VOLUME X SLICE VII Fox, George to France (continued 8)

Meanwhile the War of the Austrian Succession broke out again, and never had secretary of state more intricate questions to solve than had D’Argenson. In the attempt to make a stage-emperor of Charles Albert of Bavaria, Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle. defeat was incurred at Dettingen, and the French were driven back on the Rhine (1743). The Bavarian dream dissipated, victories gained in Flanders by Marshal Saxe, another adventurer of genius, at Fontenoy, Raucoux and Lawfeld (1745-1747), were hailed with joy as continuing those of Louis XIV.; even though they resulted in the loss of Germany and the doubling of English armaments. The “disinterested” peace of Aix-la-Chapelle (October 1748) had no effectual result other than that of destroying in Germany, and for the benefit of Prussia, a balance of power that had yet to be secured in Italy, despite the establishment of the Spanish prince Philip at Parma. France, meanwhile, was beaten at sea by England, Maria Theresa’s sole ally. While founding her colonial empire England had come into collision with France; and the rivalry of the Hundred Years’ War had immediately sprung up again between the two countries. Engaged already in both Canada and in India (where Dupleix was founding an empire with a mere handful of men), it was to France’s interest not to become involved in war upon the Rhine, thus falling into England’s continental trap. She did fall into it, however: for the sake of conquering Silesia for the king of Prussia, Canada was left exposed by the capture of Cape Breton; while in order to restore this same Silesia to Maria Theresa, Canada was lost and with it India.

France had worked for the king of Prussia from 1740 to 1748; now it was Maria Theresa’s game that was played in the Seven Years’ War. In 1755, the English having made a sudden attack upon the French at sea, and The Seven Years’ War, 1756-1763. Frederick II. having by a fresh volte-face passed into alliance with Great Britain, Louis XV.’s government accepted an alliance with Maria Theresa in the treaty of the 1st of May 1756. Instead of remaining upon the defensive in this continental war—merely accessory as it was—he made it his chief affair, and placed himself under the petticoat government of three women, Maria Theresa, Elizabeth of Russia and the marquise de Pompadour. This error—the worst of all—laid the foundations of the Prussian and British empires. By three battles, victories for the enemies of France—Rossbach in Germany, 1757, Plassey in India, 1757, and Quebec in Canada, 1759 (owing to the recall of Dupleix, who was not bringing in large enough dividends to the Company of the Indies, and to the abandonment of Montcalm, who could not interest any one in “a few acres of snow”), the expansion of Prussia was assured, and the British relieved of French rivalry in the expansion of their empire in India and on the North American continent.

Owing to the blindness of Louis XV. and the vanity of the favourite, the treaties of Paris and Hubertusburg (1763) once more proved the French splendid in their conceptions, but deficient in action. Moreover, Choiseul, secretary Treaties of Paris and Hubertusburg. of state for foreign affairs since 1758, made out of this deceptive Austrian alliance a system which put the finishing touch to disaster, and after having thrown away everything to satisfy Maria Theresa’s hatred of Frederick II., the reconciliation between these two irreconcilable Germans at Neisse and at Neustadt (1769-1770) was witnessed by France, to the prejudice of Poland, one of her most ancient adherents. The expedient of the Family Compact, concluded with Spain in 1761—with a view to taking vengeance upon England, whose fleets were a continual thorn in the side to France—served only to involve Spain herself in misfortune. Choiseul, who at least had a policy that was sometimes in the right, and who was very anxious to carry it out, then realized that the real quarrel had to be settled with England. Amid the anguish of defeat and of approaching ruin, he had an acute sense of the actualities of the case, and from 1763 to 1766 devoted himself passionately to the reconstruction of the navy. To compensate for the loss of the colonies he annexed Lorraine (1766), and by the acquisition of Corsica in 1768 he gave France an intermediary position in the Mediterranean, between friendly Spain and Italy, looking forward to the time when it should become a stepping-stone to Africa.

But Louis XV. had two policies. The incoherent efforts which he made to repair by the secret diplomacy of the comte de Broglie the evils caused by his official policy only aggravated his shortcomings and betrayed his weakness. First partition of Poland. The contradictory intrigues of the king’s secret proceedings in the candidature of Prince Xavier, the dauphine’s brother, and the patriotic efforts of the confederation of Bar, contributed to bring about the Polish crisis which the partition of 1772 resolved in favour of Frederick II.; and the Turks were in their turn dragged into the same disastrous affair. Of the old allies of France, Choiseul preserved at least Sweden by the coup d’état of Gustavus III.; but instead of being as formerly the centre of great affairs, the cabinet of Versailles lost all its credit, and only exhibited before the eyes of contemptuous Europe France’s extreme state of decay.

The nation felt this humiliation, and showed all the greater irritation as the want of cohesion in the government and the anarchy in the central authority became more and more intolerable in home affairs. Though the administration Internal policy of Louis XV. still possessed a fund of tradition and a personnel which, including many men of note, protected it from the enfeebling influence of the court, it looked as though chance regulated everything so far as the government was concerned. These fluctuations were owing partly to the character of Louis XV., and partly also to the fact that society in the 18th century was too advanced in its ideas to submit without resistance to the caprice of such a man. His mistresses were not the only cause of this; for ever since Fleury’s advent political parties had come to the fore. From 1749 to 1757 the party of religious devotees grouped round the queen and the king’s daughters, with the dauphin as chief and the comte D’Argenson, and Machault d’Arnouville, keeper of the seals, as lieutenants, had worked against Madame de Pompadour (who leant for support upon the parlements, the Jansenists and the philosophers) and had gained the upper hand. Thenceforward poverty, disorders, and consequently murmurs increased. The financial reform attempted by Machault d’Arnouville between 1745 and 1749—a reduction of the debt through the impost of the twentieth and the edict of 1749 against the extensive property held in mortmain by the Church—after his disgrace only resulted in failure. The army, which D’Argenson (likewise dismissed by Madame de Pompadour) had been from 1743 to 1747 trying to restore by useful reforms, was riddled by cabals. Half the people in the kingdom were dying of hunger, while the court was insulting poverty by its luxury and waste; and from 1750 onwards political ferment was everywhere manifest. It found all the more favourable foothold in that the Church, the State’s best ally, had made herself more and more unpopular. Her refusal of the sacraments to those who would not accept the bull Unigenitus (1746) was exploited in the eyes of the masses, as in those of more enlightened people was her selfish and short-sighted resistance to the financial plans of Machault. The general discontent was expressed by the parlements in their attempt to establish a political supremacy amid universal confusion, and by the popular voice in pamphlets recalling by their violence those of the League. Every one expected and desired a speedy revolution that should put an end to a policy which alternated between overheated effervescence, abnormal activity and lethargy. Nothing can better show the point to which things had descended than the attempted assassination of Louis the Well-beloved by Damiens in 1757.

Choiseul was the means of accelerating this revolution, not only by his abandonment of diplomatic traditions, but still more by his improvidence and violence. He reversed the policy of his predecessors in regard to the parlement. Choiseul. Supported by public opinion, which clamoured for guarantees against abitrary power, the parlements had dared not only to insist on being consulted as to the budget of the state in 1763, but to enter upon a confederation throughout the whole of France, and on repeated occasions to ordain a general strike of the judicial authorities. Choiseul did not hesitate to attack through lits de justice or by exile a judiciary oligarchy which doubtless rested its pretensions merely on wealth, high birth, or that encroaching spirit that was the only counteracting agency to the monarchy. Louis XV., wearied with their clamour, called them to order. Choiseul’s religious policy was no less venturesome; after the condemnation in 1759 of the Jesuits who were involved in the bankruptcy of Father de la Valette, their general, in the Antilles, he had the order dissolved for refusing to modify its constitution (1761-1764). Thus, not content with encouraging writers with innovating ideas to the prejudice of traditional institutions, he attacked, in the order of the Jesuits, the strongest defender of these latter, and delivered over the new generation to revolutionary doctrines.

A woman had elevated him into power; a woman brought him to the ground. He succumbed to a coalition of the chancellor Maupeou, the duc d’Aiguillon and the Abbé Terray, which depended on the favour of the king’s latest The Triumvirate, 1770-1774. mistress, Madame du Barry (December 1770); and the Jesuits were avenged by a stroke of authority similar to that by which they themselves had suffered. Following on an edict registered by the lit de justice, which forbade any remonstrance in political matters, the parlement had resigned, and had been imitated by the provincial parlements; whereupon Maupeou, an energetic chancellor, suppressed the parlements and substituted superior councils of magistrates appointed by the king (1771). This reform was justified by the religious intolerance of the parlements; by their scandalous trials of Calas, Pierre Paul Sirven (1709-1777), the chevalier de la Barre and the comte de Lally; by the retrograde spirit that had made them suppress the Encyclopaedia in 1759 and condemn Émile in 1762; and by their selfishness in perpetuating abuses by which they profited. But this reform, being made by the minister of a hated sovereign, only aided in exasperating public opinion, which was grateful to the parlements in that their remonstrances had not always been fruitless.

Thus all the buttresses of the monarchical institution began to fall to pieces: the Church, undermined by the heresy of Jansenism, weakened by the inroads of philosophy, discredited by evil-livers among the priesthood, and Ancient influences and institutions. divided against itself, like all losing parties; the nobility of the court, still brave at heart, though incapable of exertion and reduced to beggary, having lost all respect for discipline and authority, not only in the camp, but in civilian society; and the upper-class officials, narrow-minded and egotistical, unsettling by their opposition the royal authority which they pretended to safeguard. Even the “liberties,” among the few representative institutions which the ancien régime had left intact in some provinces, turned against the people. The estates opposed most of the intelligent and humane measures proposed by such intendants as Tourny and Turgot to relieve the peasants, whose distress was very great; they did their utmost to render the selfishness of the privileged classes more oppressive and vexatious.

