The story of the various state constitutions, and of the constitution of

the United States as a whole, is a very intricate one, and we can only

deal with it here in the broadest way. The most noteworthy point in a

modern view is the disregard of women as citizens. The American

community was a simple, largely agricultural community, and most women

were married; it seemed natural that they should be represented by

their men folk. But New Jersey admitted a few women to vote on a

property qualification. Another point of great interest is the almost

universal decision to have two governing assemblies, confirming or

checking each other, on the model of the Lords and Commons of Britain.

Only Pennsylvania had a single representative chamber, and that was felt

to be a very dangerous and ultra-democratic state of affairs. Apart from

the argument that legislation should be slow as well as sure, it is

difficult to establish any necessity for this “bi-cameral” arrangement.

It seems to have been a fashion with constitution planners in the

eighteenth century rather than a reasonable imperative. The British

division was an old one; the Lords, the original parliament, was an

assembly of “notables,” the leading men of the kingdom; the House of

Commons came in as a new factor, as the elected spokesmen of the

burghers and the small landed men. It was a little too hastily assumed

in the eighteenth century that the commonalty would be given to wild

impulses and would need checking; opinion was for democracy, but for

democracy with powerful brakes always on, whether it was going up hill

or down. About all the upper houses there was therefore a flavour of

selectness; they were elected on a more limited franchise. This idea of

making an upper chamber which shall be a stronghold for the substantial

man does not appeal to modern thinkers so strongly as it did to the men

of the eighteenth century, but the bi-cameral idea in another form still

has its advocates. They suggest that a community may with advantage

consider its affairs from two points of view--through the eyes of a body

elected to represent trades, industries, professions, public services,

and the like, a body representing _function_, and through the eyes of a

second body elected by localities to represent _communities_. For the

members of the former a man would vote by his calling, for the latter by

his district of residence. They point out that the British House of

Lords is in effect a body representing function, in which the land, the

law, and the church are no doubt disproportionately represented, but in

which industrialism, finance, the great public services, art, science,

and medicine, also find places; and that the British House of Commons is

purely geographical in its reference. It has even been suggested in

Britain that there should be “labour peers,” selected from among the

leaders of the great industrial trade unions. But these are speculations

beyond our present scope.

[Illustration: The UNITED STATES of AMERICA]

The Central Government of the United States was at first a very feeble

body, a congress of representatives of the thirteen governments, held

together by certain Articles of Confederation. This Congress was little

more than a conference of sovereign representatives; it had no control,

for instance, over the foreign trade of each state, it could not coin

money nor levy taxes by its own authority. When John Adams, the first

minister from the United States to England, went to discuss a commercial

treaty with the British foreign secretary, he was met by a request for

thirteen representatives, one from each of the states concerned. He had

to confess his inadequacy to make binding arrangements. The British

presently began dealing with each state separately over the head of

Congress, and they retained possession of a number of posts in the

American territory about the great lakes because of the inability of

Congress to hold these regions effectually. In another urgent matter

Congress proved equally feeble. To the west of the thirteen states

stretched limitless lands into which settlers were now pushing in

ever-increasing numbers. Each of the states had indefinable claims to

expansion westward. It was evident to every clear-sighted man that the

jostling of these claims must lead in the long run to war, unless the

Central Government could take on their apportionment. The feebleness of

the Central Government, its lack of concentration, became so much of an

inconvenience and so manifest a danger that there was some secret

discussion of a monarchy, and Nathaniel Gorham of Massachusetts, the

president of Congress, caused Prince Henry of Prussia, the brother of

Frederick the Great, to be approached on the subject. Finally a

constitutional convention was called in 1787 at Philadelphia, and there

it was that the present constitution of the United States was in its

broad lines hammered out. A great change of spirit had gone on during

the intervening years, a widespread realization of the need of unity.

When the Articles of Confederation were drawn up, men had thought of the

people of Virginia, the people of Massachusetts, the people of Rhode

Island, and the like; but now there appears a new conception, “the

people of the United States.” The new government, with the executive

President, the senators, congressmen, and the Supreme Court, that was

now created, was declared to be the government of “the people of the

United States”; it was a synthesis and not a mere assembly. It said “we

the people,” and not “we the states,” as Lee of Virginia bitterly

complained. It was to be a “federal” and not a confederate government.

State by state the new constitution was ratified, and in the spring of

1788 the first congress upon the new lines assembled at New York, under

the presidency of George Washington, who had been the national

commander-in-chief throughout the War of Independence. The constitution

then underwent considerable revision, and Washington upon the Potomac

was selected as the Federal capital.

§ 6

In an earlier chapter we have described the Roman republic, and its

mixture of modern features with dark superstition and primordial

savagery, as the Neanderthal anticipation of the modern democratic

state. A time may come when people will regard the contrivances and

machinery of the American constitution as the political equivalents of

the implements and contrivances of Neolithic man. They have served their

purpose well, and under their protection the people of the States have

grown into one of the greatest, most powerful, and most civilized

communities that the world has yet seen; but there is no reason in that

for regarding the American constitution as a thing more final and

inalterable than the pattern of street railway that overshadows many New

York thoroughfares, or the excellent and homely type of house

architecture that still prevails in Philadelphia. These things also have

served a purpose well, they have their faults, and they can be improved.

Our political contrivances, just as much as our domestic and mechanical

contrivances, need to undergo constant revision as knowledge and

understanding grow.

Since the American constitution was planned, our conception of history

and our knowledge of collective psychology has undergone very

considerable development. We are beginning to see many things in the

problem of government to which the men of the eighteenth century were

blind; and, courageous as their constructive disposition was in relation

to whatever political creation had gone before, it fell far short of the

boldness which we in these days realize to be needful if this great

human problem of establishing a civilized community of will in the earth

is to be solved. They took many things for granted that now we know need

to be made the subject of the most exacting scientific study and the

most careful adjustment. They thought it was only necessary to set up

schools and colleges, with a grant of land for maintenance, and that

they might then be left to themselves. But education is not a weed that

will grow lustily in any soil, it is a necessary and delicate crop that

may easily wilt and degenerate. We learn nowadays that the

under-development of universities and educational machinery is like some

under-development of the brain and nerves, which hampers the whole

growth of the social body. By European standards, by the standard of any

state that has existed hitherto, the level of the common education of

America is high; but by the standard of what it might be, America is an

uneducated country. And those fathers of America thought also that they

had but to leave the press free, and everyone would live in the light.

They did not realize that a free press could develop a sort of

constitutional venality due to its relations with advertisers, and that

large newspaper proprietors could become buccaneers of opinion and

insensate wreckers of good beginnings. And, finally, the makers of

America had no knowledge of the complexities of vote manipulation. The

whole science of elections was beyond their ken, they knew nothing of

the need of the transferable vote to prevent the “working” of elections

by specialized organizations, and the crude and rigid methods they

adopted left their political system the certain prey of the great party

machines that have robbed American democracy of half its freedom and

most of its political soul. Politics became a trade, and a very base

trade; decent and able men, after the first great period, drifted out of

politics and attended to “business,” and what I have called elsewhere

the “sense of the state”[432] declined. Private enterprise ruled in many

matters of common concern, because political corruption made collective

enterprise impossible.

Yet the defects of the great political system created by the Americans

of the revolutionary period did not appear at once. For several

generations the history of the United States was one of rapid expansion

and of an amount of freedom, homely happiness, and energetic work

unparalleled in the world’s history. And the record of America for the

whole last century and a half, in spite of many reversions towards

inequality, in spite of much rawness and much blundering, is

nevertheless as bright and honourable a story as that of any other

contemporary people.

[Illustration: Benjamin Franklin]

In this brief account of the creation of the United States of America we

have been able to do little more than mention the names of some of the

group of great men who made this new departure in human history. We have

named casually or we have not even named such men as Tom Paine, Benjamin

Franklin, Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, the Adams brothers, Madison,

Alexander Hamilton, and George Washington. It is hard to measure the men

of one period of history with those in another. Some writers, even

American writers, impressed by the artificial splendours of the European

courts and by the tawdry and destructive exploits of a Frederick the

Great or a Great Catherine, display a snobbish shame of something

homespun about these makers of America. They feel that Benjamin Franklin

at the court of Louis XVI, with his long hair, his plain clothes, and

his pawky manner, was sadly lacking in aristocratic distinction. But

stripped to their personalities, Louis XVI was hardly gifted enough or

noble-minded enough to be Franklin’s valet. If human greatness is a

matter of scale and glitter, then no doubt Alexander the Great is at the

apex of human greatness. But is greatness that? Is not a great man

rather one who, in a great position or amidst great opportunities--and

great gifts are no more than great opportunities--serves God and his

fellows with a humble heart? And quite a number of these Americans of

the revolutionary time do seem to have displayed much disinterestedness

and devotion. They were limited men, fallible men; Washington was, for

example, a conspicuously indolent man; but on the whole they seem to

have cared more for the commonweal they were creating than for any

personal end or personal vanity.

[Illustration: Washington]

They were all limited men. They were limited in knowledge and outlook;

they were limited by the limitations of the time. And there was no

perfect man among them. They were, like all of us, men of mixed motives;

good impulses arose in their minds, great ideas swept through them, and

also they could be jealous, lazy, obstinate, greedy, vicious. If one

were to write a true, full, and particular history of the making of the

United States, it would have to be written with charity and high spirits

as a splendid comedy. And in no other regard do we find the rich

tortuous humanity of the American story so finely displayed as in regard

to slavery. Slavery, having regard to the general question of labour, is

the test of this new soul in the world’s history, the American soul.

Slavery began very early in the European history of America, and no

European people who went to America can be held altogether innocent in

the matter. At a time when the German is still the moral whipping-boy of

Europe, it is well to note that the German record is in this respect the

best of all. Almost the first outspoken utterances against negro slavery

came from German settlers in Pennsylvania. But the German settler was

working with free labour upon a temperate countryside, well north of the

plantation zone; he was not under serious temptation in this matter.

American slavery began with the enslavement of Indians for gang work in

mines and upon plantations, and it is curious to note that it was a very

good and humane man indeed, Las Casas, who urged that negroes should be

brought to America to relieve his tormented Indian protégés. The need

for labour upon the plantations of the West Indies and the south was

imperative. When the supply of Indian captives proved inadequate, the

planters turned not only to the negro, but to the jails and poor-houses

of Europe for a supply of toilers. The reader of Defoe’s _Moll Flanders_

will learn how the business of Virginian white slavery looked to an

intelligent Englishman in the early eighteenth century. But the negro

came very early. The year (1620) that saw the Pilgrim Fathers landing at

Plymouth in New England saw a Dutch sloop disembarking the first cargo

of negroes at Jamestown in Virginia. Negro slavery was as old as New

England; it had been an American institution for over a century and a

half before the War of Independence. It was to struggle on for the

better part of a century more.

But the conscience of thoughtful men in the colonies was never quite

easy upon this score, and it was one of the accusations of Thomas

Jefferson against the crown and lords of Great Britain that every

attempt to ameliorate or restrain the slave trade on the part of the

colonists had been checked by the great proprietary interests in the

mother country.[433] With the moral and intellectual ferment of the

revolution, the question of negro slavery came right into the foreground

of the public conscience. The contrast and the challenge glared upon the

mind. “All men are by nature free and equal,” said the Virginia Bill of

Rights, and outside in the sunshine, under the whip of the overseer,

toiled the negro slave.

It witnesses to the great change in human ideas since the Roman Imperial

system dissolved under the barbarian inrush, that there could be this

heart-searching. Conditions of industry, production, and land tenure had

long prevented any recrudescence of gang slavery; but now the cycle had

come round again, and there were enormous immediate advantages to be

reaped by the owning and ruling classes in the revival of that ancient

institution in mines, upon plantations, and upon great public works. It

was revived--but against great opposition. From the beginning of the

revival there were protests, and they grew. The revival was counter to

the new conscience of mankind. In some respects the new gang slavery was

worse than anything in the ancient world. Peculiarly horrible was the

provocation by the trade of slave wars and man hunts in Western Africa,

and the cruelties of the long transatlantic voyage. The poor creatures

were packed on the ships often with insufficient provision of food and

water, without proper sanitation, without medicines. Many who could

tolerate slavery upon the plantations found the slave trade too much for

their moral digestions. Three European nations were chiefly concerned in

this dark business, Britain, Spain, and Portugal, because they were the

chief owners of the new lands in America. The comparative innocence of

the other European powers is to be ascribed largely to their lesser

temptations. They were similar communities; in parallel circumstances

they would have behaved similarly.

Throughout the middle part of the eighteenth century there was an active

agitation against negro slavery in Great Britain as well as in the

States. It was estimated that in 1770 there were fifteen thousand slaves

in Britain, mostly brought over by their owners from the West Indies and

Virginia. In 1771 the issue came to a conclusive test in Britain before

Lord Mansfield. A negro named James Somersett had been brought to

England from Virginia by his owner. He ran away, was captured, and

violently taken on a ship to be returned to Virginia. From the ship he

was extracted by a writ of _habeas corpus_. Lord Mansfield declared that

slavery was a condition unknown to English law, an “odious” condition,

and Somersett walked out of the court a free man.

The Massachusetts constitution of 1780 had declared that “all men are

born free and equal.” A certain negro, Quaco, put this to the test in

1783, and in that year the soil of Massachusetts became like the soil of

Britain, intolerant of slavery; to tread upon it was to become free. At

that time no other state in the Union followed this example. At the

census of 1790, Massachusetts, alone of all the states, returned “no

slaves.”

The state of opinion in Virginia is remarkable, because it brings to

light the peculiar difficulties of the southern states. The great

Virginian statesmen, such as Washington and Jefferson, condemned the

institution, yet because there was no other form of domestic service,

Washington owned slaves. There was in Virginia a strong party in favour

of emancipating slaves. But they demanded that the emancipated slaves

should leave the state within a year or be outlawed! They were naturally

alarmed at the possibility that a free barbaric black community, many of

its members African-born and reeking with traditions of cannibalism and

secret and dreadful religious rites, should arise beside them upon

Virginian soil. When we consider that point of view, we can understand

why it was that a large number of Virginians should be disposed to

retain the mass of blacks in the country under control as slaves, while

at the same time they were bitterly opposed to the slave trade and the

importation of any fresh blood from Africa. The free blacks, one sees,

might easily become a nuisance; indeed the free state of Massachusetts

presently closed its borders to their entry.... The question of slavery,

which in the ancient world was usually no more than a question of status

between individuals racially akin, merged in America with the different

and profounder question of relationship between two races at opposite

extremes of the human species and of the most contrasted types of

tradition and culture. If the black man had been white, there can be

little doubt that negro slavery, like white servitude, would have

vanished from the United States within a generation of the Declaration

of Independence as a natural consequence of the statements in that

declaration.

