Hardly had a catastrophe snatched her away in the zenith of her power

when complete corruption and the flagrant triumph of egoism supervened

with the accession to power of the marquise de Pompadour, and for nearly

twenty years (1745-1764) the whims and caprices of this little

_bourgeoise_ ruled the realm. A prime minister in petticoats, she had

her political system: reversed the time-honoured alliances of France,

appointed or disgraced ministers, directed fleets and armies, concluded

treaties, and failed in all her enterprises! She was the queen of

fashion in a society where corruption blossomed luxuriantly and

exquisitely, and in a century of wit hers was second to none. Amidst

this extraordinary instability, when everything was at the mercy of a

secret thought of the master, the mistress alone held lasting sway; in a

reign of all-pervading satiety and tedium, she managed to remain

indispensable and bewitching to the day of her death.

Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle.

Meanwhile the War of the Austrian Succession broke out again, and never

had secretary of state more intricate questions to solve than had

D'Argenson. In the attempt to make a stage-emperor of Charles Albert of

Bavaria, defeat was incurred at Dettingen, and the French were driven

back on the Rhine (1743). The Bavarian dream dissipated, victories

gained in Flanders by Marshal Saxe, another adventurer of genius, at

Fontenoy, Raucoux and Lawfeld (1745-1747), were hailed with joy as

continuing those of Louis XIV.; even though they resulted in the loss of

Germany and the doubling of English armaments. The "disinterested" peace

of Aix-la-Chapelle (October 1748) had no effectual result other than

that of destroying in Germany, and for the benefit of Prussia, a balance

of power that had yet to be secured in Italy, despite the establishment

of the Spanish prince Philip at Parma. France, meanwhile, was beaten at

sea by England, Maria Theresa's sole ally. While founding her colonial

empire England had come into collision with France; and the rivalry of

the Hundred Years' War had immediately sprung up again between the two

countries. Engaged already in both Canada and in India (where Dupleix

was founding an empire with a mere handful of men), it was to France's

interest not to become involved in war upon the Rhine, thus falling into

England's continental trap. She did fall into it, however: for the sake

of conquering Silesia for the king of Prussia, Canada was left exposed

by the capture of Cape Breton; while in order to restore this same

Silesia to Maria Theresa, Canada was lost and with it India.

The Seven Years' War, 1756-1763.

France had worked for the king of Prussia from 1740 to 1748; now it was

Maria Theresa's game that was played in the Seven Years' War. In 1755,

the English having made a sudden attack upon the French at sea, and

Frederick II. having by a fresh _volte-face_ passed into alliance with

Great Britain, Louis XV.'s government accepted an alliance with Maria

Theresa in the treaty of the 1st of May 1756. Instead of remaining upon

the defensive in this continental war--merely accessory as it was--he

made it his chief affair, and placed himself under the petticoat

government of three women, Maria Theresa, Elizabeth of Russia and the

marquise de Pompadour. This error--the worst of all--laid the

foundations of the Prussian and British empires. By three battles,

victories for the enemies of France--Rossbach in Germany, 1757, Plassey

in India, 1757, and Quebec in Canada, 1759 (owing to the recall of

Dupleix, who was not bringing in large enough dividends to the Company

of the Indies, and to the abandonment of Montcalm, who could not

interest any one in "a few acres of snow"), the expansion of Prussia was

assured, and the British relieved of French rivalry in the expansion of

their empire in India and on the North American continent.

Treaties of Paris and Hubertusburg.

Owing to the blindness of Louis XV. and the vanity of the favourite, the

treaties of Paris and Hubertusburg (1763) once more proved the French

splendid in their conceptions, but deficient in action. Moreover,

Choiseul, secretary of state for foreign affairs since 1758, made out of

this deceptive Austrian alliance a system which put the finishing touch

to disaster, and after having thrown away everything to satisfy Maria

Theresa's hatred of Frederick II., the reconciliation between these two

irreconcilable Germans at Neisse and at Neustadt (1769-1770) was

witnessed by France, to the prejudice of Poland, one of her most ancient

adherents. The expedient of the Family Compact, concluded with Spain in

1761--with a view to taking vengeance upon England, whose fleets were a

continual thorn in the side to France--served only to involve Spain

herself in misfortune. Choiseul, who at least had a policy that was

sometimes in the right, and who was very anxious to carry it out, then

realized that the real quarrel had to be settled with England. Amid the

anguish of defeat and of approaching ruin, he had an acute sense of the

actualities of the case, and from 1763 to 1766 devoted himself

passionately to the reconstruction of the navy. To compensate for the

loss of the colonies he annexed Lorraine (1766), and by the acquisition

of Corsica in 1768 he gave France an intermediary position in the

Mediterranean, between friendly Spain and Italy, looking forward to the

time when it should become a stepping-stone to Africa.

First partition of Poland.

But Louis XV. had two policies. The incoherent efforts which he made to

repair by the secret diplomacy of the comte de Broglie the evils caused

by his official policy only aggravated his shortcomings and betrayed his

weakness. The contradictory intrigues of the king's secret proceedings

in the candidature of Prince Xavier, the dauphine's brother, and the

patriotic efforts of the confederation of Bar, contributed to bring

about the Polish crisis which the partition of 1772 resolved in favour

of Frederick II.; and the Turks were in their turn dragged into the same

disastrous affair. Of the old allies of France, Choiseul preserved at

least Sweden by the _coup d'état_ of Gustavus III.; but instead of being

as formerly the centre of great affairs, the cabinet of Versailles lost

all its credit, and only exhibited before the eyes of contemptuous

Europe France's extreme state of decay.

Internal policy of Louis XV.

The nation felt this humiliation, and showed all the greater irritation

as the want of cohesion in the government and the anarchy in the central

authority became more and more intolerable in home affairs. Though the

administration still possessed a fund of tradition and a personnel

which, including many men of note, protected it from the enfeebling

influence of the court, it looked as though chance regulated everything

so far as the government was concerned. These fluctuations were owing

partly to the character of Louis XV., and partly also to the fact that

society in the 18th century was too advanced in its ideas to submit

without resistance to the caprice of such a man. His mistresses were not

the only cause of this; for ever since Fleury's advent political parties

had come to the fore. From 1749 to 1757 the party of religious devotees

grouped round the queen and the king's daughters, with the dauphin as

chief and the comte D'Argenson, and Machault d'Arnouville, keeper of the

seals, as lieutenants, had worked against Madame de Pompadour (who leant

for support upon the parlements, the Jansenists and the philosophers)

and had gained the upper hand. Thenceforward poverty, disorders, and

consequently murmurs increased. The financial reform attempted by

Machault d'Arnouville between 1745 and 1749--a reduction of the debt

through the impost of the twentieth and the edict of 1749 against the

extensive property held in mortmain by the Church--after his disgrace

only resulted in failure. The army, which D'Argenson (likewise dismissed

by Madame de Pompadour) had been from 1743 to 1747 trying to restore by

useful reforms, was riddled by cabals. Half the people in the kingdom

were dying of hunger, while the court was insulting poverty by its

luxury and waste; and from 1750 onwards political ferment was everywhere

manifest. It found all the more favourable foothold in that the Church,

the State's best ally, had made herself more and more unpopular. Her

refusal of the sacraments to those who would not accept the bull

_Unigenitus_ (1746) was exploited in the eyes of the masses, as in those

of more enlightened people was her selfish and short-sighted resistance

to the financial plans of Machault. The general discontent was expressed

by the parlements in their attempt to establish a political supremacy

amid universal confusion, and by the popular voice in pamphlets

recalling by their violence those of the League. Every one expected and

desired a speedy revolution that should put an end to a policy which

alternated between overheated effervescence, abnormal activity and

lethargy. Nothing can better show the point to which things had

descended than the attempted assassination of Louis the Well-beloved by

Damiens in 1757.

Choiseul.

Choiseul was the means of accelerating this revolution, not only by his

abandonment of diplomatic traditions, but still more by his improvidence

and violence. He reversed the policy of his predecessors in regard to

the parlement. Supported by public opinion, which clamoured for

guarantees against abitrary power, the parlements had dared not only to

insist on being consulted as to the budget of the state in 1763, but to

enter upon a confederation throughout the whole of France, and on

repeated occasions to ordain a general strike of the judicial

authorities. Choiseul did not hesitate to attack through _lits de

justice_ or by exile a judiciary oligarchy which doubtless rested its

pretensions merely on wealth, high birth, or that encroaching spirit

that was the only counteracting agency to the monarchy. Louis XV.,

wearied with their clamour, called them to order. Choiseul's religious

policy was no less venturesome; after the condemnation in 1759 of the

Jesuits who were involved in the bankruptcy of Father de la Valette,

their general, in the Antilles, he had the order dissolved for refusing

to modify its constitution (1761-1764). Thus, not content with

encouraging writers with innovating ideas to the prejudice of

traditional institutions, he attacked, in the order of the Jesuits, the

strongest defender of these latter, and delivered over the new

generation to revolutionary doctrines.

The Triumvirate, 1770-1774.

A woman had elevated him into power; a woman brought him to the ground.

He succumbed to a coalition of the chancellor Maupeou, the duc

d'Aiguillon and the Abbé Terray, which depended on the favour of the

king's latest mistress, Madame du Barry (December 1770); and the Jesuits

were avenged by a stroke of authority similar to that by which they

themselves had suffered. Following on an edict registered by the _lit de

justice_, which forbade any remonstrance in political matters, the

parlement had resigned, and had been imitated by the provincial

parlements; whereupon Maupeou, an energetic chancellor, suppressed the

parlements and substituted superior councils of magistrates appointed by

the king (1771). This reform was justified by the religious intolerance

of the parlements; by their scandalous trials of Calas, Pierre Paul

Sirven (1709-1777), the chevalier de la Barre and the comte de Lally; by

the retrograde spirit that had made them suppress the Encyclopaedia in

1759 and condemn _Émile_ in 1762; and by their selfishness in

perpetuating abuses by which they profited. But this reform, being made

by the minister of a hated sovereign, only aided in exasperating public

opinion, which was grateful to the parlements in that their

remonstrances had not always been fruitless.

Ancient influences and institutions.

Thus all the buttresses of the monarchical institution began to fall to

pieces: the Church, undermined by the heresy of Jansenism, weakened by

the inroads of philosophy, discredited by evil-livers among the

priesthood, and divided against itself, like all losing parties; the

nobility of the court, still brave at heart, though incapable of

exertion and reduced to beggary, having lost all respect for discipline

and authority, not only in the camp, but in civilian society; and the

upper-class officials, narrow-minded and egotistical, unsettling by

their opposition the royal authority which they pretended to safeguard.

Even the "liberties," among the few representative institutions which

the _ancien régime_ had left intact in some provinces, turned against

the people. The estates opposed most of the intelligent and humane

measures proposed by such intendants as Tourny and Turgot to relieve the

peasants, whose distress was very great; they did their utmost to render

the selfishness of the privileged classes more oppressive and vexatious.

The new ideas.

