extending her vast empire to the Dneister and the Caucasus,
and opening a passage for her fleets from the Black Sea to the
Mediterranean. By treaty in 1774 she placed the Tartars of the
Crimea in independence of the Turks, and so isolated them for
easy conquest. In 1783 the conquest was made complete. By the
same treaty she secured a right of remonstrance on behalf of
the Christian subjects of the Sultan, in the Danubian
principalities and in the Greek Church at Constantinople,
which opened many pretexts for future interference and for war
at Russian convenience. The aggressions of the strong-willed
and powerful Czarina, and their dazzling success, filled her
subjects with pride, and effaced all remembrance of her
foreign origin and her want of right to the seat which she
filled. She was ambitious to improve the empire, as well as to
expand it; for her liberal mind took in the large ideas of that
speculative age and was much moved by them. She attempted many
reforms; but most things that she tried to do for the
bettering of civilization and the lifting of the people were
done imperiously, and spoiled by the autocratic method of the
doing. In her later years, her inclination towards liberal
ideas was checked, and the French Revolution put an end to it.
{1089}
State of France in the Eighteenth Century.
In tracing the destruction of Poland and the aggrandizement of
Russia, we have passed the date of that great catastrophe in
France which ended the old modern order of things, and
introduced a new one, not for France only, but for Europe at
large. It was a catastrophe toward which the abused French
people had been slowly slipping for generations, pushed
unrelentingly to it by blind rulers and a besotted
aristocracy. By nature a people ardent and lively in temper,
hopeful and brave in spirit, full of intelligence, they had
been held down in dumb repression: silenced in voice, even for
the uttering of their complaints; the national meeting of
their representative States suppressed for nearly two
centuries; taxes wrung from them on no measure save the will
of a wanton-minded and ignorant king; their beliefs
prescribed, their laws ordained, their courts of justice
commanded, their industries directed, their trade hedged
round, their rights and permissions in all particulars meted
out to them by the same blundering and irresponsible
autocracy. How long would they bear it? and would their
deliverance come by the easing of their yoke, or by the
breaking of it?--were the only questions.
Their state was probably at its worst in the later years of
Louis XIV. That seems to be the conclusion which the deepest
study has now reached, and the picture formerly drawn by
historians, of a society continually sinking into lower
miseries, is mostly put aside. The worst state, seemingly, was
passed, or nearly so, when Louis XIV. died. It began to mend
under his despicable successor, Louis XV. (1715-1774),--
perhaps even during the regency of the profligate Orleans
(1715-1723). Why it mended, no historian has clearly
explained. The cause was not in better government; for the
government grew worse. It did not come from any rise in
character of the privileged classes; for the privileged
classes abused their privileges with increasing selfishness.
But general influences were at work in the world at large,
stimulating activities of all kinds,--industry, trade,
speculation, combination, invention, experiment, science,
philosophy,--and whatever improvement occurred in the material
condition and social state of the common people of France may
find its explanation in these. There was an augmentation of
life in the air of the eighteenth century, and France took
some invigoration from it, despite the many maladies in its
social system and the oppressions of government under which it
bent.
But the difference between the France of Louis XIV. and the
France of Louis XVI. was more in the people than in their
state. If their misery was a little less, their patience was
less, and by not a little. The stimulations of the age, which
may have given more effectiveness to labor and more energy to
trade, had likewise set thinking astir, on the same practical
lines. Men whose minds in former centuries would have labored
on riddles dialectical, metaphysical and theological, were now
bent on the pressing problems of daily life. The mysteries of
economic science began to challenge them. Every aspect of
surrounding society thrust questions upon them, concerning its
origin, its history, its inequalities, its laws and their
principles, its government and the source of authority in it.
The so-called "philosophers" of the age, Rousseau, Voltaire
and the encyclopædists--were not the only questioners of the
social world, nor did the questioning all come from what they
taught. It was the intellectual epidemic of the time, carried
into all countries, penetrating all classes, and nowhere with
more diffusion than in France.
