Lectures on the French Revolution

The new Constitution afforded securities for order and for liberty such as France had never enjoyed. The Revolution had begun with a Liberalism which was a passion more than a philosophy, and the first Assembly endeavoured to realise it by diminishing authority, weakening the executive, and decentralising power. In the hour of peril under the Girondins the policy failed, and the Jacobins governed on the principle that power, coming from the people, ought to be concentrated in the fewest possible hands and made absolutely irresistible. Equality became the substitute of liberty, and the danger arose that the most welcome form of equality would be the equal distribution of property. The Jacobin statesmen, the thinkers of the party, undertook to abolish poverty without falling into Socialism. They had the Church property, which served as the basis of the public credit. They had the royal domain, the confiscated estates of emigrants and malignants, the common lands, the forest lands. And in time of war there was the pillage of opulent neighbours. By these operations the income of the peasantry was doubled, and it was deemed possible to relieve the masses from taxation, until, by the immense transfer of property, there should be no poor in the Republic. These schemes were at an end, and the Constitution of the year III. closes the revolutionary period.

The royalists and conservatives of the capital would have acquiesced in the defeat of their hopes but for the additional article which threatened to perpetuate power in the hands of existing deputies, which had been carried by a far smaller vote than that which was given in favour of the organic law itself. The alarm and the indignation were extreme, and the royalists, on counting their forces, saw that they had a good chance against the declining assembly. Nearly thirty thousand men were collected, and the command was given to an experienced officer. It had been proposed by some to confer it on the Count Colbert de Maulevrier, the former employer of Stofflet. This was refused on the ground that they were not absolutists or émigrés, but Liberals, and partisans of constitutional monarchy, and of no other.

The army of the Convention was scarcely six thousand, and a large body of Jacobin roughs were among them. The command was bestowed on Menou, a member of the minority of nobles of 1789. But Menou was disgusted with his materials, and felt more sympathy with the enemy. He endeavoured to negotiate, and was deposed, and succeeded by Barras, the victor in the bloodless battle of Thermidor.

Bonaparte, out of employment, was lounging in Paris, and as he came out of the theatre he found himself among the men who were holding the parley. He hurried to headquarters, where the effect of his defining words upon the scared authorities was such that he was at once appointed second in command. Therefore, when morning dawned, on October 5, the Louvre and the Tuileries had become a fortress, and the gardens were a fortified camp. A young officer who became the most brilliant figure on the battlefield of Europe – Murat – brought up cannon from the country. The bridge, and the quay, and every street that opened on the palace, were so commanded by batteries that they could be swept by grape-shot. Officers had been sent out for provisions, for barrels of gunpowder, for all that belongs to hospital and ambulance. Lest retreat should be cut off, a strong detachment held the road to St. Cloud; and arms were liberally supplied to the Convention and the friendly quarter of St. Antoine. The insurgents, led by dexterous intriguers, but without a great soldier at their head, could not approach the river; and those who came down from the opulent centre of the city missed their opportunity. After a sharp conflict in the Rue St. Honoré, they fled, pursued by nothing more murderous than blank cartridge; and Paris felt, for the first time, the grasp of the master. The man who defeated them, and by defeating them kept the throne vacant, was Bonaparte, through whose genius the Revolution was to subjugate the Continent.

APPENDIX

THE LITERATURE OF THE REVOLUTION

Before embarking on the stormy sea before us, we ought to be provided with chart and compass. Therefore I begin by speaking about the histories of the Revolution, so that you may at once have some idea what to choose and what to reject, that you may know where we stand, how we have come to penetrate so far and no farther, what branches there are that already bear ripe fruit and where it is still ripening on the tree of knowledge. I desire to rescue you from the writers of each particular school and each particular age, and from perpetual dependence on the ready-made and conventional narratives that satisfy the outer world.

With the growing experience of mankind, the larger curiosity and the increased resource, each generation adds to our insight. Lesser events can be understood by those who behold them, great events require time in proportion to their greatness.