§ 7[434]

We have told of the War of Independence in America as the first great

break away from the system of European monarchies and foreign offices,

as the repudiation by a new community of Machiavellian statescraft as

the directive form of human affairs. Within a decade there came a second

and much more portentous revolt against this strange game of Great

Powers, this tangled interaction of courts and policies which obsessed

Europe. But this time it was no breaking away at the outskirts. In

France, the nest and home of Grand Monarchy, the heart and centre of

Europe, came this second upheaval. And, unlike the American colonists,

who simply repudiated a king, the French, following in the footsteps of

the English revolution, beheaded one.

Like the British revolution and like the revolution in the United

States, the French revolution can be traced back to the ambitious

absurdities of the French monarchy. The schemes of aggrandizement, the

aims and designs of the Grand Monarch, necessitated an expenditure upon

war equipment throughout Europe out of all proportion to the taxable

capacity of the age. And even the splendours of monarchy were enormously

costly, measured by the productivity of the time. In France, just as in

Britain and in America, the first resistance was made not to the monarch

as such and to his foreign policy as such, nor with any clear

recognition of these things as the roots of the trouble, but merely to

the inconveniences and charges upon the individual life caused by them.

The practical taxable capacity of France must have been relatively much

less than that of England because of the various exemptions of the

nobility and clergy. The burthen resting directly upon the common people

was heavier. That made the upper classes the confederates of the court

instead of the antagonists of the court as they were in England, and so

prolonged the period of waste further; but when at last the

bursting-point did come, the explosion was more violent and shattering.

During the years of the American War of Independence there were few

signs of any impending explosion in France.[435] There was much misery

among the lower classes, much criticism and satire, much outspoken

liberal thinking, but there was little to indicate that the thing as a

whole, with all its customs, usages, and familiar discords, might not go

on for an indefinite time. It was consuming beyond its powers of

production, but as yet only the inarticulate classes were feeling the

pinch. Gibbon, the historian, knew France well; Paris was as familiar to

him as London; but there is no suspicion to be detected in the passage

we have quoted that days of political and social dissolution were at

hand. No doubt the world abounded in absurdities and injustices, yet

nevertheless, from the point of view of a scholar and a gentleman, it

was fairly comfortable, and it seemed fairly secure.

There was much liberal thought, speech, and sentiment in France at this

time. Parallel with and a little later than John Locke in England,

Montesquieu (1689-1755) in France, in the earlier half of the eighteenth

century, had subjected social, political, and religious institutions to

the same searching and fundamental analysis, especially in his _Esprit

des Lois_. He had stripped the magical prestige from the absolutist

monarchy in France. He shares with Locke the credit for clearing away

many of the false ideas that had hitherto prevented deliberate and

conscious attempts to reconstruct human society. It was not his fault if

at first some extremely unsound and impermanent shanties were run up on

the vacant site. The generation that followed him in the middle and

later decades of the eighteenth century was boldly speculative upon the

moral and intellectual clearings he had made. A group of brilliant

writers, the “Encyclopædists,” mostly rebel spirits from the excellent

schools of the Jesuits, set themselves under the leadership of Diderot

to scheme out, in a group of works, a new world (1766). The glory of the

Encyclopædists, says Mallet, lay “in their hatred of things unjust, in

their denunciation of the trade in slaves, of the inequalities of

taxation, of the corruption of justice, of the wastefulness of wars, in

their dreams of social progress, in their sympathy with the rising

empire of industry which was beginning to transform the world.” Their

chief error seems to have been an indiscriminate hostility to religion.

They believed that man was naturally just and politically competent,

whereas his impulse to social service and self-forgetfulness is usually

developed only through an education essentially religious, and sustained

only in an atmosphere of honest co-operation. Unco-ordinated human

initiatives lead to nothing but social chaos.

Side by side with the Encyclopædists were the Economists or Physiocrats,

who were making bold and crude inquiries into the production and

distribution of food and goods. Morally, the author of the _Code de la

Nature_, denounced the institution of private property and proposed a

communistic organization of society. He was the precursor of that large

and various school of collectivist thinkers in the nineteenth century

who are lumped together as Socialists.

Both the Encyclopædists and the various Economists and Physiocrats

demanded a considerable amount of hard thinking in their disciples. An

easier and more popular leader to follow was that eloquent

sentimentalist, Rousseau (1712-78). He preached the alluring doctrine

that the primitive state of man was one of virtue and happiness, from

which he had declined through the rather inexplicable activities of

priests, kings, lawyers, and the like. (We have tried to convey to our

readers in chap, ix, § 2, primitive man’s state of virtue and happiness,

as the vivid vision of Mr. Worthington Smith has realized it; and we

have done our best to show both the necessity of priests and kings to

early civilization, and the possible inconveniences of their later rô1es

in human affairs.) Rousseau’s work was essentially demoralizing. It

struck not only at the existing social fabric, but at any social

organization. When he wrote of the _Social Contract_, he did so rather

to excuse breaches of the covenant than to emphasize its necessity. Man

is so far from perfect, that a writer who could show that the almost

universal disposition, against which we all have to fortify ourselves,

to repudiate debts, misbehave sexually, and evade the toil and expenses

of education for ourselves and others, is not after all a delinquency,

but a fine display of Natural Virtue, was bound to have a large

following in every class that could read him. Rousseau’s tremendous

vogue did much to swamp the harder, clearer thinkers of this time, and

to prepare a sentimental, declamatory, and insincere popular psychology

for the great trials that were now coming upon France.[436]

We have already remarked that hitherto no human community has begun to

act upon theory. There must first be some breakdown and necessity for

direction that lets theory into her own. Up to 1788 the republican and

anarchist talk and writing of French thinkers must have seemed as

ineffective and politically unimportant as the æsthetic socialism of

William Morris at the end of the nineteenth century. There was the

social and political system going on with an effect of an invincible

persistence, the king hunting and mending his clocks, the court and the

world of fashion pursuing their pleasures, the financiers conceiving

continually more enterprising extensions of credit, business blundering

clumsily along its ancient routes, much incommoded by taxes and imposts,

the peasants worrying, toiling, and suffering, full of a hopeless hatred

of the nobleman’s château. Men talked--and felt they were merely

talking. Anything might be said, because nothing would ever happen.

§ 8

The first jar to this sense of the secure continuity of life in France

came in 1787. Louis XVI (1774-92) was a dull, ill-educated monarch, and

he had the misfortune to be married to a silly and extravagant woman,

Marie Antoinette, the sister of the Austrian emperor. The question of

her virtue is one of profound interest to a certain type of historical

writer, but we need not discuss it here. She lived, as Paul Wiriath[437]

puts it, “side by side, but not at the side” of her husband. She was

rather heavy-featured, but not so plain as to prevent her posing as a

beautiful, romantic, and haughty queen. When the exchequer was exhausted

by the war in America (an enterprise to weaken England of the highest

Machiavellian quality), when the whole country was uneasy with

discontents, she set her influence to thwart the attempts at economy of

the king’s ministers, to encourage every sort of aristocratic

extravagance, and to restore the church and the nobility to the position

they had held in the great days of Louis XIV. Non-aristocratic officers

were to be weeded from the army; the power of the church over private

life was to be extended. She found in an upper-class official, Calonne,

her ideal minister of finance. From 1783-87 this wonderful man produced

money as if by magic--and as if by magic it disappeared again. Then in

1787 he collapsed. He had piled loan on loan, and now he declared that

the monarchy, the Grand Monarchy that had ruled France since the days of

Louis XIV, was bankrupt. No more money could be raised. There must be a

gathering of the Notables of the kingdom to consider the situation.

To the gathering of notables, a summoned assembly of leading men,

Calonne propounded a scheme for a subsidy to be levied upon all landed

property. This roused the aristocrats to a pitch of great indignation.

They demanded the summoning of a body roughly equivalent to the British

parliament, the States General, which had not met since 1610. Regardless

of the organ of opinion they were creating for the discontents below

them, excited only by the proposal that they should bear part of the

weight of the financial burthens of the country, the French notables

insisted. And in May, 1789, the States General met.

It was an assembly of the representatives of three orders, the nobles,

the clergy, and the Third Estate, the commons. For the Third Estate the

franchise was very wide, nearly every tax-payer of twenty-five having a

vote. (The parish priests voted as clergy, the small noblesse as

nobles.) The States General was a body without any tradition of

procedure. Enquiries were sent to the antiquarians of the Academy of

Inscriptions in that matter. Its opening deliberations turned on the

question whether it was to meet as one body or as three, each estate

having an equal vote. Since the Clergy numbered 308, the Nobles 285, and

the Deputies 621, the former arrangement would put the Commons in an

absolute majority, the latter gave them one vote in three. Nor had the

States General any meeting-place. Should it meet in Paris or in some

provincial city? Versailles was chosen, “because of the hunting.”

It is clear that the king and queen meant to treat this fuss about the

national finance as a terrible bore, and to allow it to interfere with

their social routine as little as possible. We find the meetings going

on in salons that were not wanted, in orangeries and tennis-courts, and

so forth.

The question whether the voting was to be by the estates or by head was

clearly a vital one. It was wrangled over for six weeks. The Third

Estate, taking a leaf from the book of the English House of Commons,

then declared that it alone represented the nation, and that no taxation

must be levied henceforth without its consent. Whereupon the king closed

the hall in which it was sitting, and intimated that the deputies had

better go home. Instead, the deputies met in a convenient tennis-court,

and there took oath, the Oath of the Tennis Court, not to separate until

they had established a constitution in France.

The king took a high line, and attempted to disperse the Third Estate by

force. The soldiers refused to act. On that the king gave in with a

dangerous suddenness, and accepted the principle that the Three Estates

should all deliberate and vote together as one National Assembly.

Meanwhile, apparently at the queen’s instigation, foreign regiments in

the French service, who could be trusted to act against the people, were

brought up from the provinces under the Marshal de Broglie, and the king

prepared to go back upon his concessions. Whereupon Paris and France

revolted. Broglie hesitated to fire on the crowds. A provisional city

government was set up in Paris and in most of the other large cities,

and a new armed force, the National Guard, a force designed primarily

and plainly to resist the forces of the crown, was brought into

existence by these municipal bodies.

The revolt of July, 1789 was really the effective French revolution. The

grim-looking prison of the Bastille was stormed by the people of Paris,

and the insurrection spread rapidly throughout France. Everywhere

châteaux belonging to the nobility were burnt by the peasants, their

title-deeds carefully destroyed, and the nobles murdered or driven away.

In a month the ancient and decayed system of the aristocratic order had

collapsed. Many of the leading princes and courtiers of the queen’s

party fled abroad. The National Assembly found itself called upon to

create a new political and social system for a new age.[438]

§ 9

The French National Assembly was far less fortunate in the circumstances

of its task than the American Congress. The latter had half a continent

to itself, with no possible antagonist but the British Government. Its

religious and educational organizations were various, collectively not

very powerful, and on the whole friendly. King George was far away in

England, and sinking slowly towards an imbecile condition. Nevertheless,

it took the United States several years to hammer out a working

constitution. The French, on the other hand, were surrounded by

aggressive neighbors with Machiavellian ideas, they were encumbered by a

king and court resolved to make mischief, and the church was one single

great organization inextricably bound up with the ancient order. The

queen was in close correspondence with the Count of Artois, the Duke of

Bourbon, and the other exiled princes who were trying to induce Austria

and Prussia to attack the new French nation. Moreover, France was

already a bankrupt country, while the United States had limitless

undeveloped resources; and the revolution, by altering the conditions of

land tenure and marketing, had produced an economic disorganization that

has no parallel in the case of America.

These were the unavoidable difficulties of the situation. But in

addition the Assembly made difficulties for itself. There was no orderly

procedure. The English House of Commons had had more than five centuries

of experience in its work, and Mirabeau, one of the great leaders of the

early Revolution, tried in vain to have the English rules adopted. But

the feeling of the times was all in favour of outcries, dramatic

interruptions, and such-like manifestations of Natural Virtue. And the

disorder did not come merely from the assembly. There was a great

gallery, much too great a gallery, for strangers; but who would restrain

the free citizens from having a voice in the national control? This

gallery swarmed with people eager for a “scene,” ready to applaud or

shout down the speakers below. The abler speakers were obliged to play

to the gallery, and take a sentimental and sensational line. It was easy

at a crisis to bring in a mob to kill debate.

So encumbered, the Assembly set about its constructive task. On the

Fourth of August it achieved a great dramatic success. Led by several of

the nobles, it made a clean sweep, in a series of resolutions, of

serfdom, privileges, tax exemptions, tithes, feudal courts. Titles

followed. Long before France was a republic it was an offence for a

nobleman to sign his name with his title. For six weeks the Assembly

devoted itself, with endless opportunities for rhetoric, to the

formulation of a Declaration of the Rights of Man--on the lines of the

Bills of Rights that were the English preliminaries to organized change.

Meanwhile the court plotted for reaction, and the people felt that the

court was plotting. The story is complicated here by the scoundrelly

schemes of the king’s cousin, Philip of Orleans, who hoped to use the

discords of the time to replace Louis on the French throne. His gardens

at the Palais Royal were thrown open to the public, and became a great

centre of advanced discussion. His agents did much to intensify the

popular suspicion of the king. And things were exacerbated by a shortage

of provisions--for which the king’s government was held guilty.

Presently the loyal Flanders regiment appeared at Versailles. The royal

family was scheming to get farther away from Paris--in order to undo all

that had been done, to restore tyranny and extravagance. Such

constitutional monarchists as General Lafayette were seriously alarmed.

And just at this time occurred an outbreak of popular indignation at the

scarcity of food, that passed by an easy transition into indignation

against the threat of royalist reaction. It was believed that there was

an abundance of provisions at Versailles; that food was being kept there

away from the people. The public mind had been much disturbed by

reports, possibly by exaggerated reports, of a recent banquet at

Versailles, hostile to the nation. Here are some extracts from Carlyle

descriptive of that unfortunate feast.

“The Hall of the Opera is granted; the Salon d’Hercule shall be

drawing-room. Not only the Officers of Flandre, but of the Swiss, of the

Hundred Swiss; nay of the Versailles National Guard, such of them as

have any loyalty, shall feast; it will be a Repast like few.

