Produced by Al Haines
[Transcriber's note: Page numbers in this book are indicated by numbers
enclosed in curly braces, e.g. {99}. They have been located where page
breaks occurred in the original book, in accordance with Project
Gutenberg's FAQ-V-99. This has been done only in the book's main
chapters (I-XVII). For its Preface and its Index, page numbers have
been placed only at the start of each of those two sections.]
[Frontispiece: 1. Voltaire. 2. Marie Antoinette on her way to the
guillotine. 3. Fouquier-Tinville. 4. Carrier. 5. Danton before the
Tribunal Revolutionnaire.]
The French Revolution
_A SHORT HISTORY_
_By_
R. M. Johnston
M.A., CANTAB.
_Assistant Professor of History in Harvard University_
NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
1910.
COPYRIGHT, 1909
BY
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
Published, May, 1909
Second Printing, January, 1910
TO
Rayner Neate
IN MEMORY OF OLD PEMBROKE DAYS
{v}
PREFACE
The object of this book is similar to that with which, a few years ago,
I wrote a short biography of Napoleon. The main outlines of the
Revolution, the proportion and relation of things, tend to become
obscured under the accumulation of historical detail that is now
proceeding. This is an attempt, therefore, to disentangle from the
mass of details the shape, the movement, the significance of this great
historical cataclysm. To keep the outline clear I have deliberately
avoided mentioning the names of many subordinate actors; thinking that
if nothing essential was connected with them the mention of their names
would only tend to confuse matters. Similarly with incidents, I have
omitted a few, such as the troubles at Avignon, and changed the
emphasis on others, judging freely their importance and not following
the footsteps of my predecessors, as in the case of the capture of the
Bastille, the importance of which was vastly exaggerated by early
writers on the subject.
The end of the Revolution I place at Brumaire,--as good a date as any,
though like all others, open to criticism. The present narrative,
however, will be found to merge into that of my _Napoleon_, which forms
its natural continuation after that date.
CAMBRIDGE, MASS., Feb., 1909.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION . . . . 1
II. VERSAILLES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
III. ECONOMIC CRISIS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
IV. CONVOCATION OF THE STATES GENERAL . . . . . . . 35
V. FRANCE COMES TO VERSAILLES . . . . . . . . . . . 52
VI. FROM VERSAILLES TO PARIS . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
VII. THE ASSEMBLY DEMOLISHES PRIVILEGE . . . . . . . 89
VIII. THE FLIGHT TO VARENNES . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
IX. WAR BREAKS OUT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
X. THE MASSACRE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139
XI. ENDING THE MONARCHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157
XII. THE FALL OF THE GIRONDE . . . . . . . . . . . . 170
XIII. THE REIGN OF TERROR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185
XIV. THERMIDOR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 202
XV. THE LAST DAYS OF THE CONVENTION . . . . . . . . 222
XVI. THE DIRECTOIRE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 239
XVII. ART AND LITERATURE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 262
INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279
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THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
CHAPTER I
THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
The magnitude of an event is too apt to lie with its reporter, and the
reporter often fails in his sense of historical proportion. The nearer
he is to the event the more authority he has as a witness, but the less
authority as a judge. It is time alone can establish the relation and
harmony of things. This is notably the case with the greatest event of
modern European history, the French Revolution, and the first task of
the historian writing a century later, is to attempt to catch its
perspective. To do this the simplest course will be to see how the
Revolution has been interpreted from the moment of its close to the
present day.
It was Madame de Staël, under the influence of Constant, who first made
Europe listen to reason after the Bourbon restoration of 1815. {2} Her
_Considérations sur la Révolution francaise_, published in 1818, one
year after her death, was a bold though temperate plea for the cause of
political liberty. At a moment of reaction when the Holy Alliance
proclaimed the fraternity not of men but of monarchs, and the direct
delegation by Divine Providence of its essential virtues to Alexander,
Frederick William and Francis,--at a moment when the men of the
Convention were proscribed as regicides, when the word Jacobin sent a
thrill of horror down every respectable spinal chord, the daughter of
Necker raised her voice to say that if, during the stormy years just
passed, the people of France had done nothing but stumble from crime to
folly and from folly to crime, the fault did not, after all, lie with
them, but with the old régime. If Frenchmen had failed to show the
virtues of freemen, it was because they had for so many centuries been
treated as slaves. This was in 1818, three years after Waterloo.
