CHAPTER II.

French and Austrian armies on the Flemish frontier--Prussia enters the

war--Brunswick invades France--His Proclamation--Insurrection of Aug. 10

at Paris--Massacres of September--Character of the war--Brunswick, checked

at Valmy, retreats--The War becomes a Crusade of France--Neighbours of

France--Custine enters Mainz--Dumouriez conquers the Austrian Netherlands

--Nice and Savoy annexed--Decree of the Convention against all Governments

--Execution of Louis XVI.--War with England, followed by war with the

Mediterranean States--Condition of England--English Parties, how affected

by the Revolution--The Gironde and the Mountain--Austria recovers the

Netherlands--The Allies invade France--La Vendée--Revolutionary System of

1793--Errors of the Allies--New French Commanders and Democratic Army--

Victories of Jourdan, Hoche, and Pichegru--Prussia withdrawing from the War

--Polish Affairs--Austria abandons the Netherlands--Treaties of

Basle--France in 1795--Insurrection of 13 Vendémiaire--Constitution of

1795--The Directory--Effect of the Revolution on the spirit of Europe up

to 1795.

[Fighting on Flemish frontier, April, 1792.]

[Prussian army invades France, July, 1792. Proclamation.]

The war between France and Austria opened in April, 1792, on the Flemish

frontier. The first encounters were discreditable to the French soldiery,

who took to flight and murdered one of their generals. The discouragement

with which the nation heard of these reverses deepened into sullen

indignation against the Court, as weeks and months passed by, and the

forces lay idle on the frontier or met the enemy only in trifling

skirmishes which left both sides where they were before. If at this crisis

of the Revolution, with all the patriotism, all the bravery, all the

military genius of France burning for service, the Government conducted the

war with results scarcely distinguishable from those of a parade, the

suggestion of treason on the part of the Court was only too likely to be

entertained. The internal difficulties of the country were increasing. The

Assembly had determined to banish from France the priests who rejected the

new ecclesiastical system, and the King had placed his veto upon their

decree. He had refused to permit the formation of a camp of volunteers in

the neighbourhood of Paris. He had dismissed the popular Ministry forced

upon him by the Gironde. A tumult on the 20th of June, in which the mob

forced their way into the Tuileries, showed the nature of the attack

impending upon the monarchy if Louis continued to oppose himself to the

demands of the nation; but the lesson was lost upon the King. Louis was as

little able to nerve himself for an armed conflict with the populace as to

reconcile his conscience to the Ecclesiastical Decrees, and he surrendered

himself to a pious inertia at a moment when the alarm of foreign invasion

doubled revolutionary passion all over France. Prussia, in pursuance of a

treaty made in February, united its forces to those of Austria. Forty

thousand Prussian troops, under the Duke of Brunswick, the best of

Frederick's surviving generals, advanced along the Moselle. From Belgium

and the upper Rhine two Austrian armies converged upon the line of

invasion; and the emigrant nobles were given their place among the forces

of the Allies.

On the 25th of July the Duke of Brunswick, in the name of the Emperor and

the King of Prussia, issued a proclamation to the French people, which, but

for the difference between violent words and violent deeds, would have left

little to be complained of in the cruelties that henceforward stained the

popular cause. In this manifesto, after declaring that the Allies entered

France in order to deliver Louis from captivity, and that members of the

National Guard fighting against the invaders would be punished as rebels

against their king, the Sovereigns addressed themselves to the city of

Paris and to the representatives of the French nation:--"The city of Paris

and its inhabitants are warned to submit without delay to their King; to

set that Prince at entire liberty, and to show to him and to all the Royal

Family the inviolability and respect which the law of nature and of nations

imposes on subjects towards their Sovereigns. Their Imperial and Royal

Majesties will hold all the members of the National Assembly, of the

Municipality, and of the National Guard of Paris responsible for all events

with their heads, before military tribunals, without hope of pardon. They

further declare that, if the Tuileries be forced or insulted, or the least

violence offered to the King, the Queen, or the Royal Family, and if

provision be not at once made for their safety and liberty, they will

inflict a memorable vengeance, by delivering up the city of Paris to

military execution and total overthrow, and the rebels guilty of such

crimes to the punishment they have merited." [17]

[Insurrection August 10, 1792.]

This challenge was not necessary to determine the fate of Louis. Since the

capture of the Bastille in the first days of the Revolution the National

Government had with difficulty supported itself against the populace of the

capital; and, even before the foreigner threatened Paris with fire and

sword, Paris had learnt to look for the will of France within itself. As

the columns of Brunswick advanced across the north-eastern frontier, Danton

and the leaders of the city-democracy marshalled their army of the poor and

the desperate to overthrow that monarchy whose cause the invader had made

his own. The Republic which had floated so long in the thoughts of the

Girondins was won in a single day by the populace of Paris, amid the roar

of cannons and the flash of bayonets. On the 10th of August Danton let

loose the armed mob upon the Tuileries. Louis quitted the Palace without

giving orders to the guard either to fight or to retire; but the guard were

ignorant that their master desired them to offer no resistance, and one

hundred and sixty of the mob were shot down before an order reached the

troops to abandon the Palace. The cruelties which followed the victory of

the people indicated the fate in store for those whom the invader came to

protect. It is doubtful whether the foreign Courts would have made any

serious attempt to undo the social changes effected by the Revolution in

France; but no one supposed that those thousands of self-exiled nobles who

now returned behind the guns of Brunswick had returned in order to take

their places peacefully in the new social order. In their own imagination,

as much as in that of the people, they returned with fire and sword to

repossess themselves of rights of which they had been despoiled, and to

take vengeance upon the men who were responsible for the changes made in

France since 1789. [18] In the midst of a panic little justified by the

real military situation, Danton inflamed the nation with his own passionate

courage and resolution; he unhappily also thought it necessary to a

successful national defence that the reactionary party at Paris should be

paralysed by a terrible example. The prisons were filled with persons

suspected of hostility to the national cause, and in the first days of

September many hundreds of these unfortunate persons were massacred by

gangs of assassins paid by a committee of the Municipality. Danton did not

disguise his approval of the act. He had made up his mind that the work of

the Revolution could only be saved by striking terror into its enemies, and

by preventing the Royalists from co-operating with the invader. But the

multitudes who flocked to the standards of 1792 carried with them the

patriotism of Danton unstained by his guilt. Right or wrong in its origin,

the war was now unquestionably a just one on the part of France, a war

against a privileged class attempting to recover by force the unjust

advantages that they had not been able to maintain, a war against the

foreigner in defence of the right of the nation to deal with its own

government. Since the great religious wars there had been no cause so

rooted in the hearts, so close to the lives of those who fought for it.

Every soldier who joined the armies of France in 1792 joined of his own

free will. No conscription dragged the peasant to the frontier. Men left

their homes in order that the fruit of the poor man's labour should be his

own, in order that the children of France should inherit some better

birthright than exaction and want, in order that the late-won sense of

human right should not be swept from the earth by the arms of privilege and

caste. It was a time of high-wrought hope, of generous and pathetic

self-sacrifice; a time that left a deep and indelible impression upon those

who judged it as eye-witnesses. Years afterwards the poet Wordsworth, then

alienated from France and cold in the cause of liberty, could not recall

without tears the memories of 1792. [19]

[Brunswick checked at Valmy, Sept. 20.]

[Retreat of Brunswick.]

The defence of France rested on General Dumouriez. The fortresses of Longwy

and Verdun, covering the passage of the Meuse, had fallen after the

briefest resistance; the troops that could be collected before Brunswick's

approach were too few to meet the enemy in the open field. Happily for

France the slow advance of the Prussian general permitted Dumouriez to

occupy the difficult country of the Argonne, where, while waiting for his

reinforcements, he was able for some time to hold the invaders in check. At

length Brunswick made his way past the defile which Dumouriez had chosen

for his first line of defence; but it was only to find the French posted in

such strength on his flank that any further advance would imperil his own

army. If the advance was to be continued, Dumouriez must be dislodged.

Accordingly, on the 20th of September, Brunswick directed his artillery

against the hills of Valmy, where the French left was encamped. The

cannonade continued for some hours, but it was followed by no general

attack. The firmness of the French under Brunswick's fire made it clear

that they would not be displaced without an obstinate battle; and,

disappointed of victory, the King of Prussia began to listen to proposals

of peace sent to him by Dumouriez. [20] A week spent in negotiation served

only to strengthen the French and to aggravate the scarcity and sickness

within the German camp. Dissensions broke out between the Prussian and

Austrian commanders; a retreat was ordered; and to the astonishment of

Europe the veteran forces of Brunswick fell back before the mutinous

soldiery and unknown generals of the Revolution, powerless to delay for a

single month the evacuation of France and the restoration of the fortresses

which they had captured.

[The Convention meets. Proclaims Republic, Sept. 21.]

[The war becomes a crusade of democracy.]

In the meantime the Legislative Assembly had decreed its own dissolution in

consequence of the overthrow of the monarchy on August both, and had

ordered the election of representatives to frame a constitution for France.