Thus the terrible prevalence of poverty and want; the successive famines; the mistakes of the government; the scandals of the Parc aux Cerfs; and the parlements playing the Roman senate: all these causes, added The new ideas. together and multiplied, assisted in setting a general fermentation to work. The philosophers only helped to precipitate a movement which they had not created; without pointing to absolute power as the cause of the trouble, and without pretending to upset the traditional system, they attempted to instil into princes the feeling of new and more precise obligations towards their subjects. Voltaire, Montesquieu, the Encyclopaedists and the Physiocrats (recurring to the tradition of Bayle and Fontenelle), by dissolving in their analytical crucible all consecrated beliefs and all fixed institutions, brought back into the human society of the 18th century that humanity which had been so rudely eliminated. They demanded freedom of thought and belief with passionate insistence; they ardently discussed institutions and conduct; and they imported into polemics the idea of natural rights superior to all political arrangements. Whilst some, like Voltaire and the Physiocrats, representatives of the privileged classes and careless of political rights, wished to make use of the omnipotence of the prince to accomplish desirable reforms, or, like Montesquieu, adversely criticized despotism and extolled moderate governments, other, plebeians like Rousseau, proclaimed the theory of the social contract and the sovereignty of the people. So that during this reign of frivolity and passion, so bold in conception and so poor in execution, the thinkers contributed still further to mark the contrast between grandeur of plan and mediocrity of result.

The preaching of all this generous philosophy, not only in France, but throughout the whole of Europe, would have been in vain had there not existed at the time a social class interested in these great changes, and capable of compassing them. Neither the witty and lucid form in which the philosophers clothed their ideas in their satires, romances, stage-plays and treatises, nor the salons of Madame du Deffand, Madame Geoffrin and Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, could possibly have been sufficiently far-reaching or active centres of political propaganda. The former touched only the more highly educated classes; while to the latter, where privileged individuals alone had entry, novelties were but an undiluted stimulant for the jaded appetites of persons whose ideas of good-breeding, moreover, would have drawn the line at martyrdom.

The class which gave the Revolution its chiefs, its outward and visible forms, and the irresistible energy of its hopes, was the bourgeoisie, intelligent, ambitious and rich; in the forefront the capitalists and financiers of the The bourgeoisie—the incarnation of new ideas. haute bourgeoisie, farmers-general and army contractors, who had supplanted or swamped the old landed and military aristocracy, had insensibly reconstructed the interior of the ancient social edifice with the gilded and incongruous materials of wealth, and in order to consolidate or increase their monopolies, needed to secure themselves against the arbitrary action of royalty and the bureaucracy. Next came the crowd of stockholders and creditors of the state, who, in face of the government’s “extravagant anarchy,” no longer felt safe from partial or total bankruptcy. More powerful still, and more masterful, was the commercial, industrial and colonial bourgeoisie; because under the Regency and under Louis XV. they had been more productive and more creative. Having gradually revolutionized the whole economic system, in Paris, in Lyons, in Nantes, in Bordeaux, in Marseilles, they could not tamely put up with being excluded from public affairs, which had so much bearing upon their private or collective enterprises. Finally, behind this bourgeoisie, and afar off, came the crowd of serfs, rustics whom the acquisition of land had gradually enfranchised, and who were the more eager to enjoy their definitive liberation because it was close at hand.

The habits and sentiments of French society showed similar changes. From having been almost exclusively national during Louis XIV.’s reign, owing to the perpetual state of war and to a sort of proud isolation, it had gradually Transformation of manners and customs. become cosmopolitan. After the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, France had been flooded from all quarters of the civilized world, but especially from England, by a concourse of refined and cultured men well acquainted with her usages and her universal language, whom she had received sympathetically. Paris became the brain of Europe. This revolution in manners and customs, coinciding with the revolution in ideas, led in its turn to a transformation in feeling, and to new aesthetic needs. Gradually people became sick of openly avowed gallantry, of shameless libertinism, of moral obliquity and of the flattering artifices of vice; a long shudder ran through the selfish torpor of the social body. After reading the Nouvelle-Héloïse, Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison, fatigued and wearied society revived as though beneath the fresh breezes of dawn. The principle of examination, the reasoned analysis of human conditions and the discussion of causes, far from culminating in disillusioned nihilism, everywhere aroused the democratic spirit, the life of sentiment and of human feeling: in the drama, with Marivaux, Diderot and La Chaussée; in art, with Chardin and Greuze; and in the salons, in view of the suppression of privilege. So that to Louis XV.’s cynical and hopeless declaration: “Apres moi le déluge,” the setting 18th century responded by a belief in progress and an appeal to the future. A long-drawn echo from all classes hailed a revolution that was possible because it was necessary.

If this revolution did not burst forth sooner, in the actual lifetime of Louis XV., if in Louis XVI.’s reign there was a renewal of loyalty to the king, before the appeal to liberty was made, that is to be explained by this hope of recovery. But Louis XVI.’s reign (1774-1792) was only to be a temporary halting-place, an artifice of history for passing through the transition period whilst elaborating the transformation which was to revolutionize, together with France, the whole world.

Louis XVI. was twenty years of age. Physically he was stout, and a slave to the Bourbon fondness for good living; intellectually a poor creature and but ill-educated, he loved nothing so much as hunting and locksmith’s Louis XVI. work. He had a taste for puerile amusements, a mania for useless little domestic economies in a court where millions vanished like smoke, and a natural idleness which achieved as its masterpiece the keeping a diary from 1766 to 1792 of a life so tragic, which was yet but a foolish chronicle of trifles. Add to this that he was a virtuous husband, a kind father, a fervent Christian and a good-natured man full of excellent intentions, yet a spectacle of moral pusillanimity and ineptitude.

From 1770 onwards lived side by side with this king, rather than at his side, the archduchess Marie Antoinette of Austria—one of the very graceful and very frivolous women who were to be found at Versailles, opening to life Marie Antoinette. like the flowers she so much loved, enamoured of pleasure and luxury, delighting to free herself from the formalities of court life, and mingling in the amusements of society; lovable and loving, without ceasing to be virtuous. Flattered and adored at the outset, she very soon furnished a sinister illustration to Beaumarchais’ Basile; for evil tongues began to calumniate the queen: those of her brothers-in-law, the duc d’Aiguillon (protector of Madame du Barry and dismissed from the ministry), and the Cardinal de Rohan, recalled from his embassy in Vienna. She was blamed for her friendship with the comtesse de Polignac, who loved her only as the dispenser of titles and positions; and when weary of this persistent begging for rewards, she was taxed with her preference for foreigners who asked nothing. People brought up against her the debts and expenditure due to her belief in the inexhaustible resources of France; and hatred became definite when she was suspected of trying to imitate her mother Maria Theresa and play the part of ruler, since her husband neglected his duty. They then became persuaded that it was she who caused the weight of taxation; in the most infamous libels comparison was made between her freedom of behaviour and that of Louis XV.’s former mistresses. Private envy and public misconceptions very soon summed up her excessive unpopularity in the menacing nickname, “L’Autrichienne.” (See Marie Antoinette.)

All this shows that Louis XVI. was not a monarch capable of directing or suppressing the inevitable revolution. His reign was but a tissue of contradictions. External affairs seemed in even a more dangerous position than Foreign policy of Louis XVI. those at home. Louis XVI. confided to Vergennes the charge of reverting to the traditions of the crown and raising France from the humiliation suffered by the treaty of Paris and the partition of Poland. His first act was to release French policy from the Austrian alliance of 1756; in this he was aided both by public opinion and by the confidence of the king—the latter managing to set aside the desires of the queen, whom the ambition of Maria Theresa and Joseph II. hoped to use as an auxiliary. Vergennes’ object was a double one: to free the kingdom from English supremacy and to shake off the yoke of Austria. Opportunities offered themselves simultaneously. In 1775 the English colonies in America rebelled, and Louis XVI., after giving them secret aid and encouragement almost from the first, finally in February 1778, despite Marie Antoinette, formed an open alliance with them; while when Joseph II., after having partitioned Poland, wanted in addition to balance the loss of Silesia with that of Bavaria, Vergennes prevented him from doing so. In vain was he offered a share in the partition of the Netherlands by way of an inducement. France’s disinterested action in the peace of Teschen (1779) restored to her the lost adherence of the secondary states. Europe began to respect her again when she signed a Franco-Dutch-Spanish alliance (1779-1780), and when, after the capitulation of the English at Yorktown, the peace of Versailles (1783) crowned her efforts with at least formal success. Thenceforward, partly from prudence and partly from penury, Vergennes cared only for the maintenance of peace—a not too easy task, in opposition to the greed of Catherine II. and Joseph II., who now wished to divide the Ottoman empire. Joseph II., recognizing that Louis XVI. would not sacrifice the “sick man” to him, raised the question of the opening of the Scheldt, against the Dutch. Vainly did Joseph II. accuse his sister of ingratitude and complain of her resistance; the treaty of Fontainebleau in 1785 maintained the rights of Holland. Later on, Joseph II., sticking to his point, wanted to settle the house of Bavaria in the Netherlands; but Louis XVI. supported the confederation of princes (Fürstenbund) which Frederick II. called together in order to keep his turbulent neighbour within bounds. Vergennes completed his work by signing a commercial treaty in 1786 with England, whose commerce and industry were favoured above others, and a second in 1787 with Russia. He died in 1787, at an opportune moment for himself; though he had temporarily raised France’s position in Europe, his work was soon ruined by the very means taken to secure its successes: warfare and armaments had hastened the “hideous bankruptcy.”

From the very beginning of his reign Louis XVI. fell into Internal policy of Louis XVI. contradictions and hesitation in internal affairs, which could not but bring him to grief. He tried first of all to govern in accordance with public opinion, and was induced to flatter it beyond measure; in an extreme of inconsistency he re-established the parlements, the worst enemies of reform, at the very moment when he was calling in the reformers to his councils.