Madame de Staël was a pamphleteer; the historians soon followed.
Thiers in 1823, Mignet in 1824, produced the first important histories
of the Revolution; the former more eloquent, more popular; the latter
more ballasted with documentary evidence, more {3} accurate, more
pedestrian, in fact, to this day, in its negative manner, one of the
best general histories of the matter. Both of these writers were too
near their subject and too hampered by the reactionary surroundings of
the moment to be successful when dealing with the larger questions the
French Revolution involved. Thiers, going a step beyond Madame de
Staël, fastened eagerly on the heroic aspects of his subject. It was
with this emphasis that later, under the more liberal régime of Louis
Philippe, he continued his work through the epoch of Napoleon and
produced his immensely popular but extremely unsound history of the
Consulate and the Empire. In 1840 the remains of Napoleon were
transferred from St. Helena to Paris, and were processionally drawn to
the Invalides surrounded by the striking figures and uniforms of a
handful of surviving veterans, acclaimed by the ringing rhetoric of
Victor Hugo, who in prose and in verse vividly formulated the
Napoleonic legend. And just before and just after this event, so made
to strike the imagination and to prepare changes of opinion, came a
series of notable books. They were all similar in that they bore the
stamp of the romanticism of the thirties and forties, interpreting
history in terms of the {4} individual; but they differed in their
political bias. These works were written by Carlyle, Louis Blanc,
Lamartine and Michelet.
Carlyle's French Revolution belongs far more to the domain of
literature than to that of history. Its brilliancy may still dazzle
those who are able to think of Carlyle as no more than the literary
artist; it will not blind those who see foremost in him the great
humanitarian. He was too impulsive an artist to resist the high lights
of his subject, and was hypnotized by Versailles and the guillotine
just as his contemporary Turner was by the glories of flaming sunsets
and tumbling waves. The book is a magnificent quest for an unfindable
hero, but it is not the French Revolution.
Carlyle's French contemporaries add the note of the party man to his
individualistic impressionism, and all three are strong apologists of
the Revolution. Lamartine extols the Girondins; Blanc sanctifies
Robespierre, whom he mistakes for an apostle of socialism; Michelet, as
enthusiastic as either, but larger in his views and much more profound
as a scholar, sees the Revolution as a whole and hails in it the
regeneration of humanity. Within a few days of the publication of his
{5} first volumes, France had risen in revolution once more and had
proclaimed the Second Republic. She then, in the space of a few
months, passed through all the phases of political thought which
Thiers, Blanc, Lamartine and Michelet had glorified--the democratic,
the bourgeois, the autocratic republic, and finally the relapse into
the empire--the empire of Louis Napoleon.
And, essentially, the histories of the Revolution produced by these
writers were special pleadings for a defeated cause, springing up in
the year 1848 to a new assertion. Under the Second Empire, with
autocracy even more triumphant than under the brothers of Louis XVI,
they became the gospels of the recalcitrant liberalism of France;
Michelet the gospel of the intellectuals, Blanc the gospel of the
proletarians. De Tocqueville added his voice to theirs, his _Ancien
Régime_ appearing in 1856. Then came 1870, the fall of the Empire, and
1871, the struggle between the middle class republic of Thiers, and the
proletarian republic of Paris. The latter, vanquished once more,
disappeared in a nightmare of assassination and incendiarism.
