the
first. If the French forces had been homogeneous, in good spirit, and
well trained, they might have held what they won; as a fact, they were
most unhomogeneous, great portions of them were ill trained, and, worst
of all, there was no consistent theory of subordinate command. Men who
imagined that subordinate, that is, regimental, command in an army
could be erected from below, and that a fighting force could resemble a
somewhat lax and turbulent democracy, marched alongside of and were
actually incorporated with old soldiers who had spent their whole
careers under an unquestioned discipline, and under a subordinate
command which came to them they knew not whence, and as it were by fate.
The mere mixture of two such different classes of men in one force would
have been bad enough to deal with, but what was worse, the political
theories of the day fostered the military error of the new battalions
though the politicians dared not interfere with the valuable
organisation of the old.
The invasion of the Low Countries began with a great, though somewhat
informal and unfruitful success, in the victory of Jemappes. It was the
first striking and dramatic decisive action which the French, always of
an eager appetite for such news, had been given since between forty and
fifty years. The success in America against the English, though
brilliantly won and solidly founded, had not presented occasions of this
character, and Fontenoy was the last national victory which Paris could
remember. Men elderly or old in this autumn of 1792 would have been boys
or very young men when Fontenoy was fought. The eager generation of the
Revolution, with its military appetites and aptitudes, as yet had hardly
expected victory, though victory was ardently desired by them and
peculiarly suitable to their temper.
It may be imagined, therefore, what an effect the news of Jemappes had
upon the political world in Paris. The action was fought just below the
town of Mons, a few miles over the frontier, and consisted in a somewhat
ill-ordered but successful advance across the River Haine. Whether
because the Austrians, with an inferior force, attempted to hold too
long a line, or because the infantry and even the new French volunteer
battalions, as yet untried by fatigue, proved irresistible in the centre
of the movement, Jemappes was a victory so complete that the attempts of
apologists to belittle it only serve to enhance its character.
Like many another great and apparently decisive action, however, it bore
no lasting fruit. Both the factors of which I have spoken above appeared
immediately after this success. Belgium was, indeed, over-run by the
French, but in their over-running of it with something like eighty
thousand men, they made no attempt to spare the traditions or to
conciliate the sympathies of the inhabitants. Hardly was Jemappes won
when Mons, the neighbouring fortified frontier town, was at once endowed
with the whole machinery of revolutionary government. Church property
was invaded and occasionally rifled, and the French paper money, the
assignats of which we have heard, poured in to disturb and in places to
ruin the excellent commercial system upon which Belgium then as now
reposed.
Jemappes was fought upon the 6th of November, 1792. Brussels was entered
upon the 14th, and throughout that winter the Low Countries lay
entirely in the hands of the French. The Commissioners from the
Convention, though endowing Belgium with republican institutions,
treated it as a conquered country, and before the breaking of spring,
the French Parliament voted its annexation to France. This annexation,
the determination of the politicians in Paris that the new Belgian
Government should be republican and anti-Catholic, the maltreatment of
the Church in the occupied country and the increasing ill discipline and
lack of cohesion in his army, left Dumouriez in a position which grew
more and more difficult as the new year, 1793, advanced. It must be
remembered that this moment exactly corresponded with the execution of
the King and the consequent declaration of war by or against France in
the case of one Power after another throughout Europe. Meanwhile, it was
decided, foolishly enough, to proceed from the difficult occupation of
Belgium to the still more difficult occupation of Holland, and the siege
of Maestricht was planned.
The moment was utterly ill-suited for such a plan. Every Executive in
the civilised world was coalescing openly or secretly, directly or
indirectly, against the revolutionary Government. The first order to
retreat came upon the 8th of March, when the siege of Maestricht was
seen to be impossible, and when the great forces of the Allies were
gathered again to attempt what was to be the really serious attack upon
the Revolution: something far more dangerous, something which much more
nearly achieved success, than the march of the comparatively small force
which had been checked at Valmy.
For ten days the French retreat continued, when, upon the 18th of March,
Dumouriez risked battle at Neerwinden. His army was defeated.
The defeat was not disastrous, the retreat was continued in fairly good
order, but a civilian population understands nothing besides the words
defeat and victory; it can appreciate a battle, not a campaign. The news
of the defeat, coming at a moment of crisis in the politics of Paris,
was decisive; it led to grave doubts of Dumouriez’ loyalty to the
revolutionary Government, it shattered his popularity with those who had
continued to believe in him, while the general himself could not but
believe that the material under his command was rapidly deteriorating.
Before the end of the month the army had abandoned all its conquests,
and Valenciennes, in French territory, was reached upon the 27th. The
dash upon Belgium had wholly failed.
At this moment came one of those political acts which so considerably
disturb any purely military conspectus of the revolutionary wars.
Dumouriez, at the head of his army, which, though in retreat and
defeated, was still intact, determined upon what posterity has justly
called treason, but what to his own mind must have seemed no more than
statesmanship. He proposed an understanding with the enemy and a
combined march upon Paris to restore the monarchical government, and
put an end to what seemed to him, as a soldier, a perfectly hopeless
situation. He certainly believed it impossible for the French army, in
the welter of 1793, to defeat the invader. He saw his own life in peril
merely because he was defeated. He had no toleration for the rising
enthusiasm or delirium of the political theory which had sent him out,
and, even before he had reached French territory, his negotiations with
Coburg, the Austrian commander, had begun. They lasted long. Dumouriez
agreed to put the frontier fortresses of the French into the hands of
the enemy as a guarantee and a pledge; and on the 5th of April all was
ready for the alliance of the two armed forces.
But just as the treason of Dumouriez is, in the military sense, abnormal
and disturbing to any general conspectus of the campaign, so was the
action of his army.
The doubtful point of a general command which is political in nature,
and may be unpopular with the rank and file, lies, of course, in the
attitude of the commanders of units, and these unanimously refused to
obey the orders of their chief. It was known that Dumouriez had been
summoned to the bar of the Convention, which body had sent commissioners
to apprehend him. He had arrested the commissioners, and had handed them
over as hostages and prisoners to Coburg. So far from Dumouriez upon the
critical day handing over his force to the enemy, or constituting it a
part of an allied army to march upon the capital, he was compelled to
fly upon the 8th of April; all that disappeared with him, counting many
who later deserted back again to the French colours, was less than a
thousand men--and these foreign mercenaries.
The consequence of this strange passage upon the political history of
the time we have already seen. Its consequence upon the military history
of it was indirect but profound. The French forces, such as they were,
were still intact, but no general officer could in future be trusted by
Paris, and the stimulus which nations in the critical moments of
invasion and of danger during foreign war seek in patriotism, in the
offering of a high wage to the men and of honours and fortunes to their
commanders, was now sought by the French in the singular, novel and
abnormal experiment of the Terror. Command upon the frontier throughout
1793 and the first part of 1794, during the critical fourteen months,
that is, which decided the fate of the Revolution, and which turned the
tide of arms in favour of the French, was a task accomplished under the
motive power of capital punishment. A blunder was taken as a proof of
treason, and there lay over the ordering of every general movement the
threat of the guillotine.
What we have now to follow is somewhat over a year of a struggle thus
abnormally organised upon the French side, and finally successful
through the genius of a great organiser, once a soldier, now a
politician, Carnot. The French succeeded by the unshakable conviction
which permitted the political leaders to proceed to all extremity in
their determination to save the Revolution; by the peculiar physical
powers of endurance which their army displayed, and finally, of course,
by certain accidents--for accident will always be a determining factor
in war.
The spring of 1793, the months of April and May, form the first crisis
of the revolutionary war. The attack about to be delivered is universal,
and seems absolutely certain to succeed. With the exception of the rush
at Jemappes, where less than thirty thousand Austrians were broken
through by a torrent superior in numbers (though even there obviously
ill-organised), no success had attended the revolutionary armies. Their
condition was, even to the eye of the layman, bad, and to the eye of the
expert hopeless. There was no unity apparent in direction, there were
vast lesions in the discipline of the ranks like great holes torn in
some rotten fabric. Even against the forces already mobilised against
it, it had proved powerless, and it might be taken for granted that by
an act more nearly resembling police work than a true campaign, the
Allies would reach Paris and something resembling the old order be soon
restored. What remains is to follow the process by which this
expectation was disappointed.
The situation at this moment can best be understood by a glance at the
sketch map on p. 178. Two great French advances had been made in the
winter of 1792-93; the one a northern advance, which we have just
detailed, the over-running of Belgium; the other an eastern advance
right up to the Rhine and to the town of Mayence. Both had failed. The
failure in Belgium, culminating in the treason of Dumouriez, has been
read. On the Rhine (where Mayence had been annexed by the French
Parliament just as Belgium had been) the active hostility of the
population and the gathering of the organised forces of the Allies had
the same effect as had been produced in the Low Countries.
It was on March 21, 1793, that the Prussians crossed the Rhine at
Bacharach, and within that week the French commander, Custine, began to
fall back. On the first of April he was back again in French territory,
leaving the garrison of Mayence, somewhat over twenty thousand men, to
hold out as best it could; a fortnight later the Prussians had
surrounded the town and the siege had begun.
On the north-eastern front, stretching from the Ardennes to the sea, a
similar state of things was developing. There, a barrier of fortresses
stood between the Allies and Paris, and a series of sieges corresponding
to the siege of Mayence in the east had to be undertaken. At much the
same time as the investment of Mayence, on April 9, the first step in
this military task was taken by the Allies moving in between the
fortress of Condé and the fortress of Valenciennes. Thenceforward it was
the business of the Austrians under Coburg, with the Allies that were to
reach him, to reduce the frontier fortresses one by one, and when his
communications were thus secure, to march upon Paris.
It is here necessary for the reader unacquainted with military history
to appreciate two points upon which not a little of contemporary
historical writing may mislead him. The first is that both in the Rhine
valley and on the Belgian frontier the forces of the Allies in their
numbers and their organisation were conceived to be overwhelming. The
second is that no competent commander on the spot would have thought of
leaving behind him the garrison of even one untaken fortress. It is
important to insist upon these points, because the political passions
roused by the Revolution are still so strong that men can hardly write
of it without prejudice and bias, and two errors continually present in
these descriptions of the military situation in the spring of 1793, are,
first, that the Allies were weakened by the Polish question, which was
then active, and secondly, that the delay of their commanders before the
French fortresses was unnecessary.
Both these propositions are put forward with the object of explaining
the ultimate defeat of the enemies of the Revolution: both, however
great the authority behind them, are unhistorical and worthless. The
French success was a military success due to certain military factors
both of design and accident, which will appear in what follows. The
Allies played their part as all the art of war demanded it to be played;
they were ultimately defeated, not from the commission of any such
gross and obvious error in policy or strategy as historians with too
little comprehension of military affairs sometimes pretend, but from the
military superiority of their opponents.
It is true that the Polish question (that is the necessity the Austrian
and Prussian Governments were each under of watching that the other was
not lessened in importance by the approaching annexations of further
Polish territory with the consequent jealousy and mistrust that arose
from this between Austria and Prussia) was a very important feature of
the moment. But it is bad military history to pretend that this affected
the military situation on the Rhine or in the Netherlands.
Every campaign is conditioned by its political object. The political
object in this case was to march upon and to occupy Paris. The political
object of a campaign once determined, the size and the organisation of
the enemy are calculated and a certain force is brought against it. No
much larger force is brought than is necessary: to act in such a fashion
would be in military art what paying two or three times the price of an
article would be in commerce. The forces of the Allies upon the Rhine
and in the Netherlands were, in the opinion of every authority of the
time, amply sufficient for their purpose; and more than sufficient: so
much more than sufficient that the attitude of that military opinion
which had to meet the attack--to wit, the professional military opinion
of the French republican soldiers, was that the situation was
desperate, nor indeed was it attempted to be met save by a violent and,
as it were, irrational enthusiasm.
The second point, the so-called “delay” involved in the sieges
undertaken by the Allies, proves, when it is put forward, an
insufficient acquaintance with contemporary conditions. Any fortress
with a considerable garrison left behind untaken would have meant the
destruction of the Austrian or Prussian communications, and their
destruction at a moment when the Austrian and Prussian forces were
actually advancing over a desperately hostile country. Moreover, when
acting against forces wholly inferior in discipline and organisation, an
untaken fortress is a refuge which one must take peculiar pains to
destroy. To throw himself into such a refuge will always stand before
the commander of those inferior forces as a last resource. It is a
refuge which he will certainly avail himself of ultimately, if it is
permitted to him. And when he has so availed himself of it, it means the
indefinite survival of an armed organisation in the rear of the
advancing invaders. We must conclude, if we are to understand this
critical campaign which changed the history of the world, that Coburg
did perfectly right in laying siege to one fortress after another before
he began what every one expected to be the necessarily successful
advance on Paris. The French despair, as one town after another
surrendered, is an amply sufficient proof of the excellence of his
judgment.