Lamartine once said that the Revolution has mysteries but no enigmas. It is humiliating to be obliged to confess that those words are no nearer truth now than when they were written. People have not yet ceased to dispute about the real origin and nature of the event. It was the deficit; it was the famine; it was the Austrian Committee; it was the Diamond Necklace, and the humiliating memories of the Seven Years' War; it was the pride of nobles or the intolerance of priests; it was philosophy; it was freemasonry; it was Mr. Pitt; it was the incurable levity and violence of the national character; it was the issue of that struggle between classes that constitutes the unity of the history of France.

Amongst these interpretations we shall have to pick our way; but there are many questions of detail on which I shall be forced to tell you that I have no deciding evidence.

After the contemporary memoirs, the first historian who wrote with authority was Droz. He was at work for thirty years, having begun in 1811, when Paris was still full of floating information, and he knew much that otherwise did not come out until long after his death. He had consulted Lally Tollendal, and he was allowed to use the memoirs of Malouet, which were in manuscript, and which are unsurpassed for wisdom and good faith in the literature of the National Assembly. Droz was a man of sense and experience, with a true if not a powerful mind; and his book, in point of soundness and accuracy, was all that a book could be in the days when it was written. It is a history of Lewis XVI. during the time when it was possible to bring the Revolution under control; and the author shows, with an absolute sureness of judgment, that the turning-point was the rejection of the first project of Constitution, in September 1789. For him, the Revolution is contained in the first four months. He meant to write a political treatise on the natural history of revolutions, and the art of so managing just demands that unjust and dangerous demands shall acquire no force. It became a history of rejected opportunities, and an indictment of the wisdom of the minister and of the goodness of the king, by a constitutional royalist of the English school. His service to history is that he shows how disorder and crime grew out of unreadiness, want of energy, want of clear thought and definite design. Droz admits that there is a flaw in the philosophy of his title-page. The position lost in the summer of 1789 was never recovered. But during the year 1790 Mirabeau was at work on schemes to restore the monarchy, and it is not plain that they could never have succeeded. Therefore Droz added a volume on the parliamentary career of Mirabeau, and called it an appendix, so as to remain true to his original theory of the fatal limit. We know the great orator better than he could be known in 1842, and the value of Droz's excellent work is confined to the second volume. It will stand undiminished even if we reject the idea which inspired it, and prefer to think that the cause might have been won, even when it came to actual fighting, on the 10th of August. Droz's book belongs to the small number of writings before us which are superior to their fame, and it was followed by one that enjoyed to the utmost the opposite fate.

For our next event is an explosion. Lamartine, the poet, was one of those legitimists who believed that 1830 had killed monarchy, who considered the Orleans dynasty a sham, and set themselves at once to look ahead of it towards the inevitable Republic. Talleyrand warned him to hold himself ready for something more substantial than the exchange of a nephew for an uncle on a baseless throne. With the intuition of genius he saw sooner than most men, more accurately than any man, the signs of what was to come. In six years, he said, we shall be masters. He was mistaken only by a few weeks. He laid his plans that, when the time came, he should be the accepted leader. To chasten and idealise the Revolution, and to prepare a Republic that should not be a terror to mankind, but should submit easily to the fascination of a melodious and sympathetic eloquence, he wrote the History of the Girondins. The success was the most instantaneous and splendid ever obtained by a historical work. People could read nothing else; and Alexandre Dumas paid him the shrewd compliment of saying that he had lifted history to the level of romance. Lamartine gained his purpose. He contributed to institute a Republic that was pacific and humane, responsive to the charm of phrase, and obedient to the master hand that wrote the glories of the Gironde. He always believed that, without his book, the Reign of Terror would have been renewed.