Turgot, the most notable of these latter, was well fitted to play his great part as an enlightened minister, as much from the principle of hard work and domestic economy traditional in his family, as from a maturity of mind Turgot 1774-1776. developed by extensive study at the Sorbonne and by frequenting the salons of the Encyclopaedists. He had proved this by his capable administration in the paymaster’s office at Limoges, from 1761 to 1774. A disciple of Quesnay and of Gournay, he tried to repeat in great affairs the experience of liberty which he had found successful in small, and to fortify the unity of the nation and the government by social, political and economic reforms. He ordained the free circulation of grain within the kingdom, and was supported by Louis XVI. in the course of the flour-war (guerre des farines) (April-May 1775); he substituted a territorial subsidy for the royal corvée—so burdensome upon the peasants—and thus tended to abolish privilege in the matter of imposts; and he established the freedom of industry by the dissolution of privileged trade corporations (1776). Finance was in a deplorable state, and as controller-general he formulated a new fiscal policy, consisting of neither fresh taxation nor loans, but of retrenchment. At one fell stroke the two auxiliaries on which he had a right to count failed him: public opinion, clamouring for reform on condition of not paying the cost; and the king, too timid to dominate public opinion, and not knowing how to refuse the demands of privilege. Economy in the matter of public finance implies a grain of severity in the collection of taxes as well as, in expenditure. By the former Turgot hampered the great interests; by the second he thwarted the desires of courtiers not only of the second rank but of the first. Therefore, after he had aroused the complaints of the commercial world and the bourgeoisie, the court, headed by Marie Antoinette, profited by the general excitement to overthrow him. The Choiseul party, which had gradually been reconstituted, under the influence of the queen, the princes, parlement, the prebendaries, and the trade corporations, worked adroitly to eliminate this reformer of lucrative abuses. The old courtier Maurepas, jealous of Turgot and desirous of remaining a minister himself, refrained from defending his colleague; and when Turgot, who never knew how to give in, spoke of establishing assemblies of freeholders in the communes and the provinces, in order to relax the tension of over-centralization, Louis XVI., who never dared to pass from sentiment to action, sacrificed his minister to the rancour of the queen, as he had already sacrificed Malesherbes (1776). Thus the first governmental act of the queen was an error, and dissipated the hope of replacing special privileges by a general guarantee given to the nation, which alone could have postponed a revolution. It was still too early for a Fourth of August; but the queen’s victory was none the less vain, since Turgot’s ideas were taken up by his successors.

The first of these was Necker, a Genevese financier. More able than Turgot, though a man of smaller ideas, he abrogated the edicts registered by the lits de justice; and unable or not daring to attack the evil at its root, he thought Necker, 1776-1781. he could suppress its symptoms by a curative process of borrowing and economy. Like Turgot he failed, and for the same reasons. The American war had finally exhausted the exchequer, and, in order to replenish it, he would have needed to inspire confidence in the minds of capitalists; but the resumption in 1778 of the plan of provincial assemblies charged with remodelling the various imposts, and his compte-rendu in which he exhibited the monarchy paying its pensioners for their inactivity as it had never paid its agents for their zeal, aroused a fresh outburst of anger. Necker was carried away in his turn by the reaction he had helped to bring about (1781).

Having fought the oligarchy of privilege, the monarchy next tried to rally it to its side, and all the springs of the old régime were strained to the breaking-point. The military rule of the marquis de Ségur eliminated the plebeians The return of feudalism to the offensive. from the army; while the great lords, drones in the hive, worked with a kind of fever at the enforcement of their seigniorial rights; the feudal system was making a last struggle before dying. The Church claimed her right of ordering the civil estate of all Frenchmen as an absolute mistress more strictly than ever. Joly de Fleury and D’Ormesson, Necker’s successors, pushed their narrow spirit of reaction and the temerity of their inexperience to the furthest limit; but the reaction which reinforced the privileged classes was not sufficient to fill the coffers of the treasury, and Marie Antoinette, who seemed gifted with a fatal perversity of instinct, confided the finances of the kingdom to Calonne, an upper-class official and a veritable Cagliostro of finance.

From 1783 to 1787, this man organized his astounding system of falsification all along the line. His unbridled prodigality, by spreading a belief in unlimited resources, augmented the confidence necessary for the success of perpetual Calonne, 1783-1787. loans; until the day came when, having exhausted the system, he tried to suppress privilege and fall back upon the social reforms of Turgot, and the financial schemes of Necker, by suggesting once more to the assembly of notables a territorial subsidy from all landed property. He failed, owing to the same reaction that was causing the feudal system to make inroads upon the army, the magistracy and industry; but in his fall he put on the guise of a reformer, and by a last wild plunge he left the monarchy, already compromised by the affair of the Diamond Necklace (q.v.), hopelessly exposed (April 1787).

The volatile and brilliant archbishop Loménie de Brienne was charged with the task of laying the affairs of the ancien régime before the assembly of notables, and with asking the nation for resources, since the monarchy could no Loménie de Brienne. longer provide for itself; but the notables refused, and referred the minister to the states-general, the representative of the nation. Before resorting to this extremity, Brienne preferred to lay before the parlement his two edicts regarding a stamp duty and the territorial subsidy; to be met by the same refusal, and the same reference to the states-general. The exile of the parlement to Troyes, the arrest of various members, and the curt declaration of the king’s absolute authority (November 9, 1787) were unsuccessful in breaking down its resistance. The threat of Chrétien François de Lamoignon, keeper of the seals, to imitate Maupeou, aroused public opinion and caused a fresh confederation of the parlements of the kingdom. The royal government was too much exhausted to overthrow even a decaying power like that of the parlements, and being still more afraid of the future representatives of the French people than of the supreme courts, capitulated to the insurgent parlements. The recalled parlement seemed at the pinnacle of power.

Its next action ruined its ephemeral popularity, by claiming the convocation of the states-general “according to the formula observed in 1614,” as already demanded by the estates of Dauphiné at Vizille on the 21st of July 1788. Recall of Necker. The exchequer was empty; it was necessary to comply. The royal declaration of the 23rd of September 1788 convoked the states-general for the 1st of May 1789, and the fall of Brienne and Lamoignon followed the recall of Necker. Thenceforward public opinion, which was looking for something quite different from the superannuated formula of 1614, abandoned the parlements, which in their turn disappeared from view; for the struggle beginning between the privileged classes and the government, now at bay, had given the public, through the states-general, that means of expression which they had always lacked.

The conflict immediately changed ground, and an engagement began between privilege and the people over the twofold question of the number of deputies and the mode of voting. Voting by Prelude to the states-general. head, and the double representation of the third estate (tiers état); this was the great revolution; voting by order meant the continued domination of privilege, and the lesser revolution. The monarchy, standing apart, held the balance, but needed a decisive policy. Necker, with little backing at court, could not act energetically, and Louis XVI., wavering between Necker and the queen, chose the attitude most convenient to his indolence and least to his interest: he remained neutral, and his timidity showed clearly in the council of the 27th of December 1788. Separating the two questions which were so closely connected, and despite the sensational brochure of the abbé Sieyès, “What is the Third Estate?” he pronounced for the doubling of the third estate without deciding as to the vote by head, yet leaving it to be divined that he preferred the vote by order. As to the programme there was no more decisive resolution; but the edict of convocation gave it to be understood that a reform was under consideration; “the establishment of lasting and permanent order in all branches of the administration.” The point as to the place of convocation gave rise to a compromise between the too-distant centre of France and too-tumultuous Paris. Versailles was chosen The electorate. “because of the hunting!” In the procedure of the elections the traditional system of the states-general of 1614 was preserved, and the suffrage was almost universal, but in two kinds: for the third estate nearly all citizens over twenty-five years of age, paying a direct contribution, voted—peasants as well as bourgeois; the country clergy were included among the ecclesiastics; the smaller nobility among the nobles; and finally, Protestants were electors and eligible.

According to custom, documents (cahiers) were drawn up, containing a list of grievances and proposals for reform. All the orders were agreed in demanding prudently modified reform: the vote on the budget, order in finance, The addresses. regular convocation of the states-general, and a written constitution in order to get rid of arbitrary rule. The address of the clergy, inspired by the great prelates, sought to make inaccurate lamentations over the progress of impiety a means of safeguarding their enormous spiritual and temporal powers, their privileges and exemptions, and their vast wealth. The nobility demanded voting by order, the maintenance of their privileges, and, above all, laws to protect them against the arbitrary proceedings of royalty. The third estate insisted on the vote by head, the graduated abolition of privilege in all governmental affairs, a written constitution and union. The programme went on broadening as it descended in the social scale.

The elections sufficed finally to show that the ancien régime, characterized from the social point of view by inequality, from the political point of view by arbitrariness, and from the religious point of view by intolerance, was completed The elections. from the administrative point of view by inextricable disorder. As even the extent of the jurisdiction of the bailliages was unknown, convocations were made at haphazard, according to the good pleasure of influential persons, and in these assemblies decisions were arrived at by a process that confused every variety of rights and powers, and was governed by no logical principle; and in this extreme confusion terms and affairs were alike involved.

Whilst the bureaucracy of the ancien régime sought for desperate expedients to prolong its domination, the whole social body gave signs of a yet distant but ever nearing disintegration. The revolution was already complete The counter-currents of the Revolution. before it was declared to the world. Two distinct currents of disaffection, one economic, the other philosophic, had for long been pervading the nation. There had been much suffering throughout the 17th and 18th centuries; but no one had hitherto thought of a politico-social rising. But the other, the philosophic current, had been set going in the 18th century; and the policy of despotism tempered by privilege had been criticized in the name of liberty as no longer justifying itself by its services to the state. The ultramontane and oppressively burdensome church had been taunted with its lack of Christian charity, apostolic poverty and primitive virtue. All vitality had been sapped from the old order of nobles, reduced in prestige by the savonnette à vilains (office purchased to ennoble the holder), enervated by court life, and so robbed of its roots in the soil, from which it had once drawn its strength, that it could no longer live save as a ruinous parasite on the central monarchy. Lastly, to come to the bottom of the social scale, there were the common people, taxable at will, subject to the arbitrary and burdensome forced labour of the corvée, cut off by an impassable barrier from the privileged classes whom they hated. For them the right to work had been asserted, among others by Turgot, as a natural right opposed to the caprices of the arbitrary and selfish aristocracy of the corporations, and a breach had been made in the tyranny of the masters which had endeavoured to set a barrier to the astonishing outburst of industrial force which was destined to characterize the coming age.