Thus the terrible prevalence of poverty and want; the successive

famines; the mistakes of the government; the scandals of the Parc aux

Cerfs; and the parlements playing the Roman senate: all these causes,

added together and multiplied, assisted in setting a general

fermentation to work. The philosophers only helped to precipitate a

movement which they had not created; without pointing to absolute power

as the cause of the trouble, and without pretending to upset the

traditional system, they attempted to instil into princes the feeling of

new and more precise obligations towards their subjects. Voltaire,

Montesquieu, the Encyclopaedists and the Physiocrats (recurring to the

tradition of Bayle and Fontenelle), by dissolving in their analytical

crucible all consecrated beliefs and all fixed institutions, brought

back into the human society of the 18th century that humanity which had

been so rudely eliminated. They demanded freedom of thought and belief

with passionate insistence; they ardently discussed institutions and

conduct; and they imported into polemics the idea of natural rights

superior to all political arrangements. Whilst some, like Voltaire and

the Physiocrats, representatives of the privileged classes and careless

of political rights, wished to make use of the omnipotence of the prince

to accomplish desirable reforms, or, like Montesquieu, adversely

criticized despotism and extolled moderate governments, other, plebeians

like Rousseau, proclaimed the theory of the social contract and the

sovereignty of the people. So that during this reign of frivolity and

passion, so bold in conception and so poor in execution, the thinkers

contributed still further to mark the contrast between grandeur of plan

and mediocrity of result.

The preaching of all this generous philosophy, not only in France, but

throughout the whole of Europe, would have been in vain had there not

existed at the time a social class interested in these great changes,

and capable of compassing them. Neither the witty and lucid form in

which the philosophers clothed their ideas in their satires, romances,

stage-plays and treatises, nor the salons of Madame du Deffand, Madame

Geoffrin and Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, could possibly have been

sufficiently far-reaching or active centres of political propaganda. The

former touched only the more highly educated classes; while to the

latter, where privileged individuals alone had entry, novelties were but

an undiluted stimulant for the jaded appetites of persons whose ideas of

good-breeding, moreover, would have drawn the line at martyrdom.

The bourgeoisie--the incarnation of new ideas.

The class which gave the Revolution its chiefs, its outward and visible

forms, and the irresistible energy of its hopes, was the _bourgeoisie_,

intelligent, ambitious and rich; in the forefront the capitalists and

financiers of the _haute bourgeoisie_, farmers-general and army

contractors, who had supplanted or swamped the old landed and military

aristocracy, had insensibly reconstructed the interior of the ancient

social edifice with the gilded and incongruous materials of wealth, and

in order to consolidate or increase their monopolies, needed to secure

themselves against the arbitrary action of royalty and the bureaucracy.

Next came the crowd of stockholders and creditors of the state, who, in

face of the government's "extravagant anarchy," no longer felt safe from

partial or total bankruptcy. More powerful still, and more masterful,

was the commercial, industrial and colonial _bourgeoisie_; because under

the Regency and under Louis XV. they had been more productive and more

creative. Having gradually revolutionized the whole economic system, in

Paris, in Lyons, in Nantes, in Bordeaux, in Marseilles, they could not

tamely put up with being excluded from public affairs, which had so much

bearing upon their private or collective enterprises. Finally, behind

this _bourgeoisie_, and afar off, came the crowd of serfs, rustics whom

the acquisition of land had gradually enfranchised, and who were the

more eager to enjoy their definitive liberation because it was close at

hand.

Transformation of manners and customs.

The habits and sentiments of French society showed similar changes. From

having been almost exclusively national during Louis XIV.'s reign, owing

to the perpetual state of war and to a sort of proud isolation, it had

gradually become cosmopolitan. After the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle,

France had been flooded from all quarters of the civilized world, but

especially from England, by a concourse of refined and cultured men well

acquainted with her usages and her universal language, whom she had

received sympathetically. Paris became the brain of Europe. This

revolution in manners and customs, coinciding with the revolution in

ideas, led in its turn to a transformation in feeling, and to new

aesthetic needs. Gradually people became sick of openly avowed

gallantry, of shameless libertinism, of moral obliquity and of the

flattering artifices of vice; a long shudder ran through the selfish

torpor of the social body. After reading the _Nouvelle-Héloïse_,

_Clarissa_ and _Sir Charles Grandison_, fatigued and wearied society

revived as though beneath the fresh breezes of dawn. The principle of

examination, the reasoned analysis of human conditions and the

discussion of causes, far from culminating in disillusioned nihilism,

everywhere aroused the democratic spirit, the life of sentiment and of

human feeling: in the drama, with Marivaux, Diderot and La Chaussée; in

art, with Chardin and Greuze; and in the salons, in view of the

suppression of privilege. So that to Louis XV.'s cynical and hopeless

declaration: "Apres moi le déluge," the setting 18th century responded

by a belief in progress and an appeal to the future. A long-drawn echo

from all classes hailed a revolution that was possible because it was

necessary.

If this revolution did not burst forth sooner, in the actual lifetime of

Louis XV., if in Louis XVI.'s reign there was a renewal of loyalty to

the king, before the appeal to liberty was made, that is to be explained

by this hope of recovery. But Louis XVI.'s reign (1774-1792) was only to

be a temporary halting-place, an artifice of history for passing through

the transition period whilst elaborating the transformation which was to

revolutionize, together with France, the whole world.

Louis XVI.

Louis XVI. was twenty years of age. Physically he was stout, and a slave

to the Bourbon fondness for good living; intellectually a poor creature

and but ill-educated, he loved nothing so much as hunting and

locksmith's work. He had a taste for puerile amusements, a mania for

useless little domestic economies in a court where millions vanished

like smoke, and a natural idleness which achieved as its masterpiece the

keeping a diary from 1766 to 1792 of a life so tragic, which was yet but

a foolish chronicle of trifles. Add to this that he was a virtuous

husband, a kind father, a fervent Christian and a good-natured man full

of excellent intentions, yet a spectacle of moral pusillanimity and

ineptitude.

Marie Antoinette.

From 1770 onwards lived side by side with this king, rather than at his

side, the archduchess Marie Antoinette of Austria--one of the very

graceful and very frivolous women who were to be found at Versailles,

opening to life like the flowers she so much loved, enamoured of

pleasure and luxury, delighting to free herself from the formalities of

court life, and mingling in the amusements of society; lovable and

loving, without ceasing to be virtuous. Flattered and adored at the

outset, she very soon furnished a sinister illustration to Beaumarchais'

_Basile_; for evil tongues began to calumniate the queen: those of her

brothers-in-law, the duc d'Aiguillon (protector of Madame du Barry and

dismissed from the ministry), and the Cardinal de Rohan, recalled from

his embassy in Vienna. She was blamed for her friendship with the

comtesse de Polignac, who loved her only as the dispenser of titles and

positions; and when weary of this persistent begging for rewards, she

was taxed with her preference for foreigners who asked nothing. People

brought up against her the debts and expenditure due to her belief in

the inexhaustible resources of France; and hatred became definite when

she was suspected of trying to imitate her mother Maria Theresa and play

the part of ruler, since her husband neglected his duty. They then

became persuaded that it was she who caused the weight of taxation; in

the most infamous libels comparison was made between her freedom of

behaviour and that of Louis XV.'s former mistresses. Private envy and

public misconceptions very soon summed up her excessive unpopularity in

the menacing nickname, "L'Autrichienne." (See MARIE ANTOINETTE.)

Foreign policy of Louis XVI.

All this shows that Louis XVI. was not a monarch capable of directing or

suppressing the inevitable revolution. His reign was but a tissue of

contradictions. External affairs seemed in even a more dangerous

position than those at home. Louis XVI. confided to Vergennes the charge

of reverting to the traditions of the crown and raising France from the

humiliation suffered by the treaty of Paris and the partition of Poland.

His first act was to release French policy from the Austrian alliance of

1756; in this he was aided both by public opinion and by the confidence

of the king--the latter managing to set aside the desires of the queen,

whom the ambition of Maria Theresa and Joseph II. hoped to use as an

auxiliary. Vergennes' object was a double one: to free the kingdom from

English supremacy and to shake off the yoke of Austria. Opportunities

offered themselves simultaneously. In 1775 the English colonies in

America rebelled, and Louis XVI., after giving them secret aid and

encouragement almost from the first, finally in February 1778, despite

Marie Antoinette, formed an open alliance with them; while when Joseph

II., after having partitioned Poland, wanted in addition to balance the

loss of Silesia with that of Bavaria, Vergennes prevented him from doing

so. In vain was he offered a share in the partition of the Netherlands

by way of an inducement. France's disinterested action in the peace of

Teschen (1779) restored to her the lost adherence of the secondary

states. Europe began to respect her again when she signed a

Franco-Dutch-Spanish alliance (1779-1780), and when, after the

capitulation of the English at Yorktown, the peace of Versailles (1783)

crowned her efforts with at least formal success. Thenceforward, partly

from prudence and partly from penury, Vergennes cared only for the

maintenance of peace--a not too easy task, in opposition to the greed of

Catherine II. and Joseph II., who now wished to divide the Ottoman

empire. Joseph II., recognizing that Louis XVI. would not sacrifice the

"sick man" to him, raised the question of the opening of the Scheldt,

against the Dutch. Vainly did Joseph II. accuse his sister of

ingratitude and complain of her resistance; the treaty of Fontainebleau

in 1785 maintained the rights of Holland. Later on, Joseph II., sticking

to his point, wanted to settle the house of Bavaria in the Netherlands;

but Louis XVI. supported the confederation of princes (Fürstenbund)

which Frederick II. called together in order to keep his turbulent

neighbour within bounds. Vergennes completed his work by signing a

commercial treaty in 1786 with England, whose commerce and industry were

favoured above others, and a second in 1787 with Russia. He died in

1787, at an opportune moment for himself; though he had temporarily

raised France's position in Europe, his work was soon ruined by the very

means taken to secure its successes: warfare and armaments had hastened

the "hideous bankruptcy."

Internal policy of Louis XVI.

From the very beginning of his reign Louis XVI. fell into

contradictions and hesitation in internal affairs, which could not but

bring him to grief. He tried first of all to govern in accordance with

public opinion, and was induced to flatter it beyond measure; in an

extreme of inconsistency he re-established the parlements, the worst

enemies of reform, at the very moment when he was calling in the

reformers to his councils.

Turgot 1774-1776.

