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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The French Revolution, by Hilaire Belloc
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
+www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
+will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
+using this eBook.
+
+
+Title: The French Revolution
+
+Author: Hilaire Belloc
+
+Release Date: February 8, 2011 [EBook #35215]
+[Last Updated: March 25, 2022]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+Produced by: Steven Gibbs, Richard J. Shiffer and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FRENCH REVOLUTION ***
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+  THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
+
+  BY
+
+  HILAIRE BELLOC, M.A.
+
+
+  AUTHOR OF “DANTON,” “ROBESPIERRE,” “MARIE ANTOINETTE,” “THE OLD ROAD,”
+  “THE PATH TO ROME,” “PARIS,” “THE HILLS AND THE SEA,” “THE HISTORIC
+  THAMES,” ETC., ETC.
+
+
+  LONDON
+
+  WILLIAMS AND NORGATE
+
+
+  RICHARD CLAY AND SONS, LIMITED,
+  BRUNSWICK STREET, STAMFORD STREET, S.E.,
+  AND BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+The object of these few pages is not to recount once more the history of
+the Revolution: that can be followed in any one of a hundred text-books.
+Their object is rather to lay, if that be possible, an explanation of it
+before the English reader; so that he may understand both what it was
+and how it proceeded, and also why certain problems hitherto unfamiliar
+to Englishmen have risen out of it.
+
+First, therefore, it is necessary to set down, clearly without modern
+accretion, that political theory which was a sort of religious creed,
+supplying the motive force of the whole business; of the new Civil Code
+as of the massacres; of the panics and capitulations as of the
+victories; of the successful transformation of society as of the
+conspicuous failures in detail which still menace the achievement of the
+Revolution.
+
+This grasped, the way in which the main events followed each other, and
+the reason of their interlocking and proceeding as they did must be put
+forward--not, I repeat, in the shape of a chronicle, but in the shape of
+a thesis. Thus the reader must know not only that the failure of the
+royal family’s flight was followed by war, but how and why it was
+followed by war. He must not only appreciate the severity of the
+government of the great Committee, but why that severity was present,
+and of the conditions of war upon which it reposed. But in so explaining
+the development of the movement it is necessary to select for
+appreciation as the chief figures the characters of the time, since upon
+their will and manner depended the fate of the whole. For instance, had
+the Queen been French either in blood or in sympathy, had the King been
+alert, had any one character retained the old religious motives, all
+history would have been changed, and this human company must be seen if
+its action and drama are to be comprehended.
+
+The reader interested in that capital event should further seize (and
+but too rarely has an opportunity for seizing) its military aspect; and
+this difficulty of his proceeds from two causes: the first, that
+historians, even when they recognise the importance of the military side
+of some past movement, are careless of the military aspect, and think
+it sufficient to relate particular victories and general actions. The
+military aspect of any period does not consist in these, but in the
+campaigns of which actions, however decisive, are but incidental parts.
+In other words, the reader must seize the movement and design of armies
+if he is to seize a military period, and these are not commonly given
+him. In the second place, the historian, however much alive to the
+importance of military affairs, too rarely presents them as part of a
+general position. He will make his story a story of war, or again, a
+story of civilian development, and the reader will fail to see how the
+two combine.
+
+Now, the Revolution, more than any other modern period, turns upon, and
+is explained by, its military history. On this account has so
+considerable a space been devoted to the explaining of that feature.
+
+The reader will note, again, that the quarrel between the Revolution and
+the Catholic Church has also been dealt with at length.
+
+To emphasise this aspect of the revolutionary struggle may seem unusual
+and perhaps deserves a word of apology.
+
+The reader is invited to consider the fact that the Revolution took
+place in a country which had, in the first place, definitely determined
+during the religious struggle of the sixteenth and seventeenth
+centuries to remain in communion with Rome; and had, in the second
+place, admitted a very large and important body of converts to the
+doctrines of the Reformation.
+
+The determination of the French people, in the crisis of 1572-1610, to
+remain Catholic under a strong central Government, was a capital point
+in the future history of France. So was the presence of a wealthy, very
+large, and highly cultivated body of dissentients in the midst of the
+nation. The two phenomena hardly co-existed elsewhere in Europe. Between
+them they lent to the political history of France a peculiar character
+which the nineteenth century, even more than the Revolution itself, has
+emphasised; and it is the opinion of the present writer that it is
+impossible to understand the Revolution unless very high relief is given
+to the religious problem.
+
+If a personal point may be noted, the fact that the writer of these
+pages is himself a Catholic and in political sympathy strongly attached
+to the political theory of the Revolution, should not be hidden from the
+reader. Such personal conditions have perhaps enabled him to treat the
+matter more thoroughly than it might have been treated by one who
+rejected either Republicanism upon the one hand, or Catholicism upon the
+other; but he believes that no personal and therefore exaggerated note
+has been allowed to intrude upon his description of what is a definite
+piece of objective history lying in the field of record rather than in
+that of opinion.
+
+Some years ago the paramount importance of the quarrel between the
+Church and the Revolution might still have been questioned by men who
+had no personal experience of the struggle, and of its vast results.
+To-day the increasing consequences and the contemporary violence of that
+quarrel make its presentation an essential part of any study of the
+period.
+
+The scheme thus outlined will show why I have given this sketch the
+divisions in which it lies.
+
+                                             H. BELLOC.
+
+  _King’s Land,
+    January 1911._
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+                                                                   PAGE
+
+      PREFACE                                                         v
+
+    I THE POLITICAL THEORY OF THE REVOLUTION                         13
+
+   II ROUSSEAU                                                       29
+
+  III THE CHARACTERS OF THE REVOLUTION:
+      King Louis XVI                                                 37
+      The Queen                                                      45
+      Mirabeau                                                       53
+      La Fayette                                                     61
+      Dumouriez                                                      65
+      Danton                                                         67
+      Carnot                                                         72
+      Marat                                                          74
+      Robespierre                                                    77
+
+   IV THE PHASES OF THE REVOLUTION:
+        i. From May 1789 to 17th of July 1789                        83
+       ii. From the 17th of July 1789 to the 6th of October 1789     98
+      iii. From October 1789 to June 1791                           102
+       iv. From June 1791 to September 1792                         108
+        v. From the Invasion of September 1792 to the Establishment
+           of the Committee of Public Safety, April 1793            118
+       vi. From April 1793 to July 1794                             126
+
+    V THE MILITARY ASPECT OF THE REVOLUTION                         142
+      One                                                           145
+      Two                                                           156
+      Three                                                         163
+      Four                                                          179
+      Five                                                          204
+
+   VI THE REVOLUTION AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH                        214
+
+     INDEX                                                          255
+
+
+
+
+THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+THE POLITICAL THEORY OF THE REVOLUTION
+
+
+The political theory upon which the Revolution proceeded has, especially
+in this country, suffered ridicule as local, as ephemeral, and as
+fallacious. It is universal, it is eternal, and it is true.