“And now suppose this Repast, the solid part of it, transacted; and the

first bottle over. Suppose the customary loyal toasts drunk; the King’s

health, the Queen’s with deafening vivats; that of the nation ‘omitted,’

or even ‘rejected.’ Suppose champagne flowing; with pot-valorous speech,

with instrumental music; empty featherheads growing ever the noisier, in

their own emptiness, in each other’s noise. Her Majesty, who looks

unusually sad to-night (His Majesty sitting dulled with the day’s

hunting), is told that the sight of it would cheer her. Behold! She

enters there, issuing from her State-rooms, like the Moon from clouds,

this fairest unhappy Queen of Hearts; royal Husband by her side, young

Dauphin in her arms! She descends from the Boxes, amid splendour and

acclaim; walks queen-like round the Tables; gracefully nodding; her

looks full of sorrow, yet of gratitude and daring, with the hope of

France on her mother-bosom! And now, the band striking up, _O Richard, O

mon Roi, l’univers t’abandonne_ (Oh Richard, O my king, the world is all

forsaking thee), could man do other than rise to height of pity, of

loyal valour? Could feather-headed young ensigns do other than, by white

Bourbon Cockades, handed them from fair fingers; by waving of swords,

drawn to pledge the Queen’s health; by trampling of National Cockades;

by scaling the Boxes, whence intrusive murmurs may come; by

vociferation, sound, fury and distraction, within doors and

without--testify what tempest-tost state of vacuity they are in?...

“A natural Repast; in ordinary times, a harmless one: now fatal.... Poor

ill-advised Marie Antoinette; with a woman’s vehemence, not with a

sovereign’s foresight! It was so natural, yet so unwise. Next day, in

public speech of ceremony, her Majesty declares herself ‘delighted with

Thursday.’”

And here to set against this is Carlyle’s picture of the mood of the

people.

“In squalid garret, on Monday morning Maternity awakes, to hear children

weeping for bread. Maternity must forth to the streets, to the

herb-makers and bakers’-queues; meets there with hunger-stricken

Maternity, sympathetic, exasperative. O we unhappy women! But, instead

of bakers’-queues, why not to Aristocrats’ palaces, the root of the

matter? _Allons!_ Let us assemble. To the Hôtel-de-Ville; to

Versailles....”

There was much shouting and coming and going in Paris before this latter

idea realized itself. One Maillard appeared with organizing power, and

assumed a certain leadership. There can be little doubt that the

revolutionary leaders, and particularly General Lafayette, used and

organized this outbreak to secure the king, before he could slip

away--as Charles I did to Oxford--to begin a civil war. As the afternoon

wore on, the procession started on its eleven mile tramp....

Again we quote Carlyle:

“Maillard has halted his draggled Menads on the last hill-top; and now

Versailles, and the Château of Versailles, and far and wide the

inheritance of Royalty opens to the wondering eye. From far on the

right, over Marly and Saint-Germain-en-Laye; round towards Rambouillet,

on the left, beautiful all; softly embosomed; as if in sadness, in the

dim moist weather! And near before us is Versailles, New and Old; with

that broad frondent _Avenue de Versailles_ between--stately frondent,

broad, three hundred feet as men reckon, with its four rows of elms; and

then the Château de Versailles, ending in royal parks and pleasances,

gleaming lakelets, arbours, labyrinths, the _Ménagerie_, and Great and

Little Trianon. High-towered dwellings, leafy pleasant places; where the

gods of this lower world abide: whence, nevertheless, black care cannot

be excluded; whither Menadic hunger is even now advancing, armed with

pike-thyrsi!”

Rain fell as the evening closed.

“Behold the Esplanade, over all its spacious expanse, is covered with

groups of squalid dripping women; of lank-haired male rascality, armed

with axes, rusty pikes, old muskets, iron-shod clubs (_batons ferrés_,

which end in knives or swordblades, a kind of extempore billhook);

looking nothing but hungry revolt. The rain pours; Gardes-du-Corps go

caracoling through the groups ‘amid hisses’; irritating and agitating

what is but dispersed here to reunite there....

“Innumerable squalid women beleaguer the President and Deputation;

insist on going with him: has not his Majesty himself, looking from the

window, sent out to ask, What we wanted? ‘Bread, and speech with the

King,’ that was the answer. Twelve women are clamorously added to the

deputation; and march with it, across the Esplanade; through dissipated

groups, caracoling bodyguards and the pouring rain.”

“Bread and not too much talking!” Natural demands.

“One learns also that the royal Carriages are getting yoked, as if for

Metz. Carriages, royal or not, have verily showed themselves at the

back gates. They even produced, or quoted, a written order from our

Versailles Municipality--which is a monarchic not a democratic one.

However, Versailles patrols drove them in again; as the vigilant

Lecointre had strictly charged them to do....

“So sink the shadows of night, blustering, rainy; and all paths grow

dark. Strangest night ever seen in these regions; perhaps since the

Bartholomew Night, when Versailles, as Bassompierre writes of it, was a

_chetif château_.

“O for the lyre of some Orpheus, to constrain, with touch of melodious

strings, these mad masses into Order! For here all seems fallen asunder,

in wide-yawning dislocation. The highest, as in down-rushing of a world,

is come in contact with the lowest: the rascality of France beleaguering

the royalty of France; ‘iron-shod batons’ lifted round the diadem, not

to guard it! With denunciations of bloodthirsty anti-national

bodyguards, are heard dark growlings against a queenly name.

“The Court sits tremulous, powerless: varies with the varying temper of

the Esplanade, with the varying colour of the rumours from Paris.

Thick-coming rumours; now of peace, now of war. Necker and all the

Ministers consult; with a blank issue. The Œil-de-Bœuf is one

tempest of whispers: We will fly to Metz; we will not fly. The royal

carriages again attempt egress--though for trial merely; they are again

driven in by Lecointres patrols.”

But we must send the reader to Carlyle to learn of the coming of the

National Guard in the night under General Lafayette himself, the

bargaining between the Assembly and the King, the outbreak of fighting

in the morning between the bodyguard and the hungry besiegers, and how

the latter stormed into the palace and came near to a massacre of the

royal family. Lafayette and his troops turned out in time to prevent

that, and timely cart-loads of loaves arrived from Paris for the crowd.

At last it was decided that the king should come to Paris.

“Processional marches not a few our world has seen; Roman triumphs and

ovations, Cabiric cymbal-beatings, Royal progresses, Irish funerals; but

this of the French Monarchy marching to its bed remained to be seen.

Miles long, and of breadth losing itself in vagueness, for all the

neighbouring country crowds to see. Slow: stagnating along, like

shoreless Lake, yet with a noise like Niagara, like Babel and Bedlam. A

splashing and a tramping; a hurrahing, uproaring, musket-volleying; the

truest segment of Chaos seen in these latter Ages! Till slowly it

disembogue itself in the thickening dusk, into expectant Paris, through

a double row of faces all the way from Passy to the Hôtel-de-Ville.

“Consider this: Vanguard of National troops; with trains of artillery;

of pikemen and pikewomen, mounted on cannons, on carts, hackney-coaches,

or on foot.... Loaves stuck on the points of bayonets, green boughs

stuck in gun-barrels. Next, as main-march, ‘fifty cart-loads of corn,’

which have been lent, for peace, from the stores of Versailles. Behind

which follow stragglers of the Garde-du-Corps; all humiliated, in

Grenadier bonnets. Close on these comes the royal carriage; come royal

carriages; for there are a hundred national deputies too, among whom

sits Mirabeau--his remarks not given. Then finally, pell-mell, as

rear-guard, Flandre, Swiss, Hundred Swiss, other bodyguards, brigands,

whosoever cannot get before. Between and among all which masses flows

without limit Saint-Antoine and the Menadic cohort. Menadic especially

about the royal carriage.... Covered with tricolor; singing ‘allusive

songs’; pointing with one hand to the royal carriage, which the

allusions hit, and pointing to the provision-wagons with the other hand,

and these words: ‘Courage, Friends! We shall not want bread now; we are

bringing you the Baker, the Bakeress, and Baker’s boy.’ ...

“The wet day draggles the tricolor, but the joy is unextinguishable. Is

not all well now? ‘_Ah Madame, notre bonne Reine_,’ said some of these

Strong-women some days hence, ‘Ah, Madame, our good Queen, don’t be a

traitor any more and we will all love you!’ ...”

This was October the sixth, 1789. For nearly two years the royal family

dwelt unmolested in the Tuileries. Had the court kept common faith with

the people, the king might have died there, a king.

From 1789 to 1791 the early Revolution held its own; France was a

limited monarchy, the king kept a diminished state in the Tuileries, and

the National Assembly ruled a country at peace. The reader who will

glance back to the maps of Poland we have given in the previous chapter

will realize what occupied Russia, Prussia, and Austria at this time.

While France experimented with a crowned republic in the west, the last

division of the crowned republic of the east was in progress. France

could wait.

When we consider its inexperience, the conditions under which it worked,

and the complexities of its problems, one must concede that the Assembly

did a very remarkable amount of constructive work. Much of that work was

sound and still endures, much was experimental and has been undone. Some

was disastrous. There was a clearing up of the penal code; torture,

arbitrary imprisonment, and persecutions for heresy were abolished; and

the ancient provinces of France, Normandy, Burgundy, and the like gave

place to eighty departments. Promotion to the highest ranks in the army

was laid open to men of every class. An excellent and simple system of

law courts was set up, but its value was much vitiated by having the

judges appointed by popular election for short periods of time. This

made the crowd a sort of final court of appeal, and the judges, like the

members of the Assembly, were forced to play to the gallery. And the

whole vast property of the church was seized and administered by the

state; religious establishments not engaged in education or works of

charity were broken up, and the salaries of the clergy made a charge

upon the nation. This in itself was not a bad thing for the lower clergy

in France, who were often scandalously underpaid in comparison with the

richer dignitaries. But in addition the choice of priests and bishops

was made elective, which struck at the very root idea of the Roman

church, which centred everything upon the Pope, and in which all

authority is from above downward. Practically the National Assembly

wanted at one blow to make the church in France Protestant, in

organization if not in doctrine. Everywhere there were disputes and

conflicts between the state priests of the republic and the recalcitrant

(non-juring) priests who were loyal to Rome....

One curious thing the National Assembly did which greatly weakened its

grip on affairs. It decreed that no member of the Assembly should be an

executive minister. This was in imitation of the American constitution,

where also ministers are separated from the legislature. The British

method has been to have all ministers in the legislative body, ready to

answer questions and account for their interpretation of the laws and

their conduct of the nation’s business. If the legislature represents

the sovereign people, then it is surely necessary for the ministers to

be in the closest touch with their sovereign. This severance of the

legislature and executive in France caused misunderstandings and

mistrust; the legislature lacked control and the executive lacked moral

force. This led to such an ineffectiveness in the central government

that in many districts at this time, communes and towns were to be found

that were practically self-governing communities; they accepted or

rejected the commands of Paris as they thought fit, declined the payment

of taxes, and divided up the church lands according to their local

appetites.

§ 10

It is quite possible that with the loyal support of the crown and a

reasonable patriotism on the part of the nobility, the National

Assembly, in spite of its noisy galleries, its Rousseauism, and its

inexperience, might have blundered through to a stable form of

parliamentary government for France. In Mirabeau it had a statesman with

clear ideas of the needs of the time; he knew the strength and the

defects of the British system, and apparently he had set himself to

establish in France a parallel political organization upon a wider, more

honest franchise. He had, it is true, indulged in a sort of Ruritanian

flirtation with the queen, seen her secretly, pronounced her very

solemnly the “only _man_” about the king, and made rather a fool of

himself in that matter, but his schemes were drawn upon a much larger

scale than the scale of the back stairs of the Tuileries. By his death

in 1791 France certainly lost one of her most constructive statesmen,

and the National Assembly its last chance of any co-operation with the

king. When there is a court there is usually a conspiracy, and royalist

schemes and royalist mischief-making were the last straw in the balance

against the National Assembly. The royalists did not care for Mirabeau,

they did not care for France; they wanted to be back in their lost

paradise of privilege, haughtiness, and limitless expenditure, and it

seemed to them that if only they could make the government of the

National Assembly impossible, then by a sort of miracle the dry bones of

the ancient régime would live again. They had no sense of the other

possibility, the gulf of the republican extremists, that yawned at their

feet.

[Illustration: Map to illustrate the FLIGHT to VARENNES]

One June night in 1791, between eleven o’clock and midnight, the king

and queen and their two children slipped out of the Tuileries disguised,

threaded their palpitating way through Paris, circled round from the

north of the city to the east, and got at last into a

travelling-carriage that was waiting upon the road to Chalons. They were

flying to the army of the east.[439] The army of the east was “loyal,”

that is to say, its general and officers at least were prepared to

betray France to the king and court. Here was adventure at last after

the queen’s heart, and one can understand the pleasurable excitement of

the little party as the miles lengthened between themselves and Paris.

Away over the hills were reverence, deep bows, and the kissing of hands.

Then back to Versailles. A little shooting of the mob in

Paris--artillery, if need be. A few executions--but not of the sort of

people who matter. A White Terror for a few months. Then all would be

well again. Perhaps Calonne might return too, with fresh financial

expedients. He was busy just then gathering support among the German

princes. There were a lot of chateaux to rebuild, but the people who

burnt them down could hardly complain if the task of rebuilding them

pressed rather heavily upon their grimy necks....

All such bright anticipations were cruelly dashed that night at

Varennes. The king had been recognized at Sainte Menehould by the

landlord of the post house, and as the night fell, the eastward roads

clattered with galloping messengers rousing the country, and trying to

intercept the fugitives. There were fresh horses waiting in the upper

village of Varennes--the young officer in charge had given the king up

for the night and gone to bed--while for half an hour in the lower

village the poor king, disguised as a valet, disputed with his

postillions, who had expected reliefs in the lower village and refused

to go further. Finally they consented to go on. They consented too late.

The little party found the postmaster from Sainte Menehould, who had

ridden past while the postillions wrangled, and a number of worthy

republicans of Varennes whom he had gathered together, awaiting them at

the bridge between the two parts of the town. The bridge was barricaded.

Muskets were thrust into the carriage: “Your passports?”

The king surrendered without a struggle. The little party was taken into

the house of some village functionary. “Well,” said the king, “here you

have me!” Also he remarked that he was hungry. At dinner he commended

the wine, “quite excellent wine.” What the queen said is not recorded.

There were royalist troops at hand, but they attempted no rescue. The

tocsin began to ring, and the village “illuminated itself,” to guard

against surprise....