Turgot, the most notable of these latter, was well fitted to play his

great part as an enlightened minister, as much from the principle of

hard work and domestic economy traditional in his family, as from a

maturity of mind developed by extensive study at the Sorbonne and by

frequenting the salons of the Encyclopaedists. He had proved this by his

capable administration in the paymaster's office at Limoges, from 1761

to 1774. A disciple of Quesnay and of Gournay, he tried to repeat in

great affairs the experience of liberty which he had found successful in

small, and to fortify the unity of the nation and the government by

social, political and economic reforms. He ordained the free circulation

of grain within the kingdom, and was supported by Louis XVI. in the

course of the flour-war (_guerre des farines_) (April-May 1775); he

substituted a territorial subsidy for the royal _corvée_--so burdensome

upon the peasants--and thus tended to abolish privilege in the matter of

imposts; and he established the freedom of industry by the dissolution

of privileged trade corporations (1776). Finance was in a deplorable

state, and as controller-general he formulated a new fiscal policy,

consisting of neither fresh taxation nor loans, but of retrenchment. At

one fell stroke the two auxiliaries on which he had a right to count

failed him: public opinion, clamouring for reform on condition of not

paying the cost; and the king, too timid to dominate public opinion, and

not knowing how to refuse the demands of privilege. Economy in the

matter of public finance implies a grain of severity in the collection

of taxes as well as, in expenditure. By the former Turgot hampered the

great interests; by the second he thwarted the desires of courtiers not

only of the second rank but of the first. Therefore, after he had

aroused the complaints of the commercial world and the bourgeoisie, the

court, headed by Marie Antoinette, profited by the general excitement to

overthrow him. The Choiseul party, which had gradually been

reconstituted, under the influence of the queen, the princes, parlement,

the prebendaries, and the trade corporations, worked adroitly to

eliminate this reformer of lucrative abuses. The old courtier Maurepas,

jealous of Turgot and desirous of remaining a minister himself,

refrained from defending his colleague; and when Turgot, who never knew

how to give in, spoke of establishing assemblies of freeholders in the

communes and the provinces, in order to relax the tension of

over-centralization, Louis XVI., who never dared to pass from sentiment

to action, sacrificed his minister to the rancour of the queen, as he

had already sacrificed Malesherbes (1776). Thus the first governmental

act of the queen was an error, and dissipated the hope of replacing

special privileges by a general guarantee given to the nation, which

alone could have postponed a revolution. It was still too early for a

Fourth of August; but the queen's victory was none the less vain, since

Turgot's ideas were taken up by his successors.

Necker, 1776-1781.

The first of these was Necker, a Genevese financier. More able than

Turgot, though a man of smaller ideas, he abrogated the edicts

registered by the _lits de justice_; and unable or not daring to attack

the evil at its root, he thought he could suppress its symptoms by a

curative process of borrowing and economy. Like Turgot he failed, and

for the same reasons. The American war had finally exhausted the

exchequer, and, in order to replenish it, he would have needed to

inspire confidence in the minds of capitalists; but the resumption in

1778 of the plan of provincial assemblies charged with remodelling the

various imposts, and his _compte-rendu_ in which he exhibited the

monarchy paying its pensioners for their inactivity as it had never paid

its agents for their zeal, aroused a fresh outburst of anger. Necker was

carried away in his turn by the reaction he had helped to bring about

(1781).

The return of feudalism to the offensive.

Having fought the oligarchy of privilege, the monarchy next tried to

rally it to its side, and all the springs of the old régime were

strained to the breaking-point. The military rule of the marquis de

Ségur eliminated the plebeians from the army; while the great lords,

drones in the hive, worked with a kind of fever at the enforcement of

their seigniorial rights; the feudal system was making a last struggle

before dying. The Church claimed her right of ordering the civil estate

of all Frenchmen as an absolute mistress more strictly than ever. Joly

de Fleury and D'Ormesson, Necker's successors, pushed their narrow

spirit of reaction and the temerity of their inexperience to the

furthest limit; but the reaction which reinforced the privileged classes

was not sufficient to fill the coffers of the treasury, and Marie

Antoinette, who seemed gifted with a fatal perversity of instinct,

confided the finances of the kingdom to Calonne, an upper-class official

and a veritable Cagliostro of finance.

Calonne, 1783-1787.

From 1783 to 1787, this man organized his astounding system of

falsification all along the line. His unbridled prodigality, by

spreading a belief in unlimited resources, augmented the confidence

necessary for the success of perpetual loans; until the day came when,

having exhausted the system, he tried to suppress privilege and fall

back upon the social reforms of Turgot, and the financial schemes of

Necker, by suggesting once more to the assembly of notables a

territorial subsidy from all landed property. He failed, owing to the

same reaction that was causing the feudal system to make inroads upon

the army, the magistracy and industry; but in his fall he put on the

guise of a reformer, and by a last wild plunge he left the monarchy,

already compromised by the affair of the Diamond Necklace (q.v.),

hopelessly exposed (April 1787).

Loménie de Brienne.

The volatile and brilliant archbishop Loménie de Brienne was charged

with the task of laying the affairs of the _ancien régime_ before the

assembly of notables, and with asking the nation for resources, since

the monarchy could no longer provide for itself; but the notables

refused, and referred the minister to the states-general, the

representative of the nation. Before resorting to this extremity,

Brienne preferred to lay before the parlement his two edicts regarding a

stamp duty and the territorial subsidy; to be met by the same refusal,

and the same reference to the states-general. The exile of the parlement

to Troyes, the arrest of various members, and the curt declaration of

the king's absolute authority (November 9, 1787) were unsuccessful in

breaking down its resistance. The threat of Chrétien François de

Lamoignon, keeper of the seals, to imitate Maupeou, aroused public

opinion and caused a fresh confederation of the parlements of the

kingdom. The royal government was too much exhausted to overthrow even a

decaying power like that of the parlements, and being still more afraid

of the future representatives of the French people than of the supreme

courts, capitulated to the insurgent parlements. The recalled parlement

seemed at the pinnacle of power.

Recall of Necker.

Its next action ruined its ephemeral popularity, by claiming the

convocation of the states-general "according to the formula observed in

1614," as already demanded by the estates of Dauphiné at Vizille on the

21st of July 1788. The exchequer was empty; it was necessary to comply.

The royal declaration of the 23rd of September 1788 convoked the

states-general for the 1st of May 1789, and the fall of Brienne and

Lamoignon followed the recall of Necker. Thenceforward public opinion,

which was looking for something quite different from the superannuated

formula of 1614, abandoned the parlements, which in their turn

disappeared from view; for the struggle beginning between the privileged

classes and the government, now at bay, had given the public, through

the states-general, that means of expression which they had always

lacked.

Prelude to the states-general.

The electorate.

The conflict immediately changed ground, and an engagement began between

privilege and the people over the twofold question of the number of

deputies and the mode of voting. Voting by head, and the double

representation of the third estate (_tiers état_); this was the great

revolution; voting by order meant the continued domination of

privilege, and the lesser revolution. The monarchy, standing apart, held

the balance, but needed a decisive policy. Necker, with little backing

at court, could not act energetically, and Louis XVI., wavering between

Necker and the queen, chose the attitude most convenient to his

indolence and least to his interest: he remained neutral, and his

timidity showed clearly in the council of the 27th of December 1788.

Separating the two questions which were so closely connected, and

despite the sensational brochure of the abbé Sieyès, "What is the Third

Estate?" he pronounced for the doubling of the third estate without

deciding as to the vote by head, yet leaving it to be divined that he

preferred the vote by order. As to the programme there was no more

decisive resolution; but the edict of convocation gave it to be

understood that a reform was under consideration; "the establishment of

lasting and permanent order in all branches of the administration." The

point as to the place of convocation gave rise to a compromise between

the too-distant centre of France and too-tumultuous Paris. Versailles

was chosen "because of the hunting!" In the procedure of the elections

the traditional system of the states-general of 1614 was preserved, and

the suffrage was almost universal, but in two kinds: for the third

estate nearly all citizens over twenty-five years of age, paying a

direct contribution, voted--peasants as well as bourgeois; the country

clergy were included among the ecclesiastics; the smaller nobility among

the nobles; and finally, Protestants were electors and eligible.

The addresses.

According to custom, documents (_cahiers_) were drawn up, containing a

list of grievances and proposals for reform. All the orders were agreed

in demanding prudently modified reform: the vote on the budget, order in

finance, regular convocation of the states-general, and a written

constitution in order to get rid of arbitrary rule. The address of the

clergy, inspired by the great prelates, sought to make inaccurate

lamentations over the progress of impiety a means of safeguarding their

enormous spiritual and temporal powers, their privileges and exemptions,

and their vast wealth. The nobility demanded voting by order, the

maintenance of their privileges, and, above all, laws to protect them

against the arbitrary proceedings of royalty. The third estate insisted

on the vote by head, the graduated abolition of privilege in all

governmental affairs, a written constitution and union. The programme

went on broadening as it descended in the social scale.

The elections.

The elections sufficed finally to show that the _ancien régime_,

characterized from the social point of view by inequality, from the

political point of view by arbitrariness, and from the religious point

of view by intolerance, was completed from the administrative point of

view by inextricable disorder. As even the extent of the jurisdiction of

the _bailliages_ was unknown, convocations were made at haphazard,

according to the good pleasure of influential persons, and in these

assemblies decisions were arrived at by a process that confused every

variety of rights and powers, and was governed by no logical principle;

and in this extreme confusion terms and affairs were alike involved.

The counter-currents of the Revolution.

Whilst the bureaucracy of the _ancien régime_ sought for desperate

expedients to prolong its domination, the whole social body gave signs

of a yet distant but ever nearing disintegration. The revolution was

already complete before it was declared to the world. Two distinct

currents of disaffection, one economic, the other philosophic, had for

long been pervading the nation. There had been much suffering throughout

the 17th and 18th centuries; but no one had hitherto thought of a

politico-social rising. But the other, the philosophic current, had been

set going in the 18th century; and the policy of despotism tempered by

privilege had been criticized in the name of liberty as no longer

justifying itself by its services to the state. The ultramontane and

oppressively burdensome church had been taunted with its lack of

Christian charity, apostolic poverty and primitive virtue. All vitality

had been sapped from the old order of nobles, reduced in prestige by

the _savonnette à vilains_ (office purchased to ennoble the holder),

enervated by court life, and so robbed of its roots in the soil, from

which it had once drawn its strength, that it could no longer live save

as a ruinous parasite on the central monarchy. Lastly, to come to the

bottom of the social scale, there were the common people, taxable at

will, subject to the arbitrary and burdensome forced labour of the

_corvée_, cut off by an impassable barrier from the privileged classes

whom they hated. For them the right to work had been asserted, among

others by Turgot, as a natural right opposed to the caprices of the

arbitrary and selfish aristocracy of the corporations, and a breach had

been made in the tyranny of the masters which had endeavoured to set a

barrier to the astonishing outburst of industrial force which was

destined to characterize the coming age.

The outward and visible progress of the Revolution, due primarily to

profound economic disturbance, was thus accelerated and rendered

irresistible. Economic reformers found a moral justification for their

dissatisfaction in philosophical theories; the chance conjunction of a

philosopho-political idea with a national deficit led to the

preponderance of the third estate at the elections, and to the

predominance of the democratic spirit in the states-general. The third

estate wanted civil liberty above all; political liberty came second

only, as a means and guarantee for the former. They wanted the abolition

of the feudal system, the establishment of equality and a share in

power. Neither the family nor property was violently attacked; the

church and the monarchy still appeared to most people two respectable

and respected institutions. The king and the privileged classes had but

so to desire it, and the revolution would be easy and peaceful.

Meeting of the states-general.

Louis XVI. was reluctant to abandon a tittle of his absolute power, nor

would the privileged classes sacrifice their time-honoured traditions;

they were inexorable. The king, more ponderous and irresolute every day,

vacillated between Necker the liberal on one side and Marie Antoinette,

whose feminine pride was opposed to any concessions, with the comte

d'Artois, a mischievous nobody who could neither choose a side nor stick

to one, on the other. When the states-general opened on the 5th of May

1789 Louis XVI. had decided nothing. The conflict between him and the

Assembly immediately broke out, and became acute over the verification

of the mandates; the third estate desiring this to be made in common by

the deputies of the three orders, which would involve voting by head,

the suppression of classes and the preponderance of the third estate. On

the refusal of the privileged classes and after an interval of six

weeks, the third estate, considering that they represented 96% of the

nation, and in accordance with the proposal of Sieyès, declared that

they represented the nation and therefore were authorized to take

resolutions unaided, the first being that in future no arrangement for

taxation could take place without their consent.