After the successful revolt of the English colonies in
America, and the conspicuous blazoning of the doctrines of
political equality and popular self-government in their
declaration of independence and their republican constitution,
the ferment of social free-thinking in France was naturally
increased. The French had helped the colonists, fought side by
side with them, watched their struggle with intense interest,
and all the issues involved in the American revolution were
discussed among them, with partiality to the republican side.
Franklin, most republican representative of the young
republic, came among them and captivated every class. He
recommended to them the ideas for which he stood, perhaps more
than we suspect.
Louis XVI. and his reign.
And thus, by many influences, the French people of all classes
except the privileged nobility, and even in that class to some
small extent, were made increasingly impatient of their
misgovernment and of the wrongs and miseries going with it.
Louis XVI., who came to the throne in 1774, was the best in
character of the Bourbon kings. He had no noxious vices and no
baleful ambitions. If he had found right conditions prevailing
in his kingdom he would have made the best of them. But he had
no capacity for reforming the evils that he inherited, and no
strength of will to sustain those who had. He accepted an
earnest reforming minister with more than willingness, and
approved the wise measures of economy, of equitable taxation,
and of emancipation for manufactures and trade, which Turgot
proposed. But when protected interests, and the privileged
order which fattened on existing abuses, raised a storm of
opposition, he weakly gave way to it, and dismissed the man
(1776) who might possibly have made the inevitable revolution
a peaceful one. Another minister, the Genevan banker, Necker,
who aimed at less reform, but demanded economy, suffered the
same overthrow (1781). The waste, the profligate expenditure,
the jobbery, the leeching of the treasury by high-born
pensioners and sinecure office-holders, went on, scarcely
checked, until the beginnings of actual bankruptcy had
appeared.
The States-General.
Then a cry, not much heeded before, for the convocation of the
States-general of the kingdom--the ancient great legislature
of France, extinct since the year 1614--became loud and
general. The king yielded (1788). The States-general was
called to meet on the 1st of May, 1789, and the royal summons
decreed that the deputies chosen to it from the third
estate--the common people--should be equal in number to the
deputies of the nobility and the clergy together. So the dumb
lips of France as a nation were opened, its tongue unloosed,
its common public opinion, and public feeling made articulate,
for the first time in one hundred and seventy-five years. And
the word that it spoke was the mandate of Revolution.
The States-general assembled at Versailles on the 5th of May,
and a conflict between the third estate and the nobles
occurred at once on the question between three assemblies and
one. Should the three orders deliberate and vote together as
one body, or sit and act separately and apart. The commons
demanded the single assembly. The nobles and most of the
clergy refused the union, in which their votes would be
overpowered.
{1090}
The National Assembly.
After some weeks of dead-lock on this fundamental issue, the
third estate brought it to a summary decision, by boldly
asserting its own supremacy, as representative of the mass of
the nation, and organizing itself in the character of the
"National Assembly" of France. Under that name and character
it was joined by a considerable part of the humbler clergy,
and by some of the nobles,--additional to a few, like
Mirabeau, who sat from the beginning with the third estate, as
elected representatives of the people. The king made a weak
attempt to annul this assumption of legislative sufficiency on
the part of the third estate, and only hurried the exposure of
his own powerlessness. Persuaded by his worst advisers to
attempt a stronger demonstration of the royal authority, he
filled Paris with troops, and inflamed the excitement, which
had risen already to a passionate heat.
Outbreak of the Revolution.
Necker, who had been recalled to the ministry when the meeting
of the States-general was decided upon, now received his
second dismissal (July 11), and the news of it acted on Paris
like a signal of insurrection. The city next day was in
tumult. On the 14th the Bastile was attacked and taken. The
king's government vanished utterly. His troops fraternized
with the riotous people. Citizens of Paris organized
themselves as a National Guard, on which every hope of order
depended, and Lafayette took command. The frightened nobility
began flight, first from Paris, and then from the provinces,
as mob violence spread over the kingdom from the capital. In
October there were rumors that the king had planned to follow
the "émigrés" and take refuge in Metz. Then occurred the
famous rising of the women; their procession to Versailles;
the crowd of men which followed, accompanied but not
controlled by Lafayette and his National Guards; the
conveyance of the king and royal family to Paris, where they
remained during the subsequent year, practically in captivity,
and at the mercy of the Parisian mob.