The elections were held in the crisis of invasion, in the height of

national indignation against the alliance of the aristocracy with the

foreigner, and, in some districts, under the influence of men who had not

shrunk from ordering the massacres in the prisons. At such a moment a

Constitutional Royalist had scarcely more chance of election than a

detected spy from the enemy's camp. The Girondins, who had been the party

of extremes in the Legislative Assembly, were the party of moderation and

order in the Convention. By their side there were returned men whose whole

being seemed to be compounded out of the forces of conflict, men who,

sometimes without conscious depravity, carried into political and social

struggles that direct, unquestioning employment of force which has

ordinarily been reserved for war or for the diffusion of religious

doctrines. The moral differences that separated this party from the Gironde

were at once conspicuous: the political creed of the two parties appeared

at first to be much the same. Monarchy was abolished, and France declared a

Republic (Sept. 21). Office continued in the hands of the Gironde; but the

vehement, uncompromising spirit of their rivals, the so-called party of the

Mountain, quickly made itself felt in all the relations of France to

foreign Powers. The intention of conquest might still be disavowed, as it

had been five months before; but were the converts to liberty to be denied

the right of uniting themselves to the French people by their own free

will? When the armies of the Republic had swept its assailants from the

border-provinces that gave them entrance into France, were those provinces

to be handed back to a government of priests and nobles? The scruples which

had condemned all annexation of territory vanished in that orgy of

patriotism which followed the expulsion of the invader and the discovery

that the Revolution was already a power in other lands than France. The

nation that had to fight the battle of European freedom must appeal to the

spirit of freedom wherever it would answer the call: the conflict with

sovereigns must be maintained by arming their subjects against them in

every land. In this conception of the universal alliance of the nations,

the Governments with which France was not yet at war were scarcely

distinguished from those which had pronounced against her. The

frontier-lines traced by an obsolete diplomacy, the artificial guarantees

of treaties, were of little account against the living and inalienable

sovereignty of the people. To men inflamed with the passions of 1792 an

argument of international law scarcely conveyed more meaning than to Peter

the Hermit. Among the statesmen of other lands, who had no intention of

abandoning all the principles recognised as the public right of Europe, the

language now used by France could only be understood as the avowal of

indiscriminate aggression.

[The neighbors of France.]

The Revolution had displayed itself in France as a force of union as well

as of division. It had driven the nobles across the frontier; it had torn

the clergy from their altars; but it had reconciled sullen Corsica; and by

abolishing feudal rights it had made France the real fatherland of the

Teutonic peasant in Alsace and Lorraine. It was now about to prove its

attractive power in foreign lands. At the close of the last century the

nationalities of Europe were far less consolidated than they are at

present; only on the Spanish and the Swiss frontier had France a neighbour

that could be called a nation. On the north, what is now the kingdom of

Belgium was in 1792 a collection of provinces subject to the House of

Austria. The German population both of the districts west of the Rhine and

of those opposite to Alsace was parcelled out among a number of petty

principalities. Savoy, though west of the chain of the Alps and French in

speech, formed part of the kingdom of Piedmont, which was itself severed by

history and by national character from the other States of Northern Italy.

Along the entire frontier, from Dunkirk to the Maritime Alps, France

nowhere touched a strong, united, and independent people; and along this

entire frontier, except in the country opposite Alsace, the armed

proselytism of the French Revolution proved a greater force than the

influences on which the existing order of things depended. In the Low

Countries, in the Principalities of the Rhine, in Switzerland, in Savoy, in

Piedmont itself, the doctrines of the Revolution were welcomed by a more or

less numerous class, and the armies of France appeared, though but for a

moment, as the missionaries of liberty and right rather than as an invading

enemy.

[Custine enters Mainz, Oct. 20.]

No sooner had Brunswick been brought to a stand by Dumouriez at Valmy than

a French division under Custine crossed the Alsatian frontier and advanced

upon Spires, where Brunswick had left large stores of war. The garrison was

defeated in an encounter outside the town; Spires and Worms surrendered to

Custine. In the neighbouring fortress of Mainz, the key to Western Germany,

Custine's advance was watched by a republican party among the inhabitants,

from whom the French general learnt that he had only to appear before the

city to become its master. Brunswick had indeed apprehended the failure of

his invasion of France, but he had never given a thought to the defence of

Germany; and, although the King of Prussia had been warned of the

defenceless state of Mainz, no steps had been taken beyond the payment of a

sum of money for the repair of the fortifications, which money the

Archbishop expended in the purchase of a wood belonging to himself and the

erection of a timber patchwork. On news arriving of the capture of Spires,

the Archbishop fled, leaving the administration to the Dean, the

Chancellor, and the Commandant. The Chancellor made a speech, calling upon

his "beloved brethren" the citizens to defend themselves to the last

extremity, and daily announced the overthrow of Dumouriez and the

approaching entry of the Allies into Paris, until Custine's soldiers

actually came into sight. [21] Then a council of war declared the city to

be untenable; and before Custine had brought up a single siege-gun the

garrison capitulated, and the French were welcomed into Mainz by the

partisans of the Republic (Oct. 20). With the French arms came the French

organisation of liberty. A club was formed on the model of the Jacobin Club

of Paris; existing officers and distinctions of rank were abolished; and

although the mass of the inhabitants held aloof, a Republic was finally

proclaimed, and incorporated with the Republic of France.

[Dumouriez invades the Netherlands.]

[Battle of Jemappes, Nov. 6.]

The success of Custine's raid into Germany did not divert the Convention

from the design of attacking Austria in the Netherlands, which Dumouriez

had from the first pressed upon the Government. It was not three years

since the Netherlands had been in revolt against the Emperor Joseph. In its

origin the revolt was a reactionary movement of the clerical party against

Joseph's reforms; but there soon sprang up ambitions and hopes at variance

with the first impulses of the insurrection; and by the side of monks and

monopolists a national party came into existence, proclaiming the

sovereignty of the people, and imitating all the movements of the French

Revolution. During the brief suspension of Austrian rule the popular and

the reactionary parties attacked one another; and on the restoration of

Leopold's authority in 1791 the democratic leaders, with a large body of

their followers, took refuge beyond the frontier, looking forward to the

outbreak of war between Austria and France. Their partisans formed a French

connection in the interior of the country; and by some strange illusion,

the priests themselves and the close corporations which had been attacked

by Joseph supposed that their interests would be respected by Revolutionary

France. [22] Thus the ground was everywhere prepared for a French invasion.

Dumouriez crossed the frontier. The border fortresses no longer existed;

and after a single battle won by the French at Jemappes on the 6th of

November, [23] the Austrians, finding the population universally hostile,

abandoned the Netherlands without a struggle.

[Nice and Savoy annexed.]

[Decree of Dec. 15.]

The victory of Jemappes, the first pitched battle won by the Republic,

excited an outburst of revolutionary fervour in the Convention which deeply

affected the relations of France to Great Britain, hitherto a neutral

spectator of the war. A manifesto was published declaring that the French

nation offered its alliance to all peoples who wished to recover their

freedom, and charging the generals of the Republic to give their protection

to all persons who might suffer in the cause of liberty (Nov. 19). A week

later Savoy and Nice were annexed to France, the population of Savoy having

declared in favour of France and Sardinia. On the 15th of December the

Convention proclaimed that social and political revolution was henceforth

to accompany every movement of its armies on foreign soil. "In every

country that shall be occupied by the armies of the French Republic"--such

was the substance of the Decree of December 15th--"the generals shall

announce the abolition of all existing authorities; of nobility, of

serfage, of every feudal right and every monopoly; they shall proclaim the

sovereignty of the people, and convoke the inhabitants in assemblies to

form a provisional Government, to which no officer of a former Government,

no noble, nor any member of the former privileged corporations shall be

eligible. They shall place under the charge of the French Republic all

property belonging to the Sovereign or his adherents, and the property of

every civil or religious corporation. The French nation will treat as

enemies any people which, refusing liberty and equality, desires to

preserve its prince and privileged castes, or to make any accommodation

with them."

[England arms.]

[The Schelde.]

[Execution of Louis XVI., Jan. 21, 1793.]

This singular announcement of a new crusade caused the Government of Great

Britain to arm. Although the decree of the Convention related only to

States with which France was at war, the Convention had in fact formed

connections with the English revolutionary societies; and the French

Minister of Marine informed his sailors that they were about to carry fifty

thousand caps of liberty to their English brethren. No prudent statesman

would treat a mere series of threats against all existing authorities as

ground for war; but the acts of the French Government showed that it

intended to carry into effect the violent interference in the affairs of

other nations announced in its manifestoes. Its agents were stirring up

dissatisfaction in every State; and although the annexation of Savoy and

the occupation of the Netherlands might be treated as incidental to the

conflict with Austria and Sardinia, in which Great Britain had pledged

itself to neutrality, other acts of the Convention were certainly

infringements of the rights of allies of England. A series of European

treaties, oppressive according to our own ideas, but in keeping with the

ideas of that age, prohibited the navigation of the River Schelde, on which

Antwerp is situated, in order that the commerce of the North Sea might flow

exclusively into Dutch ports. On the conquest of Belgium the French

Government gave orders to Dumouriez to send a flotilla down the river, and

to declare Antwerp an open port in right of the law of nature, which

treaties cannot abrogate. Whatever the folly of commercial restraints, the

navigation of the Schelde was a question between the Antwerpers and the

Dutch, and one in which France had no direct concern. The incident, though

trivial, was viewed in England as one among many proofs of the intention of

the French to interfere with the affairs of neighbouring States at their

pleasure. In ordinary times it would not have been easy to excite much

interest in England on behalf of a Dutch monopoly; but the feeling of this

country towards the French Revolution had been converted into a passionate

hatred by the massacres of September, and by the open alliance between the

Convention and the Revolutionary societies in England itself. Pitt indeed,

whom the Parisians imagined to be their most malignant enemy, laboured

against the swelling national passion, and hoped against all hope for

peace. Not only was Pitt guiltless of the desire to add this country to the

enemies of France, but he earnestly desired to reconcile France with

Austria, in order that the Western States, whose embroilment left Eastern

Europe at the mercy of Catherine of Russia, might unite to save both Poland

and Turkey from falling into the hands of a Power whose steady aggression

threatened Europe more seriously than all the noisy and outspoken

excitement of the French Convention. Pitt, moreover, viewed with deep

disapproval the secret designs of Austria and Prussia. [24] If the French

executive would have given any assurance that the Netherlands should not be

annexed, or if the French ambassador, Chauvelin, who was connected with

English plotters, had been superseded by a trustworthy negotiator, it is

probable that peace might have been preserved. But when, on the execution

of King Louis (Jan. 21, 1793), Chauvelin was expelled from England as a

suspected alien, war became a question of days. [25]

[Holland and Mediterranean States enter the war.]