The outward and visible progress of the Revolution, due primarily to profound economic disturbance, was thus accelerated and rendered irresistible. Economic reformers found a moral justification for their dissatisfaction in philosophical theories; the chance conjunction of a philosopho-political idea with a national deficit led to the preponderance of the third estate at the elections, and to the predominance of the democratic spirit in the states-general. The third estate wanted civil liberty above all; political liberty came second only, as a means and guarantee for the former. They wanted the abolition of the feudal system, the establishment of equality and a share in power. Neither the family nor property was violently attacked; the church and the monarchy still appeared to most people two respectable and respected institutions. The king and the privileged classes had but so to desire it, and the revolution would be easy and peaceful.

Louis XVI. was reluctant to abandon a tittle of his absolute power, nor would the privileged classes sacrifice their time-honoured traditions; they were inexorable. The king, more ponderous and irresolute every day, vacillated Meeting of the states-general. between Necker the liberal on one side and Marie Antoinette, whose feminine pride was opposed to any concessions, with the comte d’Artois, a mischievous nobody who could neither choose a side nor stick to one, on the other. When the states-general opened on the 5th of May 1789 Louis XVI. had decided nothing. The conflict between him and the Assembly immediately broke out, and became acute over the verification of the mandates; the third estate desiring this to be made in common by the deputies of the three orders, which would involve voting by head, the suppression of classes and the preponderance of the third estate. On the refusal of the privileged classes and after an interval of six weeks, the third estate, considering that they represented 96% of the nation, and in accordance with the proposal of Sieyès, declared that they represented the nation and therefore were authorized to take resolutions unaided, the first being that in future no arrangement for taxation could take place without their consent.

The king, urged by the privileged classes, responded to this Oath of the tennis-court. first revolutionary act, as in 1614, by closing the Salle des Menus Plaisirs where the third estate were sitting; whereupon, gathered in one of the tennis-courts under the presidency of Bailly, they swore on the 20th of June not to separate before having established the constitution of the kingdom.

Louis XVI. then decided, on the 23rd, to make known his policy in a royal lit de justice. He declared for the lesser reform, the fiscal, not the social; were this rejected, he declared that “he alone would arrange for the welfare of his people.” Meanwhile he annulled the sitting of the The Lit de Justice of June 23, 1789. 17th, and demanded the immediate dispersal of the Assembly. The third estate refused to obey, and by the mouth of Bailly and Mirabeau asserted the legitimacy of the Revolution. The refusal of the soldiers to coerce the Assembly showed that the monarchy could no longer rely on the army; and a few days later, when the lesser nobility and the lower ranks of the clergy had united with the third estate whose cause was their own, the king yielded, and on the 27th of June commanded both orders to join in the National Assembly, which was thereby recognized and the political revolution sanctioned. But at the same time, urged by the “infernal cabal” of the queen and the comte d’Artois, Louis XVI. called in the foreign regiments—the only ones of which he could be certain—and dismissed Necker. The Assembly, dreading a sudden attack, demanded the withdrawal of the troops. Meeting with a refusal, Paris Taking of the Bastille. opposed the king’s army with her citizen-soldiers; and by the taking of the Bastille, that mysterious dark fortress which personified the ancien régime, secured the triumph of the Revolution (July 14). The king was obliged to recall Necker, to mount the tricolor cockade at the Hôtel de Ville, and to recognize Bailly as mayor of Paris and La Fayette as commander of the National Guard, which remained in arms after the victory. The National Assembly had right on its side after the 20th of June and might after the 14th of July. Thus was accomplished the Revolution which was to throw into the melting-pot all that had for centuries appeared fixed and stable.

As Paris had taken her Bastille, it remained for the towns and country districts to take theirs—all the Bastilles of feudalism. Want, terror and the contagion of examples precipitated the disruption of governmental authority and of the Spontaneous anarchy. old political status; and sudden anarchy dislocated all the organs of authority. Upon the ruins of the central administration temporary authorities were founded in various isolated localities, limited in area but none the less defiant of the government. The provincial assemblies of Dauphiné and elsewhere gave the signal; and numerous towns, following the example of Paris, instituted municipalities which substituted their authority for that of the intendants and their subordinates. Clubs were openly organized, pamphlets and journals appeared, regardless of administrative orders; workmen’s unions multiplied in Paris, Bordeaux and Lyons, in face of drastic prohibition; and anarchy finally set in with the defection of the army in Paris on the 23rd of June, at Nancy, at Metz and at Brest. The crying abuses of the old régime, an insignificant factor at the outset, soon combined with the widespread agrarian distress, due to the unjust distribution of land, the disastrous exploitation of the soil, the actions of the government, and the severe winter of 1788. Discontent showed itself in pillage and incendiarism on country estates; between March and July 1789 more than three hundred agrarian riots took place, uprooting the feudal idea of property, already compromised by its own excesses. Not only did pillaging take place; the boundaries of property were also ignored, and people no longer held themselves bound to pay taxes. These jacqueries hastened the movement of the regular revolution.

The decrees of the 4th of August, proposed by those noble “patriots” the duc d’Aiguillon and the vicomte de Noailles, who had already on the 23rd of June made armed resistance to the evacuation of the Hall of Assembly, The night of August 4. put the final touch to the revolution begun by the provincial assemblies, by liberating land and labour, and proclaiming equality among all Frenchmen. Instead of exasperating the demands of the peasants and workmen by repression and raising civil war between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, they drew a distinction between personal servitude, which was suppressed, and the rights of contract, which were to be redeemed—a laudable but impossible distinction. The whole feudal system crumbled before the revolutionary insistence of the peasants; for their masters, bourgeois or nobles, terrified by prolonged riots, capitulated and gradually had to consent to make the resolutions of the 4th of August a reality.

Overjoyed by this social liberation, the Assembly awarded Louis XVI. the title of “renewer of French liberty”; but remaining faithful to his hesitating policy of the 23rd of June, he ratified the decrees of the 4th of Elaboration of the constitution. August, only with a very ill grace. On the other hand, the privileged classes, and notably the clergy, who saw the whole traditional structure of their power threatened, now rallied to him, and when after the 28th of August the Assembly set to work on the new constitution, they combined in the effort to recover some of the position they had lost. But whatever their theoretical agreement on social questions, politically they were hopelessly at odds. The bourgeoisie, conscious of their opportunity, decided for a single chamber against the will of the noblesse; against that of the king they declared it permanent, and, if they accorded him a suspensory veto, this was only in order to guard them against the extreme assertion of popular rights. Thus the progress of the Revolution, so far, had left the mass of the people still excluded from any constitutional influence on the government, which was in the hands of the well-to-do classes, which also controlled the National Guard and the municipalities. The irritation of the disfranchised proletariat was moreover increased by the appalling dearness of bread and food generally, which the suspicious temper of the times—fomented by the tirades of Marat in the Ami du peuple—ascribed to English intrigues in revenge for the aid given by France to the American colonies, and to the treachery in high places that made these intrigues successful. The climax came with the rumour that the court was preparing a new military coup d’état, a rumour that seemed to be confirmed by indiscreet toasts proposed at a banquet by the officers of the guard at Versailles; and on the night of the 5th to the 6th of October a Parisian mob forced the king and royal family to return with them to Paris amid cries of “We are bringing the baker, the baker’s wife and the little baker’s boy!” The Assembly followed; and henceforth king and Assembly were more or less under the influence of the whims and passions of a populace maddened by want and suspicion, by the fanatical or unscrupulous incitements of an unfettered press, and by the unrestrained oratory of obscure demagogues in the streets, the cafés and the political clubs.

Convened for the purpose of elaborating a system that should conciliate all interests, the Assembly thus found itself forced into a conflict between the views of the people, who feared betrayal, and the court, which dreaded being overwhelmed. This schism was reflected in the parties of the Assembly; the absolutists of the extreme Right; the moderate monarchists of the Right and Centre; the constitutionalists of the Left Centre and Left; and, finally, on the extreme Left the democratic revolutionists, among whom Robespierre sat as yet all but unnoticed. Of talent there was enough and to spare in the Assembly; what was conspicuously lacking was common sense and a practical knowledge of affairs. Of all the orators who declaimed from the tribune, Mirabeau alone realized the perils of the situation and possessed the power of mind and will to have mastered them. Unfortunately, however, he was discredited by a disreputable past, and yet more by the equivocal attitude he had to assume in order to maintain his authority in the Assembly while working in what he believed to be the true interests of the court. His political ideal for France was that of the monarchy, rescued from all association with the abuses of the old régime and “broad-based upon the people’s will”; his practical counsel was that the king should frankly proclaim this ideal to the people as his own, should compete with the Assembly for popular favour, while at the same time using every means to win over those by whom his authority was flouted. For a time Mirabeau influenced the counsels of the court through the comte de Montmorin; but the king neither trusted him nor could be brought to see his point of view, and Marie Antoinette, though she resigned herself to negotiating with him, was very far from sympathizing with his ideals. Finally, all hope of the conduct of affairs being entrusted to him was shattered when the Assembly passed a law forbidding its members to become ministers.

The attempted reconciliation with the king having failed, the Assembly ended by working alone, and made the control that it should have exerted an instrument, not of co-operation but of strife. It inaugurated its legislative Declaration of the rights of man. labours by a metaphysical declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (October 2, 1789). This enunciation of universal verities, the bulk of which have, sooner or later, been accepted by all civilized nations as “the gospel of modern times,” was inspired by all the philosophy of the 18th century in France and by the Contrat Social. It comprised various rational and humane ideas, no longer theological, but profoundly and deliberately thought out: ideas as to the sovereign-right of the nation, law by general consent, man superior to the pretensions of caste and the fetters of dogma, the vindication of the ideal and of human dignity. Unable to rest on historic precedent like England, the Constituent Assembly took as the basis for its labours the tradition of the thinkers.

