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READING HALLTHE DOORS OF WISDOM |
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A HISTORY OF MODERN EUROPE FROM 1792 TO 1878CHAPTER IITHE WAR, DOWN TO THE TREATIES OF BASLE AND THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE DIRECTORY.
The war between
France and Austria opened in April, 1792, on the Flemish frontier. The first
encounters were discreditable to the French soldiery, who took to flight and
murdered one of their generals. The discouragement with which the nation heard
of these reverses deepened into sullen indignation against the Court, as weeks
and months passed by, and the forces lay idle on the frontier or met the enemy
only in trifling skirmishes which left both sides where they were before. If at
this crisis of the Revolution, with all the patriotism, all the bravery, all
the military genius of France burning for service, the Government conducted the
war with results scarcely distinguishable from those of a parade, the
suggestion of treason on the part of the Court was only too likely to be
entertained. The internal difficulties of the country were increasing. The
Assembly had determined to banish from France the priests who rejected the new
ecclesiastical system, and the King had placed his veto upon their decree. He
had refused to permit the formation of a camp of volunteers in the neighbourhood of Paris. He had dismissed the popular
Ministry forced upon him by the Gironde. A tumult on the 20th of June, in which
the mob forced their way into the Tuileries, showed the nature of the attack
impending upon the monarchy if Louis continued to oppose himself to the demands
of the nation; but the lesson was lost upon the King. Louis was as little able
to nerve himself for an armed conflict with the populace as to reconcile his
conscience to the Ecclesiastical Decrees, and he surrendered himself to a pious
inertia at a moment when the alarm of foreign invasion doubled revolutionary
passion all over France. Prussia, in pursuance of a treaty made in February,
united its forces to those of Austria. Forty thousand Prussian troops, under
the Duke of Brunswick, the best of Frederick’s surviving generals, advanced
along the Moselle. From Belgium and the upper Rhine two Austrian armies
converged upon the line of invasion; and the emigrant nobles were given their
place among the forces of the Allies.
On the 25th of July the Duke of Brunswick, in the name of the Emperor and the King of Prussia, issued a proclamation to the French people, which, but for the difference between violent words and violent deeds, would have left little to be complained of in the cruelties that henceforward stained the popular cause. In this manifesto, after declaring that the Allies entered France in order to deliver Louis from captivity, and that members of the National Guard fighting against the invaders would be punished as rebels against their king, the Sovereigns addressed themselves to the city of Paris and to the representatives of the French nation: “The city of Paris and its inhabitants are warned to
submit without delay to their King; to set that Prince at entire liberty, and
to show to him and to all the Royal Family the inviolability and respect which
the law of nature and of nations imposes on subjects towards their Sovereigns.
Their Imperial and Royal Majesties will hold all the members of the National
Assembly, of the Municipality, and of the National Guard of Paris responsible
for all events with their heads, before military tribunals, without hope of
pardon. They further declare that, if the Tuileries be forced or insulted, or
the least violence offered to the King, the Queen, or the Royal Family, and if
provision be not at once made for their safety and liberty, they will inflict a
memorable vengeance, by delivering up the city of Paris to military execution
and total overthrow, and the rebels guilty of such crimes to the punishment
they have merited.”
Insurrection August 10, 1792. This challenge was not necessary to determine the fate of Louis. Since the capture of the Bastille in the first days of the Revolution the National Government had with difficulty supported itself against the populace of the capital; and, even before the foreigner threatened Paris with fire and sword, Paris had learnt to look for the will of France within itself. As the columns of Brunswick advanced across the north-eastern frontier, Danton and the leaders of the city-democracy marshalled their army of the poor and the desperate to overthrow that monarchy whose cause the invader had made his own. The Republic which had floated so long in the thoughts of the Girondins was won in a single day by the populace of Paris, amid the roar of cannons and the flash of bayonets. On the 10th of August Danton let loose the armed mob upon the Tuileries. Louis quitted the Palace without giving orders to the guard either to fight or to retire; but the guard were ignorant that their master desired them to offer no resistance, and one hundred and sixty of the mob were shot down before an order reached the troops to abandon the Palace. The cruelties which followed the victory of the people indicated the fate in store for those whom the invader came to protect. It is doubtful whether the foreign Courts would have made any serious attempt to undo the social changes effected by the Revolution in France; but no one supposed that those thousands of self-exiled nobles who now returned behind the guns of Brunswick had returned in order to take their places peacefully in the new social order. In their own imagination, as much as in that of the people, they returned with fire and sword to repossess themselves of rights of which they had been despoiled, and to take vengeance upon the men who were responsible for the changes made in France since 1789. (The accounts of the emigrants sent to England by Lord Elgin, envoy at
Brussels, and Sir J. Murray, our military attaché with Brunswick's army are
instructive: "The conduct of the army under the Princes of France is
universally reprobated. Their appearance in dress, in attendants, in
preparations, is ridiculous. As an instance, however trivial, it may be
mentioned that on one of the wagons was written Toilette de Monsieur. The
spirit of vengeance, however, which they discover on every occasion is far more
serious. Wherever they have passed, they have exercised acts of cruelty, in
banishing and severely punishing those persons who, though probably culpable,
had yet been left untouched by the Prussian commanders. To such an extent has
this been carried that the commander at Verdun would not suffer any Frenchman emigrant
to pass a night in the town without a special permission." Sept. 21. After
the failure of the campaign, Elgin writes of the emigrants: "They
everywhere added to the cruelties for some of which several hussars had been
executed: carried to its extent the vengeance threatened in the Duke of
Brunswick's Declaration, in burning whole villages where a shot was fired on
them: and on the other hand by their self-sufficiency, want of subordination
and personal disrespect, have drawn upon themselves the contempt of the
combined armies." Oct. 6. So late as 1796, the exile Louis XVI declared
his intention to restore the "property and rights" -i.e. tithes,
feudal dues, etc.- of the nobles and clergy, and to punish the men who had
"committed offences").
In the midst of a panic little justified
by the real military situation, Danton inflamed the nation with his own
passionate courage and resolution; he unhappily also thought it necessary to a
successful national defence that the reactionary
party at Paris should be paralyzed by a terrible example. The prisons were
filled with persons suspected of hostility to the national cause, and in the
first days of September many hundreds of these unfortunate persons were
massacred by gangs of assassins paid by a committee of the Municipality. Danton
did not disguise his approval of the act. He had made up his mind that the work
of the Revolution could only be saved by striking terror into its enemies, and
by preventing the Royalists from co-operating with the invader. But the
multitudes who flocked to the standards of 1792 carried with them the
patriotism of Danton unstained by his guilt. Right or wrong in its origin, the
war was now unquestionably a just one on the part of France, a war against a
privileged class attempting to recover by force the unjust advantages that they
had not been able to maintain, a war against the foreigner in defence of the right of the nation to deal with its own
government. Since the great religious wars there had been no cause so rooted in
the hearts, so close to the lives of those who fought for it. Every soldier who
joined the armies of France in 1792 joined of his own free will. No
conscription dragged the peasant to the frontier.
Men left their
homes in order that the fruit of the poor man’s labour should be his own, in order that the children of France should inherit some
better birth right than exaction and want, in order that the late-won sense of
human right should not be swept from the earth by the arms of privilege and
caste. It was a time of high-wrought hope, of generous and pathetic self-sacrifice;
a time that left a deep and indelible impression upon those who judged it as
eyewitnesses. Years afterwards the poet Wordsworth, then alienated from France
and cold in the cause of liberty, could not recall without tears the memories
of 1792.
The defence of France rested on General Dumouriez. The
fortresses of Longwy and Verdun, covering the passage
of the Meuse, had fallen after the briefest resistance; the troops that could
be collected before Brunswick's approach were too few to meet the enemy in the
open field. Happily for France the slow advance of the Prussian general
permitted Dumouriez to occupy the difficult country of the Argonne, where,
while waiting for his reinforcements, he was able for some time to hold the
invaders in check. At length Brunswick made his way past the defile which
Dumouriez had chosen for his first line of defence;
but it was only to find the French posted in such strength on his flank that
any further advance would imperil his own army. If the advance was to be
continued, Dumouriez must be dislodged. Accordingly, on the 20th of September,
Brunswick directed his artillery against the hills of Valmy, where the French
left was encamped. The cannonade continued for some hours, but it was followed
by no general attack. The firmness of the French under Brunswick's fire made it
clear that they would not be displaced without an obstinate battle; and,
disappointed of victory, the King of Prussia began to listen to proposals of
peace sent to him by Dumouriez. (Such was the famine in the Prussian camp that
Dumouriez sent the King of Prussia twelve loaves, twelve pounds of coffee, and
twelve pounds of sugar). A week spent in negotiation served only to strengthen
the French and to aggravate the scarcity and sickness within the German camp.
Dissensions broke out between the Prussian and Austrian commanders; a retreat
was ordered; and to the astonishment of Europe the veteran forces of Brunswick
fell back before the mutinous soldiery and unknown
generals of the Revolution, powerless to delay for a single month the evacuation
of France and the restoration of the fortresses which they had captured.
In the meantime
the Legislative Assembly had decreed its own dissolution in consequence of the
overthrow of the monarchy on August both, and had ordered the election of
representatives to frame a constitution for France. The elections were held in
the crisis of invasion, in the height of national indignation against the
alliance of the aristocracy with the foreigner, and, in some districts, under
the influence of men who had not shrunk from ordering the massacres in the
prisons. At such a moment a Constitutional Royalist had scarcely more chance of
election than a detected spy from the enemy’s camp. The Girondins, who had been
the party of extremes in the Legislative Assembly, were the party of moderation
and order in the Convention. By their side there were returned men whose whole
being seemed to be compounded out of the forces of conflict, men who, sometimes
without conscious depravity, carried into political and social struggles that
direct, unquestioning employment of force which has ordinarily been reserved
for war or for the diffusion of religious doctrines. The moral differences that
separated this party from the Gironde were at once conspicuous: the political
creed of the two parties appeared at first to be much the same. Monarchy was
abolished, and France declared a Republic (Sept. 21). Office continued in the
hands of the Gironde; but the vehement, uncompromising spirit of their rivals,
the so-called party of the Mountain, quickly made itself felt in all the
relations of France to foreign Powers. The intention of conquest might still be
disavowed, as it had been five months before; but were the converts to liberty
to be denied the right of uniting themselves to the French people by their own
free will? When the armies of the Republic had swept its assailants from the
border-provinces that gave them entrance into France, were those provinces to
be handed back to a government of priests and nobles? The scruples which had
condemned all annexation of territory vanished in that orgy of patriotism which
followed the expulsion of the invader and the discovery that the Revolution was
already a power in other lands than France. The nation that had to fight the
battle of European freedom must appeal to the spirit of freedom wherever it
would answer the call: the conflict with sovereigns must be maintained by
arming their subjects against them in every land. In this conception of the
universal alliance of the nations, the Governments with which France was not
yet at war were scarcely distinguished from those which had pronounced against
her. The frontier-lines traced by an obsolete diplomacy, the artificial
guarantees of treaties, were of little account against the living and
inalienable sovereignty of the people. To men inflamed with the passions of
1792 an argument of international law scarcely conveyed more meaning than to
Peter the Hermit. Among the statesmen of other lands, who had no intention of
abandoning all the principles recognised as the
public right of Europe, the language now used by France could only be
understood as the avowal of indiscriminate aggression.