[War with England, Feb. 1st, 1793.]

Points of technical right figured in the complaints of both sides; but the

real ground of war was perfectly understood. France considered itself

entitled to advance the Revolution and the Rights of Man wherever its own

arms or popular insurrection gave it the command. England denied the right

of any Power to annul the political system of Europe at its pleasure. No

more serious, no more sufficient, ground of war ever existed between two

nations; yet the event proved that, with the highest justification for war,

the highest wisdom would yet have chosen peace. England's entry into the

war converted it from an affair of two or three campaigns into a struggle

of twenty years, resulting in more violent convulsions, more widespread

misery, and more atrocious crimes, than in all probability would have

resulted even from the temporary triumph of the revolutionary cause in

1793. But in both nations political passion welcomed impending calamity;

and the declaration of war by the Convention on February 1st only

anticipated the desire of the English people. Great Britain once committed

to the struggle, Pitt spared neither money nor intimidation in his efforts

to unite all Europe against France. Holland was included with England in

the French declaration of war. The Mediterranean States felt that the navy

of England was nearer to them than the armies of Austria and Prussia; and

before the end of the summer of 1793, Spain, Portugal, Naples, Tuscany, and

the Papal States had joined the Coalition.

[French wrongly think England inclined to revolution.]

The Jacobins of Paris had formed a wrong estimate of the political

condition of England. At the outbreak of the war they believed that England

itself was on the verge of revolution. They mistook the undoubted

discontent of a portion of the middle and lower classes, which showed

itself in the cry for parliamentary reform, for a general sentiment of

hatred towards existing institutions, like that which in France had swept

away the old order at a single blow. The Convention received the addresses

of English Radical societies, and imagined that the abuses of the

parliamentary system under George III. had alienated the whole nation. What

they had found in Belgium and in Savoy--a people thankful to receive the

Rights of Man from the soldiers of the Revolution--they expected to find

among the dissenting congregations of London and the factory-hands of

Sheffield. The singular attraction exercised by each class in England upon

the one below it, as well as the indifference of the nation generally to

all ideals, was little understood in France, although the Revolutions of

the two countries bore this contrast on their face. A month after the fall

of the Bastille, the whole system of class-privilege and monopoly had

vanished from French law; fifteen years of the English Commonwealth had

left the structure of English society what it had been at the beginning.

But political observation vanished in the delirium of 1793; and the French

only discovered, when it was too late, that in Great Britain the Revolution

had fallen upon an enemy of unparalleled stubbornness and inexhaustible

strength.

[The Whigs not democratic.]

[Political condition of England.]

In the first Assembly of the Revolution it was usual to speak of the

English as free men whom the French ought to imitate; in the Convention it

was usual to speak of them as slaves whom the French ought to deliver. The

institutions of England bore in fact a very different aspect when compared

with the absolute monarchy of the Bourbons and when compared with the

democracy of 1793. Frenchmen who had lived under the government of a Court

which made laws by edict and possessed the right to imprison by

letters-patent looked with respect upon the Parliament of England, its

trial by jury, and its freedom of the press. The men who had sent a king to

prison and confiscated the estates of a great part of the aristocracy could

only feel compassion for a land where three-fourths of the national

representatives were nominees of the Crown or of wealthy peers. Nor, in

spite of the personal sympathy of Fox with the French revolutionary

movement, was there any real affinity between the English Whig party and

that which now ruled in the Convention. The event which fixed the character

of English liberty during the eighteenth century, the Revolution of 1688,

had nothing democratic in its nature. That revolution was directed against

a system of Roman Catholic despotism; it gave political power not to the

mass of the nation, which had no desire and no capacity to exercise it, but

to a group of noble families and their retainers, who, during the reigns of

the first two Georges, added all the patronage and influence of the Crown

to their social and constitutional weight in the country. The domestic

history of England since the accession of George III. had turned chiefly

upon the obstinate struggle of this monarch to deliver himself from all

dependence upon party. The divisions of the Whigs, their jealousies, but,

above all, their real alienation from the mass of the people whose rights

they professed to defend, ultimately gave the King the victory, when, after

twenty years of errors, be found in the younger Pitt a Minister capable of

uniting the interests of the Crown with the ablest and most patriotic

liberal statesmanship. Bribes, threats, and every species of base influence

had been employed by King George to break up the great Coalition of 1783,

which united all sections of the Whigs against him under the Ministry of

Fox and North; but the real support of Pitt, whom the King placed in office

with a minority in the House of Commons, was the temper of the nation

itself, wearied with the exclusiveness, the corruption, and the

party-spirit of the Whigs, and willing to believe that a popular Minister,

even if he had entered upon power unconstitutionally, might do more for the

country than the constitutional proprietors of the rotten boroughs.

[Pitt Minister, 1783.]

[Effect of French Revolution on English Parties.]

From 1783 down to the outbreak of the French Revolution, Pitt, as a Tory

Minister confronted by a Whig Opposition, governed England on more liberal

principles than any statesman who had held power during the eighteenth

century. These years were the last of the party-system of England in its

original form. The French Revolution made an end of that old distinction in

which the Tory was known as the upholder of Crown-prerogative and the Whig

as the supporter of a constitutional oligarchy of great families. It

created that new political antagonism in which, whether under the names of

Whig and Tory, or of Liberal and Conservative, two great parties have

contended, one for a series of beneficial changes, the other for the

preservation of the existing order. The convulsions of France and the dread

of revolutionary agitation in England transformed both Pitt and the Whigs

by whom he was opposed. Pitt sacrificed his schemes of peaceful progress to

foreign war and domestic repression, and set his face against the reform of

Parliament which he had once himself proposed. The Whigs broke up into two

sections, led respectively by Burke and by Fox, the one denouncing the

violence of the Revolution, and ultimately uniting itself with Pitt; the

other friendly to the Revolution, in spite of its excesses, as the cause of

civil and religious liberty, and identifying itself, under the healthy

influence of parliamentary defeat and disappointment, with the defence of

popular rights in England and the advocacy of enlightened reform.

[Burke's "Reflections," Oct. 1790.]

[Most of the Whigs support Pitt against France.]

The obliteration of the old dividing-line in English politics may be said

to date from the day when the ancient friendship of Burke and Fox was

bitterly severed by the former in the House of Commons (May 6, 1791). The

charter of the modern Conservative party was that appeal to the nation

which Burke had already published, in the autumn of 1790, under the title

of "Reflections on the French Revolution." In this survey of the political

forces which he saw in action around him, the great Whig writer, who in

past times had so passionately defended the liberties of America and the

constitutional tradition of the English Parliament against the aggression

of George III., attacked the Revolution as a system of violence and caprice

more formidable to freedom than the tyranny of any Crown. He proved that

the politicians and societies of England who had given it their sympathy

had given their sympathy to measures and to theories opposed to every

principle of 1688. Above all, he laid bare that agency of riot and

destructiveness which, even within the first few months of the Revolution,

filled him with presentiment of the calamities about to fall upon France.

Burke's treatise was no dispassionate inquiry into the condition of a

neighbouring state: it was a denunciation of Jacobinism as fierce and as

little qualified by political charity as were the maledictions of the

Hebrew prophets upon their idolatrous neighbours; and it was intended, like

these, to excite his own countrymen against innovations among themselves.

It completely succeeded. It expressed, and it heightened, the alarm arising

among the Liberal section of the propertied class, at first well inclined

to the Revolution; and, although the Whigs of the House of Commons

pronounced in favour of Fox upon his first rupture with Burke, the tide of

public feeling, rising higher with every new outrage of the Revolution,

soon invaded the legislature, and carried the bulk of the Whig party to the

side of the Minister, leaving to Fox and his few faithful adherents the

task of maintaining an unheeded protest against the blind passions of war,

and the increasing rigour with which Pitt repressed every symptom of

popular disaffection.

[The Gironde and the Mountain in the Convention.]

[The Gironde and the Commune of Paris.]

The character of violence which Burke traced and condemned in the earliest

acts of the Revolution displayed itself in a much stronger light after the

overthrow of the Monarchy by the insurrection of August 10th. That event

was the work of men who commanded the Parisian democracy, not the work of

orators and party-leaders in the Assembly. The Girondins had not hesitated

to treat the victory as their own, by placing the great offices of State,

with one exception, in the hands of their leaders; they instantly found

that the real sovereignty lay elsewhere. The Council of the Commune, or

Municipality, of Paris, whose members had seized their post at the moment

of the insurrection, was the only administrative body that possessed the

power to enforce its commands; in the Ministries of State one will alone

made itself felt, that of Danton, whom the Girondins had unwillingly

admitted to office along with themselves. The massacres of September threw

into full light the powerlessness of the expiring Assembly. For five

successive days it was unable to check the massacres; it was unable to

bring to justice the men who had planned them, and who called upon the rest

of France to follow their example. With the meeting of the Convention,

however, the Girondins, who now regarded themselves as the legitimate

government, and forgot that they owed office to an insurrection, expected

to reduce the capital to submission. They commanded an overwhelming

majority in the new chamber; they were supported by the middle class in all

the great cities of France. The party of the Mountain embraced at first

only the deputies of Paris, and a group of determined men who admitted no

criticism on the measures which the democracy of Paris had thought

necessary for the Revolution. In the Convention they were the assailed, not

the assailants. Without waiting to secure themselves by an armed force, the

orators of the Gironde attempted to crush both the Municipality and the

deputies who ruled at the Clubs. They reproached the Municipality with the

murders of September; they accused Robespierre of aiming at the

Dictatorship. It was under the pressure of these attacks that the party of

the Mountain gathered its strength within the Convention, and that the

populace of Paris transferred to the Gironde the passionate hatred which it

had hitherto borne to the King and the aristocracy. The gulf that lay

between the people and those who had imagined themselves to be its leaders

burst into view. The Girondins saw with dismay that the thousands of hungry

workmen whose victory had placed them in power had fought for something

more tangible than Republican phrases from Tacitus and Plutarch. On one

side was a handful of orators and writers, steeped in the rhetoric and the

commonplace of ancient Rome, and totally strange to the real duties of

government; on the other side the populace of Paris, such as centuries of

despotism, privilege, and priestcraft had made it: sanguinary, unjust,

vindictive; convulsed since the outbreak of the Revolution with every

passion that sways men in the mass; taught no conception of progress but

the overthrow of authority, and acquainted with no title to power but that

which was bestowed by itself. If the Girondins were to remain in power,

they could do so only by drawing an army from the departments, or by

identifying themselves with the multitude. They declined to take either

course. Their audience was in the Assembly alone; their support in the

distant provinces. Paris, daily more violent, listened to men of another

stamp. The Municipality defied the Government; the Mountain answered the

threats and invectives of the majority in the Assembly by displays of

popular menace and tumult. In the eyes of the common people, who after so

many changes of government found themselves more famished and more

destitute than ever, the Gironde was now but the last of a succession of

tyrannies; its statesmen but impostors who stood between the people and the

enjoyment of their liberty.