It was under the impression of this disaster that Taine set to work to
investigate the past {6} of his country, and particularly the great
Revolution on which all else appeared to be founded. Between 1875 and
1894 he produced his _Origines de la France Contemporaine_, which in a
sense supplanted all previous works on the Revolution. Behind it could
be plainly perceived a huge scaffolding of erudite labour, and the
working of an intellect of abnormal power; but what was not so
apparent, and is now only being slowly recognised, was that much of
this erudition was hasty and inspired by preconceived opinions, and
that Taine's genius was more philosophic than historic. Assuming the
validity of the impressions he had formed when witnessing the agony of
Paris in the spring of 1871, his history of the Revolution was a
powerful and brilliant vindication of those impressions. But it is
only the philosopher who forms his opinions before considering the
facts, the historian instinctively reverses the order of these
phenomena. As it was, Taine's great work made a tremendous impact on
the intellect of his generation, and nearly all that has been written
on the Revolution since his day is marked with his mark. His thesis
was that the Church and the State were the great institutions whereby
brute man had acquired his small share of justice and {7} reason, and
that to hack at the root of both State and Church was fatal; it could
only lead to the dictatorship of the soldier or to that of the mob. Of
these two evils the former appeared to him the less, while the latter
he could only think of in terms of folly and outrage. Taine's
conservatism was the reaction of opinion against the violence of the
Commune and the weak beginnings of the Third Republic, as Michelet's
liberalism had been its reaction against Orleanist and Bonapartist
middle class and military dictation.
Since Taine's great book, the influence of which is, in this year 1909,
only just beginning to fade, what have we had? Passing over von
Sybel's considerable and popular history of the Revolution, we have
Sorel's _L'Europe et la Révolution française_, more historical, more
balanced than Taine's work, clear in style and in arrangement, but on
the whole superficial in ideas and incorrect in details. Of far deeper
significance is the _Histoire Socialiste_ of Jean Jaurès, of which the
title is too narrow; _Histoire du peuple_, or _Histoire des classes
ouvrières_, would have more closely defined the scope of this
remarkable work. Here we have a new phenomenon, history written for
the labouring class and from the point of {8} view of the labouring
class. And although not free from the taint of the party pamphlet, not
of the first rank for historical erudition, intellectual force or
artistic composition, Jaurès' history presents the Revolution under the
aspect that gives most food for thought and that places it most
directly in touch with the problems of the present.
Last of all, what of the labours of the professed historian of to-day?
Few of the writers just named could stand the tests rigidly applied to
the young men sent out in large numbers of recent years by the
universities as technically trained historians. Of these many have
turned their attention to the vast field offered by the Revolution and
some have done good work. The trend of modern effort, however, is to
straighten out the details but to avoid the large issues; to establish
beyond question the precise shade of the colour of Robespierre's
breeches, but to give up as unattainable having any opinion whatever on
the French Revolution as a whole. Not but that, here and there,
excellent work is being done. Aulard has published an important
history of the Revolution which is a good corrective to Taine's; the
Ministry of Public Instruction helps the publication of the documents
drawn {9} up to guide the States-General, a vast undertaking that sheds
a flood of light on the economic condition of France in 1789. The
historians have, in fact, reached a moment of more impartiality, more
detachment, more strict setting out of facts; and with the general
result that the specialist benefits and the public loses.
What has been said should explain why it is that the Revolution appears
even more difficult to treat as a whole at the present day than it did
at the time of Thiers and Mignet. The event was so great, the shock
was so severe, that from that day to this France has continued to reel
and rock from the blow. It is only within the most recent years that
we can see going on under our eyes the last oscillations, the slow
attainment of the new democratic equilibrium. The end is not yet, but
what that end must eventually be now seems clear beyond a doubt. The
gradual political education and coming to power of the masses is a
process that is the logical outcome of the Revolution; and the joining
of hands of a wing of the intellectuals with the most radical section
of the working men, is a sign of our times not lightly to be passed
over. From Voltaire before the Revolution to Anatole France, at {10}
the present day, the tradition and development is continuous and
logical.
It now remains to be said that if this is the line along which the
perspective of the Revolution is to be sought, this is not the place in
which the details of that perspective can be adequately set out. That
must be reserved for a history of far larger dimensions, and of much
slower achievement, of which a number of pages are already written. In
this volume nothing more can be attempted than a sketch in brief form,
affording a general view of the Revolution down to the year 1799, when
Bonaparte seized power.
{11}