Oath of the tennis-court.

The king, urged by the privileged classes, responded to this first

revolutionary act, as in 1614, by closing the Salle des Menus Plaisirs

where the third estate were sitting; whereupon, gathered in one of the

tennis-courts under the presidency of Bailly, they swore on the 20th of

June not to separate before having established the constitution of the

kingdom.

The Lit de Justice of June 23, 1789.

Taking of the Bastille.

Louis XVI. then decided, on the 23rd, to make known his policy in a

royal _lit de justice_. He declared for the lesser reform, the fiscal,

not the social; were this rejected, he declared that "he alone would

arrange for the welfare of his people." Meanwhile he annulled the

sitting of the 17th, and demanded the immediate dispersal of the

Assembly. The third estate refused to obey, and by the mouth of Bailly

and Mirabeau asserted the legitimacy of the Revolution. The refusal of

the soldiers to coerce the Assembly showed that the monarchy could no

longer rely on the army; and a few days later, when the lesser nobility

and the lower ranks of the clergy had united with the third estate whose

cause was their own, the king yielded, and on the 27th of June commanded

both orders to join in the National Assembly, which was thereby

recognized and the political revolution sanctioned. But at the same

time, urged by the "infernal cabal" of the queen and the comte d'Artois,

Louis XVI. called in the foreign regiments--the only ones of which he

could be certain--and dismissed Necker. The Assembly, dreading a sudden

attack, demanded the withdrawal of the troops. Meeting with a refusal,

Paris opposed the king's army with her citizen-soldiers; and by the

taking of the Bastille, that mysterious dark fortress which personified

the _ancien régime_, secured the triumph of the Revolution (July 14).

The king was obliged to recall Necker, to mount the tricolor cockade at

the Hôtel de Ville, and to recognize Bailly as mayor of Paris and La

Fayette as commander of the National Guard, which remained in arms after

the victory. The National Assembly had right on its side after the 20th

of June and might after the 14th of July. Thus was accomplished the

Revolution which was to throw into the melting-pot all that had for

centuries appeared fixed and stable.

Spontaneous anarchy.

As Paris had taken her Bastille, it remained for the towns and country

districts to take theirs--all the Bastilles of feudalism. Want, terror

and the contagion of examples precipitated the disruption of

governmental authority and of the old political status; and sudden

anarchy dislocated all the organs of authority. Upon the ruins of the

central administration temporary authorities were founded in various

isolated localities, limited in area but none the less defiant of the

government. The provincial assemblies of Dauphiné and elsewhere gave the

signal; and numerous towns, following the example of Paris, instituted

municipalities which substituted their authority for that of the

intendants and their subordinates. Clubs were openly organized,

pamphlets and journals appeared, regardless of administrative orders;

workmen's unions multiplied in Paris, Bordeaux and Lyons, in face of

drastic prohibition; and anarchy finally set in with the defection of

the army in Paris on the 23rd of June, at Nancy, at Metz and at Brest.

The crying abuses of the old régime, an insignificant factor at the

outset, soon combined with the widespread agrarian distress, due to the

unjust distribution of land, the disastrous exploitation of the soil,

the actions of the government, and the severe winter of 1788. Discontent

showed itself in pillage and incendiarism on country estates; between

March and July 1789 more than three hundred agrarian riots took place,

uprooting the feudal idea of property, already compromised by its own

excesses. Not only did pillaging take place; the boundaries of property

were also ignored, and people no longer held themselves bound to pay

taxes. These _jacqueries_ hastened the movement of the regular

revolution.

The night of August 4.

The decrees of the 4th of August, proposed by those noble "patriots" the

duc d'Aiguillon and the vicomte de Noailles, who had already on the 23rd

of June made armed resistance to the evacuation of the Hall of Assembly,

put the final touch to the revolution begun by the provincial

assemblies, by liberating land and labour, and proclaiming equality

among all Frenchmen. Instead of exasperating the demands of the peasants

and workmen by repression and raising civil war between the bourgeoisie

and the proletariat, they drew a distinction between personal servitude,

which was suppressed, and the rights of contract, which were to be

redeemed--a laudable but impossible distinction. The whole feudal system

crumbled before the revolutionary insistence of the peasants; for their

masters, bourgeois or nobles, terrified by prolonged riots, capitulated

and gradually had to consent to make the resolutions of the 4th of

August a reality.

Elaboration of the constitution.

Overjoyed by this social liberation, the Assembly awarded Louis XVI. the

title of "renewer of French liberty"; but remaining faithful to his

hesitating policy of the 23rd of June, he ratified the decrees of the

4th of August, only with a very ill grace. On the other hand, the

privileged classes, and notably the clergy, who saw the whole

traditional structure of their power threatened, now rallied to him, and

when after the 28th of August the Assembly set to work on the new

constitution, they combined in the effort to recover some of the

position they had lost. But whatever their theoretical agreement on

social questions, politically they were hopelessly at odds. The

bourgeoisie, conscious of their opportunity, decided for a single

chamber against the will of the noblesse; against that of the king they

declared it permanent, and, if they accorded him a suspensory veto, this

was only in order to guard them against the extreme assertion of popular

rights. Thus the progress of the Revolution, so far, had left the mass

of the people still excluded from any constitutional influence on the

government, which was in the hands of the well-to-do classes, which also

controlled the National Guard and the municipalities. The irritation of

the disfranchised proletariat was moreover increased by the appalling

dearness of bread and food generally, which the suspicious temper of the

times--fomented by the tirades of Marat in the _Ami du peuple_--ascribed

to English intrigues in revenge for the aid given by France to the

American colonies, and to the treachery in high places that made these

intrigues successful. The climax came with the rumour that the court was

preparing a new military _coup d'état_, a rumour that seemed to be

confirmed by indiscreet toasts proposed at a banquet by the officers of

the guard at Versailles; and on the night of the 5th to the 6th of

October a Parisian mob forced the king and royal family to return with

them to Paris amid cries of "We are bringing the baker, the baker's wife

and the little baker's boy!" The Assembly followed; and henceforth king

and Assembly were more or less under the influence of the whims and

passions of a populace maddened by want and suspicion, by the fanatical

or unscrupulous incitements of an unfettered press, and by the

unrestrained oratory of obscure demagogues in the streets, the cafés and

the political clubs.

Convened for the purpose of elaborating a system that should conciliate

all interests, the Assembly thus found itself forced into a conflict

between the views of the people, who feared betrayal, and the court,

which dreaded being overwhelmed. This schism was reflected in the

parties of the Assembly; the absolutists of the extreme Right; the

moderate monarchists of the Right and Centre; the constitutionalists of

the Left Centre and Left; and, finally, on the extreme Left the

democratic revolutionists, among whom Robespierre sat as yet all but

unnoticed. Of talent there was enough and to spare in the Assembly; what

was conspicuously lacking was common sense and a practical knowledge of

affairs. Of all the orators who declaimed from the tribune, Mirabeau

alone realized the perils of the situation and possessed the power of

mind and will to have mastered them. Unfortunately, however, he was

discredited by a disreputable past, and yet more by the equivocal

attitude he had to assume in order to maintain his authority in the

Assembly while working in what he believed to be the true interests of

the court. His political ideal for France was that of the monarchy,

rescued from all association with the abuses of the old régime and

"broad-based upon the people's will"; his practical counsel was that the

king should frankly proclaim this ideal to the people as his own, should

compete with the Assembly for popular favour, while at the same time

using every means to win over those by whom his authority was flouted.

For a time Mirabeau influenced the counsels of the court through the

comte de Montmorin; but the king neither trusted him nor could be

brought to see his point of view, and Marie Antoinette, though she

resigned herself to negotiating with him, was very far from sympathizing

with his ideals. Finally, all hope of the conduct of affairs being

entrusted to him was shattered when the Assembly passed a law forbidding

its members to become ministers.

Declaration of the rights of man.

The attempted reconciliation with the king having failed, the Assembly

ended by working alone, and made the control that it should have exerted

an instrument, not of co-operation but of strife. It inaugurated its

legislative labours by a metaphysical declaration of the Rights of Man

and of the Citizen (October 2, 1789). This enunciation of universal

verities, the bulk of which have, sooner or later, been accepted by all

civilized nations as "the gospel of modern times," was inspired by all

the philosophy of the 18th century in France and by the _Contrat

Social_. It comprised various rational and humane ideas, no longer

theological, but profoundly and deliberately thought out: ideas as to

the sovereign-right of the nation, law by general consent, man superior

to the pretensions of caste and the fetters of dogma, the vindication of

the ideal and of human dignity. Unable to rest on historic precedent

like England, the Constituent Assembly took as the basis for its labours

the tradition of the thinkers.

The constitution.

Upon the principles proclaimed in this Declaration the constitution of

1791 was founded. Its provisions are discussed elsewhere (see the

section below on _Law and Institutions_); here it will suffice to say

that it established under the sovereign people, for the king was to

survive merely as the supreme executive official, a wholly new model of

government in France, both in Church and State. The historic divisions

of the realm were wiped out; for the old provinces were substituted

eighty-three departments; and with the provinces vanished the whole

organization, territorial, administrative and ecclesiastical, of the

_ancien régime_. In one respect, indeed, the system of the old monarchy

remained intact; the tradition of centralization established by Louis

XIV. was too strong to be overthrown, and the destruction of the

historic privileges and immunities with which this had been ever in

conflict only served to strengthen this tendency. In 1791 France was

pulverized into innumerable administrative atoms incapable of cohesion;

and the result was that Paris became more than ever the brain and

nerve-centre of France. This fact was soon to be fatal to the new

constitution, though the administrative system established by it still

survives. Paris was in effect dominated by the armed and organized

proletariat, and this proletariat could never be satisfied with a

settlement which, while proclaiming the sovereignty of the people, had,

by means of the property qualification for the franchise, established

the political ascendancy of the middle classes. The settlement had, in

fact, settled nothing; it had, indeed, merely intensified the profound

cleavage between the opposing tendencies; for if the democrats were

alienated by the narrow franchise, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy,

which cut at the very roots of the Catholic system, drove into

opposition to the Revolution not only the clergy themselves but a vast

number of their flocks.

The policy of the Assembly, moreover, hopelessly aggravated its

misunderstanding with the king. Louis, indeed, accepted the constitution

and attended the great Feast of Federation (July 14, 1790), when

representatives from all the new departments assembled in the Champ de

Mars to ratify the work of the Assembly; but the king either could not

or would not say the expected word that would have dissipated mistrust.

The Civil Constitution of the Clergy, too, seemed to him not only to

violate his rights as a king, but his faith as a Christian also; and

when the emigration of the nobility and the death of Mirabeau (April 2,

1791) had deprived him of his natural supporters and his only adviser,

resuming the old plan of withdrawing to the army of the marquis de

Bouillé at Metz, he made his ill-fated attempt to escape from Paris

(June 20, 1791). The flight to Varennes was an irreparable error; for

during the king's absence and until his return the insignificance of the

royal power became apparent. La Fayette's fusillade of the republicans,

who demanded the deposition of the king (July 17, 1791), led to a

definite split between the democratic party and the bourgeois party.

