phases. During the year 1793, the French maintained themselves with
difficulty, having to contend with a dangerous insurrection. In 1794
the tide turned in their favour; and 1795 was an epoch of
preponderance and triumph. The Republic inherited from the Monarchy a
regular army of 220,000 men, seriously damaged and demoralised by the
emigration of officers. To these were added, first, the volunteers of
1791, who soon made good soldiers, and supplied the bulk of the
military talent that rose to fame down to 1815, and the like of which
was never seen, either in the American Civil War, or among the Germans
in 1870. The second batch of volunteers, those who responded to the
Brunswick proclamation and the summons of September, when the country
was in danger, were not equal to the first. The two together supplied
309,000 men. At the beginning of the general war, in March 1793, the
Conscription was instituted, which provoked the rising in Vendee, and
was interrupted by troubles in other departments. Instead of 300,000
men, it yielded 164,000. In the summer of 1793, when the fortresses
were falling, there was, first, the levy _en masse_, and then, August
23, the system of requisition, by which the levy was organised and
made to produce 425,000 men. Altogether, in a year and a half, France
put 1,100,000 men into line; and at the critical moment, at the end of
the second year, more than 700,000 were present under arms. That is
the force which Carnot had to wield. He was a man of energy, of
integrity, and of professional skill as an engineer, but he was not a
man of commanding abilities. Lord Castlereagh rather flippantly called
him a foolish mathematician. Once, having quarrelled with his former
comrade Fouche and having been condemned to banishment, he had this
conversation with him: "Where am I to go, traitor?" "Wherever you
like, idiot." As an austere republican he was out of favour during
the empire; but his defence of Antwerp is a bright spot in the decline
of Napoleon. He became Minister of the Interior on the return from
Elba, and his advice might have changed the history of the world. For
he wished the emperor to fall upon the English before they could
concentrate, and then to fight the Prussians at his leisure. One
night, during a rubber of whist, the tears that ran down his cheek
betrayed the news from Waterloo.
Carnot owed his success to two things--arbitrary control over
promotion, and the cheapness of French lives. He could sacrifice as
many men as he required to carry a point. An Austrian on the Sambre,
1,000 miles from home, was hard to replace. Any number of Frenchmen
were within easy reach. Colonel Mack observed that whenever a
combatant fell, France lost a man, but Austria lost a soldier. La
Vendee had shown what could be done by men without organisation or the
power of manoeuvring, by constant activity, exposure, and courage.
Carnot taught his men to win by a rush many times repeated, and not to
count their dead. The inferior commanders were quickly weeded out,
sometimes with help from the executioner, and the ablest men were
brought to the front. The chief army of all, the army of Sambre et
Meuse, was commanded by Kleber, Moreau, Reynier, Marceau, and Ney.
Better still, on the Rhine were Hoche, Desaix, and St. Cyr. Best of
all, in the Apennines, the French were led by Bonaparte and Massena.
All these armaments had scarcely begun when the victory of Neerwinden
and the flight of Dumouriez brought the Austrians up to the Belgian
frontier. Carnot was not discovered, the better men had not risen to
command, the levy _en masse_ had not been thought of. The French could
do nothing in the field while the Prince of Coburg, supported by the
Dutch, and by an Anglo-Hanoverian army under the Duke of York, sat
down before the fortresses. By the end of July Conde and Valenciennes
had fallen, and the road to Paris was open to the victors. They might
have reached the capital in overwhelming force by the middle of
August. But the English coveted, not Paris but Dunkirk, and the Duke
of York withdrew with 37,000 men and laid siege to it. Coburg turned
aside in the opposite direction, to besiege Le Quesnoy. He proposed to
conquer the fortified towns, one after another, according to
Grenville's prescription, and then to join hands with the Prussians
whom it was urgent to have with him when penetrating to the interior.
