THE CHANGE OF THINGS.
[Sidenote: 1789--The political condition of France]
The establishment of the American republic meant something more for
England than the loss of her fairest colonies, and meant much more for
Europe than the establishment of a new form of government in the New
World. While the United States were acclaiming Washington as their first
President and rejoicing over the excellence of their carefully framed
Constitution, the principles which had elected the one and had created
the other were working elsewhere to unexpected and mighty issues. French
gentlemen of rank and fortune, fired by a philosophic admiration for
liberty, had fought and fought well for the American colonists. When the
revolt had become a revolution, and the revolution a triumph, the French
gentlemen went back to France with their hearts full of love and their
lips loud in praise for the young republic and its simple, splendid
citizens. The doctrines of liberty and equality, which had been so dear
to the Philosophers and the Encyclopaedists, were now being practically
applied across the Atlantic, and the growth of their success was watched
by the eager eyes of the wisest and the unwisest thinkers in France.
Within five years from the time when the American army was disbanded
French political philosophy found itself making astonishing strides
towards the realization of its cherished ideals. It had long felt the
need of some change in the system of government that had prevailed in
France, but its desires had seemed dim as dreams until the success of a
handful of rebellious colonists in a distant country had made the spirit
of democracy an immediate force in the life and the thought of the world.
Undoubtedly the condition of France was bad. {291} The feudal system, or
what was left of the feudal system, worn out, degraded, and corrupt, was
rapidly reducing France to financial, physical, and political ruin. It
is no part of the business of this history to dwell upon the conditions
prevailing in France towards the close of the eighteenth century,
conditions which prevailed in varying degree over the most part of
Europe. Great French financiers like Turgot, great French thinkers like
Voltaire and Rousseau and the company of the "Encyclopaedia," had been
keenly conscious of the corroding evils in the whole system of French
political and social life, and had labored directly and indirectly to
diminish them. Keen-eyed observers from abroad, men of the world like
Chesterfield, philosophers like Arthur Young, had at different epochs
observed the symptoms of social disease and prognosticated the nature of
its progress. The France of that day has been likened to a pyramid with
the sovereign for its apex, with the nobility, a remnant of antique
feudalism, for its next tier, with the wealthy and influential Church for
the next, and below these the vast unrecognized bulk of the pyramid, the
unprivileged masses who were the people of France. In the hands of the
few who had the happiness to be "born," or who otherwise belonged to the
privileged orders, lay all the power, all the authority which for the
most part they misused or abused. It has been said with truth that the
man who did not belong to the privileged orders had scarcely any more
influence upon the laws which bound him and which ground him than if he
lived in Mars or Saturn instead of in Picardy or Franche Comté. Such a
system of government, which could only have been found tolerable if it
had been swayed by a brotherhood of saints and sages, was, as a matter of
fact, worked in the worst manner possible and for the worst purposes.
The conditions under which the vast mass of the French people lived,
struggled, suffered, and died were so cruel that it is hard indeed to
believe them compatible with the high degree of civilization which, in
other respects, France had reached. A merciless and most comprehensive
process of taxation squeezed life and hope out of the French nation {292}
for the benefit of a nobility whose corruption was only rivalled by its
worthlessness and an ecclesiasticism that had forgotten the Sermon on the
Mount and the way to Calvary.
But if the condition of France was bad it contained the germs of
improvement. A greater freedom of thought, a greater freedom of speech
were beginning, very gradually, to assert themselves and to make their
influence felt. Philosophical speculation on sorrow and suffering turned
the minds of men to thoughts of how that sorrow might be stanched and
that suffering abated. The slowly rising tide of thought was blown into
an angry sea by a wind from the west, and in a little while a scarcely
suspected storm became a hurricane that swept into a common ruin
everything that opposed its fury. England had long been looked up to by
French reformers as the pattern for the changes they desired to see
brought about in their own country. The moderation and equality of its
laws, as compared with those of France, the facilities of utterance
afforded to the popular voice, made it seem a veritable Utopia to eyes
dimmed by the mist of French feudality. But now another and a greater
England had arisen in the New World. Across the Atlantic the descendants
of the men who had overthrown a dynasty and beheaded a king had shaken
themselves free from forms of oppression that seemed mild indeed to
Frenchmen, and had proclaimed themselves the champions of theories of
social liberty and political freedom which had been dreamed of by French
philosophers but had never yet been put into practice. Rebellious
America had fired the enthusiasm of gallant French adventurers;
successful, independent America animated the hopes and spurred the
imaginations of those whose eyes turned in longing admiration from the
seasoned constitution of monarchical England to the as yet green
constitution of republican America.