A very crestfallen coachload of royalty returned to Paris and was

received by vast crowds--_in silence_. The word had gone forth that

whoever insulted the king should be thrashed, and whoever applauded him

should be killed....

It was only after this foolish exploit that the idea of a republic took

hold of the French mind. Before this flight to Varennes there was no

doubt much abstract republican sentiment, but there was scarcely any

expressed disposition to abolish monarchy in France. Even in July, a

month after the flight, a great meeting in the Champ de Mars, supporting

a petition for the dethronement of the king, was dispersed by the

authorities, and many people were killed. But such displays of firmness

could not prevent the lesson of that flight soaking into men’s minds.

Just as in England in the days of Charles I, so now in France men

realized that the king could not be trusted--he was dangerous. The

Jacobins, the extreme republican party, grew rapidly in strength. Their

leaders, Robespierre, Danton, Marat, who had hitherto been a group of

impossibles on the extreme left, began to dominate the National

Assembly.

These Jacobins were the equivalents of the American radicals, men with

untrammelled advanced ideas. Their strength lay in the fact that they

were unencumbered and downright. They were poor men with nothing to

lose. The party of moderation, of compromise with the relics of the old

order, was led by such men of established position as General Lafayette,

the general who had commanded the French troops in America, and

Mirabeau, an aristocrat who was ready to model himself on the rich and

influential aristocrats of England. But Robespierre was a needy but

clever young lawyer from Arras, whose most precious possession was his

faith in Rousseau; Danton was a scarcely more wealthy barrister in

Paris, one of those big roaring gesticulating Frenchmen who are in

normal times the heroic loud-talkers of provincial cafés; Marat was an

older man, a Swiss of very great scientific distinction, but equally

unembarrassed by possessions. On Marat’s scientific standing it is

necessary to lay stress because there is a sort of fashion among English

writers to misrepresent the leaders of great revolutionary movements as

ignorant men. This gives a false view of the mental processes of

revolution; and it is the task of the historian to correct it. Marat, we

find, was conversant with English, Spanish, German, and Italian; he had

spent several years in England, he was made an honorary M.D. of St.

Andrew’s, and had published some valuable contributions to medical

science in English. Both Benjamin Franklin and Goethe were greatly

interested in his work in physics. This is the man who is called by

Carlyle “rabid dog,” “atrocious,” “squalid,” and “Dog-leech”--this last

by way of tribute to his science.

The revolution called Marat to politics, and his earliest contributions

to the great discussion were fine and sane. There was a prevalent

delusion in France that England was a land of liberty. His _Tableau des

vices de la constitution d’Angleterre_ showed the realities of the

English position. His last years were maddened by an almost intolerable

skin disease which he caught while hiding in the sewers of Paris to

escape the consequences of his denunciation of the king as a traitor

after the flight to Varennes. Only by sitting in a hot bath could he

collect his mind to write. He had been treated hardly and suffered, and

he became hard; nevertheless he stands out in history as a man of rare,

unblemished honesty. His poverty seems particularly to have provoked the

scorn of Carlyle.

“What a road he has travelled; and sits now, about half-past seven of

the clock, stewing in slipper-bath; sore afflicted; ill of Revolution

Fever.... Excessively sick and worn, poor man: with precisely

elevenpence half penny of ready-money, in paper; with slipper-bath;

strong three-footed stool for writing on, the while: and a squalid

Washerwoman for his sole household ... that is his civic establishment

in Medical-School Street; thither and not elsewhere has his road led

him.... Hark, a rap again! A musical woman’s voice, refusing to be

rejected: it is the Citoyenne who would do France a service. Marat,

recognizing from within, cries, Admit her. Charlotte Corday is

admitted.”

The young heroine--for republican leaders are fair game, and their

assassins are necessarily heroines and their voices “musical”--offered

to give him some necessary information about the counter-revolution at

Caen, and as he was occupied in making a note of her facts, she stabbed

him with a large sheath knife (1792)....

Such was the quality of most of the leaders of the Jacobin party. They

were men of no property--untethered men. They were more dissociated and

more elemental, therefore, than any other party; and they were ready to

push the ideas of freedom and equality to a logical extremity. Their

standards of patriotic virtue were high and harsh. There was something

inhuman even in their humanitarian zeal. They saw without humour the

disposition of the moderates to ease things down, to keep the common

folk just a little needy and respectful, and royalty (and men of

substance) just a little respected. They were blinded by the formulæ of

Rousseauism to the historical truth that man is by nature oppressor and

oppressed, and that it is only slowly by law, education, and the spirit

of love in the world that men can be made happy and free.

And while in America the formulæ of eighteenth-century democracy were on

the whole stimulating and helpful because it was already a land of

open-air practical equality so far as white men were concerned, in

France these formulæ made a very heady and dangerous mixture for the

town populations, because considerable parts of the towns of France were

slums full of dispossessed, demoralized, degraded, and bitter-spirited

people. The Parisian crowd was in a particularly desperate and dangerous

state, because the industries of Paris had been largely luxury

industries, and much of her employment parasitic on the weaknesses and

vices of fashionable life. Now the fashionable world had gone over the

frontier, travellers were restricted, business disordered, and the city

full of unemployed and angry people.

But the royalists, instead of realizing the significance of these

Jacobins with their dangerous integrity and their dangerous grip upon

the imagination of the mob, had the conceit to think they could make

tools of them. The time for the replacement of the National Assembly

under the new-made constitution by the “Legislative Assembly” was

drawing near; and when the Jacobins, with the idea of breaking up the

moderates, proposed to make the members of the National Assembly

ineligible for the Legislative Assembly, the royalists supported them

with great glee, and carried the proposal. They perceived that the

Legislative Assembly, so clipped of all experience, must certainly be a

politically incompetent body. They would “extract good from the excess

of evil,”[440] and presently France would fall back helpless into the

hands of her legitimate masters. So they thought. And the royalists did

more than this. They backed the election of a Jacobin as Mayor of Paris.

It was about as clever as if a man brought home a hungry tiger to

convince his wife of her need of him. There stood another body ready at

hand with which these royalists did not reckon, far better equipped than

the court to step in and take the place of an ineffective Legislative

Assembly, and that was the strongly Jacobin Commune of Paris installed

at the Hôtel de Ville.

So far France had been at peace. None of her neighbours had attacked

her, because she appeared to be weakening herself by her internal

dissensions. It was Poland that suffered by the distraction of France.

But there seemed no reason why they should not insult and threaten her,

and prepare the way for a later partition at their convenience. At

Pillnitz, in 1791, the King of Prussia and the Emperor of Austria met,

and issued a declaration[441] that the restoration of order and monarchy

in France was a matter of interest to all sovereigns. And an army of

emigrés, French nobles and gentlemen, an army largely of officers, was

allowed to accumulate close to the frontier.

It was France that declared war against Austria. The motives of those

who supported this step were conflicting. Many republicans wanted it

because they wished to see the kindred people of Belgium liberated from

the Austrian yoke. Many royalists wanted it because they saw in war a

possibility of restoring the prestige of the crown. Marat opposed it

bitterly in his paper _L’Ami du Peuple_, because he did not want to see

republican enthusiasm turned into war fever. His instinct warned him of

Napoleon. On April 20th, 1792, the king came down to the Assembly and

proposed war amidst great applause.

The war began disastrously. Three French armies entered Belgium, two

were badly beaten, and the third, under Lafayette, retreated. Then

Prussia declared war in support of Austria, and the allied forces, under

the Duke of Brunswick, prepared to invade France. The duke issued one of

the most foolish proclamations in history; he was, he said, invading

France to restore the royal authority. Any further indignity shown the

king he threatened to visit upon the Assembly and Paris with “military

execution.” This was surely enough to make the most royalist Frenchman a

republican--at least for the duration of the war.

The new phase of revolution, the Jacobin revolution, was the direct

outcome of this proclamation. It made the Legislative Assembly, in which

orderly republicans (Girondins) and royalists prevailed, it made the

government which had put down that republican meeting in the Champ de

Mars and hunted Marat into the sewers, impossible. The insurgents

gathered at the Hôtel de Ville, and on the tenth of August the Commune

launched an attack on the palace of the Tuileries.

The king behaved with a clumsy stupidity, and with that disregard for

others which is the prerogative of kings. He had with him a Swiss guard

of nearly a thousand men as well as National Guards of uncertain

loyalty. He held out vaguely until firing began, and then he went off to

the adjacent Assembly to place himself and his family under its

protection, leaving his Swiss fighting. No doubt he hoped to antagonize

Assembly and Commune, but the Assembly had none of the fighting spirit

of the Hôtel de Ville. The royal refugees were placed in a box reserved

for journalists (out of which a small room opened), and there they

remained for sixteen hours while the Assembly debated their fate.

Outside there were the sounds of a considerable battle; every now and

then a window would break. The unfortunate Swiss were fighting with

their backs to the wall because there was now nothing else for them to

do....

The Assembly had no stomach to back the government’s action of July in

the Champ de Mars. The fierce vigour of the Commune dominated it. The

king found no comfort whatever in the Assembly. It scolded him and

discussed his “suspension.” The Swiss fought until they received a

message from the king to desist, and then--the crowd being savagely

angry at the needless bloodshed and out of control--they were for the

most part massacred.

The long and tedious attempt to “Merovingianize” Louis, to make an

honest crowned republican out of a dull and inadaptable absolute

monarch, was now drawing to its tragic close. The Commune of Paris was

practically in control of France. The Legislative Assembly--which had

apparently undergone a change of heart--decreed that the king was

suspended from his office, confined him in the Temple, replaced him by

an executive commission, and summoned a National Convention to frame a

new constitution.

The tension of patriotic and republican France was now becoming

intolerable. Such armies as she had were rolling back helplessly toward

Paris. Longwy had fallen, the great fortress of Verdun followed, and

nothing seemed likely to stop the march of the allies upon the capital.

The sense of royalist treachery rose to panic cruelty. At any rate the

royalists had to be silenced and stilled and scared out of sight. The

Commune set itself to hunt out every royalist that could be found, until

the prisons of Paris were full. Danton incited the crowd against the

prisoners, Marat saw the danger of a massacre. Before it was too late

Marat tried to secure the establishment of emergency tribunals to filter

the innocent from the guilty in this miscellaneous collection of

schemers, suspects, and harmless gentlefolk. He was disregarded, and

early in September the inevitable massacre occurred.

Suddenly, first at one prison and then at others, bands of insurgents

took possession. A sort of rough court was constituted, and outside

gathered a wild mob armed with sabres, pikes, and axes. One by one the

prisoners, men and women alike, were led out from their cells,

questioned briefly, pardoned with the cry of “Vive la Nation,” or thrust

out to the mob at the gates. There the crowd jostled and fought to get a

slash or thrust at a victim. The condemned were stabbed, hacked, and

beaten to death, their heads hewn off, stuck on pikes, and carried about

the town, their torn bodies thrust aside. Among others, the Princesse de

Lamballe, whom the king and queen had left behind in the Tuileries,

perished. Her head was carried on a pike to the Temple for the queen to

see.

In the queen’s cell were two National Guards. One would have had her

look out and see this grisly sight. The other, in pity, would not let

her do so.

[Illustration: North Eastern Frontier of FRANCE showing the military

position September 1792]

Even as this red tragedy was going on in Paris, the French general

Dumouriez, who had rushed an army from Flanders into the forests of the

Argonne, was holding up the advance of the allies beyond Verdun. On

September 20th occurred a battle, mainly an artillery encounter, at

Valmy. A not very resolute Prussian advance was checked,[442] the French

infantry stood firm, their artillery was better than the allied

artillery. For ten days after this repulse the Duke of Brunswick

hesitated, and then he began to fall back towards the Rhine. This battle

at Valmy--it was little more than a cannonade--was one of the decisive

battles in the world’s history. The Revolution was saved. The National

Convention met on September 21st, 1792, and immediately proclaimed a

republic. The trial and execution of the king followed with a sort of

logical necessity upon these things. He died rather as a symbol than as

a man. There was nothing else to be done with him; poor man, he cumbered

the earth. France could not let him go to hearten the emigrants, could

not keep him harmless at home; his existence threatened her. Marat had

urged this trial relentlessly, yet with that acid clearness of his he

would not have the king charged with any offence committed before he

signed the constitution, because before then he was a real monarch,

super-legal, and so incapable of being illegal. Nor would Marat permit

attacks upon the king’s counsel.... Throughout Marat played a bitter and

yet often a just part; he was a great man, a fine intelligence, in a

skin of fire; wrung with that organic hate in the blood that is not a

product of the mind but of the body.

Louis was beheaded in January, 1793. He was guillotined--for since the

previous August the guillotine had been in use as the official

instrument in French executions.

Danton, in his leonine rôle, was very fine upon this occasion. “The

kings of Europe would challenge us,” he roared. “We throw them the head

of a king!”

§ 11

And now followed a strange phase in the history of the French people.

There arose a great flame of enthusiasm for France and the Republic.

There was to be an end to compromise at home and abroad; at home

royalists and every form of disloyalty were to be stamped out; abroad

France was to be the protector and helper of all revolutionaries. All

Europe, all the world, was to become republican. The youth of France

poured into the Republican armies; a new and wonderful song spread

through the land, a song that still warms the blood like wine, the

Marseillaise. Before that chant and the leaping columns of French

bayonets and their enthusiastically served guns the foreign armies

rolled back; before the end of 1792 the French armies had gone far

beyond the utmost achievements of Louis XIV; everywhere they stood on

foreign soil. They were in Brussels, they had overrun Savoy, they had

raided to Mayence; they had seized the Scheldt from Holland. Then the

French Government did an unwise thing. It had been exasperated by the

expulsion of its representative from England upon the execution of

Louis, and it declared war against England. It was an unwise thing to

do, because the revolution which had given France a new enthusiastic

infantry and a brilliant artillery, released from its aristocratic

officers and many cramping traditions,[443] had destroyed the discipline

of its navy, and the English were supreme upon the sea. And this

provocation united all England against France, whereas there had been at

first a very considerable liberal movement in Great Britain in sympathy

with the revolution. It robbed France of her one prospective ally.[444]

Of the fight that France made in the next few years against a European

coalition we cannot tell in any detail. She drove the Austrians for ever

out of Belgium, and made Holland a republic. The Dutch fleet, frozen in

the Texel, surrendered to a handful of cavalry without firing its guns.