+
+It may be briefly stated thus: that a political community pretending to
+sovereignty, that is, pretending to a moral right of defending its
+existence against all other communities, derives the civil and temporal
+authority of its laws not from its actual rulers, nor even from its
+magistracy, but from itself.
+
+But the community cannot express authority unless it possesses
+_corporate initiative_; that is, unless the mass of its component units
+are able to combine for the purpose of a common expression, are
+conscious of a common will, and have something in common which makes the
+whole sovereign indeed.
+
+It may be that this power of corporate initiative and of corresponding
+corporate expression is forbidden to men. In that case no such thing as
+a sovereign community can be said to exist. In that case “patriotism,”
+“public opinion,” “the genius of a people,” are terms without meaning.
+But the human race in all times and in all places has agreed that such
+terms have meaning, and the conception that a community can so live,
+order and be itself, is a human conception as consonant to the nature of
+man as is his sense of right and wrong; it is much more intimately a
+part of that nature than are the common accidents determining human
+life, such as nourishment, generation or repose: nay, more intimate a
+part of it than anything which attaches to the body.
+
+This theory of political morals, though subject to a limitless
+degradation in practice, underlies the argument of every man who
+pretends to regard the conduct of the State as a business affecting the
+conscience of citizens. Upon it relies every protest against tyranny and
+every denunciation of foreign aggression.
+
+He that is most enamoured of some set machinery for the government of
+men, and who regards the sacramental function of an hereditary monarch
+(as in Russia), the organic character of a native oligarchy (as in
+England), the mechanical arrangement of election by majorities, or even
+in a crisis the intense conviction and therefore the intense activity
+and conclusive power of great crowds as salutary to the State, will
+invariably, if any one of these engines fail him in the achievement of
+what he desires for his country, fall back upon the doctrine of an
+ultimately sovereign community. He will complain that though an
+election has defeated his ideal, yet true national tradition and true
+national sentiment were upon his side. If he defends the action of a
+native oligarchy against the leaders of the populace, he does so by an
+explanation (more or less explicit) that the oligarchy is more truly
+national, that is more truly communal, than the engineered expression of
+opinion of which the demagogues (as he will call them) have been the
+mouthpieces. Even in blaming men for criticising or restraining an
+hereditary monarch the adherent of that monarch will blame them upon the
+ground that their action is anti-national, that is anti-communal; and,
+in a word, no man pretending to sanity can challenge in matters temporal
+and civil the ultimate authority of whatever is felt to be (though with
+what difficulty is it not defined!) the general civic sense which builds
+up a State.
+
+Those words “civil” and “temporal” must lead the reader to the next
+consideration; which is, that the last authority of all does not reside
+even in the community.
+
+It must be admitted by all those who have considered their own nature
+and that of their fellow beings that the ultimate authority in any act
+is God. Or if the name of God sound unusual in an English publication
+to-day, then what now takes the place of it for many (an imperfect
+phrase), “the moral sense.”
+
+Thus if there be cast together in some abandoned place a community of a
+few families so depraved or so necessitous that, against the teachings
+of their own consciences, and well knowing that what they are doing is
+what we call _wrong_, yet they will unanimously agree to do it, then
+that agreement of theirs, though certainly no temporal or civil
+authority can be quoted against it, is yet unjustifiable. Another
+authority lies behind. Still more evidently would this be true if, of
+say, twelve, seven decided (knowing the thing to be wrong) that the
+wrong thing should be done, five stood out for the right--and yet the
+majority possessed by the seven should be determined a sufficient
+authority for the wrongful command.
+
+But it is to be noted that this axiom only applies where the authority
+of the moral law (God, as the author of this book, with due deference to
+his readers, would prefer to say) is recognised and yet flouted. If
+those twelve families do sincerely believe such and such a general
+action to be right, then not only is their authority when they carry it
+into practice a civil and a temporal authority; it is an authority
+absolute in all respects; and further, if, upon a division of opinion
+among them not perhaps a bare majority, nay, perhaps not a majority at
+all, but at any rate a determinant current of opinion--determinant in
+intensity and in weight, that is, as well as in numbers--declares an
+action to be right, then that determinant weight of opinion gives to its
+resolve a political authority not only civil and temporal but absolute.
+Beyond it and above it there is no appeal.
+
+In other words, men may justly condemn, and justly have in a thousand
+circumstances condemned, the theory that a mere decision on the major
+part of the community was necessarily right in morals. It is, for that
+matter, self-evident that if one community decides in one fashion,
+another, also sovereign, in the opposite fashion, both cannot be right.
+Reasoning men have also protested, and justly, against the conception
+that what a majority in numbers, or even (what is more compelling still)
+a unanimity of decision in a community may order, may not only be wrong
+but may be something which that community has no authority to order
+since, though it possesses a civil and temporal authority, it acts
+against that ultimate authority which is its own consciousness of right.
+Men may and do justly protest against the doctrine that a community is
+incapable of doing deliberate evil; it is as capable of such an action
+as is an individual. But men nowhere do or can deny that the community
+acting as it thinks right is ultimately sovereign: there is no
+alternative to so plain a truth.
+
+Let us take it, then, as indubitable that where civil government is
+concerned, the community is supreme, if only from the argument that no
+organ within the community can prove its right to withstand the
+corporate will when once that corporate will shall find expression.
+
+All arguments which are advanced against this prime axiom of political
+ethics are, when they are analysed, found to repose upon a confusion of
+thought. Thus a man will say, “This doctrine would lead my country to
+abandon her suzerainty over that other nation, but were I to consent to
+this, I should be weakening my country, to which I owe allegiance.” The
+doctrine compels him to no such muddlement. The community of which he is
+a member is free to make its dispositions for safety, and is bound to
+preserve its own life. It is for the oppressed to protest and to rebel.
+
+Similarly, men think that this doctrine in some way jars with the actual
+lethargy and actual imbecility of men in their corporate action. It does
+nothing of the kind. This lethargy, that imbecility, and all the other
+things that limit the application of the doctrine, in no way touch its
+right reason, any more than the fact that the speech of all men is
+imperfect contradicts the principle that man has a moral right to
+self-expression. That a dumb man cannot speak at all, but must write,
+is, so far from a contradiction, a proof of the truth that speech is the
+prime expression of man; and in the same way a community utterly without
+the power of expressing its corporate will is no contradiction, but a
+proof, of the general rule that such expression and the imposing of such
+decisions are normal to mankind. The very oddity of the contrast between
+the abnormal and the normal aids us in our decision, and when we see a
+people conquered and not persuaded, yet making no attempt at rebellion,
+or a people free from foreign oppression yet bewildered at the prospect
+of self-government, the oddity of the phenomenon proves our rule.