[Sidenote: 1789--Revival of the States-General in France]
Those Englishmen whose tastes and sympathies induced them to keep in
touch with political opinion in France, and to watch with interest the
spread of ideas which they themselves held dear, noted with approval many
remarkable {293} signs of activity across the Channel. While the strain
upon the false financial system of France had become so great that the
attempt to stop the hole in the money chest broke the spirit of finance
minister after finance minister, a feeling in favor of some change in the
system that made such catastrophes possible seemed to be on the increase
in educated and even in aristocratic circles. Many Englishmen of that
day knew France, or at least Paris, fairly well. If Pitt had paid the
French capital but a single visit, Fox was intimately acquainted with it,
and Walpole was almost as familiar with a superficial Paris as he was
with a superficial London. Dr. Johnson, not very long before the time of
which we write, had visited Paris with his friends the Thrales, and had
made the acquaintance of a brewer named Santerre. Arthur Young travelled
in France as he travelled in England and in Ireland. On the other hand,
Frenchmen who were soon to be conspicuous advocates of change were not
unknown on the English side of the Channel. Mirabeau was known in
London--not too favorably--and the cousin of the French King, the Duke de
Chartres, afterwards Duke of Orleans, had moved in London society and was
to move there again. So when educated Englishmen heard that Lafayette
had demanded the revival of the States-General, unused and almost
forgotten these two centuries, they knew that the friend of Washington
was not likely to ask for impossibilities. When the Duke of Orleans set
himself openly in opposition to the King, his cousin, they recognized a
significance in the act, and when Mirabeau asserted himself as the
champion of a growing agitation in favor of an oppressed and
unrepresented people they remembered the big, vehement man who had passed
so much of his life in prisons and had played the spy upon the Prussian
Court. Gradually prepared for some change in the administrative system
of France, they were not prepared for the rapid succession of changes
that followed upon the formal convocation of the States-General in the
spring of 1789.
The States-General was the nearest approach to a representative
parliamentary system that was known to France. {294} But the
States-General had not been summoned to aid the deliberations of a French
monarch in the course of many reigns. France had lived under what was
practically a despotism untempered by an expression of organized public
opinion for several generations. It was so long since the States-General
had been convoked that the very forms and ceremonies incidental to or
essential to its convocation had passed out of living memory, and had to
be painfully ascertained by much groping after authority and precedent.
In the end, however, authority and precedent were ascertained, and the
States-General, composed of representatives of the three estates of the
realm--the Church, the Nobility, and the People--met with much ceremony
at Versailles. They were called together for the ostensible purpose of
dealing with the financial difficulties that threatened to make the
country bankrupt. But it was soon clear that they, or at least the
majority of their members, intended to accomplish much more than that.
The news that travelled slowly in those days from the capital of France
to the capital of England grew to be interesting and important with an
interest and an importance that were not to cease in steady activity for
more than a quarter of a century. Event followed event with startling
rapidity. The members of the Third Estate severed themselves from the
Church and the Nobility, met in the Tennis Court in Versailles, and
declared themselves a National Assembly. The people of Paris, profoundly
agitated, and fearing that the King intended to suppress the insurgent
National Assembly by force, broke out into riots, which culminated in an
attack upon the famous and detested prison in the Faubourg St. Antoine,
the Bastille. The Bastille had not for many years been a serious
instrument of oppression, but its record was an evil record, and it
represented in the eyes of the people of Paris all that was most detested
and most detestable in the old order. The Bastille was captured; its few
prisoners were borne in triumph through the streets, while its commander,
De Launay, was decapitated and his head carried about on the point of a
pike.
[Sidenote: 1789--The French Revolution]
If the King of France had been a different man from {295} Louis the
Sixteenth he might have faced the rising storm with some hope of success.