For some time the French thrust towards Italy was hung up, and it was

only in 1796 that a new general, Napoleon Bonaparte, led the ragged and

hungry republican armies in triumph across Piedmont to Mantua and

Verona. An _Outline of History_ cannot map out campaigns; but of the new

quality that had come into war, it is bound to take note. The old

professional armies had fought for the fighting, as slack as workers

paid by the hour; these wonderful new armies fought hungry and thirsty,

for victory. Their enemies called them the “New French.” Says C. F.

Atkinson,[445] “What astonished the Allies most of all was the number

and the velocity of the Republicans. These improvised armies had in fact

nothing to delay them. Tents were unprocurable for want of money,

untransportable for want of the enormous number of wagons that would

have been required, and also unnecessary, for the discomfort that would

have caused wholesale desertion in professional armies was cheerfully

borne by the men of 1793-4. Supplies for armies of then unheard-of size

could not be carried in convoys, and the French soon became familiar

with ‘living on the country.’ Thus 1793 saw the birth of the modern

system of war--rapidity of movement, full development of national

strength, bivouacs, requisitions and force as against cautious

manœuvring, small professional armies, tents and full rations, and

chicane. The first represented the decision-compelling spirit, the

second the spirit of risking little to gain a little....”

And while these ragged hosts of enthusiasts were chanting the

Marseillaise and fighting for _la France_, manifestly never quite clear

in their minds whether they were looting or liberating the countries

into which they poured, the republican enthusiasm in Paris was spending

itself in a far less glorious fashion. Marat, the one man of commanding

intelligence among the Jacobins, was now frantic with an incurable

disease, and presently he was murdered; Danton was a series of patriotic

thunderstorms; the steadfast fanaticism of Robespierre dominated the

situation. This man is difficult to judge; he was a man of poor

physique, naturally timid, and a prig. But he had that most necessary

gift for power, faith. He believed not in a god familiar to men, but in

a certain Supreme Being, and that Rousseau was his prophet. He set

himself to save the Republic as he conceived it, and he imagined it

could be saved by no other man than he. So that to keep in power was to

save the republic. The living spirit of the republic, it seemed, had

sprung from a slaughter of royalists and the execution of the king.

There were insurrections: one in the west, in the district of La Vendée,

where the people rose against the conscription and against the

dispossession of the orthodox clergy, and were led by noblemen and

priests; one in the south, where Lyons and Marseilles had risen and the

royalists of Toulon had admitted an English and Spanish garrison. To

which there seemed no more effectual reply than to go on killing

royalists.

Nothing could have better pleased the fierce heart of the Paris slums.

The Revolutionary Tribunal went to work, and a steady slaughtering

began.[446] The invention of the guillotine was opportune to this mood.

The queen was guillotined, most of Robespierre’s antagonists were

guillotined, atheists who argued that there was no Supreme Being were

guillotined, Danton was guillotined because he thought there was too

much guillotine; day by day, week by week, this infernal new machine

chopped off heads and more heads and more. The reign of Robespierre

lived, it seemed, on blood, and needed more and more, as an opium-taker

needs more and more opium.

Danton was still Danton, leonine and exemplary upon the guillotine.

“Danton,” he said, “no weakness!”

And the grotesque thing about the story is that Robespierre was

indubitably honest. He was far more honest than any of the group of men

who succeeded him. He was inspired by a consuming passion for a new

order of human life. So far as he could contrive it, the Committee of

Public Safety, the emergency government of twelve which had now thrust

aside the Convention, _constructed_. The scale on which it sought to

construct was stupendous. All the intricate problems with which we still

struggle to-day were met by swift and shallow solutions. Attempts were

made to equalize property. “Opulence,” said St. Just, “is infamous.” The

property of the rich was taxed or confiscated in order that it should be

divided among the poor. Every man was to have a secure house, a living,

a wife and children. The labourer was worthy of his hire, but not

entitled to an advantage. There was an attempt to abolish _profit_

altogether, the rude incentive of most human commerce since the

beginning of society. Profit is the economic riddle that still puzzles

us to-day. There were harsh laws against “profiteering” in France in

1793--England in 1919 found it necessary to make quite similar laws. And

the Jacobin government not only replanned--in eloquent outline--the

economic, but also the social system. Divorce was made as easy as

marriage; the distinction of legitimate and illegitimate children was

abolished.... A new calendar was devised, with new names for the months,

a week of ten days, and the like--that has long since been swept away;

but also the clumsy coinage and the tangled weights and measures of old

France gave place to the simple and lucid decimal system that still

endures.... There was a proposal from one extremist group to abolish God

among other institutions altogether, and to substitute the worship of

Reason. There was, indeed, a Feast of Reason in the cathedral of

Notre-Dame, with a pretty actress as the goddess of Reason. But against

this Robespierre set his face; he was no atheist. “Atheism,” he said,

“is aristocratic. The idea of a Supreme Being who watches over oppressed

innocence and punishes triumphant crime is essentially the idea of the

people.”

So he guillotined Hébert, who had celebrated the Feast of Reason, and

all his party.

A certain mental disorder became perceptible in Robespierre as the

summer of 1794 drew on. He was deeply concerned with his religion. (The

arrests and executions of suspects were going on now as briskly as ever.

Through the streets of Paris every day rumbled the Terror with its carts

full of condemned people.) He induced the Convention to decree that

France believed in a Supreme Being, and in that comforting doctrine, the

immortality of the soul. In June he celebrated a great festival, the

festival of his Supreme Being. There was a procession to the Champ de

Mars, which he headed, brilliantly arrayed, bearing a great bunch of

flowers and wheat ears. Figures of inflammatory material, representing

Atheism and Vice, were solemnly burnt; then, by an ingenious mechanism,

and with some slight creakings, an incombustible statue of Wisdom rose

in their place. There were discourses--Robespierre delivered the chief

one--but apparently no worship....

Thereafter Robespierre displayed a disposition to brood aloof from

affairs. For a month he kept away from the Convention.

One day in July he reappeared and delivered a strange speech that

clearly foreshadowed fresh prosecutions. “Gazing on the multitude of

vices which the torrent of Revolution has rolled down,” he cried, in his

last great speech in the Convention, “I have sometimes trembled lest I

should be soiled by the impure neighbourhood of wicked men.... I know

that it is easy for the leagued tyrants of the world to overwhelm a

single individual; but I know also what is the duty of a man who can die

in the defence of humanity.”...

And so on to vague utterances that seemed to threaten everyone.

The Convention heard this speech in silence; then when a proposal was

made to print and circulate it, broke into a resentful uproar and

refused permission. Robespierre went off in bitter resentment to the

club of his supporters, and _reread his speech to them_!

That night was full of talk and meetings and preparations for the

morrow, and the next morning the Convention turned upon Robespierre. One

Tallien threatened him with a dagger. When he tried to speak, he was

shouted down, and the President jingled the bell at him. “President of

Assassins,” cried Robespierre, “I demand speech!” It was refused him.

His voice deserted him; he coughed and spluttered. “The blood of Danton

chokes him,” cried someone.

He was accused and arrested there and then with his chief supporters.

Whereupon the Hôtel de Ville, still stoutly Jacobin, rose against the

Convention, and Robespierre and his companions were snatched out of the

hands of their captors. There was a night of gathering, marching,

counter-marching; and at last, about three in the morning, the forces of

the Convention faced the forces of the Commune outside the Hôtel de

Ville. Henriot, the Jacobin commander, after a busy day was drunk

upstairs; a parley ensued, and then, after some indecision, the soldiers

of the Commune went over to the Government. There was a shouting of

patriotic sentiments, and someone looked out from the Hôtel de Ville.

Robespierre and his last companions found themselves betrayed and

trapped.

Two or three of these men threw themselves out of a window, and injured

themselves frightfully on the railings below without killing themselves.

Others attempted suicide. Robespierre, it seems, was shot in the lower

jaw by a gendarme. He was found, his eyes staring from a pale face whose

lower part was blood.

Followed seventeen hours of agony before his end. He spoke never a word

during that time; his jaw being bound up roughly in dirty linen. He and

his companions, and the broken, dying bodies of those who had jumped

from the windows, twenty-two men altogether, were taken to the

guillotine instead of the condemned appointed for that day. Mostly, his

eyes were closed, but, says Carlyle, he opened them to see the great

knife rising above him, and struggled. Also it would seem he screamed

when the executioner removed his bandages. Then the knife came down,

swift and merciful.

The Terror was at an end. From first to last there had been condemned

and executed about four thousand people.

§ 12

It witnesses to the immense vitality and the profound rightness of the

flood of new ideals and intentions that the French Revolution had

released into the world of practical endeavour, that it could still flow

in a creative torrent after it had been caricatured and mocked in the

grotesque personality and career of Robespierre. He had shown its

deepest thoughts, he had displayed anticipations of its methods and

conclusions, through the green and distorting lenses of his preposterous

vanity and egotism, he had smeared and blackened all its hope and

promise with blood and horror, and the power of these ideas was not

destroyed. They stood the extreme tests of ridiculous and horrible

presentation. After his downfall, the Republic still ruled unassailable.

Leaderless, for his successors were a group of crafty or commonplace

men, the European republic struggled on, and presently fell and rose

again, and fell and rose and still struggles, entangled but invincible.

And it is well to remind the reader here of the real dimensions of this

phase of the Terror, which strikes so vividly upon the imagination and

which has therefore been enormously exaggerated relatively to the rest

of the revolution. From 1789 to late in 1791 the French Revolution was

an orderly process, and from the summer of 1794 the Republic was an

orderly and victorious state. The Terror was not the work of the whole

country, but of the town mob which owed its existence and its savagery

to the misrule and social injustice of the ancient régime; and the

explosion of the Terror could have happened only through the persistent

treacherous disloyalty of the royalists which, while it raised the

extremists to frenzy, disinclined the mass of moderate republicans from

any intervention. The best men were busy fighting the Austrians and

royalists on the frontier. Altogether, we must remember, the total of

the killed in the Terror amounted to a few thousands, and among those

thousands there were certainly a great number of active antagonists whom

the Republic, by all the standards of that time, was entitled to kill.

It included such traitors and mischief-makers as Philip, Duke of

Orleans, of the Palais Royal, who had voted for the death of Louis XVI.

More lives were wasted by the British generals alone on the opening day

of what is known as the Somme offensive of July, 1916, than in the whole

French revolution from start to finish. We hear so much about the

martyrs of the French Terror because they were notable, well-connected

people, and because there has been a sort of propaganda of their

sufferings. But let us balance against them in our minds what was going

on in the prisons of the world generally at that time. In Britain and

America, while the Terror ruled in France, far more people were

slaughtered for offences--very often quite trivial offences--against

property than were condemned by the Revolutionary Tribunal for treason

against the State. Of course, they were very common people indeed, but

in their rough way they suffered. A girl was hung in Massachusetts in

1789 for forcibly taking the hat, shoes, and buckles of another girl she

had met in the street.[447] Again, Howard the philanthropist (about

1773) found a number of perfectly innocent people detained in the

English prisons who had been tried and acquitted, but were unable to pay

the gaoler’s fees. And these prisons were filthy places under no

effective control. Torture was still in use in the Hanoverian dominions

of his Britannic majesty King George III. It had been in use in France

up to the time of the National Assembly. These things mark the level of

the age. It is not on record that anyone was deliberately tortured by

the French revolutionaries during the Terror. Those few hundreds of

French gentlefolk fell into a pit that most of them had been well

content should exist for others. It was tragic, but not, by the scale of

universal history, a great tragedy. The common man in France was more

free, better off, and happier during the “Terror” than he had been in

1787.

The story of the Republic after the summer of 1794 becomes a tangled

story of political groups aiming at everything from a radical republic

to a royalist reaction, but pervaded by a general desire for some

definite working arrangement even at the price of considerable

concessions. There was a series of insurrections of the Jacobins and of

the royalists, there seems to have been what we should call nowadays a

hooligan class in Paris which was quite ready to turn out to fight and

loot on either side; nevertheless the Convention produced a government,

the Directory of five members, which held France together for five

years. The last, most threatening revolt of all, in October, 1795, was

suppressed with great skill and decision by a rising young general,

Napoleon Bonaparte.

The Directory was victorious abroad, but uncreative at home; its members

were far too anxious to stick to the sweets and glories of office to

prepare a constitution that would supersede them, and far too dishonest

to handle the task of financial and economic reconstruction demanded by

the condition of France. We need only note two of their names, Carnot,

who was an honest republican, and Barras, who was conspicuously a rogue.

Their reign of five years formed a curious interlude in this history of

great changes. They took things as they found them. The propagandist

zeal of the revolution carried the French armies into Holland, Belgium,

Switzerland, south Germany, and north Italy. Everywhere kings were

expelled and republics set up. But such propagandist zeal as animated

the Directorate did not prevent the looting of the treasures of the

liberated peoples to relieve the financial embarrassment of the French

Government. Their wars became less and less the holy war of freedom, and

more and more like the aggressive wars of the ancient régime. The last

feature of Grand Monarchy that France was disposed to discard was her

tradition of foreign policy, grasping, aggressive, restless,

French-centred. One discovers it still as vigorous under the Directorate

as if there had been no revolution.

§ 13

The ebb of this tide of Revolution in the world, this tide which had

created the great Republic of America and threatened to submerge all

European monarchies, was now at hand. It is as if something had thrust

up from beneath the surface of human affairs, made a gigantic effort,

and spent itself. It swept many obsolescent and evil things away, but

many evil and unjust things remained. It solved many problems, and it

left the desire for fellowship and order face to face with much vaster

problems that it seemed only to have revealed. Privilege of certain

types had gone, many tyrannies, much religious persecution. When these

things of the ancient régime had vanished, it seemed as if they had

never mattered. What did matter was that for all their votes and

enfranchisement, and in spite of all their passion and effort, common

men were still not free and not enjoying an equal happiness; that the

immense promise and air of a new world with which the Revolution had

come, remained unfulfilled.

Yet, after all, this wave of revolution had realized nearly everything

that had been clearly thought out before it came. It was not failing now

for want of impetus, but for want of finished ideas. Many things that

had oppressed mankind were swept away for ever. Now that they were swept

away it became apparent how unprepared men were for the creative

opportunities this clearance gave them. And periods of revolution are

periods of action; in them men reap the harvests of ideas that have

grown during phases of interlude, and they leave the fields cleared for

a new season of growth, but they cannot suddenly produce ripened new

ideas to meet an unanticipated riddle.

The sweeping away of king and lord, of priest and inquisitor, of

landlord and tax-gatherer and task-master, left the mass of men face to

face for the first time with certain very fundamental aspects of the

social structure, relationships they had taken for granted, and had

never realized the need of thinking hard and continuously about before.