+
+But though all this be true, there stands against the statement of our
+political axiom not a contradiction added, but a criticism; and all men
+with some knowledge of their fellows and of themselves at once perceive,
+_first_, that the psychology of corporate action differs essentially
+from the psychology of individual action, and _secondly_, that in
+proportion to the number, the discussions, the lack of intimacy, and in
+general the friction of the many, corporate action by a community,
+corporate self-realisation and the imposition of a corporate will,
+varies from the difficult to the impossible.
+
+On this no words need be wasted. All men who reason and who observe are
+agreed that, in proportion to distance, numbers, and complexity, the
+difficulty of self-expression within a community increases. We may get
+in a lively people explosions of popular will violent, acute, and
+certainly real; but rare. We may attempt with a people more lethargic to
+obtain some reflection of popular will through the medium of a permanent
+machinery of deputation which, less than any other, perhaps, permits a
+great community to express itself truly. We may rely upon the national
+sympathies of an aristocracy or of a king. But in any case we know that
+large communities can only indirectly and imperfectly express themselves
+where the permanent government of their whole interest is concerned. Our
+attachment, which may be passionate, to the rights of the Common Will we
+must satisfy either by demanding a loose federation of small,
+self-governing states, or submitting the central government of large
+ones to occasional insurrection and to violent corporate expressions of
+opinion which shall readjust the relations between the governor and the
+governed.
+
+All this is true: but such a criticism of the theory in political morals
+which lay behind the Revolution, the theory that the community is
+sovereign, is no contradiction. It only tells us that pure right cannot
+act untrammelled in human affairs and that it acts in some conditions
+more laboriously than in others: it gives not a jot of authority to any
+alternative thesis.[1]
+
+Such is the general theory of the Revolution to which the command of
+Jean Jacques Rousseau over the French tongue gave imperishable
+expression in that book whose style and logical connection may be
+compared to some exact and strong piece of engineering. He entitled it
+the _Contrat Social_, and it became the formula of the Revolutionary
+Creed. But though no man, perhaps, has put the prime truth of political
+morals so well, that truth was as old as the world; it appears in the
+passionate rhetoric of a hundred leaders and has stood at the head or
+has been woven into the laws of free States without number. In the
+English language the Declaration of Independence is perhaps its noblest
+expression. And though this document was posterior to the great work of
+Rousseau and (through the genius of Jefferson) was in some part
+descended from it, its language, and still more the actions of those who
+drafted and supported it, are sufficient to explain what I mean to
+English readers.
+
+Now with this general theory there stand connected on the one hand
+certain great principles without which it would have no meaning, and
+also on the other hand a number of minor points concerning no more than
+the machinery of politics. The first are vital to democracy. The second,
+in spite of their great popularity at the time of the Revolution and of
+the sanction which the Revolution gave them, nay, of their universality
+since the Revolution, have in reality nothing to do with the
+revolutionary theory itself.
+
+Of these two categories the type of the first is the doctrine of the
+equality of man; the type of the second is the mere machinery called
+“representative.”
+
+The doctrine of the equality of the man is a transcendent doctrine: a
+“dogma,” as we call such doctrines in the field of transcendental
+religion. It corresponds to no physical reality which we can grasp, it
+is hardly to be adumbrated even by metaphors drawn from physical
+objects. We may attempt to rationalise it by saying that what is common
+to all men is not _more_ important but _infinitely more_ important than
+the accidents by which men differ. We may compare human attributes to
+tri-dimensional, and personal attributes to bi-dimensional measurements;
+we may say that whatever man has of his nature is the standard of man,
+and we may show that in all such things men are potentially equal. None
+of these metaphors explains the matter; still less do any of them
+satisfy the demand of those to whom the dogma may be incomprehensible.
+
+Its truth is to be arrived at (for these) in a negative manner. If men
+are _not_ equal then no scheme of jurisprudence, no act of justice, no
+movement of human indignation, no exaltation of fellowship, has any
+meaning. The doctrine of the equality of man is one which, like many of
+the great transcendental doctrines, may be proved by the results
+consequent upon its absence. It is in man to believe it--and all lively
+societies believe it.
+
+It is certainly not in man to prove the equality of men save, as I have
+said, by negation; but it demands no considerable intellectual faculty
+to perceive that, void of the doctrine of equality, the conception of
+political freedom and of a community’s moral right to self-government
+disappear. Now to believe that doctrine positively, and to believe it
+ardently, to go on crusade for that religious point, was indeed
+characteristic of the French. It required the peculiar and inherited
+religious temper of the French which had for so many hundred years
+seized and defined point after point in the character of man, to grow
+enamoured of this definition and to feel it not in the intellect, but as
+it were in their bones. They became soldiers for it, and that enormous
+march of theirs, overrunning Europe, which may not inaptly be compared
+to their adventures in the twelfth century, when they engaged upon the
+Crusades, was inspired by no one part of the doctrine of political
+freedom more strongly than by this doctrine of equality.
+
+The scorn which was in those days universally felt for that pride which
+associates itself with things not inherent to a man (notably and most
+absurdly with capricious differences of wealth) never ran higher; and
+the passionate sense of justice which springs from this profound and
+fundamental social dogma of equality, as it moved France during the
+Revolution to frenzy, so also moved it to creation.
+
+Those who ask how it was that a group of men sustaining all the weight
+of civil conflict within and of universal war without, yet made time
+enough in twenty years to frame the codes which govern modern Europe, to
+lay down the foundations of universal education, of a strictly
+impersonal scheme of administration, and even in detail to remodel the
+material face of society--in a word, to make modern Europe--must be
+content for their reply to learn that the Republican Energy had for its
+flame and excitant this vision: a sense almost physical of the equality
+of man.
+
+The minor points which wove themselves into the political practice of
+democracy during the Revolution, which are not of its principles, and
+which would not, were they abstracted, affect its essence, are of quite
+another and less noble kind. I have taken as the chief of these the
+machinery of deputation or of “representation.”
+
+The representative system had been designed for a particular purpose
+under the influence of the Church and especially of the monastic orders
+(who invented it) in the Middle Ages. It had been practised as a useful
+check upon the national monarchy in France, and as a useful form of
+national expression in times of crisis or when national initiative was
+peculiarly demanded.
+
+In Spain it became, as the Middle Ages proceeded, a very vital national
+and local thing, varying from place to place. It is not surprising that
+Spain (seeing that in her territory the first experiments in
+representation were made) should have thus preserved it, popular and
+alive.
+
+In England Representation, vigorous as everywhere else in the true
+Middle Ages, narrowed and decayed at their close, until in the
+seventeenth century it had become a mere scheme for aristocratic
+government.