Among the leaders of the Mountain, Danton aimed at the creation of a

central Revolutionary Government, armed with absolute powers for the

prosecution of the war; and he attacked the Girondins only when they

themselves had rejected his support. Robespierre, himself the author of

little beyond destruction, was the idol of those whom Rousseau's writings

had filled with the idea of a direct exercise of sovereignty by the people.

It was in the trial of the King that the Gironde first confessed its

submission to the democracy of Paris. The Girondins in their hearts desired

to save the King; they voted for his death with the hope of maintaining

their influence in Paris, and of clearing themselves from the charge of

lukewarmness in the cause of the Revolution. But the sacrifice was as vain

as it was dishonourable. The populace and the party of the Mountain took

the act in its true character, as an acknowledgment of their own victory. A

series of measures was brought forward providing for the poorer classes at

the expense of the wealthy. The Gironde, now forced to become the defenders

of property, encountered the fatal charge of deserting the cause of the

people; and from this time nothing but successful foreign warfare could

have saved their party from ruin.

[Defeat and treason of Dumouriez, March, 1793.]

Instead of success came inaction, disaster, and treason. The army of

Flanders lay idle during January and February for want of provisions and

materials of war; and no sooner had Dumouriez opened the campaign against

Holland than he was recalled by intelligence that the Austrians had fallen

upon his lieutenant, Miranda, at Maestricht, and driven the French army

before them. Dumouriez returned, in order to fight a pitched battle before

Brussels. He attacked the Austrians at Neerwinden (March 18), and suffered

a repulse inconsiderable in itself, but sufficient to demoralise an army

composed in great part of recruits and National Guards. [26] His defeat

laid Flanders open to the Austrians; but Dumouriez intended that it should

inflict upon the Republic a far heavier blow. Since the execution of the

King, he had been at open enmity with the Jacobins. He now proposed to the

Austrian commander to unite with him in an attack upon the Convention, and

in re-establishing monarchy in France. The first pledge of Dumouriez's

treason was the surrender of three commissioners sent by the Convention to

his camp; the second was to have been the surrender of the fortress of

Condé. But Dumouriez had overrated his influence with the army. Plainer

minds than his own knew how to deal with a general who intrigues with the

foreigner. Dumouriez's orders were disregarded; his movements watched; and

he fled to the Austrian lines under the fire of his own soldiers. About

thirty officers and eight hundred men passed with him to the enemy.

[Defeats on the North and East. Revolt of La Vendée, March, 1793.]

[The Commune crushes the Gironde, June 2.]

The defeat and treason of Dumouriez brought the army of Austria over the

northern frontier. Almost at the same moment Custine was overpowered in the

Palatinate; and the conquests of the previous autumn, with the exception of

Mainz, were lost as rapidly as they had been won. Custine fell back upon

the lines of Weissenburg, leaving the defence of Mainz to a garrison of

17,000 men, which, alone among the Republican armies, now maintained its

reputation. In France itself civil war broke out. The peasants of La

Vendée, a district destitute of large towns, and scarcely touched either by

the evils which had produced the Revolution or by the hopes which animated

the rest of France, had seen with anger the expulsion of the parish priests

who refused to take the oath to the Constitution. A levy of 300,000 men,

which was ordered by the Convention in February, 1793, threw into revolt

the simple Vendeans, who cared for nothing outside their own parishes, and

preferred to fight against their countrymen rather than to quit their

homes. The priests and the Royalists fanned these village outbreaks into a

religious war of the most serious character. Though poorly armed, and

accustomed to return to their homes as soon as fighting was over, the

Vendean peasantry proved themselves a formidable soldiery in the moment of

attack, and cut to pieces the half-disciplined battalions which the

Government sent against them. On the north, France was now assailed by the

English as well as by the Austrians. The Allies laid siege to Condé and

Valenciennes, and drove the French army back in disorder at Famars. Each

defeat was a blow dealt to the Government of the Gironde at Paris. With

foreign and civil war adding disaster to disaster, with the general to whom

the Gironde had entrusted the defence of the Republic openly betraying it

to its enemies, the fury of the capital was easily excited against the

party charged with all the misfortunes of France. A threatening movement of

the middle classes in resistance to a forced loan precipitated the

struggle. The Girondins were accused of arresting the armies of the

Republic in the midst of their conquests, of throwing the frontier open to

the foreigner, and of kindling the civil war of La Vendée. On the 31st of

May a raging mob invaded the Convention. Two days later the representatives

of France were surrounded by the armed forces of the Commune; the

twenty-four leading members of the Gironde were placed under arrest, and

the victory of the Mountain was completed. [27]

[Civil War. The Committee of Public Safety.]

The situation of France, which was serious before, now became desperate;

for the Girondins, escaping from their arrest, called the departments to

arms against Paris. Normandy, Bordeaux, Marseilles, Lyons, rose in

insurrection against the tyranny of the Mountain, and the Royalists of the

south and west threw themselves into a civil war which they hoped to turn

to their own advantage. But a form of government had now arisen in France

well fitted to cope with extraordinary perils. It was a form of government

in which there was little trace of the constitutional tendencies of 1789,

one that had come into being as the stress of conflict threw into the

background the earlier hopes and efforts of the Revolution. In the two

earlier Assemblies it had been a fixed principle that the representatives

of the people were to control the Government, but were not to assume

executive powers themselves. After the overthrow of Monarchy on the 10th

August, the Ministers, though still nominally possessed of powers distinct

from the representative body, began to be checked by Committees of the

Convention appointed for various branches of the public service; and in

March, 1793, in order to meet the increasing difficulties of the war, a

Committee of Public Safety was appointed, charged with the duty of

exercising a general surveillance over the administration. In this

Committee, however, as in all the others, the Gironde were in the majority;

and the twenty-four members who composed it were too numerous a body to act

with effect. The growing ascendancy of the Mountain produced that

concentration of force which the times required. The Committee was reduced

in April to nine members, and in this form it ultimately became the supreme

central power. It was not until after the revolt of Lyons that the

Committee, exchanging Danton's influence for that of Robespierre, adopted

the principle of Terror which has made the memory of their rule one of the

most sinister in history. Their authority steadily increased. The members

divided among themselves the great branches of government. One directed the

army, another the navy, another foreign affairs; the signature of three

members practically gave to any measure the force of law, for the

Convention accepted and voted their reports as a matter of course.

[Commissioners of the Convention]

Whilst the Committee gave orders as the supreme executive, eighty of the

most energetic of the Mountain spread themselves over France, in parties of

two and three, with the title of Commissioners of the Convention, and with

powers over-riding those of all the local authorities. They were originally

appointed for the purpose of hastening on the levy ordered by the

Convention in March, but their powers were gradually extended over the

whole range of administration. Their will was absolute, their authority

supreme. Where the councillors of the Departments or the municipal officers

were good Jacobins, the Commissioners availed themselves of local

machinery; where they suspected their principles, they sent them to the

scaffold, and enforced their own orders by whatever means were readiest.

They censured and dismissed the generals; one of them even directed the

movements of a fleet at sea. What was lost by waste and confusion and by

the interference of the Commissioners in military movements was more than

counterbalanced by the vigour which they threw into all the preparations of

war, and by the unity of purpose which, at the price of unsparing

bloodshed, they communicated to every group where Frenchmen met together.

[Local revolutionary system of 1793]

But no individual energy could have sustained these dictatorships without

the support of a popular organisation. All over France a system of

revolutionary government sprang up, which superseded all existing

institutions just as the authority of the Commissioners of the Convention

superseded all existing local powers. The local revolutionary

administration consisted of a Committee, a Club, and a Tribunal. [28] In

each of 21,000 communes a committee of twelve was elected by the people,

and entrusted by the Convention, as the Terror gained ground, with

boundless powers of arrest and imprisonment. Popular excitement was

sustained by clubs, where the peasants and labourers assembled at the close

of their day's work, and applauded the victories or denounced the enemies

of the Revolution. A Tribunal with swift procedure and powers of life and

death sat in each of the largest towns, and judged the prisoners who were

sent to it by the committees of the neighbouring district. Such was the

government of 1793--an executive of uncontrolled power drawn from the

members of a single Assembly, and itself brought into immediate contact

with the poorest of the people in their assemblies and clubs. The balance

of interests which creates a constitutional system, the security of life,

liberty, and property, which is the essence of every recognised social

order, did not now exist in France. One public purpose, the defence of the

Revolution, became the law before which all others lost their force.

Treating all France like a town in a state of siege, the Government took

upon itself the duty of providing support for the poorest classes by

enactments controlling the sale and possession of the necessaries of life.