Institutions that had seemed to be in the nature of things, and matters

that had seemed to happen by the same sort of necessity that brought

round the dawn and springtime, were discovered to be artificial,

controllable, were they not so perplexingly intricate, and--now that the

old routines were abolished and done away with--in urgent need of

control. The New Order found itself confronted with three riddles which

it was quite unprepared to solve: Property, Currency, and International

Relationship.

Let us take these three problems in order, and ask what they are and how

they arose in human affairs. Every human life is deeply entangled in

them, and concerned in their solution. The rest of this history becomes

more and more clearly the development of the effort to solve these

problems; that is to say, so to interpret property, so to establish

currency, and so to control international reactions as to render

possible a world-wide, progressive and happy community of will. They are

the three riddles of the sphinx of fate, to which the human commonweal

must find an answer or perish.

The idea of property arises out of the combative instincts of the

species. Long before men were men, the ancestral ape was a proprietor.

Primitive property is what a beast will fight for. The dog and his bone,

the tigress and her lair, the roaring stag and his herd, these are

proprietorship blazing. No more nonsensical expression is conceivable in

sociology than the term “primitive communism.” The Old Man of the family

tribe of early palæolithic times insisted upon his proprietorship in his

wives and daughters, in his tools, in his visible universe. If any other

man wandered into his visible universe he fought him, and if he could he

slew him. The tribe grew in the course of ages, as Atkinson showed

convincingly in his _Primal Law_, by the gradual toleration by the Old

Man of the existence of the younger men, and of their proprietorship in

the wives they captured from outside the tribe, and in the tools and

ornaments they made and the game they slew. Human society grew by a

compromise between this one’s property and that. It was largely a

compromise and an alliance forced upon men by the necessity of driving

some other tribe out of its visible universe. If the hills and forests

and streams were not _your_ land or _my_ land, it was because they had

to be our land. Each of us would have preferred to have it _my_ land,

but that would not work. In that case the other fellows would have

destroyed us. Society, therefore, is from its beginnings the mitigation

of ownership. Ownership in the beast and in the primitive savage was far

more intense a thing than it is in the civilized world to-day. It is

rooted more strongly in our instincts than in our reason.

In the natural savage and in the untutored man to-day--for it is well to

keep in mind that no man to-day is more than four hundred generations

from the primordial savage--there is no limitation to the sphere of

ownership. Whatever you can fight for, you can own; women-folk, spared

captive, captured beast, forest glade, stone pit, or what not. As the

community grew and a sort of law came to restrain internecine fighting,

men developed rough and ready methods of settling proprietorship. Men

could own what they were the first to make or capture or claim. It

seemed natural that a debtor who could not pay up should become the

property of his creditor. Equally natural was it that, after claiming a

patch of land (“Bags I,” as the schoolboy says), a man should exact

payments and tribute from anyone else who wanted to use it. It was only

slowly, as the possibilities of organized life dawned on men, that this

unlimited property in anything whatever began to be recognized as a

nuisance. Men found themselves born into a universe all owned and

claimed, nay! they found themselves born, owned, and claimed. The social

struggles of the earlier civilization are difficult to trace now, but

the history we have told of the Roman republic shows a community waking

up to the idea that they may become a public inconvenience and should

then be repudiated, and that the unlimited ownership of land is also an

inconvenience. We find that later Babylonia severely limited the rights

of property in slaves. Finally, we find in the teaching of that great

revolutionist, Jesus of Nazareth, such an attack upon property as had

never been before. Easier it was, he said, for a camel to go through the

eye of a needle than for the owner of great possessions to enter the

kingdom of heaven. A steady, continuous criticism of the permissible

scope of property seems to have been going on in the world for the last

twenty-five or thirty centuries. Nineteen hundred years after Jesus of

Nazareth we find all the world that has come under the Christian

teaching persuaded that there could be no property in persons. There has

been a turn over in the common conscience in that matter. And also the

idea that “a man may do what he likes with his own” was clearly very

much shaken in relation to other sorts of property. But this world of

the closing eighteenth century was still only in the interrogative stage

in this matter. It had got nothing clear enough, much less settled

enough, to act upon. One of its primary impulses was to protect property

against the greed and waste of kings and the exploitation of noble

adventurers. It was to protect private property that the Revolution

began. But its equalitarian formulæ carried it into a criticism of the

very property it had risen to protect. How can men be free and equal

when numbers of them have no ground to stand upon and nothing to eat,

and the owners will neither feed nor lodge them unless they toil?

Excessively--the poor complained.

To which riddle the Jacobin reply was to set about “dividing up.” They

wanted to intensify and universalize property. Aiming at the same end

by another route, there were already in the eighteenth century certain

primitive socialists--or, to be more exact, communists--who wanted to

“abolish” private property altogether. The state (a democratic state was

of course understood) was to own all property. It was only as the

nineteenth century developed that men began to realize that property was

not one simple thing, but a great complex of ownerships of different

values and consequences, that many things (such as human beings, the

implements of an artist, clothing, toothbrushes) are very profoundly and

incurably personal property, and that there is a very great range of

things, railways, machinery of various sorts, homes, cultivated gardens,

pleasure-boats, for example, which need each to be considered very

particularly to determine how far and under what limitations it may come

under private ownership, and how far it falls into the public domain and

may be administered and let out by the state in the collective interest.

On the practical side these questions pass into politics, and the

problem of making and sustaining efficient state administration. They

open up issues in social psychology, and interact with the enquiries of

educational science. We have to-day the advantage of a hundred and

thirty years of discussion over the first revolutionary generation, but

even now this criticism of property is still a vast and passionate

ferment rather than a science. Under the circumstances it was impossible

that eighteenth-century France should present any other spectacle than

that of vague and confused popular movements seeking to dispossess

owners, and classes of small and large owners holding on grimly,

demanding, before everything else, law, order, and security, and seeking

to increase their individual share of anything whatever that could be

legally possessed.

Closely connected with the vagueness of men’s ideas about property was

the vagueness of their ideas about currency. Both the American and the

French republics fell into serious trouble upon this score. Here, again,

we deal with something that is not simple, a tangle of usages,

conventions, laws, and prevalent mental habits, out of which arise

problems which admit of no solution in simple terms, and which yet are

of vital importance to the everyday life of the community. The validity

of the acknowledgement a man is given for a day’s work is manifestly of

quite primary importance to the working of the social machine. The

growth of confidence in the precious metals and of coins, until the

assurance became practically universal that good money could be trusted

to have its purchasing power anywhere, must have been a gradual one in

human history. And being fairly established, this assurance was

subjected to very considerable strains and perplexities by the action of

governments in debasing currency and in substituting paper promises to

pay for the actual metallic coins. Every age produced a number of clever

people intelligent enough to realize the opportunities for smart

operations afforded by the complex of faiths and fictions upon which the

money system rested, and sufficiently unsound morally to give their best

energies to growing rich and so getting people to work for them, through

tricks and tampering with gold, coinage, and credit. So soon as serious

political and social dislocation occurred, the money mechanism began to

work stiffly and inaccurately. The United States and the French Republic

both started their careers in a phase of financial difficulty.

Everywhere governments had been borrowing and issuing paper promises to

pay interest, more interest than they could conveniently raise. Both

revolutions led to much desperate public spending and borrowing, and at

the same time to an interruption of cultivation and production that

further diminished real taxable wealth. Both governments, being unable

to pay their way in gold, resorted to the issue of paper money,

promising to pay upon the security of undeveloped land (in America) or

recently confiscated church lands (France). In both cases the amount of

issue went far beyond the confidence of men in the new security. Gold

was called in, hidden by the cunning ones, or went abroad to pay for

imports; and people found themselves with various sorts of bills and

notes in the place of coins, all of uncertain and diminishing value.

However complicated the origins of currency, its practical effect and

the end it has to serve in the community may be stated roughly in simple

terms. The money a man receives for his work (mental or bodily) or for

relinquishing his property in some consumable good, must ultimately be

able to purchase for him for his use a fairly equivalent amount of

consumable goods. (“Consumable goods” is a phrase we would have

understood in the widest sense to represent even such things as a

journey, a lecture or theatrical entertainment, housing, medical advice,

and so forth.) When everyone in a community is assured of this, and

assured that the money will not deteriorate in purchasing power, then

currency--and the distribution of goods by trade--is in a healthy and

satisfactory state. Then men will work cheerfully, and only then. The

imperative need for that steadfastness and security of currency is the

fixed datum from which the scientific study and control of currency must

begin. But under the most stable conditions there will always be

fluctuations in currency value. The sum total of saleable consumable

goods in the world and in various countries varies from year to year and

from season to season; autumn is probably a time of plenty in comparison

with spring; with an increase the purchasing power of currency will

increase, unless there is also an increase in the amount of currency. On

the other hand, if there is a diminution in the production of consumable

goods or a great and unprofitable destruction of consumable goods, such

as occurs in a war, the share of the total of consumable goods

represented by a sum of money will diminish and prices and wages will

rise. In modern war the explosion of a single big shell, even if it hits

nothing, destroys labour and material roughly equivalent to a

comfortable cottage or a year’s holiday for a man. If the shell hits

anything, then that further destruction has to be added to the

diminution of consumable goods. Every shell that burst in the recent war

diminished by a little fraction the purchasing value of every coin in

the whole world. If there is also an increase of currency during a

period when consumable goods are being used up and not fully

replaced--and the necessities of revolutionary and war-making

governments almost always require this--then the enhancement of prices

and the fall in the value of the currency paid in wages is still

greater. Usually also governments under these stresses borrow money,

that is to say, they issue interest-bearing paper, secured on the

willingness and ability of the general community to endure taxation.

Such operations would be difficult enough if they were carried out

frankly by perfectly honest men, in the full light of publicity and

scientific knowledge. But hitherto this has never been the case; at

every point the clever egotist, the bad rich man, is trying to deflect

things a little to his own advantage. Everywhere too one finds the

stupid egotist ready to take fright and break into panic. Consequently

we presently discover the state encumbered by an excess of currency,

which is in effect a non-interest-paying debt, and also with a great

burthen of interest upon loans. Both credit and currency begin to

fluctuate wildly with the evaporation of public confidence. They are, we

say, demoralized.

The ultimate consequence of an entirely demoralized currency would be to

end all work and all trade that could not be carried on by payment in

kind and barter. Men would refuse to work except for food, clothing,

housing, and payment in kind. The immediate consequence of a partially

demoralized currency is to drive up prices and make trading feverishly

adventurous and workers suspicious and irritable. A sharp man wants

under such conditions to hold money for as brief a period as possible;

he demands the utmost for his reality, and buys a reality again as soon

as possible in order to get this perishable stuff, the currency paper,

off his hands. All who have fixed incomes and saved accumulations suffer

by the rise in prices, and the wage-earners find, with a gathering fury,

that the real value of their wages is continually less. Here is a state

of affairs where the duty of every clever person is evidently to help

adjust and reassure. But all the traditions of private enterprise, all

the ideas of the later eighteenth century, went to justify the action of

acute-minded and dexterous people who set themselves to accumulate

claims, titles, and tangible property in the storms and dislocations of

this currency breakdown. The number of understanding people in the world

who were setting themselves sincerely and simply to restore honest and

workable currency and credit conditions were few and ineffectual. Most

of the financial and speculative people of the time were playing the

part of Cornish wreckers--not apparently with any conscious dishonesty,

but with the completest self-approval and the applause of their fellow

men. The aim of every clever person was to accumulate as much as he

could of really negotiable wealth, and then, and only then, to bring

about some sort of stabilizing political process that would leave him in

advantageous possession of his accumulation. Here were the factors of a

bad economic atmosphere, suspicious, feverish, greedy, and

speculative....

In the third direction in which the Revolution had been unprepared with

clear ideas, the problem of international relationships, developments

were to occur that interacted disastrously with this state of financial

and economic adventure, this scramble and confusion, this pre-occupation

of men’s minds with the perplexing slipperiness of their private

property and their monetary position at home. The Republic at its birth

found itself at war. For a time that war was waged by the new levies

with a patriotism and a zeal unparalleled in the world’s history. But

that could not go on. The Directory found itself at the head of a

conquering country, intolerably needy and embarrassed at home, and in

occupation of rich foreign lands, full of seizable wealth and material

and financial opportunity. We have all double natures, and the French in

particular seem to be developed logically and symmetrically on both

sides. Into these conquered regions France came as a liberator, the

teacher of Republicanism to mankind. Holland and Belgium became the

Batavian Republic, Genoa and its Riviera the Ligurian Republic, north

Italy the Cisalpine Republic, Switzerland was rechristened the Helvetian

Republic, Mülhausen, Rome, and Naples were designated republics. Grouped

about France, these republics were to be a constellation of freedom

leading the world. That was the ideal side. At the same time the French

government, and French private individuals in concert with the

government, proceeded to a complete and exhaustive exploitation of the

resources of these liberated lands.

So within ten years of the meeting of the States General, New France

begins to take on a singular likeness to the old. It is more flushed,

more vigorous; it wears a cap of liberty instead of a crown; it has a

new army--but a damaged fleet; it has new rich people instead of the old

rich people, a new peasantry working even harder than the old and

yielding more taxes, a new foreign policy curiously like the old foreign

policy disrobed, and--there is no Millennium.

XXXVIII

THE CAREER OF NAPOLEON BONAPARTE[448]

§ 1. _The Bonaparte Family in Corsica._ § 2. _Bonaparte as a

Republican General._ § 3. _Napoleon First Consul, 1799-1804._ § 4.

_Napoleon I, Emperor, 1804-14._ § 5. _The Hundred Days._ § 6. _The

Cult of the Napoleonic._ § 7. _The Map of Europe in 1815._

§ 1

And now we come to one of the most illuminating figures in modern

history, the figure of an adventurer and a wrecker, whose story seems to

display with an extraordinary vividness the universal subtle conflict of

egotism, vanity, and personality with the weaker, wider claims of the

common good. Against this background of confusion and stress and hope,

this strained and heaving France and Europe, this stormy and tremendous

dawn, appears this dark little archaic personage, hard, compact,

capable, unscrupulous, imitative, and neatly vulgar. He was born (1769)

in the still half-barbaric island of Corsica, the son of a rather

prosaic father, a lawyer who had been first a patriotic Corsican against

the French monarchy which was trying to subjugate Corsica, and who had

then gone over to the side of the invader. His mother was of sturdier

stuff, passionately patriotic and a strong and managing woman. (She

birched her sons; on one occasion she birched Napoleon when he was

sixteen.) There were numerous brothers and sisters, and the family

pursued the French authorities with importunities for rewards and jobs.