The Revolution
had displayed itself in France as a force of union as well as of division. It
had driven the nobles across the frontier; it had torn the clergy from their
altars; but it had reconciled sullen Corsica; and by abolishing feudal rights
it had made France the real fatherland of the Teutonic peasant in Alsace and
Lorraine. It was now about to prove its attractive power in foreign lands. At
the close of the last century the nationalities of Europe were far less
consolidated than they are at present; only on the Spanish and the Swiss
frontier had France a neighbour that could be called
a nation. On the north, what is now the kingdom of Belgium was in 1792 a
collection of provinces subject to the House of Austria. The German population
both of the districts west of the Rhine and of those opposite to Alsace was parcelled out among a number of petty principalities.
Savoy, though west of the chain of the Alps and French in speech, formed part
of the kingdom of Piedmont, which was itself severed by history and by national
character from the other States of Northern Italy. Along the entire frontier,
from Dunkirk to the Maritime Alps, France nowhere touched a strong, united, and
independent people; and along this entire frontier, except in the country
opposite Alsace, the armed proselytism of the French Revolution proved a
greater force than the influences on which the existing order of things
depended. In the Low Countries, in the Principalities of the Rhine, in
Switzerland, in Savoy, in Piedmont itself, the doctrines of the Revolution were
welcomed by a more or less numerous class, and the armies of France appeared,
though but for a moment, as the missionaries of liberty and right rather than
as an invading enemy.
No sooner had
Brunswick been brought to a stand by Dumouriez at Valmy than a French division
under Custine crossed the Alsatian frontier and
advanced upon Spires, where Brunswick had left large stores of war. The
garrison was defeated in an encounter outside the town; Spires and Worms
surrendered to Custine. In the neighbouring fortress of Mainz, the key to Western Germany, Custine’s advance was watched by a republican party among the inhabitants, from whom the
French general learnt that he had only to appear before the city to become its
master. Brunswick had indeed apprehended the failure of his invasion of France,
but he had never given a thought to the defence of
Germany; and, although the King of Prussia had been warned of the defenceless state of Mainz, no steps had been taken beyond
the payment of a sum of money for the repair of the fortifications, which money
the Archbishop expended in the purchase of a wood belonging to himself and the
erection of a timber patchwork. On news arriving of the capture of Spires, the
Archbishop fled, leaving the administration to the Dean, the Chancellor, and
the Commandant. The Chancellor made a speech, calling upon his "beloved
brethren" the citizens to defend themselves to the last extremity, and
daily announced the overthrow of Dumouriez and the approaching entry of the
Allies into Paris, until Custine’s soldiers actually
came into sight. Then a council of war declared the city to be untenable; and
before Custine had brought up a single siege-gun the
garrison capitulated, and the French were welcomed into Mainz by the partisans
of the Republic (Oct. 20). With the French arms came the French organization of
liberty. A club was formed on the model of the Jacobin Club of Paris; existing
officers and distinctions of rank were abolished; and although the mass of the
inhabitants held aloof, a Republic was finally proclaimed, and incorporated
with the Republic of France.
The success of Custine’s raid into Germany did not divert the Convention from the design of attacking Austria in the Netherlands, which Dumouriez had from the first pressed upon the Government. It was not three years since the Netherlands had been in revolt against the Emperor Joseph. In its origin the revolt was a reactionary movement of the clerical party against Joseph's reforms; but there soon sprang up ambitions and hopes at variance with the first impulses of the insurrection; and by the side of monks and monopolists a national party came into existence, proclaiming the sovereignty of the people, and imitating all the movements of the French Revolution. During the brief suspension of Austrian rule the popular and the reactionary parties attacked one another; and on the restoration of Leopold's authority in 1791 the democratic leaders, with a large body of their followers, took refuge beyond the frontier, looking forward to the outbreak of war between Austria and France. Their partisans formed a French connection in the interior of the country; and by some strange illusion, the priests themselves and the close corporations which had been attacked by Joseph supposed that their interests would be respected by Revolutionary France. "The very night the news of the late Emperor's Leopold's death
arrived Brussels, inflammatory advertisements and invitations to arm were
distributed." One culprit "belonged to the Choir of St. Gudule: he chose the middle of the day, and in the presence
of many people posted up a paper in the church, exhorting to a general
insurrection. The remainder of this strange production was the description of a
vision he pretended to have seen, representing the soul of the late emperor on
its way to join that of Joseph, already suffering in the other world."
Col. Gardiner, March 20, 1792.
Thus the ground was everywhere prepared for a French invasion. Dumouriez
crossed the frontier. The border fortresses no longer existed; and after a
single battle won by the French at Jemappes on the
6th of November, the Austrians, finding the population universally hostile,
abandoned the Netherlands without a struggle.
(Elgin, from Brussels, Nov. 6.
"A brisk cannonade has been heard this whole forenoon in the
direction of Mons. It is at this moment somewhat diminished, though not at an
end"
Nov. 7. "Several messengers have arrived from camp in the course of
the night, but all the Ministers -I have seen them all- deny having received one
word of detail.... Couriers have been sent this night in every direction to
call in all the detachments on the frontiers.... The Government is making every
arrangement for quitting Brussels: their papers are already prepared, their
carriages ready." ... Then a PS. "A cannonade is distinctly heard
again.... All the emigrants now here are removing with the utmost haste."
Nov. 9th. "The confusion throughout the country is extreme. The
roads are covered with emigrants, and persons of these provinces flying from
the French armies").
The victory of Jemappes, the first pitched battle won by the Republic, excited an outburst of revolutionary fervour in the Convention which deeply affected the relations of France to Great Britain, hitherto a neutral spectator of the war. A manifesto was published declaring that the French nation offered its alliance to all peoples who wished to recover their freedom, and charging the generals of the Republic to give their protection to all persons who might suffer in the cause of liberty (Nov. 19). A week later Savoy and Nice were annexed to France, the population of Savoy having declared in favour of France and Sardinia. On the 15th of December the Convention proclaimed that social and political revolution was henceforth to accompany every movement of its armies on foreign soil. “In every country that
shall be occupied by the armies of the French Republic”, such was the substance
of the Decree of December 15th; “the generals shall announce the abolition of
all existing authorities; of nobility, of serfage, of
every feudal right and every monopoly; they shall proclaim the sovereignty of
the people, and convoke the inhabitants in assemblies to form a provisional
Government, to which no officer of a former Government, no noble, nor any member
of the former privileged corporations shall be eligible. They shall place under
the charge of the French Republic all property belonging to the Sovereign or
his adherents, and the property of every civil or religious corporation. The
French nation will treat as enemies any people which, refusing liberty and
equality, desires to preserve its prince and privileged castes, or to make any
accommodation with them”.
Execution
of Louis XVI, Jan. 21, 1793.
This singular announcement of a new crusade caused the Government of Great Britain to arm. Although the decree of the Convention related only to States with which France was at war, the Convention had in fact formed connections with the English revolutionary societies; and the French Minister of Marine informed his sailors that they were about to carry fifty thousand caps of liberty to their English brethren. No prudent statesman would treat a mere series of threats against all existing authorities as ground for war; but the acts of the French Government showed that it intended to carry into effect the violent interference in the affairs of other nations announced in its manifestoes. Its agents were stirring up dissatisfaction in every State; and although the annexation of Savoy and the occupation of the Netherlands might be treated as incidental to the conflict with Austria and Sardinia, in which Great Britain had pledged itself to neutrality, other acts of the Convention were certainly infringements of the rights of allies of England. A series of European treaties, oppressive according to our own ideas, but in keeping with the ideas of that age, prohibited the navigation of the River Schelde, on which Antwerp is situated, in order that the commerce of the North Sea might flow exclusively into Dutch ports. On the conquest of Belgium the French Government gave orders to Dumouriez to send a flotilla down the river, and to declare Antwerp an open port in right of the law of nature, which treaties cannot abrogate. Whatever the folly of commercial restraints, the navigation of the Schelde was a question between the Antwerpers and the Dutch, and one in which France had no direct concern. The incident, though trivial, was viewed in England as one among many proofs of the intention of the French to interfere with the affairs of neighbouring States at their pleasure. In ordinary times it would not have been easy to excite much interest in England on behalf of a Dutch monopoly; but the feeling of this country towards the French Revolution had been converted into a passionate hatred by the massacres of September, and by the open alliance between the Convention and the Revolutionary societies in England itself. Pitt indeed, whom the Parisians imagined to be their most malignant enemy, laboured against the swelling national passion, and hoped against all hope for peace. Not only was Pitt guiltless of the desire to add this country to the enemies of France, but he earnestly desired to reconcile France with Austria, in order that the Western States, whose embroilment left Eastern Europe at the mercy of Catherine of Russia, might unite to save both Poland and Turkey from falling into the hands of a Power whose steady aggression threatened Europe more seriously than all the noisy and outspoken excitement of the French Convention. Pitt, moreover, viewed with deep disapproval the secret designs of Austria and Prussia. (In Nov. 1792, Grenville ordered the English envoys at Vienna and Berlin
to discover, if possible, the real designs of aggrandizement held by those
Courts. Mr. Straton, at Vienna, got wind of the
agreement against Poland. "I requested Count Philip Cobenzl"
-the Austrian Minister- "that he would have the goodness to open himself
confidentially to me on the precise object which the two allied Courts might
have in contemplation. This, however, the Count was by no means disposed to do;
on the contrary, he went round the compass of evasion in order to avoid a
direct answer. But determined as I was to push the Austrian Minister, I heaped
question on question, until I forced him to say, blushing, and with evident
signs of embarrassment, 'Count Stadion' -Ambassador
at London- 'will be able to satisfy the curiosity of the British Minister, to
whatever point it may be directed." Stadion accordingly informed Lord Grenville of the Polish and Bavarian plans. Grenville
expressed his concern and regret at the aggression on Poland, and gave reasons
against the Bavarian exchange. To our envoy with the King of Prussia Grenville
wrote: "It may possibly be the intention of the Courts to adopt a plan of
indemnifying themselves for the expense of the war by fresh acquisitions in
Poland, and carrying into execution a new partition of that country. You will
not fail to explain in the most distinct and pointed manner his Majesty's
entire disapprobation of such a plan, and his determination on no account to
concur in any measures which may tend to the completion of a design so unjust
in itself." At Vienna Cobenzl declared, Feb. 9,
that Austria could not now "even manifest a wish to oppose the projects of
Prussia in Poland, as in that case his Prussian Majesty would probably withdraw
his assistance from the French war; nay, perhaps even enter into an alliance
with that nation and invade Bohemia"). If the French executive would have
given any assurance that the Netherlands should not be annexed, or if the
French ambassador, Chauvelin, who was connected with
English plotters, had been superseded by a trustworthy negotiator, it is
probable that peace might have been preserved. But when, on the execution of
King Louis (Jan. 21, 1793), Chauvelin was expelled
from England as a suspected alien, war became a question of days.
