Some months ago Lady Sykes accidentally came across a very rare
work--Henry Redhead Yorke’s “Letters from France, written in
1802.” She immediately became its possessor, and a perusal of its
contents suggested the excellent idea of editing the book for modern
publication: for, although intensely interesting, Yorke’s “Letters”
were written in the verbose style characteristic of his day. By
judicious pruning and omissions Lady Sykes has reduced the volume
by about a third, without, however, omitting anything of the least
importance; whereby she enables in a concise manner students of French
history to bridge over the important though little known period which
elapsed between the downfall of Robespierre and the Consulate.
Many imagine that immediately after the Reign of Terror ended things
settled down very quickly in France, and that whatever benefits
accrued from the Revolution soon blossomed and bore abundant fruit.
It was, however, very much otherwise; and the prevalent idea, that
the prosperity of modern France is due to the great Revolution, is
a fallacy; for, independently of the chaos created by the Reign of
Terror, we must take into consideration the decade of Napoleonic
despotism which separates the Revolution from the beginning of what is
known as _la France moderne_.
Henry Redhead was born in 1772, most probably in the West Indies,
whence he was fetched as a child, and brought up at Little Eaton,
near Derby. He was evidently a youth of considerable observation and
studious habits, and before he was twenty had written a pamphlet
against negro emancipation, which, however, he recalled a couple
of years later as the result of a visit to Paris, then in the early
throes of the Revolution. Redhead threw himself heart and soul with the
enthusiasm of youth into a popular movement which he believed was to
liberate humanity from every sort of bondage, and bring about a period
of quite utopian peace and prosperity. Whilst under the influence of
the buoyant rhetoric that marked the first period of the Revolution,
he was privileged to witness many of the most striking events and
scenes in that momentous drama; including the trial of Louis XVI., in
connection with which he gives in these “Letters” several facts omitted
by general historians. There were at this time several other British
enthusiasts in Paris, amongst them Robert and John Sheares, with whom
he became acquainted, and who induced him to join the British Club, an
association at which were discussed such subjects as the advantage of
liberating England by the assassination of that harmless monarch George
III. Redhead would not, however, hear of any such project, and, after
a violent quarrel with the Sheares, left the Club, being denounced to
the Convention by Robert Rayment. He now concluded it were wiser to put
the frontier between himself and the disorderly and fanatical horde of
informers and informed who had, with surprising rapidity, seized the
reins of administration in Paris. He changed his name, assumed that of
Yorke, and, travelling through Holland, reached England in 1793, where
he joined a liberal debating society in Derby, and became distinguished
for his rhetorical eloquence. It was soon alleged against him, however,
that he had, amongst other revolutionary ebullitions, declared, “You
have before you, young as I am (about twenty-two years of age), a man
who has been concerned in three revolutions already, who essentially
contributed to serve the Republic in America, who contributed to that
of Holland, who materially assisted in that of France, and who will
continue to cause revolutions all over the world.” This striking
boast did not receive the support Redhead imagined it would; for he
was promptly arrested, and at the York Spring Assizes in 1795, true
bills were found against him for conspiracy, sedition and libel. His
trial took place on July 23, 1795, at York, but his co-defendant,
Joseph Gales, printer of the “Sheffield Register,” and Richard Davison,
compositor, absconded. Although he repudiated the violent words
imputed to him, and declared himself to be a loyal citizen, Redhead
was none the less sentenced to two years’ imprisonment in Dorchester
Castle, whence he was not released until March 1799. Whilst in prison
his views, political and otherwise, became greatly modified, and,
although he remained a staunch Liberal, he conceived an abhorrence of
revolutionary methods, considering them as the most unlikely to conduce
to true freedom or to the prosperity of the peoples who employed them.
In 1802 he revisited France, the result of his observations on this
occasion being embodied in the “Letters from France.” He remained in
Paris three months, making notes of all he saw, visiting such old
friends as had survived the Terror, and seeing for himself all the
havoc the Revolution had wrought. On his return to England Redhead
continued to place his talents at the disposal of the Liberal party.
In 1811 he appeared in London, and delivered a series of lectures on
historical and political subjects; but his health completely broke
down, and although he had been induced by Richard Valpy to undertake
the continuation of John Campbell’s “Lives of British Admirals,”
he was too ill to finish that work, and died at Chelsea, after a
brief illness, on January 28, 1813. Mr. Redhead married in 1800 the
accomplished daughter of Mr. Andrews, keeper of Dorchester Castle, by
whom he had four children. This lady accompanied him, and together with
her friend, Mrs. Cosway, the wife of the celebrated painter and herself
a fine artist, was his companion on most of his excursions in that city
and its neighbourhood.