But he could do nothing, would do nothing. His advisers, his intimates,
his kinsmen, his captains, despairing at his vacillation and fearing that
they would be abandoned to the fury of insurgent Paris, fled for their
lives from a country that seemed to them as if possessed by a devil. The
country was possessed, possessed by the spirit of revolution. After ages
of injustice a chance had come for the oppressed, and the oppressed had
seized their chance and misused it, as the long oppressed always misuse
sudden power. Rebellious Paris marched upon Versailles, camped outside
the King's palace; broke in the night time into the King's palace,
slaying and seeking to slay. The Royal Family were rescued, if rescue it
can be called, by the interposition of Lafayette. They were carried in
triumph to Paris. Still nominally sovereign, they were practically
prisoners in their palace of the Tuileries. Europe looked on in
astonishment at the unexpected outbreak. In England at first the leaders
of liberal opinion applauded what they believed to be the dawn of a new
and glorious era of political freedom. Fox hailed in a rapture of
exultation the fall of the Bastille. The Duke of Dorset, the English
ambassador to France, saluted the accomplishment of the greatest
revolution recorded by history. Eager young men, nameless then but yet
to be famous, apostrophised the dawn of liberty. "Bliss was it in that
dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven," Wordsworth wrote,
with a wistful regret, fifteen years after the Bastille had fallen,
recalling with a kind of tragic irony the emotions of that hour and
contrasting them with his thoughts on the events that had followed
through half a generation. All over England strenuous politicians,
catching the contagion of excitement from excited France, formulated
their sympathy with the Revolution in ardent, eloquent addresses, formed
themselves into clubs to propagate the principles that were making France
free and illustrious, and sent delegates speeding across the Channel to
convey to a confident, constitution-making National Assembly the {296}
assurance that the best hearts and the wisest brains in England pulsed
and moved in unison with their desires.
[Sidenote: 1790--Burke and the French Revolution]
Such assurances were inaccurate and misleading. There was one man in
England the goodness of whose heart, the wisdom of whose brain could
scarcely be questioned, whose censure in England, and not in England
alone, was more serious than the applause of a whole theatre of others.
At a moment when all who represented liberal thought in politics, all who
some ten years earlier had sympathized with the American colonists, were
showing a like sympathy for the insurgent people of France, Edmund Burke
made himself conspicuous by the vehemence and the vigor of his opposition
to a movement which commanded the admiration of his most intimate friends
and closest political allies. While the Revolution was still almost in
its infancy, while Sheridan and Fox vied with each other in the warmth of
their applause, Burke set himself to preach a crusade against the
Revolution with all the unrestrained ardor of his uncompromising nature.
No words of Fox or of Sheridan, no resolution of clubs, no delegated
enthusiasm had anything like the same effect in aiding, that Burke's
famous pamphlet had in injuring the French Revolution, in the eyes not
merely of the mass of the English people, but in the eyes of a very great
number of people in the countries of Europe. People whose business it
was to be king, to use the famous phrase of a then reigning prince,
readily welcomed Burke's "Reflexions on the French Revolution," which was
soon disseminated all over the Continent in a French translation.
Naturally enough it appealed to the Emperor of Germany, to the Empress
Catherine of Russia, to the French princes sheltering in Coblentz and
boasting of the revenge they would take on the Revolution when the King
should enjoy his own again. Naturally enough it appealed to George the
Third as a book which every gentleman ought to read. Kings and princes
everywhere, who felt that at any moment their own thrones might begin to
rock unsteadily beneath them, inevitably applauded the unexpected
assistance of the greatest orator and thinker of his age.
{297}
Such applause alone would not have made Burke's pamphlet the formidable
weapon that it proved to be in the hands of reaction, or have brought
about the grave results that may be directly attributed to Burke's pen.
The words of Burke created, the breath of Burke fanned, a public opinion
in England and abroad that was in direct antagonism to everything that
was meant by those who formed and who guided or were driven by the
Revolution. It would be hard to find a parallel in history for the
influence thus exerted by a single man against so great a force. All the
conservatism of Burke's nature--the conservatism that led him to regard
the English Parliamentary system of his day as well-nigh ideally perfect,
and that prompted him to resist so steadily and so successfully Pitt's
proposals of Parliamentary reform--concentrated itself against what he
believed to be the spirit of anarchy newly arisen in France. The
Revolution was but a year old, and was as yet unstained by the worst
excesses of the Terror, when Burke launched his bolt, shouted his
battle-cry, and animated Europe to arms. It must be admitted that many
of the evils which Burke prophesied in his review of the nascent
revolution were the stigmas of its prime. From the premises he beheld he
drew clear and definite conclusions, which were only too unhappily
verified as the tide of revolution flowed. But it must also be
remembered that Burke was himself in no small measure the cause of the
realization of his own dark and tragic prognostications. Burke's
arguments, Burke's eloquence, Burke's splendid ability were among the
most potent factors in animating the hopes of the refugee princes, of
inspiriting their allies, and of forming that ill-advised and disastrous
coalition of the Powers against France which Danton answered with the
head of a king. It was the genius of Burke that stemmed the sympathy
between England and a nation struggling to be free; it was the genius of
Burke that fostered the spirit of animosity to France which began with
the march upon Paris, and which ended after the disastrous defeats of the
invaders, the deaths of the King and Queen, and all the agonies of the
Terror, in {298} creating for England, in common with Europe at large,
the most formidable enemy that she had ever known.