If the French executive would have given any assurance that the
Netherlands should not be annexed, or if the French ambassador, Chauvelin, who was connected with English plotters, had
been superseded by a trustworthy negotiator, it is probable that peace might
have been preserved. But when, on the execution of King Louis (Jan. 21, 1793), Chauvelin was expelled from England as a suspected alien,
war became a question of days.
Holland and Mediterranean States enter the war. War with England, Feb. 1st, 1793. Points of
technical right figured in the complaints of both sides; but the real ground of
war was perfectly understood. France considered itself entitled to advance the
Revolution and the Rights of Man wherever its own arms or popular insurrection
gave it the command. England denied the right of any Power to annul the
political system of Europe at its pleasure. No more serious, no more
sufficient, ground of war ever existed between two nations; yet the event
proved that, with the highest justification for war, the highest wisdom would
yet have chosen peace. England's entry into the war converted it from an affair
of two or three campaigns into a struggle of twenty years, resulting in more
violent convulsions, more widespread misery, and more atrocious crimes, than in
all probability would have resulted even from the temporary triumph of the
revolutionary cause in 1793. But in both nations political passion welcomed
impending calamity; and the declaration of war by the Convention on February
1st only anticipated the desire of the English people. Great Britain once
committed to the struggle, Pitt spared neither money nor intimidation in his
efforts to unite all Europe against France. Holland was included with England
in the French declaration of war. The Mediterranean States felt that the navy
of England was nearer to them than the armies of Austria and Prussia; and
before the end of the summer of 1793, Spain, Portugal, Naples, Tuscany, and the
Papal States had joined the Coalition.
The Jacobins of
Paris had formed a wrong estimate of the political condition of England. At the
outbreak of the war they believed that England itself was on the verge of
revolution. They mistook the undoubted discontent of a portion of the middle
and lower classes, which showed itself in the cry for parliamentary reform, for
a general sentiment of hatred towards existing institutions, like that which in
France had swept away the old order at a single blow. The Convention received
the addresses of English Radical societies, and imagined that the abuses of the
parliamentary system under George III had alienated the whole nation. What they
had found in Belgium and in Savoy, a people thankful to receive the Rights of
Man from the soldiers of the Revolution, they expected to find among the
dissenting congregations of London and the factory-hands of Sheffield. The
singular attraction exercised by each class in England upon the one below it,
as well as the indifference of the nation generally to all ideals, was little
understood in France, although the Revolutions of the two countries bore this
contrast on their face. A month after the fall of the Bastille, the whole
system of class-privilege and monopoly had vanished from French law; fifteen
years of the English Commonwealth had left the structure of English society what
it had been at the beginning. But political observation vanished in the
delirium of 1793; and the French only discovered, when it was too late, that in
Great Britain the Revolution had fallen upon an enemy of unparalleled
stubbornness and inexhaustible strength.
In the first
Assembly of the Revolution it was usual to speak of the English as free men
whom the French ought to imitate; in the Convention it was usual to speak of
them as slaves whom the French ought to deliver. The institutions of England
bore in fact a very different aspect when compared with the absolute monarchy
of the Bourbons and when compared with the democracy of 1793. Frenchmen who had
lived under the government of a Court which made laws by edict and possessed
the right to imprison by letters-patent looked with respect upon the Parliament
of England, its trial by jury, and its freedom of the press. The men who had
sent a king to prison and confiscated the estates of a great part of the
aristocracy could only feel compassion for a land where three-fourths of the
national representatives were nominees of the Crown or of wealthy peers. Nor,
in spite of the personal sympathy of Fox with the French revolutionary
movement, was there any real affinity between the English Whig party and that
which now ruled in the Convention. The event which fixed the character of
English liberty during the eighteenth century, the Revolution of 1688, had
nothing democratic in its nature. That revolution was directed against a system
of Roman Catholic despotism; it gave political power not to the mass of the
nation, which had no desire and no capacity to exercise it, but to a group of
noble families and their retainers, who, during the reigns of the first two
Georges, added all the patronage and influence of the Crown to their social and
constitutional weight in the country. The domestic history of England since the
accession of George III had turned chiefly upon the obstinate struggle of this
monarch to deliver himself from all dependence upon party. The divisions of the
Whigs, their jealousies, but, above all, their real alienation from the mass of
the people whose rights they professed to defend, ultimately gave the King the
victory, when, after twenty years of errors, be found in the younger Pitt a
Minister capable of uniting the interests of the Crown with the ablest and most
patriotic liberal statesmanship. Bribes, threats, and every species of base
influence had been employed by King George to break up the great Coalition of
1783, which united all sections of the Whigs against him under the Ministry of
Fox and North; but the real support of Pitt, whom the King placed in office
with a minority in the House of Commons, was the temper of the nation itself,
wearied with the exclusiveness, the corruption, and the party-spirit of the
Whigs, and willing to believe that a popular Minister, even if he had entered
upon power unconstitutionally, might do more for the country than the
constitutional proprietors of the rotten boroughs.
From 1783 down
to the outbreak of the French Revolution, Pitt, as a Tory Minister confronted
by a Whig Opposition, governed England on more liberal principles than any
statesman who had held power during the eighteenth century. These years were
the last of the party-system of England in its original form. The French
Revolution made an end of that old distinction in which the Tory was known as
the upholder of Crown-prerogative and the Whig as the supporter of a
constitutional oligarchy of great families. It created that new political
antagonism in which, whether under the names of Whig and Tory, or of Liberal
and Conservative, two great parties have contended, one for a series of
beneficial changes, the other for the preservation of the existing order. The
convulsions of France and the dread of revolutionary agitation in England
transformed both Pitt and the Whigs by whom he was opposed. Pitt sacrificed his
schemes of peaceful progress to foreign war and domestic repression, and set
his face against the reform of Parliament which he had once himself proposed.
The Whigs broke up into two sections, led respectively by Burke and by Fox, the
one denouncing the violence of the Revolution, and ultimately uniting itself
with Pitt; the other friendly to the Revolution, in spite of its excesses, as
the cause of civil and religious liberty, and identifying itself, under the
healthy influence of parliamentary defeat and disappointment, with the defence of popular rights in England and the advocacy of
enlightened reform
"Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France," Oct. 1790 (pdf).The
obliteration of the old dividing-line in English politics may be said to date
from the day when the ancient friendship of Burke and Fox was bitterly severed
by the former in the House of Commons (May 6, 1791). The charter of the modern
Conservative party was that appeal to the nation which Burke had already
published, in the autumn of 1790, under the title of Reflections on the French
Revolution. In this survey of the political forces which he saw in action
around him, the great Whig writer, who in past times had so passionately
defended the liberties of America and the constitutional tradition of the
English Parliament against the aggression of George III, attacked the
Revolution as a system of violence and caprice more formidable to freedom than
the tyranny of any Crown. He proved that the politicians and societies of
England who had given it their sympathy had given their sympathy to measures
and to theories opposed to every principle of 1688. Above all, he laid bare
that agency of riot and destructiveness which, even within the first few months
of the Revolution, filled him with presentiment of the calamities about to fall
upon France. Burke's treatise was no dispassionate inquiry into the condition
of a neighbouring state: it was a denunciation of
Jacobinism as fierce and as little qualified by political charity as were the
maledictions of the Hebrew prophets upon their idolatrous neighbours;
and it was intended, like these, to excite his own countrymen against
innovations among themselves. It completely succeeded. It expressed, and it
heightened, the alarm arising among the Liberal section of the propertied
class, at first well inclined to the Revolution; and, although the Whigs of the
House of Commons pronounced in favour of Fox upon his
first rupture with Burke, the tide of public feeling, rising higher with every
new outrage of the Revolution, soon invaded the legislature, and carried the
bulk of the Whig party to the side of the Minister, leaving to Fox and his few
faithful adherents the task of maintaining an unheeded protest against the blind
passions of war, and the increasing rigor with which Pitt repressed every
symptom of popular disaffection.
The character
of violence which Burke traced and condemned in the earliest acts of the
Revolution displayed itself in a much stronger light after the overthrow of the
Monarchy by the insurrection of August 10th. That event was the work of men who
commanded the Parisian democracy, not the work of orators and party-leaders in
the Assembly. The Girondins had not hesitated to treat the victory as their own,
by placing the great offices of State, with one exception, in the hands of
their leaders; they instantly found that the real sovereignty lay elsewhere.
The Council of the Commune, or Municipality, of Paris, whose members had seized
their post at the moment of the insurrection, was the only administrative body
that possessed the power to enforce its commands; in the Ministries of State
one will alone made itself felt, that of Danton, whom the Girondins had
unwillingly admitted to office along with themselves. The massacres of
September threw into full light the powerlessness of the expiring Assembly. For
five successive days it was unable to check the massacres; it was unable to
bring to justice the men who had planned them, and who called upon the rest of
France to follow their example. With the meeting of the Convention, however,
the Girondins, who now regarded themselves as the legitimate government, and
forgot that they owed office to an insurrection, expected to reduce the capital
to submission. They commanded an overwhelming majority in the new chamber; they
were supported by the middle class in all the great cities of France. The party
of the Mountain embraced at first only the deputies of Paris, and a group of
determined men who admitted no criticism on the measures which the democracy of
Paris had thought necessary for the Revolution. In the Convention they were the
assailed, not the assailants. Without waiting to secure themselves by an armed
force, the orators of the Gironde attempted to crush both the Municipality and
the deputies who ruled at the Clubs. They reproached the Municipality with the
murders of September; they accused Robespierre of aiming at the Dictatorship.