[Law of the Maximum]

The price of corn and other necessaries was fixed; and, when the traders

and producers consequently ceased to bring their goods to market, the

Commissioners of the Convention were empowered to make requisition of a

certain quantity of corn for every acre of ground. Property was thus placed

at the disposal of the men who already exercised absolute political power.

"The state of France," said Burke, "is perfectly simple. It consists of but

two descriptions, the oppressors and the oppressed." It is in vain that the

attempt has been made to extenuate the atrocious and senseless cruelties of

this time by extolling the great legislative projects of the Convention, or

pleading the dire necessity of a land attacked on every side by the

foreigner, and rent with civil war. The more that is known of the Reign of

Terror, the more hateful, the meaner and more disgusting is the picture

unveiled. France was saved not by the brutalities, but by the energy, of

the faction that ruled it. It is scarcely too much to say that the cause of

European progress would have been less injured by the military overthrow of

the Republic, by the severance of the border provinces from France and the

restoration of some shadow of the ancient _régime_, than by the traditions

of horror which for the next fifty years were inseparably associated in

men's minds with the victory of the people over established power.

[French disasters, March-Sept., 1793.]

The Revolutionary organisation did not reach its full vigour till the

autumn of 1793, when the prospects of France were at their worst. Custine,

who was brought up from Alsace to take command of the Army of the North,

found it so demoralised that he was unable to attempt the relief of the

fortresses which were now besieged by the Allies. Condé surrendered to the

Austrians on the 10th of July; Valenciennes capitulated to the Duke of York

a fortnight later. In the east the fortune of war was no better. An attack

made on the Prussian army besieging Mainz totally failed; and on the 23rd

of July this great fortress, which had been besieged since the middle of

April, passed back into the hands of the Germans. On every side the

Republic seemed to be sinking before its enemies. Its frontier defences had

fallen before the victorious Austrians and English; Brunswick was ready to

advance upon Alsace from conquered Mainz; Lyons and Toulon were in revolt;

La Vendée had proved the grave of the forces sent to subdue it. It was in

this crisis of misfortune that the Convention placed the entire male

population of France between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five at the

disposal of the Government, and turned the whole country into one great

camp and arsenal of war. Nor was there wanting a mind equal to the task of

giving order to this vast material. The appointment of Carnot, an officer

of engineers, to a seat on the Committee of Public Safety placed the

military administration of France in the hands of a man who, as an

organiser, if not as a strategist, was soon to prove himself without equal

in Europe.

[The Allies seek each their separate ends.]

Nevertheless, it was to the dissensions and to the bad policy of the Allies

more than to the energy of its own Government that France owed its safety.

The object for which the Allies professed to be carrying on the war, the

establishment of a pacific Government in France, was subordinated to

schemes of aggrandisement, known as the acquisition of just indemnities.

While Prussia, bent chiefly on preventing the Emperor from gaining Bavaria

in exchange for Belgium, kept its own army inactive on the Rhine, [29]

Austria, with the full approval of Pitt's Cabinet, claimed annexations in

Northern France, as well as Alsace, and treated the conquered town of Condé

as Austrian territory. [30] Henceforward all the operations of the northern

army were directed to the acquisition of frontier territory, not to the

pursuit and overthrow of the Republican forces. The war was openly

converted from a war of defence into a war of spoliation. It was a change

which mocked the disinterested professions with which the Allies had taken

up arms; in its military results it was absolutely ruinous. In face of the

immense levies which promised the French certain victory in a long war, the

only hope for the Allies lay in a rapid march to Paris; they preferred the

extreme of division and delay. No sooner had the advance of their united

armies driven Custine from his stronghold at Famars, than the English

commander led off his forces to besiege Dunkirk, while the Austrians, under

Prince Coburg, proceeded to invest Cambray and Le Quesnoy. The line of the

invaders thus extended from the Channel to Brunswick's posts at Landau, on

the border of Alsace; the main armies were out of reach of one another, and

their strength was diminished by the corps detached to keep up their

communications. The French held the inner circle; and the advantage which

this gave them was well understood by Carnot, who now inspired the measures

of the Committee. In steadiness and precision the French recruits were no

match for the trained armies of Germany; but the supply of them was

inexhaustible, and Carnot knew that when they were thrown in sufficient

masses upon the enemy their courage and enthusiasm would make amends for

their inexperience. The successes of the Allies, unbroken from February to

August, now began to alternate with defeats; the flood of invasion was

first slowly and obstinately repelled, then swept away before a victorious

advance.

[York driven from Dunkirk Sept. 8.]

It was on the British commander that the first blow was struck. The forces

that could be detached from the French Northern army were not sufficient to

drive York from before Dunkirk; but on the Moselle there were troops

engaged in watching an enemy who was not likely to advance; and the

Committee did not hesitate to leave this side of France open to the

Prussians in order to deal a decisive stroke in the north. Before the

movement was noticed by the enemy, Carnot had transported 30,000 men from

Metz to the English Channel; and in the first week of September the German

corps covering York was assailed by General Houchard with numbers double

its own. The Germans were driven back upon Dunkirk; York only saved his own

army from destruction by hastily raising the siege and abandoning his heavy

artillery. The victory of the French, however, was ill followed up.

Houchard was sent before the Revolutionary Tribunal, and he paid with his

life for his mistakes. Custine had already perished, unjustly condemned for

the loss of Mainz and Valenciennes.

[Commands given to men of the people.]

[Jourdan's victory at Wattignies, Oct 15.]

It was no unimportant change for France when the successors of Custine and

Houchard received their commands from the Committee of Public Safety. The

levelling principle of the Reign of Terror left its effect on France

through its operation in the army, and through this almost alone. Its

executions produced only horror and reaction; its confiscations were soon

reversed; but the creation of a thoroughly democratic army, the work of the

men who overthrew the Gironde, gave the most powerful and abiding impulse

to social equality in France. The first generals of the Revolution had been

officers of the old army, men, with a few exceptions, of noble birth, who,

like Custine, had enrolled themselves on the popular side when most of

their companions quitted the country. These generals were connected with

the politicians of the Gironde, and were involved in its fall. The victory

of the Mountain brought men of another type into command. Almost all the

leaders appointed by the Committee of Public Safety were soldiers who had

served in the ranks. In the levies of 1792 and 1793 the officers of the

newly-formed battalions were chosen by the recruits themselves. Patriotism,

energy of character, acquaintance with warfare, instantly brought men into

prominence. Soldiers of the old army, like Massena, who had reached middle

life with their knapsacks on their backs; lawyers, like the Breton Moreau;

waiters at inns, like Murat, found themselves at the head of their

battalions, and knew that Carnot was ever watching for genius and ability

to call it to the highest commands. With a million of men under arms, there

were many in whom great natural gifts supplied the want of professional

training. It was also inevitable that at the outset command should

sometimes fall into the hands of mere busy politicians; but the character

of the generals steadily rose as the Committee gained the ascendancy over a

knot of demagogues who held the War Ministry during the summer of 1793; and

by the end of the year there was scarcely one officer in high command who

had not proved himself worthy of his post. In the investigation into

Houchard's conduct at Dunkirk, Carnot learnt that the victory had in fact

been won by Jourdan, one of the generals of division. Jourdan had begun

life as a common soldier fifteen years before. Discharged at the end of the

American War, he had set up a draper's shop in Limoges, his native town. He

joined the army a second time on the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, and

the men of his battalion elected him captain. His ability was noticed; he

was made successively general of brigade and general of division; and, upon

the dismissal of Houchard, Carnot summoned him to the command of the Army

of the North. The Austrians were now engaged in the investment of Maubeuge.

On the 15th of October Jourdan attacked and defeated their covering army at

Wattignies. His victory forced the Austrians to raise the siege, and

brought the campaign to an end for the winter.

[Lyons, Toulon, La Vendée, conquered, Oct.-Dec. 1793.]

Thus successful on the northern frontier, the Republic carried on war

against its internal enemies without pause and without mercy. Lyons

surrendered in October; its citizens were slaughtered by hundreds in cold

blood. Toulon had thrown itself into the hands of the English, and

proclaimed King Louis XVII. It was besieged by land; but the operations

produced no effect until Napoleon Bonaparte, captain of artillery, planned

the capture of a ridge from which the cannon of the besiegers would command

the English fleet in the harbour. Hood, the British admiral, now found his

position hopeless. He took several thousands of the inhabitants on board

his ships, and put out to sea, blowing up the French ships which he left in

the harbour. Hood had received the fleet from the Royalists in trust for

their King; its destruction gave England command of the Mediterranean and

freed Naples from fear of attack; and Hood thought too little of the

consequences which his act would bring down upon those of the inhabitants

of Toulon whom he left behind. [31]

The horrors that followed the entry of the Republican army into the city

did not prevent Pitt from including among the subjects of congratulation in

the King's Speech of 1794 "the circumstances attending the evacuation of

Toulon." It was perhaps fortunate for the Royalists in other parts of

France that they failed to receive the assistance of England. Help was

promised to the Vendeans, but it arrived too late. The appearance of Kleber

at the head of the army which had defended Mainz had already turned the

scale. Brave as they were, the Vendeans could not long resist trained

armies. The war of pitched battles ended on the Loire with the year 1793.

It was succeeded by a war of merciless and systematic destruction on the

one side, and of ambush and surprises on the other.

[Prussia withdrawing from the war on account of Polish affairs.]

At home the foes of the Republic were sinking; its invaders were too much

at discord with one another to threaten it any longer with serious danger.

