river, Nantes had thrown up earthworks, and had fortified the hearts
of its inhabitants. The attack failed. Cathelineau penetrated to the
market place, and they still show the window from which a cobbler shot
down the hero of Anjou. The Vendeans retreated to their stronghold,
and their cause was without a future. D'Elbee was chosen to succeed,
on the death of Cathelineau. He admitted the superior claims of
Bonchamps, but he disliked his policy of carrying the war to the
north. The others preferred d'Elbee because they had less to fear from
his ascendancy and strength of will. They were not only divided by
jealousy, but by enmity. Charette kept away from the decisive field,
and rejoiced when the grand army passed the Loire, and left their
whole country to him. Charette and Stofflet caused Marigny, the
commander of the artillery, to be executed. Lescure once exclaimed
that, if he had not been helpless from a wound, he would have cut down
the Prince de Talmond. Stofflet sent a challenge to Bonchamps; and
both Stofflet and Charette were ultimately betrayed by their comrades.
Success depended on the fidelity of d'Elbee, Bonchamps, and Lescure to
each other, through all divergences of character and policy. For two
months they continued to hold the Republic at bay. They never reached
Poitiers, and they were heavily defeated at Lucon; but they made
themselves a frontier line of towns, to the south-west, by taking
Thouars, Parthenay, Fontenay, and Niort. There was a road from north
to south by Beaupreau, Chatillon, and Bressuire; and another from east
to west, through Doue, Vihiers, Coron, Mortagne. All these are names
of famous battles. At Cholet, which is in the middle of La Vendee,
where the two roads cross, the first success and the final rout took
place.
The advantage which the Vendeans possessed was that there was no good
army to oppose them, and there were no good officers. It was the early
policy of Robespierre to repress military talent, which may be
dangerous in a republic, and to employ noisy patriots. He was not
duped by them; but he trusted them as safe men; and if they did their
work coarsely and cruelly, imitating the practice that succeeded so
well at Paris, it was no harm. That was a surer way of destroying
royalists _en masse_ than the manoeuvres of a tactician, who was
very likely to be humane, and almost sure to be ambitious and
suspicious of civilians. Therefore a succession of incompetent men
were sent out, and the star of d'Elbee ascended higher and higher.
There had been time for communication with Pitt, who was believed to
be intriguing everywhere, and the dread of an English landing in the
west became strong in the Committees of government at Paris.
At the end of July, a serious disaster befell the French armies. Mentz
surrendered to the Prussians, and Valenciennes immediately after to
the Austrians. Their garrisons, unable to serve against the enemy
abroad, were available against the enemy at home. The soldiers from
Mayence were sent to Nantes. They were 8000, and they brought Kleber
with them. It was the doom of La Vendee. By the middle of September
the best soldiers and the best generals the French government
possessed met the veterans of Bonchamps and d'Elbee. In a week, from
the 18th to the 23rd, they fought five battles, of which the most
celebrated is named after the village of Torfou. And with this
astonishing result, that the royalists were victorious in every one of
them, and captured more than 100 cannon. On one of these fields,
Kleber and Marceau saw each other for the first time. But it seemed
that Bonchamps was able to defeat even Kleber and Marceau, as he had
defeated Westermann and Rossignol. Then a strange thing happened. Some
men, in disguise, were brought into the Vendean lines. They proved to
be from the Mayence garrison; and they said that they would prefer
serving under the royalist generals who had beaten them, rather than
under their own unsuccessful chiefs. They undertook, for a large sum
of money, to return with their comrades. Bonchamps and Charette took
the proposals seriously, and wished to accept them. But the money
could only be procured by melting down the Church plate, and the
clergy made objection. Some have thought that this was a fatal
miscalculation. The other causes of their ruin are obvious and are
decisive. They ought to have been supported by the Bretons, and the
Bretons were not ready. They ought to have been united, and they were
bitterly divided and insubordinate. They ought to have created an
impregnable fastness on the high ground above the Loire; but they had
no defensive tactics, and when they occupied a town, would not wait
for the attack, but retired, to have the unqualified delight of
expelling the enemy. Above all, they ought to have been backed by
England. D'Elbee's first letter was intercepted, and four months
passed before the English government stirred. The _emigres_ and their
princes had no love for these peasants and stay-at-home gentry and
clergy, who took so long to declare themselves, and whose primary or
ultimate motive was not royalism. Puisaye showed Napier a letter in
which Lewis XVIII. directed that he should be put secretly to death.