In spite of Burke and Burke's melancholy vaticinations the course of the
Revolution in France seemed at first to most liberal-minded Englishmen to
move along reasonable lines and to confine itself within the bounds of
moderation. The excesses and outrages that followed immediately upon the
first upheaval, the murders of Foulon and Berthier in Paris, the peasant
war upon the castles, were regarded as the unavoidable, deplorable
ebullitions of a long dormant force which, under the guidance of capable
and honorable men, would be directed henceforward solely to the
establishment of a stable and popular system of government. The men who
were, or who seemed to be, at the head of affairs in France had names
that for the most part commended themselves to such Englishmen as had
anything more than a superficial knowledge of the country. The fame of
Lafayette, the hero of the American war, seemed to answer for the conduct
of the army. In Bailly, the astronomer whom unhappy chance had made
Mayor of Paris, constitutionalism recognized a man after its own heart.
The majority of the members of the National Assembly seemed to be
gloriously occupied in evolving out of the chaos of the old order a new
and entirely admirable framework of laws modelled boldly after the
English pattern. Most English observers thought, in opposition to Burke,
what the majority of the members of the National Assembly themselves
thought, that the Revolution was an accomplished fact, a concluded page
of history, brought about not indeed bloodlessly, but still, on the
whole, with comparatively slight shedding of blood, considering the
difficulty and the greatness of the accomplished thing. The practical
imprisonment of the King and Queen within the walls of Paris, within the
walls of the Tuileries, seemed no great hardship in the eyes of the
Englishmen who sympathized with the aims of those of the French
revolutionaries with whom they were acquainted. The French King himself
seemed to be reconciled to his lot, to have joined himself frankly and
{299} freely enough to the party of progress within his dominions, and to
be as loyally eager to accept the new constitution which the National
Assembly was busy framing as the most ardent patriot among its members.
Even the flight of the Royal Family, the attempted flight that began with
such laborious pomp at Paris to end in such pitiful disaster at Varennes,
the flight that condemned the King and Queen to a restraint far more
rigorous than before, did not greatly disturb British equanimity.
[Sidenote: 1791--Burke and the coalition against France]
To the mind of Burke, however, his prophecies were already justifying
themselves. He could see nothing in the Revolution but its errors, and
he hailed the coalition of Europe against France as a league of light
against the powers of darkness. He broke away furiously from his friends
and allies of so many great political battles. He could not understand,
he could not bear to realize that men who had struggled with him to
champion the rights of the American colonists, and to punish the offences
of Warren Hastings, should now be either avowed sympathizers with or
indifferent spectators of the events that were passing in France. He had
loved Charles Fox greatly ever since Fox had shaken off the traditions of
Toryism and become the most conspicuous champion of liberal ideas in
England. But he could not and would not forgive him for his attitude
towards the French Revolution and the French Revolutionists. Burke saw
nothing but evil in, thought nothing but evil could come of, what was
happening in France, and he feared disasters for his own country if it
became impregnated with the poison of the revolutionary doctrine. That
Fox should in any way advocate that doctrine made him in Burke's eyes an
enemy of England, and not merely of England but of the whole human race.
There was no middle way with Burke. Those who were not with him were
against him, not merely as a politician, but as a man. To the day of his
death, in 1797, he hated the Revolution and denied his friendship to
those who expressed anything less than execration for its principles and
its makers. Although it is always easy to exaggerate the influence that
any single spirit may have upon a movement embracing {300} many
nationalities and many different orders of mind, it would be difficult to
overestimate the effect of Burke's words and Burke's actions in animating
the coalition of monarchical Europe against insurgent France. And upon a
responsibility for the intervention of other States in the affairs of
France depends also a proportionate degree of responsibility for the
results of that intervention. Burke was to see all the horrors he had so
eloquently anticipated realized as the direct consequence of the invasion
of France by the allied armies. The French people in the very hour in
which they believed their cherished revolution to be an accomplished fact
saw it menaced by the formidable league which proposed to bring the
King's brothers back in triumph from Coblentz, and which threatened, in
the extraordinary language to which Brunswick put his name, to blot Paris
from the map of Europe if any injury were done to the King, who had
already formally accepted the constitution that the Revolution had
created. Paris went mad with fear and rage. The September massacres,
the attacks upon the Tuileries, the proclaimed republicanism of the
Convention, the rise of the men of the Mountain, Marat, Danton, and
Robespierre, the execution first of the King and then of the Queen, the
dominion of the guillotine and the Reign of Terror, were the direct
results of a coalition whose only excuse would have been its complete
success. The coalition proved to be an absolute failure. To the cry
that the country was in danger ragged legions of desperate men rushed to
the frontiers, and, to the astonishment of the world, proved more than a
match for the armies that were sent against them.