From early in the century to the other day there was a succession of authors in France who knew how to write as scarcely any but Mr. Ruskin or Mr. Swinburne have ever written in England. They doubled the opulence and the significance of language, and made prose more sonorous and more penetrating than anything but the highest poetry. There were not more than half a dozen, beginning with Chateaubriand, and, I fear, ending with Saint Victor. Lamartine became the historian in this Corinthian school of style, and his purple patches outdo everything in effectiveness. But it would appear that in French rhetoric there are pitfalls which tamer pens avoid. Rousseau compared the Roman Senate to two hundred kings, because his sensitive ear did not allow him to say three hundred —trois cents rois. Chateaubriand, describing in a private letter his journey to the Alps, speaks of the moon along the mountain tops, and adds: "It is all right; I have looked up the Almanac, and find that there was a moon." Paul Louis Courier says that Plutarch would have made Pompey conquer at Pharsalus if it would have read better, and he thinks that he was quite right. Courier's exacting taste would have found contentment in Lamartine. He knows very well that Marie Antoinette was fifteen when she married the Dauphin in 1770; yet he affirms that she was the child the Empress held up in her arms when the Magyar magnates swore to die for their queen, Maria Theresa. The scene occurred in 1741, fourteen years before she was born. Histories of literature give the catalogue of his amazing blunders.

In his declining years he reverted to this book, and wrote an apology, in which he answered his accusers, and confessed to some passages which he exhorted them to tear out. There was good ground for recantation. Writing to dazzle the democracy by means of a bright halo, with himself in the midst of it, he was sometimes weak in exposing crimes that had a popular motive. His republicanism was of the sort that allows no safeguard for minorities, no rights to men but those which their country gives them. He had been the speaker who, when the Chamber wavered, rejected the Regency which was the legal government, and compelled the Duchess of Orleans to fly. When a report reached him that she had been seized, and he was asked to order her release, he refused, saying, "If the people ask for her, she must be given up to them."

In his own defence he showed that he had consulted the widow of Danton, and had found a witness of the last banquet of the Girondins. In his book he dramatised the scene, and displayed the various bearing of the fallen statesmen during their last night on earth. Granier de Cassagnac pronounced the whole thing a fabrication. It was told by Nodier who was a professional inventor, and by Thiers who gave no authority, and none could be found. But there was a priest who sat outside the door, waiting to offer the last consolations of religion to the men about to die. Fifty years later he was still living, and Lamartine found him and took down his recollections. An old Girondin, whom Charlotte Corday had requested to defend her, and who died a senator of the Second Empire, Pontécoulant, assured his friends that Lamartine had given the true colour, had reproduced the times as he remembered them. In the same way General Dumas approved of Thiers's 10th of August. He was an old soldier of the American war, a statesman of the Revolution, a trusted servant of Napoleon, whose military history he wrote, and he left memoirs which we value. But I suspect that these lingering veterans were easily pleased with clever writers who brought back the scenes of their early life. There may be truth in Lamartine's colouring, but on the whole his Girondins live as literature not as history. And his four volumes on the National Assembly are a piece of book-making that requires no comment.

Before the thunder of the Girondins had rolled away, they were followed by two books of more enduring value on the same side. Louis Blanc was a socialist politician, who helped, after 1840, to cement that union of socialists and republicans which overthrew the monarchy, and went to pieces on the barricades of June 1848. Driven into exile, he settled in London, and spent several years at work in the British Museum. It was not all a misfortune, as this is what he found there: it will give you an encouraging idea of the resources that await us on our path. When Croker gave up his house at the Admiralty on the accession of the Whigs, he sold his revolutionary library of more than 10,000 pieces to the Museum. But the collector's fever is an ailment not to be laid by change of government or loss of income. Six years later Croker had made another collection as large as the first, which also was bought by the Trustees. Before he died, this incurable collector had brought together as much as the two previous lots, and the whole was at last deposited in the same place. There, in one room, we have about five hundred shelves crowded, on an average, with more than one hundred and twenty pamphlets, all of them belonging to the epoch that concerns us. Allowing for duplicates, this amounts to forty or fifty thousand Revolution tracts; and I believe that there is nothing equal to it at Paris. Half of them were already there, in time to be consulted both by Louis Blanc and Tocqueville. Croker's collection of manuscript papers on the same period was sold for £50 at his death, and went to what was once the famous library of Middle Hill.

Louis Blanc was thus able to continue in England the work he had begun at home, and he completed it in twelve volumes. It contains much subsidiary detail and many literary references, and this makes it a useful book to consult. The ponderous mass of material, and the power of the pen, do not compensate for the weary obtrusion of the author's doctrine and design.