We approach the military problem of 1793, therefore, with the following
two fields clear before us:--
1. In the north-east an advance on Paris, the way to which is blocked by
a quadrilateral of fortresses: Mons, Maubeuge, Condé, and Valenciennes,
with the subsidiary stronghold of Lequesnoy in the neighbourhood of the
last. Mons has been in Austrian hands since Dumouriez’ retreat; Condé is
just cut off from Valenciennes by Coburg’s advance, but has not fallen;
Valenciennes and the neighbouring Lequesnoy are still intact, and so is
Maubeuge. All must be reduced before the advance on Paris can begin.
Behind these fortresses is a French army incapable as yet of attacking
Coburg’s command with any hope of success. Such is the position in the
last fortnight of April.
2. Meanwhile, on the Rhine the French garrison in Mayence is besieged;
Custine, the French commander in that quarter, has fallen back on the
French town of Landau, and is drawing up what are known in history as
the Lines of Weissembourg. The accompanying sketch map explains their
importance. Reposing upon the two obstacles of the river on the right
and the mountains on the left, they fulfilled precisely the same
functions as a fortress; and those functions we have just described.
Until these lines were carried, the whole of Alsace may be regarded as a
fortress defended by the mountains and the river on two sides, and by
the Lines of Weissembourg on the third.
A reader unacquainted with military history may ask why the obstruction
was not drawn upon the line of the Prussian advance on Paris. The answer
is that the presence of a force behind fortifications anywhere in the
neighbourhood of a line of communication is precisely equivalent to an
obstacle lying right upon those lines. For no commander can go forward
along the line of his advance and leave a large undestroyed force close
to one side of that line, and so situated that it can come out when he
has passed and cut off his communications; for it is by communications
that an army lives, especially when it is marching in hostile country.
[Illustration: Strategic situation in early summer of 1793. Mayence
besieged, Condé and Valenciennes about to be besieged. Conditions of the
double advance on Paris.]
Custine, therefore, behind his Lines of Weissembourg, and the besieged
garrison in Mayence, correspond to the barrier of fortresses on the
north-east and delayed the advance of the Prussians under Wurmser and
Brunswick from the Rhine, just as Condé, Valenciennes, and Maubeuge
prevented the advance of Coburg on the north-east. Such in general was
the situation upon the eastern frontier at the end of that month of
April, 1793.
FOUR
Let us first follow the development of the northern position. It will be
remembered that all Europe was at war against the French. The Austrians
had for allies Dutch troops which joined them at this moment, and
certain English and Hanoverian troops under the Duke of York who also
joined them.
At this moment, when Coburg found himself in increasing strength, a
tentative French attack upon him was delivered and failed. Dampierre,
who was in command of all this French “Army of the North,” was killed,
and Custine was sent to replace him. The Army of the North did not, as
perhaps it should have done, concentrate into one body to meet Coburg’s
threatened advance; it was perpetually attempting diversions which were
useless because its strength was insufficient. Now it feinted upon the
right towards Namur, now along the sea coast on the left; and these
diversions failed in their object. Before the end of the month, Coburg,
to give himself elbow room, as it were, for the sieges which he was
preparing, compelled the main French force to retreat to a position well
behind Valenciennes. It was immediately after this success of Coburg’s
that Custine arrived to take command on the Belgian frontier, his place
on the Rhine being taken by Houchard.
Custine was a very able commander, but a most unlucky one. His plan was
the right one: to concentrate all the French forces (abandoning the
Rhine) and so form an army sufficient to cope with Coburg’s. The
Government would not meet him in this, and he devoted himself
immediately to the reorganisation of the Army of the North alone. The
month of June and half of July was taken up in that task.
Meanwhile, the Austrian siege work had begun, and Condé was the first
object of its attention. Upon July 10 Condé fell. Meanwhile Custine had
been recalled to Paris, and Valenciennes was invested. Custine was
succeeded by Kilmaine, a general of Irish extraction, who maintained his
position for but a short time, and was unable while he maintained it to
do anything. The forces of the Allies continually increased. The number
at Coburg’s disposal free from the business of besieging Valenciennes
was already larger than the force required for that purpose. And yet
another fifteen thousand Hessian troops marched in while the issue of
that siege was in doubt. This great advantage in numbers permitted him
to get rid of the main French force that was still present in front of
him, though not seriously annoying him.
This force lay due south-west of Valenciennes, and about a day’s march
distant. He depended for the capture of it upon his English and
Hanoverian Allies under the Duke of York, but that general’s march
failed. The distance was too much for his troops in the hot summer
weather, and the French were able to retreat behind the line of the
Scarpe and save their army intact.
The Duke of York’s talents have been patriotically exaggerated in many a
treatise. He always failed: and this was among the most signal of his
failures.
Kilmaine had hardly escaped from York, drawn up his army behind the
Scarpe and put it into a position of safety when he in his turn was
deprived of the command, and Houchard was taken from the Rhine just as
Custine had been, and put at the head of the Army of the North. Before
the main French army had taken up this position of safety, Valenciennes
had fallen. It fell on the 28th of July, and its fall, inevitable though
it was and, as one may say, taken for granted by military opinion, was
much the heaviest blow yet delivered. Nothing of importance remained to
block the march of the Armies of the Allies, save Maubeuge.
At about the same moment occurred three very important changes in the
general military situation, which the reader must note if he is to
understand what follows.
The first was the sudden serious internal menace opposed to the
Republican Government; the second was the advent of Carnot to power; the
third was the English diversion upon Dunquerque.
The serious internal menace which the Government of the Republic had to
face was the widespread rebellion which has been dealt with in the
earlier part of this book. The action of the Paris Radicals against the
Girondins had raised whole districts in the provinces. Marseilles, which
had shown signs of disaffection since April, and had begun to raise a
local reactionary force, revolted. So did Bordeaux, Nîmes, and other
great southern towns. Lyons had risen at the end of May and had killed
the Jacobin mayor of the town in the period between the fall of Condé
and that of Valenciennes. The troop which Marseilles had raised against
the Republic was defeated in the field only the day before Valenciennes
fell, but the great seaport was still unoccupied by the forces of the
Government. The Norman march upon Paris had also failed between those
two dates, the fall of Condé and the fall of Valenciennes. The Norman
bark had proved worse than the Norman bite; but the force was so
neighbouring to the capital that it took a very large place in the
preoccupations of the time. The Vendean revolt, though its triumphant
advance was checked before Nantes a fortnight before the fall of Condé,
was still vigorous, and the terrible reprisals against it were hardly
begun. Worst of all, or at least, worst perhaps, after the revolt of
Lyons, was the defection of Toulon. Toulon rose two days before the fall
of Valenciennes, and was prepared to hand itself over (as at last it did
hand itself over) to occupation by the English fleet.
The dates thus set in their order may somewhat confuse the reader, and I
will therefore summarise the general position of the internal danger
thus: A man in the French camp on the Scheldt, listening to the guns
before Valenciennes fifteen miles away, and hourly expecting their
silence as a signal that the city had surrendered, would have heard by
one post after another how Marseilles still held out against the
Government; how the counter-attack against the successful Vendeans had
but doubtfully begun (all July was full of disasters in that quarter);
how Lyons was furiously successful in her rebellion and had dared to put
to death the Republican mayor of the town; and that the great arsenal
and port at Toulon, the Portsmouth of France upon the Mediterranean, had
sickened of the Government and was about to admit the English fleet. His
only comfort would have been to hear that the Norman march on Paris had
failed--but he would still be under the impression of it and of the
murder of Marat by a Norman woman.
There is the picture of that sudden internal struggle which coincides
with this moment of the revolutionary war, the moment of the fall of
Condé and of Valenciennes, and the exposure of the frontier.
The second point, the advent of Carnot into the Committee of Public
Safety, which has already been touched upon in the political part of
this work, has so preponderating a military significance that we must
consider it here also.
The old Committee of Public Safety, it will be remembered, reached the
end of its legal term on July 10. It was the Committee which the wisdom
of Danton had controlled. The members elected to the new Committee did
not include Carnot, but the military genius of this man was already
public. He came of that strong middle class which is the pivot upon
which the history of modern Europe turns; a Burgundian with lineage,
intensely republican, he had been returned to the Convention and had
voted for the death of the King; a sapper before the Revolution, and one
thoroughly well grounded in his arm and in general reading of military
things, he had been sent by the Convention to the Army of the North on
commission, he had seen its weakness and had watched its experiments.
Upon his return he was not immediately selected for the post in which he
was to transform the revolutionary war. It was not until the 14th of
August that he was given a temporary place upon the Committee which his
talents very soon made permanent. He was given the place merely as a
stopgap to the odious and incompetent fanatic, Saint-André, who was for
the moment away on mission. But from the day of his admission his
superiority in military affairs was so incontestable that he was
virtually a dictator therein, and his first action after the general
lines of organisation had been laid down by him was to impose upon the
frontier armies the necessity of concentration. He introduced what
afterwards Napoleon inherited from him, the tactical venture of “all
upon one throw.”
It must be remembered that Carnot’s success did not lie in any
revolutionary discovery in connection with the art of war, but rather in
that vast capacity for varied detail which marks the organiser, and in
an intimate sympathy with the national character. He understood the
contempt for parade, the severity or brutality of discipline, the
consciousness of immense powers of endurance which are in the Frenchman
when he becomes a soldier;--and he made use of this understanding of
his.
It must be further remembered that this powerful genius had behind him
in these first days of his activity the equally powerful genius of
Danton; for it was Danton and he who gave practical shape to that law of
conscription by which the French Revolution suddenly increased its armed
forces by nearly half a million of men, restored the Roman tradition,
and laid the foundation of the armed system on which Europe to-day
depends. With Carnot virtually commander-in-chief of all the armies, and
enabled to impose his decisions in particular upon that Army of the
North which he had studied so recently as a commissioner, the second
factor of the situation I am describing is comprehended.
The third, as I have said, was the English diversion upon Dunquerque.
The subsequent failure of the Allies has led to bitter criticism of this
movement. Had the Allies not failed, history would have treated it as
its contemporaries treated it. The forces of the Allies on the
north-eastern frontier were so great and their confidence so
secure--especially after the fall of Valenciennes--that the English
proposal to withdraw their forces for the moment from Coburg’s and to
secure Dunquerque, was not received with any destructive criticism.
Eighteen battalions and fourteen squadrons of the Imperial forces were
actually lent to the Duke of York for this expedition. What is more,
even after that diversion failed, the plan was fixed to begin again when
the last of the other fortresses should have fallen: so little was the
English plan for the capture of the seaport disfavoured by the
commander-in-chief of the Allies.
That diversion on Dunquerque turned out, however, to be an error of
capital importance. The attempt to capture the city utterly failed, and
the victory which accompanied its repulsion had upon the French that
indefinable but powerful moral effect which largely contributed to their
future successes.
The accompanying sketch map will explain the position. Valenciennes and
Condé have fallen; Lequesnoy, the small fortress subsidiary to
Valenciennes, has not yet been attacked but comes next in the series,
when the moment was judged propitious for the detachment of the
Anglo-Hanoverian force with a certain number of Imperial Allies to march
to the sea.
It must always be remembered by the reader of history that military
situations, like the situations upon a chess board, rather happen than
are designed; and the situation which developed at the end of September
upon the extreme north and west of the line which the French were
attempting to hold against the Allies was strategically of this nature.
When the Duke of York insisted upon a division of the forces of the
Allies and an attack upon Dunquerque, no living contemporary foresaw
disaster.
[Illustration: Showing condition of the frontier fortresses blocking the
road to Paris when the expedition to Dunquerque was decided upon. August
1793.]
Coburg, indeed, would have preferred the English to remain with him, and
asked them to do so, but he felt in no sort of danger through their
temporary absence, nor, as a matter of fact, was he in any danger
through it.
Again, though the positions which the Duke of York took up when he
arrived in front of Dunquerque were bad, neither his critics at home,
nor any of his own subordinates, nor any of the enemy, perceived fully
how bad they were. It was, as will presently be seen, a sort of drift,
bad luck combined with bad management, which led to this British
disaster, and (what was all-important for the conduct of the war) to the
first success in a general action which the French had to flatter and
encourage themselves with during all that fatal summer.
The Duke of York separated his force from that of Coburg just before the
middle of August; besides the British, who were not quite 7,000 strong,
11,000 Austrians, over 10,000 Hanoverians and 7,000 Hessians were under
his command. The total force, therefore, was nearly 37,000 strong. No
one could imagine that, opposed by such troops as the French were able
to put into line, and marching against such wretched defences as those
of Dunquerque then were, the Duke’s army had not a perfectly easy task
before it; and the plan, which was to take Dunquerque and upon the
return to join the Austrian march on Paris, was reasonable and feasible.
It is important that the reader should firmly seize this and not read
history backward from future events.