+
+In France for nearly two hundred years before the Revolution it had
+fallen into disuse, but an active memory of it still remained;
+especially a memory of its value in critical moments when a consultation
+of the whole people was required, and when the corporate initiative of
+the whole people must be set at work in order to save the State.
+
+It is no wonder, therefore, that the French, on the eve of the
+Revolution, clamoured for a revival of representation, or, as the system
+was called in the French tongue, “the States-General.” But as a
+permanent machine of government no one in Europe had the least idea how
+the system might serve the ends of democracy. In England democracy was
+not practised nor was representation connected with the conception of
+it. The nation had forgotten democracy as completely as it had forgotten
+the religion and the old ideals of the Middle Ages.
+
+In those parts of Christendom in which this ancient Christian
+institution of a parliament had not narrowed to be the mask of an
+oligarchy or dwindled to be a mere provincial custom, its use had
+disappeared. The ancient function of Representation, when it had been
+most lively and vigorous, that is, in the Middle Ages, was occasionally
+to initiate a national policy in critical moments, but more generally to
+grant taxes. What a democratic parliament might do, no one in 1789 could
+conceive.
+
+There was indeed one great example of democratic representation in
+existence: the example of the United States; but the conditions were
+wholly different from those of Europe. No true central power yet existed
+there; no ancient central institution, no Crown nor any Custom of the
+City. The numbers over which American representative democracy then held
+power were not to be compared to the twenty-five millions who inhabited
+the French realm. And even so, most of what counted in their lives was
+regulated by a system of highly local autonomy: for they were as
+scattered as they were few, and the wisest and strongest and best were
+dependent upon slaves. In Europe, I repeat, the experiment was untried;
+and it is one of the chief faults of the French revolutionaries that,
+having been compelled in the critical moment of the opening of the
+Revolution to the use of election and representation, they envisaged the
+permanent use of a similar machinery as a something sacred to and normal
+in the democratic State.
+
+True, they could not foresee modern parliamentarism. Nothing could be
+more alien to their conception of the State than the deplorable method
+of government which parliamentarism everywhere tends to introduce
+to-day.
+
+True, the French people during the revolutionary wars made short work of
+parliamentary theory, and found it a more national thing to follow a
+soldier (being by that time all soldiers themselves), and to incarnate
+in a dictator the will of the nation.
+
+But though the French revolutionaries could not have foreseen what we
+call “Parliamentarism” to-day, and though the society from which they
+sprang made short work of the oligarchic pretensions of a parliament
+when the realities of the national struggle had to be considered, yet
+they did as a fact pay an almost absurd reverence to the machinery of
+representation and election.
+
+They went so far as to introduce it into their attempted reform of the
+Church; they introduced it everywhere into civil government, from the
+smallest units to the highest. They even for a moment played with the
+illusion in that most real of games which men can ever play at--the
+business of arms: they allowed the election of officers. They were led
+to do this by that common fallacy, more excusable in them than in us,
+which confounds the individual will with the corporate. A representative
+(they thought) could in some way be the permanent receptacle of his
+electorate. They imagined that corporate initiative was always
+sufficiently active, in no matter what divisions or subdivisions, to
+react at once upon the delegate, to guide him as may be guided a driven
+animal, or to command him as may be commanded a servant.
+
+It was in vain that Rousseau, the great exponent of the democratic
+theory upon which France attempted to proceed, had warned posterity
+against the possible results of the representative system: they fell
+into the error, and it possesses many of their descendants to this day.
+
+Rousseau’s searching mind perceived indeed no more than the general
+truth that men who consent to a representative system are free only
+while the representatives are not sitting. But (as is so often the case
+with intuitions of genius) though he saw not the whole of the evil, he
+had put his finger upon its central spot, and from that main and just
+principle which he laid down--that under a merely representative system
+men cannot be really free--flow all those evils which we now know to
+attach to this method of government. What a rather clumsy epigram has
+called “the audacity of elected persons” is part of this truth. The
+evident spectacle of modern parliamentary nations driven against their
+will into economic conditions which appal them, proceeds again from the
+same truth; the conspicuous and hearty contempt into which parliamentary
+institutions have everywhere fallen again proceeds from it, and there
+proceeds from it that further derivative plague that the representatives
+themselves have now everywhere become more servile than the electorate
+and that in all parliamentary countries a few intriguers are the
+unworthy depositories of power, and by their service of finance permit
+the money-dealers to govern us all to-day. Rousseau, I say, the chief
+prophet of the Revolution, had warned the French of this danger. It is a
+capital example of his talent, for the experiment of democratic
+representation had not yet, in his time, been tried. But much more is
+that power of his by which he not only stamped and issued the gold of
+democracy as it had never till then been minted. No one man makes a
+people or their creed, but Rousseau more than any other man made vocal
+the creed of a people, and it is advisable or necessary for the reader
+of the Revolution to consider at the outset of his reading of what
+nature was Rousseau’s abundant influence upon the men who remodelled the
+society of Europe between 1789 and 1794.
+
+Why did he dominate those five years, and how was it that he dominated
+them increasingly?
+
+An explanation of Rousseau’s power merits a particular digression, for
+few who express themselves in the English tongue have cared to
+understand it, and in the academies provincial men have been content to
+deal with this great writer as though he were in some way inferior to
+themselves.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] We need not waste any time upon those who talk about such and such a
+form of government being good because “it works.” The use of such
+language connotes that the user of it is fatigued by the effort of
+thought. For what is “working,” _i.e._ successful action, in any sphere?
+The attainment of certain ends in that sphere. What are those ends in a
+State? If material well-being, then there is an end to talk of
+patriotism, the nation, public opinion and the rest of it which, as we
+all very well know, men always have regarded and always will regard as
+the supreme matters of public interest. If the end is not material
+well-being, but a sense of political freedom and of the power of the
+citizen to react upon the State, then to say that an institution “works”
+though apparently not democratic, is simply to say that under such and
+such conditions that institution achieves the ends of democracy most
+nearly. In other words, to contrast the good “working” of an institution
+superficially undemocratic with democratic theory is meaningless. The
+institution “works” in proportion as it satisfies that political sense
+which perfect democracy would, were it attainable, completely satisfy.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+ROUSSEAU
+
+
+In order to appreciate what Rousseau meant to the revolutionary
+movement, it is necessary to consider the effect of style upon men.
+
+Men are influenced by the word. Spoken or written, the _word_ is the
+organ of persuasion and, therefore, of moral government.
+
+Now, degraded as that term has become in our time, there is no proper
+term to express the exact use of words save the term “style.”
+
+What words we use, and in what order we put them, is the whole matter of
+style; and a man desiring to influence his fellow men has therefore not
+one, but two co-related instruments at his disposal. He cannot use one
+without the other. The weakness of the one will ruin the other. These
+two instruments are his idea and his style.
