three that are excellent. And there are a few sagacious and impartial
men who keep the narrow path between them: Tocqueville for the origin,
Droz and Laboulaye for the decisive period of 1789, Duvergier de
Hauranne for all the political thinking, Dareste for the great outline
of public events, in peace and war. They amount to no more than five
volumes, and are less than the single Thiers or Michelet, and not half
as long as Louis Blanc. We can easily read them through; and we shall
find that they have made all things clear to us, that we can trust
them, and that we have nothing to unlearn. But if we confine ourselves
to the company of men who steer a judicious middle course, with whom
we find that we can agree, our wisdom will turn sour, and we shall
never behold parties in their strength. No man feels the grandeur of
the Revolution till he reads Michelet, or the horror of it without
reading Taine. But I have kept the best for the end, and will speak of
Taine, and two or three more who rival Taine, next week.
* * * * *
After much partial and contentious writing, sagacious men attained a
reasonable judgment on the good and evil, the truth and error, of the
Revolution. The view established by constitutional royalists, like
Duvergier de Hauranne, and by men equidistant from royalist or
republican exclusiveness, such as Tocqueville and Laboulaye, was very
largely shared by intelligent democrats, more particularly by Lanfrey,
and by Quinet in his two volumes on the genius of the Revolution. At
that time, under the Second Empire, there was nothing that could be
called an adequate history. The archives were practically unexplored,
and men had no idea of the amount of labour serious exploration
implies. The first writer who produced original matter from the papers
of the Paris Commune was Mortimer Ternaux, whose eight volumes on the
Reign of Terror came out between 1862 and 1880. What he revealed was
so decisive that it obliged Sybel to rewrite what he had written on
the scenes of September.
When I describe the real study of the Revolution as beginning with
Tocqueville and Ternaux, I mean the study of it in the genuine and
official sources. Memoirs, of course, abounded. There are more than a
hundred. But memoirs do not supply the certainty of history. Certainty
comes with the means of control, and there is no controlling or
testing memoirs without the contemporary document. Down to the middle
of the century, private letters and official documents were rare.
Then, in the early summer of 1851, two important collections appeared
within a few weeks of each other.
First came the _Memoirs_ of Mallet du Pan, a liberal, independent, and
discerning observer, whom, apart from the gift of style, Taine
compares to Burke, and who, like Burke, went over to the other side.
This was followed by Mirabeau's _Secret Correspondence with the
Court_. His prevarication and double-dealing as a popular leader in
the pay of the king had long been known. At least twenty persons were
in the secret. One man, leaving Paris hurriedly, left one paper, the
most important of all, lying about in his room. Unmistakable allusions
were found among the contents of the Iron Chest. One of the ministers
told the story in his _Memoirs_, and a letter belonging to the series
was printed in 1827. La Marck, just before his death, showed the
papers to Montigny, who gave an account of them in his work on
Mirabeau, and Droz moreover knew the main facts from Malouet when he
wrote in 1842. For us the interest of the publication lies not in the
exposure of what was already known, but in the details of his tortuous
and ingenious policy during his last year of life, and of his schemes
to save the king and the constitution. For the revolutionary party,
the posthumous avowal of so much treachery was like the story of the
monk who, dying with the fame of a saint, rose under the shroud during
the funeral service, and confessed before his brethren that he had
lived and died an unrepentant hypocrite.
Still, no private papers could make up for the silence of the public
archives; and the true secrets of government, diplomacy and war,
remained almost intact until 1865. The manner in which they came to be
exhumed is the most curious transaction in the progress of
revolutionary history. It was a consequence of the passion for
autographs and the collector's craze. Seventy thousand autographs were
sold by auction in Paris in the twenty-eight years from 1822 to 1850.