It was under the pressure of these attacks that the party of the Mountain gathered
its strength within the Convention, and that the populace of Paris transferred
to the Gironde the passionate hatred which it had hitherto borne to the King
and the aristocracy. The gulf that lay between the people and those who had
imagined themselves to be its leaders burst into view. The Girondins saw with
dismay that the thousands of hungry workmen whose victory had placed them in
power had fought for something more tangible than Republican phrases from
Tacitus and Plutarch. On one side was a handful of orators and writers, steeped
in the rhetoric and the commonplace of ancient Rome, and totally strange to the
real duties of government; on the other side the populace of Paris, such as
centuries of despotism, privilege, and priestcraft had made it: sanguinary,
unjust, vindictive; convulsed since the outbreak of the Revolution with every
passion that sways men in the mass; taught no conception of progress but the
overthrow of authority, and acquainted with no title to power but that which
was bestowed by itself. If the Girondins were to remain in power, they could do
so only by drawing an army from the departments, or by identifying themselves
with the multitude. They declined to take either course. Their audience was in
the Assembly alone; their support in the distant provinces. Paris, daily more
violent, listened to men of another stamp. The Municipality defied the
Government; the Mountain answered the threats and invectives of the majority in
the Assembly by displays of popular menace and tumult. In the eyes of the
common people, who after so many changes of government found themselves more
famished and more destitute than ever, the Gironde was now but the last of a
succession of tyrannies; its statesmen but impostors who stood between the
people and the enjoyment of their liberty.
Among the
leaders of the Mountain, Danton aimed at the creation of a central
Revolutionary Government, armed with absolute powers for the prosecution of the
war; and he attacked the Girondins only when they themselves had rejected his
support. Robespierre, himself the author of little beyond destruction, was the
idol of those whom Rousseau's writings had filled with the idea of a direct
exercise of sovereignty by the people. It was in the trial of the King that the
Gironde first confessed its submission to the democracy of Paris. The Girondins
in their hearts desired to save the King; they voted for his death with the
hope of maintaining their influence in Paris, and of clearing themselves from
the charge of lukewarmness in the cause of the Revolution. But the sacrifice
was as vain as it was dishonourable. The populace and
the party of the Mountain took the act in its true character, as an
acknowledgment of their own victory. A series of measures was brought forward
providing for the poorer classes at the expense of the wealthy. The Gironde,
now forced to become the defenders of property, encountered the fatal charge of
deserting the cause of the people; and from this time nothing but successful
foreign warfare could have saved their party from ruin.
Instead of success came inaction, disaster, and treason. The army of Flanders lay idle during January and February for want of provisions and materials of war; and no sooner had Dumouriez opened the campaign against Holland than he was recalled by intelligence that the Austrians had fallen upon his lieutenant, Miranda, at Maastricht, and driven the French army before them. Dumouriez returned, in order to fight a pitched battle before Brussels. He attacked the Austrians at Neerwinden (March 18), and suffered a repulse inconsiderable in itself, but sufficient to demoralize an army composed in great part of recruits and National Guards. (Von Sybel, Letters from Brussels,
23rd March: "The Huzars are in motion all
round, so that we hope to have them here tomorrow. Most of the French troops who
arrived last, and which are mostly peasants armed with pikes, are returning
home, besides a great number of their volunteers."
24th March. "At this moment we hear the cannon. The French have
just had it cry'd in the town that all the tailors
who are making coats for the army must bring them made or unmade, and be paid
directly.... They beat the drums to drown the report of the cannon.... You have
not a conception of the confusion in the town.... This moment passed four
Austrians with their heads cut to pieces, and one with his eye poked out. The
French are retiring by the Porte d'Anderlecht."
Ostend, April 4th. "This day, before two of the clock, twenty-five
Austrian huzars enter'd the
town while the inhabitants were employed burning the tree of liberty").
His defeat laid Flanders open to
the Austrians; but Dumouriez intended that it should inflict upon the Republic
a far heavier blow. Since the execution of the King, he had been at open enmity
with the Jacobins. He now proposed to the Austrian commander to unite with him
in an attack upon the Convention, and in re-establishing monarchy in France.
The first pledge of Dumouriez's treason was the
surrender of three commissioners sent by the Convention to his camp; the second
was to have been the surrender of the fortress of Conde. But Dumouriez had
overrated his influence with the army. Plainer minds than his own knew how to
deal with a general who intrigues with the foreigner. Dumouriez’s orders were disregarded; his movements watched; and he fled to the Austrian
lines under the fire of his own soldiers. About thirty officers and eight
hundred men passed with him to the enemy.
The defeat and
treason of Dumouriez brought the army of Austria over the northern frontier.
Almost at the same moment Custine was overpowered in
the Palatinate; and the conquests of the previous autumn, with the exception of
Mainz, were lost as rapidly as they had been won. Custine fell back upon the lines of Weissenburg, leaving the defence of Mainz to a garrison of 17,000 men, which, alone
among the Republican armies, now maintained its reputation. In France itself
civil war broke out. The peasants of La Vendee, a district destitute of large
towns, and scarcely touched either by the evils which had produced the
Revolution or by the hopes which animated the rest of France, had seen with
anger the expulsion of the parish priests who refused to take the oath to the
Constitution. A levy of 300,000 men, which was ordered by the Convention in
February, 1793, threw into revolt the simple Vendeans,
who cared for nothing outside their own parishes, and preferred to fight
against their countrymen rather than to quit their homes. The priests and the
Royalists fanned these village outbreaks into a religious war of the most
serious character. Though poorly armed, and accustomed to return to their homes
as soon as fighting was over, the Vendean peasantry proved themselves a
formidable soldiery in the moment of attack, and cut to pieces the
half-disciplined battalions which the Government sent against them. On the
north, France was now assailed by the English as well as by the Austrians. The
Allies laid siege to Conde and Valenciennes, and drove the French army back in
disorder at Famars. Each defeat was a blow dealt to
the Government of the Gironde at Paris. With foreign and civil war adding
disaster to disaster, with the general to whom the Gironde had entrusted the defence of the Republic openly betraying it to its enemies,
the fury of the capital was easily excited against the party charged with all
the misfortunes of France. A threatening movement of the middle classes in
resistance to a forced loan precipitated the struggle. The Girondins were
accused of arresting the armies of the Republic in the midst of their
conquests, of throwing the frontier open to the foreigner, and of kindling the
civil war of La Vendee. On the 31st of May a raging mob invaded the Convention.
Two days later the representatives of France were surrounded by the armed
forces of the Commune; the twenty-four leading members of the Gironde were
placed under arrest, and the victory of the Mountain was completed.
The situation
of France, which was serious before, now became desperate; for the Girondins,
escaping from their arrest, called the departments to arms against Paris.
Normandy, Bordeaux, Marseilles, Lyons, rose in insurrection against the tyranny
of the Mountain, and the Royalists of the south and west threw themselves into
a civil war which they hoped to turn to their own advantage. But a form of
government had now arisen in France well fitted to cope with extraordinary
perils. It was a form of government in which there was little trace of the constitutional
tendencies of 1789, one that had come into being as the stress of conflict
threw into the background the earlier hopes and efforts of the Revolution. In
the two earlier Assemblies it had been a fixed principle that the representatives
of the people were to control the Government, but were not to assume executive
powers themselves. After the overthrow of Monarchy on the 10th August, the
Ministers, though still nominally possessed of powers distinct from the
representative body, began to be checked by Committees of the Convention
appointed for various branches of the public service; and in March, 1793, in
order to meet the increasing difficulties of the war, a Committee of Public
Safety was appointed, charged with the duty of exercising a general
surveillance over the administration. In this Committee, however, as in all the
others, the Gironde were in the majority; and the twenty-four members who
composed it were too numerous a body to act with effect. The growing ascendancy
of the Mountain produced that concentration of force which the times required.
The Committee was reduced in April to nine members, and in this form it
ultimately became the supreme central power. It was not until after the revolt
of Lyons that the Committee, exchanging Danton's influence for that of
Robespierre, adopted the principle of Terror which has made the memory of their
rule one of the most sinister in history.
Their authority
steadily increased. The members divided among themselves the great branches of
government. One directed the army, another the navy, another foreign affairs;
the signature of three members practically gave to any measure the force of
law, for the Convention accepted and voted their reports as a matter of course.
Whilst the Committee gave orders as the supreme executive, eighty of the most
energetic of the Mountain spread themselves over France, in parties of two and
three, with the title of Commissioners of the Convention, and with powers
over-riding those of all the local authorities. They were originally appointed
for the purpose of hastening on the levy ordered by the Convention in March,
but their powers were gradually extended over the whole range of
administration. Their will was absolute, their authority supreme. Where the councillors of the Departments or the municipal officers
were good Jacobins, the Commissioners availed themselves of local machinery;
where they suspected their principles, they sent them to the scaffold, and
enforced their own orders by whatever means were readiest. They censured and
dismissed the generals; one of them even directed the movements of a fleet at
sea. What was lost by waste and confusion and by the interference of the
Commissioners in military movements was more than counterbalanced by the vigour which they threw into all the preparations of war,
and by the unity of purpose which, at the price of unsparing bloodshed, they
communicated to every group where Frenchmen met together.
But no
individual energy could have sustained these dictatorships without the support
of a popular organization. All over France a system of revolutionary government
sprang up, which superseded all existing institutions just as the authority of
the Commissioners of the Convention superseded all existing local powers. The local
revolutionary administration consisted of a Committee, a Club, and a Tribunal.
In each of 21,000 communes a committee of twelve was elected by the people, and
entrusted by the Convention, as the Terror gained ground, with boundless powers
of arrest and imprisonment. Popular excitement was sustained by clubs, where
the peasants and laborers assembled at the close of their day's work, and
applauded the victories or denounced the enemies of the Revolution. A Tribunal
with swift procedure and powers of life and death sat in each of the largest
towns, and judged the prisoners who were sent to it by the committees of the neighbouring district. Such was the government of 1793-an
executive of uncontrolled power drawn from the members of a single Assembly,
and itself brought into immediate contact with the poorest of the people in
their assemblies and clubs. The balance of interests which creates a
constitutional system, the security of life, liberty, and property, which is
the essence of every recognised social order, did not
now exist in France. One public purpose, the defence of the Revolution, became the law before which all others lost their force.
Treating all France like a town in a state of siege, the Government took upon
itself the duty of providing support for the poorest classes by enactments
controlling the sale and possession of the necessaries of life. The price of
corn and other necessaries was fixed; and, when the traders and producers
consequently ceased to bring their goods to market, the Commissioners of the
Convention were empowered to make requisition of a certain quantity of corn for
every acre of ground. Property was thus placed at the disposal of the men who
already exercised absolute political power. “The state of France”, said Burke,
“is perfectly simple. It consists of but two descriptions, the oppressors and
the oppressed”. It is in vain that the attempt has been made to extenuate the
atrocious and senseless cruelties of this time by extolling the great
legislative projects of the Convention, or pleading the dire necessity of a
land attacked on every side by the foreigner, and rent with civil war. The more
that is known of the Reign of Terror, the more hateful, the meaner and more
disgusting is the picture unveiled. France was saved not by the brutalities,
but by the energy, of the faction that ruled it. It is scarcely too much to say
that the cause of European progress would have been less injured by the
military overthrow of the Republic, by the severance of the border provinces
from France and the restoration of some shadow of the ancient regime, than by
the traditions of horror which for the next fifty years were inseparably
associated in men's minds with the victory of the people over established
power.