The Prussians meanwhile had taken Mentz, the garrison, like that of
Valenciennes, making a defence too short for their fame. But the
Prussians remembered the invasion of the year before, and they were in
no hurry. The allies, with conflicting interests and divided counsels,
gave the enemy time. Some years later, when Napoleon had defeated the
Piedmontese, and was waiting for them to send back the treaty he had
dictated at Cherasco, duly signed, he grew excessively impatient at
their delay. The Piedmontese officers were surprised at what seemed a
want of self-restraint, and let him see it. His answer was, "I may
often lose a battle, but I shall never lose a minute."
The French put to good account the time their enemies allowed them.
Carnot took office on August 14, and on the 23rd he caused the
Convention to decree what is pleasantly called the levy _en masse_ but
was the system of requisition, making every able-bodied man a soldier.
The new spirit of administration was soon felt in the army. The forces
besieging Le Quesnoy and Dunkirk were so far apart that the French
came between and attacked them successively. The Dunkirk garrison
opened the sluices and flooded the country, separating the English
from the covering force of Hanoverians, and leaving the Duke of York
no means of retreat except by a single causeway. On September 8 the
French defeated the Hanoverians at Hondschooten and relieved Dunkirk.
The English got away in great haste, abandoning their siege guns; but
as they ought not to have got away at all, the French cut off the head
of their victorious commander. Jourdan, his successor, turned upon the
Prince of Coburg, and, by the new and expensive tactics, defeated him
at Wattignies on October 16. Carnot, who did not yet trust his
generals, arrived in time to win the day by overruling Jourdan and
his staff. And every French child knows how he led the charge through
the grapeshot, on foot, with his hat at the end of his sword. From
that day to the peace of Bale he held the army in his grasp. He had
stopped the invasion. No one in the allied camp spoke any more of the
shortest road to Paris; but they still held the places they had
conquered. Two months later, Hoche, who had distinguished himself at
Dunkirk, took the command in the Vosges, and stormed the lines of
Weissenburg at the scene of the first action in the war of 1870. By
the end of December the Prussians were shut up in Mayence, and Wurmser
had retired beyond the Rhine. By that time, too, La Vendee, and Lyons,
and Toulon had fallen. The campaign of 1794 was to be devoted to
foreign war.
During that autumn and winter, Carnot, somewhat unmindful of what went
on near him and heedless of the signatures he gave, was organising the
enormous force the requisition provided, and laying the plans that
were to give him so great a name in the history of his country. He
divided the troops into thirteen armies. They call them fourteen, I
believe, because there were _cadres_ for an army of reserve. Two were
required for the Spanish war, for the Pyrenees are impassable by
artillery except at the two ends, where narrow valleys lead from
France to Spain near San Sebastian, and by a strip of more open
country near the Mediterranean. What passed there did not influence
events; but it is well to know that the Spaniards under Ricardos
gained important advantages in 1794, and fought better than they ever
did in the field during their struggle with Napoleon. A third army was
placed on the Italian frontier, a fourth on the Rhine, and a fifth
against the allies in Flanders. Carnot increased the number because he
had no men who had proved their fitness for the direction of very
large forces. He meant that his armies should be everywhere
sufficient, but in Belgium they were to be overwhelming. That was the
point of danger, and there a great body of Austrians, Dutch, English,
and Hanoverians had been collected. The Emperor himself appeared
among them in May; and his brother, the Archduke Charles, was the best
officer in the allied camp.
At the end of April Coburg took Landrecies, the fourth of the line of
fortresses that had fallen. On May 18 the French were victorious at
Tourcoing, where the English suffered severely, and the Duke of York
sought safety in precipitate flight. There was even talk of a court
martial. The day was lost in consequence of the absence of the
Archduke, who suffered from fits like Julius Caesar, and is said to
have been lying unconscious many miles away. For a month longer the
allies held their ground and repeatedly repressed Jourdan in his
attempts to cross the Sambre. At last, Charleroi surrendered to the
French, and on the following day, June 26, they won the great battle
of Fleurus. Mons fell on July 1, and on the 5th the allies resolved to
evacuate Belgium. The four fortresses were recovered in August; and
Coburg retired by Liege into Germany, York by Antwerp into Holland. In
October Jourdan pursued the Austrians, and drove them across the
Rhine. The battle of Fleurus established the ascendancy of the French
in Europe as the 1st of June had created that of England on the ocean.