From the days of the Restoration no letters were more eagerly sought
and prized than those of the queen. Royalist society regarded her as
an august, heroic, and innocent victim, and attributed the ruin of
the monarchy to the neglect of her high-minded counsels. It became a
lucrative occupation to steal letters that bore her signature, in
order to sell them to wealthy purchasers. Prices rose steadily. A
letter of the year 1784, which fetched fifty-two francs in 1850, was
sold for one hundred and seven in 1857, and for one hundred and fifty
in 1861. In 1844 one was bought for two hundred francs, and another
for three hundred and thirty. A letter to the Princess de Lamballe,
which fetched seven hundred francs in 1860, went up to seven hundred
and sixty in 1865, when suspicion was beginning to stir. In all,
forty-one letters from the queen to Mme. de Lamballe have been in the
market, and not one of them was genuine. When it became worth while to
steal, it was still more profitable to forge, for then there was no
limit to the supply.
In her lifetime the queen was aware that hostile _emigres_ imitated
her hand. Three such letters were published in 1801 in a worthless
book called _Madame de Lamballe's Memoirs_. Such forgeries came into
the market from the year 1822. The art was carried to the point that
it defied detection, and the credulity of the public was insatiable.
In Germany a man imitated Schiller's writing so perfectly that
Schiller's daughter bought his letters as fast as they could be
produced. At Paris the nefarious trade became active about 1839.
On March 15, 1861, a facsimilist, Betbeder, issued a challenge,
undertaking to execute autographs that it would be impossible to
detect, by paper, ink, handwriting, or text. The trial came off in the
presence of experts, and in April 1864 they pronounced that his
imitations could not be distinguished from originals. In those days
there was a famous mathematician whose name was Chasles. He was
interested in the history of geometry, and also in the glory of
France, and a clever genealogist saw his opportunity. He produced
letters from which it appeared that some of Newton's discoveries had
been anticipated by Frenchmen who had been robbed of their due fame.
M. Chasles bought them, with a patriotic disregard for money; and he
continued to buy, from time to time, all that the impostor, Vrain
Lucas, offered him. He laid his documents before the Institute, and
the Institute declared them genuine. There were autograph letters from
Alexander to Aristotle, from Caesar to Vercingetorix, from Lazarus to
St. Peter, from Mary Magdalen to Lazarus. The fabricator's imagination
ran riot, and he produced a fragment in the handwriting of Pythagoras,
showing that Pythagoras wrote in bad French. At last other learned
men, who did not love Chasles, tried to make him understand that he
had been befooled. When the iniquity came to light, and the culprit
was sent to prison, he had flourished for seven years, had made
several thousand pounds, and had found a market for 27,000 unblushing
forgeries.
About the time when this mysterious manufacture was thriving, Count
Hunolstein bought one hundred and forty-eight letters from Marie
Antoinette, of a Paris dealer, for L3400, and he published them in
June 1864. Napoleon III. and the Empress Eugenie, whose policy it was
to conciliate legitimists whom the Italian Revolution offended,
exhibited a cultivated interest in the memory of the unhappy queen;
and it happened that a high official of their Court, M. Feuillet de
Conches, was zealous in the same cause. He began his purchases as
early as 1830, and had obtained much from the Thermidorean, Courtois,
who had had Robespierre's papers in his hands. Wachsmuth, who went to
Paris in 1840 to prepare his historical work, reported in German
reviews on the value of Feuillet's collection; and in 1843 he was
described as the first of French autographophiles--the term is not of
my coining. It was known that he meditated a publication on the royal
family. He travelled all over Europe, and was admitted to make
transcripts and facsimiles in many places that were jealously guarded
against intruders. His first volume appeared two months later than
Hunolstein's, and his second in September. During that summer and
autumn royalism was the fashion, and enjoyed a season of triumph.
Twenty-four letters were common to both collections; and as they did
not literally agree, troublesome people began to ask questions.