Upon the principles proclaimed in this Declaration the constitution of 1791 was founded. Its provisions are discussed elsewhere (see the section below on Law and Institutions); here it will suffice to say that it established under the The constitution. sovereign people, for the king was to survive merely as the supreme executive official, a wholly new model of government in France, both in Church and State. The historic divisions of the realm were wiped out; for the old provinces were substituted eighty-three departments; and with the provinces vanished the whole organization, territorial, administrative and ecclesiastical, of the ancien régime. In one respect, indeed, the system of the old monarchy remained intact; the tradition of centralization established by Louis XIV. was too strong to be overthrown, and the destruction of the historic privileges and immunities with which this had been ever in conflict only served to strengthen this tendency. In 1791 France was pulverized into innumerable administrative atoms incapable of cohesion; and the result was that Paris became more than ever the brain and nerve-centre of France. This fact was soon to be fatal to the new constitution, though the administrative system established by it still survives. Paris was in effect dominated by the armed and organized proletariat, and this proletariat could never be satisfied with a settlement which, while proclaiming the sovereignty of the people, had, by means of the property qualification for the franchise, established the political ascendancy of the middle classes. The settlement had, in fact, settled nothing; it had, indeed, merely intensified the profound cleavage between the opposing tendencies; for if the democrats were alienated by the narrow franchise, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which cut at the very roots of the Catholic system, drove into opposition to the Revolution not only the clergy themselves but a vast number of their flocks.

The policy of the Assembly, moreover, hopelessly aggravated its misunderstanding with the king. Louis, indeed, accepted the constitution and attended the great Feast of Federation (July 14, 1790), when representatives from all the new departments assembled in the Champ de Mars to ratify the work of the Assembly; but the king either could not or would not say the expected word that would have dissipated mistrust. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy, too, seemed to him not only to violate his rights as a king, but his faith as a Christian also; and when the emigration of the nobility and the death of Mirabeau (April 2, 1791) had deprived him of his natural supporters and his only adviser, resuming the old plan of withdrawing to the army of the marquis de Bouillé at Metz, he made his ill-fated attempt to escape from Paris (June 20, 1791). The flight to Varennes was an irreparable error; for during the king’s absence and until his return the insignificance of the royal power became apparent. La Fayette’s fusillade of the republicans, who demanded the deposition of the king (July 17, 1791), led to a definite split between the democratic party and the bourgeois party. Vainly did Louis, brought back a captive to Paris, swear on the 14th of September 1791 solemnly mere lip-service to the constitution; the mistrustful party of revolution abandoned the constitution they had only just obtained, and to guard against the sovereign’s mental reservations and the selfish policy of the middle classes, appealed to the main force of the people. The conflict between the ancien régime and the National Assembly ended in the defeat of the royalists.

Through lassitude or disinterestedness the men of 1791, on The Legislative Assembly (Oct. 1, 1791-Sept 20, 1792). Robespierre’s suggestion, had committed one last mistake, by leaving the task of putting the constitution into practice to new men even more inexperienced than themselves. Thus the new Assembly’s time was occupied in a conflict between the Legislative Assembly and the king, who plotted against it; and, as a result, the monarchy, insulted by the proceedings of the 20th of June, was eliminated altogether by those of the 10th of August 1792.

The new Assembly which had met on the 1st of October 1791 had a majority favourable to the constitutional monarchy and to the bourgeois franchise. But, among these bourgeois those who were called Feuillants, from the name of The parties. their club (see Feuillants, Club of the), desired the strict and loyal application of the constitution without encroaching upon the authority of the king; the triumvirate, Duport, Barnave and Lameth, were at the head of this party. The Jacobins, on the contrary, considered that the king should merely be hereditary president of the Republic, to be deposed if he attempted to violate the constitution, and that universal suffrage should be established. The dominant group among these was that of the Girondins or Girondists, so called because its most brilliant members had been elected in the Gironde (see Girondists). But the republican party was more powerful without than within. Their chief was not so much Robespierre, president of the parliamentary and bourgeois club of the Jacobins (q.v.), which had acquired by means of its two thousand affiliated branches great power in the provinces, as the advocate Danton, president of the popular and Parisian club of the Cordeliers (q.v.). Between the Feuillants and the Jacobins, the independents, incapable of keeping to any fixed programme, vacillated sometimes to the right, sometimes to the left.

But the best allies of the republicans against the Feuillants were the royalists pure and simple, who cared nothing about the constitution, and claimed to “extract good from the excess of evil.” The election of a Jacobin, Pétion, Royalist intrigues. The émigrés. instead of Bailly, the resigning mayor, and La Fayette, the candidate for office, was their first achievement. The court, on its side, showed little sign of a conciliatory spirit, though, realizing its danger, it attempted to restrain the foolish violence of the émigrés, i.e. the nobles who after the suppression of titles of nobility in 1790 and the arrest of the king at Varennes, had fled in a body to Coblenz and joined Louis XVI.’s brothers, the counts of Provence and Artois. They it was who set in motion the national and European conflict. Under the prince of Condé they had collected a little army round Trier; and in concert with the “Austrian Committee” of Paris they solicited the armed intervention of monarchical Europe. The declaration of Pilnitz, which was but an excuse Declaration of Pilnitz. for non-interference on the part of the emperor and the king of Prussia, interested in the prolongation of these internal troubles, was put forward by them as an assurance of forthcoming support (August 27, 1791). At the same time the application of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy roused the whole of western La Vendée; and in face of the danger threatened by the refractory clergy and by the army of the émigrés, the Girondins set about confounding the court with the Feuillants in the minds of the public, and compromising Louis XVI. by a national agitation, denouncing him as an accomplice of the foreigner. Owing to the decrees against The decrees. The war. the comte de Provence, the emigrants, and the refractory priests, voted by the Legislative Assembly in November 1791, they forced Louis XVI. to show his hand by using his veto, so that his complicity should be plainly declared, to replace his Feuillant ministry—disparate in birth, opinions and ambitions—by the Girondin ministry of Dumouriez-Roland (March 10), no more united than the other, but believers in a republican crusade for the overthrow of thrones, that of Louis XVI. first of all; and finally to declare war against the king of Bohemia and Hungary, a step also desired by the court in the hope of ridding itself of the Assembly at the first note of victory (April 20, 1792).

But when, owing to the disorganization of the army through emigration and desertion, the ill-prepared Belgian war was followed by invasion and the trouble in La Vendée increased, all France suspected a betrayal. The Proceedings of June 20. Assembly, in order to reduce the number of hostile forces, voted for the exile of all priests who had refused to swear to the Civil Constitution and the substitution of a body of twenty thousand volunteer national guards, under the authority of Paris, for the king’s constitutional guard (May 27-June 8, 1792). Louis XVI.’s veto and the dismissal of the Girondin ministry—thanks to an intrigue of Dumouriez, analogous to that of Mirabeau and as ineffectual—dismayed the Feuillants and maddened the Girondins; the latter, to avert popular fury, turned it upon the king. The émeute of the 20th of June, a burlesque which, but for the persistent good-humour of Louis XVI., might have become a tragedy, alarmed but did not overthrow the monarchy.

The bourgeoisie, the Assembly, the country and La Fayette, one of the leaders of the army, now embarked upon a royalist reaction, which would perhaps have been efficacious, had it not been for the entry into the affair of the Manifesto of Brunswick. Prussians as allies of the Austrians, and for the insolent manifesto of the duke of Brunswick. The Assembly’s cry of “the country in danger” (July 11) proved to the nation that the king was incapable of defending France against the foreigner; and the appeal of the federal volunteers in Paris gave to the opposition, together with the war-song of the Marseillaise, the army which had been refused by Louis XVI., now disarmed. The vain attempts of the Gironde to reconcile the king and the Revolution, the ill-advised decree of the Assembly on the 8th of August, freeing La Fayette from his guilt in forsaking his army; his refusal to vote for the deposition of the king, and the suspected treachery of the court, led to the success of the republican forces when, on the 10th of August, the mob of Paris organized by the revolutionary Commune rose against the monarchy.

The suspension and imprisonment of the king left the supreme authority nominally in the hands of the Assembly, but actually in those of the Commune, consisting of delegates from the administrative sections of Paris. Installed The insurrectional commune of Paris. The September massacres. at the Hôtel de Ville this attempted to influence the discredited government, entered into conflict with the Legislative Assembly, which considered its mission at an end, and paralyzed the action of the executive council, particularly during the bloody days of September, provoked by the discovery of the court’s intrigues with the foreigner, by the treachery of La Fayette, the capture of Longwy, the investiture of Verdun by the Prussians (August 19-30), and finally by the incendiary placards of Marat. Danton, a master of diplomatic and military operations, had to avoid any rupture with the Commune. Fortunately, on the very day of the dispersal of the Legislative Assembly, Dumouriez saved France from a Prussian invasion by the victory of Valmy, and by unauthorized negotiations which prefigured those of Bonaparte at Léoben (September 22, 1792).

The popular insurrection against Louis XVI. determined the simultaneous fall of the bourgeois régime and the establishment of the democracy in power. The Legislative Assembly, without a mandate for modifying a constitution that had become inapplicable with the suspension of the monarch, had before disappearing convoked a National Convention, and as the reward of the struggle for liberty had replaced the limited franchise by universal suffrage. Public opinion became republican from an excess of patriotism, and owing to the propaganda of the Jacobin club; while the decree of the 25th of August 1792, which marked the destruction of feudalism, now abolished in principle, caused the peasants to rally definitely to the Republic.

This had hardly been established before it became distracted by the fratricidal strife of its adherents, from September 22, 1792, to the 18th Fructidor (September 4, 1797). The electoral The Convention, Sept. 21. 1792-Oct. 26, 1795. assemblies, in very great majority, had desired this Republic to be democratic and equalizing in spirit, but on the face of it, liberal, uniform and propagandist; in consequence, the 782 deputies of the Convention were not divided on principles, but only by personal rivalries and ambition. They all wished for a unanimity and harmony impossible to obtain; and being unable to convince they destroyed one another.