Redhead was a man of very keen perception, generous impulse, and,
having the courage of his opinions, was never ashamed to own that
circumstances had occasionally compelled him to change them. The best
known of his numerous publications is this volume of “Letters from
France,” written with the object of exposing the fruits of a tyrannical
and corrupt form of government, whose wires were pulled by unscrupulous
miscreants in the oft-blasphemed names of “Liberty, Equality, and
Fraternity.” These “Letters” were not published until after the
author’s death, when Mrs. Redhead found copies of them amongst her
husband’s effects, and a very limited edition was printed; so that at
present the work is exceedingly scarce.
The value of Redhead Yorke’s “Letters from France” consists not only
in the remarkable picture he gives of Paris eight years after the
Reign of Terror, but in the fact that, as he was intimately acquainted
with many of those who played a prominent part in that tragedy, he was
frequently able to give an account of their latter years. In 1802 the
majority, however, of those with whom he had lived on terms of fairly
good fellowship on the occasion of his first visit to France, had
been guillotined; and, on the other hand, not a few who had been but
little known in his earlier years had now risen to conspicuous official
positions--which, more often than not, they did not fill so much for
their country’s good as for their own. He gives us a very interesting
account of a conversation which he had with Tom Paine, whom he had
known and admired previously, but whom he now discovered in a state of
abject poverty on the very day that the American Republic determined
to bring him back to his own country, where, however, he lived, after
all his sufferings and misery in France, only two years. Our author was
also well acquainted with that remarkable woman, Miss Helen Williams;
and he supplies many unedited anecdotes of other Revolutionary
celebrities, including Théroigne de Mirecourt; David, the celebrated
painter, and his wife; the partially insane English revolutionary,
Colonel Oswald; Joseph Le Bon, and the brothers Sheares. One of them
was the son of that unhappy Amazon, Théroigne de Mirecourt.
The perusal of these “Letters” will probably convince many readers
that this Revolution did not benefit humanity to a quarter of the
extent which its enthusiasts would have us believe it did. In fact,
Redhead, like most travellers in France at that period, soon came to
the conclusion, from personal and unprejudiced observation, that the
much-vaunted great Revolution had been a failure. The class which
was to have more especially benefited by it was reduced to a greater
depth of degradation and poverty in the first decade of the nineteenth
century than ever it had been under the _ancien régime_: the
peasantry and the working classes in general were for the most part
out of employment; and the pernicious forced recruiting system which
Napoleon had introduced was draining the country of useful men, whose
place in the fields and manufactories had to be filled by incompetent
lads, old men, and even by girls and women. At least a third of the
arable land had gone out of cultivation, and French manufactures had
sunk to the utmost insignificance. The rich landowners who had hitherto
helped the peasantry were either dead, in exile or else bankrupt. The
village school, like the village church, was generally closed; and
the rustic population were endeavouring to escape the conscription
which weighed so heavily on the country. Higher education was also at
a standstill: the richly endowed universities, colleges, and public
schools which had been founded in the eighteenth century, had been
pillaged, many of their buildings were in ruins, and their libraries
confiscated by the Revolutionaries, had not yet been restored. So
it was with the scientific and literary institutions in the capital
and larger towns, though in 1802 some of these were beginning to
slowly revive. The Revolution was, in short, an orgy of brute force,
a destroyer producing nothing great either in art, literature, or
science. David was the representative painter, and his pictures, when
put up for auction in a modern sale-room, now fetch scarcely the price
of the canvas and frames on which they are painted and stretched.
The exquisite highly finished art-work of the eighteenth century in
bronze, furniture, and ceramic, which still sells for fabulous prices
at Christie’s and the Hôtel Drouet, was lost; and it was not until
the Empire was well established that it began gradually to improve,
a proof, if one were needed, that the artistic taste of the nation
had not been entirely extinguished in the general disorder that had
overwhelmed the capital and country. The utmost licentiousness reigned
supreme in Paris at this period; and Redhead’s description of the
nightly and indecent scenes in the Palais Royal, which proved so
attractive to British and other foreign bachelors, shows that they
were not unlike those that draw crowds of tourists to the heights of
Montmartre in 1906. The shop windows in 1802, as at present, were
filled with abominable and blasphemous prints: and the whole atmosphere
of Parisian life was charged with an unwholesome _miasma_ which
filled Redhead with horror and disgust, despite his fiery advocacy of
the Revolution in its earlier stages.