[Sidenote: 1789-92--Pitt and the French Revolution]
Pitt was not himself eager to see England dragged into the European
quarrel with France. But it was not easy for a minister who loved
popularity, and who very sincerely believed his presence at the head of
affairs to be essential to the welfare of the State, to avoid being
involved in the controversy. The result of the unsuccessful coalition
had been to increase the crimes that marked the course of the French
Revolution, and seemingly to justify the fierce indignation of Burke.
The country that had {301} been profoundly impressed by Burke's eloquence
was profoundly shocked by the horrors that lost nothing of their
magnitude in the reports that crossed the Channel. The country was
flooded with fugitives from France, emigrants who presented in themselves
moving pictures of the sufferings of those who were opposed to the
Revolution, and who were not slow to express their sense of the ruin that
had fallen upon their country. King George's native shrewdness and
native narrowness of mind had made him from the first an active opponent
of the Revolution. He declared that if a stop were not put to French
principles there would not be a king left in Europe in a few years. To
him, whose business above all things it had been to be king, the prospect
was unlovely and alarming. The fear that he felt for his office was
shared in varying degree by all those who felt that they would have much
to lose if the example set by France came to be followed in England. The
Church and the aristocracy, with all wealthy and vested interests, were
naturally ranked to resist by all means the spread of the new doctrines.
There were a few noblemen who, like Lord Stanhope and Lord Lauderdale,
professed themselves to be champions of the French Revolution; there were
some statesmen among the Opposition who were either sympathizers with the
Revolution or asserters of the doctrine that it was no part of England's
duty to interfere with the way in which another nation chose to govern
herself. But the strength of public opinion was against these, as it was
against the minister who was as eager as any Englishman living to remain
on good terms with France.
Pitt from the first had looked with a favorable eye upon the changes that
were taking place across the Channel. To maintain a friendship with
France was a radical part of his policy. Friendship with France was
essential in his mind in order to combat the aggrandizement of Russia and
Prussia, and friendship with France seemed more possible under an
enlightened constitution than under a despotic king. While Burke, who
could only make the House of Commons smile and sneer by his denunciations
{302} of Jacobin intrigues and his display of Jacobin daggers, was
playing on the heart-strings of England and reviving all the old
hostility to France, Pitt pursued as long as he was allowed to pursue it
a policy of absolute neutrality. But he was not long allowed to pursue
that policy, although he reaped some reward for it in a proof that the
French Government appreciated his intentions and shared his desire for
friendship. An English settlement at Nootka Sound, in Vancouver Island,
had been interfered with by Spain. England was ready to assert her
rights in arms. Spain appealed to France for her aid by the terms of the
Family Compact. The French King and the French Ministers were willing
enough to engage in a war with England, in the hope of diverting the
course and weakening the power of the Revolution. But the National
Assembly, after a long and angry struggle, took away from the King the
old right to declare war, save with the consent of the National Assembly,
which consent the National Assembly, in that particular crisis, was
decided not to give. Pitt was delighted at this proof of the friendly
spirit of the French people and the advantage of his principle of
neutrality. But he was not able to act upon that principle. The forces
brought against him were too many and too potent for him to resist. From
the King on the throne to the mob in the streets, who sacked the houses
of citizens known to be in sympathy with the Revolution, the English
people as a whole were against him. The people who sympathized with the
Revolution, who made speeches for it in Westminster and formed
Constitutional Clubs which framed addresses of friendship to France, were
but a handful in the House of Commons, were but a handful in the whole
country. Their existence dazzled and deluded the French Revolutionists
into the belief that the heart of England was with them at a time when
every feeling of self-interest and of sentiment in England was against
them. Pitt clung desperately to peace. He thought, what the Opposition
thought then and for long years later, that it was wisest to leave France
to settle her internal affairs and her form of government in her own way.