Prussia was in fact withdrawing from the war. It has been seen that when

King Frederick William and the Emperor concerted the autumn campaign of

1792, the understanding was formed that Prussia, in return for its efforts

against France, should be allowed to seize part of western Poland, if the

Empress Catherine should give her consent. With this prospect before it,

the thoughts of the Prussian Government had been from the first busied more

with Poland, where it hoped to enter into possession, than with France,

where it had only to fight Austria's battles. Negotiations on the Polish

question had been actively carried on between Berlin and St. Petersburg

during the first months of the war; and in January, 1793, the Empress

Catherine had concluded a Treaty of Partition with King Frederick William,

in virtue of which a Prussian army under General Möllendorf immediately

entered western Poland. It was thought good policy to keep the terms of

this treaty secret from Austria, as it granted a much larger portion of

Poland to Prussia than Austria was willing that it should receive. Two

months passed before the Austrian Sovereign learnt how he had been treated

by his ally. He then denounced the treaty, and assumed so threatening an

attitude that the Prussians thought it necessary to fortify the territory

that they had seized. [32] The Ministers who had been outwitted by the

Court of Berlin were dismissed; Baron Thugut, who from the first had

prophesied nothing but evil of the Prussian alliance, was called to power.

The history of this statesman, who for the next eight years directed the

war-policy of Austria, and filled a part in Europe subordinate only to

those of Pitt and Bonaparte, has until a recent date been drawn chiefly

from the representations of his enemies. Humbly born, scornful and

inaccessible, Thugut was detested by the Viennese aristocracy; the French

emigrants hated and maligned him on account of his indifference to their

cause; the public opinion of Austria held him responsible for unparalleled

military disasters; Prussian generals and ambassadors, whose reports have

formed the basis of Prussian histories, pictured him as a Satanic

antagonist. It was long believed of Thugut that while ambassador at

Constantinople he had sold the Austrian cypher to the French; that in 1794

he prevented his master's armies from winning victories because he had

speculated in the French funds; and that in 1799 he occasioned the murder

of the French envoys at Rastadt, in order to recover documents

incriminating himself. Better sources of information are now opened, and a

statesman, jealous, bitter, and over-reaching, but not without great

qualities of character, stands in the place of the legendary criminal. It

is indeed clear that Thugut's hatred of Prussia amounted almost to mania;

it is also clear that his designs of aggression, formed in the school of

the Emperor Joseph, were fatally in conflict with the defensive principles

which Europe ought to have opposed to the aggressions of France. Evidence

exists that during the eight years of Thugut's ministry he entertained,

together or successively, projects for the annexation of French Flanders,

Bavaria, Alsace, part of Poland, Venice and Dalmatia, Salzburg, the Papal

Legations, the Republic of Genoa, Piedmont, and Bosnia; and to this list

Tuscany and Savoy ought probably to be added. But the charges brought

against Thugut of underhand dealings with France, and of the willing

abandonment of German interests in return for compensation to Austria in

Italy, rest on insufficient ground. Though, like every other politician at

Vienna and Berlin, he viewed German affairs not as a matter of nationality

but in subordination to the general interests of his own Court, Thugut

appears to have been, of all the Continental statesmen of that time, the

steadiest enemy of French aggression, and to have offered the longest

resistance to a peace that was purchased by the cession of German soil.

[33]

[Victories of Hoche and Pichegru at Wörth and Weissenburg, Dec. 23, 26.]

Nevertheless, from the moment when Thugut was called to power the alliance

between Austria and Prussia was doomed. Others might perhaps have averted a

rupture; Thugut made no attempt to do so. The siege of Mainz was the last

serious operation of war which the Prussian army performed. The mission of

an Austrian envoy, Lehrbach, to the Prussian camp in August, 1793, and his

negotiations on the Polish and the Bavarian questions, only widened the

breach between the two Courts. It was known that the Austrians were

encouraging the Polish Diet to refuse the cession of the provinces occupied

by Prussia; and the advisers of King Frederick William in consequence

recommended him to quit the Rhine, and to place himself at the head of an

army in Poland. At the headquarters of the Allies, between Mainz and the

Alsatian frontier, all was dissension and intrigue. The impetuosity of the

Austrian general, Wurmser, who advanced upon Alsace without consulting the

King, was construed as a studied insult. On the 29th of September, after

informing the allied Courts that Prussia would henceforth take only a

subordinate part in the war, King Frederick William quitted the army,

leaving orders with the Duke of Brunswick to fight no great battle. It was

in vain that Wurmser stormed the lines of Weissenburg (Oct. 13), and

victoriously pushed forward into Alsace. The hopes of a Royalist

insurrection in Strasburg proved illusory. The German sympathies shown by a

portion of the upper and middle classes of Alsace only brought down upon

them a bloody vengeance at the hands of St. Just, commissioner of the

Convention. The peasantry, partly from hatred of the feudal burdens of the

old _régime_, partly from fear of St. Just and the guillotine, thronged to

the French camp. In place of the beaten generals came Hoche and Pichegru:

Hoche, lately a common soldier in the Guards, earning by a humble industry

little sums for the purchase of books, now, at the age of twenty-six, a

commander more than a match for the wrangling veterans of Germany;

Pichegru, six years older, also a man sprung from the people, once a

teacher in the military school of Brienne, afterwards a private of

artillery in the American War. A series of harassing encounters took place

during December. At length, with St. Just cheering on the Alsatian peasants

in the hottest of the fire, these generals victoriously carried the

Austrian positions at Wörth and at Weissenburg (Dec. 23, 26). The Austrian

commander declared his army to be utterly ruined; and Brunswick, who had

abstained from rendering his ally any real assistance, found himself a

second time back upon the Rhine. [34]

[Pitt's bargain with Prussia, April, 1794.]

[Revolt of Kosciusko. April, 1794.]

[Möllendorf refuses to help in Flanders.]

The virtual retirement of Prussia from the Coalition was no secret to the

French Government: amongst the Allies it was viewed in various lights. The

Empress Catherine, who had counted on seeing her troublesome Prussian

friend engaged with her detested French enemy, taunted the King of Prussia

with the loss of his personal honour. Austria, conscious of the antagonism

between Prussian and Austrian interests and of the hollow character of the

Coalition, would concede nothing to keep Prussia in arms. Pitt alone was

willing to make a sacrifice, in order to prevent the rupture of the

alliance. The King of Prussia was ready to continue the struggle with

France if his expenses were paid, but not otherwise. Accordingly, after

Austria had refused to contribute the small sum which Pitt asked, a bargain

was struck between Lord Malmesbury and the Prussian Minister Haugwitz, by

which Great Britain undertook to furnish a subsidy, provided that 60,000

Prussian troops, under General Möllendorf, were placed at the disposal of

the Maritime Powers. [35] It was Pitt's intention that the troops which he

subsidised should be massed with Austrian and English forces for the

defence of Belgium: the Prussian Ministry, availing themselves of an

ambiguous expression in the treaty, insisted on keeping them inactive upon

the Upper Rhine. Möllendorf wished to guard Mainz: other men of influence

longed to abandon the alliance with Austria, and to employ the whole of

Prussia's force in Poland. At the moment when Haugwitz was contracting to

place Möllendorf's army at Pitt's disposal, Poland had risen in revolt

under Kosciusko, and the Russian garrison which occupied Warsaw had been

overpowered and cut to pieces. Catherine called upon the King of Prussia

for assistance; but it was not so much a desire to rescue the Empress from

a momentary danger that excited the Prussian Cabinet as the belief that her

vengeance would now make an absolute end of what remained of the Polish

kingdom. The prey was doomed; the wisdom of Prussia was to be the first to

seize and drag it to the ground. So large a prospect offered itself to the

Power that should crush Poland during the brief paralysis of the Russian

arms, that, on the first news of the outbreak, the King's advisers urged

him instantly to make peace with France and to throw his whole strength

into the Polish struggle. Frederick William could not reconcile himself to

making peace with the Jacobins; but he ordered an army to march upon

Warsaw, and shortly afterwards placed himself at its head (May, 1794). When

the King, who was the only politician in Prussia who took an interest in

the French war, thus publicly acknowledged the higher importance of the

Polish campaign, his generals upon the Rhine made it their only object to

do nothing which it was possible to leave undone without actually

forfeiting the British subsidy. Instead of fighting, Möllendorf spent his

time in urging other people to make peace. It was in vain that Malmesbury

argued that the very object of Pitt's bargain was to keep the French out of

the Netherlands: Möllendorf had made up his mind that the army should not

be committed to the orders of Pitt and the Austrians. He continued in the

Palatinate, alleging that any movement of the Prussian army towards the

north would give the French admittance to southern Germany. Pitt's hope of

defending the Netherlands now rested on the energy and on the sincerity of

the Austrian Cabinet, and on this alone.

[Battles on the Sambre, May-June, 1794.]

After breaking up from winter quarters in the spring of 1794, the Austrian

and English allied forces had successfully laid siege to Landrecies, and

defeated the enemy in its neighbourhood. [36] Their advance, however, was

checked by a movement of the French Army of the North, now commanded by

Pichegru, towards the Flemish coast. York and the English troops were

exposed to the attack, and suffered a defeat at Turcoing. The decision of

the campaign lay, however, not in the west of Flanders, but at the other

end of the Allies' position, at Charleroi on the Sambre, where a French

victory would either force the Austrians to fall back eastwards, leaving

York to his fate, or sever their communications with Germany. This became

evident to the French Government; and in May the Commissioners of the

Convention forced the generals on the Sambre to fight a series of battles,

in which the French repeatedly succeeded in crossing the Sambre, and were

repeatedly driven back again. The fate of the Netherlands depended,

however, on something beside victory or defeat on the Sambre. The Emperor

had come with Baron Thugut to Belgium in the hope of imparting greater

unity and energy to the allied forces, but his presence proved useless.

Among the Austrian generals and diplomatists there were several who desired

to withdraw from the contest in the Netherlands, and to follow the example

of Prussia in Poland. The action of the army was paralysed by intrigues.