The Girondins in the Convention played the part of the Feuillants in the Legislative Assembly. Their party was not well disciplined, they purposely refrained from making it so, and hence their ruin. Oratorically they represented The parties. the spirit of the South; politically, the ideas of the bourgeoisie in opposition to the democracy—which they despised although making use of it—and the federalist system, from an objection to the preponderance of Paris. Paris, on the other hand, had elected only deputies of the Mountain, as the more advanced of the Jacobins were called, that party being no more settled and united than the others. They drew support from the Parisian democracy, and considered the decentralization of the Girondins as endangering France’s unity, circumstances demanding a strong and highly concentrated government; they opposed a republic on the model of that of Rome to the Polish republic of the Gironde. Between the two came the Plaine, the Marais, the troop of trembling bourgeois, sincerely attached to the Revolution, but very moderate in the defence of their ideas; some seeking a refuge from their timidity in hard-working committees, others partaking in the violence of the Jacobins out of weakness or for reasons of state.

The Girondins were the first to take the lead; in order to retain it they should have turned the Revolution into a government. They remained an exclusive party, relying on the mob but with no influence over it. Without a The Girondins. leader or popular power, they might have found both in Danton; for, occupied chiefly with the external danger, he made advances towards them, which they repulsed, partly in horror at the proceedings of September, but chiefly because they saw in him the most formidable rival in the path of the government. They waged war against him as relentlessly as did the Constitutionalists against Mirabeau, whom he resembled in his extreme ugliness and his volcanic eloquence. They drove him into the arms of Robespierre, Marat and the Commune of Paris. On the other hand, after the 23rd of September they declared Paris dangerous for the Convention, and wanted to reduce it to “eighty-three influential members.” Danton and the Mountain responded by decreeing the unity and indivisibility of the Republic, in order to emphasize the suspicions of federalism which weighed upon the Girondins.

The trial of Louis XVI. still further enhanced the contrasts of ideas and characters. The discovery of fresh proofs of treachery in the iron chest (November 20, 1792) gave the Mountain a pretext for forcing on the clash of parties and Trial and death of Louis XVI. raising the question not of legality but of public safety. By the execution of the king (January 21, 1793) they “cast down a king’s head as a challenge to the kings of Europe.” In order to preserve popular favour and their direction of the Republic, the Girondins had not dared to pronounce against the sentence of death, but had demanded an appeal to the people which was rejected; morally weakened by this equivocal attitude they were still more so by foreign events.

The king’s death did not result in the unanimity so much desired by all parties; it only caused the reaction on themselves of the hatred which had been hitherto concentrated upon the king, and also an augmentation in the armies First European coalition. of the foreigner, which obliged the revolutionists to face all Europe. There was a coalition of monarchs, and the people of La Vendée rose in defence of their faith. Dumouriez, the conqueror of Jemappes (November 6, 1792), who invaded Holland, was beaten by the Austrians (March 1793). A levy of 300,000 men was ordered; a Committee of General Security was charged with the search for suspects; and thenceforward military occurrences called forth parliamentary crises and popular upheavals. Girondins and Jacobins unjustly accused one another of leaving the traitors, the conspirators, the “stipendiaries of Coblenz” unpunished. To avert the danger threatened by popular dissatisfaction, the Gironde was persuaded to vote for the creation of a revolutionary tribunal to judge suspects, while out of spite against Danton who demanded it, they refused the strong government which might have made a stand against the enemy (March 10, 1793). This was the first of the exceptional measures which were to call down ruin upon them. Whilst the insurrection in La Vendée was spreading, and Dumouriez falling back upon Neerwinden, sentence of death was laid upon émigrés and refractory priests; the treachery of First committee of pubic safety. Dumouriez, disappointed in his Belgian projects, gave grounds for all kinds of suspicion, as that of Mirabeau had formerly done, and led the Gironde to propose the new government which they had refused to Danton. The transformation of the provisional executive council into the Committee of Public Safety—omnipotent save in financial matters—was voted because the Girondins meant to control it; but Danton got the upper hand (April 6).

The Girondins, discredited in Paris, multiplied their attacks upon Danton, now the master: they attributed the civil war and the disasters of the foreign campaign to the despotism of the Paris Commune and the clubs; they Struggle between the commune and the Gironde. accused Marat of instigating the September massacres; and they began the supreme struggle by demanding the election of a committee of twelve deputies, charged with breaking up the anarchic authorities in Paris (May 18). The complete success of the Girondin proposals; the arrest of Hébert—the violent editor of the Père Duchêne; the insurrection of the Girondins of Lyons against the Montagnard Commune; the bad news from La Vendée—the military reverses; and the economic situation which had compelled the fixing of a maximum price of corn (May 4) excited the “moral insurrections” of May 31 and June 2. Marat himself sounded the tocsin, and Hanriot, at the head of the Parisian army, surrounded the Convention. Despite the efforts of Danton and the Committee of Public Safety, the arrest of the Girondins sealed the victory of the Mountain.

The threat of the Girondin Isnard was fulfilled. The federalist insurrection, to avenge the violation of national representation, responded to the Parisian insurrection. Sixty-nine departmental governments protested against the Fall of the Gironde. violence done to the Convention; but the ultra-democratic constitution of 1793 deprived the Girondins, who were arming in the west, the south and the centre, of all legal force. To the departments that were hostile to the dictatorship of Paris, and the tyranny of Danton or Robespierre, it promised the referendum, an executive of twenty-four citizens, universal suffrage, and the free exercise of religion. The populace, who could not understand this parliamentary quarrel, and were in a hurry to set up a national defence, abandoned the Girondins, and the latter excited the enthusiasm of only one person, Charlotte Corday, who by the murder of Marat ruined them irretrievably. The battle of Brécourt was a defeat without a fight for their party without stamina and their general without troops (July 13); while on the 31st of October their leaders perished on the guillotine, where they had been preceded by the queen, Marie Antoinette. The Girondins and their adversaries were differentiated by neither religious dissensions nor political divergency, but merely by a question of time. The Girondins, when in power, had had scruples which had not troubled them while scaling the ladder; idols of Paris, they had flattered her in turn, and when Paris scorned them they sought support in the provinces. A great responsibility for this defeat of the liberal and republican bourgeoisie, whom they represented, is to be laid upon Madame Roland, the Egeria of the party. An ardent patriot and republican, her relations with Danton resembled those of Marie Antoinette with Mirabeau, in each case a woman spoilt by flattery, enraged at indifference. She was the ruin of the Gironde, but taught it how to die.

The fall of the Gironde left the country disturbed by civil war, and the frontiers more seriously threatened than before Valmy. Bouchotte, a totally inefficient minister for war, the Commune’s man of straw, left the army without food or ammunition, while the suspected officers remained inactive. In the Angevin Vendée the incapable leaders let themselves be beaten at Aubiers, Beaupréau and Thouars, at a time when Cathelineau was taking possession of Saumur and threatening Nantes, the capture of which would have permitted the insurgents in La Vendée to join those of Brittany and receive provisions from England. Meanwhile, the remnants of the Girondin federalists were overcome by the disguised royalists, who had aroused the whole of the Rhône valley from Lyons to Marseilles, had called in the Sardinians, and handed over the fleet and the arsenal at Toulon to the English, whilst Paoli left Corsica at their disposal. The scarcity of money due to the discrediting of the assignats, the cessation of commerce, abroad and on the sea, and the bad harvest of 1793, were added to all these dangers, and formed a serious menace to France and the Convention.

This meant a hard task for the first Committee of Public Safety and its chief Danton. He was the only one to understand the conditions necessary to a firm government; he caused the adjournment of the decentralizing constitution The dictatorship of the first committee of public safety. of 1793, and set up a revolutionary government. The Committee of Public Safety, now a permanency, annulled the Convention and was itself the central authority, its organization in Paris being the twelve committees substituted for the provisional executive committee and the six ministers, the Committee of General Security for the maintenance of the police, and the arbitrary Revolutionary Tribunal. The execution of its orders in the departments was carried out by omnipotent representatives “on mission” in the armies, by popular societies—veritable missionaries of the Revolution—and by the revolutionary committees which were its backbone.

Despite this Reign of Terror Danton failed; he could neither dominate foes within nor divide those without. Representing the sane and vigorous democracy, and like Jefferson a friend to liberty and self-government, he had been Danton’s failure. obliged to set up the most despotic of governments in face of internal anarchy and foreign invasion. Being of a temperament that expressed itself only in action, and neither a theorist nor a cabinet-minister, he held the views of a statesman without having a following sufficient to realize them. Moreover, the proceedings of the 2nd of June, when the Commune of Paris had triumphed, had dealt him a mortal blow. He in his turn tried to stem the tumultuous current which had borne him along, and to prevent discord; but the check to his policy of an understanding with Prussia and with Sardinia, to whom, like Richelieu and D’Argenson, he offered the realization of her transalpine ambition in exchange for Nice and Savoy, was added to the failure of his temporizing methods in regard to the federalist insurgents, and of his military operations against La Vendée. A man of action and not of cunning shifts, he succumbed on the 10th of July to the blows of his own government, which had passed from his hands into those of Robespierre, his ambitious and crafty rival.

The second Committee of Public Safety lasted until the 27th of July 1794. Composed of twelve members, re-eligible every month, and dominated by the triumvirate, Robespierre, Saint-Just and Couthon, it was stronger Second committee of public safety. than ever, since it obtained the right of appointing leaders, disposed of money, and muzzled the press. Many of its members were sons of the bourgeoisie, men who having been educated at college, thanks to some charitable agency, in the pride of learning, and raised above their original station, were ready for anything but had achieved nothing. They had plenty of talent at command, were full of classical tirades against tyranny, and, though sensitive enough in their private life, were bloodthirsty butchers in their public relations. Such were Robespierre, Saint-Just, Couthon, Billaud-Varenne, Cambon, Thuriot, Collot d’Herbois, Barrère and Prieur de la Mârne. Working hand in hand with these politicians, not always in accordance with them, but preserving a solid front, were the specialists, Carnot, Robert Lindet, Jean Bon Saint-André and Prieur de la Côte d’Or, honourable men, anxious above all to safeguard their country. At the head of the former type Robespierre, without special knowledge or exceptional talent, devoured by jealous ambition and gifted with cold grave eloquence, enjoyed a great moral ascendancy, due to his incorruptible purity of life and the invariably correct behaviour that had been wanting in Mirabeau, and by the persevering will which Danton had lacked. His marching orders were: no more temporizing with the federalists or with generals who are afraid of conquering; war to the death with all Europe in the name of revolutionary propaganda and the monarchical tradition of natural frontiers; and fear, as a means of government. The specialists answered foreign foes by their organization of victory; as for foes at home, the triumvirate crushed them beneath the Terror.