Meanwhile, the National Assembly, negligent of the dangers of
the moment, while actual anarchy prevailed, busied itself with
debates on constitutional theory, with enactments for the
abolition of titles and privileges, and with the creating of
an inconvertible paper money, based on confiscated church
lands, to supply the needs of the national treasury. Meantime,
too, the members of the Assembly and their supporters outside
of it were breaking into parties and factions, divided by
their different purposes, principles and aims, and forming
clubs,--centers of agitation and discussion,--clubs of the
Jacobins, the Cordeliers, the Feuillants and the like,--where
fear, distrust and jealousy were soon engendering ferocious
conflicts among the revolutionists themselves. And outside of
France, on the border where the fugitive nobles lurked,
intrigue was always active, striving to enlist foreign help
for King Louis against his subjects.
The First Constitution.
In April, 1791, Mirabeau, whose influence had been a powerful
restraint upon the Revolution, died. In June, the king made an
attempt to escape from his durance in Paris, but was captured
at Varennes and brought back. Angry demands for his deposition
were now made, and a tumultuous republican demonstration
occurred, on the Champ de Mars, which Lafayette and the mayor
of Paris, Bailly, dispersed, with bloodshed. But republicanism
had not yet got its footing. In the constitution, which the
Assembly completed at this time, the throne was left
undisturbed. The king accepted the instrument, and a
constitutional monarchy appeared to have quietly taken the
place of the absolute monarchy of the past.
The Girondists.
It was an appearance not long delusive. The Constituent
National Assembly being dissolved, gave way to a Legislative
Assembly (October, 1791) elected under the new constitution.
In the Legislative Assembly the republicans appeared with a
strength which soon gave them control of it. They were divided
into various groups; but the most eloquent and energetic of
these, coming from Bordeaux and the department of the Gironde,
fixed the name of Girondists upon the party to which they
belonged. The king, as a constitutional sovereign, was forced
presently to choose ministers from the ranks of the
Girondists, and they controlled the government for several
months in the spring of 1792. The earliest use they made of
their control was to hurry the country into war with the
German powers, which were accused of giving encouragement to
the hostile plans of the émigrés on the border. It is now a
well-determined fact that the Emperor Leopold was strongly
opposed to war with France, and used all his influence for the
preservation of peace. It was revolutionary France which
opened the conflict, and it was the Girondists who led and
shaped the policy of war.
Overthrow of the Monarchy.
In the first encounters of the war, the undisciplined French
troops were beaten, and Paris was in panic. Measures were
adopted which the king refused to sanction, and he dismissed
his Girondist ministers. Lafayette, who was commanding one
division of the army in the field, approved the king's course,
and wrote an unwise letter to the Assembly, intimating that
the army would not submit to a violation of the constitution.
The republicans were enraged. Everything seemed proof to them
of a treasonable connivance with the enemies of France, to
bring about the subjugation of the country, and a forcible
restoration of the old regime, absolutism, aristocratic
privilege and all. On the 20th of June there was another
rising of the Paris mob, unchecked by those who could, as yet,
have controlled it. The rioters broke into the Tuileries and
humiliated the king and queen with insults, but did no
violence. Lafayette came to Paris and attempted to reorganize
his old National Guard, for the defense of the constitution
and the preservation of order, but failed. The extremists then
resolved to throw down the toppling monarchy at once, by a
sudden blow. In the early morning of August 10, they expelled
the Council-General of the Municipality of Paris from the
Hotel de Ville, and placed the government of the city under
the control of a provisional Commune, with Danton at its head.