"Every one," wrote Thugut, "does exactly as he pleases: there is absolute

anarchy and disorder." [37] At the beginning of June the Emperor quitted

the army; the combats on the Sambre were taken up by Jourdan and 50,000

fresh troops brought from the army of the Moselle; and on the 26th of June

the French defeated Coburg at Fleurus, as he advanced to the relief of

Charleroi, unconscious that Charleroi had surrendered on the day before.

Even now the defence of Belgium was not hopeless; but after one council of

war had declared in favour of fighting, a second determined on a retreat.

It was in vain that the representatives of England appealed to the good

faith and military honour of Austria. Namur and Louvain were abandoned; the

French pressed onwards; and before the end of July the Austrian army had

fallen back behind the Meuse. York, forsaken by the allies, retired

northwards before the superior forces of Pichegru, who entered Antwerp and

made himself master of the whole of the Netherlands up to the Dutch

frontier. [38]

[England disappointed by the Allies.]

Such was the result of Great Britain's well-meant effort to assist the two

great military Powers to defend Europe against the Revolution. To the aim

of the English Minister, the defence of existing rights against democratic

aggression, most of the public men alike of Austria and Prussia were now

absolutely indifferent. They were willing to let the French seize and

revolutionise any territory they pleased, provided that they themselves

obtained their equivalent in Poland. England was in fact in the position of

a man who sets out to attack a highway robber, and offers each of his arms

to a pickpocket. The motives and conduct of these politicians were justly

enough described by the English statesmen and generals who were brought

into closest contact with them. In the councils of Prussia, Malmesbury

declared that he could find no quality but "great and shabby art and

cunning; ill-will, jealousy, and every sort of dirty passion." From the

head quarters of Möllendorf he wrote to a member of Pitt's Cabinet: "Here I

have to do with knavery and dotage.... If we listened only to our feelings,

it would be difficult to keep any measure with Prussia. We must consider it

an alliance with the Algerians, whom it is no disgrace to pay, or any

impeachment of good sense to be cheated by." To the Austrian commander the

Duke of York addressed himself with royal plainness: "Your Serene Highness,

the British nation, whose public opinion is not to be despised, will

consider that it has been bought and sold." [39]

[French reach the Rhine, Oct., 1794.]

[Pichegru conquers Holland, Dec., 1794.]

The sorry concert lasted for a few months longer. Coburg, the Austrian

commander, was dismissed at the peremptory demand of Great Britain; his

successor, Clerfayt, after losing a battle on the Ourthe, offered no

further resistance to the advance of the Republican army, and the campaign

ended in the capture of Cologne by the French, and the disappearance of the

Austrians behind the Rhine. The Prussian subsidies granted by England

resulted in some useless engagements between Möllendorf's corps in the

Palatinate and a French army double its size, followed by the retreat of

the Prussians into Mainz. It only remained for Great Britain to attempt to

keep the French out of Holland. The defence of the Dutch, after everything

south of the river Waal had been lost, Pitt determined to entrust to abler

hands than those of the Duke of York; but the presence of one high-born

blunderer more or less made little difference in a series of operations

conceived in indifference and perversity. Clerfayt would not, or could not,

obey the Emperor's orders and succour his ally. City after city in Holland

welcomed the French. The very elements seemed to declare for the Republic.

Pichegru's army marched in safety over the frozen rivers; and, when the

conquest of the land was completed, his cavalry crowned the campaign by the

capture of the Dutch fleet in the midst of the ice-bound waters of the

Texel. The British regiments, cut off from home, made their way eastward

through the snow towards the Hanoverian frontier, in a state of prostrate

misery which is compared by an eye-witness of both events to that of the

French on their retreat in 1813 after the battle of Leipzig. [40]

[Treaties of Basle with Prussia, April 5, and Spain, July 22, 1795.]

The first act of the struggle between France and the Monarchies of Europe

was concluded. The result of three years of war was that Belgium, Nice, and

Savoy had been added to the territory of the Republic, and that French

armies were in possession of Holland, and the whole of Germany west of the

Rhine. In Spain and in Piedmont the mountain-passes and some extent of

country had been won. Even on the seas, in spite of the destruction of the

fleet at Toulon, and of a heavy defeat by Lord Howe off Ushant on the 1st

of June, 1794, the strength of France was still formidable; and the losses

which she inflicted on the commercial marine of her enemies exceeded those

which she herself sustained. England, which had captured most of the French

West Indian Islands, was the only Power that had wrested anything from the

Republic. The dream of suppressing the Revolution by force of arms had

vanished away; and the States which had entered upon the contest in levity,

in fanaticism, or at the bidding of more powerful allies, found it

necessary to make peace upon such terms as they could obtain. Holland, in

which a strong Republican party had always maintained connection with

France, abolished the rule of its Stadtholder, and placed its resources at

the disposal of its conquerors. Sardinia entered upon abortive

negotiations. Spain, in return for peace, ceded to the Republic the Spanish

half of St. Domingo (July 22, 1795). Prussia concluded a Treaty at Basle

(April 5), which marked and perpetuated the division of Germany by

providing that, although the Empire as a body was still at war with France,

the benefit of Prussia's neutrality should extend to all German States

north of a certain line. A secret article stipulated that, upon the

conclusion of a general peace, if the Empire should cede to France the

principalities west of the Rhine, Prussia should cede its own territory

lying in that district, and receive compensation elsewhere. [41]

[Austria and England continue the war, 1795.]

Humiliating such a peace certainly was; yet it would probably have been the

happiest issue for Europe had every Power been forced to accept its

conditions. The territory gained by France was not much more than the very

principle of the Balance of Power would have entitled it to demand, at a

moment when Russia, victorious over the Polish rebellion, was proceeding to

make the final partition of Poland among the three Eastern Monarchies; and,

with all its faults, the France of 1795 would have offered to Europe the

example of a great free State, such as the growth of the military spirit

made impossible after the first of Napoleon's campaigns. But the dark

future was withdrawn from the view of those British statesmen who most

keenly felt the evils of the present; and England, resolutely set against

the course of French aggression, still found in Austria an ally willing to

continue the struggle. The financial help of Great Britain, the Russian

offer of a large share in the spoils of Poland, stimulated the flagging

energy of the Emperor's government. Orders were sent to Clerfayt to advance

from the Rhine at whatever risk, in order to withdraw the troops of the

Republic from the west of France, where England was about to land a body of

Royalists. Clerfayt, however, disobeyed his instructions, and remained

inactive till the autumn. He then defeated a French army pushing beyond the

Rhine, and drove back the besiegers of Mainz; but the British expedition

had already failed, and the time was passed when Clerfayt's successes might

have produced a decisive result. [42]

[Landing at Quiberon, June 27, 1795.]

[France in 1795.]

A new Government was now entering upon power in France. The Reign of Terror

had ended in July, 1794, with the life of Robespierre. The men by whom

Robespierre was overthrown were Terrorists more cruel and less earnest than

himself, who attacked him only in order to save their own lives, and

without the least intention of restoring a constitutional Government to

France. An overwhelming national reaction forced them, however, to

represent themselves as the party of clemency. The reaction was indeed a

simple outburst of human feeling rather than a change in political opinion.

Among the victims of the Terror the great majority had been men of the

lower or middle class, who, except in La Vendée and Brittany, were as

little friendly to the old _régime_ as their executioners. Every class in

France, with the exception of the starving city mobs, longed for security,

and the quiet routine of life. After the disorders of the Republic a

monarchical government naturally seemed to many the best guarantee of

peace; but the monarchy so contemplated was the liberal monarchy of 1791,

not the ancient Court, with its accessories of a landed Church and

privileged noblesse. Religion was still a power in France; but the peasant,

with all his superstition and all his desire for order, was perfectly free

from any delusions about the good old times. He liked to see his children

baptised; but he had no desire to see the priest's tithe-collector back in

his barn: he shuddered at the summary marketing of Conventional

Commissioners; but he had no wish to resume his labours on the fields of

his late seigneur. To be a Monarchist in 1795, among the shopkeepers of

Paris or the farmers of Normandy, meant no more than to wish for a

political system capable of subsisting for twelve months together, and

resting on some other basis than forced loans and compulsory sales of

property. But among the men of the Convention, who had abolished monarchy

and passed sentence of death upon the King, the restoration of the Crown

seemed the bitterest condemnation of all that the Convention had done for

France, and a sentence of outlawry against themselves. If the will of the

nation was for the moment in favour of a restored monarchy, the Convention

determined that its will must be overpowered by force or thwarted by

constitutional forms. Threatened alternately by the Jacobin mob of Paris

and by the Royalist middle class, the Government played off one enemy

against the other, until an ill-timed effort of the emigrant noblesse gave

to the Convention the prestige of a decisive victory over Royalists and

foreigners combined. On the 27th of June, 1795, an English fleet landed the

flower of the old nobility of France at the Bay of Quiberon in southern

Brittany. It was only to give one last fatal proof of their incapacity that

these unhappy men appeared once more on French soil. Within three weeks

after their landing, in a region where for years together the peasantry,

led by their landlords, baffled the best generals of the Republic, this

invading army of the nobles, supported by the fleet, the arms, and the

money of England, was brought to utter ruin by the discord of its own

leaders. Before the nobles had settled who was to command and who was to

obey, General Hoche surprised their fort, beat them back to the edge of the

peninsula where they had landed, and captured all who were not killed

fighting or rescued by English boats (July 20). The Commissioner Tallien,

in order to purge himself from the just suspicion of Royalist intrigues,

caused six hundred prisoners to be shot in cold blood. [43]

[Project of Constitution, 1795.]