Vainly did Louis, brought back a captive to Paris, swear on the 14th of

September 1791 solemnly mere lip-service to the constitution; the

mistrustful party of revolution abandoned the constitution they had only

just obtained, and to guard against the sovereign's mental reservations

and the selfish policy of the middle classes, appealed to the main force

of the people. The conflict between the _ancien régime_ and the National

Assembly ended in the defeat of the royalists.

The Legislative Assembly (Oct. 1, 1791-Sept 20, 1792).

Through lassitude or disinterestedness the men of 1791, on

Robespierre's suggestion, had committed one last mistake, by leaving

the task of putting the constitution into practice to new men even more

inexperienced than themselves. Thus the new Assembly's time was occupied

in a conflict between the Legislative Assembly and the king, who plotted

against it; and, as a result, the monarchy, insulted by the proceedings

of the 20th of June, was eliminated altogether by those of the 10th of

August 1792.

The parties.

The new Assembly which had met on the 1st of October 1791 had a majority

favourable to the constitutional monarchy and to the bourgeois

franchise. But, among these bourgeois those who were called Feuillants,

from the name of their club (see FEUILLANTS, CLUB OF THE), desired the

strict and loyal application of the constitution without encroaching

upon the authority of the king; the triumvirate, Duport, Barnave and

Lameth, were at the head of this party. The Jacobins, on the contrary,

considered that the king should merely be hereditary president of the

Republic, to be deposed if he attempted to violate the constitution, and

that universal suffrage should be established. The dominant group among

these was that of the Girondins or Girondists, so called because its

most brilliant members had been elected in the Gironde (see GIRONDISTS).

But the republican party was more powerful without than within. Their

chief was not so much Robespierre, president of the parliamentary and

bourgeois club of the Jacobins (q.v.), which had acquired by means of

its two thousand affiliated branches great power in the provinces, as

the advocate Danton, president of the popular and Parisian club of the

Cordeliers (q.v.). Between the Feuillants and the Jacobins, the

independents, incapable of keeping to any fixed programme, vacillated

sometimes to the right, sometimes to the left.

Royalist intrigues.

The émigrés.

Declaration of Pilnitz.

The decrees.

The war.

But the best allies of the republicans against the Feuillants were the

royalists pure and simple, who cared nothing about the constitution, and

claimed to "extract good from the excess of evil." The election of a

Jacobin, Pétion, instead of Bailly, the resigning mayor, and La Fayette,

the candidate for office, was their first achievement. The court, on its

side, showed little sign of a conciliatory spirit, though, realizing its

danger, it attempted to restrain the foolish violence of the _émigrés_,

i.e. the nobles who after the suppression of titles of nobility in 1790

and the arrest of the king at Varennes, had fled in a body to Coblenz

and joined Louis XVI.'s brothers, the counts of Provence and Artois.

They it was who set in motion the national and European conflict. Under

the prince of Condé they had collected a little army round Trier; and in

concert with the "Austrian Committee" of Paris they solicited the armed

intervention of monarchical Europe. The declaration of Pilnitz, which

was but an excuse for non-interference on the part of the emperor and

the king of Prussia, interested in the prolongation of these internal

troubles, was put forward by them as an assurance of forthcoming support

(August 27, 1791). At the same time the application of the Civil

Constitution of the Clergy roused the whole of western La Vendée; and in

face of the danger threatened by the refractory clergy and by the army

of the _émigrés_, the Girondins set about confounding the court with the

Feuillants in the minds of the public, and compromising Louis XVI. by a

national agitation, denouncing him as an accomplice of the foreigner.

Owing to the decrees against the comte de Provence, the emigrants, and

the refractory priests, voted by the Legislative Assembly in November

1791, they forced Louis XVI. to show his hand by using his veto, so that

his complicity should be plainly declared, to replace his Feuillant

ministry--disparate in birth, opinions and ambitions--by the Girondin

ministry of Dumouriez-Roland (March 10), no more united than the other,

but believers in a republican crusade for the overthrow of thrones, that

of Louis XVI. first of all; and finally to declare war against the king

of Bohemia and Hungary, a step also desired by the court in the hope of

ridding itself of the Assembly at the first note of victory (April 20,

1792).

Proceedings of June 20.

But when, owing to the disorganization of the army through emigration

and desertion, the ill-prepared Belgian war was followed by invasion and

the trouble in La Vendée increased, all France suspected a betrayal. The

Assembly, in order to reduce the number of hostile forces, voted for the

exile of all priests who had refused to swear to the Civil Constitution

and the substitution of a body of twenty thousand volunteer national

guards, under the authority of Paris, for the king's constitutional

guard (May 27-June 8, 1792). Louis XVI.'s veto and the dismissal of the

Girondin ministry--thanks to an intrigue of Dumouriez, analogous to that

of Mirabeau and as ineffectual--dismayed the Feuillants and maddened the

Girondins; the latter, to avert popular fury, turned it upon the king.

The _émeute_ of the 20th of June, a burlesque which, but for the

persistent good-humour of Louis XVI., might have become a tragedy,

alarmed but did not overthrow the monarchy.

Manifesto of Brunswick.

The bourgeoisie, the Assembly, the country and La Fayette, one of the

leaders of the army, now embarked upon a royalist reaction, which would

perhaps have been efficacious, had it not been for the entry into the

affair of the Prussians as allies of the Austrians, and for the insolent

manifesto of the duke of Brunswick. The Assembly's cry of "the country

in danger" (July 11) proved to the nation that the king was incapable of

defending France against the foreigner; and the appeal of the federal

volunteers in Paris gave to the opposition, together with the war-song

of the Marseillaise, the army which had been refused by Louis XVI., now

disarmed. The vain attempts of the Gironde to reconcile the king and the

Revolution, the ill-advised decree of the Assembly on the 8th of August,

freeing La Fayette from his guilt in forsaking his army; his refusal to

vote for the deposition of the king, and the suspected treachery of the

court, led to the success of the republican forces when, on the 10th of

August, the mob of Paris organized by the revolutionary Commune rose

against the monarchy.

The insurrectional commune of Paris.

The September massacres.

The suspension and imprisonment of the king left the supreme authority

nominally in the hands of the Assembly, but actually in those of the

Commune, consisting of delegates from the administrative sections of

Paris. Installed at the Hôtel de Ville this attempted to influence the

discredited government, entered into conflict with the Legislative

Assembly, which considered its mission at an end, and paralyzed the

action of the executive council, particularly during the bloody days of

September, provoked by the discovery of the court's intrigues with the

foreigner, by the treachery of La Fayette, the capture of Longwy, the

investiture of Verdun by the Prussians (August 19-30), and finally by

the incendiary placards of Marat. Danton, a master of diplomatic and

military operations, had to avoid any rupture with the Commune.

Fortunately, on the very day of the dispersal of the Legislative

Assembly, Dumouriez saved France from a Prussian invasion by the victory

of Valmy, and by unauthorized negotiations which prefigured those of

Bonaparte at Léoben (September 22, 1792).

The popular insurrection against Louis XVI. determined the simultaneous

fall of the bourgeois régime and the establishment of the democracy in

power. The Legislative Assembly, without a mandate for modifying a

constitution that had become inapplicable with the suspension of the

monarch, had before disappearing convoked a National Convention, and as

the reward of the struggle for liberty had replaced the limited

franchise by universal suffrage. Public opinion became republican from

an excess of patriotism, and owing to the propaganda of the Jacobin

club; while the decree of the 25th of August 1792, which marked the

destruction of feudalism, now abolished in principle, caused the

peasants to rally definitely to the Republic.

The Convention, Sept. 21. 1792-Oct. 26, 1795.

This had hardly been established before it became distracted by the

fratricidal strife of its adherents, from September 22, 1792, to the

18th Fructidor (September 4, 1797). The electoral assemblies, in very

great majority, had desired this Republic to be democratic and

equalizing in spirit, but on the face of it, liberal, uniform and

propagandist; in consequence, the 782 deputies of the Convention were

not divided on principles, but only by personal rivalries and ambition.

They all wished for a unanimity and harmony impossible to obtain; and

being unable to convince they destroyed one another.

The parties.

The Girondins in the Convention played the part of the Feuillants in the

Legislative Assembly. Their party was not well disciplined, they

purposely refrained from making it so, and hence their ruin.

Oratorically they represented the spirit of the South; politically, the

ideas of the bourgeoisie in opposition to the democracy--which they

despised although making use of it--and the federalist system, from an

objection to the preponderance of Paris. Paris, on the other hand, had

elected only deputies of the Mountain, as the more advanced of the

Jacobins were called, that party being no more settled and united than

the others. They drew support from the Parisian democracy, and

considered the decentralization of the Girondins as endangering France's

unity, circumstances demanding a strong and highly concentrated

government; they opposed a republic on the model of that of Rome to the

Polish republic of the Gironde. Between the two came the _Plaine_, the

_Marais_, the troop of trembling bourgeois, sincerely attached to the

Revolution, but very moderate in the defence of their ideas; some

seeking a refuge from their timidity in hard-working committees, others

partaking in the violence of the Jacobins out of weakness or for reasons

of state.

The Girondins.

The Girondins were the first to take the lead; in order to retain it

they should have turned the Revolution into a government. They remained

an exclusive party, relying on the mob but with no influence over it.

Without a leader or popular power, they might have found both in Danton;

for, occupied chiefly with the external danger, he made advances towards

them, which they repulsed, partly in horror at the proceedings of

September, but chiefly because they saw in him the most formidable rival

in the path of the government. They waged war against him as

relentlessly as did the Constitutionalists against Mirabeau, whom he

resembled in his extreme ugliness and his volcanic eloquence. They drove

him into the arms of Robespierre, Marat and the Commune of Paris. On the

other hand, after the 23rd of September they declared Paris dangerous

for the Convention, and wanted to reduce it to "eighty-three influential

members." Danton and the Mountain responded by decreeing the unity and

indivisibility of the Republic, in order to emphasize the suspicions of

federalism which weighed upon the Girondins.

Trial and death of Louis XVI.

The trial of Louis XVI. still further enhanced the contrasts of ideas

and characters. The discovery of fresh proofs of treachery in the iron

chest (November 20, 1792) gave the Mountain a pretext for forcing on the

clash of parties and raising the question not of legality but of public

safety. By the execution of the king (January 21, 1793) they "cast down

a king's head as a challenge to the kings of Europe." In order to

preserve popular favour and their direction of the Republic, the

Girondins had not dared to pronounce against the sentence of death, but

had demanded an appeal to the people which was rejected; morally

weakened by this equivocal attitude they were still more so by foreign

events.

First European coalition.

First committee of pubic safety.

The king's death did not result in the unanimity so much desired by all

parties; it only caused the reaction on themselves of the hatred which

had been hitherto concentrated upon the king, and also an augmentation

in the armies of the foreigner, which obliged the revolutionists to face

all Europe. There was a coalition of monarchs, and the people of La

Vendée rose in defence of their faith. Dumouriez, the conqueror of

Jemappes (November 6, 1792), who invaded Holland, was beaten by the

Austrians (March 1793). A levy of 300,000 men was ordered; a Committee

of General Security was charged with the search for suspects; and

thenceforward military occurrences called forth parliamentary crises

and popular upheavals. Girondins and Jacobins unjustly accused one

another of leaving the traitors, the conspirators, the "stipendiaries of

Coblenz" unpunished. To avert the danger threatened by popular

dissatisfaction, the Gironde was persuaded to vote for the creation of a

revolutionary tribunal to judge suspects, while out of spite against

Danton who demanded it, they refused the strong government which might

have made a stand against the enemy (March 10, 1793). This was the first

of the exceptional measures which were to call down ruin upon them.