+
+However powerful, native, sympathetic to his hearers’ mood or cogently
+provable by reference to new things may be a man’s idea, he cannot
+persuade his fellow men to it if he have not words that express it. And
+he will persuade them more and more in proportion as his words are well
+chosen and in the right order, such order being determined by the genius
+of the language whence they are drawn.
+
+Whether the idea of which Rousseau made himself the exponent in his
+famous tract be true or false, need not further concern us in this
+little book. We all know that the difficult attempt to realise political
+freedom has attracted various communities of men at various times and
+repelled others. What English readers rarely hear is that the triumph of
+Rousseau depended not only on the first element in persuasion, which is
+vision, but also upon the second of the two co-related instruments by
+which a man may influence his fellows--to wit, style. It was his choice
+of French words and the order in which he arranged them, that gave him
+his enormous ascendancy over the generation which was young when he was
+old.
+
+I have alluded to his famous tract, the _Contrat Social_, and here a
+second point concerning it may be introduced. This book which gave a
+text for the Revolution, the document to which its political theory
+could refer, was by no means (as foreign observers have sometimes
+imagined) the whole body of writing for which Rousseau was responsible.
+To imagine that is to make the very common error of confusing a man with
+his books.
+
+Rousseau wrote on many things: his character was of an exalted, nervous
+and diseased sort. Its excessive sensibility degenerated with advancing
+years into something not distinguishable from mania. He wrote upon
+education, and the glory of his style carried conviction both where he
+was right and where the short experience of a hundred years has proved
+him to have been wholly wrong. He wrote upon love, and half the lessons
+to be drawn from his writing will be condemned by the sane. He wrote
+upon botany at vast length; he wrote also upon music--with what success
+in either department I am incompetent to determine. He wrote upon human
+inequality: and though the sentences were beautiful and the sentiment
+just, the analysis was very insufficient and the historical conception
+bad. He wrote upon a project for perpetual peace, which was rubbish; and
+he wrote upon the government of Poland an essay which was a perfect
+masterpiece.
+
+But when a great writer writes, each of his great writings has a life of
+its own, and it was not any of these other writings of Rousseau, on
+love or botany, which were the text of the Revolution. The text of the
+Revolution was his _Contrat Social_.
+
+Now it is not too much to say that never in the history of political
+theory has a political theory been put forward so lucidly, so
+convincingly, so tersely or so accurately as in this short and wonderful
+book. The modern publisher in this country would be ashamed to print it:
+not for its views (which would now seem commonplace), nor for its
+excellence, which would ensure it a failure, but for its brevity. It is
+as short as a gospel, and would cover but a hundred pages of one of our
+serious reviews. A modern publisher in this city would not know what
+price to set upon such a work, and the modern reader in this country
+would be puzzled to understand how a great thing could be got within so
+narrow a compass. A debate in Parliament or the libretto of a long
+pantomime is of greater volume.
+
+Nevertheless, if it be closely read the _Contrat Social_ will be
+discovered to say all that can be said of the moral basis of democracy.
+Our ignorance of the historical basis of the State is presumed in the
+very opening lines of it. The logical priority of the family to the
+State is the next statement. The ridiculous and shameful argument that
+strength is the basis of authority--which has never had standing save
+among the uninstructed or the superficial--is contemptuously dismissed
+in a very simple proof which forms the third chapter, and that chapter
+is not a page of a book in length. It is with the fifth chapter that the
+powerful argument begins, and the logical precedence of _human
+association_ to any particular form of government is the foundation
+stone of that analysis. It is this indeed which gives its title to the
+book: the moral authority of men in community arises from _conscious
+association_; or, as an exact phraseology would have it, a “social
+contract.” All the business of democracy as based upon the only moral
+authority in a State follows from this first principle, and is developed
+in Rousseau’s extraordinary achievement which, much more than any other
+writing not religious, has affected the destiny of mankind.
+
+It is indeed astonishing to one who is well acquainted not only with the
+matter, but with the manner of the _Contrat Social_, to remark what
+criticisms have been passed upon it by those who either have not read
+the work or, having read it, did so with an imperfect knowledge of the
+meaning of French words. The two great counter arguments, the one
+theoretic the other practical, which democracy has to meet, stand
+luminously exposed in these pages, though in so short a treatise the
+author might have been excused from considering them. The theoretical
+argument against democracy is, of course, that man being prone to evil,
+something external to him and indifferent to his passions must be put up
+to govern him; the people will corrupt themselves, but a despot or an
+oligarchy, when it has satisfied its corrupt desires, still has a wide
+margin over which it may rule well because it is indifferent. You
+cannot bribe the despot or the oligarch beyond the limit of his desires,
+but a whole people can follow its own corrupt desires to the full, and
+they will infect all government.
+
+The full practice of democracy, therefore, says Rousseau, is better
+suited to angels than to men.
+
+As to the practical argument that men are not sufficiently conscious of
+the State to practise democracy, save in small communities, that plea
+also is recognised and stated better than any one else has stated it.
+For there is not in this book an apology for democracy as a method of
+government, but a statement of why and how democracy is right.
+
+The silly confusion which regards a representative method as essentially
+democratic has never been more contemptuously dealt with, nor more
+thoroughly, than in the few words in which the _Contrat Social_
+dismisses it for ever; though it was left to our own time to discover,
+in the school of unpleasant experience, how right was Rousseau in this
+particular condemnation.
+
+Exiguous as are the limits within which the great writer has finally
+decided the theory of democracy, he finds space for side issues which
+nowhere else but in this book had been orderly considered, and which,
+when once one has heard them mentioned, one sees to be of the most
+excellent wisdom: that the fundamental laws, or original and particular
+bonds, of a new democracy must come from a source external to itself;
+that to the nature of the people for whom one is legislating, however
+democratic the form of the State, we must conform the particulars of
+law; that a democracy cannot live without “tribunes”; that no utterly
+inflexible law can be permitted in the State--and hence the necessity
+for dictatorship in exceptional times; that no code can foresee future
+details--and so forth.
+
+It would be a legitimate and entertaining task to challenge any man who
+had not read the _Contrat Social_ (and this would include most academic
+writers upon the treatise) to challenge any such one, I say, to put down
+an argument against democratic theory which could not be found within
+those few pages, or to suggest a limitation of it which Rousseau had not
+touched on.
+
+If proof were needed of what particular merits this pamphlet displayed,
+it would be sufficient to point out that in a time when the problem
+represented by religion was least comprehended, when the practice of
+religion was at its lowest, and when the meaning, almost, of religion
+had left men’s minds, Rousseau was capable of writing his final chapter.