Certain faults are to be observed in the first conduct of the march. It
began on the 15th of August, proceeding from Marchiennes to Menin, and
at the outset displayed that deplorable lack of marching power which the
Duke of York’s command had shown throughout the campaign.[6] From
Marchiennes to Tourcoing is a long day’s march: it took the Duke of York
four days; and, take the march altogether, nine days were spent in
covering less than forty miles. In the course of that march, the British
troops had an opportunity of learning to despise their adversary: they
found at Linselles, upon the flank of their advance, a number of
undisciplined boys who broke the moment the Guards were upon them, and
whose physical condition excited the ridicule of their assailants. The
army proceeded after this purposeless and unfruitful skirmish to the
neighbourhood of the sea coast, and the siege of Dunquerque was
undertaken under conditions which will be clear to the reader from the
following sketch map.
[Illustration: Operations round Dunquerque. September 1793.]
The date of the 20th of August must first be fixed in the mind: on that
date the army which was to take Dunquerque was separated into its two
component parts. The first, under the Duke of York, was to attack the
town itself; the second, under the aged Austrian general, Freytag, was
to watch the movement of any approaching enemy and to cover the force
which was besieging the town. Two days later, the Duke of York was
leaving Furnes, which he had made his base for the advance, and Freytag
had with the greatest ease brushed the French posts--mainly of
volunteers--from before him, and was beginning to take up the flanking
positions south and east of Bergues which covered the siege of
Dunquerque.
Two days later again, on August 24, Freytag had occupied Wormhoudt and
Esquelbecque, capturing guns by the dozen, doing pretty well what he
would with the French outposts, and quite surrounding the town of
Bergues. Wilder was his headquarters. On the same day, the 24th, the
Duke of York had with the greatest ease driven in the advanced posts of
the French before Dunquerque, and shut up the enemy within the town,
while he formed his besieging force outside of it, entrenched in a
position which he had chosen beforehand, reposing upon the sea at his
right, his left on the village of Tetteghem. He was then about 3,000
yards from the fortifications at Dunquerque.
Such was the situation upon the dawn of the 25th, when everything was
ready for active operations. And here the reader must look upon the map
for what ultimately proved the ruin of the situation.
Supposing Freytag round Bergues in the position which the map shows; the
Duke of York in front of Dunquerque as the map also shows him; the two
forces are in touch across the road and the belt of country which unites
Bergues and Dunquerque. The covering army and the besieging force which
it covers are each a wing of one combined body; each communicates with
the other, each can support the other at the main point of effort, and
though between the one and the other eastward there stretches a line of
marshy country--the “meres” which the map indicates--yet a junction
between the two forces exists westward of these, and the two armies can
co-operate by the Bergues-Dunquerque road.
A factor which the Duke of York may have neglected was the power of
flooding all that flat country round, the road which the French in
Dunquerque, being in possession of the sluices, possessed. They used it
at once: they drowned the low lands to the south of Dunquerque, upon the
very day when the last dispositions of the attacking force were
completed. But more important--and never yet explained--was the
Austrians’ abandonment of Coudequerque. By this error, the main road
itself, standing above the flood, was lost, and from being one strong
army the force of the Allies became two weak ones. Communication was no
longer possible between the Duke of York’s and Freytag’s territories,
and it was of this separation that the French, in spite of their
deplorable organisation and more deplorable personnel, took advantage.
They took advantage of it slowly. Houchard gathered altogether forty
thousand men near Cassel, but it was ten days before they could be
concentrated. It must again be insisted upon and repeated that, large as
the number was--it was four times as great as Freytag’s now isolated
force--Houchard’s command was made up of men quite two-thirds of whom
were hardly soldiers: volunteers both new and recent, ill-trained
conscripts and so forth. There was no basis of discipline, hardly any
power to enforce it; the men had behaved disgracefully in all the
affairs of outposts, they had been brushed away contemptuously by the
small Austrian force from every position they had held. With all his
numerical superiority the attempt which Houchard was about to make was
very hazardous: and Houchard was a hesitating and uncertain commander.
Furthermore, of the forty thousand men one quarter at least remained out
of action through the ineptitude and political terror of Dumesny,
Houchard’s lieutenant upon the right.
It was upon the 6th of September that the French advance began along the
whole line; it was a mere pushing in of inferior numbers by superior
numbers, the superior numbers perpetually proving themselves inferior to
the Austrians in military value. Thus, the capture of old Freytag
himself in a night skirmish was at once avenged by the storming of the
village near which he had been caught, and he was re-taken. In actual
fighting and force for force, Houchard’s command found nothing to
encourage it during these first operations.
The Austrians in falling back concentrated and were soon one compact
body: to attack and dislodge it was the object of the French advance,
but an object hardly to be attained.
What happened was not only the unexpected success of this advance, but
the gaining by the French of the first decisive action in the long
series which was to terminate twenty years later at Leipsic.
The army of Freytag fell back upon the village of Hondschoote and stood
there in full force upon the morning of Sunday, the 8th of September.
Houchard attacked it with a force greatly lessened but still double that
of the defenders. So conspicuous, however, was the superiority of the
Austrian regulars over the French raw troops and volunteers that during
this morning of the 8th the result was still doubtful. By the afternoon,
however, the work was done, and the enemy were in a retreat which might
easily have been turned into a rout. A glance at the map will show that
Houchard, had he possessed the initiative common to so many of his
contemporaries, might at once have driven the numerically inferior and
heavily defeated force (it had lost one-third of its men) to the right,
and proceeded himself to cut the communications of the Duke of York and
to destroy his army, which lay packed upon the waterless sand dunes
where the village of Malo-les-Bains now stands. Houchard hesitated;
Freytag escaped; the Duke of York, abandoning his siege-pieces to the
number of forty and much of his heavy baggage, retreated precipitately
through the night to Furnes, right across the front of the French army,
and escaped destruction.
The Battle of Hoondschoote, therefore, as it is called, raised the siege
of Dunquerque. It was, as I have said, the first successful decisive
action which the Revolution could count since the moment of its extreme
danger and the opening of the general European war. But it was nothing
like what it might have been had Houchard been willing to risk a hardy
stroke. Houchard was therefore recalled, condemned to death, and
executed by the Committee of Public Safety, whose pitiless despotism was
alone capable of saving the nation. He remains the single example of a
general officer who has suffered death for military incompetence after
the gaining of a victory, and his execution is an excellent example of
the way in which the military temper of the Committee, and particularly
of Carnot, refused to consider any factor in the war save those that
make for military success.
Carnot and the Committee had no patience with the illusions which a
civilian crowd possesses upon mere individual actions: what they saw was
the campaign as a whole, and they knew that Houchard had left the armies
opposite him intact.
Perhaps his execution was made more certain by the continuance of bad
news from that more important point of the frontier--the direct line of
Austrian advance upon Paris. Here, already, Valenciennes had fallen two
months before, and Condé also. Lequesnoy, the third point of the barrier
line, capitulated on the 11th of September, and the news of that
capitulation reached Paris immediately after the news of Hondschoote. No
fortress was now left between the Allies and the capital but Maubeuge.
Coburg marched upon it at once.
Not only had he that immense superiority in the quality of his troops
which must be still insisted upon, but numerically also he was three to
one when, on the 28th of September, at dawn, he crossed the Sambre above
and below Maubeuge, and by noon of that day had contained the French
army in that neighbourhood within the lines of the fortress.
The situation was critical in the extreme: Maubeuge was ill prepared to
stand siege; it was hardly provisioned; its garrison was of varied and,
on the whole, of bad quality. In mere victuals it could stand out for
but a few days, and, worst of all, it had behind it the continued
example of necessary and fatal surrenders which had marked the whole
summer. The orders of the Committee of Public Safety to its commander
were terse: “Your head shall answer for Maubeuge.” After the receipt of
that message no more came through the lines.
The reader, if he be unaccustomed to military history, does well to note
that in every action and in every campaign there is some one factor of
position or of arms or of time which explains the result. Each has a
pivot or hinge, as it were, upon which the whole turns. It was now upon
Maubeuge that the revolutionary war thus depended. At risk of
oversimplifying a complex story, I would lay this down as the prime
condition for the understanding of the early revolutionary wars: had
Maubeuge fallen, the road to Paris lay open and the trick was
done[7]--and here we must consider again the effect in the field of
Carnot’s genius.
In the first place, he had provided numbers not on paper, but in
reality; the Committee, through a decree of the Assembly, had
despotically “requisitioned” men, animals, vehicles and supplies. The
levy was a reality. Mere numbers then raw, but increasing, had begun to
pour into the north-east. It was they that had told at Hoondschoote, it
was they that were to tell in front of Maubeuge.
Secondly, as the Committee supplied the necessary initiative, Carnot
supplied the necessary personality of war. His own will and own brain
could come to one decision in one moment, and did so. It was he, as we
shall see, who won the critical action. He chose Jourdan, a man whose
quaint military career we must reluctantly leave aside in so brief a
study as this, but at any rate an amateur, and put him in Houchard’s
command over the Army of the Northern Frontier, and that command was
extended from right away beyond the Ardennes to the sea. He ordered (and
Jourdan obeyed) the concentration of men from all down that lengthy line
to the right and the left upon one point, Guise. To leave the rest of
the frontier weak was a grave risk only to be excused by very rapid
action and success: both these were to follow. The concentration was
effected in four days. Troops from the extreme north could not come in
time. The furthest called upon were beyond Arras, with sixty-five miles
of route between them and Guise. This division (which shall be typical
of many), not quite eight thousand strong, left on receiving orders in
the morning of the 3rd of October and entered Guise in the course of the
6th. The rate of marching and the synchrony of these movements of
imperfect troops should especially be noted by any one who would
understand how the Revolution succeeded.
[Illustration: The rapid eight days’ concentration in front of Maubeuge.
October 1783.]
A second division of over thirteen thousand men followed along the
parallel road, with a similar time table. From the other end of his
line, a detachment under Beauregard, just over four thousand men, was
called up from the extreme right. It will serve as a typical example
upon the eastern side of this lightning concentration. It had been
gathered near Carignan, a town full fourteen miles beyond Sedan. It
picked up reinforcements on the way and marched into Fourmies upon the
11th, after covering just seventy miles in the three and a half days.
With its arrival the concentration was complete, and not a moment too
soon, for the bombardment of Maubeuge was about to begin. From the 11th
to the 15th of October the army was advanced and drawn up in line, a
day’s march in front of Guise, with its centre at Avesnes and facing the
covering army of Coburg, which lay entrenched upon a long wooded crest
with the valley of the Sambre upon its right and the village of
Wattignies, on a sort of promontory of high land, upon its left.
The Austrian position was reconnoitred upon the 14th. Upon the 15th the
general attack was delivered and badly repelled. When darkness fell upon
that day few in the army could have believed that Maubeuge was
succourable--and it was a question of hours.
Carnot, however, sufficiently knew the virtues as the vices of his novel
troops, the troops of the great levy, stiffened with a proportion of
regulars, to attempt an extraordinary thing. He marched eight thousand
from his left and centre, over to his right during the night, and in the
morning of the 16th his right, in front of the Austrian left at
Wattignies had, by this conversion, become far the strongest point of
the whole line.
A dense mist had covered the end of this operation as the night had
covered its inception, and that mist endured until nearly midday. The
Austrians upon the heights had no hint of the conversion, and Wattignies
was only held by three regiments. If they expected a renewed attack at
all, they can only have expected it in the centre, or even upon the left
where the French had suffered most the day before.
Initiative in war is essentially a calculation of risk, and with high
initiative the risk is high. What Carnot gambled upon (for Jourdan was
against the experiment) when he moved those young men through the night,
was the possibility of getting active work out of them after a day’s
furious action, the forced marches of the preceding week and on top of
it all a sleepless night of further marching. Most of the men who were
prepared to charge on the French right as the day broadened and the mist
lifted on that 16th of October, had been on foot for thirty hours. The
charge was delivered, and was successful. The unexpected numbers thus
concentrated under Wattignies carried that extreme position, held the
height, and arrived, therefore, on the flank of the whole Austrian line,
which, had not the effort of the aggressors exhausted them, would have
been rolled up in its whole length. As it was, the Austrians retreated
unmolested and in good order across the Sambre. The siege of Maubeuge
was raised; and the next day the victorious French army entered the
fortress.
Thus was successfully passed the turning-point of the revolutionary
wars.
Two months later the other gate of the country was recovered. In the
moment when Maubeuge was relieved, the enemy had pierced the lines of
Wissembourg. It is possible that an immediate and decisive understanding
among the Allies might then have swept all Alsace; but such an
understanding was lacking. The disarrayed “Army of the Rhine” was got
into some sort of order, notably through the enthusiasm of Hoche and the
silent control of Pichegru. At the end of November the Prussians stood
on the defensive at Kaiserslautern. Hoche hammered at them for three
days without success. What really turned the scale was the floods of men
and material that the levy and the requisitioning were pouring in. Just
before Christmas the enemy evacuated Haguenau. Landau they still held;
but a decisive action fought upon Boxing Day, a true soldiers’ battle,
determined by the bayonet, settled the fate of the Allies on this point.