Whilst the insurrection in La Vendée was spreading, and Dumouriez

falling back upon Neerwinden, sentence of death was laid upon _émigrés_

and refractory priests; the treachery of Dumouriez, disappointed in his

Belgian projects, gave grounds for all kinds of suspicion, as that of

Mirabeau had formerly done, and led the Gironde to propose the new

government which they had refused to Danton. The transformation of the

provisional executive council into the Committee of Public

Safety--omnipotent save in financial matters--was voted because the

Girondins meant to control it; but Danton got the upper hand (April 6).

Struggle between the commune and the Gironde.

The Girondins, discredited in Paris, multiplied their attacks upon

Danton, now the master: they attributed the civil war and the disasters

of the foreign campaign to the despotism of the Paris Commune and the

clubs; they accused Marat of instigating the September massacres; and

they began the supreme struggle by demanding the election of a committee

of twelve deputies, charged with breaking up the anarchic authorities in

Paris (May 18). The complete success of the Girondin proposals; the

arrest of Hébert--the violent editor of the _Père Duchêne_; the

insurrection of the Girondins of Lyons against the Montagnard Commune;

the bad news from La Vendée--the military reverses; and the economic

situation which had compelled the fixing of a maximum price of corn (May

4) excited the "moral insurrections" of May 31 and June 2. Marat himself

sounded the tocsin, and Hanriot, at the head of the Parisian army,

surrounded the Convention. Despite the efforts of Danton and the

Committee of Public Safety, the arrest of the Girondins sealed the

victory of the Mountain.

Fall of the Gironde.

The threat of the Girondin Isnard was fulfilled. The federalist

insurrection, to avenge the violation of national representation,

responded to the Parisian insurrection. Sixty-nine departmental

governments protested against the violence done to the Convention; but

the ultra-democratic constitution of 1793 deprived the Girondins, who

were arming in the west, the south and the centre, of all legal force.

To the departments that were hostile to the dictatorship of Paris, and

the tyranny of Danton or Robespierre, it promised the referendum, an

executive of twenty-four citizens, universal suffrage, and the free

exercise of religion. The populace, who could not understand this

parliamentary quarrel, and were in a hurry to set up a national defence,

abandoned the Girondins, and the latter excited the enthusiasm of only

one person, Charlotte Corday, who by the murder of Marat ruined them

irretrievably. The battle of Brécourt was a defeat without a fight for

their party without stamina and their general without troops (July 13);

while on the 31st of October their leaders perished on the guillotine,

where they had been preceded by the queen, Marie Antoinette. The

Girondins and their adversaries were differentiated by neither religious

dissensions nor political divergency, but merely by a question of time.

The Girondins, when in power, had had scruples which had not troubled

them while scaling the ladder; idols of Paris, they had flattered her in

turn, and when Paris scorned them they sought support in the provinces.

A great responsibility for this defeat of the liberal and republican

bourgeoisie, whom they represented, is to be laid upon Madame Roland,

the Egeria of the party. An ardent patriot and republican, her relations

with Danton resembled those of Marie Antoinette with Mirabeau, in each

case a woman spoilt by flattery, enraged at indifference. She was the

ruin of the Gironde, but taught it how to die.

The fall of the Gironde left the country disturbed by civil war, and

the frontiers more seriously threatened than before Valmy. Bouchotte, a

totally inefficient minister for war, the Commune's man of straw, left

the army without food or ammunition, while the suspected officers

remained inactive. In the Angevin Vendée the incapable leaders let

themselves be beaten at Aubiers, Beaupréau and Thouars, at a time when

Cathelineau was taking possession of Saumur and threatening Nantes, the

capture of which would have permitted the insurgents in La Vendée to

join those of Brittany and receive provisions from England. Meanwhile,

the remnants of the Girondin federalists were overcome by the disguised

royalists, who had aroused the whole of the Rhône valley from Lyons to

Marseilles, had called in the Sardinians, and handed over the fleet and

the arsenal at Toulon to the English, whilst Paoli left Corsica at their

disposal. The scarcity of money due to the discrediting of the

assignats, the cessation of commerce, abroad and on the sea, and the bad

harvest of 1793, were added to all these dangers, and formed a serious

menace to France and the Convention.

The dictatorship of the first committee of public safety.

This meant a hard task for the first Committee of Public Safety and its

chief Danton. He was the only one to understand the conditions necessary

to a firm government; he caused the adjournment of the decentralizing

constitution of 1793, and set up a revolutionary government. The

Committee of Public Safety, now a permanency, annulled the Convention

and was itself the central authority, its organization in Paris being

the twelve committees substituted for the provisional executive

committee and the six ministers, the Committee of General Security for

the maintenance of the police, and the arbitrary Revolutionary Tribunal.

The execution of its orders in the departments was carried out by

omnipotent representatives "on mission" in the armies, by popular

societies--veritable missionaries of the Revolution--and by the

revolutionary committees which were its backbone.

Danton's failure.

Despite this Reign of Terror Danton failed; he could neither dominate

foes within nor divide those without. Representing the sane and vigorous

democracy, and like Jefferson a friend to liberty and self-government,

he had been obliged to set up the most despotic of governments in face

of internal anarchy and foreign invasion. Being of a temperament that

expressed itself only in action, and neither a theorist nor a

cabinet-minister, he held the views of a statesman without having a

following sufficient to realize them. Moreover, the proceedings of the

2nd of June, when the Commune of Paris had triumphed, had dealt him a

mortal blow. He in his turn tried to stem the tumultuous current which

had borne him along, and to prevent discord; but the check to his policy

of an understanding with Prussia and with Sardinia, to whom, like

Richelieu and D'Argenson, he offered the realization of her transalpine

ambition in exchange for Nice and Savoy, was added to the failure of his

temporizing methods in regard to the federalist insurgents, and of his

military operations against La Vendée. A man of action and not of

cunning shifts, he succumbed on the 10th of July to the blows of his own

government, which had passed from his hands into those of Robespierre,

his ambitious and crafty rival.

Second committee of public safety.

The second Committee of Public Safety lasted until the 27th of July

1794. Composed of twelve members, re-eligible every month, and dominated

by the triumvirate, Robespierre, Saint-Just and Couthon, it was stronger

than ever, since it obtained the right of appointing leaders, disposed

of money, and muzzled the press. Many of its members were sons of the

bourgeoisie, men who having been educated at college, thanks to some

charitable agency, in the pride of learning, and raised above their

original station, were ready for anything but had achieved nothing. They

had plenty of talent at command, were full of classical tirades against

tyranny, and, though sensitive enough in their private life, were

bloodthirsty butchers in their public relations. Such were Robespierre,

Saint-Just, Couthon, Billaud-Varenne, Cambon, Thuriot, Collot d'Herbois,

Barrère and Prieur de la Mârne. Working hand in hand with these

politicians, not always in accordance with them, but preserving a solid

front, were the specialists, Carnot, Robert Lindet, Jean Bon Saint-André

and Prieur de la Côte d'Or, honourable men, anxious above all to

safeguard their country. At the head of the former type Robespierre,

without special knowledge or exceptional talent, devoured by jealous

ambition and gifted with cold grave eloquence, enjoyed a great moral

ascendancy, due to his incorruptible purity of life and the invariably

correct behaviour that had been wanting in Mirabeau, and by the

persevering will which Danton had lacked. His marching orders were: no

more temporizing with the federalists or with generals who are afraid of

conquering; war to the death with all Europe in the name of

revolutionary propaganda and the monarchical tradition of natural

frontiers; and fear, as a means of government. The specialists answered

foreign foes by their organization of victory; as for foes at home, the

triumvirate crushed them beneath the Terror.

Defeat of the coalition.

France was saved by them and by that admirable outburst of patriotism

which provided 750,000 patriots for the army through the general levy of

the 16th of August 1793, aided, moreover, by the mistakes of her

enemies. Instead of profiting by Dumouriez's treachery and the successes

in La Vendée, the Coalition, divided over the resuscitated Polish

question, lost time on the frontiers of this new Poland of the west

which was sacrificing itself for the sake of a Universal Republic. Thus

in January 1794 the territory of France was cleared of the Prussians and

Austrians by the victories at Hondschoote, Wattignies and Wissembourg;

the army of La Vendée was repulsed from Granville, overwhelmed by

Hoche's army at Le Mans and Savenay, and its leaders shot; royalist

sedition was suppressed at Lyons, Bordeaux, Marseilles and Toulon;

federalist insurrections were wiped out by the terrible massacres of

Carrier at Nantes, the atrocities of Lebon at Arras, and the wholesale

executions of Fouché and Collot d'Herbois at Lyons; Louis XVI. and Marie

Antoinette guillotined, the _émigrés_ dispersed, denied or forsaken by

all Europe.

The new parties.

The party of tolerance.

But the triumphant Mountain was not as united as it boasted. The second

Committee of Public Safety had now to struggle against two oppositions:

one of the left, represented by Hébert, the Commune of Paris and the

Cordeliers; another of the right, Danton and his followers. The former

would not admit that the Terror was only a temporary method of defence;

for them it was a permanent system which was even to be strengthened in

order to crush all who were hostile to the Revolution. Their sanguinary

violence was combined with an anti-religious policy, not atheistical,

but inspired by mistrust of the clergy, and by a civic and deistic creed

that was a direct outcome of the federations. To these latter were due

the substitution of the Republican for the Gregorian calendar, and the

secular Feasts of Reason (November 19, 1793). The followers of Hébert

wanted to push forward the movement of May 31, 1793, in order to become

masters in their turn; while those of Danton were by way of arresting

it. They considered it time to re-establish the reign of ordinary laws

and justice; sick of bloodshed, with Camille Desmoulins they demanded a

"Committee of Clemency." A deist and therefore hostile to

"anti-religious masquerades," while uneasy at the absolute authority of

the Paris Commune, which aimed at suppressing the State, and at its

armed propaganda abroad, Robespierre resumed the struggle against its

illegal power, so fatal to the Gironde. His boldness succeeded (March

24, 1794), and then, jealous of Danton's activity and statesmanship, and

exasperated by the jeers of his friends, he rid himself of the party of

tolerance by a parody of justice (April 5).

Robespierre's dictatorship.

9th Thermidor.

Robespierre now stood alone. During five months, while affecting to be

the representative of "a reign of justice and virtue," he laboured at

strengthening his politico-religious dictatorship--already so formidably

armed--with new powers. "The incorruptible wanted to become the

invulnerable" and the scaffold of the guillotine was crowded. By his

dogma of the supreme state Robespierre founded a theocratic government

with the police as an Inquisition. The festival of the new doctrine,

which turned the head of the new pontiff (June 8), the _loi de

Prairial_, or "code of legal murder" (June 10), which gave the deputies

themselves into his hand; and the multiplication of executions at a time

when the victory of Fleurus (June 25) showed the uselessness and

barbarity of this aggravation of the Reign of Terror provoked against

him the victorious coalition of revenge, lassitude and fear. Vanquished

and imprisoned, he refused to take part in the illegal action proposed

by the Commune against the Convention. Robespierre was no man of action.

