THE SWORD OF HONOR : : : : OR : : : : The Foundation of the French Republic

A Tale of The French Revolution

B y E U G E N E S U E

In Two Volumes

TRANSLATED FROM THE ORIGINAL FRENCH BY

DANIEL DE LEON

NEW YORK LABOR NEWS COMPANY, 1910

Copyright, 1910, by the NEW YORK LABOR NEWS CO.

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE.

Most persons know the French Revolution as a tremendous outburst in human affairs. Many know it as one of the race's great steps forward. That, however, it was the revolution which carried into power the then rising bourgeois, now capitalist, class; that this class, while appealing for and using the help of the working class, secretly hated and feared the demands of the latter, and blocked them at every opportunity; that finally the bourgeoisie, having obtained as revolutionists, by the aid of the workers, their end of the revolution, became as violently reactionary as had been the nobility they fought, and ruthlessly shot and guillotined to pieces the then definite proletarian movement for full political equality and collective ownership of the tools of production—that is an insight into the French Revolutionary period hitherto vouchsafed to few. To that insight Eugene Sue's genius has, with the present thrilling novel, made straight the way for all.

This, The Sword of Honor; or, The Foundation of the French Republic, is the eighteenth and culminating unit in Sue's great historic-fiction series, The Mysteries of the People; or, History of a Proletarian Family Across the Ages. Following close upon the previous volume, The Blacksmith's Hammer; or, The Peasant Code, in which the popular storm was seen gathering head under the atrocities of the gilded age of the Grand Monarch, the present story portrays that storm breaking in all the accumulated vigor of its centuries of postponement, and sweeping away the empty lay figures of an outgrown feudalism. True, one barrier to human liberty was thrown down only to disclose another. To the empire of birth and privilege was to succeed the empire of the shekel; to the rule of do-nothing kings, the rule of do-nothing plutocracy. But it is in the act of drilling itself for the overthrow of that final parasite class—for the final conquering, in other words, of freedom for the race—that Sue portrays the proletariat in the next and closing work of the series, The Galley Slave's Ring; or, The Family of Lebrenn. Though he minimizes none of the difficulties, his message for the future is of hope only.

Nothing is more unanimous among historians of the period than expressions of commiseration for the condition of the French people before the Revolution. Yet nothing, on the other hand, is more unanimous either than the condemnation showered upon this people the moment it seizes the reins and enters upon the task of putting down its age-long tyrannizers. Into this absurd breach of consistency Sue's genius saved him from falling. In his pages Marat, Danton and Robespierre walk to their doom with head erect, clean from the smut slung at them by their bourgeois enemies, for whom they were going too far. Friends of the People once, so they remained to the end; and in that mantle Sue has preserved their memory for all time. For him who would rail at their summary deeds Sue has far from spread a bed of roses. The memory of the royalist massacres in the Vendee and of the triumphant bourgeois massacres during the White Terror, rescued by his pen from the oblivion in which they were sought to be buried, have thrown the Revolutionary Terror into its proper perspective. It is a bagatelle beside the acts committed by its denouncers.

Sue's clear presentation of the maxim, "To the peasant the land, to the workman the tool"; his unflinching delineation of the debauchery of court and ecclesiastical circles of the time; his revelation of the role of the political machine under the guise of religion sending out its arms as willing regicides or agents provocateurs by turn; and his clear depiction of the cowardly, grasping, double-dealing and fraud-perpetrating character of the bourgeois, all of which is presented in the easy reading of a story, make this thrilling work of fiction an unsurpassable epitome of the period in which its action elapses.

Finally, it is the distinctive test of good literature upon any topic, that it does not sate, but incites to further thought and study. Not the least of the values of The Sword of Honor; or, The Foundation of the French Republic, is that it performs this reverent duty matchlessly for the momentous period of which it treats.

SOLON DE LEON.

New York, April, 1910.

INDEX (to both volumes)

PART I. FALL OF THE BASTILLE.

CHAPTER

I.THE HOUSE IN ST. FRANCOIS STREET7

II.REVOLUTIONARY EFFERVESCENCE22

III.THE VOYANTS33

IV.LITTLE RODIN46

V.COUNT AND JESUIT54

VI.ROYALISTS AT BANQUET68

VII.NEWS FROM THE BARRICADES83

VIII.IN THE HALL OF THE PORTRAITS101

IX.FILIAL CONFIDENCES105

X.DEPUTY DESMARAIS111

XI.LIONS AND JACKALS122

XII.REUNITED FROM THE BASTILLE132

XIII.THE LEBRENN FAMILY138

XIV.THE BOURGEOIS UNMASKED150

XV.THE MYSTERIES OF THE PEOPLE167

PART II. THE BOURGEOIS REVOLUTION.