The
Revolutionary organization did not reach its full vigour till the autumn of 1793, when the prospects of France were at their worst. Custine, who was brought up from Alsace to take command of
the Army of the North, found it so demoralized that he was unable to attempt
the relief of the fortresses which were now besieged by the Allies. Conde
surrendered to the Austrians on the 10th of July; Valenciennes capitulated to
the Duke of York a fortnight later. In the east the fortune of war was no
better. An attack made on the Prussian army besieging Mainz totally failed; and
on the 23rd of July this great fortress, which had been besieged since the
middle of April, passed back into the hands of the Germans. On every side the
Republic seemed to be sinking before its enemies. Its frontier defences had fallen before the victorious Austrians and
English; Brunswick was ready to advance upon Alsace from conquered Mainz; Lyons
and Toulon were in revolt; La Vendee had proved the grave of the forces sent to
subdue it. It was in this crisis of misfortune that the Convention placed the
entire male population of France between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five
at the disposal of the Government, and turned the whole country into one great
camp and arsenal of war. Nor was there wanting a mind equal to the task of
giving order to this vast material. The appointment of Carnot, an officer of
engineers, to a seat on the Committee of Public Safety placed the military
administration of France in the hands of a man who, as an organizer, if not as
a strategist, was soon to prove himself without equal in Europe.
Nevertheless, it was to the dissensions and to the bad policy of the Allies more than to the energy of its own Government that France owed its safety. The object for which the Allies professed to be carrying on the war, the establishment of a pacific Government in France, was subordinated to schemes of aggrandizement, known as the acquisition of just indemnities. While Prussia, bent chiefly on preventing the Emperor from gaining Bavaria in exchange for Belgium, kept its own army inactive on the Rhine, Austria, with the full approval of Pitt's Cabinet, claimed annexations in Northern France, as well as Alsace, and treated the conquered town of Conde as Austrian territory. (1.-"The King of Prussia has been educated in the persuasion that
the execution of that exchange involves the ruin of his family, and he is the
more sore about it that by the qualified consent which he has given to its
taking place he has precluded himself from opposing it by arms. Accordingly,
every idle story which arrives from Munich which tends to revive this
apprehension makes an impression which I am unable, at the first moment, to efface."
Lord Yarmouth, from the Prussian camp, Aug. 12, 1793.
Elgin, May 17: "Marquis Lucchesini, the
effectual director, is desirous of avoiding every expense and every exertion of
the troops; of leaving the whole burden of the war on Austria and the other combined
Powers; and of seeing difficulties multiply in the arrangements which the Court
of Vienna may wish to form I do not perceive any object beyond this; no desire
of diminishing the power of France; no system or feeling for crushing the
opinions, the doctrines, of that country."
2.- Grenville to Eden, Sept. 7th, 1793: Austria, if it will abandon the
Bavarian exchange, may claim annexations on the border of the Netherlands, in
Alsace and Lorraine, and in the intermediate parts of the frontier of France.
England's indemnity "must be looked for in the foreign settlements and
colonies of France.... His Majesty has an interest in seeing the House of
Austria strengthen itself by acquisitions on the French frontier. The Emperor
must see with pleasure the relative increase of the naval and commercial
resources of this country beyond those of France." In the face of this
paper, it cannot be maintained that the war of 1793 was, after the first few
months, purely defensive on England's part; though no doubt Pitt's notion of an
indemnity was fair and modest in comparison with the schemes and acts of his
enemy).
Henceforward all the operations
of the northern army were directed to the acquisition of frontier territory,
not to the pursuit and overthrow of the Republican forces. The war was openly
converted from a war of defence into a war of
spoliation. It was a change which mocked the disinterested professions with
which the Allies had taken up arms; in its military results it was absolutely
ruinous. In face of the immense levies which promised the French certain
victory in a long war, the only hope for the Allies lay in a rapid march to
Paris; they preferred the extreme of division and delay. No sooner had the
advance of their united armies driven Custine from
his stronghold at Famars, than the English commander
led off his forces to besiege Dunkirk, while the Austrians, under Prince
Coburg, proceeded to invest Cambray and Le Quesnoy. The line of the invaders thus extended from the
Channel to Brunswick's posts at Landau, on the border of Alsace; the main
armies were out of reach of one another, and their strength was diminished by
the corps detached to keep up their communications. The French held the inner
circle; and the advantage which this gave them was well understood by Carnot,
who now inspired the measures of the Committee. In steadiness and precision the
French recruits were no match for the trained armies of Germany; but the supply
of them was inexhaustible, and Carnot knew that when they were thrown in
sufficient masses upon the enemy their courage and enthusiasm would make amends
for their inexperience. The successes of the Allies, unbroken from February to
August, now began to alternate with defeats; the flood of invasion was first
slowly and obstinately repelled, then swept away before a victorious advance.
It was on the
British commander that the first blow was struck. The forces that could be detached
from the French Northern army were not sufficient to drive York from before
Dunkirk; but on the Moselle there were troops engaged in watching an enemy who
was not likely to advance; and the Committee did not hesitate to leave this
side of France open to the Prussians in order to deal a decisive stroke in the
north. Before the movement was noticed by the enemy, Carnot had transported
30,000 men from Metz to the English Channel; and in the first week of September
the German corps covering York was assailed by General Houchard with numbers double its own. The Germans were driven back upon Dunkirk; York
only saved his own army from destruction by hastily raising the siege and
abandoning his heavy artillery. The victory of the French, however, was ill
followed up. Houchard was sent before the
Revolutionary Tribunal, and he paid with his life for his mistakes. Custine had already perished, unjustly condemned for the
loss of Mainz and Valenciennes.
It was no
unimportant change for France when the successors of Custine and Houchard received their commands from the
Committee of Public Safety. The levelling principle of the Reign of Terror left
its effect on France through its operation in the army, and through this almost
alone. Its executions produced only horror and reaction; its confiscations were
soon reversed; but the creation of a thoroughly democratic army, the work of
the men who overthrew the Gironde, gave the most powerful and abiding impulse
to social equality in France. The first generals of the Revolution had been
officers of the old army, men, with a few exceptions, of noble birth, who, like Custine, had enrolled themselves on the popular side
when most of their companions quitted the country. These generals were
connected with the politicians of the Gironde, and were involved in its fall.
The victory of the Mountain brought men of another type into command. Almost
all the leaders appointed by the Committee of Public Safety were soldiers who
had served in the ranks. In the levies of 1792 and 1793 the officers of the
newly-formed battalions were chosen by the recruits themselves. Patriotism,
energy of character, acquaintance with warfare, instantly brought men into
prominence. Soldiers of the old army, like Massena, who had reached middle life
with their knapsacks on their backs; lawyers, like the Breton Moreau; waiters
at inns, like Murat, found themselves at the head of their battalions, and knew
that Carnot was ever watching for genius and ability to call it to the highest
commands. With a million of men under arms, there were many in whom great
natural gifts supplied the want of professional training. It was also
inevitable that at the outset command should sometimes fall into the hands of
mere busy politicians; but the character of the generals steadily rose as the
Committee gained the ascendancy over a knot of demagogues who held the War
Ministry during the summer of 1793; and by the end of the year there was
scarcely one officer in high command who had not proved himself worthy of his
post. In the investigation into Houchard’s conduct at
Dunkirk, Carnot learnt that the victory had in fact been won by Jourdan, one of
the generals of division. Jourdan had begun life as a common soldier fifteen
years before. Discharged at the end of the American War, he had set up a
draper's shop in Limoges, his native town. He joined the army a second time on
the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, and the men of his battalion elected him
captain. His ability was noticed; he was made successively general of brigade
and general of division; and, upon the dismissal of Houchard,
Carnot summoned him to the command of the Army of the North. The Austrians were
now engaged in the investment of Maubeuge. On the
15th of October Jourdan attacked and defeated their covering army at Wattignies. His victory forced the Austrians to raise the
siege, and brought the campaign to an end for the winter.
Thus successful on the northern frontier, the Republic carried on war against its internal enemies without pause and without mercy. Lyons surrendered in October; its citizens were slaughtered by hundreds in cold blood. Toulon had thrown itself into the hands of the English, and proclaimed King Louis XVII. It was besieged by land; but the operations produced no effect until Napoleon Bonaparte, captain of artillery, planned the capture of a ridge from which the cannon of the besiegers would command the English fleet in the harbour. Hood, the British admiral, now found his position hopeless. He took several thousands of the inhabitants on board his ships, and put out to sea, blowing up the French ships which he left in the harbour. Hood had received the fleet from the Royalists in trust for their King; its destruction gave England command of the Mediterranean and freed Naples from fear of attack; and Hood thought too little of the consequences which his act would bring down upon those of the inhabitants of Toulon whom he left behind.
(The first mention of Bonaparte's name in any British document occurs in an account of the army of Toulon sent to London in Dec. 1793 by a spy. "Les capitaines d'artillérie, élévé dans cet état, connoissent leur service et ont tous du talens. Ils préféroient l'employer pour une meilleure cause.... Le sixtèrne, nommé Bonaparte, trés republicain, a été tué sous les murs de Toulon." Austria undertook to send 5,000 troops from Lombardy to defend Toulon, but broke its engagement. "You will wait on M. Thugut -the Austrian Minister- and claim in the most peremptory terms the performance of this engagement. It would be very offensive to his Majesty that a request made so repeatedly on his part should be neglected; but it is infinitely more so to see that, when this country is straining every nerve for the common cause, a body of troops for the want of which Toulon may possibly at this moment be lost, have remained inactive at Milan. You will admit of no further excuses." Grenville to Eden, Nov. 24, 1793. Thugut's written answer was: "The Emperor gave the order of march at a moment when the town of Toulon had no garrison. Its preservation then seemed matter of pressing necessity, but now all inquietude on this score has happily disappeared. The troops of different nations already assembled at Toulon put the place out of all danger"). The horrors that followed the entry of the Republican army into the city did
not prevent Pitt from including among the subjects of congratulation in the
King's Speech of 1794 “the circumstances attending the evacuation of Toulon”.
It was perhaps fortunate for the Royalists in other parts of France that they
failed to receive the assistance of England. Help was promised to the Vendeans, but it arrived too late. The appearance of Kleber
at the head of the army which had defended Mainz had already turned the scale.