On the 9th Thermidor (July 27, 1794) he fell into the gulf that had

opened on the 31st of May, and through which the 18th Brumaire was

visible.

Third committee of public safety.

Although brought about by the Terrorists, the tragic fall of Robespierre

put an end to the Reign of Terror; for their chiefs having disappeared,

the subordinates were too much divided to keep up the dictatorship of

the third Committee of Public Safety, and reaction soon set in. After a

change in _personnel_ in favour of the surviving Dantonists, came a

limitation to the powers of the Committee of Public Safety, now placed

in dependence upon the Convention; and next followed the destruction of

the revolutionary system, the Girondin decentralization and the

resuscitation of departmental governments; the reform of the

Revolutionary Tribunal on the 10th of August; the suppression of the

Commune of Paris on the 1st of September, and of the salary of forty

_sous_ given to members of the sections; the abolition of the maximum,

the suppression of the Guillotine, the opening of the prisons, the

closing of the Jacobin club (November 11), and the henceforward

insignificant existence of the popular societies.

Resuscitation of the royalist party.

Popular risings of Germinal and Prairial.

Power reverted to the Girondins and Dantonists, who re-entered the

Convention on the 18th of December; but with them re-entered likewise

the royalists of Lyons, Marseilles and Toulon, and further, after the

peace of Basel, many young men set free from the army, hostile to the

Jacobins and defenders of the now moderate and peace-making Convention.

These _muscadins_ and _incroyables_, led by Fréron, Tallien and

Barras--former revolutionists who had become aristocrats--profited by

the restored liberty of the press to prepare for days of battle in the

salons of the _merveilleuses_ Madame Tallien, Madame de Staël and Madame

Récamier, as the _sans-culottes_ had formerly done in the clubs. The

remnants of Robespierre's faction became alarmed at this Thermidor

reaction, in which they scented royalism. Aided by famine, by the

suppression of the maximum, and by the imminent bankruptcy of the

assignats, they endeavoured to arouse the working classes and the former

Hanriot companies against a government which was trying to destroy the

republic, and had broken the busts of Marat and guillotined Carrier and

Fouquier-Tinville, the former public prosecutor. Thus the risings of the

12th Germinal (April 1, 1795) and of the 1st Prairial (May 20) were

economic revolts rather than insurrections excited by the deputies of

the Mountain; in order to suppress them the reactionaries called in the

army. Owing to this first intervention of the troops in politics, the

Committee of Public Safety, which aimed not so much at a moderate policy

as at steering a middle course between the Thermidorians of the Right

and of the Left, was able to dispense with the latter.

The white terror.

The royalists now supposed that their hour had come. In the south, the

companions of Jehu and of the Sun inaugurated a "White Terror," which

had not even the apparent excuse of the public safety or of exasperated

patriotism. At the same time they prepared for a twofold insurrection

against the republic--in the west with the help of England, and in the

east with that of Austria--by an attempt to bribe General Pichegru. But

though the heads of the government wanted to put an end to the

Revolution they had no thought of restoring the monarchy in favour of

the Comte de Provence, who had taken the title of Louis XVIII. on

hearing of the death of the dauphin in the Temple, and still less of

bringing back the _ancien régime_. Hoche crushed the insurrection of

the Chouans and the Bretons at Quiberon on the 2nd of July 1795, and

Pichegru, scared, refused to entangle himself any further.

The constitution of the year III.

The 13th Vendémiaire.

To cut off all danger from royalists or terrorists the Convention now

voted the Constitution of the year III.; suppressing that of 1793, in

order to counteract the terrorists, and re-establishing the bourgeois

limited franchise with election in two degrees--a less liberal

arrangement than that granted from 1789 to 1792. The chambers of the

Five Hundred and of the Ancients were elected by the moneyed and

intellectual aristocracy, and were to be re-elected by thirds annually.

The executive authority, entrusted to five Directors, was no more than a

definite and very strong Committee of Public Safety; but Sieyès, the

author of the new constitution, in opposition to the royalists, had

secured places of refuge for his party by reserving posts as directors

for the regicides, and two-thirds of the deputies' seats for members of

the Convention. In self-defence against this continuance of the policy

and the _personnel_ of the Convention--a modern "Long Parliament"--the

royalists, persistent street-fighters and masters in the "sections"

after the suppression of the daily indemnification of forty _sous_,

attempted the insurrection of the 13th Vendémiaire (October 5, 1795),

which was easily put down by General Bonaparte.

Military achievements of the convention.

Treaty of Basel.

Thus the bourgeois republic reaped the fruits of its predecessor's

external policy. After the freeing of the land in January 1794 an

impulse had been given to the spirit of conquest which had gradually

succeeded to the disinterested fever of propaganda and overheated

patriotism. This it was which had sustained Robespierre's dictatorship;

and, owing to the "amalgam" and the re-establishment of discipline,

Belgium and the left bank of the Rhine had been conquered and Holland

occupied, simultaneously with Kosciusko's rising in Poland, Prussia's

necessity of keeping and extending her Polish acquisitions,

Robespierre's death, the prevalent desires of the majority, and the

continued victories of Pichegru, Jourdan and Moreau, enfeebled the

coalition. At Basel (April-July 1795) republican France, having rejoined

the concert of Europe, signed the long-awaited peace with Prussia,

Spain, Holland and the grand-duke of Tuscany. But thanks to the past

influence of the Girondin party, who had caused the war, and of the

regicides of the Mountain, this peace not only ratified the conquest of

Belgium, the left bank of the Rhine and Santo Domingo, but paved the way

for fresh conquests; for the old spirit of domination and persistent

hostility to Austria attracted the destinies of the Revolution

definitely towards war.

Internal achievements.

The work of internal construction amidst this continued battle against

the whole world had been no less remarkable. The Constituent Assembly

had been more destructive than constructive; but the Convention

preserved intact those fundamental principles of civil liberty which had

been the main results of the Revolution: the equality so dear to the

French, and the sovereignty of the people--the foundation of democracy.

It also managed to engage private interests in state reform by creating

the Grand Livre de la Dette Publique (September 13-26, 1793), and

enlisted peasant and bourgeois savings in social reforms by the

distribution and sale of national property. But with views reaching

beyond equality of rights to a certain equality of property, the

committees, as regards legislation, poor relief and instruction, laid

down principles which have never been realized, save in the matter of

the metric system; so that the Convention which was dispersed on the

16th of October 1795 made a greater impression on political history and

social ideas than on institutions. Its disappearance left a great blank.

The Directory.

During four years the Directory attempted to fill this blank. Being the

outcome of the Constitution of the year III., it should have been the

organizing and pacifying government of the Republic; in reality it

sought not to create, but to preserve its own existence. Its internal

weakness, between the danger of anarchy and the opposition of the

monarchists, was extreme; and it soon became discredited by its own

_coups d'état_ and by financial impotence in the eyes of a nation sick

of revolution, aspiring towards peace and the resumption of economic

undertakings. As to foreign affairs, its aggressive policy imperilled

the conquests that had been the glory of the Convention, and caused the

frontiers of France, the defence of which had been a point of honour

with the Republic, to be called in question. Finally, there was no real

government on the part of the five directors: La Révellière-Lépeaux, an

honest man but weak; Reubell, the negotiator of the Hague; Letourneur,

an officer of talent; Barras, a man of intrigue, corrupt and without

real convictions; and Carnot, the only really worthy member. They never

understood one another, and never consulted together in hours of danger,

save to embroil matters in politics as in war. Leaning on the bourgeois,

conservative, liberal and anti-clerical republicans, they were no more

able than was the Thermidor party to re-establish the freedom that had

been suspended by revolutionary despotism; they created a ministry of

police, interdicted the clubs and popular societies, distracted the

press, and with partiality undertook the separation of Church and State

voted on the 18th of September 1794. Their real defence against counter

revolution was the army; but, by a further contradiction, they

reinforced the army attached to the Revolution while seeking an alliance

with the peacemaking bourgeoisie. Their party had therefore no more

homogeneity than had their policy.

The parties.

Moreover the Directory could not govern alone; it had to rely upon two

other parties, according to circumstances: the republican-democrats and

the disguised royalists. The former, purely anti-royalist, thought only

of remedying the sufferings of the people. Roused by the collapse of the

assignats, following upon the ruin of industry and the arrest of

commerce, they were still further exasperated by the speculations of the

financiers, by the jobbery which prevailed throughout the

administration, and by the sale of national property which had profited

hardly any but the bourgeoisie. After the 13th Vendémiaire the royalists

too, deceived in their hopes, were expecting to return gradually to the

councils, thanks to the high property qualification for the franchise.

Under the name of "moderates" they demanded an end to this war which

England continued and Austria threatened to recommence, and that the

Directory from self-interested motives refused to conclude; they desired

the abandonment of revolutionary proceedings, order in finance and

religious peace.

Struggle against the royalists.

Struggle against the republican democrats and the socialists.

Babeuf.

The Directory, then, was in a minority in the country, and had to be

ever on the alert against faction; all possible methods seemed

legitimate, and during two years appeared successful. Order was

maintained in France, even the royalist west being pacified, thanks to

Hoche, who finished his victorious campaign of 1796 against Stofflet,

Charette and Cadoudal, by using mild and just measures to complete the

subjection of the country. The greatest danger lay in the

republican-democrats and their socialist ally, François Noel

("Gracchus") Babeuf (q.v.). The former had united the Jacobins and the

more violent members of the Convention in their club, the Société du

Panthéon; and their fusion, after the closing of the club, with the

secret society of the Babouvists lent formidable strength to this party,

with which Barras was secretly in league. The terrorist party, deprived

of its head, had found a new leader, who, by developing the consequences

of the Revolution's acts to their logical conclusion, gave first

expression to the levelling principle of communism. He proclaimed the

right of property as appertaining to the state, that is, to the whole

community; the doctrine of equality as absolutely opposed to social

inequality of any kind--that of property as well as that of rank; and

finally the inadequacy of the solution of the agrarian question, which

had profited scarcely any one, save a new class of privileged

individuals. But these socialist demands were premature; the attack of

the camp of Grenelle upon constitutional order ended merely in the

arrest and guillotining of Babeuf (September 9, 1796-May 25, 1797).

Financial policy of the Directory.

The liquidation of the financial inheritance of the Convention was no

less difficult. The successive issues of assignats, and the

multiplication of counterfeits made abroad, had so depreciated this

paper money that an assignat of 100 francs was in February 1796 worth

only 30 centimes; while the government, obliged to accept them at their

nominal value, no longer collected any taxes and could not pay salaries.

The destruction of the plate for printing assignats, on the 18th of

February 1796, did not prevent the drop in the forty milliards still in

circulation. Territorial mandates were now tried, which inspired no

greater confidence, but served to liquidate two-thirds of the debt, the

remaining third being consolidated by its dependence on the Grand Livre

(September 30, 1797). This widespread bankruptcy, falling chiefly on the

bourgeoisie, inaugurated a reaction which lasted until 1830 against the

chief principle of the Constituent Assembly, which had favoured indirect

taxation as producing a large sum without imposing any very obvious

burden. The bureaucrats of the old system--having returned to their

offices and being used to these indirect taxes--lent their assistance,

and thus the Directory was enabled to maintain its struggle against the

Coalition.