When England {303} no longer had an ambassador at the French capital Pitt
adhered doggedly, tenaciously, to a peace policy; persisted in preserving
the neutrality of Holland; was ready, were it only possible, only
permitted to him, to recognize the new Republic. But even if the
execution of Louis the Sixteenth had not roused irresistible indignation
in England the action of the new Republic made the prolongation of peace
an impossibility. When, in the winter of 1792, the Convention made the
famous offer of its aid in arms to all peoples eager to be free, it must
have been plain to Pitt that, with France in that temper and England
tempest-tossed between hatred of the Revolution and fear lest its
theories were being insidiously fostered in her own confines, the
preservation of peace was a dream. The dream was finally dissipated when
France made ready to attack Holland and, rejecting all possible
negotiations, declared war in the early days of 1793.
[Sidenote: 1793--France declares war against Holland]
At first the war went ill with France, and if the German Powers had
co-operated earnestly and honestly with England it is at least within the
limits of possibility that Paris might have been occupied and the
Revolution for the time retarded. France seemed to be circled by foes;
her enemies abroad were aided by civil war at home. La Vendée was in
Royalist revolt; Marseilles and Lyons rose against the tyranny of Paris;
Toulon, turning against the Republic, welcomed an English fleet. For a
moment the arms of England and the aims of the Allies seemed to have
triumphed. But the passionate determination of the French popular
leaders and the mass of the French people to save the Revolution seemed
to inspire them with a heroism that grew in proportion to the threatened
danger. Her armies were swollen with enthusiastic recruits. Her
internal revolts were coped with and crushed with savage severity. Loyal
La Vendée was beaten. The rebellious towns of Lyons and Marseilles
almost ceased to exist under the merciless repression of their
conquerors. Many of the allied armies were defeated, while those of the
two German Powers for their own selfish ends played the game of
revolutionary France by abstaining from any serious effort to {304}
advance into the country. Germany and Austria were confident that they
could whenever they pleased crush revolutionary France, and they
preferred to postpone the process, in order to occupy themselves in a new
partition of Poland, which they could scarcely have carried out if the
French monarchy had been restored. If there was nothing to justify the
conduct of the two German Powers, there was much to warrant their
confidence in their own strength when they judged that the time had come
for them to exert it. They counted upon the known when they measured
their forces with those of revolutionary France; they could not count
upon the unknown quantity which was to disturb all their calculations.
The unknown quantity asserted itself just at the moment when France, in
spite of some successes, seemed to be deeply wounded by the loss of
Toulon.
With the great port of Toulon in their hands the adversaries of France
might well believe that a serious blow had been struck at her strength,
and that the spirit which so long had defied them might yet be broken.
But the success which had seemed to menace France so gravely proved to be
but the point of departure for a new era of French glory. The occupation
of Toulon is forever memorable, because it gave an opportunity to a young
lieutenant of artillery in the French service, quite obscure in that
service and wholly unknown outside of it. The quick intelligence of this
young soldier perceived that the seizure of a certain promontory left
unguarded by the invaders would place Toulon and those who had held it at
the mercy of the French cannon. The suggestion was acted upon; was
entirely successful; the English admiral was obliged to retire with all
his fleet, and Toulon was once again a French citadel garrisoned by
French soldiers. But the importance of the event, for France and the
world lay not in the capture but in the captor. Though Barras, confident
in his dominion over the Directory, might sneer at the young adventurer
from Corsica and minimize his share in a success that had suddenly made
him conspicuous, the name of Bonaparte then for the first time took its
{305} place in the history of Europe. The youth whose military genius
had enabled him to see and to seize upon the fatal weakness in a
well-defended city was destined to prove the greatest soldier France had
ever known, the greatest as well as the most implacable enemy England had
ever to reckon with, and one of the greatest conquerors that ever
followed the star of conquest across the war-convulsed earth.
[Sidenote: 1793--Napoleon Bonaparte]
This is the story of England, not the story of France, and Napoleon was
at his best and worst rather an influence upon than an integral part of
English history. It must be enough to say here that he is assumed to
have been born in Ajaccio, in Corsica, in 1769; that when he was ten
years old he tried to become French rather than Italian--a feat which he
never successfully accomplished--by entering the military school of
Brienne; that he served Louis the Sixteenth with indifference and the
Revolution with an ambition that was often baffled, and that he struck
the first of his many strokes at England when he won Toulon for France.
{306}