An eminent personage once said to me that the parliament of his country was intent on suppressing educational freedom. When I asked what made them illiberal, he answered, "It is because they are liberal." Louis Blanc partook of that mixture. He is the expounder of Revolution in its compulsory and illiberal aspect. He desires government to be so constituted that it may do everything for the people, not so restricted that it can do no injury to minorities. The masses have more to suffer from abuse of wealth than from abuse of power, and need protection by the State, not against it. Power, in the proper hands, acting for the whole, must not be restrained in the interest of a part. Therefore Louis Blanc is the admirer and advocate of Robespierre; and the tone of his pleading appears at the September massacres, when he bids us remember St. Bartholomew.

Michelet undertook to vindicate the Revolution at the same time as Louis Blanc, without his frigid passion, his ostentatious research, his attention to particulars, but with deeper insight and a stronger pinion. His position at the archives gave him an advantage over every rival; and when he lost his place, he settled in the west of France and made a study of La Vendée. He is regardless of proof, and rejects as rubbish mere facts that contribute nothing to his argument or his picture. Because Arras was a clerical town, he calls Robespierre a priest. Because there are Punic tombs at Ajaccio, he calls Napoleon a countryman of Hannibal. For him the function of history is judgment, not narrative. If we submit ourselves to the event, if we think more of the accomplished deed than of the suggested problem, we become servile accomplices of success and force. History is resurrection. The historian is called to revise trials and to reverse sentences, as the people, who are the subject of all history, awoke to the knowledge of their wrongs and of their power, and rose up to avenge the past. History is also restitution. Authorities tyrannised and nations suffered; but the Revolution is the advent of justice, and the central fact in the experience of mankind. Michelet proclaims that at his touch the hollow idols were shattered and exposed, the carrion kings appeared, unsheeted and unmasked. He says that he has had to swallow too much anger and too much woe, too many vipers and too many kings; and he writes sometimes as if such diet disagreed with him. His imagination is filled with the cruel sufferings of man, and he hails with a profound enthusiasm the moment when the victim that could not die, in a furious act of retribution, avenged the martyrdom of a thousand years. The acquisition of rights, the academic theory, touches him less than the punishment of wrong. There is no forgiveness for those who resist the people rising in the consciousness of its might. What is good proceeds from the mass, and what is bad from individuals. Mankind, ignorant in regard to nature, is a righteous judge of the affairs of man. The light which comes to the learned from reflection comes to the unlearned more surely by natural inspiration; and power is due to the mass by reason of instinct, not by reason of numbers. They are right by dispensation of heaven, and there is no pity for their victims, if you remember the days of old. Michelet had no patience with those who sought the pure essence of the Revolution in religion. He contrasts the agonies with which the Church aggravated the punishment of death with the swift mercy of the guillotine, and prefers to fall into Danton's hands rather than into those of Lewis IX. or Torquemada.

With all this, by the real sincerity of his feeling for the multitude, by the thoroughness of his view and his intensely expressive language, he is the most illuminating of the democratic historians. We often read of men whose lives have been changed because a particular book has fallen into their hands, or, one might say, because they have fallen into the hands of a particular book. It is not always a happy accident; and one feels that things would have gone otherwise with them if they had examined Sir John Lubbock's List of Best Books, or what I would rather call the St. Helena library, containing none but works adequate and adapted to use by the ablest man in the full maturity of his mind. Of such books, that are strong enough, in some eminent quality, to work a change and form an epoch in a reader's life, there are two, perhaps, on our revolutionary shelf. One is Taine, and the other Michelet.

The fourth work of the revolutionary party, that was written almost simultaneously with these, is that of Villiaumé. Lamartine esteemed Vergniaud. Louis Blanc esteemed Robespierre, Michelet, Danton. Villiaumé went a step farther, and admired Marat. He had lived much in the surviving families of revolutionary heroes, and received, he says, the last breath of an expiring tradition. He had also gathered from Chateaubriand what he remembered; and Thierry, who was blind, caused his book to be read to him twice over.