France was saved by them and by that admirable outburst of patriotism which provided 750,000 patriots for the army through the general levy of the 16th of August 1793, aided, moreover, by the mistakes of her enemies. Defeat of the coalition. Instead of profiting by Dumouriez’s treachery and the successes in La Vendée, the Coalition, divided over the resuscitated Polish question, lost time on the frontiers of this new Poland of the west which was sacrificing itself for the sake of a Universal Republic. Thus in January 1794 the territory of France was cleared of the Prussians and Austrians by the victories at Hondschoote, Wattignies and Wissembourg; the army of La Vendée was repulsed from Granville, overwhelmed by Hoche’s army at Le Mans and Savenay, and its leaders shot; royalist sedition was suppressed at Lyons, Bordeaux, Marseilles and Toulon; federalist insurrections were wiped out by the terrible massacres of Carrier at Nantes, the atrocities of Lebon at Arras, and the wholesale executions of Fouché and Collot d’Herbois at Lyons; Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette guillotined, the émigrés dispersed, denied or forsaken by all Europe.

But the triumphant Mountain was not as united as it boasted. The second Committee of Public Safety had now to struggle against two oppositions: one of the left, represented by Hébert, the Commune of Paris and the Cordeliers; The new parties. another of the right, Danton and his followers. The former would not admit that the Terror was only a temporary method of defence; for them it was a permanent system which was even to be strengthened in order to crush all who were hostile to the Revolution. Their sanguinary violence was combined with an anti-religious policy, not atheistical, but inspired by mistrust of the clergy, and by a civic and deistic creed that was a direct outcome of the federations. To these latter were due the substitution of the Republican for the Gregorian calendar, and the secular Feasts of Reason (November 19, 1793). The followers of Hébert wanted to push forward the movement of May 31, 1793, in order to become masters in their turn; while those of Danton were by way of arresting it. They considered it The party of tolerance. time to re-establish the reign of ordinary laws and justice; sick of bloodshed, with Camille Desmoulins they demanded a “Committee of Clemency.” A deist and therefore hostile to “anti-religious masquerades,” while uneasy at the absolute authority of the Paris Commune, which aimed at suppressing the State, and at its armed propaganda abroad, Robespierre resumed the struggle against its illegal power, so fatal to the Gironde. His boldness succeeded (March 24, 1794), and then, jealous of Danton’s activity and statesmanship, and exasperated by the jeers of his friends, he rid himself of the party of tolerance by a parody of justice (April 5).

Robespierre now stood alone. During five months, while affecting to be the representative of “a reign of justice and virtue,” he laboured at strengthening his politico-religious dictatorship—already so formidably armed—with Robespierre’s dictatorship. new powers. “The incorruptible wanted to become the invulnerable” and the scaffold of the guillotine was crowded. By his dogma of the supreme state Robespierre founded a theocratic government with the police as an Inquisition. The festival of the new doctrine, which turned the head of the new pontiff (June 8), the loi de Prairial, or “code of legal murder” (June 10), which gave the deputies themselves into his hand; and the multiplication of executions at a time when the victory of Fleurus (June 25) showed the uselessness and barbarity of this aggravation of the Reign of Terror provoked against him the victorious coalition of revenge, 9th Thermidor. lassitude and fear. Vanquished and imprisoned, he refused to take part in the illegal action proposed by the Commune against the Convention. Robespierre was no man of action. On the 9th Thermidor (July 27, 1794) he fell into the gulf that had opened on the 31st of May, and through which the 18th Brumaire was visible.

Although brought about by the Terrorists, the tragic fall of Robespierre put an end to the Reign of Terror; for their chiefs having disappeared, the subordinates were too much divided to keep up the dictatorship of the third Third committee of public safety. Committee of Public Safety, and reaction soon set in. After a change in personnel in favour of the surviving Dantonists, came a limitation to the powers of the Committee of Public Safety, now placed in dependence upon the Convention; and next followed the destruction of the revolutionary system, the Girondin decentralization and the resuscitation of departmental governments; the reform of the Revolutionary Tribunal on the 10th of August; the suppression of the Commune of Paris on the 1st of September, and of the salary of forty sous given to members of the sections; the abolition of the maximum, the suppression of the Guillotine, the opening of the prisons, the closing of the Jacobin club (November 11), and the henceforward insignificant existence of the popular societies.

Power reverted to the Girondins and Dantonists, who re-entered the Convention on the 18th of December; but with them re-entered likewise the royalists of Lyons, Marseilles and Toulon, and further, after the peace of Resuscitation of the royalist party. Basel, many young men set free from the army, hostile to the Jacobins and defenders of the now moderate and peace-making Convention. These muscadins and incroyables, led by Fréron, Tallien and Barras—former revolutionists who had become aristocrats—profited by the restored liberty of the press to prepare for days of battle in the salons of the merveilleuses Madame Tallien, Madame de Staël and Madame Récamier, as the sans-culottes had formerly done in the clubs. The remnants of Robespierre’s faction became alarmed at this Thermidor reaction, in which they scented royalism. Aided by famine, by the suppression of the maximum, and by the imminent bankruptcy of the assignats, they endeavoured to arouse the working classes and the former Hanriot companies against a government which was trying to destroy the republic, and had broken the busts of Marat and guillotined Carrier and Fouquier-Tinville, the former public prosecutor. Popular risings of Germinal and Prairial. Thus the risings of the 12th Germinal (April 1, 1795) and of the 1st Prairial (May 20) were economic revolts rather than insurrections excited by the deputies of the Mountain; in order to suppress them the reactionaries called in the army. Owing to this first intervention of the troops in politics, the Committee of Public Safety, which aimed not so much at a moderate policy as at steering a middle course between the Thermidorians of the Right and of the Left, was able to dispense with the latter.

The royalists now supposed that their hour had come. In the south, the companions of Jehu and of the Sun inaugurated a “White Terror,” which had not even the apparent excuse of the public safety or of exasperated patriotism. The white terror. At the same time they prepared for a twofold insurrection against the republic—in the west with the help of England, and in the east with that of Austria—by an attempt to bribe General Pichegru. But though the heads of the government wanted to put an end to the Revolution they had no thought of restoring the monarchy in favour of the Comte de Provence, who had taken the title of Louis XVIII. on hearing of the death of the dauphin in the Temple, and still less of bringing back the ancien régime. Hoche crushed the insurrection of the Chouans and the Bretons at Quiberon on the 2nd of July 1795, and Pichegru, scared, refused to entangle himself any further.

To cut off all danger from royalists or terrorists the Convention now voted the Constitution of the year III.; suppressing that of 1793, in order to counteract the terrorists, and re-establishing the bourgeois limited franchise with The constitution of the year III. The 13th Vendémiaire. election in two degrees—a less liberal arrangement than that granted from 1789 to 1792. The chambers of the Five Hundred and of the Ancients were elected by the moneyed and intellectual aristocracy, and were to be re-elected by thirds annually. The executive authority, entrusted to five Directors, was no more than a definite and very strong Committee of Public Safety; but Sieyès, the author of the new constitution, in opposition to the royalists, had secured places of refuge for his party by reserving posts as directors for the regicides, and two-thirds of the deputies’ seats for members of the Convention. In self-defence against this continuance of the policy and the personnel of the Convention—a modern “Long Parliament”—the royalists, persistent street-fighters and masters in the “sections” after the suppression of the daily indemnification of forty sous, attempted the insurrection of the 13th Vendémiaire (October 5, 1795), which was easily put down by General Bonaparte.

Thus the bourgeois republic reaped the fruits of its predecessor’s external policy. After the freeing of the land in January 1794 an impulse had been given to the spirit of conquest which had gradually succeeded to the disinterested fever of Military achievements of the convention. Treaty of Basel. propaganda and overheated patriotism. This it was which had sustained Robespierre’s dictatorship; and, owing to the “amalgam” and the re-establishment of discipline, Belgium and the left bank of the Rhine had been conquered and Holland occupied, simultaneously with Kosciusko’s rising in Poland, Prussia’s necessity of keeping and extending her Polish acquisitions, Robespierre’s death, the prevalent desires of the majority, and the continued victories of Pichegru, Jourdan and Moreau, enfeebled the coalition. At Basel (April-July 1795) republican France, having rejoined the concert of Europe, signed the long-awaited peace with Prussia, Spain, Holland and the grand-duke of Tuscany. But thanks to the past influence of the Girondin party, who had caused the war, and of the regicides of the Mountain, this peace not only ratified the conquest of Belgium, the left bank of the Rhine and Santo Domingo, but paved the way for fresh conquests; for the old spirit of domination and persistent hostility to Austria attracted the destinies of the Revolution definitely towards war.

The work of internal construction amidst this continued battle against the whole world had been no less remarkable. The Constituent Assembly had been more destructive than constructive; but the Convention preserved intact Internal achievements. those fundamental principles of civil liberty which had been the main results of the Revolution: the equality so dear to the French, and the sovereignty of the people—the foundation of democracy. It also managed to engage private interests in state reform by creating the Grand Livre de la Dette Publique (September 13-26, 1793), and enlisted peasant and bourgeois savings in social reforms by the distribution and sale of national property. But with views reaching beyond equality of rights to a certain equality of property, the committees, as regards legislation, poor relief and instruction, laid down principles which have never been realized, save in the matter of the metric system; so that the Convention which was dispersed on the 16th of October 1795 made a greater impression on political history and social ideas than on institutions. Its disappearance left a great blank.