They began the offensive, and retained it for twenty years. Yet the
defeat of Fleurus, after such varying fortunes and so much alternate
success does not explain the sudden discouragement and collapse of the
allies. One of the great powers was about to abandon the alliance.
Prussia had agreed in the spring to accept an English subsidy. For,
L300,000 down, and L150,000 a month, a force of fifty to sixty
thousand Prussians was to be employed in a manner to be agreed upon
with England,--that meant in Belgium. Before Malmesbury's signature
was dry the whole situation altered.
The Committee of Public Safety had created a diversion in the rear of
the foe. Kozsiusko, with the help of French money and advice, had
raised an insurrection in Poland, and the hands of the Prussians were
tied. The Polish question touched them nearer than the French, and all
their thoughts were turned in the opposite direction. The Austrians
began to apprehend that Prussia would desert them on the Rhine, and
would gain an advantage over them in Poland, while they were busy with
their best army in Flanders. Pitt increased his offers. Lord Spencer
was sent to Vienna to arrange for a further subsidy. But the Prussians
began to withdraw. Marshal Moellendorf informed the French in
September that the Austrians were about to attack Treves. He promised
that he would do no more than he could help for his allies. On the
20th, Hohenlohe, who was not in the secret, having fought Hoche at
Kaiserslautern and defeated him, the commander-in-chief sent
explanations and apologies. In October, Pitt stopped the supplies, and
the Prussians disappeared from the war.
The winter of 1794-95 was severe, and even the sea froze in Holland.
In January, Pichegru marched over the solid Rhine, and neither Dutch
nor English offered any considerable resistance. The Prince of Orange
fled to England; the Duke of York retreated to Bremen, and there
embarked; and on the 28th the French were welcomed by the democracy of
Amsterdam. A body of cavalry rode up to the fleet on the ice, and
received its surrender. There was no cause left for it to defend.
Holland was to be the salvation of French credit. It gave France
trade, a fleet, a position from which to enter Germany on the
undefended side. The tables were turned against Pitt and his policy.
His Prussian ally made peace in April, giving up to France all Germany
as far as the Rhine, and undertaking to occupy Hanover, if George
III., as elector, refused to be neutral. Spain almost immediately
followed. Manuel Godoy, lately a guardsman, but Prime Minister and
Duke of Alcudia since November 1792, had declined Pitt's proposals for
an alliance as long as there were hopes of saving the life of Lewis by
the promise of neutrality. When those hopes came to an end, he
consented. The joint occupation of Toulon had not been amicable; and
when George III. was made King of Corsica, it was an injury to Spain
as a Mediterranean Power. The animosity against regicide France faded
away; the war was not popular, and the Duke of Alcudia became, amid
general rejoicing, Prince of the Peace.
We saw how the first invasion in 1792, brought the worst men to power.
In 1793, the Reign of Terror coincided exactly with the season of
public danger. Robespierre became the head of the government on the
very day when the bad news came from the fortresses, and he fell
immediately after the occupation of Brussels, July 11, 1794, exposed
the effects of Fleurus. We cannot dissociate these events, or disprove
the contention that the Reign of Terror was the salvation of France.
It is certain that the conscription of March 1793, under Girondin
auspices, scarcely yielded half the required amount, whilst the levies
of the following August, decreed and carried out by the Mountain,
inundated the country with soldiers, who were prepared by the
slaughter going on at home to face the slaughter at the front. This,
then, was the result which Conservative Europe obtained by its attack
on the Republic. The French had subjugated Savoy, the Rhineland,
Belgium, Holland, whilst Prussia and Spain had been made to sue for
peace. England had deprived France of her colonies, but had lost
repute as a military Power. Austria alone, with her dependent
neighbours, maintained the unequal struggle on the Continent under
worse conditions, and with no hope but in the help of Russia.