The French entered Wissembourg again, and Landau was relieved after a
siege of four months and a display of tenacity which had done not a
little to turn the tide of the war.
Meanwhile the news had come in that the last of the serious internal
rebellions was crushed. Toulon had been re-captured, the English fleet
driven out; the town, the harbour and the arsenal had fallen into the
hands of the French largely through the science of a young major of
artillery (not captain: I have discussed the point elsewhere),
Bonaparte, and this had taken place a week before the relief of Landau.
The last confused horde of La Vendée had been driven from the walls of
Granville in Normandy, to which it had erred and drifted rather than
retreated. At Mans on the 13th of December it was cut to pieces, and at
Savenay on the 23rd, three days before the great victory in Alsace, it
was destroyed. A long peasant-and-bandit struggle, desperate yet hardly
to be called guerilla, continued through the next year behind the hedges
of Lower Brittany and of Vendée, but the danger to the State and to the
Revolution was over. The year 1793 ended, therefore, with the complete
relief of the whole territory of the Republic, save a narrow strip upon
the Belgian frontier, complete domination of it by its Cæsar, the
Committee of Public Safety; with two-thirds of a million of men under
arms, and the future of the great experiment apparently secure.
The causes of the wonder have been discussed, and will be discussed
indefinitely. Primarily, they resided in the re-creation of a strong
central power; secondly, in the combination of vast numbers and of a
reckless spirit of sacrifice. The losses on the National side were
perpetually and heavily superior to those of the Allies--in Alsace they
had been three to one; and we shall better understand the duel when we
appreciate that in the short eight years between the opening of the war
and the triumph of Napoleon at Marengo, there had fallen in killed and
wounded, on the French side, over seven hundred thousand men.
FIVE
The story of 1794 is but the consequence of what we have just read. It
was the little belt or patch upon the Belgian frontier which was still
in the hands of the enemy that determined the nature of the campaign.
It was not until spring that the issue was joined. The Emperor of
Austria reached Brussels on the 2nd day of April, and a fortnight later
reviewed his army. The French line drawn up in opposition to it suffered
small but continual reverses until the close of the month.
On the 29th Clerfayt suffered a defeat which led to the fall, or rather
the escape, of the small garrison of Menin. Clerfayt was beaten again at
Courtray a fortnight later; but all these early engagements in the
campaign were of no decisive moment. Tourcoing was to be the first heavy
blow that should begin to settle matters, Fleurus was to clinch them.
No battle can be less satisfactorily described in a few lines than that
of Tourcoing, so different did it appear to either combatant, so
opposite are the plans of what was expected on either side, and of what
happened, so confused are the various accounts of contemporaries. The
accusations of treason which nearly always arise after a disaster, and
especially a disaster overtaking an allied force, are particularly
monstrous, and may be dismissed: in particular the childish legend which
pretends that the Austrians desired an English defeat.
What the French say is that excellent forced marching and scientific
concentration permitted them to attack the enemy before the junction of
his various forces was effected. What the Allies say is (if they are
speaking for their centre) that it was shamefully abandoned and
unsupported by the two wings; if they are speaking for the wings, that
the centre had no business to advance, when it saw that the two wings
were not up in time to co-operate.
One story goes that the Archduke Charles was incapacitated by a fit;
Lord Acton has lent his considerable authority to this amusing version.
At any rate, what happened was this:--
The Allies lay along the river Scheldt on Friday, the 16th of May:
Tournay was their centre, with the Duke of York in command of the chief
force there; five or six miles north, down the river, was one extremity
of their line at a place called Warcoing: it was a body of Hanoverians.
The left, under the Archduke Charles, was Austrian and had reached a
place a day’s march south of Tournay called St. Amand. Over against the
Allies lay a large French force also occupying a wide front of over
fifteen miles, the centre of which was Tourcoing, then a village. Its
left was in front of the fortress of Courtrai. Now, behind the French,
up country northward in the opposite direction from the line of the
Allies on the Scheldt was another force of the Allies under Clerfayt.
The plan was that the Allied right should advance on to Mouscron and
take it. The Allied centre should advance on to Tourcoing and Mouveaux
and take them, while the left should march across the upper waters of
the river Marque, forcing the bridges that crossed that marshy stream,
and come up alongside the centre. In other words, there was to be an
attack all along the French line from the south, and while it was
proceeding, Clerfayt, from the north of the French, was to cross the Lys
and attack also.
On the day of the 17th what happened was this: The left of the Allies,
marching from St. Amand, came up half a day late; the right of the
Allies took Mouscron, but were beaten out of it by the French. The
centre of the Allies fulfilled their programme, reaching Tourcoing and
its neighbourhood by noon and holding their positions. It is to the
honour of English arms that this success was accomplished by a force a
third of which was British and the most notable bayonet work in which
was done by the Guards. Meanwhile, Clerfayt was late in moving and in
crossing the river Lys, which lay between him and his objective.
[Illustration: Tourcoing. May 16 to 18, 1794.
The breakdown of the attempt of the Allies to cut off the French near
Courtrai from Lille was due to their failure to synchronise They should
have been in line from A to B at noon of the 17th with Clerfayt at C.]
When night fell, therefore, on the first day of the action, a glance at
the map will show that instead of one solid line advancing against the
French from A to B, and the northern force in touch with it at C, the
Allied formation was an absurd projection in the middle, due to the
success of the mixed and half-British force under the Duke of York: a
success which had not been maintained on the two wings. A bulge of this
sort in an attacking line is on the face of it disastrous. The enemy
have only to be rapid in falling upon either flank of it and the bulge
can be burst in. The French were rapid, and burst in the bulge was. By
concentrating their forces against this one central part of the Allies
they fought three to one.
That same capacity which at Wattignies had permitted them to scorn sleep
and to be indefatigable in marching, put them on the road before three
o’clock in the morning of Sunday, the 18th, and with the dawn they fell
upon the central force of the Allies, attacking it from all three sides.
It is on this account that the battle is called the Battle of Tourcoing,
for Tourcoing was the most advanced point to which the centre of the
Allies had reached. The Germans, upon the Duke of York’s right at
Tourcoing, felt the first brunt of the attack. The Duke of York himself,
with his mixed, half-British force, came in for the blow immediately
afterwards, and while it was still early morning. The Germans at
Tourcoing began to fall back. The Duke of York’s force, to the left of
them, was left isolated: its commander ought not to have hung on so
long. But the defence was maintained with the utmost gallantry for the
short time during which it was still possible. The retreat began about
nine in the morning and was kept orderly for the first two miles, but
after that point it was a rout. The drivers of the British cannon fled,
and the guns, left without teams, blocked the precipitate flight of the
cavalry. Their disorder communicated itself at once to the Guards, and
to the line.
Even in this desperate strait some sort of order was restored, notably
by the Guards Brigade, which were apparently the first to form, and a
movement that could still be called a retreat was pursued towards the
south. The Duke of York himself was chased from spinney to spinney and
escaped by a stroke of luck, finding a bridge across the last brook held
by a detachment of Hessians. In this way were the central columns, who
between them numbered not a third of the total force of the Allies,
destroyed.
Clerfayt had first advanced--but far too late to save the centre--and
then retreated. The Archduke Charles, upon the left, was four hours late
in marching to the help of the Duke of York; the right wing of the
Allies was not even late: it spent the morning in an orderly artillery
duel with the French force opposed to it. By five in the afternoon
defeat was admitted and a general retreat of the Allies ordered.
I have said that many reasons are given to account for the disaster of
Tourcoing, one of the very few in which a British force has been routed
upon the Continent; but I confess that if I were asked for an
explanation of my own, I would say that it was simply due to the gross
lack of synchrony on the part of the Allies, and that this in its turn
was taken advantage of by the power both of vigil and of marching which
the French troops, still inferior in most military characteristics, had
developed and maintained, and which (a more important matter) their
commanders knew how to use.
This heavy blow, delivered on the 18th of May, in spite of a successful
rally a week later, finally convinced the Emperor that the march on
Paris was impossible. Eleven days later, on the 29th, it was announced
in the camp of Tournay, upon which the Allied army had fallen back, that
the Emperor had determined to return to Vienna. The Allied army was
indeed still left upon that front, but the French continued to pour up
against it. It was again their numbers that brought about the next and
the final victory.
Far off, upon the east of that same line, the army which is famous in
history and in song as that of the Sambre et Meuse was violently
attempting to cross the Sambre and to turn the line of the Allies.
Coburg reinforced his right opposite the French left, but numbers had
begun to bewilder him. The enthusiasm of Saint-Just, the science of
Carnot, decided victory at this eastern end of the line.
Six times the passage of the Sambre had failed. Reinforcements continued
to reach the army, and the seventh attempt succeeded.
Charleroi, which is the main fortress blocking the passage of the
Sambre at this place, could be, and was, invested when once the river
was crossed by the French. It capitulated in a week. But the evacuation
of Charleroi was but just accomplished when Coburg, seventy thousand
strong, appeared in relief of the city.
[Illustration: Showing effect of _Ypres_, _Charleroi_ and _Fleurus_ in
wholly throwing back the Allies in June 1794.
_Ypres_ captured on June 19 by the French, they march on Oudenarde and
pass it on June 25 to 27. Meanwhile _Charleroi_ has also surrendered to
the French, and when, immediately afterwards, the Austrians try to
relieve it, they are beaten at _Fleurus_ and retire on Brussels.
Thus the English at _Tournai_ and all the Allied Forces at _Condé_,
_Valenciennes_, _Landrecies_, and _Mons_ are imperilled and must
surrender or retire.]
The plateau above the town where the great struggle was decided, is
known as that of Fleurus, and it was upon the 26th of June that the
armies were there engaged. Never before had forces so equal permitted
the French any success. It had hitherto been the ceaseless
requisitioning of men to supply their insufficient training and command,
which had accomplished the salvation of the country. At Fleurus, though
there was still some advantage on the French side, the numbers were
more nearly equal.
The action was not determined for ten hours, and on the French centre
and left was nearly lost, when the Reserves’ and Marceau’s obstinacy in
front of Fleurus village itself at last decided it.
The consequences of the victory were final. As the French right advanced
from Fleurus the French left advanced from Ypres, and the centre became
untenable for the Allies. The four French fortresses which the enemy
still garrisoned in that Belgian “belt” of which I have spoken, were
invested and re-captured. By the 10th of July the French were in
Brussels, the English were beaten back upon Holland, the Austrians
retreating upon the Rhine, and the continuous success of the
revolutionary armies was assured.
* * * * *
While these things were proceeding upon land, however, there had
appeared a factor in the war which modern desire for comfort and, above
all, for commercial security has greatly exaggerated, but which the
student will do well to note in its due proportion. This factor was the
military weakness of France at sea.
In mere numbers the struggle was entered upon with fleets in the ratio
of about two to one, while to the fleet of Great Britain, already twice
as large as its opponent, must be added the fleets of the Allies. But
numbers did not then, nor will they in the future, really decide the
issue of maritime war. It was the supremacy of English gunnery which
turned the scale. This triumphant superiority was proved in the battle
of the 1st of June, 1794.
The English fleet under Lord Howe attacked the French fleet which was
waiting to escort a convoy of grain into Brest; the forces came in
contact upon the 28th of May, and the action was a running one of three
days.
Two examples must suffice to prove how determining was the superiority
of the British fire. The _Queen Charlotte_, in the final action, found
herself caught between the _Montagne_ and the _Jacobin_. We have the
figures of the losses during the duel of these two flagships. The _Queen
Charlotte_ lost forty-two men in the short and furious exchange, the
_Montagne_ alone three hundred. Again, consider the total figures. The
number of the crews on both sides was nearly equal, but their losses
were as eleven to five. It cannot be too often repeated that the initial
advantage which the English fleet gained in the great war, which it
maintained and increased as that war proceeded, and which it made
absolute at Trafalgar, was an advantage mainly due to the guns.
The reader must not expect in a sketch which ends with the fall of
Robespierre any treatise, however short, upon the effect of sea power in
the revolutionary wars. It has of late years been grossly exaggerated,
the reaction which will follow this exaggeration may as grossly belittle
it. It prevented the invasion of England, it permitted the exasperation
and wearing out of the French forces in the Peninsula. But it could not
have determined the fate of Napoleon. That was determined by his Russian
miscalculation and by his subsequent and consequent defeat at Leipsic.
Upon the early success of the Revolution and the resulting establishment
of European democracy, with which alone these pages deal, sea power was
of no considerable effect.
FOOTNOTES:
[6] Incidentally it should be noted how true it is that this supreme
military quality is a matter of organisation rather than of the physical
power of troops; in the Napoleonic wars the marching power of the
English troops was often proved exceptional, and perhaps the greatest of
all feats accomplished by a small body was that of the Light Brigade
marching to the succour of Wellington at Talavera.
[7] I must not, in fairness to the reader, neglect the great mass of
opinion, from Jomini to Mr. Fortescue’s classic work upon the British
Army, which lays it down that the Allies had but to mask the frontier
fortresses and to advance their cavalry rapidly along the Paris road.