+
+That the great religious revival of the nineteenth century should have
+proved Rousseau’s view of religion in the State to be insufficient is in
+no way remarkable, for when Rousseau wrote, that revival was undreamt
+of; what is remarkable is that he should have allowed as he did for the
+religious sentiment, and above all, that he should have seen how
+impossible it is for a selection of Christian dogma to be accepted as a
+civic religion.
+
+It is further amazing that at such a time a man could be found who
+should appreciate that for the State, to have unity, it must possess a
+religion, and Rousseau’s attempt to define that minimum or substratum of
+religion without which unity could not exist in the State unfortunately
+became the commonplace of the politicians, and particularly of the
+English politicians who succeeded him. Who might not think, for
+instance, that he was reading--though better expressed, of course, than
+a politician could put it--some “Liberal” politician at Westminster, if
+he were to come on such phrases as these with regard to what should be
+taught in the schools of the country?
+
+“The doctrines taught by the State should be simple, few in number,
+expressed with precision and without explanation or commentary. The
+existence of a powerful God, beneficent, providential and good; the
+future life; the happiness of the good and the punishment of evil; the
+sanctity of the agreements which bind society together and of laws;
+while as for negative doctrines, one is sufficient, and that one is the
+wickedness of intolerance.”
+
+Rousseau’s hundred pages are the direct source of the theory of the
+modern State; their lucidity and unmatched economy of diction; their
+rigid analysis, their epigrammatic judgment and wisdom--these are the
+reservoirs from whence modern democracy has flowed; what are now proved
+to be the errors of democracy are errors against which the _Contrat
+Social_ warned men; the moral apology of democracy is the moral apology
+written by Rousseau; and if in this one point of religion he struck a
+more confused and a less determined note than in the rest, it must be
+remembered that in his time no other man understood what part religion
+played in human affairs; for in his days the few who studied religion
+and observed it could not connect it in any way with the political
+nature of man, and of those who counted in the intellect of Europe, by
+far the greater number thought political problems better solved if
+religion (which they had lost) were treated as negligible. They were
+wrong--and Rousseau, in his generalities upon the soul, was
+insufficient; both were beneath the height of a final theory of man, but
+Rousseau came much nearer to comprehension, even in this point of
+religion, than did any of his contemporaries.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+THE CHARACTERS OF THE REVOLUTION
+
+
+KING LOUIS XVI
+
+As might be expected, the character of King Louis XVI has suffered more
+distortion at the hands of historians than has any other of the
+revolutionary figures; and this because he combined with that personal
+character of his a certain office to which were traditionally attached
+certain points of view and methods of action which the historian takes
+for granted when he deals with the character of the man. As any one
+thinking of a judge of some standing upon the English bench cannot but
+believe that he is possessed of some learning or some gravity, etc.; as
+any one hearing of a famous soldier cannot but believe that he has
+certain qualities associated with the business of soldiering, so
+historians tend to confuse the personality and character of Louis XVI
+with that of his office; they either by contrast exaggerate his unkingly
+defects or by sympathy exaggerate his kingly opposition to reform.
+
+The student will do well to avoid this error and its source, and to
+think of Louis as of a man who had been casually introduced, almost
+without preparation, into the office which he held. In other words, the
+student will do well, in his reading of the Revolution, to consider
+Louis XVI simply as a man, and his character as a private character. For
+this last of the long, unbroken line of Capetians possessed a character
+essentially individual. It was of a type which, no matter what accidents
+of fortune might have fallen upon its possessor, would have remained the
+same. Nor was ever a man possessed of high office whom high office had
+less moulded.
+
+Men thus impervious to their environment are commonly so from two
+causes: either from an intense and vivid personal initiative which may
+border upon madness, or from something thick and heavy in their moral
+accoutrement which defends against external action the inner personal
+temperament. The latter was the case with Louis.
+
+He was very slow of thought, and very slow of decision. His physical
+movements were slow. The movement of his eyes was notably slow. He had a
+way of falling asleep under the effort of fatigue at the most
+incongruous moments. The things that amused him were of the largest and
+most superficial kind. Horse-play, now and then a little touched with
+eccentricity, and very plain but unexpected jokes. One may express him
+from one aspect by saying that he was one of those men whom you could
+never by any chance have hoped to convince of anything. The few things
+which he accepted he accepted quite simply, and the process of reasoning
+in the mouth of any who approached him was always too rapid for him to
+follow. But it must not be imagined on this account that the moral
+integument so described was wrapped about a void. On the contrary, it
+enclosed a very definite character. Louis possessed a number of intimate
+convictions upon which he was not to be shaken. He was profoundly
+convinced of the existence and value of a certain corporate tradition in
+the organism which he ruled: the French nation. He was national. In this
+he differed from many a pedant, many a courtier, many an ecclesiastic,
+and many a woman about him, especially his wife.
+
+He was, again, possessed of all the elements of the Catholic faith.
+
+It was, indeed, a singular thing for a man of his position at such a
+time to hold intimately to religion, but Louis held to it. He confessed,
+he communicated, he attended mass, he performed his ordinary
+devotions--not by way of tradition or political duty, or State function,
+to which religious performance was now reduced in the vast majority of
+his wealthy contemporaries, but as an individual for whom these things
+had a personal value. Had he, with precisely the same interior spirit,
+woken in his bed some morning to find himself a country squire, and to
+discover that all his past kingship had been a dream of the night, he
+would have continued the practice of his religion as before.
+
+Now this is a sufficiently remarkable point, for the country squire, the
+noble, the lawyer, the university professor of the generation
+immediately preceding the Revolution had, as a rule, no conception of
+the Catholic Church. With them the faith was dead, save in the case of a
+very few who made it, if one may say so without disrespect, a mania, and
+in their exaggerations were themselves the proofs of the depth of decay
+into which the Church of Gaul had fallen.
+
+Louis XVI was possessed, then, of religion: it appeared in many of his
+acts, in his hesitation to appoint not a few of the many atheist bishops
+of the time, in his real agony of responsibility upon the Civil
+Constitution of the clergy, and in nothing more than the peculiar
+sobriety and solid ritual whereby he prepared for a tragic, sudden, and
+ignominious death.
+
+It is next to be observed that though he was a man not yet in middle
+age, and though he was quite devoid of ardour in any form, he had from
+the first matured a great basis of courage. It is well to admit that
+this quality in him was connected with those slow processes of thought
+and action which hampered him, but it is not to be explained by them. No
+man yet has become brave through mere stupidity.
+
+It was not only the accidents of the Revolution that proved this quality
+in him: his physical habits proved it long before. He was a resolute and
+capable rider of the horse: an aptitude in that exercise is impossible
+to the coward. Again, in those by-products of courage which are
+apparent, even where no physical danger threatens, he was conspicuous;
+he had no hesitation in facing a number of men, and he had aptitude in a
+mechanical trade--a business by no means unconnected with virility.