Brave as they were, the Vendeans could not long
resist trained armies. The war of pitched battles ended on the Loire with the
year 1793. It was succeeded by a war of merciless and systematic destruction on
the one side, and of ambush and surprises on the other.
At home the foes of the Republic were sinking; its invaders were too much at discord with one another to threaten it any longer with serious danger. Prussia was in fact withdrawing from the war. It has been seen that when King Frederick William and the Emperor concerted the autumn campaign of 1792, the understanding was formed that Prussia, in return for its efforts against France, should be allowed to seize part of western Poland, if the Empress Catherine should give her consent. With this prospect before it, the thoughts of the Prussian Government had been from the first busied more with Poland, where it hoped to enter into possession, than with France, where it had only to fight Austria's battles. Negotiations on the Polish question had been actively carried on between Berlin and St. Petersburg during the first months of the war; and in January, 1793, the Empress Catherine had concluded a Treaty of Partition with King Frederick William, in virtue of which a Prussian army under General Mollendorf immediately entered western Poland. It was thought good policy to keep the terms of this treaty secret from Austria, as it granted a much larger portion of Poland to Prussia than Austria was willing that it should receive. Two months passed before the Austrian Sovereign learnt how he had been treated by his ally. He then denounced the treaty, and assumed so threatening an attitude that the Prussians thought it necessary to fortify the territory that they had seized.
("La Prusse"
wrote Thugut at this time, "parviendra au moyen de son alliance à nous faire plus de mal qu'elle ne nous a fait par les guerres les plus sanglantes." Thugut even proposed that
England should encourage the Poles to resist).
The Ministers who had been outwitted by the Court of Berlin were dismissed; Baron Thugut, who from the first had prophesied nothing but evil of the Prussian alliance, was called to power. The history of this statesman, who for the next eight years directed the war-policy of Austria, and filled a part in Europe subordinate only to those of Pitt and Bonaparte, has until a recent date been drawn chiefly from the representations of his enemies. Humbly born, scornful and inaccessible, Thugut was detested by the Viennese aristocracy; the French emigrants hated and maligned him on account of his indifference to their cause; the public opinion of Austria held him responsible for unparalleled military disasters; Prussian generals and ambassadors, whose reports have formed the basis of Prussian histories, pictured him as a Satanic antagonist. It was long believed of Thugut that while ambassador at Constantinople he had sold the Austrian cypher to the French; that in 1794 he prevented his master's armies from winning victories because he had speculated in the French funds; and that in 1799 he occasioned the murder of the French envoys at Rastadt, in order to recover documents incriminating himself. Better sources of information are now opened, and a statesman, jealous, bitter, and over-reaching, but not without great qualities of character, stands in the place of the legendary criminal. It is indeed clear that Thugut’s hatred of Prussia amounted almost to mania; it is also clear that his designs of aggression, formed in the school of the Emperor Joseph, were fatally in conflict with the defensive principles which Europe ought to have opposed to the aggressions of France. Evidence exists that during the eight years of Thugut's ministry he entertained, together or successively, projects for the annexation of French Flanders, Bavaria, Alsace, part of Poland, Venice and Dalmatia, Salzburg, the Papal Legations, the Republic of Genoa, Piedmont, and Bosnia; and to this list Tuscany and Savoy ought probably to be added. But the charges brought against Thugut of underhand dealings with France, and of the willing abandonment of German interests in return for compensation to Austria in Italy, rest on insufficient ground. Though, like every other politician at Vienna and Berlin, he viewed German affairs not as a matter of nationality but in subordination to the general interests of his own Court, Thugut appears to have been, of all the Continental statesmen of that time, the steadiest enemy of French aggression, and to have offered the longest resistance to a peace that was purchased by the cession of German soil. (The English Government found that Thugut was from the first indifferent to their own aim, the restoration of the Bourbons, or establishment of some orderly government in France. In so far as he concerned himself with the internal affairs of France, he hoped rather for continued dissension, as facilitating the annexation of French territory by Austria. "Qu'on profite de ce conflit des partis en France pour tâcher de se rendre mâitre des forteresses, afin de faire la loi au parti qui aura prévalu, et l'obliger d'acheter la paix et la protection de l'empereur, en lui cedant telle partie de ses conquêtes que S.M. jugera de sa covenance"). Nevertheless,
from the moment when Thugut was called to power the alliance between Austria
and Prussia was doomed. Others might perhaps have averted a rupture; Thugut
made no attempt to do so. The siege of Mainz was the last serious operation of
war which the Prussian army performed. The mission of an Austrian envoy, Lehrbach, to the Prussian camp in August, 1793, and his
negotiations on the Polish and the Bavarian questions, only widened the breach
between the two Courts. It was known that the Austrians were encouraging the
Polish Diet to refuse the cession of the provinces occupied by Prussia; and the
advisers of King Frederick William in consequence recommended him to quit the
Rhine, and to place himself at the head of an army in Poland. At the
headquarters of the Allies, between Mainz and the Alsatian frontier, all was
dissension and intrigue. The impetuosity of the Austrian general, Wurmser, who advanced upon Alsace without consulting the
King, was construed as a studied insult. On the 29th of September, after
informing the allied Courts that Prussia would henceforth take only a
subordinate part in the war, King Frederick William quitted the army, leaving
orders with the Duke of Brunswick to fight no great battle. It was in vain that Wurmser stormed the lines of Weissenburg (Oct. 13), and victoriously pushed forward into Alsace. The hopes of a Royalist
insurrection in Strasburg proved illusory. The German sympathies shown by a
portion of the upper and middle classes of Alsace only brought down upon them a
bloody vengeance at the hands of St. Just, commissioner of the Convention. The
peasantry, partly from hatred of the feudal burdens of the old regime, partly
from fear of St. Just and the guillotine, thronged to the French camp. In place
of the beaten generals came Hoche and Pichegru:
Hoche, lately a common soldier in the Guards, earning by a humble industry
little sums for the purchase of books, now, at the age of twenty-six, a
commander more than a match for the wrangling veterans of Germany; Pichegru, six years older, also a man sprung from the
people, once a teacher in the military school of Brienne, afterwards a private
of artillery in the American War. A series of harassing encounters took place
during December. At length, with St. Just cheering on the Alsatian peasants in
the hottest of the fire, these generals victoriously carried the Austrian
positions at Warth and at Weissenburg (Dec. 23, 26). The Austrian commander declared his army to be utterly ruined;
and Brunswick, who had abstained from rendering his ally any real assistance,
found himself a second time back upon the Rhine.
The virtual
retirement of Prussia from the Coalition was no secret to the French
Government: amongst the Allies it was viewed in various lights. The Empress
Catherine, who had counted on seeing her troublesome Prussian friend engaged
with her detested French enemy, taunted the King of Prussia with the loss of
his personal honour. Austria, conscious of the
antagonism between Prussian and Austrian interests and of the hollow character
of the Coalition, would concede nothing to keep Prussia in arms. Pitt alone was
willing to make a sacrifice, in order to prevent the rupture of the alliance.
The King of Prussia was ready to continue the struggle with France if his
expenses were paid, but not otherwise. Accordingly, after Austria had refused
to contribute the small sum which Pitt asked, a bargain was struck between Lord Malmesbury and the Prussian Minister Haugwitz, by which Great Britain undertook to furnish a
subsidy, provided that 60,000 Prussian troops, under General Mollendorf, were placed at the disposal of the Maritime
Powers. It was Pitt's intention that the troops which he subsidized should be
massed with Austrian and English forces for the defence of Belgium: the Prussian Ministry, availing themselves of an ambiguous
expression in the treaty, insisted on keeping them inactive upon the Upper
Rhine. Mollendorf wished to guard Mainz: other men of
influence longed to abandon the alliance with Austria, and to employ the whole
of Prussia's force in Poland. At the moment when Haugwitz was contracting to place Mollendorf’s army at Pitt's
disposal, Poland had risen in revolt under Kosciusko, and the Russian garrison
which occupied Warsaw had been overpowered and cut to pieces. Catherine called
upon the King of Prussia for assistance; but it was not so much a desire to
rescue the Empress from a momentary danger that excited the Prussian Cabinet as
the belief that her vengeance would now make an absolute end of what remained
of the Polish kingdom. The prey was doomed; the wisdom of Prussia was to be the
first to seize and drag it to the ground. So large a prospect offered itself to
the Power that should crush Poland during the brief paralysis of the Russian
arms, that, on the first news of the outbreak, the King's advisers urged him
instantly to make peace with France and to throw his whole strength into the
Polish struggle. Frederick William could not reconcile himself to making peace
with the Jacobins; but he ordered an army to march upon Warsaw, and shortly
afterwards placed himself at its head (May, 1794). When the King, who was the
only politician in Prussia who took an interest in the French war, thus
publicly acknowledged the higher importance of the Polish campaign, his
generals upon the Rhine made it their only object to do nothing which it was
possible to leave undone without actually forfeiting the British subsidy.
Instead of fighting, Mollendorf spent his time in
urging other people to make peace. It was in vain that Malmesbury argued that the very object of Pitt’s bargain was to keep the French out of the
Netherlands: Mollendorf had made up his mind that the
army should not be committed to the orders of Pitt and the Austrians. He
continued in the Palatinate, alleging that any movement of the Prussian army
towards the north would give the French admittance to southern Germany. Pitt's
hope of defending the Netherlands now rested on the energy and on the sincerity
of the Austrian Cabinet, and on this alone.
After breaking up from winter quarters in the spring of 1794, the Austrian and English allied forces had successfully laid siege to Landrecies, and defeated the enemy in its neighbourhood. (Elgin reports after this engagement, May 1st, 1794:"The French
army appears to continue much what it has hitherto been, vigorous and
persevering where -as in villages and woods- the local advantages are of a
nature to supply the defects of military science; weak and helpless beyond
belief where cavalry can act, and maneuvers are possible.... The magazines of
the army are stored, and the provisions regularly given out to the troops, and
good in quality. Indeed, it is singular to observe in all the villages where we
have been forward forage, etc., in plenty, and all the country cultivated as
usual. The inhabitants, however, have retired with the French army; and to that
degree that the tract we have lately taken possession of is absolutely
deserted.... The execution of Danton has produced no greater effect in the army
than other executions, and we have found many papers on those who fell in the
late actions treating it with ridicule, and as a source of joy."
Consul Harward, at Ostend, March 4th: "I
am in hopes to hear from you on the subject of the French prisoners, as to
where I am to apply for the money I advance for their subsistence. They are a
great number of them almost naked, some entirely so. It is absolutely shocking
to humanity to see them. I would purchase some coarse clothing for those that
are in the worst state, but know not how far I should be authorized. They are
mostly old men and boys").