Except for Napoleon it seems to have been a thoroughly commonplace,

“hungry” family. He was clever, bad-tempered, and overbearing. From his

mother he had acquired a romantic Corsican patriotism.

Through the patronage of the French governor of Corsica he got an

education first at the military school of Brienne and then at the

military school of Paris, from which he passed into the artillery in

1785. He was an industrious student both of mathematics and history, his

memory was prodigiously good, and he made copious note-books which still

exist. These note-books show no very exceptional intelligence, and they

contain short pieces of original composition--upon suicide and similar

adolescent topics. He fell early under the spell of Rousseau; he

developed sensibility and a scorn for the corruptions of civilization.

In 1786 he wrote a pamphlet against a Swiss pastor who had attacked

Rousseau. It was a very ordinary adolescent production, rhetorical and

imitative. He dreamt of an independent Corsica, freed from the French.

With the revolution, he became an ardent republican and a supporter of

the new French régime in Corsica. For some years, until the fall of

Robespierre, he remained a Jacobin.

§ 2

He soon gained the reputation of a useful and capable officer, and it

was through Robespierre’s younger brother that he got his first chance

of distinction at Toulon. Toulon had been handed over to the British and

Spanish by the Royalists, and an allied fleet occupied its harbour.

Bonaparte was given the command of the artillery, and under his

direction the French forced the allies to abandon the port and town.

He was next appointed commander of the artillery in Italy, but he had

not taken up his duties when the death of Robespierre seemed likely to

involve his own; he was put under arrest as a Jacobin, and for a time he

was in danger of the guillotine. That danger passed. He was employed as

artillery commander in an abortive raid upon Corsica, and then went to

Paris (1795) rather down at heel. Madame Junot in her Memoirs describes

his lean face and slovenly appearance at this time, “his ill-combed,

ill-powdered hair hanging down over his grey overcoat,” his gloveless

hands and badly blacked boots. It was a time of exhaustion and reaction

after the severities of the Jacobite republic. “In Paris,” says Holland

Rose, “the star of Liberty was paling before Mercury, Mars, and

Venus”--finance, uniforms, and social charm. The best of the common men

were in the armies, away beyond the frontiers. We have already noted the

last rising of the royalists in this year (1795). Napoleon had the luck

to be in Paris, and found his second opportunity in this affair. He

saved the Republic--of the Directory.

His abilities greatly impressed Carnot, the most upright of the

Directors. Moreover, he married a charming young widow, Madame Josephine

de Beauharnais, who had great influence with Barras. Both these things

probably helped him to secure the command in Italy.

We have no space here for the story of his brilliant campaigns in Italy

(1796-7), but of the spirit in which that invasion of Italy was

conducted we must say a word or two, because it illustrates so vividly

the double soul of France and of Napoleon, and how revolutionary

idealism was paling before practical urgencies. He proclaimed to the

Italians that the French were coming to break their chains--_and they

were_! He wrote to the Directory: “We will levy 20,000,000 francs in

exactions in this country; it is one of the richest in the world.” To

his soldiers he said, “You are famished and nearly naked.... I lead you

into the most fertile plain in the world. There you will find great

towns, rich provinces, honour, glory, riches....”

We are all such mixed stuff as this; in all of us the intimations of a

new world and a finer duty struggle to veil and control the ancient

greeds and lusts of our inherited past; but these passages, written by a

young man of twenty-seven, seem to show the gilt of honourable idealism

rubbed off at an unusually early age. These are the bribes of an

adventurer who has brought whatever impulse of devotion to a great cause

once stirred within him, well under the control of his self love.

His successes in Italy were brilliant and complete; they enormously

stimulated his self-confidence and his contempt for the energy and

ability of his fellow creatures. He had wanted to go into Italy because

there lay the most attractive task--he had risked his position in the

army by refusing to take up the irksome duties of a command against the

rebels in La Vendée--and there are clear signs of a vast expansion of

his vanity with his victories. He had been a great reader of Plutarch’s

Lives and of Roman history, and his extremely active but totally

uncreative imagination was now busy with dreams of a revival of the

eastern conquests of the Roman Empire. He got the republic of Venice out

of his way by cutting it up between the French and Austria, securing the

Ionian Islands and the Venetian fleet for France. This peace, the peace

of Campo Formio, was for both sides a thoroughly scoundrelly and

ultimately a disastrous bargain. The new republic of France assisted in

the murder of an ancient republic--Napoleon carried his point against a

considerable outcry in France--and Austria got Venetia, in which land in

1918 she was destined to bleed to death. There were also secret clauses

by which both France and Austria were later to acquire south German

territory. And it was not only the Roman push eastward that was now

exciting Napoleon’s brain. This was the land of Cæsar--and Cæsar was a

bad example for the successful general of a not very stable republic.

Cæsar had come back to Rome from Gaul a hero and conqueror. His new

imitator would come back from Egypt and India--Egypt and India were to

be his Gaul. There was really none of the genius about which historians

write so glibly in this decision. It was a tawdry and ill-conceived

imitation. The elements of failure stared him in the face. The way to

Egypt and India was by sea, and the British, in spite of two recent

naval mutinies, whose importance Napoleon exaggerated, were stronger

than the French at sea. Moreover, Egypt was a part of the Turkish

empire, by no means a contemptible power in those days. Nevertheless he

persuaded the Directory, which was dazzled by his Italian exploits, to

let him go. An Armada started from Toulon in May, 1798, captured Malta,

and had the good luck to evade the British fleet and arrive at

Alexandria. He landed his troops hurriedly, and the battle of the

Pyramids made him master of Egypt.

[Illustration: Map to illustrate Napoleon’s EGYPTIAN CAMPAIGN]

The main British fleet at that time was in the Atlantic outside Cadiz,

but the admiral had detached a force of his best ships, under

Vice-Admiral Nelson--a man certainly as great a genius in naval affairs

as was Napoleon in things military--to chase and engage the French

flotilla.[449] For a time Nelson sought the French fleet in vain;

finally, on the evening of the first of August, he found it at anchor in

Aboukir Bay. He had caught it unawares; many of the men were ashore and

a council was being held in the flagship. He had no charts, and it was a

hazardous thing to sail into the shallow water in a bad light. The

French admiral concluded, therefore, that he would not attack before

morning, and so made no haste in recalling his men aboard until it was

too late to do so. Nelson struck at once--against the advice of some of

his captains. One ship only went aground. She marked the shoal for the

rest of the fleet. He sailed to the attack in a double line about

sundown, putting the French between two fires. Night fell as the battle

was joined; the fight thundered and crashed in the darkness, until it

was lit presently by the flames of burning French ships, and then by the

flare of the French flag-ship, the Orient, blowing up.... Before

midnight the battle of the Nile was over, and Napoleon’s fleet was

destroyed. Napoleon was cut off from France.

Says Holland Rose, quoting Thiers, this Egyptian expedition was “the

rashest attempt history records.” Napoleon was left in Egypt with the

Turks gathering against him and his army infected with the plague.

Nevertheless, with a stupid sort of persistence, he went on for a time

with this Eastern scheme. He gained a victory at Jaffa, and, being short

of provisions, _massacred all his prisoners_. Then he tried to take

Acre, where his own siege artillery, just captured at sea by the

English, was used against him. Returning baffled to Egypt, he gained a

brilliant victory over a Turkish force at Aboukir, and then, deserting

the army of Egypt--it held on until 1801, when it capitulated to a

British force--made his escape back to France (1799), narrowly missing

capture by a British cruiser off Sicily.

Here was muddle and failure enough to discredit any general--had it been

known. But the very British cruisers which came so near to catching him,

helped him by preventing any real understanding of the Egyptian

situation from reaching the French people. He could make a great

flourish over the battle of Aboukir and conceal the shame and loss of

Acre. Things were not going well with France just then. There had been

military failures at several points; much of Italy had been lost,

Bonaparte’s Italy, and this turned men’s minds to him as the natural

saviour of that situation; moreover, there had been much peculation, and

some of it was coming to light; France was in one of her phases of

financial scandal, and Napoleon had not filched; the public was in that

state of moral fatigue when a strong and honest man is called for, a

wonderful, impossible healing man who will do everything for everybody.

People, poor lazy souls, persuaded themselves that this specious young

man with the hard face, so providentially back from Egypt, was the

strong and honest man required--another Washington.

With Julius Cæsar rather than Washington at the back of his mind,

Napoleon responded to the demand of his time. A conspiracy was carefully

engineered to replace the Directory by three “Consuls”--everybody seems

to have been reading far too much Roman history just then--of whom

Napoleon was to be the chief. The working of that conspiracy is too

intricate a story for our space; it involved a Cromwell-like dispersal

of the Lower House (the Council of Five Hundred), and in this affair

Napoleon lost his nerve. The deputies shouted at him and hustled him,

and he seems to have been very much frightened. He nearly fainted,

stuttered, and could say nothing, but the situation was saved by his

brother Lucien, who brought in the soldiers and dispersed the council.

This little hitch did not affect the final success of the scheme. The

three Consuls were installed at the Luxembourg palace, with two

commissioners, to reconstruct the constitution.

With all his confidence restored and sure of the support of the people,

who supposed him to be honest, patriotic, republican, and able to bring

about a good peace, Napoleon took a high hand with his colleagues and

the commissioners. A constitution was produced in which the chief

executive officer was to be called the First Consul, with enormous

powers. He was to be Napoleon; this was part of the constitution. He was

to be re-elected or replaced at the end of ten years. He was to be

assisted by a Council of State, appointed by himself, which was to

initiate legislation and send its proposals to two bodies, the

Legislative Body (which could vote, but not discuss) and the Tribunate

(which could discuss, but not vote), which were _selected_ by an

appointed Senate from a special class, the “notabilities of France,” who

were elected by the “notabilities of the departments,” who were elected

by the “notabilities of the commune,” who were elected by the common

voters. The suffrage for the election of the notabilities of the commune

was universal. This was the sole vestige of democracy in the astounding

pyramid. This constitution was chiefly the joint production of a worthy

philosopher Sieyès, who was one of the three consuls, and Bonaparte. But

so weary was France with her troubles and efforts, and so confident were

men in the virtue and ability of this adventurer from Corsica, that

when, at the birth of the nineteenth century, this constitution was

submitted to the country, it was carried by 3,011,007 votes to 1,562.

France put herself absolutely in Bonaparte’s hands, and prepared to be

peaceful, happy, and glorious.

§ 3

Now surely here was opportunity such as never came to man before. Here

was a position in which a man might well bow himself in fear of himself,

and search his heart and serve God and man to the utmost. The old order

of things was dead or dying; strange new forces drove through the world

seeking form and direction; the promise of a world republic and an

enduring world peace whispered in a multitude of startled minds. Had

this man any profundity of vision, any power of creative imagination,

had he been accessible to any disinterested ambition, he might have done

work for mankind that would have made him the very sun of history. All

Europe and America, stirred by the first promise of a new age, was

waiting for him. Not France alone. France was in his hand, his

instrument, to do with as he pleased, willing for peace, but tempered

for war like an exquisite sword. There lacked nothing to this great

occasion but a noble imagination. And failing that, Napoleon could do no

more than strut upon the crest of this great mountain of opportunity

like a cockerel on a dunghill. The figure he makes in history is one of

almost incredible self-conceit, of vanity, greed, and cunning, of

callous contempt and disregard of all who trusted him, and of a

grandiose aping of Cæsar, Alexander, and Charlemagne which would be

purely comic if it were not caked over with human blood. Until, as

Victor Hugo said in his tremendous way, “God was bored by him,” and he

was kicked aside into a corner to end his days, explaining and

explaining how very clever his worst blunders had been, prowling about

his dismal hot island shooting birds and squabbling meanly with an

underbred gaoler who failed to show him proper “respect.”

His career as First Consul was perhaps the least dishonourable phase in

his career. He took the crumbling military affairs of the Directory in

hand, and after a complicated campaign in North Italy brought matters to

a head in the victory of Marengo, near Alessandria (1800). It was a

victory that at some moments came very near disaster. In the December of

the same year General Moreau, in the midst of snow, mud, and altogether

abominable weather, inflicted an overwhelming defeat upon the Austrian

army at Hohenlinden. If Napoleon had gained this battle, it would have

counted among his most characteristic and brilliant exploits. These

things made the hoped-for peace possible. In 1801 the preliminaries of

peace with England and Austria were signed. Peace with England, the

Treaty of Amiens, was concluded in 1802, and Napoleon was free to give

himself to the creative statecraft of which France, and Europe through

France, stood in need. The war had given the country extended

boundaries, the treaty with England restored the colonial empire of

France and left her in a position of security beyond the utmost dreams

of Louis XIV. It was open to Napoleon to work out and consolidate the

new order of things, to make a modern state that should become a beacon

and inspiration to Europe and all the world.

He attempted nothing of the sort. He did not realize that there were

such things as modern states in the scheme of possibility. His little

imitative imagination was full of a deep cunning dream of being Cæsar

over again--as if this universe would ever tolerate anything of that

sort over again! He was scheming to make himself a real emperor, with a

crown upon his head and all his rivals and school-fellows and friends at

his feet. This could give him no fresh power that he did not already

exercise, but it would be more splendid--it would astonish his mother.

What response was there in a head of that sort for the splendid creative

challenge of the time? But first France must be prosperous. France

hungry would certainly not endure an emperor. He set himself to carry

out an old scheme of roads that Louis XV had approved; he developed

canals in imitation of the English canals; he reorganized the police and

made the country safe; and, preparing the scene for his personal drama,

he set himself to make Paris look like Rome, with classical arches, with

classical columns. Admirable schemes for banking development were

available, and he made use of them. In all these things he moved with

the times, they would have happened--with less autocracy, with less

centralization, if he had never been born. And he set himself to weaken

the republicans whose fundamental convictions he was planning to

outrage. He recalled the émigrés, provided they gave satisfactory

assurances to respect the new régime. Many were very willing to come

back on such terms, and let Bourbons be bygones. And he worked out a

great reconciliation, a Concordat, with Rome. Rome was to support him,

and he was to restore the authority of Rome in the parishes. France

would never be obedient and manageable, he thought; she would never

stand a new monarchy, without religion. “How can you have order in a

state,” he said, “without religion? Society cannot exist without

inequality of fortunes, which cannot endure apart from religion. When

one man is dying of hunger near another who is ill of surfeit, he cannot

resign himself to this difference, unless there is an authority which

declares--‘God wills it thus: there must be poor and rich in the world:

but hereafter and during all eternity the division of things will take

place differently.’” Religion--especially of the later Roman brand--was,

in fact, excellent stuff for keeping the common people quiet. In his

early honest Jacobin days he had denounced it for that very reason.