The man of genius who was destined eventually to re-establish order
was only First Consul; but even then people were beginning to whisper
that he intended to make himself King or Emperor. Naturally, Redhead,
as an Englishman, has not many compliments to bestow on Napoleon;
though, had he lived to see the accomplishment of the great Corsican’s
work, he might have entertained a higher opinion of the “ogre.” As it
was, Redhead was disgusted with Napoleon’s ostentatious display, and
above all with the manner in which the spoils stolen from Italy were
exhibited in Paris; one of his most interesting letters being that
in which he describes the condition of the Louvre even as he saw it
stuffed with the treasures of Italy, many of which bore inscriptions he
considered an outrage to decency. Thus, for instance, on the _Madonna
del Orto_ might have been read, “This picture was taken from the
church of Santa Maria del Orto at Venice,” or again, “This picture, one
of the best that Paul Veronese ever painted, was taken from the church
of the nuns of St. Zacharia at Venice,” and so on. Unfortunately,
many of the pictures brought to Paris were injudiciously restored;
and when, after the Treaty of Vienna, they were returned to Italy, it
was found that they had been irreparably damaged. Not content with
carrying off pictures, statues, and other works of art, Napoleon carted
away the chief archives of the foremost Italian cities; and these were
so carelessly packed that many hundreds of valuable documents were
irretrievably lost. From the artistic and historical point of view,
the French Revolution was especially injurious to Italy. Venice not
only lost her independence, but half her art treasures. During the
French occupation at the beginning of the nineteenth century, forty
of her churches were closed and thirty of them destroyed, amongst the
finest of them being San Gregorio, still standing though desecrated;
and the Servi, one of the largest and most historical in the city,
not a stone of which exists. Eugène Beauharnais, when Governor of
Venice, pulled down Palladio’s Church of San Geminiano, which stood
opposite St. Mark’s, to increase the Royal Palace, and over thirty of
the characteristic and beautiful _campanile_, or church towers,
which form so delightful a feature in Venetian scenery, were destroyed,
their material being carted away to build the new fortifications.
At Verona the magnificent church of San Zeno was desecrated (since
restored), and two out of three of its splendid cloisters were wantonly
laid level. Padua, and, indeed, every other city in Venetia, suffered
losses. Ravenna lost three of the handsomest of her ancient basilicas,
including San Agnese, whose fine mosaics are now in the Berlin Museum.
Milan lost fifty churches full of fine frescoes by Leonardo, Luini,
Foppa, and Proccaccino. At Genoa, thanks to the French Revolutionaries,
the magnificent Church of San Domenico was demolished, as well as
that of San Francesco, which contained the tombs of the Doges, not
one of which was spared. Moreover, the sudden suppression of the
law of primogeniture ruined half the Italian nobility, and obliged
them to sell at low prices the accumulated art treasures of their
ancestors. To this day Italy is covered with churches and chapels
ruined during the French occupation--which was effected on the pretext
of “liberating” that country from superstition.
Every subsequent Revolution which has taken place in France since
1793--in 1838, 1848, and 1870--has originated in the continuance of
the Jacobin traditions, the main object of which is to substitute
free-thought for Christianity. In each case the Revolution has ended
in disorder and bloodshed, and has been succeeded by a more or less
modified form of autocracy; yet the dawn of the twentieth century is
witnessing what may be termed the most powerful combat between the
Revolutionary traditions and those of the _ancien régime_ which
has taken place since the execution of Louis XVI. Europe is to-day
watching with anxiety the result of the abrogation of that very
Concordat in honour of the signing of which a _Te Deum_ was sung
in Notre Dame amidst the utmost ecclesiastical, civil, and military
pomp, and attended by Napoleon and his Court, a function described by
Redhead in a letter which is especially interesting at the present time.
It is not by religious persecution that a lasting Republic can be
established. France, so generous in her impulses, so artistic, and,
above all, so literary, has not yet learned that a true democracy can
only be founded upon a more practical interpretation of the motto,
“Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity,” than the one that is now in vogue
amongst the majority of Frenchmen in both camps.
At the end of this volume will be found a very interesting series of
biographies, compiled by Lady Sykes, of the persons connected with the
Revolution mentioned in Redhead Yorke’s “Letters,” many of whom are
little known even to close students of Revolutionary history.
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