Their
advance, however, was checked by a movement of the French Army of the North,
now commanded by Pichegru, towards the Flemish coast.
York and the English troops were exposed to the attack, and suffered a defeat
at Turcoing. The decision of the campaign lay,
however, not in the west of Flanders, but at the other end of the Allies'
position, at Charleroi on the Sambre, where a French victory would either force
the Austrians to fall back eastwards, leaving York to his fate, or sever their
communications with Germany. This became evident to the French Government; and
in May the Commissioners of the Convention forced the generals on the Sambre to
fight a series of battles, in which the French repeatedly succeeded in crossing
the Sambre, and were repeatedly driven back again. The fate of the Netherlands
depended, however, on something besides victory or defeat on the Sambre. The
Emperor had come with Baron Thugut to Belgium in the hope of imparting greater
unity and energy to the allied forces, but his presence proved useless. Among
the Austrian generals and diplomatists there were several who desired to
withdraw from the contest in the Netherlands,
(These events are the subject of controversy. The old belief, defended
by Von Sybel, was that Thugut himself had determined
upon the evacuation of Belgium, and treacherously deprived Coburg of forces for its defence. But, apart from other evidence, the tone of
exasperation that runs through Thugut's private letters is irreconcilable with
this theory. Lord Elgin, whose reports are used by Von Sybel,
no doubt believed that Thugut was playing false; but he was a bad judge, being
in the hands of Thugut’s opponents, especially General Mack, whom he glorifies
in the most absurd way. The other English envoy in Belgium, Lord Yarmouth,
reported in favor of Thugut’s good faith in this matter, and against military
intriguers).
At the beginning of
June the Emperor quitted the army; the combats on the Sambre were taken up by
Jourdan and 50,000 fresh troops brought from the army of the Moselle; and on
the 26th of June the French defeated Coburg at Fleurus,
as he advanced to the relief of Charleroi, unconscious that Charleroi had
surrendered on the day before. Even now the defence of Belgium was not hopeless; but after one council of war had declared in favour of fighting, a second determined on a retreat. It
was in vain that the representatives of England appealed to the good faith and
military honour of Austria. Namur and Louvain were
abandoned; the French pressed onwards; and before the end of July the Austrian
army had fallen back behind the Meuse. York, forsaken by the allies, retired
northwards before the superior forces of Pichegru,
who entered Antwerp and made himself master of the whole of the Netherlands up
to the Dutch frontier.
(Consul Harward Records: "All the English
are arrested in Ostend; the men are confined in the Capuchin convent, and the
women in the Convent des Soeurs Blancs.
All the Flamands from the age of 17 to 32 are forced
to go for soldiers. At Bruges the French issued an order for 800 men to present
themselves. Thirty only came, in consequence of which they rang a bell on the
Grand Place, and the inhabitants thinking that it was some ordinance, quitted
their houses to hear it, when they were surrounded by the French soldiers, and
upwards of 1,000 men secured, gentle and simple, who were all immediately set
to work on the canals").
Such was the result of Great Britain's well-meant effort to assist the two great military Powers to defend Europe against the Revolution. To the aim of the English Minister, the defence of existing rights against democratic aggression, most of the public men alike of Austria and Prussia were now absolutely indifferent. They were willing to let the French seize and revolutionize any territory they pleased, provided that they themselves obtained their equivalent in Poland. England was in fact in the position of a man who sets out to attack a highway robber, and offers each of his arms to a pickpocket. The motives and conduct of these politicians were justly enough described by the English statesmen and generals who were brought into closest contact with them. In the councils of Prussia, Malmesbury declared that he could find no quality but “great and shabby art and cunning;
ill-will, jealousy, and every sort of dirty passion”. From the headquarters of Mollendorf he wrote to a member of Pitt’s Cabinet: “Here I
have to do with knavery and dotage. If we listened only to our feelings, it
would be difficult to keep any measure with Prussia. We must consider it an
alliance with the Algerians, whom it is no disgrace to pay, or any impeachment
of good sense to be cheated by”. To the Austrian commander the Duke of York
addressed himself with royal plainness: “Your Serene Highness, the British
nation, whose public opinion is not to be despised, will consider that it has
been bought and sold”.
Pichegru conquers Holland, Dec., 1794. The sorry
concert lasted for a few months longer. Coburg, the Austrian commander, was
dismissed at the peremptory demand of Great Britain; his successor, Clerfayt, after losing a battle on the Ourthe,
offered no further resistance to the advance of the Republican army, and the
campaign ended in the capture of Cologne by the French, and the disappearance
of the Austrians behind the Rhine. The Prussian subsidies granted by England
resulted in some useless engagements between Mollendorf’s corps in the Palatinate and a French army double its size, followed by the
retreat of the Prussians into Mainz. It only remained for Great Britain to
attempt to keep the French out of Holland. The defence of the Dutch, after everything south of the river Waal had been lost, Pitt
determined to entrust to abler hands than those of the Duke of York; but the
presence of one high-born blunderer more or less made little difference in a
series of operations conceived in indifference and perversity. Clerfayt would not, or could not, obey the Emperor's orders
and succour his ally. City after city in Holland
welcomed the French. The very elements seemed to declare for the Republic. Pichegru’s army marched in safety over the frozen rivers;
and, when the conquest of the land was completed, his cavalry crowned the
campaign by the capture of the Dutch fleet in the midst of the ice-bound waters
of the Texel. The British regiments, cut off from home, made their way eastward
through the snow towards the Hanoverian frontier, in a state of prostrate
misery which is compared by an eye-witness of both events to that of the French
on their retreat in 1813 after the battle of Leipzig.
The first act of the struggle between France and the Monarchies of Europe was concluded. The result of three years of war was that Belgium, Nice, and Savoy had been added to the territory of the Republic, and that French armies were in possession of Holland, and the whole of Germany west of the Rhine. In Spain and in Piedmont the mountain-passes and some extent of country had been won. Even on the seas, in spite of the destruction of the fleet at Toulon, and of a heavy defeat by Lord Howe off Ushant on the 1st of June, 1794, the strength of France was still formidable; and the losses which she inflicted on the commercial marine of her enemies exceeded those which she herself sustained. England, which had captured most of the French West Indian Islands, was the only Power that had wrested anything from the Republic. The dream of suppressing the Revolution by force of arms had vanished away; and the States which had entered upon the contest in levity, in fanaticism, or at the bidding of more powerful allies, found it necessary to make peace upon such terms as they could obtain. Holland, in which a strong Republican party had always maintained connection with France, abolished the rule of its Stadtholder, and placed its resources at the disposal of its conquerors. Sardinia entered upon abortive negotiations. Spain, in return for peace, ceded to the Republic the Spanish half of St. Domingo (July 22, 1795). Prussia concluded a Treaty at Basle (April 5), which marked and perpetuated the division of Germany by providing that, although the Empire as a body was still at war with France, the benefit of Prussia's neutrality should extend to all German States north of a certain line. A secret article stipulated that, upon the conclusion of a general peace, if the Empire should cede to France the principalities west of the Rhine, Prussia should cede its own territory lying in that district, and receive compensation elsewhere. ("Le Roi de Prusse,"
wrote the Empress Catherine, "est une méchante bête et un grand cochon." Prussia made no attempt to deliver the
unhappy son of Louis XVI from his captivity).
Humiliating
such a peace certainly was; yet it would probably have been the happiest issue
for Europe had every Power been forced to accept its conditions. The territory
gained by France was not much more than the very principle of the Balance of
Power would have entitled it to demand, at a moment when Russia, victorious
over the Polish rebellion, was proceeding to make the final partition of Poland
among the three Eastern Monarchies; and, with all its faults, the France of
1795 would have offered to Europe the example of a great free State, such as
the growth of the military spirit made impossible after the first of Napoleon's
campaigns. But the dark future was withdrawn from the view of those British
statesmen who most keenly felt the evils of the present; and England,
resolutely set against the course of French aggression, still found in Austria
an ally willing to continue the struggle. The financial help of Great Britain,
the Russian offer of a large share in the spoils of Poland, stimulated the
flagging energy of the Emperor's government. Orders were sent to Clerfayt to advance from the Rhine at whatever risk, in
order to withdraw the troops of the Republic from the west of France, where
England was about to land a body of Royalists. Clerfayt,
however, disobeyed his instructions, and remained inactive till the autumn. He
then defeated a French army pushing beyond the Rhine, and drove back the
besiegers of Mainz; but the British expedition had already failed, and the time
was passed when Clerfayt’s successes might have
produced a decisive result.
A new
Government was now entering upon power in France. The Reign of Terror had ended
in July, 1794, with the life of Robespierre. The men by whom Robespierre was
overthrown were Terrorists more cruel and less earnest than himself, who
attacked him only in order to save their own lives, and without the least
intention of restoring a constitutional Government to France. An overwhelming
national reaction forced them, however, to represent themselves as the party of
clemency. The reaction was indeed a simple outburst of human feeling rather
than a change in political opinion. Among the victims of the Terror the great
majority had been men of the lower or middle class, who, except in La Vendee
and Brittany, were as little friendly to the old regime as their executioners.
Every class in France, with the exception of the starving city mobs, longed for
security, and the quiet routine of life. After the disorders of the Republic a
monarchical government naturally seemed to many the best guarantee of peace;
but the monarchy so contemplated was the liberal monarchy of 1791, not the
ancient Court, with its accessories of a landed Church and privileged noblesse.
Religion was still a power in France; but the peasant, with all his
superstition and all his desire for order, was perfectly free from any
delusions about the good old times. He liked to see his children baptized; but
he had no desire to see the priest's tithe-collector back in his barn: he
shuddered at the summary marketing of Conventional Commissioners; but he had no
wish to resume his labours on the fields of his late
seigneur. To be a Monarchist in 1795, among the shopkeepers of Paris or the farmers
of Normandy, meant no more than to wish for a political system capable of
subsisting for twelve months together, and resting on some other basis than
forced loans and compulsory sales of property. But among the men of the
Convention, who had abolished monarchy and passed sentence of death upon the
King, the restoration of the Crown seemed the bitterest condemnation of all
that the Convention had done for France, and a sentence of outlawry against
themselves. If the will of the nation was for the moment in favour of a restored monarchy, the Convention determined that its will must be
overpowered by force or thwarted by constitutional forms. Threatened
alternately by the Jacobin mob of Paris and by the Royalist middle class, the
Government played off one enemy against the other, until an ill- timed effort
of the emigrant noblesse gave to the Convention the prestige of a decisive
victory over Royalists and foreigners combined. On the 27th of June, 1795, an
English fleet landed the flower of the old nobility of France at the Bay of
Quiberon in southern Brittany. It was only to give one last fatal proof of
their incapacity that these unhappy men appeared once more on French soil.
