Lectures on the French Revolution

Instead of Guizot, our Doctrinaire historian is Barante. He had the distinction and the dignity of his friends, their book learning, and their experience of public affairs; and his work on the dukes of Burgundy was praised, in the infancy of those studies, beyond its merit in early life he had assisted Madame de la Rochejaquelein to bring out her Memoirs. His short biography of Saint Priest, Minister of the Interior in the first revolutionary year, is a singularly just and weighty narrative. After 1848 he published nine volumes on the Convention and the Directory. Like the rest of his party, Barante had always acknowledged the original spirit of the Revolution as the root of French institutions. But the movement of 1848, directed as it was against the Doctrinaires, against their monarchy and their ministry, had much developed the conservative element which was always strong within them.

In those days Montalembert succeeded Droz at the Academy, and took the opportunity to attack, as he said, not 1793 but 1789. He said that Guizot, the most eloquent of the immortals, had not found a word to urge in reply. On this level, and in opposition to the revival of Jacobin ideas and the rehabilitation of Jacobin character, Barante composed his work. It was a great occasion, as the tide had been running strongly the other way; but the book, coming from such a man, is a disappointment. In the trial of the king adverse points are slurred over, as if a historian could hold a brief. A more powerful writer of conservative history appeared about the same time in Heinrich von Sybel.

About the middle of the fifties, when Sybel's earlier volumes were coming out, the deeper studies began in France with Tocqueville. He was the first to establish, if not to discover, that the Revolution was not simply a break, a reversal, a surprise, but in part a development of tendencies at work in the old monarchy. He brought it into closer connection with French history, and believed that it had become inevitable, when Lewis XVI. ascended the throne, that the success and also the failure of the movement came from causes that were at work before. The desire for political freedom was sincere but adulterated. It was crossed and baffled by other aims. The secondary and subordinate liberties embarrassed the approach to the supreme goal of self-government. For Tocqueville was a Liberal of the purest breed – a Liberal and nothing else, deeply suspicious of democracy and its kindred, equality, centralisation and utilitarianism. Of all writers he is the most widely acceptable, and the hardest to find fault with. He is always wise, always right, and as just as Aristides. His intellect is without a flaw, but it is limited and constrained. He knows political literature and history less well than political life; his originality is not creative, and he does not stimulate with gleams of new light or unfathomed suggestiveness.

Two years later, in 1858, a work began to appear which was less new and less polished than Tocqueville's, but is still more instructive for every student of politics. Duvergier de Hauranne had long experience of public life. He remembered the day when he saw Cuvier mount the tribune in a black velvet suit and speak as few orators have spoken, and carry the electoral law which was the Reform Bill of 1817. Having quarrelled with the Doctrinaires, he led the attack which overthrew Guizot, and was one of three on whom Thiers was relying to save the throne, when the king went away in a cab and carried the dynasty with him. He devoted the evening of his life to a history of parliamentary government in France, which extends in ten volumes to 1830, and contains more profound ideas, more political science, than any other work I know in the compass of literature. He analyses every constitutional discussion, aided by much confidential knowledge, and the fullest acquaintance with pamphlets and leading articles. He is not so much at home in books; but he does not allow a shade of intelligent thought or a valid argument to escape him. During the Restoration, the great controversy of all ages, the conflict between reason and custom was fought out on the higher level. The question at that time was not which of the two should prevail, but how they should be reconciled, and whether rational thought and national life could be made to harmonise. The introductory volume covers the Revolution, and traces the progress and variation of views of government in France, from the appearance of Sieyès to the elevation of Napoleon.

Laboulaye was a man of like calibre and measurements, whom Waddington, when he was minister, called the true successor of Tocqueville. Like him he had saturated himself with American ideas, and like him he was persuaded that the revolutionary legacy of concentrated power was the chief obstacle to free institutions. He wrote, in three small volumes, a history of the United States, which is a most intelligent abstract of what he had learnt in Bancroft and Hildreth. He wrote with the utmost lucidity and definiteness, and never darkened counsel with prevaricating eloquence, so that there is no man from whom it is so easy and so agreeable to learn. His lectures on the early days of the Revolution were published from time to time in a review, and, I believe, have not been collected. Laboulaye was a scholar as well as a statesman, and always knew his subject well, and as a guide to the times we can have none more helpful than his unfinished course.

The event of the English competition is the appearance of Carlyle. After fifty years we are still dependent on him for Cromwell, and in Past and Present he gave what was the most remarkable piece of historical thinking in the language. But the mystery of investigation had not been revealed to him when he began his most famous book. He was scared from the Museum by an offender who sneezed in the Reading Room. As the French pamphlets were not yet catalogued, he asked permission to examine them and to make his selection at the shelves on which they stood. He complained that, having applied to a respectable official, he had been refused. Panizzi, furious at being described as a respectable official, declared that he could not allow the library to be pulled about by an unknown man of letters. In the end, the usual modest resources of a private collection satisfied his requirements. But the vivid gleam, the mixture of the sublime with the grotesque, make other opponents forget the impatient verdicts and the poverty of settled fact in the volumes that delivered our fathers from thraldom to Burke. They remain one of those disappointing stormclouds that give out more thunder than lightning.

The proof of advancing knowledge is the improvement in compendiums and school books. There are three which must be mentioned. In the middle of the century Lavallée wrote a history of France for his students at the Military College. Quoting Napoleon's remark, that the history of France must be in four volumes or in a hundred, he pronounces in favour of four. During a generation his work passed for the best of its kind. Being at St. Cyr, once the famous girls' school, for which Racine composed his later tragedies, he devoted many years to the elucidation of Madame de Maintenon, and the recovery of her interpolated letters. His Revolution is contained in 230 pages of his fourth volume. There is an abridgment of the like moderate dimensions by Carnot. He was the father of the President, and the son of the organiser of victory, who, in 1815, gave the memorable advice to Napoleon that, if he made a rush at the English, he would find them scattered and unprepared. He was a militant republican, editor of the Memoirs of his father, of Grégoire, and of Barère, and M. Aulard praises his book, with the sympathy of a co-religionist, as the best existing narrative. Other good republicans prefer what Henri Martin wrote in continuation of his history of France. I should have no difficulty in declaring that the seventh volume of the French history by Dareste is superior to them all; and however far we carry the process of selection and exclusion, I would never surrender it.

We have seen that there are many able works on either side, and two or 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 émigrés 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 Cæsar 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 £3400, and he published them in June 1864. Napoleon III. and the Empress Eugénie, 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 £1250 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, Barthélemy and Talleyrand, have been made public, besides those of Fersen, Maury, Vaudreuil, and many émigrés; 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 Fouché. 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. Cléry, 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. Ferrières 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 Bouillé 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.