XXII
AFTER THE TERROR
It remains for us to pursue the course of French politics from the
fall of the Terrorists to the Constitution of the year III., and the
close of the Convention in October 1795. The State drifted after the
storm, and was long without a regular government or a guiding body of
opinion. The first feeling was relief at an immense deliverance.
Prisons were opened and thousands of private citizens were released.
The new sensation displayed itself extravagantly, in the search for
pleasures unknown during the stern and sombre reign. Madame Tallien
set the fashion as queen of Paris society. Men rejected the modern
garment which characterised the hateful years, and put on tights. They
buried the chin in folded neckcloths, and wore tall hats in protest
against the exposed neck and the red nightcap of the enemy. Powder was
resumed; but the pigtail was cut off straight, in commemoration of
friends lost by the fall of the axe. Young men, representing the new
spirit, wore a kind of uniform, with the badge of mourning on the arm,
and a knobstick in their hands adapted to the Jacobin skull. They
became known afterwards as the _Jeunesse Doree_. The press made much
of them, and they served as a body to the leaders of the reaction,
hustling opponents, and denoting the infinite change in the conditions
of public life.
These were externals. What went on underneath was the gradual recovery
of the respectable elements of society, and the passage of power from
the unworthy hands of the men who destroyed Robespierre. These, the
Thermidorians, were faithful to the contract with the Plain, by which
they obtained their victory. Some had been friends of Danton, who, at
one moment of the previous winter, had approved a policy of moderation
in the use of the guillotine. Tallien had domestic as well as public
reasons for clemency. But the bulk of the genuine Montagnards were
unaltered. They had deserted Robespierre when it became unsafe to
defend him; but they had not renounced his system, and held that it
was needful as their security against the furious enmity they had
incurred when they were the ruling faction.
The majority in the Convention, where all powers were now
concentrated, were unable to govern. The irresistible resources of the
Reign of Terror were gone, and nothing occupied their place. There was
no working Constitution, no settled authority, no party enjoying
ascendancy and respect, no public men free from the guilt of blood.
Many months were to pass before the ruins of the fallen parties
gathered together and constituted an effective government with a real
policy and the means of pursuing it. The chiefs of the Commune and of
the revolutionary tribunal, near one hundred in number, had followed
Robespierre to the scaffold.
The Committees of government had lost their most energetic members,
and were disabled by the new plan of rapid renewal. Power fluctuated
between varying combinations of deputies, all of them transient and
quickly discredited. The main division was between vengeance and
amnesty. And the character of the following months was a gradual drift
in the direction of vengeance, as the imprisoned or proscribed
minority returned to their seats. But the Mountain included the men,
who by organising, and equipping, and controlling the armies had made
France the first of European Powers, and they could not at once be
displaced. Barere proposed that existing institutions should be
preserved, and that Fouquier should continue his office. On August 19,
Louchet, the man who led the assault against Robespierre, insisted
that it was needful to keep up the Terror with all the rigour that
had been prescribed by the sagacious and profound Marat. A month
later, September 21, the Convention solemnised the apotheosis of
Marat, whose remains were deposited in the Pantheon, while those of
Mirabeau were cast out. Three weeks later, the master of Robespierre,
Rousseau, was brought, with equal ceremony, to be laid by his side.
The worst of the remaining offenders, Barere, Collot d'Herbois, and
Billaud-Varennes, were deprived of their seats on the Committee of
Public Safety. But in spite of the denunciations of Lecointre and of
Legendre, the Convention refused to proceed against them.
All through September and a great part of October the Mountain held
its ground, and prevented the reform of the government. Billaud,
gaining courage, declared that the lion might slumber, but would rend
his enemies on awaking. By the lion, he meant himself and his friends
of Thermidor. The governing Committees were reconstructed on the
principle of frequent change; the law of Prairial, which gave the
right of arbitrary arrest and unconditional gaol delivery, was
abrogated; and commissaries were sent out to teach the Provinces the
example of Paris.