External policy.

All system in finance having disappeared, war provided the Directory,

now _in extremis_, with a treasury, and was its only source for

supplying constitutional needs; while it opened a path to the military

commanders who were to be the support and the glory of the state.

England remaining invulnerable in her insular position despite Hoche's

attempt to land in Ireland in 1796, the Directory resumed the

traditional policy against Austria of conquering the natural frontiers,

Carnot furnishing the plans; hence the war in southern Germany, in which

Jourdan and Moreau were repulsed by an inferior force under the archduke

Charles, and Bonaparte's triumphant Italian campaign. Chief of an army

that he had made irresistible, not by honour but by glory, and master of

wealth by rapine, Bonaparte imposed his will upon the Directory, which

he provided with funds. After having separated the Piedmontese from the

Austrians, whom he drove back into Tyrol, and repulsed offensive

reprisals of Wurmser and Alvinzi on four occasions, he stopped short at

the preliminary negotiations of Léoben just at the moment when the

Directory, discouraged by the problem of Italian reconstitution, was

preparing the army of the Rhine to re-enter the field under the command

of Hoche. Bonaparte thus gained the good opinion of peace-loving

Frenchmen; he partitioned Venetian territory with Austria, contrary to

French interests but conformably with his own in Italy, and henceforward

was the decisive factor in French and European policy, like Caesar or

Pompey of old. England, in consternation, offered in her turn to

negotiate at Lille.

Struggle against the royalists.

18th Fructidor.

These military successes did not prevent the Directory, like the

Thermidorians, from losing ground in the country. Every strategic truce

since 1795 had been marked by a political crisis; peace reawakened

opposition. The constitutional party, royalist in reality, had made

alarming progress, chiefly owing to the Babouvist conspiracy; they now

tried to corrupt the republican generals, and Condé procured the

treachery of Pichegru, Kellermann and General Ferrand at Besançon.

Moreover, their Clichy club, directed by the abbé Brottier, manipulated

Parisian opinion; while many of the refractory priests, having returned

after the liberal Public Worship Act of September 1795, made active

propaganda against the principles of the Revolution, and plotted the

fall of the Directory as maintaining the State's independence of the

Church. Thus the partial elections of the year V. (May 20, 1797) had

brought back into the two councils a counter-revolutionary majority of

royalists, constitutionalists of 1791, Catholics and moderates. The

Director Letourneur had been replaced by Barthélemy, who had negotiated

the treaty of Basel and was a constitutional monarchist. So that the

executive not only found it impossible to govern, owing to the

opposition of the councils and a vehement press-campaign, but was

distracted by ceaseless internal conflict. Carnot and Barthélemy wished

to meet ecclesiastical opposition by legal measures only, and demanded

peace; while Barras, La Révellière and Reubell saw no other remedy save

military force. The attempt of the counter-revolutionaries to make an

army for themselves out of the guard of the Legislative Assembly, and

the success of the Catholics, who had managed at the end of August 1797

to repeal the laws against refractory priests, determined the Directory

to appeal from the rebellious parliament to the ready swords of Augereau

and Bernadotte. On the 18th Fructidor (September 4, 1797) Bonaparte's

lieutenants, backed up by the whole army, stopped the elections in

forty-nine departments, and deported to Guiana many deputies of both

councils, journalists and non-juring priests, as well as the director

Barthélemy, though Carnot escaped into Switzerland. The royalist party

was once more overthrown, but with it the republican constitution

itself. Thus every act of violence still further confirmed the new

empire of the army and the defeat of principles, preparing the way for

military despotism.

Aggressive policy of the Directory.

Political and financial _coups d'état_ were not enough for the

directors. In order to win back public opinion, tired of internecine

quarrels and sickened by the scandalous immorality of the generals and

of those in power, and to remove from Paris an army which after having

given them a fresh lease of life was now a menace to them, war appeared

their only hopeful course. They attempted to renew the designs of Louis

XIV. and anticipate those of Napoleon. But Bonaparte saw what they were

planning; and to the rupture of the negotiations at Lille and an order

for the resumption of hostilities he responded by a fresh act of

disobedience and the infliction on the Directory of the peace of

Campo-Formio, on October 17, 1797. The directors were consoled for this

enforced peace by acquiring the left bank of the Rhine and Belgium, and

for the forfeiture of republican principles by attaining what had for so

long been the ambition of the monarchy. But the army continued a menace.

To avoid disbanding it, which might, as after the peace of Basel, have

given the counter-revolution further auxiliaries, the Directory

appointed Bonaparte chief of the Army of England, and employed Jourdan

to revise the conscription laws so as to make military service a

permanent duty of the citizen, since war was now to be the permanent

object of policy. The Directory finally conceived the gigantic project

of bolstering up the French Republic--the triumph of which was

celebrated by the peace of Campo-Formio--by forming the neighbouring

weak states into tributary vassal republics. This system had already

been applied to the Batavian republic in 1795, to the Ligurian and

Cisalpine republics in June 1797; it was extended to that of Mülhausen

on the 28th of January 1798, to the Roman republic in February, to the

Helvetian in April, while the Parthenopaean republic (Naples) was to be

established in 1799. This was an international _coup de force_, which

presupposed that all these nations in whose eyes independence was

flaunted would make no claim to enjoy it; that though they had been

beaten and pillaged they would not learn to conquer in their turn; and

that the king of Sardinia, dispossessed of Milan, the grand-duke of

Tuscany who had given refuge to the pope when driven from Rome, and the

king of Naples, who had opened his ports to Nelson's fleet, would not

find allies to make a stand against this hypocritical system.

Coup d'état of the 22nd Floréal.

Bonaparte in Egypt.

The second coalition.

What happened was exactly the contrary. Meanwhile, the armies were kept

in perpetual motion, procuring money for the impecunious Directory,

making a diversion for internal discontent, and also permitting of a

"reversed Fructidor," against the anarchists, who had got the upper hand

in the partial elections of May 1798. The social danger was averted in

its turn after the clerical danger had been dissipated. The next task

was to relieve Paris of Bonaparte, who had already refused to repeat

Hoche's unhappy expedition to Ireland and to attack England at home

without either money or a navy. The pecuniary resources of Berne and

the wealth of Rome fortunately tided over the financial difficulty and

provided for the expedition to Egypt, which permitted Bonaparte to wait

"for the fruit to ripen"--i.e. till the Directory should be ruined in

the eyes of France and of all Europe. The disaster of Aboukir (August 1,

1798) speedily decided the coalition pending between England, Austria,

the Empire, Portugal, Naples, Russia and Turkey. The Directory had to

make a stand or perish, and with it the Republic. The directors had

thought France might retain a monopoly in numbers and in initiative.

They soon perceived that enthusiasm is not as great for a war of policy

and conquest as for a war of national defence; and the army dwindled,

since a country cannot bleed itself to death. The law of conscription

was voted on the 5th of September 1798; and the tragedy of Rastadt,

where the French commissioners were assassinated, was the opening of a

war, desired but ill-prepared for, in which the Directory showed

hesitation in strategy and incoherence in tactics, over a

disproportionate area in Germany, Switzerland and Italy. Military

reverses were inevitable, and responsibility for them could not be

shirked. As though shattered by a reverberant echo from the cannon of

the Trebbia, the Directory crumbled to pieces, succumbing on the 18th of

June 1799 beneath the reprobation showered on Treilhard, Merlin de

Douai, and La Révellière-Lépeaux. A few more military disasters,

royalist insurrections in the south, Chouan disturbances in Normandy,

Orleanist intrigues and the end came. To soothe the populace and protect

the frontier more was required than the resumption, as in all grave

crises of the Revolution, of terrorist measures such as forced taxation

or the law of hostages; the new Directory, Sieyès presiding, saw that

for the indispensable revision of the constitution "a head and a sword"

were needed. Moreau being unattainable, Joubert was to be the sword of

Sieyès; but, when he was killed at the battle of Novi, the sword of the

Revolution fell into the hands of Bonaparte.

Coup d'état of the 18th Brumaire.

Although Brune and Masséna retrieved the fight at Bergen and Zürich, and

although the Allies lingered on the frontier as they had done after

Valmy, still the fortunes of the Directory were not restored. Success

was reserved for Bonaparte, suddenly landing at Fréjus with the prestige

of his victories in the East, and now, after Hoche's death, appearing as

sole master of the armies. He manoeuvred among the parties as on the

13th Vendémiaire. On the 18th Brumaire of the year VIII. France and the

army fell together at his feet. By a twofold _coup d'état_,

parliamentary and military, he culled the fruits of the Directory's

systematic aggression and unpopularity, and realized the universal

desires of the rich bourgeoisie, tired of warfare; of the wretched

populace; of landholders, afraid of a return to the old order of things;

of royalists, who looked upon Bonaparte as a future Monk; of priests and

their people, who hoped for an indulgent treatment of Catholicism; and

finally of the immense majority of the French, who love to be ruled and

for long had had no efficient government. There was hardly any one to

defend a liberty which they had never known. France had, indeed,

remained monarchist at heart for all her revolutionary appearance; and

Bonaparte added but a name, though an illustrious one, to the series of

national or local dictatorships, which, after the departure of the weak

Louis XVI., had maintained a sort of informal republican royalty.

The Consulate, Sept. 11, 1799-May 18, 1804.

On the night of the 19th Brumaire a mere ghost of an Assembly abolished

the constitution of the year III., ordained the provisionary Consulate,

and legalized the coup d'état in favour of Bonaparte. A striking and

singular event; for the history of France and a great part of Europe was

now for fifteen years to be summed up in the person of a single man (see

NAPOLEON).

The constitution of the year VIII.

This night of Brumaire, however, seemed to be a victory for Sieyès

rather than for Bonaparte. He it was who originated the project which

the legislative commissions, charged with elaborating the new

constitution, had to discuss. Bonaparte's cleverness lay in opposing

Daunou's plan to that of Sieyès, and in retaining only those portions of

both which could serve his ambition. Parliamentary institutions annulled

by the complication of three assemblies--the Council of State which

drafted bills, the Tribunate which discussed them without voting them,

and the Legislative Assembly which voted them without discussing them;

popular suffrage, mutilated by the lists of notables (on which the

members of the Assemblies were to be chosen by the conservative senate);

and the triple executive authority of the consuls, elected for ten

years: all these semblances of constitutional authority were adopted by

Bonaparte. But he abolished the post of Grand Elector, which Sieyès had

reserved for himself, in order to reinforce the real authority of the

First Consul himself--by leaving the two other consuls, Cambacérès and

Lebrun, as well as the Assemblies, equally weak. Thus the aristocratic

constitution of Sieyès was transformed into an unavowed dictatorship, a

public ratification of which the First Consul obtained by a third _coup

d'état_ from the intimidated and yet reassured electors-reassured by his

dazzling but unconvincing offers of peace to the victorious Coalition

(which repulsed them), by the rapid disarmament of La Vendée, and by the

proclamations in which he filled the ears of the infatuated people with

the new talk of stability of government, order, justice and moderation.

He gave every one a feeling that France was governed once more by a real

statesman, that a pilot was at the helm.

The Consulate.