At the moment when the emigrant army reached France, the Convention was

engaged in discussing the political system which was to succeed its own

rule. A week earlier, the Committee appointed to draw up a new constitution

for France had presented its report. The main object of the new

constitution in its original form was to secure France against a recurrence

of those evils which it had suffered since 1792. The calamities of the last

three years were ascribed to the sovereignty of a single Assembly. A vote

of the Convention had established the Revolutionary Tribunal, proscribed

the Girondins, and placed France at the mercy of eighty individuals

selected by the Convention from itself. The legislators of 1795 desired a

guarantee that no party, however determined, should thus destroy its

enemies by a single law, and unite supreme legislative and executive power

in its own hands. With the object of dividing authority, the executive was,

in the new draft-constitution, made independent of the legislature, and the

legislature itself was broken up into two chambers. A Directory of five

members, chosen by the Assemblies, but not responsible except under actual

impeachment, was to conduct the administration, without the right of

proposing laws; a Chamber of five hundred was to submit laws to the

approval of a Council of two hundred and fifty Ancients, or men of middle

life; but neither of these bodies was to exercise any influence upon the

actual government. One director and a third part of each of the legislative

bodies were to retire every year. [44]

[Constitution of 1795. Insurrection of Vendémiaire, Oct. 4.]

The project thus outlined met with general approval, and gained even that

of the Royalists, who believed that a popular election would place them in

a majority in the two new Assemblies. Such an event was, however, in the

eyes of the Convention, the one fatal possibility that must be averted at

every cost. In the midst of the debates upon the draft-constitution there

arrived the news of Hoche's victory at Quiberon. The Convention gained

courage to add a clause providing that two-thirds of the new deputies

should be appointed from among its own members, thus rendering a Royalist

majority in the Chambers impossible. With this condition attached to it,

the Constitution was laid before the country. The provinces accepted it;

the Royalist middle class of Paris rose in insurrection, and marched

against the Convention in the Tuileries. Their revolt was foreseen; the

defence of the Convention was entrusted to General Bonaparte, who met the

attack of the Parisians in a style unknown in the warfare of the capital.

Bonaparte's command of trained artillery secured him victory; but the

struggle of the 4th of October (13 Vendémiaire) was the severest that took

place in Paris during the Revolution, and the loss of life in fighting

greater than on the day that overthrew the Monarchy.

[The Directory, Oct., 1795.]

The new Government of France now entered into power. Members of the

Convention formed two-thirds of the new legislative bodies; the one-third

which the country was permitted to elect consisted chiefly of men of

moderate or Royalist opinions. The five persons who were chosen Directors

were all Conventionalists who had voted for the death of the King; Carnot,

however, who had won the victories without sharing in the cruelties of the

Reign of Terror, was the only member of the late Committee of Public Safety

who was placed in power. In spite of the striking homage paid to the great

act of regicide in the election of the five Directors, the establishment of

the Directory was accepted by Europe as the close of revolutionary

disorder. The return of constitutional rule in France was marked by a

declaration on the part of the King of England of his willingness to treat

for peace. A gentler spirit seemed to have arisen in the Republic. Although

the laws against the emigrants and non-juring priests were still

unrepealed, the exiles began to return unmolested to their homes. Life

resumed something of its old aspect in the capital. The rich and the gay

consoled themselves with costlier luxury for all the austerities of the

Reign of Terror. The labouring classes, now harmless and disarmed, were

sharply taught that they must be content with such improvement in their lot

as the progress of society might bring.

[What was new to Europe in the Revolution.]

[Absolute governments of 18th century engaged in reforms.]

At the close of this first period of the Revolutionary War we may pause to

make an estimate of the new influences which the French Revolution had

brought into Europe, and of the effects which had thus far resulted from

them. The opinion current among the French people themselves, that the

Revolution gave birth to the modern life not of France only but of the

Western Continent generally, is true of one great set of facts; it is

untrue of another. There were conceptions in France in 1789 which made

France a real contrast to most of the Continental monarchies; there were

others which it shared in common with them. The ideas of social, legal, and

ecclesiastical reform which were realised in 1789 were not peculiar to

France; what was peculiar to France was the idea that these reforms were to

be effected by the nation itself. In other countries reforms had been

initiated by Governments, and forced upon an unwilling people. Innovation

sprang from the Crown; its agents were the servants of the State. A

distinct class of improvements, many of them identical with the changes

made by the Revolution in France, attracted the attention in a greater or

less degree of almost all the Western Courts of the eighteenth century. The

creation of a simple and regular administrative system; the reform of the

clergy; the emancipation of the Church from the jurisdiction of the Pope,

and of all orders in the State from the jurisdiction of the Church; the

amelioration of the lot of the peasant; the introduction of codes of law

abolishing both the cruelties and the confusion of ancient practice,--all

these were purposes more or less familiar to the absolute sovereigns of the

eighteenth century, whom the French so summarily described as benighted

tyrants. It was in Austria, Prussia, and Tuscany that the civilising energy

of the Crown had been seen in its strongest form, but even the Governments

of Naples and Spain had caught the spirit of change. The religious

tolerance which Joseph gave to Austria, the rejection of Papal authority

and the abolition of the punishment of death which Leopold effected in

Tuscany, were bolder efforts of the same political rationalism which in

Spain minimised the powers of the Inquisition and in Naples attempted to

found a system of public education. In all this, however, there was no

trace of the action of the people, or of any sense that a nation ought to

raise itself above a state of tutelage. Men of ideas called upon

Governments to impose better institutions upon the people, not upon the

people to wrest them from the Governments.

[In France, the nation itself acted.]

In France alone a view of public affairs had grown up which impelled the

nation to create its reforms for itself. If the substance of many of the

French revolutionary changes coincided with the objects of Austrian or of

Tuscan reform, there was nothing similar in their method. In other

countries reform sprang from the command of an enlightened ruler; in France

it started with the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and aimed at the

creation of local authority to be exercised by the citizens themselves. The

source of this difference lay partly in the influence of England and

America upon French opinion, but much more in the existence within France

of a numerous and energetic middle class, enriched by commerce, and keenly

interested in all the speculation and literary activity of the age. This

was a class that both understood the wrongs which the other classes

inflicted or suffered, and felt itself capable of redressing them. For the

flogged and over-driven peasant in Naples or Hungary no ally existed but

the Crown. In most of those poor and backward States which made up

monarchical Europe, the fraction of the inhabitants which neither enjoyed

privilege nor stood in bondage to it was too small to think of forcing

itself into power. The nobles sought to preserve their feudal rights: the

Crown sought to reduce them; the nation, elsewhere than in France, did not

intervene and lay hands upon power for itself, because the nation was

nothing but the four mutually exclusive classes of the landlords who

commanded, the peasants who served, the priests who idled, and the soldiers

who fought. France differed from all the other monarchies of the Continent

in possessing a public which blended all classes and was dominated by none;

a public comprehending thousands of men who were familiar with the great

interests of society, and who, whether noble or not noble, possessed the

wealth and the intelligence that made them rightly desire a share in power.

[Movements against governments outside France.]

Liberty, the right of the nation to govern itself, seemed at the outset to

be the great principle of the Revolution. The French people themselves

believed the question at issue to be mainly between authority and popular

right; the rest of Europe saw the Revolution under the same aspect. Hence,

in those countries where the example of France produced political

movements, the effect was in the first instance to excite agitation against

the Government, whatever might be the form of the latter. In England the

agitation was one of the middle class against the aristocratic

parliamentary system; in Hungary, it was an agitation of the nobles against

the Crown; on the Rhine it was an agitation of the commercial classes

against ecclesiastical rule. But in every case in which the reforming

movement was not supported by the presence of French armies, the terrors

which succeeded the first sanguine hopes of the Revolution struck the

leaders of these movements with revulsion and despair, and converted even

the better Governments into engines of reaction. In France itself it was

seen that the desire for liberty among an enlightened class could not

suddenly transform the habits of a nation accustomed to accept everything

from authority. Privilege was destroyed, equality was advanced; but instead

of self-government the Revolution brought France the most absolute rule it

had ever known. It was not that the Revolution had swept by, leaving things

where they were before: it had in fact accomplished most of those great

changes which lay the foundation of a sound social life: but the faculty of

self-government, the first condition of any lasting political liberty,

remained to be slowly won.

[Reaction.]

Outside France reaction set in without the benefit of previous change. At

London, Vienna, Naples, and Madrid, Governments gave up all other objects

in order to devote themselves to the suppression of Jacobinism. Pitt, whose

noble aims had been the extinction of the slave-trade, the reform of

Parliament, and the advance of national intercourse by free trade,

surrendered himself to men whose thoughts centred upon informers, Gagging

Acts, and constructive treasons, and who opposed all legislation upon the

slave-trade because slaves had been freed by the Jacobins of the

Convention. State trials and imprisonments became the order of the day; but

the reaction in England at least stopped short of the scaffold. At Vienna

and Naples fear was more cruel. The men who either were, or affected to be,

in such fear of revolution that they discovered a Jacobinical allegory in

Mozart's last opera, [45] did not spare life when the threads of anything

like a real conspiracy were placed in their hands. At Vienna terror was

employed to crush the constitutional opposition of Hungary to the Austrian

Court. In Naples a long reign of cruelty and oppression began with the

creation of a secret tribunal to investigate charges of conspiracy made by

informers. In Mainz, the Archbishop occupied the last years of his

government, after his restoration in 1793, with a series of brutal

punishments and tyrannical precautions.

These were but instances of the effect which the first epoch of the

Revolution produced upon the old European States. After a momentary

stimulus to freedom it threw the nations themselves into reaction and

apathy; it totally changed the spirit of the better governments, attaching

to all liberal ideas the stigma of Revolution, and identifying the work of

authority with resistance to every kind of reform. There were States in

which this change, the first effect of the Revolution, was also its only

one; States whose history, as in the case of England, is for a whole

generation the history of political progress unnaturally checked and thrown

out of its course. There were others, and these the more numerous, where

the first stimulus and the first reaction were soon forgotten in new and

penetrating changes produced by the successive victories of France. The

nature of these changes, even more than the warfare which introduced them,

gives its interest to the period on which we are about to enter.