Historical hypothesis can never be more than a matter of judgment, but I
confess that this view has always seemed to me to ignore--as purely
military historians and especially foreign ones might well ignore--the
social condition of “’93.” Cavalry is the weakest of all arms with which
to deal with sporadic, unorganised, but determined resistance. To pass
through the densely populated country of the Paris road may be compared
to the forcing of an open town, and cavalry can never be relied upon for
_that_. As for the army moving as a whole without a perfect security in
its communications, the matter need not even be discussed; and it must
further be remembered that, the moment such an advance began, an
immediate concentration from the north would have fallen upon the
ill-guarded lines of supply. It may be taken that Coburg knew his
business when he sat down before this, the last of the fortresses.
VI
THE REVOLUTION AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH
The last and the most important of the aspects which the French
Revolution presents to a foreign, and in particular to an English
reader, is the antagonism which arose between it and the Church.
As this is the most important so it is the most practical of the
historical problems which the Revolution sets the student to solve; for
the opposition of the Church’s organisation in France has at once been
the most profound which the Revolution has had to encounter, the most
active in its methods, and the only one which has increased in strength
as time proceeded. It is hardly too much to say that the Revolution
would, in France at least, have achieved its object and created a
homogeneous, centralised democracy, had not this great quarrel between
the Republic and the Church arisen; and one may legitimately contrast
the ready pliancy of men to political suggestion and the easy story of
their institutions where men knew nothing of the Church, with the great
storms that arise and the fundamental quarrels that are challenged
wherever men are acquainted with the burning truths of Catholicism.
Finally, the struggle between the Catholic Church and the Revolution is
not only the most important and the most practical, but also by an
unhappy coincidence the most difficult of comprehension of all the
matters presented to us by the great change.
We have seen in this book that one department of revolutionary history,
the second in importance, perhaps, to the religious department, was also
difficult of comprehension--to wit, the military department. And we have
seen (or at least I have postulated) that the difficulty of following
the military fortunes of the Republic was due to the mass of detail, to
the technical character of the information to be acquired and to the
natural unfamiliarity of the general reader with the elements of
military science. In other words, an accurate knowledge of great numbers
of facts, the proper disposition of these facts in their order of
military importance, and the correlation of a great number of
disconnected actions and plans will alone permit us to grasp the
function of the armies in the development and establishment of the
modern State through the revolutionary wars.
Now in this second and greater problem, the problem of the function
played by religion, it is an exactly opposite method which can alone be
of service.
We must examine the field generally, and still more generally we must
forget details that here only bewilder, and see in the largest possible
outline what forces were really at issue, why their conflict occurred,
upon what points that conflict was vital. Any more particular plan will
land us, as it has landed so many thousands of controversialists, in
mere invective on one side or the other, till we come to see nothing but
a welter of treason on the part of priests, and of massacre upon the
part of democrats.
Men would, did they try to unravel the skein by analysing the documents
of the Vatican or of the French archives, come apparently upon nothing
but a host of petty, base, and often personal calculations; or again,
did they attempt to take a local sample of the struggle and to follow it
in one department of thought, they would come upon nothing but a whirl
of conflict with no sort of clue to the motives that lay behind.
The contrast between the military and the religious problem of the
French Revolution is like the contrast between the geological
composition and the topographical contours of a countryside. To
understand the first we must bore and dig, we must take numerous samples
of soil and subject them to analysis, we must make ourselves acquainted
with detail in its utmost recesses. But for the second, the more general
our standpoint, the wider our gaze, and the more comprehensive our
judgment, the more accurately do we grasp the knowledge we have set out
to seek.
We must, then, approach our business by asking at the outset the most
general question of all: “_Was there a necessary and fundamental quarrel
between the doctrines of the Revolution and those of the Catholic
Church?_”
Those ill acquainted with either party, and therefore ill equipped for
reply, commonly reply with assurance in the affirmative. The French (and
still more the non-French) Republican who may happen, by the accident of
his life, to have missed the Catholic Church, to have had no intimacy
with any Catholic character, no reading of Catholic philosophy, and
perhaps even no chance view of so much as an external Catholic ceremony,
replies unhesitatingly that the Church is the necessary enemy of the
Revolution. Again, the _émigré_, the wealthy woman, the recluse, any one
of the many contemporary types to whom the democratic theory of the
Revolution came as a complete novelty, and to-day the wealthy families
in that tradition, reply as unhesitatingly that the Revolution is the
necessary enemy of the Church. The reply seems quite sufficient to the
Tory squire in England or Germany, who may happen to be a Catholic by
birth or by conversion; and it seems equally obvious to (let us say) a
democratic member of some Protestant Church in one of the new countries.
Historically and logically, theologically also, those who affirm a
necessary antagonism between the Republic and the Church are in error.
Those who are best fitted to approach the problem by their knowledge
both of what the Revolution attempted and of what Catholic philosophy
is, find it in proportion to their knowledge difficult or impossible to
answer that fundamental question in the affirmative. They cannot call
the Revolution a necessary enemy of the Church, nor the Church of
Democracy.
What is more, minds at once of the most active and of the best
instructed sort are the very minds which find it difficult to explain
how any such quarrel can have arisen. French history itself is full of
the names of those for whom not so much a reconciliation between the
Revolution and the Church, as a statement that no real quarrel existed
between them, was the motive of politics; and almost in proportion to a
man’s knowledge of his fellows in Catholic societies, almost in that
proportion is the prime question I have asked answered by such a man in
the negative. A man who knows both the Faith and the Republic will tell
you that there is not and cannot be any necessary or fundamental reason
why conflict should have arisen between a European Democracy and the
Catholic Church.
When we examine those who concern themselves with the deepest and most
abstract side of the quarrel, we find the same thing. It is impossible
for the theologian, or even for the practical ecclesiastical teacher, to
put his finger upon a political doctrine essential to the Revolution and
to say, “This doctrine is opposed to Catholic dogma or to Catholic
morals.” Conversely, it is impossible for the Republican to put his
finger upon a matter of ecclesiastical discipline or religious dogma and
to say, “This Catholic point is at issue with my political theory of the
State.”
Thousands of active men upon either side would have been only too
willing during the last hundred years to discover some such issue, and
it has proved undiscoverable. In a word, only those Democrats who know
little of the Catholic Church can say that of its nature it forbids
democracy; and only those Catholics who have a confused or imperfect
conception of democracy can say that of its nature it is antagonistic to
the Catholic Church.
Much that is taught by the purely temporal theory of the one is
indifferent to the transcendental and supernatural philosophy of the
other. In some points, where there is contact (as in the conception of
the dignity of man and of the equality of men) there is agreement. To
sum up, the Republican cannot by his theory persecute the Church; the
Church cannot by her theory excommunicate the Republican.
Why, then, it must next be asked, has there in practice arisen so
furious and so enormous a conflict, a conflict whose activity and whose
consequence are not narrowing but broadening to-day?
It may be replied to this second question, which is only less general
than the first, in one of two manners.
One may say that the actions of men are divided not by theories but by
spiritual atmospheres, as it were. According to this view men act under
impulses not ideal but actual: impulses which affect great numbers and
yet in their texture correspond to the complex but united impulses of an
individual personality. Thus, though there be no conflict demonstrable
between the theology of the Catholic Church and the political theory of
the Revolution, yet there may be necessary and fundamental conflict
between the _Persons_ we call the Revolution and the Church, and between
the vivifying principles by which either lives. That is one answer that
can be, and is, given.
Or one may give a totally different answer and say, “There was no
quarrel between the theology of the Catholic Church and the political
theory of the Revolution; but the folly of this statesman, the ill
drafting of that law, the misconception of such and such an institution,
the coincidence of war breaking out at such and such a moment and
affecting men in such and such a fashion--all these material accidents
bred a misunderstanding between the two great forces, led into conflict
the human officers and the human organisations which directed them; and
conflict once established feeds upon, and grows from, its own
substance.”
Now, if that first form of reply be given to the question we have posed,
though it is sufficient for the type of philosophy which uses it, though
it is certainly explanatory of all human quarrels, and though it in
particular satisfies a particular modern school of thought, it is
evident that history, properly so called, cannot deal with it.
You may say that the Revolution was the expression of a spirit far more
real than any theory, that this spirit is no more susceptible of
analysis or definition than is the personality of a single human
character, and that this reality was in conflict with another
reality--to wit, the Catholic Church. You may even (as some minds by no
means negligible have done) pass into the field of mysticism in the
matter, and assert that really personal forces, wills superior and
external to man, Demons and Angels, drove the Revolution against the
Catholic Church, and created The Republic to be an anti-Catholic force
capable of meeting and of defeating that Church, which (by its own
definition of itself) is not a theory, but the expression of a
Personality and a Will. To put it in old-fashioned terms, you may say
that the Revolution was the work of antichrist;--but with that kind of
reply, I repeat, history cannot deal.
If it be true that, in spite of an absence of contradictory intellectual
theories, there is a fundamental spiritual contradiction between the
Revolution and the Catholic Church, then time will test the business; we
shall see in that case a perpetual extension of the quarrel until the
Revolution becomes principally a force for the extinction of
Catholicism, and the Catholic Church appears to the supporter of the
Revolution not as his principal, but as his only enemy. Such a
development has not arisen in a hundred years; a process of time far
more lengthy will alone permit us to judge whether the supposed duello
is a real matter or a phantasm.
The second type of answer, the answer which pretends to explain the
antagonism by a definite series of events, does concern the historian.
Proceeding upon the lines of that second answer, he can bring his
science to bear and use the instruments of his trade; and he can show
(as I propose to show in what follows) how, although no quarrel can be
found between the theory of the Revolution and that of the Church, an
active quarrel did in fact spring up between the Revolution in action
and the authorities of Catholicism; a quarrel which a hundred years has
not appeased, but accentuated.
* * * * *
Behind the revolutionary quarrel lay the condition of the Church in the
French State since the settlement of the quarrel of the Reformation.
With what that quarrel of the Reformation was, the reader is
sufficiently familiar. For, roughly speaking, a hundred years, from the
first years of the sixteenth century to the first years of the
seventeenth (from the youth of Henry VIII to the boyhood of Charles I in
England), a great attempt was made to change (as one party would have
said to amend, as the other would have said to denaturalise) the _whole
body_ of Western Christendom. A _general_ movement of attack upon the
inherited form of the Church, and a general resistance to that attack,
was at work throughout European civilisation; and either antagonist
hoped for a universal success, the one of what he called “The
Reformation of religion,” the other of what he called “The Divine
Institution and visible unity of the Catholic Church.”
At the end of such a period it became apparent that no such general
result had been, or could be, attained. All that part of the West which
had rejected the authority of the See of Rome began to appear as a
separate territorial region permanently divided from the rest; all that
part of Europe which had retained the Authority of the See of Rome began
to appear as another region of territory. The line of cleavage between
the two was beginning to define itself as a geographical line, and
nearly corresponded to the line which, centuries before, had divided the
Roman and civilised world from the Barbarians.
The Province of Britain had an exceptional fate. Though Roman in origin
and of the ancient civilisation in its foundation, it fell upon the
non-Roman side of the new boundary; while Ireland, which the Roman
Empire had never organised or instructed, remained, alone of the
external parts of Europe, in communion with Rome. Italy, Spain, and in
the main southern or Romanised Germany, refused ultimately to abandon
their tradition of civilisation and of religion. But in Gaul it was
otherwise--and the action of Gaul during the Reformation must be seized
if its modern religious quarrels are to be apprehended. A very
considerable proportion of the French landed and mercantile classes,
that is of the wealthy men of the country, were in sympathy with the new
religious doctrines and the new social organisation which had now taken
root in England, Scotland, Holland, northern Germany and Scandinavia,
and which were destined in those countries to lead to the domination of
wealth. These French squires and traders were called the Huguenots.
The succeeding hundred years, from 1615 to 1715, let us say, were a
settlement, not without bloodshed, of the unsatisfied quarrel of the
preceding century. All Englishmen know what happened in England; how the
last vestiges of Catholicism were crushed out and all the social and
political consequences of Protestantism established in the State.
There was, even in that same seventeenth century, a separate, but
futile, attempt to destroy Catholicism in Ireland. In Germany a struggle
of the utmost violence had only led to a similar regional result. The
first third of that hundred years concluded in the Peace of Westphalia,
and left the Protestant and Catholic territorial divisions much what we
now know them.
In France, however, the peculiar phenomenon remained of a body powerful
in numbers and (what was far more important) in wealth and social power,
scattered throughout the territory of the kingdom, organised and, by
this time, fixedly anti-Catholic, and therefore anti-national.
The nation had recovered its traditional line and had insisted upon the
victory of a strong executive, and that executive Catholic. France,
therefore, in this period of settlement, became an absolute monarchy
whose chief possessed tremendous and immediate powers, and a monarchy
which incorporated with itself all the great elements of the national
tradition, _including the Church_.