CHAPTER

I.THE NATION INSULTED—AND AVENGED 179

II.MIRABEAU189

III.AT THE JACOBIN CLUB195

IV.THE KING ARRESTED211

V.THE DAY OF THE FIELD OF MARS217

VI.WAR AND COUNTER-WAR229

VII.TRIUMPHANT INSURRECTION242

VIII.REPRISALS258

IX."TO THE FRONT!"274

X.ROYALTY ABOLISHED287

XI.BOURGEOIS TURNED SANS-CULOTTE293

XII.HOWLING WITH THE WOLVES303

XIII.THE HOWL RINGS FALSE311

PART II—THE BOURGEOIS REVOLUTION. (Continued) (volume 2)

CHAPTER

XIV.JESUIT CAMPAIGNING1

XV.THE KING ON TRIAL23

XVI.LEBRENN AND NEROWEG33

XVII.PLANS FOR THE FUTURE45

XVIII.THE KING SENTENCED61

XIX.EXECUTION66

XX.MARRIAGE OF JOHN LEBRENN69

XXI.A LOVE FROM THE GRAVE76

XXII.MASTER AND FOREMAN84

XXIII.TO THE WORKMAN THE TOOL95

XXIV.LOST AGAIN101

XXV.ROYALIST BARBARITIES111

XXVI.A REVOLUTIONARY OUTPOST122

XXVII.THE HEROINE IN ARMS137

XXVIII.SERVING AND MIS-SERVING150

XXIX.BATTLE OF THE LINES OF WEISSENBURG 159

XXX.DEATH OF VICTORIA175

XXXI.ONRUSH OF THE REVOLUTION178

XXXII.AD MAJOREM DEI GLORIAM!188

XXXIII.ARREST OF ROBESPIERRE196

XXXIV.THE NINTH THERMIDOR.205

XXXV.DEATH OF ROBESPIERRE.213

PART III—NAPOLEON.

CHAPTER

I.THE WHITE TERROR221

II.COLONEL OLIVER227

III.CROSS PURPOSES240

IV.LAYING THE TRAIN245

V.THE EIGHTEENTH BRUMAIRE252

VI.IN THE ORANGERY AT ST. CLOUD258

VII.GLORY; AND ELBA268

VIII.RETURN OF NAPOLEON277

IX.WATERLOO288

X.DEPOSITION295

EPILOGUE.

I."TO THE BARRICADES!"—1830303

II.ORLEANS ON THE THRONE317

CONCLUSION328

INTRODUCTION.

I, John Lebrenn, the son of Ronan, whose father was Alain, the last son of Salaun Lebrenn the mariner, now take up the thread of our family history, by writing the following narrative.

Thanks to God, Oh, sons of Joel! my eyes have seen the beautiful day predicted to our ancestor Scanvoch the soldier by Victoria the Great, now more than fifteen centuries ago, and awaited from age to age by our family. I have witnessed the solemn judgment, the expiatory punishment of Louis Capet, called Louis XVI, the last of that line of Kings of Frankish origin. Rejoice, ye shades of my ancestors—ye martyrs of the Church, of the Nobility, and of Royalty! Rejoice, ye obscure soldiers who fought in the bloody conflicts that you engaged in from age to age, in resolute insurrections of the oppressed against the oppressors of centuries—of the sons of the conquered Gauls against the conqueror Franks! Rejoice! Old Gaul has recovered her ancient republican freedom! She has broken the abhorred yoke of the Kings, and the infamous yoke of the Church of Rome.

I am writing this narrative in the year II of the French Republic, one and indivisible.

My great-grandfather, Salaun Lebrenn, died at Amsterdam in his ninety-first year, on December 20, 1715. His son Alain, born in 1685, was then thirty years of age. He worked in Amsterdam as a printer, one of the most lucrative trades, in that the large number of books, then being written against the Church and royalty, could be published only at Geneva, or in Holland, free countries in which the right of intellectual free research was recognized and protected. My ancestor Alain sold in 1715 the modest patrimony which he inherited from his father Salaun, left Holland, and settled down in France at the beginning of the Regency under Louis XV, the successor of Louis XIV. The freedom then enjoyed was great compared with conditions at the period of Louis XIV. Being exceptionally skilled at his trade, my grandfather secured the position of foreman in the printing house of one of the descendants of the famous Estienne, in whose establishment our ancestor Christian was long employed. Alain married the niece of his employer. Of that marriage was born, in 1727, my father Ronan. He followed my grandfather's trade. The latter died in 1751. My father had two children—my sister Victoria, born in 1760, and myself, John Lebrenn, born in 1766.

My grandfather's life was spent in peace and obscurity. But great misfortunes fell upon our family. As you will read in the course of the following history, Oh, sons of Joel! it was not vouchsafed to my father to witness, as I did, the brilliant victory that crowned fifteen centuries of incessant, painful and bloody endeavor, thanks to which our ancestors—successively slaves, serfs and vassals—conquered, at the price of their lives and of innumerable rebellions, step by step, one by one, the franchises that the French Republic has now confirmed and consecrated in the face of the whole world, by proclaiming, in the name of the Rights of Man, the downfall of Kings and the sovereignty of the People.