The account of Marat in the 28th volume of Buchez was partly written by Villiaumé, and was approved by Albertine Marat. The great bibliographical curiosity in the literature of the Revolution is Marat's newspaper. It was printed often in hiding-places and under difficulties, and is so hard to find that, a few years ago, the Paris library did not possess a complete set. A bookseller once told me that he had sold it to an English statesman for £240. Marat's own copy, corrected in his handwriting, and enriched with other matter, was preserved by his sister. In 1835 she made it over to Villiaumé, who, having finished his book, sold it in 1859 for £80 to the collector Solar. Prince Napoleon afterwards owned it; and at last it made its way to an ancient Scottish castle, where I had the good fortune to find it.

Whilst the revolutionary historians, aided by public events, were predominating in France, the conservatives competed obscurely, and at first without success. Genoude was for many years editor of the leading royalist journal, and in that capacity initiated a remarkable phase of political thought. When the Bourbons were cast out under the imputation of incurable absolutism, the legitimists found themselves identified with a grudging liberality and a restricted suffrage, and stood at a hopeless disadvantage. In the Gazette de France Genoude at once adopted the opposite policy, and overtrumped the liberal Orleanists. He argued that a throne which was not occupied by right of inheritance, as a man holds his estate, could only be made legitimate by the expressed will of France. Therefore he insisted on an appeal to the nation, on the sovereignty of the people, on the widest extension of the franchise. When his friend Courmenin drew up the Constitution of 1848, it was Genoude who induced him to adopt the new practice of universal suffrage, which was unknown to the Revolution. Having lost his wife, he took orders. All this, he said one day, will presently come to an end, not through the act of a soldier or an orator, but of a Cardinal. And he drank to the memory of Richelieu.

The notion of a legitimate throne, restored by democracy, which was borrowed from Bolingbroke, and which nearly prevailed in 1873, gives some relief and originality to his work on the Revolution. You are not likely to meet with it. When Talleyrand's Memoirs appeared, most people learnt for the first time that he went at night to offer his services to the king, to get the better of the Assembly. The editor placed the event in the middle of July. Nobody seemed to know that the story was already told by Genoude, and that he fixed the midnight bid for power at its proper date, a month earlier.

The history of Amédée Gabourd is a far better book, and perhaps the best of its kind. Gabourd had previously written a history of France, and his many volumes on the nineteenth century, with no pretension in point of research, are convenient for the lower range of countries and events. He writes with the care, the intelligence, the knowledge of the work of other men, which distinguish Charles Knight's Popular History of England. I have known very deep students indeed who were in the habit of constantly using him. He says, with reason, that no writer has sought truth and justice with more perfect good faith, or has been more careful to keep aloof from party spirit and accepted judgments. As he was a constitutionalist, the revolution of February was the ruin of a system which he expected to last for ever, and to govern the last age of the world. But Gabourd remained true to his principles. He wrote: "I shall love the people, and honour the king; and I shall have the same judgment on the tyranny from above and the tyranny from below. I am not one of those who set a chasm between liberty and religion, as if God would accept no worship but that of servile hearts. I shall not oppose the results of the event which I describe, or deny the merit of what had been won at the price of so much suffering."

The Doctrinaires were of all men in the best position to understand the Revolution and to judge it rightly. They had no weakness for the ancient monarchy, none for the republic; and they accepted the results rather than the motives. They rejoiced in the reign of reason, but they required the monarchy duly limited, and the church as established by the Concordat, in order to resume the chain of history and the reposing influence of custom. They were the most intellectual group of statesmen in the country; but, like the Peelites, they were leaders without followers, and it was said of them that they were only four, but pretended to be five, to strike terror by their number. Guizot, the greatest writer among them, composed, in his old age, a history of France for his grandchildren. It was left incomplete, but his discourses on the Revolution, the topic he had thought about all his life, were edited by his family. These tales of a grandfather are not properly his work, and, like the kindred and coequal lectures of Niebuhr, give approximately the views of a man so great that it is a grief not to possess them in authentic form.