Beyond these measures, the action of the State stood still. The fall
of the men who reigned by terror produced, at first, no great
political result. The process of change was set in motion by certain
citizens of Nantes. Carrier had sent a batch of 132 of his prisoners
to feed the Paris guillotine. Thirty-eight of them died of the
hardships they endured. The remainder were still in prison in
Thermidor; and they now petitioned to be put on their trial. The trial
took place; and the evidence given was such as made a reaction
inevitable. On September 14, the Nantais were acquitted. Then the
necessary consequence followed. If the victims of Carrier were
innocent, what was Carrier himself? His atrocities had been exposed,
and, on November 12, the Convention resolved, by 498 to 2, that he
should appear before the tribunal. For Carrier was a deputy,
inviolable under common law. The trial was prolonged, for it was the
trial not of a man, but of a system, of a whole class of men still in
the enjoyment of immunity.
Everything that could be brought to light gave strength to the
Thermidorians against their enemies, and gave them the command of
public opinion. On December 16 Carrier was guillotined, he had
defended himself with spirit. The strength of his case was that his
prosecutors were nearly as guilty as himself, and that they would all,
successively, be struck down by the enemies of the Republic. He did
his best to drag down the party with him. His associates, acquitted by
the revolutionary tribunal on the plea that their delinquencies were
not political, were then sent before the ordinary courts. On the day
on which the convention resolved that the butcher of Nantes must stand
his trial, they closed the Jacobin Club, and now the reaction was
setting in.
On December 1, after hearing a report by Carnot, the assembly offered
an amnesty to the insurgents on the Loire, and on the 8th those
Girondins were recalled who had been placed under arrest. This measure
was decisive. With the willing aid of the Plain they were masters of
the Convention, for they were seventy-three in number, and, unlike the
Plain, they were not hampered and disabled by their own iniquities.
They were not accomplices of the Reign of Terror, for they had spent
it in confinement. They had nothing to fear from a vigorous
application of deserved penalties, and they had a terrible score to
clear off. There were still sixteen deputies who had been proscribed
with Buzot and the rest. They were now amnestied, and three months
later, March 8, they were admitted to their seats. There they sat face
to face with the men who had outlawed them, who had devoted them to
death by an act the injustice of which was now proclaimed.
The cry for vengeance was becoming irresistible as the policy of the
last year was reversed. In the course of that process La Vendee had
its turn. On the 17th of February, at La Jaunaye, the French Republic
came to terms with Charette. He was treated as an equal power. He
obtained liberty for religion, compensation in money, relief from
conscription, and a territorial guard of 2000 men, to be paid by the
government, and commanded by himself. The same conditions were
accepted soon after by Stofflet, and by the Breton leader, Cormatin.
In that hour of triumph Charette rode into Nantes with the white badge
of Royalism displayed; and he was received with honour by the
authorities, and acclaimed by the crowd. Immediately after the treaty
of La Jaunaye which, granted the free practice of religion in the
west, it was extended to the whole of France. The churches were given
back some months later; there is one parish, in an eastern department,
where it is said that the church was never closed, and the service
never interrupted.
In March the Girondins were strong enough to turn upon their foes. The
extent of the reaction was tested by the expulsion of Marat from his
brief rest in the Pantheon, and the destruction of his busts all over
the town, by the young men stimulated by Freron. In March, the great
offenders who had been so hard to reach, Collot d'Herbois, Billaud,
and Barere, were thrown into prison. Carnot defended them, on the
ground that they were hardly worse than himself. The Convention
resolved that they should be sent to Cayenne. Barere escaped on the
way. Fouquier-Tinville came next, and his trial did as much harm to
his party in the spring as that of Carrier in the preceding autumn. He
pleaded that he was but an instrument in the hands of the Committee of
Public Safety, and that as the three members of it, whom he had
obeyed, were only transported, no more could be done to himself. The
tribunal was not bound by the punishments decreed by the Assembly, and
in May Fouquier was executed.