It is the name of Louis XIV, of course, which symbolises this great
time; his very long reign precisely corresponds to it. He was born
coincidently with that universal struggle for a religious settlement in
Europe, which I have described as characteristic of the time; he died
precisely at its close; and under him it seemed as though the
reconstructed power of Gaul and the defence of organised Catholicism
were to be synonymous.
But there were two elements of disruption in that homogeneous body which
Louis XIV apparently commanded. The very fact that the Church had thus
become in France an unshakable national institution, chilled the vital
source of Catholicism. Not only did the hierarchy stand in a perpetual
suspicion of the Roman See, and toy with the conception of national
independence, but they, and all the official organisation of French
Catholicism, put the security of the national establishment and its
intimate attachment to the general political structure of the State, far
beyond the sanctity of Catholic dogma or the practice of Catholic
morals.
That political structure--the French monarchy--seemed to be of granite
and eternal. Had it indeed survived, the Church in Gaul would doubtless,
in spite of its attachment to so mundane a thing as the crown, have
still survived to enjoy one of those resurrections which have never
failed it in the past, and would have returned, by some creative
reaction, to its principle of life. But for the moment the consequence
of this fixed political establishment was that scepticism, and all those
other active forces of the mind which play upon religion in any Catholic
State, had full opportunity. The Church was, so to speak, not concerned
to defend itself but only its method of existence. It was as though a
garrison, forgetting the main defences of a place, had concentrated all
its efforts upon the security of one work which contained its supplies
of food.
Wit, good verse, sincere enthusiasm, a lucid exposition of whatever in
the human mind perpetually rebels against transcendental affirmations,
were allowed every latitude and provoked no effective reply. But overt
acts of disrespect to ecclesiastical authority were punished with
rigour.
While in the wealthy, the bureaucratic, and the governing classes, to
ridicule the Faith was an attitude taken for granted, seriously to
attack the privileges or position of its ministers was ungentlemanly,
and was not allowed. It did not shock the hierarchy that one of its
Apostolic members should be a witty atheist; that another should go
hunting upon Corpus Christi, nearly upset the Blessed Sacrament in his
gallop, and forget what day it was when the accident occurred. The
bishops found nothing remarkable in seeing a large proportion of their
body to be loose livers, or in some of them openly presenting their
friends to their mistresses as might be done by any great lay noble
round them. That a diocese or any other spiritual charge should be
divorced from its titular chief, seemed to them as natural as does to us
the absence from his modern regiment of some titular foreign colonel.
Unquestioned also by the bishops were the poverty, the neglect, and the
uninstruction of the parish clergy; nay--and this is by far the
principal feature--the abandonment of religion by all but a very few of
the French millions, no more affected the ecclesiastical officials of
the time than does the starvation of our poor affect, let us say, one of
our professional politicians. It was a thing simply taken for granted.
The reader must seize that moribund condition of the religious life of
France upon the eve of the Revolution, for it is at once imperfectly
grasped by the general run of historians, and is also the only fact
which thoroughly explains what followed. The swoon of the Faith in the
eighteenth century is the negative foundation upon which the strange
religious experience of the French was about to rise. France, in the
generation before the Revolution, was passing through a phase in which
the Catholic Faith was at a lower ebb than it had ever been since the
preaching and establishment of it in Gaul.
This truth is veiled by more than one circumstance. Thus many official
acts, notably marriages and the registration of births, took place under
a Catholic form, and indeed Catholic forms had a monopoly of them.
Again, the State wore Catholic clothes, as it were: the public occasions
of pomp were full of religious ceremony. Few of the middle classes went
to Mass in the great towns, hardly any of the artisans; but the Churches
were “official.” Great sums of money--including official money--were at
the disposal of the Church; and the great ecclesiastics were men from
whom solid favours could be got. Again, the historic truth is masked by
the language and point of view of the great Catholic reaction which has
taken place in our own time.
It is safe to say that where one adult of the educated classes concerned
himself seriously with the Catholic Faith and Practice in France before
the Revolution, there are five to-day. But in between lies the violent
episode of the persecution, and the Catholic reaction in our time
perpetually tends to contrast a supposed pre-revolutionary “Catholic”
society with the revolutionary fury. “Look,” say its champions, “at the
dreadful way in which the Revolution treated the Church.” And as they
say this the converse truth appears obvious and they seem to imply,
“Think how different it must have been before the Revolution persecuted
the Church!” The very violence of the modern reaction towards
Catholicism has exaggerated the revolutionary persecution, and in doing
so has made men forget that apart from other evidence of the decline of
religion, it is obvious that persecution could never have arisen without
a strong and continuous historical backing. You could not have had a
Diocletian in the thirteenth century with the spirit of the Crusaders
just preceding him; you could not have had Henry VIII if the England of
the fifteenth century just preceding him had been an England devoted to
the monastic profession. And you could not have had the revolutionary
fury against the Catholic Church in France if the preceding generation
had been actively Catholic even in a considerable portion.
As a fact, of course it was not: and in the popular indifference to or
hatred of the Church the principal factor was the strict brotherhood not
so much of Church and State as of Church and executive Government.
But there was another factor. We were describing a little way back how
in France there had arisen, during the movement of the Reformation, a
wealthy, powerful and numerically large Huguenot body. In mere numbers
it dwindled, but it maintained throughout the seventeenth century a very
high position, both of privilege and (what was its characteristic) of
money-power; and even to-day, though their birth-rate is, of course,
lower than the average of the nation, the French Huguenots number close
upon a million, and are far wealthier, upon the average, than their
fellow citizens. It is their wealth which dominates the trade of
certain districts, which exercises so great an effect upon the
universities, the publishing trade, and the press; and in general lends
them such weight in the affairs of the nation.
Now the Huguenot had in France a special and permanent quarrel with the
monarchy, and therefore with the Catholic Church, which, precisely
because it was not of the vivid and intense kind which is associated
with popular and universal religions, was the more secretly ubiquitous.
His quarrel was that, having been highly privileged for nearly a
century, the member of “a State within a State,” and for more than a
generation free to hold assemblies separate from and often antagonistic
to the national Government, these privileges had been suddenly removed
from him by the Government of Louis XIV a century before the Revolution.
The quarrel was more political than religious; it was a sort of “Home
Rule” quarrel. For though the Huguenots were spread throughout France,
they had possessed special cities and territories wherein their spirit
and, to a certain extent, their private self-government, formed
_enclaves_ of particularism within the State.
They had held this position, as I have said, for close upon a hundred
years, and it was not until a date contemporary with the violent
settlement of the religious trouble in England by the expulsion of James
II that a similar settlement, less violent, achieved (as it was thought)
a similar religious unity in France. But that unity was not achieved.
The Huguenots, though no longer permitted to exist as a State within a
State, remained, for the hundred years between the Revocation of the
Edict of Nantes and the outbreak of the Revolution, a powerful and
ever-watchful body. They stood upon the flank of the attack which
intellectual scepticism was making upon the Catholic Church, they were
prepared to take advantage of that scepticism’s first political victory,
and since the Revolution they have been the most powerful and, after the
Freemasons, with whom they are largely identified, the most strongly
organised, of the anti-clerical forces in the country.
The Jews, whose action since the Revolution has been so remarkable in
this same business, were not, in the period immediately preceding it, of
any considerable influence, and their element in the coalition may be
neglected.
Such, then, was the position when the Revolution was preparing. Within
memory of all men living, the Church had become more and more official,
the masses of the great towns had wholly lost touch with it; the
intelligence of the country was in the main drawn to the Deist or even
to the purely sceptical propaganda, the powerful Huguenot body was ready
prepared for an alliance with any foe of Catholicism, and in the eyes of
the impoverished town populace--notably in Paris, which had long
abandoned the practice of religion--the human organisation of the
Church, the hierarchy, the priesthood, and the few but very wealthy
religious orders which still lingered on in dwindling numbers, were but
a portion of the privileged world which the populace hated and was
prepared to destroy.
It is upon such a spirit and in such conditions of the national
religious life that the Revolution begins to work. In the National
Assembly you have the great body of the Commons which determines the
whole, touched only here and there with men in any way acquainted with
or devoted to Catholic practice, and those men for the most part
individual and eccentric, that is, uncatholic, almost in proportion to
the genuineness of their religious feeling. Among the nobility the
practice of religion was a social habit with some--as a mental attitude
the Faith was forgotten among all but a very few. Among the clergy a
very wealthy hierarchy, no one of them prepared to defend the Church
with philosophical argument, and almost unanimous in regarding itself as
a part of the old political machine, was dominant; while the
representatives of the lower clergy, strongly democratic in character,
were at first more occupied with the establishment of democracy than
with the impending attack upon the material and temporal organisation of
the Church.
Now, that material and temporal organisation offered at the very
beginning of the debates an opportunity for attack which no other
department of the old _régime_ could show.
The immediate peril of the State was financial. The pretext and even to
some extent the motive for the calling of the States-General was the
necessity for finding money. The old fiscal machinery had broken down,
and as always happens when a fiscal machine breaks down, the hardship it
involved, and the pressure upon individuals which it involved, appeared
to be universal. _There was no immediate and easily available fund of
wealth upon which the Executive could lay hands save the wealth of the
clergy._
The feudal dues of the nobles, if abandoned, must fall rather to the
peasantry than to the State. Of the existing taxes few could be
increased without peril, and none with any prospect of a large
additional revenue. The charge for debt alone was one-half of the total
receipts of the State, the deficit was, in proportion to the revenue,
overwhelming. Face to face with that you had an institution not popular,
one whose public functions were followed by but a small proportion of
the population, one in which income was most unequally distributed, and
one whose feudal property yielded in dues an amount equal to more than a
quarter of the total revenue of the State. Add to this a system of
tithes which produced nearly as much again, and it will be apparent
under what a financial temptation the Assembly lay.
It may be argued, of course, that the right of the Church to this
ecclesiastical property, whether in land or in tithes, was absolute, and
that the confiscation of the one or of the other form of revenue was
mere theft. But such was not the legal conception of the moment. The
wealth of the Church was not even (and this is most remarkable)
defended as absolute property by the generality of those who enjoyed it.
The tone of the debates which suppressed the tithes, and later
confiscated the Church lands, was a tone of discussion upon legal
points, precedents, public utility, and so forth. There was not heard in
it, in any effective degree, the assertion of mere moral right; though
in that time the moral rights of property were among the first of
political doctrines.
It was not, however, the confiscation of the Church lands and the
suppression of the tithe which founded the quarrel between the
Revolution and the clergy. No financial or economic change is ever more
than a preparation for, or a permissive condition of, a moral change. It
is never the cause of a moral change. Even the suppression of the
religious houses in the beginning of 1790 must not be taken as the point
of departure in the great quarrel. The religious orders in France were
at that moment too decayed in zeal and in numbers, too wealthy and much
too removed from the life of the nation, for this to be the case. The
true historical point of departure from which we must date the beginning
of this profound debate between the Revolution and Catholicism, is to be
found in the morning of the 30th of May, 1790, when a parliamentary
committee (the Ecclesiastical Committee) presented to the House its plan
for the reform of the Constitution of the Church in Gaul.
The enormity of that act is now apparent to the whole world. The
proposal, at the bidding of chance representatives not elected _ad hoc_,
to change the dioceses and the sees of Catholic France, the decision of
an ephemeral political body to limit to such and such ties (and very
feeble they were) the bond between the Church of France and the Holy
See, the suppression of the Cathedral Chapters, the seemingly farcical
proposal that bishops should be elected, nay, priests also thus chosen,
the submission of the hierarchy in the matter of residence and travel to
a civil authority which openly declared itself indifferent in matters of
religion,--all this bewilders the modern mind. How, we ask, could men so
learned, so enthusiastic, so laborious and so closely in touch with all
the realities of their time, make a blunder of that magnitude? Much
more, how did such a blunder escape the damnation of universal mockery
and immediate impotence? The answer is to be discovered in what has just
been laid down with so much insistence: the temporary eclipse of
religion in France before the Revolution broke out.
The men who framed the Constitution of the Clergy, the men who voted it,
nay, even the men who argued against it, all had at the back of their
minds three conceptions which they were attempting to reconcile: of
those three conceptions one was wholly wrong, one was imperfect because
superficial, the third alone was true. And these three conceptions were,
first, that the Catholic Church was a moribund superstition, secondly,
that it possessed in its organisation and tradition a power to be
reckoned with, and thirdly, that the State, its organs, and their
corporate inheritance of action, were so bound up with the Catholic
Church that it was impossible to effect any general political settlement
in which that body both external to France and internal, should be
neglected.
Of these three conceptions, had the first been as true as the last, it
would have saved the Constitution of the Clergy and the reputation for
common-sense of those who framed it.
It was certainly true that Catholicism had for so many centuries been
bound up in the framework of the State that the Parliament must
therefore do something with the Church in the general settlement of the
nation: it could not merely leave the Church on one side.