The one man able to answer them was Arneth, then deputy keeper of the
archives at Vienna, who was employed laying down the great history of
Maria Theresa that has made him famous. For the letters written by
Marie Antoinette to her mother and her family had been religiously
preserved, and were in his custody. Before the end of the year Arneth
produced the very words of the letters, as the Empress received them;
and then it was discovered that they were quite different from those
which had been printed at Paris.
An angry controversy ensued, and in the end it became certain that
most of Hunolstein's edition, and part of Feuillet's, was fabricated
by an impostor. It was whispered that the supposed originals sold by
Charavay, the dealer, to Hunolstein came to him from Feuillet de
Conches. Sainte Beuve, who had been taken in at first, and had
applauded, thereupon indignantly broke off his acquaintance, and
published the letter in which he did it. Feuillet became more wary.
His four later volumes are filled with matter of the utmost value; and
his large collection of the illegible autographs of Napoleon were sold
for L1250 and are now at The Durdans.
It is in this way that the roguery of a very dexterous thief resulted
in the opening of the imperial archives, in which the authentic
records of the Revolution are deposited. For the emperors, Joseph and
Leopold, were the queen's brothers; her sister was regent in the Low
Countries, the family ambassador was in her confidence, and the events
that brought on the great war, and the war itself, under Clerfayt,
Coburg, and the Archduke Charles, can be known there and there only.
Once opened, Arneth never afterwards allowed the door to be closed on
students. He published many documents himself, he encouraged his
countrymen to examine his treasures, and he welcomed, and continues to
welcome, the scholars of Berlin. Thirty or forty volumes of Austrian
documents, which were brought to light by the act of the felonious
Frenchman, constitute our best authority for the inner and outer
history of the Revolution and of the time that preceded it. The French
Foreign Office is less communicative. The papers of their two ablest
diplomatists, Barthelemy and Talleyrand, have been made public,
besides those of Fersen, Maury, Vaudreuil, and many _emigres_; and the
letters of several deputies to their constituents are now coming out.
Next to the Austrian, the most valuable of the diplomatists are the
Americans, the Venetians, and the Swede, for he was the husband of
Necker's illustrious daughter. This change in the centre of gravity
which went on between 1865 and 1885 or 1890, besides directing renewed
attention to international affairs, considerably reduced the value of
the memoirs on which the current view of our history was founded. For
memoirs are written afterwards for the world, and are clever,
apologetic, designing and deceitful. Letters are written at the
moment, and are confidential, and therefore they enable us to test the
truth of the memoirs. In the first place, we find that many of them
are not authentic, or are not by the reputed author. What purports to
be the memoirs of Prince Hardenberg is the composition of two
well-informed men of letters, Beauchamp and d'Allouville. Beauchamp
also wrote the book known as the _Memoirs of Fouche_. Those of
Robespierre are by Reybaud, and those of Barras by Rousselin. Roche
wrote the memoirs of Levasseur de la Sarthe, and Lafitte those of
Fleury. Clery, the king's confidential valet, left a diary which met
with such success that somebody composed his pretended memoirs. Six
volumes attributed to Sanson, the executioner, are of course spurious.
When Weber's _Memoirs_ were republished in the long collection of
Baudoin, Weber protested and brought an action. The defendant denied
his claim, and produced evidence to prove that the three first
chapters are by Lally Tollendal. It does not always follow that the
book is worthless because the title-page assigns it to a man who is
not the author. The real author very often is not to be trusted.