{1091}
At the same hour, the mob which these conspirators held in
readiness, and which they directed, attacked the Tuileries and
massacred the Swiss guard, while the king and the royal family
escaped for refuge to the Chamber of the Legislative Assembly,
near at hand. There, in the king's presence, on a formal
demand made by the new self-constituted Municipality or
Commune of Paris, the Assembly declared his suspension from
executive functions, and invited the people to elect without
delay a National Convention for the revising of the
Constitution. Commissioners, hastily sent out to the provinces
and the armies in the field, were received everywhere with
submission to the change of government, except by Lafayette
and his army, in and around Sedan. The Marquis placed them
under arrest and took from his soldiers a new oath of fidelity
to the constitution and the king. But he found himself
unsupported, and, yielding to the sweep of events, he obeyed a
dismissal by the new government from his command, and left
France, to wait in exile for a time when he might serve his
Country with a conscience more assured.
The Paris Commune.
Pending the meeting of the Convention, the Paris Commune,
increased in number to two hundred and eighty-eight, and
dominated by Danton and Robespierre, became the governing
power in France. The Legislative Assembly was subservient to
it; the kingless Ministry, which had Danton in association
with the restored Girondists, was no less so. It was the
fierce vigor of the Commune which caused the king and the
royal family to be imprisoned in the Temple; which instituted
a special tribunal for the summary trial of political
prisoners; which searched Paris for "suspects," on the night
of August 29-30, gathered three thousand men and women into
the prisons and convents of the city, planned and ordered the
"September Massacres" of the following week, and thus thinned
the whole number of these "suspects" by a half.
Fall of the Girondists.
On the 22d of September the National Convention assembled. The
Jacobins who controlled the Commune were found to have carried
Paris overwhelmingly and all France largely with them, in the
election of representatives. A furious, fanatical democracy, a
bloodthirsty anarchism, was in the ascendant. The republican
Girondists were now the conservative party in the Convention.
They struggled to hold their ground, and very soon they were
struggling for their lives. The Jacobin fury was tolerant of
no opposition. What stood in its path, with no deadlier weapon
than an argument or an appeal, must be, not merely overcome,
but destroyed. The Girondists would have saved the king from
the guillotine, but they dared not adopt his defense, and
their own fate was sealed when they gave votes, under fear,
which sent him in January to his death. Five months longer
they contended irresolutely, as a failing faction, with their
terrible adversaries, and then, in June, 1793, they were
proscribed and their arrest decreed. Some escaped and raised
futile insurrections in the provinces. Some stayed and faced
the death which awaited them in the fast approaching "reign of
terror."
"The Mountain" and "the Terror."
The fall of the Girondists left the Jacobin "Mountain"
(so-called from the elevation of the seats on which its
deputies sat in the Convention) unopposed. Their power was not
only absolute in fact, but unquestioned, and they inevitably
ran to riot in the exercise of it. The same madness overcame
them in the mass which overcame Nero, Caligula, Caracalla, as
individuals; for it is no more strange that the unnatural and
awful feeling of unlimited dominion over one's fellows should
turn the brain of a suddenly triumphant faction, than that it
should madden a single shallow-minded man. The men of "the
Mountain" were not only masters of France--except in La Vendée
and the neighboring region south of the Loire, where an obstinate
insurrection had broken out--but the armies which obeyed them
had driven back the invading Germans, had occupied the
Austrian Netherlands and taken possession of Savoy and Nice.
Intoxicated by these successes, the Convention had proclaimed
a crusade against all monarchical government, offering the
help of France to every people which would rise against
existing authorities, and declaring enmity to those who
refused alliance with the Revolution. Holland was attacked and
England forced to war. The spring of 1793 found a great
European coalition formed against revolutionary France, and
justified by the aggressions of the Jacobinical government.