England ought to have been active on the coast very early, during the
light winds of summer. But the English wanted a safe landing-place,
and there was none to give them. With more enterprise, while Charette
held the island of Noirmoutier, Pitt might have become the arbiter of
France. When he gave definite promises and advice, it was October, and
the day of hope had passed.
In the middle of October Kleber, largely reinforced, advanced with
25,000 men, and Bonchamps made up his mind that the time had come to
retreat into Brittany. He posted a detachment to secure the passage of
the Loire at St. Laurent, and fell back with his whole force to
Cholet, whilst he sent warning to Charette of the decisive hour.
There, on October 16, he fought his last fight. D'Elbee was shot
through the body. He was carried in safety to Noirmoutier, and still
lingered when the Republicans recovered the island in January. His
last conversation with his conqueror, before he suffered death, is of
the highest value for this history. Lescure had already received a
bullet through the head, and at Cholet, Bonchamps was wounded
mortally. But there had been a moment in the day during which fortune
wavered, and the lost cause owed its ruin to the absence of Charette.
Stofflet and La Rochejaquelein led the retreat from Cholet to the
Loire. It was a day's march, and there was no pursuit. Bonchamps was
still living when they came to the river, and still able to give one
last order. Four thousand five hundred prisoners had been brought from
Cholet; they were shut up in the church at St. Laurent, and the
officers agreed that they must be put to death. At first, the
Convention had not allowed the men whom the royalists released to
serve again. But these amenities of civilised war had long been
abolished; and the prisoners were sure to be employed against the
captors who spared them. Bonchamps gave these men their lives, and on
the same day he died. When, at the same moment, d'Elbee, Lescure and
Bonchamps had disappeared, La Rochejaquelein assumed the command,
Kleber, whom he repulsed at Laval, described him as a very able
officer; but he led the army into the country beyond the Loire without
a definite purpose. The Prince de Talmond, who was a La Tremoille,
promised that when they came near the domains of his family, the
expected Bretons would come in. More important was the appearance of
two peasants carrying a stick. For the peasants were _emigres_
disguised, and their stick contained letters from Whitehall, in which
Pitt undertook to help them if they succeeded in occupying a seaport;
and he recommended Granville, which stands on a promontory not far
from French Saint Michael's Mount. The messengers declined to confirm
the encouragement they brought; but La Rochejaquelein, heavily
hampered with thousands of women and children who had lost their
homes, made his way across to the sea, and attacked the fortifications
of the place. He assaulted in vain; and although Jersey listened to
the cannonade, no ships came. The last hope had now gone; and the
remnant of the great army, cursing the English, turned back towards
their own country. Some thousands of Bretons had joined, and Stofflet
still drove the republicans before him. With La Rochejaquelein and
Sapinaud he crossed the Loire in a small boat. The army found the
river impassable, and wandered helplessly without officers until, at
Savenay, December 26, it was overtaken by the enemy, and ceased to
exist. Lescure had followed the column in his carriage, until he heard
of the execution of the queen. With his last breath, he said: "I
fought to save her: I would live to avenge her. There must be no
quarter now."
In this implacable spirit Carrier was acting at Nantes. But I care not
to tell the vengeance of the victorious republicans upon the brave men
who had made them tremble. The same atrocities were being committed in
the south. Lyons had overthrown the Jacobins, had put the worst of
them to death, and had stood a siege under the republican flag.