It was also superficially true that the Church was a power to be
reckoned with politically, quite apart from the traditional union of
Church and State--but only superficially true. What the revolutionary
politicians feared was the intrigue of those who commanded the
organisation of the Catholic Church, men whom they knew for the most
part to be without religion, and the sincerity of all of whom they
naturally doubted. A less superficial and a more solid judgment of the
matter would have discovered that the real danger lay in the animosity
or intrigue against the Civil Constitution, not of the corrupt
hierarchy, but of the sincere though ill-instructed and dwindling
minority which was still loyally attached to the doctrines and
discipline of the Church. But even this superficial judgment would not
have been fatal, had not the judgment of the National Assembly been
actually erroneous upon the first point--the vitality of the Faith.
Had the Catholic Church been, as nearly all educated men then imagined,
a moribund superstition, had the phase of decline through which it was
passing been a phase comparable to that through which other religions
have passed in their last moments, had it been supported by ancient
families from mere tradition, clung to by remote peasants from mere
ignorance and isolation, abandoned (as it was) in the towns simply
because the towns had better opportunities of intellectual enlightenment
and of acquiring elementary knowledge in history and the sciences; had,
in a word, the imaginary picture which these men drew in their minds of
the Catholic Church and its fortunes been an exact one, then the Civil
Constitution of the Clergy would have been a statesmanlike act. It would
have permitted the hold of the Catholic Church upon such districts as it
still retained to vanish slowly and without shock. It proposed to keep
alive at a reasonable salary the ministers of a ritual which would
presumably have lost all vitality before the last of its pensioners was
dead; it would have prepared a bed, as it were, upon which the last of
Catholicism in Gaul could peacefully pass away. The action of the
politicians in framing the Constitution would have seemed more generous
with every passing decade and their wisdom in avoiding offence to the
few who still remained faithful, would have been increasingly applauded.
On the other hand, and from the point of view of the statesman, the
Civil Constitution of the Clergy bound strictly to the State and made
responsible to it those ancient functions, not yet dead, of the
episcopacy and all its train. It was a wise and a just consideration on
the part of the Assembly that religions retain their machinery long
after they are dead, and if that machinery has ever been a State
machinery it must remain subject to the control of the State: and
subject not only up to the moment when the living force which once
animated it is fled, but much longer; up, indeed, to the moment when the
surviving institutions of the dead religion break down and perish.
So argued the National Assembly and its committee, and, I repeat, the
argument was just and statesmanlike, prudent and full of foresight, save
for one miscalculation. The Catholic Church was not dead, and was not
even dying. It was exhibiting many of the symptoms which in other
organisms and institutions correspond to the approach of death, but the
Catholic Church is an organism and an institution quite unlike any
other. It fructifies and expands immediately under the touch of a lethal
weapon; it has at its very roots the conception that material prosperity
is stifling to it, poverty and misfortune nutritious.
The men of the National Assembly would have acted more wisely had they
closely studied the story of Ireland (then but little known), or had
they even made themselves acquainted with the methods by which the
Catholic Church in Britain, after passing in the fifteenth century
through a phase somewhat similar to that under which it was sinking in
Gaul in the eighteenth, was stifled under Henry and Elizabeth.
But the desire of the men of 1789 was not to kill the Church but to let
it die; they thought it dying. Their desire was only to make that death
decent and of no hurt to the nation, and to control the political action
of a hierarchy that had been wealthy and was bound up with the old
society that was crumbling upon every side.
The Civil Constitution of the Clergy failed: it lit the civil war, it
dug the pit which divided Catholicism from the Revolution at the moment
of the foreign invasion, it segregated the loyal priest in such a
fashion that his order could not but appear to the populace as an order
of traitors, and it led, in the furnace of 1793, to the great
persecution from the memories of which the relations between the French
democracy and the Church have not recovered.
It is important to trace the actual steps of the failure; for when we
appreciate what the dates were, how short the time which was left for
judgment or for revision, and how immediately disaster followed upon
error, we can understand what followed and we can understand it in no
other way.
If we find an enduring quarrel between two families whose cause of
contention we cannot seize and whose mutual hostility we find
unreasonable, to learn that it proceeded from a cataclysm too rapid and
too violent for either to have exercised judgment upon it will enable us
to excuse or at least to comprehend the endurance of their antagonism.
Now, it was a cataclysm which fell upon the relations of the Church and
State immediately after the error which the Parliament had committed; a
cataclysm quite out of proportion to their intentions, as indeed are
most sudden disasters quite out of proportion to the forces that bring
them about.
It was, as we have seen, in the summer of 1790--upon the 12th of
July--that the Civil Constitution of the Clergy was approved by the
Assembly. But it was not until the 26th of August that the King
consented to sign. Nor was there at the moment any attempt to give the
law effect. The protests of the bishops, for instance, came out quite at
leisure, in the month of October, and the active principle of the whole
of the Civil Constitution--to wit, the presentation of the Civic Oath
which the clergy were required to take, was not even debated until the
end of the year.
This Civic Oath, which is sometimes used as a bugbear in the matter, was
no more than an engagement under the sanction of an oath that the bishop
or priest taking it would maintain the new _régime_--though that
_régime_ included the constitution of the clergy; the oath involved no
direct breach with Catholic doctrine or practice. It was, indeed, a
folly to impose it, and it was a folly based upon the ignorance of the
politicians (and of many of the bishops of the day) as to the nature of
the Catholic Church. But the oath was not, nor was it intended to be, a
measure of persecution. Many of the parish clergy took it, and most of
them probably took it in good faith: nor did it discredit the oath with
the public that it was refused by all save four of the acting bishops,
for the condition of the hierarchy in pre-revolutionary France was
notorious. The action of the bishops appeared in the public eye to be
purely political, and the ready acceptance of the oath by so many,
though a minority, of the lower clergy argued strongly in its favour.
Nevertheless, no Catholic priest or bishop or layman could take that
oath without landing himself in disloyalty to his religion; and that for
the same reason which led St. Thomas of Canterbury to make his curious
and fruitful stand against the reasonable and inevitable, as much as
against the unreasonable, governmental provisions of his time. The
Catholic Church is an institution of necessity autonomous. It cannot
admit the right of any other power exterior to its own organisation to
impose upon it a modification of its discipline, nor, above all, a new
conception of its hieratic organisation.
The reader must carefully distinguish between the acceptation by the
Church of a detail of economic reform, the consent to suppress a
corporation at the request of the civil power, or even to forego certain
traditional political rights, and the admission of the general principle
of civil control. To that general principle the Assembly, in framing the
Constitution of the Clergy, was quite evidently committed. To admit such
a co-ordinate external and civil power, or rather to admit a _superior_
external power, is in theory to deny the principle of Catholicism, and
in practice to make of the Catholic Church what the other State
religions of Christendom have become.
I have said that not until the end of the year 1790 was the debate
opened upon the proposition to compel the clergy to take the oath.
It is a singular commentary upon the whole affair that compulsion should
have been the subject for debate at all. It should have followed, one
would have imagined, normally from the law. But so exceptional had been
the action of the Assembly and, as they now were beginning to find, so
perilous, that a special decree was necessary--and the King’s signature
to it--before this normal consequence of a measure which had been law
for months, could be acted upon.
Here let the reader pause and consider with what that moment--the end of
1790--coincided.
The assignats, paper-money issued upon the security of the confiscated
estates of the Church, had already depreciated 10 per cent. Those who
had first accepted them were paying throughout France a penny in the
livre, or as we may put it, a penny farthing on the shilling, for what
must have seemed to most of them the obstinacy of one single
corporation--and that an unpopular one--against the decrees of the
National Assembly.
It was now the moment when a definite reaction against the Revolution
was first taking shape, and when the populace was first beginning
uneasily to have suspicion of it; it was the moment when the Court was
beginning to negotiate for flight; it was the moment when (though the
populace did not know it) Mirabeau was advising the King with all his
might to seize upon the enforcement of the priests’ oath as an
opportunity for civil war.
The whole air of that winter was charged with doubt and mystery: in the
minds of all who had enthusiastically followed the march of the
Revolution, the short days of that rigorous cold of 1790-91 contained
passages of despair, and a very brief period was to suffice for making
the clerical oath not only the test of democracy against reaction, but
the wedge that should split the nation in two.
With the very opening of the new year, on the 4th of January, the
bishops and priests in the Assembly were summoned to take the oath to
the King, the Nation, and the Law; but that law included the Civil
Constitution of the Clergy, and they refused. Within three months
Mirabeau was dead, the flight of the King determined on, the suspicion
of Paris at white heat, the oath taken or refused throughout France,
and the schismatic priests introduced into their parishes--it may be
imagined with what a clamour and with how many village quarrels! In that
same fortnight appeared the papal brief, long delayed, and known as the
Brief “_Caritas_,” denouncing the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. Six
weeks later, at the end of May, the papal representative at the French
Court was withdrawn, and in that act religious war declared.
Throughout this quarrel, which was now exactly of a year’s duration, but
the acute phase of which had lasted only six months, every act of either
party to it necessarily tended to make the conflict more violent. Not
only was there no opportunity for conciliation, but in the very nature
of things the most moderate counsel had to range itself on one side or
the other, and every public act which touched in any way upon the sore
point, though it touched but indirectly, and with no desire on the part
of the actors to rouse the passions of the moment, immediately appeared
as a provocation upon one side or the other.
It was inevitable that it should be so, with a population which had
abandoned the practice of religion, with the attachment of the clerical
organisation to the organisation of the old _régime_, with the strict
bond of discipline that united the priesthood of the Church in France
into one whole, and above all with the necessity under which the
Revolution was, at this stage, of finding a definite and tangible
enemy.
This last point is of the very first importance. Public opinion was
exasperated and inflamed, for the King was known to be an opponent of
the democratic movement; yet he signed the bills and could not be
overtly attacked. The Queen was known to be a violent opponent of it;
but she did not actually govern. The Governments of Europe were known to
be opponents; but no diplomatic note had yet appeared of which public
opinion could make an object for attack.
The resistance, therefore, offered by the clergy to the Civil
Constitution, had just that effect which a nucleus will have in the
crystallisation of some solution. It polarised the energies of the
Revolution, it provided a definite foil, a definite negative, a definite
counterpoint, a definite butt. Here was a simple issue. Men wearing a
special uniform, pursuing known functions, performing a known part in
society--to wit, the priests--were now for the most part the enemies of
the new democratic Constitution that was in preparation. They would not
take the oath of loyalty to it: they were everywhere in secret rebellion
against it and, where they were dispossessed of their cures, in open
rebellion. The clergy, therefore, that is the non-juring clergy (and the
conforming clergy were an experiment that soon became a fiction), were
after April 1791, in the eyes of all the democrats of the time, the
plainest and most tangible form of the opposition to democracy.
To the way in which I have presented the problem a great deal more might
be added. The very fact that the democratic movement had come after a
period of unfaith, and was non-Catholic in its springs, would have
tended to produce that quarrel. So would the necessary attachment of the
Catholic to authority and the easy confusion between the principle of
authority and claims of a traditional monarchy. Again, the elements of
vanity, of material greed, and of a false finality which are to be
discovered in any purely democratic theory of the State, will between
them always bring this theory into some conflict with religion. The
centuries during which the throne and the altar had stood as twin
symbols, especially in France, the very terminology of religious
metaphor which had been forged during the centuries of monarchical
institutions in Europe, helped to found the great quarrel. But, I
repeat, the overt act without which the quarrel could never have become
the terribly great thing it did, the master blunder which destroyed the
unity of the revolutionary movement, was the Civil Constitution of the
Clergy.
So much for the first year of the schism, May 1790 to May 1791. The
second year is but an intensification of the process apparent in the
first.
It opens with the King’s flight in June 1791: that is, with the first
open act of enmity taken against the authority of the National
Parliament since, two years before, the National Parliament had declared
itself supreme. Already the Court had been generally identified with the
resistance of the clergy, and a particular example of this had appeared
in the opinion that the King’s attempted journey to St. Cloud in April
had been prompted by a desire to have communion at the hands of a
non-juring priest.[8] When, therefore, the King fled, though his flight
had nothing whatsoever to do with the clerical quarrel, it was
associated in men’s minds with the clerical quarrel through his attempt
to leave Paris in April and from a long association of the Court with
the clerical resistance. The outburst of anti-monarchical feeling which
followed the flight was at the same time an outburst of anti-clerical
feeling; but the clergy were everywhere and could be attacked
everywhere. The Declaration of Pillnitz, which the nation very rightly
interpreted as the beginning of an armed European advance against the
French democracy, was felt to be a threat not only in favour of the King
but in favour also of the rebellious ecclesiastics.
And so forth. The uneasy approach of war throughout that autumn and
winter of 1791-92, the peculiar transformation of the French
temperament which war or its approach invariably produces--a sort of
constructive exaltation and creative passion--began to turn a great part
of its energy or fury against the very persons of the orthodox priests.