For effective exercise of the power of the Jacobins, the
Convention as a whole proved too large a body, even when it
had been purged of Girondist opposition. Its authority was now
gathered into the hands of the famous Committee of Public
Safety, which became, in fact, the Revolutionary Government,
controlling the national armies, and the whole administration
of domestic and foreign affairs. Its reign was the Reign of
Terror, and the fearful Revolutionary Tribunal, which began
its bloody work with the guillotine in October, 1793, was the
chief instrument of its power. Robespierre, Barère, St. Just,
Couthon, Billaud-Varennes, Collot d' Herbois and Carnot--the
latter devoted to the business of the war--were the
controlling members of the Committee. Danton withdrew from it,
refusing to serve.
In September, the policy of terrorism was avowedly adopted,
and, in the language of the Paris Commune, "the Reign of
Terror" became "the order of the day." The arraignment of
"suspects" before the Revolutionary Tribunal began. On the
14th of October Marie Antoinette was put on trial; on the 16th
she met her death. On the 31st the twenty-one imprisoned
Girondist deputies were sent to the guillotine; followed on
the 10th of November by the remarkable woman, Madame Roland,
who was looked upon as the real leader of their party. From
that time until the mid-summer following, the blood-madness
raged; not in Paris alone, but throughout France, at Lyons,
Marseilles, Toulon, Bordeaux, Nantes, and wherever a show of
insurrection and resistance had challenged the ferocity of the
Commissioners of the Revolutionary Government, who had been
sent into the provinces with unlimited death-dealing powers.
{1092}
But when Jacobinism had destroyed all exterior opposition, it
began very soon to break into factions within itself. There
was a pitch in its excesses at which even Danton and
Robespierre became conservatives, as against Hébert and the
atheists of his faction. A brief struggle ensued, and the
Hébertists, in March, 1794, passed under the knife of the
guillotine. A month later Danton's enemies had rallied and he,
with his followers, went down before their attack, and the
sharp knife in the Place de la Revolution silenced his bold
tongue. Robespierre remained dominant for a few weeks longer
in the still reigning Committee of Public Safety; but his
domination was already undermined by many fears, distrusts and
jealousies among his colleagues and throughout his party. His
downfall came suddenly on the 27th of July. On the morning of
that day he was the dictator of the Convention and of its
ruling committee; at night he was a headless corpse, and Paris
was shouting with joy.
On the death of Robespierre the Reign of Terror came quickly
to an end. The reaction was sudden and swift. The Committee of
Public Safety was changed; of the old members only Carnot,
indispensable organizer of war, remained. The Revolutionary
Tribunal was remodeled. The Jacobin Club was broken up. The
surviving Girondist deputies came back to the Convention.
Prosecution of the Terrorists for their crimes began. A new
struggle opened, between the lower elements in Parisian and
French society, the sansculotte elements, which had controlled
the Revolution thus far, and the middle class, the
bourgeoisie, long cowed and suppressed, but now rallying to
recover its share of power. Bourgeoisie triumphed in the
contest. The Sansculottes made their last effort in a rising
on the 1st Prairial (May 20, 1795) and were put down. A new
constitution was framed which organized the government of the
Republic under a legislature in two chambers,--a Council of
Five Hundred and a Council of Ancients,--with an executive
Directory of Five. But only one third of the legislature first
assembled was to be freely elected by the people. The
remaining two thirds were to be taken from the membership of
the existing Convention. Paris rejected this last mentioned
feature of the constitution, while France at large ratified
it. The National Guard of Paris rose in insurrection on the
13th Vendémiare (October 5), and it was on this occasion that
the young Corsican officer, Napoleon Bonaparte, got his foot
on the first round of the ladder by which he climbed
afterwards to so great a height. Put in command of the regular
troops in Paris, which numbered only 5,000, against 30,000 of the
National Guards, he crushed the latter in an action of an
hour. That hour was the opening hour of his career.
The government of the Directory was instituted on the 27th of
October following. Of its five members, Carnot and Barras were
the only men of note, then or afterwards.
The war with the Coalition.