Within three weeks after their landing, in a region where for years together the
peasantry, led by their landlords, baffled the best generals of the Republic,
this invading army of the nobles, supported by the fleet, the arms, and the
money of England, was brought to utter ruin by the discord of its own leaders.
Before the nobles had settled who was to command and who was to obey, General
Hoche surprised their fort, beat them back to the edge of the peninsula where
they had landed, and captured all who were not killed fighting or rescued by
English boats (July 20). The Commissioner Tallien, in
order to purge himself from the just suspicion of Royalist intrigues, caused
six hundred prisoners to be shot in cold blood.
At the moment
when the emigrant army reached France, the Convention was engaged in discussing
the political system which was to succeed its own rule. A week earlier, the
Committee appointed to draw up a new constitution for France had presented its
report. The main object of the new constitution in its original form was to
secure France against a recurrence of those evils which it had suffered since
1792. The calamities of the last three years were ascribed to the sovereignty
of a single Assembly. A vote of the Convention had established the
Revolutionary Tribunal, proscribed the Girondins, and placed France at the
mercy of eighty individuals selected by the Convention from itself. The
legislators of 1795 desired a guarantee that no party, however determined,
should thus destroy its enemies by a single law, and unite supreme legislative
and executive power in its own hands. With the object of dividing authority,
the executive was, in the new draft-constitution, made independent of the
legislature, and the legislature itself was broken up into two chambers. A
Directory of five members, chosen by the Assemblies, but not responsible except
under actual impeachment, was to conduct the administration, without the right
of proposing laws; a Chamber of five hundred was to submit laws to the approval
of a Council of two hundred and fifty Ancients, or men of middle life; but
neither of these bodies was to exercise any influence upon the actual
government. One director and a third part of each of the legislative bodies
were to retire every year.
The project
thus outlined met with general approval, and gained even that of the Royalists,
who believed that a popular election would place them in a majority in the two
new Assemblies. Such an event was, however, in the eyes of the Convention, the
one fatal possibility that must be averted at every cost. In the midst of the
debates upon the draftconstitution there arrived the news of Hoche's victory
at Quiberon. The Convention gained courage to add a clause providing that
two-thirds of the new deputies should be appointed from among its own members,
thus rendering a Royalist majority in the Chambers impossible. With this
condition attached to it, the Constitution was laid before the country. The
provinces accepted it; the Royalist middle class of Paris rose in insurrection,
and marched against the Convention in the Tuileries. Their revolt was foreseen;
the defence of the Convention was entrusted to
General Bonaparte, who met the attack of the Parisians in a style unknown in
the warfare of the capital. Bonaparte’s command of trained artillery secured
him victory; but the struggle of the 4th of October (13 Vendemiaire) was the
severest that took place in Paris during the Revolution, and the loss of life
in fighting greater than on the day that overthrew the Monarchy.
The new
Government of France now entered into power. Members of the Convention formed
two-thirds of the new legislative bodies; the one-third which the country was
permitted to elect consisted chiefly of men of moderate or Royalist opinions.
The five persons who were chosen Directors were all Conventionalists who had
voted for the death of the King; Carnot, however, who had won the victories
without sharing in the cruelties of the Reign of Terror, was the only member of
the late Committee of Public Safety who was placed in power. In spite of the
striking homage paid to the great act of regicide in the election of the five
Directors, the establishment of the Directory was accepted by Europe as the
close of revolutionary disorder. The return of constitutional rule in France
was marked by a declaration on the part of the King of England of his willingness
to treat for peace. A gentler spirit seemed to have arisen in the Republic.
Although the laws against the emigrants and non-juring priests were still unrepealed, the exiles began to return unmolested to their
homes. Life resumed something of its old aspect in the capital. The rich and
the gay consoled themselves with costlier luxury for all the austerities of the
Reign of Terror. The labouring classes, now harmless
and disarmed, were sharply taught that they must be content with such
improvement in their lot as the progress of society might bring.
At the close of
this first period of the Revolutionary War we may pause to make an estimate of
the new influences which the French Revolution had brought into Europe, and of
the effects which had thus far resulted from them. The opinion current among
the French people themselves, that the Revolution gave birth to the modern life
not of France only but of the Western Continent generally, is true of one great
set of facts; it is untrue of another. There were conceptions in France in 1789
which made France a real contrast to most of the Continental monarchies; there
were others which it shared in common with them. The ideas of social, legal,
and ecclesiastical reform which were realized in 1789 were not peculiar to
France; what was peculiar to France was the idea that these reforms were to be
effected by the nation itself. In other countries reforms had been initiated by
Governments, and forced upon an unwilling people. Innovation sprang from the
Crown; its agents were the servants of the State. A distinct class of
improvements, many of them identical with the changes made by the Revolution in
France, attracted the attention in a greater or less degree of almost all the
Western Courts of the eighteenth century. The creation of a simple and regular
administrative system; the reform of the clergy; the emancipation of the Church
from the jurisdiction of the Pope, and of all orders in the State from the
jurisdiction of the Church; the amelioration of the lot of the peasant; the
introduction of codes of law abolishing both the cruelties and the confusion of
ancient practice,-all these were purposes more or less familiar to the absolute
sovereigns of the eighteenth century, whom the French so summarily described as
benighted tyrants. It was in Austria, Prussia, and Tuscany that the civilizing
energy of the Crown had been seen in its strongest form, but even the
Governments of Naples and Spain had caught the spirit of change. The religious
tolerance which Joseph gave to Austria, the rejection of Papal authority and
the abolition of the punishment of death which Leopold effected in Tuscany,
were bolder efforts of the same political rationalism which in Spain minimized
the powers of the Inquisition and in Naples attempted to found a system of
public education. In all this, however, there was no trace of the action of the
people, or of any sense that a nation ought to raise itself above a state of
tutelage. Men of ideas called upon Governments to impose better institutions upon
the people, not upon the people to wrest them from the Governments.
In France alone
a view of public affairs had grown up which impelled the nation to create its
reforms for itself. If the substance of many of the French revolutionary
changes coincided with the objects of Austrian or of Tuscan reform, there was
nothing similar in their method. In other countries reform sprang from the
command of an enlightened ruler; in France it started with the Declaration of
the Rights of Man, and aimed at the creation of local authority to be exercised
by the citizens themselves. The source of this difference lay partly in the
influence of England and America upon French opinion, but much more in the
existence within France of a numerous and energetic middle class, enriched by
commerce, and keenly interested in all the speculation and literary activity of
the age. This was a class that both understood the wrongs which the other
classes inflicted or suffered, and felt itself capable of redressing them. For
the flogged and over-driven peasant in Naples or Hungary no ally existed but
the Crown. In most of those poor and backward States which made up monarchical
Europe, the fraction of the inhabitants which neither enjoyed privilege nor
stood in bondage to it was too small to think of forcing itself into power. The
nobles sought to preserve their feudal rights: the Crown sought to reduce them;
the nation, elsewhere than in France, did not intervene and lay hands upon
power for itself, because the nation was nothing but the four mutually
exclusive classes of the landlords who commanded, the peasants who served, the
priests who idled, and the soldiers who fought. France differed from all the
other monarchies of the Continent in possessing a public which blended all
classes and was dominated by none; a public comprehending thousands of men who
were familiar with the great interests of society, and who, whether noble or
not noble, possessed the wealth and the intelligence that made them rightly
desire a share in power.
Liberty, the right
of the nation to govern itself, seemed at the outset to be the great principle
of the Revolution. The French people themselves believed the question at issue
to be mainly between authority and popular right; the rest of Europe saw the
Revolution under the same aspect. Hence, in those countries where the example
of France produced political movements, the effect was in the first instance to
excite agitation against the Government, whatever might be the form of the
latter. In England the agitation was one of the middle class against the
aristocratic parliamentary system; in Hungary, it was an agitation of the
nobles against the Crown; on the Rhine it was an agitation of the commercial
classes against ecclesiastical rule. But in every case in which the reforming
movement was not supported by the presence of French armies, the terrors which
succeeded the first sanguine hopes of the Revolution struck the leaders of
these movements with revulsion and despair, and converted even the better
Governments into engines of reaction. In France itself it was seen that the
desire for liberty among an enlightened class could not suddenly transform the
habits of a nation accustomed to accept everything from authority. Privilege
was destroyed, equality was advanced; but instead of self-government the
Revolution brought France the most absolute rule it had ever known. It was not
that the Revolution had swept by, leaving things where they were before: it had
in fact accomplished most of those great changes which lay the foundation of a
sound social life: but the faculty of self-government, the first condition of
any lasting political liberty, remained to be slowly won.
Outside France
reaction set in without the benefit of previous change. At London, Vienna,
Naples, and Madrid, Governments gave up all other objects in order to devote
themselves to the suppression of Jacobinism. Pitt, whose noble aims had been
the extinction of the slave-trade, the reform of Parliament, and the advance of
national intercourse by free trade, surrendered himself to men whose thoughts centred upon informers, Gagging Acts, and constructive
treasons, and who opposed all legislation upon the slave-trade because slaves
had been freed by the Jacobins of the Convention. State trials and
imprisonments became the order of the day; but the reaction in England at least
stopped short of the scaffold. At Vienna and Naples fear was more cruel. The
men who either were, or affected to be, in such fear of revolution that they
discovered a Jacobinical allegory in Mozart's last
opera, did not spare life when the threads of anything like a real conspiracy
were placed in their hands. At Vienna terror was employed to crush the
constitutional opposition of Hungary to the Austrian Court. In Naples a long
reign of cruelty and oppression began with the creation of a secret tribunal to
investigate charges of conspiracy made by informers. In Mainz, the Archbishop
occupied the last years of his government, after his restoration in 1793, with
a series of brutal punishments and tyrannical precautions.
These were but
instances of the effect which the first epoch of the Revolution produced upon
the old European States. After a momentary stimulus to freedom it threw the
nations themselves into reaction and apathy; it totally changed the spirit of
the better governments, attaching to all liberal ideas the stigma of
Revolution, and identifying the work of authority with resistance to every kind
of reform. There were States in which this change, the first effect of the
Revolution, was also its only one; States whose history, as in the case of
England, is for a whole generation the history of political progress
unnaturally checked and thrown out of its course. There were others, and these
the more numerous, where the first stimulus and the first reaction were soon
forgotten in new and penetrating changes produced by the successive victories
of France. The nature of these changes, even more than the warfare which
introduced them, gives its interest to the period on which we are about to
enter.
CHAPTER IIIITALIAN CAMPAIGNS: TREATY OF CAMPO FORMIO.
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