The new Parliament, the “Legislative” as it was called, had not been
sitting two months when it passed, upon November 29, 1791, the decree
that non-juring priests should be deprived of their stipend. And here
again we must note the curious lack of adjustment between law and fact
in all this clerical quarrel! For more than a year public money had been
paid to men who, under the law, should not during the whole of that year
have touched any salary! Yet, as in the case of the oath, special action
was necessary, and moreover the Parliament added to this tardy and
logical consequence of the law a declaration that those who had not so
taken the oath within eight days of their decree should be rendered
“suspect.”
The word “suspect” is significant. The Parliament even now could not
act, at least it could not act without the King; and this word
“suspect,” which carried no material consequences with it, was one that
might cover a threat of things worse than regular and legal punishment.
It was like the mark that some power not authorised or legal makes upon
the door of those whom that power has singled out for massacre in some
city.
Three weeks later Louis vetoed the decree refusing stipends to
non-jurors, and the year 1791 ended with the whole matter in suspense
but with exasperation increasing to madness.
The first three months of 1792 saw no change. The non-juring clergy were
still tolerated by the Executive in their illegal position, and, what is
more extraordinary, still received public money and were still for the
most part in possession of their cures; the conception that the clergy
were the prime, or at any rate the most obvious, enemies of the new
_régime_ now hardened into a fixed opinion which the attempted
persecution of religion, as the one party called it, the obstinate and
anti-national rebellion of factious priests, as the other party called
it, was rapidly approaching real persecution and real rebellion.
With April 1792 came the war, and all the passions of the war.
The known hostility of the King to the Revolution was now become
something far worse: his known sympathy with an enemy under arms. To
force the King into the open was henceforward the main tactic of the
revolutionary body.
Now for those whose object was forcing Louis XVI to open declarations of
hostility against the nation, his religion was an obvious instrument. In
no point could one come to closer grips with the King than on this
question of the Church, where already, in December 1791, he had
exercised his veto.
On May 27, 1792, therefore, Guadet and Vergniaud, the Girondins, moved
that a priest who had refused to take the oath should be subjected to
transportation upon the mere demand of any twenty taxpayers within that
assembly of parishes known as a “Canton.” It was almost exactly two
years since the Civil Constitution of the Clergy had first been reported
to the House by the Ecclesiastical Committee of the Constituent or
National Assembly.
It must not be forgotten under what external conditions this violent
act, the first true act of persecution, was demanded. It was already a
month since, upon the 20th of April, the war had opened upon the Belgian
frontier by a disgraceful panic and the murder of General Dillon; almost
contemporaneous with that breakdown was the corresponding panic and
flight of the French troops in their advance to Mons. All Europe was
talking of the facile march upon Paris which could now be undertaken;
and in general this decree against the priests was but part of the
exasperated policy which was rising to meet the terror of the invasion.
It was followed, of course, by the decree dismissing the Royal Guard,
and, rather more than a week later, by the demand for the formation of a
camp of volunteers under the walls of Paris. But with this we are not
here concerned. The King vetoed the decree against the non-juring
priests, and in the wild two months that followed the orthodox clergy
were, in the mind of the populace, and particularly the populace of
Paris, identified with the cause of the re-establishment of the old
_régime_ and the success of the invading foreign armies.
With the crash of the 10th of August the persecution began: the true
persecution, which was to the growing bitterness of the previous two
years what a blow is to the opening words of a quarrel.
The decree of the 27th of May was put into force within eleven days of
the fall of the Tuileries. True, it was not put into force in that
crudity which the Parliament had demanded: the non-juring priests were
given a fortnight to leave the kingdom, and if they failed to avail
themselves of the delay were to be transported.
From this date to the end of the Terror, twenty-three months later, the
story of the relations between the Revolution and the Church, though
wild and terrible, is simple: it is a story of mere persecution
culminating in extremes of cruelty and in the supposed uprooting of
Christianity in France.
The orthodox clergy were everywhere regarded by this time as the typical
enemies of the revolutionary movement; they themselves regarded the
revolutionary movement, by this time, as being principally an attempt to
destroy the Catholic Church.
Within seven months of the fall of the monarchy, from the 18th of March,
1793, the priests, whether non-juring or schismatic, might, on the
denunciation of any six citizens, be subjected to transportation.
There followed immediately a general attack upon religion. The attempted
closing of all churches was, of course, a failure, but it was firmly
believed that such attachment as yet remained to the Catholic Church was
due only to the ignorance of the provincial districts which displayed
it, or to the self-seeking of those who fostered it. The attempt at mere
“de-christianisation,” as it was called, failed, but the months of
terror and cruelty, the vast number of martyrdoms (for they were no
less) and the incredible sufferings and indignities to which the priests
who attempted to remain in the country were subjected, burnt itself, as
it were, into the very fibre of the Catholic organisation in France, and
remained, in spite of political theory one way or the other, and in
spite of the national sympathies of the priesthood, the one great active
memory inherited from that time.
Conversely, the picture of the priest, his habit and character, as the
fatal and necessary opponent of the revolutionary theory, became so
fixed in the mind of the Republican that two generations did nothing to
eliminate it, and that even in our time the older men, in spite of pure
theory, cannot rid themselves of an imagined connection between the
Catholic Church and an international conspiracy against democracy. Nor
does this non-rational but very real feeling lack support from the
utterances of those who, in opposing the political theory of the French
Revolution, consistently quote the Catholic Church as its necessary and
holy antagonist.
The attempt to “de-christianise” France failed, as I have said,
completely. Public worship was restored, and the Concordat of Napoleon
was believed to have settled the relations between Church and State in a
permanent fashion. We have lived to see it dissolved; but this
generation will not see, nor perhaps the generation succeeding it, the
issue of the struggle between two bodies of thought which are divided by
no process of reason, but profoundly divorced by the action of vivid and
tragic historical memories.
FOOTNOTES:
[8] This opinion has entered into so many Protestant and non-Catholic
histories of the Revolution that it is worth criticising once again in
this little book. The King was perfectly free to receive communion
privately from the hands of orthodox priests, did so receive it, and had
received communion well within the canonical times. There was little
ecclesiastical reason for the attempted leaving of Paris for St. Cloud
on Monday the 18th April, 1791, save the _custom_ (not the religious
duty) of communicating in public on Easter Sunday itself; it was a
political move.
INDEX
Alexander the Great, 144
Argonne, the, 156
Arras, 132, 137
Artois, Comte d’, 105
Avignon, 111
Bacharach, 173
Bailly, 71, 95
Barentin, 89
Barrère, 80, 125, 130, 131
Bastille, the, 95, 105, 109, 115
Beauregard, 200
Belgium, 123, 167, 169, 173
Bergues, 191
Bordeaux, 135
Bouillé, 107, 152
Brissot, 110, 130
Brunswick, Duke of, 115, 118, 178
Brussels, 168
Cæsar, 144
Calonne, 46
Cambon, 125
Carignan, 200
Carlyle, Thomas, 68
Carnot, 72-74, 80, 81, 136, 139, 171, 184, 186, 195, 197, 198, 200,
201
Cassel, 192
Chalôns, 107, 158
Champ-de-Mars, Massacre of, 109
Champfleury, 77
Charleroi, 210, 211
Charles I of England, 222
Chollet, 128
Clerfayt, 206, 207, 209
Coblentz, 115
Coburg, 170, 173, 176, 177, 179, 186, 188, 196, 210
Committee of Public Safety, 78, 79, 80, 81, 119, 125, 126, 128, 129,
131, 134, 136, 137, 140, 183, 195, 196, 203
Condé, 106
Condé, fortress of, 135, 173, 177, 178, 180, 182, 183, 186, 195
Condorcet, 71
_Contrat Social_, 21, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 37, 125, 133
Coudequerque, 192
Couthon, 131
Custine, 177, 178, 179, 180
Danton, 64, 67-72, 73, 81, 82, 109, 117, 119, 120, 125, 130, 131, 135,
137, 138, 139, 150, 162, 184, 185
Desmoulins, 138
Dillon, General, 250
Drouet, 108
Dumouriez, 43, 65-67, 113, 123, 124, 125, 155, 157, 158, 159, 162,
163, 165, 168, 169, 170, 173
Dunquerque, 135, 136, 181, 185, 186, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 195
England, 14, 124, 145
Elizabeth, Queen of England, 239
Esquelbecque, 191
Fersen, Count Axel de, 53
Fleurus, 211, 212
Fontenay, 128
Fontenoy, 149, 166
Fouché, 74
Freemasonry, 71, 231
Freytag, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194
Furnes, 190, 194
George III of England, 63
Gironde, 110
_Girondins, The_, 110, 112, 119, 122, 123, 129, 249
Grandpré, 158
Guadet, 249
Guise, 198, 200
Haguenau, 202
Haine, the River, 167
Hébert, 138
Henry VIII of England, 222, 229, 239
Hesse-Cassel, Landgrave of, 113
Hoche, 202
Holland, 124, 163
Hoondschoote, 74, 136, 195, 196, 197
Houchard, 179, 181, 192, 193, 194, 195, 198
Howe, Lord, 213
Ireland, 239
Isnard, 110
James II of England, 230
Jefferson, 21
Jemappes, 123, 166, 167
Joseph II of Austria, 112, 163, 165
Jourdan, 198
Kaiserslautern, 202
Kaunitz, 155
Kellermann, 159, 160
Kilmaine, 180, 181
La Fayette, 43, 51, 61-65, 95, 100, 109, 114
Lamballe, Princess de, 53, 71
Landau, 177, 202, 203
Lebas, 141
Leipsic, 143, 214
Lequesnoy, 177, 186, 195
Linselles, 189
Longwy, 115, 118, 156
Lorraine, 118
Louis XIV of France, 100, 225, 230
Louis XVI of France, vi, 37-45, 71, 84, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92,
93, 95, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 107, 108, 109, 111, 114,
117, 123, 124, 152, 153, 243, 245, 246, 247, 248, 249, 250
Louis XVII of France, 135
Louvre, the, 116, 117
Luxembourg, 118
Lyons, 129, 136, 182, 183
Lys, the River, 206, 207
Machecoul, 128
Maestricht, 168
Malo-les-Bains, 194
Marat, 74-77, 120, 135, 183
Marcel, 120
Marchionnes, 189
Marie Antoinette, Queen of France, vi, 45-53, 63, 64, 90, 99, 100,
101, 102, 103, 106, 107, 108, 109, 113, 116, 117, 138, 139, 152,
153, 155, 245
Marque, the River, 206
“Marseillaise,” the, 116
Marseilles, 116, 131, 135, 182
Maubeuge, 136, 177, 178, 181, 196, 197, 202
Mayence, 135, 173, 177, 178
Merda, 142
Metz, 159
Michelet, 68
Mirabeau, 44, 53-61, 64, 70, 72, 102, 103, 104, 106, 107, 243
Mons, 167, 177, 250
Montmédy, 107
Mouveau, 206
Namur, 179
Nantes, 128, 131, 136, 137, 182
Napoleon I, 66, 67, 72, 143, 150, 205, 214, 253
Narbonne, 43, 155
Necker, 46, 90, 94, 95
Neerwinden, 124, 125, 128, 169
Orleans, 128
Orleans, Duke of, 109
Parthenay, 128
Pichegru, 202
Pillnitz, 154, 247
Poland, 31
Polignac, Madame de, 53
Pollio, 120
Redange, 118
Robespierre, 77-83, 111, 112, 132, 133, 134, 140, 141, 142, 213
Robinet, Dr., 120
Roland, 110
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 20, 21, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35,
36, 37, 125
Russia, 14
St. Amand, 206
Saint-André, Jeanbon, 80, 131, 185
St. Cloud, 108, 247
Saint-Just, 80, 131, 133, 140, 141, 210
St. Menehould, 159
Scheldt, the, 123, 183, 205, 206
Sedan, 114
Servia, 155
Sièyes, 87
Spain, 24, 44, 124, 150
Talavera, 189
Talleyrand, 150
Terror, the, 79, 80, 81, 82, 120, 137, 139, 140, 142, 251
Tetteghem, 191
Thouars, 128
Toulon, 135, 136, 182, 183, 203
Tourcoing, 189, 206, 208, 209
Tournay, 210
Trafalgar, 213
Tuileries, the, 100, 101, 116, 121, 251
Valenciennes, 129, 135, 169, 173, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183,
186, 195
Valmy, 121, 122, 131, 158, 159, 160, 169
Varennes, 107, 108, 154
Vendée, 128, 135, 203
Verdun, 118, 120, 156, 157
Vergniaud, 110, 130, 249
Versailles, 52, 94, 99, 100, 102, 152, 153
Vienna, 163, 210
Warcoing, 205
Waterloo, 143
Wattignies, 73, 136, 201, 208
Wellington, Duke of, 189
Westermann, 131
Wilder, 191
Wissembourg, 202
Wormhoudt, 191
Wurmser, 178
York, Duke of, 179, 181, 186, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 194, 205, 208,
209
* * * * *
_Richard Clay & Sons, Limited, London and Bungay._
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