During four years the Directory attempted to fill this blank. Being the outcome of the Constitution of the year III., it should have been the organizing and pacifying government of the Republic; in reality it sought not to create, but The Directory. to preserve its own existence. Its internal weakness, between the danger of anarchy and the opposition of the monarchists, was extreme; and it soon became discredited by its own coups d’état and by financial impotence in the eyes of a nation sick of revolution, aspiring towards peace and the resumption of economic undertakings. As to foreign affairs, its aggressive policy imperilled the conquests that had been the glory of the Convention, and caused the frontiers of France, the defence of which had been a point of honour with the Republic, to be called in question. Finally, there was no real government on the part of the five directors: La Révellière-Lépeaux, an honest man but weak; Reubell, the negotiator of the Hague; Letourneur, an officer of talent; Barras, a man of intrigue, corrupt and without real convictions; and Carnot, the only really worthy member. They never understood one another, and never consulted together in hours of danger, save to embroil matters in politics as in war. Leaning on the bourgeois, conservative, liberal and anti-clerical republicans, they were no more able than was the Thermidor party to re-establish the freedom that had been suspended by revolutionary despotism; they created a ministry of police, interdicted the clubs and popular societies, distracted the press, and with partiality undertook the separation of Church and State voted on the 18th of September 1794. Their real defence against counter revolution was the army; but, by a further contradiction, they reinforced the army attached to the Revolution while seeking an alliance with the peacemaking bourgeoisie. Their party had therefore no more homogeneity than had their policy.

Moreover the Directory could not govern alone; it had to rely upon two other parties, according to circumstances: the republican-democrats and the disguised royalists. The former, purely anti-royalist, thought only of The parties. remedying the sufferings of the people. Roused by the collapse of the assignats, following upon the ruin of industry and the arrest of commerce, they were still further exasperated by the speculations of the financiers, by the jobbery which prevailed throughout the administration, and by the sale of national property which had profited hardly any but the bourgeoisie. After the 13th Vendémiaire the royalists too, deceived in their hopes, were expecting to return gradually to the councils, thanks to the high property qualification for the franchise. Under the name of “moderates” they demanded an end to this war which England continued and Austria threatened to recommence, and that the Directory from self-interested motives refused to conclude; they desired the abandonment of revolutionary proceedings, order in finance and religious peace.

The Directory, then, was in a minority in the country, and had to be ever on the alert against faction; all possible methods seemed legitimate, and during two years appeared successful. Order was maintained in France, even the Struggle against the royalists. Struggle against the republican democrats and the socialists. royalist west being pacified, thanks to Hoche, who finished his victorious campaign of 1796 against Stofflet, Charette and Cadoudal, by using mild and just measures to complete the subjection of the country. The greatest danger lay in the republican-democrats and their socialist ally, François Noel (“Gracchus”) Babeuf (q.v.). The former had united the Jacobins and the more violent members of the Convention in their club, the Société du Panthéon; and their fusion, after the closing of the club, with the secret society of the Babouvists lent formidable strength to this party, with which Barras was secretly in league. The terrorist party, deprived of its head, had found a new leader, who, by developing the consequences of the Revolution’s acts to their logical conclusion, gave first expression to the levelling principle of communism. He proclaimed the right of property as appertaining to the state, that is, to the whole community; Babeuf. the doctrine of equality as absolutely opposed to social inequality of any kind—that of property as well as that of rank; and finally the inadequacy of the solution of the agrarian question, which had profited scarcely any one, save a new class of privileged individuals. But these socialist demands were premature; the attack of the camp of Grenelle upon constitutional order ended merely in the arrest and guillotining of Babeuf (September 9, 1796-May 25, 1797).

The liquidation of the financial inheritance of the Convention was no less difficult. The successive issues of assignats, and the multiplication of counterfeits made abroad, had so depreciated this paper money that an assignat of 100 Financial policy of the Directory. francs was in February 1796 worth only 30 centimes; while the government, obliged to accept them at their nominal value, no longer collected any taxes and could not pay salaries. The destruction of the plate for printing assignats, on the 18th of February 1796, did not prevent the drop in the forty milliards still in circulation. Territorial mandates were now tried, which inspired no greater confidence, but served to liquidate two-thirds of the debt, the remaining third being consolidated by its dependence on the Grand Livre (September 30, 1797). This widespread bankruptcy, falling chiefly on the bourgeoisie, inaugurated a reaction which lasted until 1830 against the chief principle of the Constituent Assembly, which had favoured indirect taxation as producing a large sum without imposing any very obvious burden. The bureaucrats of the old system—having returned to their offices and being used to these indirect taxes—lent their assistance, and thus the Directory was enabled to maintain its struggle against the Coalition.

All system in finance having disappeared, war provided the Directory, now in extremis, with a treasury, and was its only source for supplying constitutional needs; while it opened a path to the military commanders who were External policy. to be the support and the glory of the state. England remaining invulnerable in her insular position despite Hoche’s attempt to land in Ireland in 1796, the Directory resumed the traditional policy against Austria of conquering the natural frontiers, Carnot furnishing the plans; hence the war in southern Germany, in which Jourdan and Moreau were repulsed by an inferior force under the archduke Charles, and Bonaparte’s triumphant Italian campaign. Chief of an army that he had made irresistible, not by honour but by glory, and master of wealth by rapine, Bonaparte imposed his will upon the Directory, which he provided with funds. After having separated the Piedmontese from the Austrians, whom he drove back into Tyrol, and repulsed offensive reprisals of Wurmser and Alvinzi on four occasions, he stopped short at the preliminary negotiations of Léoben just at the moment when the Directory, discouraged by the problem of Italian reconstitution, was preparing the army of the Rhine to re-enter the field under the command of Hoche. Bonaparte thus gained the good opinion of peace-loving Frenchmen; he partitioned Venetian territory with Austria, contrary to French interests but conformably with his own in Italy, and henceforward was the decisive factor in French and European policy, like Caesar or Pompey of old. England, in consternation, offered in her turn to negotiate at Lille.

These military successes did not prevent the Directory, like the Thermidorians, from losing ground in the country. Every strategic truce since 1795 had been marked by a political crisis; peace reawakened opposition. The constitutional Struggle against the royalists. party, royalist in reality, had made alarming progress, chiefly owing to the Babouvist conspiracy; they now tried to corrupt the republican generals, and Condé procured the treachery of Pichegru, Kellermann and General Ferrand at Besançon. Moreover, their Clichy club, directed by the abbé Brottier, manipulated Parisian opinion; while many of the refractory priests, having returned after the liberal Public Worship Act of September 1795, made active propaganda against the principles of the Revolution, and plotted the fall of the Directory as maintaining the State’s independence of the Church. Thus the partial elections of the year V. (May 20, 1797) had brought back into the two councils a counter-revolutionary majority of royalists, constitutionalists of 1791, Catholics and moderates. The Director Letourneur had been replaced by Barthélemy, who had negotiated the treaty of Basel and was a constitutional monarchist. So that the executive not only found it impossible to govern, owing to the opposition of the councils and a vehement press-campaign, but was distracted by ceaseless internal conflict. Carnot and Barthélemy wished to meet ecclesiastical opposition by legal measures only, and demanded peace; while Barras, La Révellière and Reubell saw no other remedy save military force. The attempt of the counter-revolutionaries to make an army for themselves out of the guard of the Legislative Assembly, and the success of the Catholics, who had managed at the end of August 1797 to repeal the laws against refractory priests, determined the Directory to appeal from the rebellious parliament to the ready swords of Augereau and Bernadotte. On the 18th Fructidor (September 18th Fructidor. 4, 1797) Bonaparte’s lieutenants, backed up by the whole army, stopped the elections in forty-nine departments, and deported to Guiana many deputies of both councils, journalists and non-juring priests, as well as the director Barthélemy, though Carnot escaped into Switzerland. The royalist party was once more overthrown, but with it the republican constitution itself. Thus every act of violence still further confirmed the new empire of the army and the defeat of principles, preparing the way for military despotism.

Political and financial coups d’état were not enough for the directors. In order to win back public opinion, tired of internecine quarrels and sickened by the scandalous immorality of the generals and of those in power, Aggressive policy of the Directory. and to remove from Paris an army which after having given them a fresh lease of life was now a menace to them, war appeared their only hopeful course. They attempted to renew the designs of Louis XIV. and anticipate those of Napoleon. But Bonaparte saw what they were planning; and to the rupture of the negotiations at Lille and an order for the resumption of hostilities he responded by a fresh act of disobedience and the infliction on the Directory of the peace of Campo-Formio, on October 17, 1797. The directors were consoled for this enforced peace by acquiring the left bank of the Rhine and Belgium, and for the forfeiture of republican principles by attaining what had for so long been the ambition of the monarchy. But the army continued a menace. To avoid disbanding it, which might, as after the peace of Basel, have given the counter-revolution further auxiliaries, the Directory appointed Bonaparte chief of the Army of England, and employed Jourdan to revise the conscription laws so as to make military service a permanent duty of the citizen, since war was now to be the permanent object of policy. The Directory finally conceived the gigantic project of bolstering up the French Republic—the triumph of which was celebrated by the peace of Campo-Formio—by forming the neighbouring weak states into tributary vassal republics. This system had already been applied to the Batavian republic in 1795, to the Ligurian and Cisalpine republics in June 1797; it was extended to that of Mülhausen on the 28th of January 1798, to the Roman republic in February, to the Helvetian in April, while the Parthenopaean republic (Naples) was to be established in 1799. This was an international coup de force, which presupposed that all these nations in whose eyes independence was flaunted would make no claim to enjoy it; that though they had been beaten and pillaged they would not learn to conquer in their turn; and that the king of Sardinia, dispossessed of Milan, the grand-duke of Tuscany who had given refuge to the pope when driven from Rome, and the king of Naples, who had opened his ports to Nelson’s fleet, would not find allies to make a stand against this hypocritical system.