Girondins and royalists, who were enemies at Nantes, fought here side
by side; and the place was so well armed that it held out to October
9. On the 29th of August, the royalists of Toulon called in a joint
British and Spanish garrison, and gave up the fleet and the arsenal to
Lord Hood. The republicans laid siege to the town in October. The
harbour of Toulon is deep and spacious; but there was, and still is, a
fort which commands the entrance. Whoever held l'Aiguillette was
master of every ship in the docks and of every gun in the arsenal. On
December 18, at midnight, during a violent storm, the French attacked
and carried the fort. Toulon was no longer tenable. Hastily, but
imperfectly, the English destroyed the French ships they could not at
once take away, leaving the materials for the Egyptian expedition, and
as fast as possible evacuated the harbour, under the fire of the
captured fort. The fortunes of Bonaparte began with that exploit, and
the first event of his career was the spectacle of a British fleet
flying before him by the glare of an immense conflagration. The year
1793 thus ended triumphantly, and the Convention was master of all
France, except the marshes down by the ocean, where Charette defied
every foe, and succeeded in imposing his own terms on the Republic.
But the danger had come that disturbed the slumber of Robespierre, and
the man was found who was to make the Revolution a stepping-stone to
the power of the sword.
XXI
THE EUROPEAN WAR
The French Revolution was an attempt to establish in the public law of
Europe maxims which had triumphed by the aid of France in America. By
the principles of the Declaration of Independence a government which
obstructs liberty forfeits the claim to obedience, and the men who
devote their families to ruin and themselves to death in order to
destroy it do no more than their duty. The American Revolution was not
provoked by tyranny or intolerable wrong, for the Colonies were better
off than the nations of Europe. They rose in arms against a
constructive danger, an evil that might have been borne but for its
possible effects. The precept which condemned George III. was fatal to
Lewis XVI., and the case for the French Revolution was stronger than
the case for the American Revolution. But it involved international
consequences. It condemned the governments of other countries. If the
revolutionary government was legitimate, the conservative governments
were not. They necessarily threatened each other. By the law of its
existence, France encouraged insurrection against its neighbours, and
the existing balance of power would have to be redressed in obedience
to a higher law.
The successful convulsion in France led to a convulsion in Europe; and
the Convention which, in the first illusions of victory, promised
brotherhood to populations striking for freedom, was impolitic, but
was not illogical. In truth the Jacobins only transplanted for the use
of oppressed Europeans a precedent created by the Monarchy in favour
of Americans who were not oppressed. Nobody imagined that the new
system of international relations could be carried into effect without
resistance or sacrifice, but the enthusiasts of liberty, true or
false, might well account it worth all that it must cost, even if the
price was to be twenty years of war. This new dogma is the real cause
of the breach with England, which did such harm to France. Intelligent
Jacobins, like Danton and Carnot, saw the danger of abandoning policy
for the sake of principle. They strove to interpret the menacing
declaration, until it became innocuous, and they put forward the
natural frontier in its stead. But it was the very essence of the
revolutionary spirit, and could not be denied.
England had remained aloof from Pilnitz and the expedition under
Brunswick, but began to be unfriendly after the 10th of August. Lord
Gower did not at once cease to be ambassador, and drew his salary to
the end of the year. But as he was accredited to the king, he was
recalled when the king went to prison, and no solicitude was shown to
make the step less offensive. Chauvelin was not acknowledged. He was
not admitted to present his new credentials, and his requests for
audience were received with coldness. Pitt and Grenville were not
conciliatory. They were so dignified that they were haughty, and when
they were haughty they were insolent. The conquest of Belgium, the
opening of the Scheldt for navigation, and the trial of the king,
roused a bitter feeling in England, and ministers, in the course of
December, felt that they would be safe if they went along with it. The
opening of the Scheldt was not resisted by the Dutch, and gave England
no valid plea. But France was threatening Holland, and if out of
English hatred to the Republic, to republican principles of foreign
policy, to the annexation of the Netherlands, war was really
inevitable, it was important to get possession at once of the Dutch
resources by sea and land.
The idea of conciliating England by renouncing conquest, and the idea
of defying England by the immediate invasion of the United Provinces,
balanced each other for a time. By renunciation, the moderate or
Girondin party would have triumphed. The Jacobins, who drew all the
consequences of theories, and who were eager to restore the finances
with the spoils of the opulent Dutchmen, carried their purpose when
they voted the death of the king. That event added what was wanting to
make the excitement and exasperation of England boil over. Down to the
month of January the government continued ready to treat on condition
that France restored her conquests, and several emissaries had been
received. The most trustworthy of these was Maret, afterwards Duke of
Bassano. On the 28th of January Talleyrand, who was living in
retirement at Leatherhead, informed ministers that Maret was again on
the way to herald the approach of Dumouriez himself, whose presence in
London, on a friendly mission, would have been tantamount to the
abandonment of the Dutch project. But Maret came too late, and
Dumouriez on his journey to the coast was overtaken by instructions
that Amsterdam, not London, was his destination.