+
+Now in mentioning his virility, it is of prime importance for the
+student to remember, though the matter can be touched upon but lightly,
+that Louis, in this department of physical life, suffered from a
+mechanical impediment which gravely distorted the first years of his
+marriage, which undoubtedly wounded his self-respect, and which was
+perhaps the only thing that caused him permanent anxiety. He was cured
+by medical aid in the summer of the year 1777, but he was already three
+years a king and seven years a husband before that relief came to him.
+The tragedy affected his whole life, and, I repeat, must never be
+forgotten when one considers either him or Marie Antoinette in their
+intimate character, and in their effect as actors in the great drama.
+
+For the rest, the character of Louis betrayed certain ineptitudes (the
+word ineptitude is far more accurate in this connection than the word
+weakness), which ineptitudes were peculiarly fatal for the military
+office which he held and for the belligerent crisis which he had to
+meet.
+
+Few men are possessed of the eye, the subtle sympathy, the very rapid
+power of decision, and the comprehension of human contrasts and
+differences which build up the apt leader of an armed force great or
+small. Most men are mediocre in the combination of these qualities. But
+Louis was quite exceptionally hopeless where they were concerned. He
+could never have seen the simplest position nor have appreciated the
+military aspects of any character or of any body of men. He could ride,
+but he could not ride at the head of a column. He was not merely bad at
+this trade, he was nul. Drafted as a private into a conscript army, he
+would never have been entrusted with the duties of a corporal. He would
+have been impossible as a sergeant; and, possessed of commissioned rank,
+ridicule would have compelled him to take his discharge.
+
+This lack did not only, or chiefly, betray itself in his inability to
+meet personally the armed crisis of a revolution; it was not only, or
+chiefly, apparent in his complete breakdown during the assault upon the
+palace on the 10th of August: it was also, and much more, the disastrous
+cause of his inability to oversee, or even to choose, military advisers.
+
+Those who propose in the early part of the Revolution to check the mob
+in Paris, are excellent commanders: but Louis does not know it. Those
+who succeed each other at the Ministry of War, or at the head of the
+armies during the active part of the revolution are various in the
+extreme: but they all seem one to him. Between a fop like Narbonne and a
+subtle, trained cavalry man like Dumouriez, Louis made no distinction.
+The military qualities of La Fayette (which were not to be despised)
+meant no more to him than does music, good or bad, to a deaf man. From
+the beginning to the end of the movement, the whole of the military
+problem escaped him.
+
+Another hole in his character, which was of prime importance at such a
+time, was his inability to grasp in a clear vision any general social
+problem. Maps he could well comprehend, and he could well retain
+statistics; but the landscape, as it were, of the Revolution his
+protuberant and lethargic eyes completely missed. He was quite unable to
+see where lay danger and where support, in what large masses such and
+such forces were grouped, and the directions in which they were
+advancing, or upon which they must retreat. In this matter he was, as
+will be seen in a moment, the very opposite of Mirabeau, and it was on
+account of this weakness, or rather this form of nullity, that all
+Mirabeau’s vision was wasted upon Louis.
+
+Finally, he had no working comprehension of Europe. He did not even
+exaggerate the powers of the allies in the later phases of the
+Revolution when they were marching upon France. He did not either
+under-estimate or over-estimate the policy and naval force of Great
+Britain, the military resources of his own subjects, the probable
+sympathies of the Netherlands (anti-Austrian but Catholic), the decay of
+Spain, the division and impotence of the Italian Peninsula. Louis saw
+nothing of all these things.
+
+One may conclude the picture (for the purposes of such a short study as
+this) by saying that only one coincidence could have led him through the
+labyrinth of the time with success. That coincidence would have been the
+presence at his side of a friend fully trusted from childhood, loved, as
+religious as himself, and yet possessing precisely those qualities which
+he himself lacked. Had Louis found to hand such a lieutenant, the
+qualities I have mentioned would have been a sort of keel and ballast
+which would have secured the monarchy, for he was not weak, he was not
+impulsive, he was not even foolish: he was only wretchedly alone in his
+incapacities. Certainly such a nature could trust and rely upon no one
+who was not of this intimate kind, and he possessed no such intimate,
+let alone an intimate who could command the qualities I have suggested.
+
+Being what he was, his character is among the half-dozen which
+determined the Revolution to take the course which it did.
+
+
+THE QUEEN
+
+Marie Antoinette presents to history a character which it is of the
+highest interest to regard as a whole. It is the business of her
+biographers to consider that character as a whole; but in her connection
+with the Revolution there is but one aspect of it which is of
+importance, and that is the attitude which such a character was bound to
+take towards the French nation in the midst of which the Queen found
+herself.
+
+It is the solution of the whole problem which the Queen’s action sets
+before us to apprehend the gulf that separated her not only from the
+French temperament, but from a comprehension of all French society. Had
+she been a woman lacking in energy or in decision, this alien character
+in her would have been a small matter, and her ignorance of the French
+in every form of their activity, or rather her inability to comprehend
+them, would have been but a private failing productive only of certain
+local and immediate consequences, and not in any way determining the
+great lines of the revolutionary movement.
+
+As it was, her energy was not only abundant but steadfast; it grew more
+secure in its action as it increased with her years, and the initiative
+which gave that energy its course never vacillated, but was always
+direct. She knew her own mind, and she attempted, often with a partial
+success, to realise her convictions. There was no character in touch
+with the Executive during the first years of the Revolution comparable
+to hers for fixity of purpose and definition of view.
+
+It was due to this energy and singleness of aim that her
+misunderstanding of the material with which she had to deal was of such
+fatal importance.
+
+It was she who chose, before the outbreak of the Revolution, the
+succession of those ministers both Liberal and Reactionary, whose unwise
+plans upon either side precipitated violence. It was she who called and
+then revoked, and later recalled to office the wealthy and
+over-estimated Necker; she who substituted for him, and then so
+inopportunely threw over Calonne, the most national of the precursors of
+the Revolution, and ever after her most bitter enemy; it was she who
+advised the more particularly irritating details of resistance after the
+meeting of the first revolutionary Parliament; it was she who presided
+over (and helped to warp) the plans for the flight of the royal family;
+it was she who, after this flight had failed, framed a definite scheme
+for the coercion of the French people by the Governments of Europe; it
+was she who betrayed to foreign chanceries the French plan of campaign
+when war had become inevitable; finally, it was she who inspired the
+declaration of Brunswick which accompanied the invasion of French
+territory, and she was in particular the author of the famous threat
+therein contained to give over Paris to military execution, and to hold
+all the popular authorities responsible with their lives for the
+restoration of the pre-revolutionary state of affairs.