Malouet is one of those men, very rare in history, whose reputation
rises the more we know him; and Dumont of Geneva was a sage observer,
the confidant, and often the prompter, of Mirabeau. Both are
misleading, for they wrote long after, and their memory is constantly
at fault. Dumouriez wrote to excuse his defection, and Talleyrand to
cast a decent veil over actions which were injurious to him at the
Restoration. The Necker family are exasperating, because they are
generally wrong in their dates. Madame Campan wished to recover her
position, which the fall of the Empire had ruined. Therefore some who
had seen her manuscript have affirmed that the suppressed passages
were adverse to the queen; for the same reason that, in the Fersen
correspondence, certain expressions are omitted and replaced by
suspicious asterisks. Ferrieres has always been acknowledged as one of
the most trustworthy witnesses. It is he who relates that, at the
first meeting after the oath, the deputies were excluded from the
tennis-court in order that the Count d'Artois might play a match. We
now find, from the letters of a deputy recently published, that the
story of this piece of insolence is a fable. The clergy had made known
that they were coming, and it was thought unworthy of such an occasion
to receive a procession of ecclesiastics in a tennis-court; so the
deputies adjourned to a neighbouring church.
Montlosier, who was what Burke called a man of honour and a cavalier,
tells us that his own colleague from Auvergne was nearly killed in a
duel, and kept his bed for three months. Biauzat, the fellow-townsman
of the wounded man, writes home that he was absent from the Assembly
only ten days. The point of the matter is that the adversary whose
hand inflicted the wound was Montlosier himself.
The narrative which Madame Roland drew up in prison, as an appeal to
posterity, is not a discreet book, but it does not reveal the secret
of her life. It came out in 1863, when three or four letters were put
up for sale at auction, and when, shortly after, a miniature, with
something written on it, was found amid the refuse of a greengrocer's
shop. They were the letters of Madame Roland, which Buzot had sent to
a place of safety before he went out and shot himself; and the
miniature was her portrait, which he had worn in his flight.
Bertrand, the Minister of Marine, relates that the queen sent to the
emperor to learn what he would do for their deliverance, and he
publishes the text of the reply which came back. For a hundred years
that document has been accepted as the authentic statement of
Leopold's intentions. It was the document which the messenger brought
back, but not the reply which the emperor gave. That reply, very
different from the one that has misled every historian, was discovered
by Arneth, and was published two years ago by Professor Lenz, who
lectures on the Revolution to the fortunate students of Berlin. Sybel
inserted it in his review, and rewrote Lenz's article, which upset an
essential part of his own structure.
The Marquis de Bouille wrote his recollections in 1797, to clear
himself from responsibility for the catastrophe of Varennes. The
correspondence, preserved among Fersen's papers, shows that the
statements in his _Memoirs_ are untrue. He says that he wished the
king to depart openly, as Mirabeau had advised; that he recommended
the route by Rheims, which the king rejected; and that he opposed the
line of military posts, which led to disaster. The letters prove that
he advised secret departure, the route of Varennes, and the cavalry
escort.
* * * * *
The general characteristic of the period I am describing has been the
breakdown of the Memoirs, and our emancipation from the authority of
the writers who depended on them. That phase is represented by the
three historians, Sybel, Taine, and Sorel. They distanced their
predecessors, because they were able to consult much personal, and
much diplomatic, correspondence. They fell short of those who were to
come, because they were wanting in official information.
Sybel was Ranke's pupil, and he had learnt in the study of the Middle
Ages, which he disliked, to root out the legend and the fable and the
lie, and to bring history within the limits of evidence. In early life
he exploded the story of Peter the Hermit and his influence on the
Crusades, and in the same capacity it was he who exposed the
fabrication of the queen's letters. Indeed he was so sturdy a critic
that he scorned to read the fictitious Hardenberg, although the work
contains good material. He more than shared the unspiritual temper of
the school, and fearing alike the materialistic and the religious
basis of history, he insisted on confining it to affairs of state.
Having a better eye for institutions than his master, and an intellect
adapted to affairs, he was one of the first to turn from the study of
texts to modern times and burning questions. In erudition and remote
research he fully equalled those who were scholars and critics, and
nothing else; but his tastes called him to a different career. He said
of himself that he was three parts a politician, so that only the
miserable remnant composed the professor. Sybel approached the
Revolution through Burke, with essays on his French and Irish policy.