The news from Paris reached London on the evening of the 23rd, and the
audience at the theatre insisted that the performance should be
stopped. There was to be a drawing-room next day. The drawing-room was
countermanded. A Council was summoned, and there a momentous decision
was registered. Grenville had refused to recognise the official
character of the French envoy, Chauvelin. He had informed him that he
was subject to the Alien Act. On the 24th he sent him his passports,
with orders to leave the country. Upon that Dumouriez was recalled. On
the 29th Chauvelin arrived at Paris, and told his story. And it was
then, February 1, that the Convention declared war against England.
With less violent counsels in London, and with patience to listen to
Dumouriez, the outbreak of the war might have been postponed. But
nothing that England was able to offer could have made up to France
for the sacrifice of the fleet and the treasure of Holland.
Our ministers may have been wanting in many qualities of negotiators,
and the dismissal of Chauvelin laid on them a responsibility that was
easy to avoid. They could not for long have averted hostilities. It is
possible that Fox might have succeeded, for Fox was able to understand
the world of new ideas which underlay the policy of France; but the
country was in no temper to follow the Whigs. They accused Pitt
unjustly when they said that he went to war from the motive of
ambition. He was guiltless of that capital charge. But he did less
than he might have done to prevent it, perceiving too clearly the
benefit that would accrue. And he is open to the grave reproach that
he went over to the absolute Powers and associated England with them
at the moment of the Second Partition, and applied to France the
principles on which they acted against Poland. When the Prince of
Coburg held his first conference with his allies in Belgium, he
declared that Austria renounced all ideas of conquest. The English at
once protested. They made known that they desired to annex as much
territory as possible, in order to make the enemy less formidable. Our
envoy was Lord Auckland, a man of moderate opinions, who had always
advised his government to come to terms with the Republic. He exhorted
Coburg not to rest until he had secured a satisfactory line of
frontier, as England was going to appropriate Dunkirk and the
Colonies, and meant to keep them. George III., on April 27, uttered
the same sentiments. France, he said, must be greatly circumscribed
before we can talk of any means of treating with that dangerous and
faithless nation. In February Grenville definitely proposed
dismemberment, offering the frontier fortresses and the whole of
Alsace and Lorraine to Austria. It was the English who impressed on
the operations, that were to follow, the character of a selfish and
sordid rapacity.
The island kingdom alone had nothing to fear, for she had the rest of
the maritime Powers on her side, and the preponderance of the naval
forces was decisive. The French began the war with 76 line-of-battle
ships. England had 115, with 8718 guns to 6002. In weight of metal
the difference was not so great, for the English guns threw 89,000
lbs. and the French 74,000. But England had the Spanish fleet, of 56
ships-of-the-line, and the Dutch with 49--the Spaniards well built,
but badly manned; the Dutch constructed for shallow waters, but with
superior crews. To these must be added Portugal, which followed
England, and Naples, whose king was a Bourbon, brother to the king of
Spain. Therefore, in weight of metal, which is the first thing, next
to brains, we were at least 2 to 1; and in the number of ships 3 to 1,
or about 230 to 76. That is the reason why the insular statesmen went
to war, if not with greater enterprise and energy, yet with more
determination and spirit, than their exposed and vulnerable allies
upon the Continent. The difference between them is that between men
who are out of reach and are 2 to 1, and men whose territories are
accessible to an enemy greatly superior to themselves in numbers.
Therefore it was Pitt who from his post of vantage pushed the others
forward, and, when they vacillated, encouraged them with money and the
promise of spoil. The alliance with the maritime states was important
for his policy, but it accomplished nothing in the actual struggle.