Another great achievement which marks his imaginative scope and his

estimate of human nature was the institution of the Legion of Honour, a

scheme for decorating Frenchmen with bits of ribbon which was admirably

calculated to divert ambitious men from subversive proceedings.

(Washington, when he became President of the United States, abolished

the only order that has ever adorned any citizen of the American

republic, the Order of Cincinnatus, because he had no use for the snob

in his fellow man.)

And also Napoleon interested himself in Christian propaganda. Here is

the Napoleonic view of the political uses of Christ, a view that has

tainted all French missions from that time forth. “It is my wish to

re-establish the institution for foreign missions; for the religious

missionaries may be very useful to me in Asia, Africa, and America, as I

shall make them reconnoitre all the lands they visit. The sanctity of

their dress will not only protect them, but serve to conceal their

political and commercial investigations. The head of the missionary

establishment shall reside no longer at Rome, but in Paris.”

These are the ideas of a roguish merchant rather than a statesman. His

treatment of education shows the same narrow vision, the same blindness

to the realities of the dawn about him. Elementary education he

neglected almost completely; he left it to the conscience of the local

authorities, and he provided that the teachers should be paid out of the

fees of the scholars; it is clear he did not want the common people to

be educated; he had no glimmering of any understanding why they should

be; but he interested himself in the provision of technical and higher

schools because his state needed the services of clever, self-seeking,

well-informed men. This was an astounding retrogression from the great

scheme, drafted by Condorcet, for the Republic in 1792, for a complete

system of free education for the entire nation. Slowly but steadfastly

the project of Condorcet comes true; the great nations of the world are

being compelled to bring it nearer and nearer to realization, and the

cheap devices of Napoleon pass out of our interest. As for the education

of the mothers and wives of our race, this was the quality of Napoleon’s

wisdom: “I do not think that we need trouble ourselves with any plan of

instruction for young females, they cannot be better brought up than by

their mothers. Public education is not suitable for them, because they

are never called upon to act in public. Manners are all in all to them,

and marriage is all they look to.”

The First Consul was no kinder to women in the Code Napoleon. A wife,

for example, had no control over her own property; she was in her

husband’s hands. This code was the work very largely of the Council of

State. Napoleon seems rather to have hindered than helped its

deliberations. He would invade the session without notice, and favour

its members with lengthy and egotistical monologues, frequently quite

irrelevant to the matter in hand. The Council listened with profound

respect; it was all the Council could do. He would keep his councillors

up to unearthly hours, and betray a simple pride in his superior

wakefulness. He recalled these discussions with peculiar satisfaction in

his later years, and remarked on one occasion that his glory consisted

not in having won forty battles, but in having created the Code

Napoleon.... So far as it substituted plain statements for inaccessible

legal mysteries his Code was a good thing; it gathered together, revised

and made clear a vast disorderly accumulation of laws, old and new. Like

all his constructive work, it made for immediate efficiency, it defined

things and relations so that men could get to work upon them without

further discussion. It was of less immediate practical importance that

it frequently defined them wrongly. There was no intellectual power, as

distinguished from intellectual energy, behind this codification. It

took everything that existed for granted. (“Sa Majesté ne croit que ce

qui est.”[450]) The fundamental ideas of the civilized community and of

the terms of human co-operation were in a process of reconstruction all

about Napoleon--and he never perceived it. He accepted a phase of

change, and tried to fix it for ever. To this day France is cramped by

this early nineteenth-century strait-waistcoat into which he clapped

her. He fixed the status of women, the status of labourers, the status

of the peasant; they all struggle to this day in the net of his hard

definitions.

So briskly and forcibly Napoleon set his mind, hard, clear, narrow, and

base, to brace up France. That bracing up was only a part of the large

egotistical schemes that dominated him. His imagination was set upon a

new Cæsarism. In 1802 he got himself made First Consul for life with the

power of appointing a successor, and his clear intention of annexing

Holland and Italy, in spite of his treaty obligations to keep them

separate, made the Peace of Amiens totter crazily from the very

beginning. Since his schemes were bound to provoke a war with England,

he should, at any cost, have kept quiet until he had brought his navy to

a superiority over the British navy. He had the control of great

resources for ship-building, the British government was a weak one, and

three or four years would have sufficed to shift that balance. But in

spite of his rough experiences in Egypt, he had never mastered the

importance of sea power, and he had not the mental steadfastness for a

waiting game and long preparation. In 1803 his occupation of Switzerland

precipitated a crisis,[451] and war broke out again with England. The

weak Addington in England gave place to the greater Pitt. The rest of

Napoleon’s story turns upon that war.

During the period of the Consulate, the First Consul was very active in

advancing the fortunes of his brothers and sisters. This was quite

human, very clannish and Corsican, and it helps us to understand just

how he valued his position and the opportunities before him. Few of us

can live without an audience, and the first audience of our childhood is

our family; most of us to the end of our days are swayed by the desire

to impress our parents and brothers and sisters. Few “letters home” of

successful men or women display the graces of modesty and

self-forgetfulness. Only souls uplifted, as the soul of Jesus of

Nazareth was uplifted, can say of all the world, “Behold my mother and

my brethren!” A large factor in the making of Napoleon was the desire to

amaze, astonish, and subdue the minds of the Bonaparte family, and their

neighbours. He promoted his brothers ridiculously--for they were the

most ordinary of men. The hungry Bonapartes were in luck. Surely all

Corsica was open-mouthed! But one person who knew him well was neither

amazed nor subdued. This was his mother. He sent her money to spend and

astonish the neighbours; he exhorted her to make a display, to live as

became the mother of so marvellous, so world-shaking, a son. But the

good lady, who had birched the Man of Destiny at the age of sixteen for

grimacing at his grandmother, was neither dazzled nor deceived by him at

the age of thirty-two. All France might worship him, but she had no

illusions. She put by the money he sent her; she continued her customary

economies. “When it is all over,” she said, “you will be glad of my

savings.”

[Illustration: Napoleon as Emperor]

§ 4

We will not detail the steps by which Napoleon became Emperor. His

coronation was the most extraordinary revival of stale history that it

is possible to imagine. Cæsar was no longer the model; Napoleon was

playing now at being Charlemagne. He was crowned emperor, not indeed at

Rome, but in the cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris; the Pope (Pius VII)

had been brought from Rome to perform the ceremony; and at the climax

Napoleon I seized the crown, waved the Pope aside, and crowned himself.

The attentive reader of this _Outline_ will know that a thousand years

before this would have had considerable significance; in 1804 it was

just a ridiculous scene. In 1806 Napoleon revived another venerable

antiquity, and, following still the footsteps of Charlemagne, crowned

himself with the iron crown of Lombardy in the cathedral of Milan. All

this mummery was to have a wonderful effect upon the imagination of

western Germany, which was to remember that it too had been a part of

the empire of Charlemagne.

The four daughter republics of France were now to become kingdoms; in

1806 he set up brother Louis in Holland and brother Joseph in Naples.

But the story of the subordinate kingdoms he created in Europe, helpful

though this free handling of frontiers was towards the subsequent

unification of Italy and Germany, is too complex and evanescent for this

_Outline_.

The pact between the new Charlemagne and the new Leo did not hold good

for very long. In 1807 he began to bully the Pope, and in 1811 he made

him a close prisoner at Fontainebleau. There does not seem to have been

much reason in these proceedings. They estranged all Catholic opinion,

as his coronation had estranged all liberal opinion. He ceased to stand

either for the old or the new. The new he had betrayed; the old he had

failed to win. He stood at last for nothing but himself.

There seems to have been as little reason in the foreign policy that now

plunged Europe into a fresh cycle of wars. Having quarreled with Great

Britain too soon, he (1804) assembled a vast army at Boulogne for the

conquest of England, regardless of the naval situation. He even struck a

medal and erected a column at Boulogne to commemorate the triumph of

this projected invasion. In some “Napoleonic” fashion the British fleet

was to be decoyed away, this army of Boulogne was to be smuggled across

the Channel on a flotilla of rafts and boats, and London was to be

captured before the fleet returned. At the same time his aggressions in

south Germany forced Austria and Russia steadily into a coalition with

Britain against him. In 1805 two fatal blows were struck at any hope he

may have entertained of ultimate victory, by the British Admirals Calder

and Nelson. In July the former inflicted a serious reverse upon the

French fleet in the Bay of Biscay; in October the latter destroyed the

joint fleets of France and Spain at the battle of Trafalgar. Nelson

died splendidly upon the _Victory_, victorious. Thereafter Napoleon was

left with Britain in pitiless opposition, unattainable and

unconquerable, able to strike here or there against him along all the

coasts of Europe.

But for a while the mortal wound of Trafalgar was hidden from the French

mind altogether. They heard merely that “storms have caused us to lose

some ships of the line after an imprudent fight.” After Calder’s victory

he had snatched his army from Boulogne, rushed it across half Europe,

and defeated the Austrian and Russian armies at Ulm and Austerlitz.

Under these inauspicious circumstances Prussia came into the war against

him, and was utterly defeated and broken at the battle of Jena (1806).

Although Austria and Prussia were broken, Russia was still a fighting

power, and the next year was devoted to this unnecessary antagonist of

the French, against whom an abler and saner ruler would never have

fought at all. We cannot trace in any detail the difficulties of the

Polish campaign against Russia; Napoleon was roughly handled at

Pultusk--which he announced in Paris as a brilliant victory--and again

at Eylau. Then the Russians were defeated at Friedland (1807). As yet he

had never touched Russian soil, the Russians were still as unbeaten as

the British; but now came an extraordinary piece of good fortune for

Napoleon. By a mixture of boasting, subtlety, and flattery he won over

the young and ambitious Tsar, Alexander I--he was just thirty years

old--to an alliance. The two emperors met on a raft in the middle of the

Niemen at Tilsit, and there came to an understanding.

[Illustration: Tsar Alexander I.]

This meeting was an occasion for sublime foolishness on the part of both

the principal actors. Alexander had imbibed much liberalism during his

education at the court of Catherine II, and was all for freedom,

education, and the new order of the world--subject to his own

pre-eminence. “He would gladly have everyone free,” said one of his

early associates, “provided that everyone was prepared to do freely

exactly what he wished.” And he declared that he would have abolished

serfdom if it had cost him his head--if only civilization had been more

advanced. He made war against France, he said, because Napoleon was a

tyrant, to free the French people. After Friedland he saw Napoleon in a

different light. These two men met eleven days after that rout;

Alexander no doubt in the state of explanatory exaltation natural to his

type during a mood of change.

To Napoleon the meeting must have been extremely gratifying. This was

his first meeting with an emperor upon terms of equality. Like all men

of limited vision, this man was a snob to the bone, his continual

solicitude for his titles shows as much, and here was a real emperor, a

born emperor, taking his three-year-old dignities as equivalent to the

authentic imperialism of Moscow. Two imaginations soared together upon

the raft at Tilsit. “What is Europe?” said Alexander. “_We_ are Europe.”

They discussed the affairs of Prussia and Austria in that spirit, they

divided Turkey in anticipation, they arranged for the conquest of India,

and indeed of most of Asia, and that Russia should take Finland from the

Swedes; and they disregarded the disagreeable fact that the greater part

of the world’s surface is sea, and that on the seas the British fleets

sailed now unchallenged. Close at hand was Poland, ready to rise up and

become the passionate ally of France had Napoleon but willed it so. But

he was blind to Poland. It was a day of visions without vision. Napoleon

even then, it seems, concealed the daring thought that he might one day

marry a Russian princess, a real princess. But that, he was to learn in

1810, was going a little too far.

After Tilsit there was a perceptible deterioration in Napoleon’s

quality; he became rasher, less patient of obstacles, more and more the

fated master of the world, more and more intolerable to everyone he

encountered.

In 1808 he committed a very serious blunder. Spain was his abject ally,

completely under his control, but he saw fit to depose its Bourbon king

in order to promote his brother Joseph from the crown of the two

Sicilies. Portugal he had already conquered, and the two kingdoms of

Spain and Portugal were to be united. Thereupon the Spanish arose in a

state of patriotic fury, surrounded a French army at Baylen, and

compelled it to surrender. It was an astonishing break in the French

career of victory.

The British were not slow to seize the foothold this insurrection gave

them. A British army under Sir Arthur Wellesley (afterwards the Duke of

Wellington) landed in Portugal, defeated the French at Vimiero, and

compelled them to retire into Spain. The news of these reverses caused a

very great excitement in Germany and Austria, and the Tsar assumed a

more arrogant attitude towards his ally.

There was another meeting of these two potentates at Erfurt, in which

the Tsar was manifestly less amenable to the dazzling tactics of

Napoleon than he had been. Followed four years of unstable “ascendancy”

for France, while the outlines on the map of Europe waved about like

garments on a clothesline on a windy day. Napoleon’s personal empire

grew by frank annexations to include Holland, much of western Germany,

much of Italy, and much of the eastern Adriatic coast. But one by one

the French colonies were falling to the British, and the British armies

in the Spanish peninsula, with the Spanish auxiliaries, slowly pressed

the French northward. All Europe was getting very weary of Napoleon and

very indignant with him; his antagonists now were no longer merely

monarchs and ministers, but whole peoples also. The Prussians, after the

disaster of Jena in 1807, had set to work to put their house in order.

Under the leadership of Freiherr von Stein they had swept aside their

feudalism, abolished privilege and serfdom, organized popular education

and popular patriotism, accomplished, in fact, without any internal

struggle nearly everything that France had achieved in 1789. By 1810 a

new Prussia existed, the nucleus of a new Germany. And now Alexander,

inspired it would seem by dreams of world ascendancy even crazier than

his rival’s, was posing again as the friend of liberty. In 1810 fresh

friction was created by Alexander’s objection to Napoleon’s matrimonial

ambitions. For he was now divorcing his old helper Josephine, because

she was childless, in order to secure the “continuity” of his

“dynasty.” Napoleon, thwarted of a Russian princess, snubbed indeed by

Alexander, turned to Austria, and married the arch-duchess Marie Louise.

The Austrian statesmen read him aright. They were very ready to throw

him their princess. By that marriage Napoleon was captured for the

dynastic system; he might have been the maker of a new world, he

preferred to be the son-in-law of the old.

[Illustration: The EMPIRE of NAPOLEON about 1810]