He stood firmly to the doctrine that men are governed by descent, that
the historic nation prevails invincibly over the actual nation, that
we cannot cast off our pedigree. Therefore the growth of things in
Prussia seemed to him to be almost normal, and acceptable in contrast
with the condition of a people which attempted to constitute itself
according to its own ideas. Political theory as well as national
antagonism allowed him no sympathy with the French, and no wonder he
is generally under-estimated in France. He stands aloof from the
meridian of Paris, and meditates high up in Central Europe on the
conflagration of 1789, and the trouble it gave to the world in
general. The distribution of power in France moves him less than the
distribution of power in Europe, and he thinks forms of government
less important than expansion of frontier. He describes the fall of
Robespierre as an episode in the partition of Poland. His endeavour is
to assign to the Revolution its place in international history.
Once it was said, in disparagement of Niebuhr and other historians,
that when you ask a German for a black coat he offers you a white
sheep, and leaves you to effect the transformation yourself. Sybel
belongs to a later age, and can write well, but heavily, and without
much light or air. His introduction, published in 1853, several years
before the volume of Tocqueville, has so much in common with it, that
it was suggested that he might have read the earlier article by
Tocqueville, which John Mill translated for the _Westminster Review_.
But Sybel assured me that he had not seen it. He had obtained access
to important papers, and when he became a great public personage,
everything was laid open before him. In diplomatic matters he is very
far ahead of all other writers, except Sorel. Having been an
opposition leader, and what in Prussia is called a Liberal, he went
over to Bismarck, and wrote the history of the new German Empire under
his inspiration, until the Emperor excluded him from the archives, of
which, for many active years, he had been the head. His five volumes,
not counting various essays written in amplification or defence,
stand, in the succession of histories, by dint of constant revision,
at a date near the year 1880. For a time they occupied the first
place. In successive editions errors were weeded out as fast as they
could be found; and yet, even in the fourth, Mounier, who, as
everybody knows, was elected for Dauphine, is called the deputy from
Provence. Inasmuch as he loves neither Thiers nor Sieyes, Sybel
declares it absurd to compare, as Thiers has done, the Constitution of
1799 to the British Constitution. In the page alluded to, one of the
most thoughtful in the Consulate and Empire, Thiers is so far from
putting the work of Sieyes on the British level, that his one purpose
is to display the superiority of a government which is the product of
much experiment and incessant adaptation to the artificial outcome of
political logic.
Sybel's view is that the Revolution went wrong quite naturally, that
the new order was no better than the old, because it proceeded from
the old, rose from an exhausted soil, and was worked by men nurtured
in the corruption of the old _regime_. He uses the Revolution to
exhibit the superiority of conservative and enlightened Germany. And
as there is little to say in favour of Prussia, which crowned an
inglorious war by an inglorious peace, he produced his effect by
piling up to the utmost the mass of French folly and iniquity. And
with all its defects, it is a most instructive work. A countryman, who
had listened to Daniel Webster's Bunker Hill oration, described it by
saying that every word weighed a pound. Almost the same thing might be
said of Sybel's history, not for force of language or depth of
thought, but by reason of the immense care with which every passage
was considered and all the evidence weighed. The author lived to see
himself overtaken and surpassed, for internal history by Taine, and
for foreign affairs by Sorel.
Taine was trained in the systems of Hegel and Comte, and his
fundamental dogma was the denial of free will and the absolute
dominion of physical causes over the life of mankind. A violent effort
to shape the future by intention and design, and not by causes that
are in the past, seemed to him the height of folly. The idea of
starting fresh, from the morrow of creation, of emancipating the
individual from the mass, the living from the dead, was a defiance of
the laws of nature. Man is civilised and trained by his surroundings,
his ancestry, his nationality, and must be adapted to them. The
natural man, whom the Revolution discovered and brought to the
surface, is, according to Taine, a vicious and destructive brute, not
to be tolerated unless caught young, and perseveringly disciplined and
controlled.