The Dutch and the Spaniards were never brought into line; and the
English, though they owed their safety at first to their system of
alliances, owed their victories to themselves. And those victories
became more numerous and splendid when, after two years of
inefficacious friendship with us, the Spaniard and the Dutchman joined
our enemies. England was drawn into the war, which it maintained with
unflagging resolution, by the prospect of sordid gain. It brought
increase of rents to the class that governed, and advantage to the
trader from the conquest of dependencies and dominions over the sea.
The year 1793 brought us no profit from the sea. We occupied Toulon on
the invitation of the inhabitants, and there we had in our possession
half of the naval resources of France. But before the end of the year
we were driven away. The French dominions in India fell at once into
our hands, and in March and April 1794 we captured the Windward
Islands in the West Indies, Martinique, Santa Lucia, and at last
Guadeloupe. But a Jacobin lawyer came over from France and reconquered
Guadeloupe, and the French held it with invincible tenacity till 1810.
They lost Hayti, but it never became English, and drifted into the
power of the negroes, who there rose to the highest point they have
attained in history. In the summer of the same year, 1794, Corsica
became a British dependency, strengthening enormously our position in
the Mediterranean. We were not able to retain it. Our admirals did
nothing for La Vendee. So little was known about it that on December
19 there was a question of sending an officer to serve under
Bonchamps, who at that time had been dead two months.
In all this chequered and inglorious history there is one day to be
remembered. On April 11, 1794, 130 merchantmen, laden with
food-supplies, sailed from Chesapeake Bay for the ports of France.
Lord Howe went out to intercept them; and on May 16 the French fleet
left Brest to protect them. Howe divided his force. He sent Montagu to
watch for the merchantmen, and led the remainder of his squadron
against Villaret Joyeuse. After a brush on May 28, they met, in equal
force, on the 1st of June, 400 miles from land. The French admiral had
an unfrocked Huguenot divine on board, who had been to sea in his
youth, and was now infusing the revolutionary ardour into the fleet,
as St. Just did with the army. The fight lasted three hours and then
ceased. Villaret waited until evening, but Lord Howe had several ships
disabled, and would neither renew the battle nor pursue the enemy. The
French had lost seven ships out of twenty-six. The most famous of
these is the _Vengeur du Peuple_. It engaged the _Brunswick_, and the
rigging of one ship became so entangled with the anchors of the other
that they were locked together, and drifted away from the line. They
were so close that the French could not fire their lower deck guns,
having no space to ram the charge. The English were provided for this
very emergency with flexible rammers of rope and went on firing into
the portholes of the enemy, while the French captain, calling up his
men from below, had the advantage on the upper deck. At last the
rolling of the sea forced the unconquered enemies to part. The
_Brunswick_ had lost 158 out of a crew of 600 and 23 of her guns out
of 74 were dismounted. She withdrew out of action disabled, and went
home to refit. The _Vengeur_ remained on the ground, with all her
masts gone. Presently it was seen that she had been hit below the
water-line. The guns were thrown overboard, but after some hours the
_Vengeur_ made signals that she was sinking. English boats came and
rescued about 400 men out of 723. Those of the survivors who were not
wounded were seen standing by the broken mast, and cried "Vive la
republique," as the ship went down. That is the history, not the
legend, of the loss of the _Vengeur_, and no exaggeration and no
contradiction can mar the dramatic grandeur of the scene.
The battle of the 1st of June is the one event by land or sea that was
glorious to British arms in the war of the first Coalition. The
ascendancy then acquired was never lost. Our failures in the West
Indies, at Cape Verde Islands, in the Mediterranean, and on the coasts
of France, and even the defection of our maritime allies, did not
impair it. And later on, when all were against us, admirals more
original and more enterprising than Howe increased our superiority.
The success was less brilliant and entire than that which Nelson
gained against a much greater force at Trafalgar, when France lost
every ship. Montagu did not intercept the French merchantmen, and did
not help to crush the French men-of-war. Villaret Joyeuse and the
energetic minister from Languedoc lost the day, but they gained the
substantial advantage. Under cover of their cannon, the ships on which
the country depended for its supplies came into port. Although during
those two years the French fought against great odds at sea, their
loss was less than they had expected, and did not weaken their
government at home. They had reason to hope that whenever their
armies were brought to close quarters with Spain and the Netherlands,
the fortune of war at sea would follow the event on land.