+
+As research proceeds, the capital effect of this woman’s continual and
+decided interference will be more and more apparent to historians.
+
+Now Marie Antoinette’s conception of mankind in general was the
+conception that you will find prevalent in such societies as that
+domestic and warm centre which had nourished her childhood. The romantic
+affection of a few equals, the personal loyalty of a handful of personal
+servants, the vague histrionic content which permeates the poor at the
+sight of great equipages and rich accoutrements, the cheers of a crowd
+when such symbols accompanying monarchy are displayed in the
+streets--all these were for Marie Antoinette the fundamental political
+feelings of mankind. An absence of them she regarded with bewilderment,
+an active opposition to them she hated as something at once
+incomprehensible and positively evil.
+
+There was in all this illusion, of course, a great element of what the
+English call middle class, and the French bourgeois. To be quite
+ignorant of what servitors will say of their masters behind their backs;
+not to appreciate that heroic devotion is the faculty of a few; never
+to have imagined the discontents of men in general, and the creative
+desire for self-expression which inspires men when they act politically;
+not to know that men as a whole (and particularly the French people) are
+not deceived by the accidents of wealth, nor attach any real inferiority
+to poverty; to despise the common will of numbers or to doubt its
+existence; to see society established in a hierarchy not of office but
+of leisure: all this may seem to the democrat a very unnatural and
+despicable mood. But it was not despicable, still less unnatural; in the
+case of Marie Antoinette: it was the only experience and the only
+conception of society which had ever been given her. She had always
+believed, when she gazed upon a mass of the populace, that the
+difference between the crowd and herself was a moral reality. The
+contrast in external habits between the wealthy, the middle class, and
+the poor--a contrast ultimately produced by differences in the
+opportunity and leisure which wealth affords--she thought to be
+fundamental. Just as children and certain domestic pet animals regard
+such economic accidents in society as something real which
+differentiates men, so did she;--but she happened to nourish this
+illusion in the midst of a people, and within a day’s walk of a capital,
+where the misconception had less hold than in any other district of
+Europe.
+
+Of the traits peculiar to the French she knew nothing, or, to put it
+more strongly, she could not believe that they really existed.
+
+The extremes of cruelty into which this people could fall were
+inconceivable to her, as were also the extremes of courage to which they
+can rise under the same excitements as arouse them to an excess of
+hatred. But that character in the French which she most utterly failed
+to foresee or to comprehend, was their power of _corporate
+organisation_.
+
+That a multitude could instruct and order themselves for a common
+purpose, rapidly acquire and nominate the officers who should bring that
+purpose to fruition, and in general pass in one moment from a mere
+multitude to an incipient army--that was a faculty which the French had
+and have to a peculiar degree, and which she (like so many of our own
+contemporaries, and especially those of German blood) could not believe
+to be real. This faculty in the French, when it took action and was
+apparent in the physical struggles of the Revolution, seemed to her, to
+the very end, a sort of nightmare; something which, by all the laws of
+reality, _ought not_ to be happening, but somehow or other _was_
+happening in a manner evilly miraculous. It was her ignorance upon this
+main point of all that caused her to rely so continually upon the use of
+the regular forces, and of those forces in insufficient numbers. She
+could not but believe that a few trained soldiery were necessarily the
+masters of great civilian bodies; their uniforms were a powerful
+argument with her, and mere civilian bodies, however numerous, were
+always, in her conception, a dust of disparate and inchoate humanity.
+She believed there was nothing to attack or resist in popular numbers
+but the opinion, the fear, or the cupidity of the individual. In this
+error of judgment concerning the French people she was not peculiar: it
+is an error repeated over and over again by foreigners, and even by some
+native commentators when they seek to account for some national movement
+of the Gauls. The unlearning of it is the first lesson which those who
+would either administrate or resist the French should learn.
+
+In the matter of religion (which the reader may see in these pages to be
+of such moment in the revolutionary story), the queen was originally far
+more indifferent than her husband, though she observed a certain measure
+of personal practice. It was not until her heavy misfortunes came upon
+her that any degree of personal devotion appeared in her daily life,
+though it must be admitted that, by a sort of premonition of disaster,
+she turned to religion in the months immediately preceding the outbreak
+of the reform.
+
+It remains to describe the personal effect she had upon those who were
+in her immediate presence. Most of the French aristocracy she repelled.
+The same misfortune which made her unable to understand the French
+temperament as a whole divorced her from that particular corner of it
+which took the shape of French aristocratic tradition. She did not
+understand its stiffness, its exactitude, its brilliancy or its
+hardness: and she heartily disliked all four.
+
+On this account she produced on the great families of her court, and
+especially upon the women of them, an effect of vulgarity. Had she
+survived, and had her misfortunes not been of so tragic an intensity,
+the legend she would have left in French society would certainly have
+been one of off-handed carelessness, self-indulgence, and lack of
+dignity which have for the French of that rank the savour that a loud
+voice, a bad accent, an insufficient usage in the rules of daily
+conduct, leave upon what is left of a corresponding rank in England
+to-day.
+
+She was, on the other hand, easily deceived by the flattery of place
+seekers, and the great power which she wielded in politics just before
+the Revolution broke out made her, as it were, a sort of _butt_ of the
+politicians.
+
+They haunted her presence, they depended upon her patronage, and, at the
+same time, they secretly ridiculed her. Her carriage, which was designed
+to impress onlookers and did have that effect upon most foreigners,
+seemed to most of the French observers (of a rank which permitted them
+to approach her familiarly) somewhat theatrical and sometimes actually
+absurd. The earnestness which she displayed in several lines of conduct,
+and notably in her determined animosity to certain characters (as that
+of La Fayette, for instance), was of an open and violent sort which
+seemed to them merely brutal and unintelligent; her luxury, moreover,
+was noticed by the refined world of Versailles to be hardly ever of her
+own choosing, but nearly always practised in imitation of others.
+
+In connection with that trait of luxury, the reader must appreciate at
+the outset that it was grievously exaggerated by her contemporaries, and
+has been still more exaggerated by posterity. She was not a very
+frivolous, still less a dissipated, woman. She was woefully loose in
+tongue, but she was certainly virtuous.
+
+She gambled, but as the times went, and the supposed unlimited fortune
+of the Crown, her gambling was not often excessive; her expenditure upon
+jewellery and dress would be thought most moderate to-day in the case of
+any lady of our wealthier families. On the other hand, her whims were
+continual and as continually changing, especially in the earlier part of
+her life.
+
+Since that surrounding world of the Court which she misunderstood and
+which had no sympathy with her was ready to find some handle against
+her, that handle of dissipation was the easiest for them to seize; but
+the accusation was not a just one.
+
+Had fortune made her the wife of a poor man in a lower class of society,
+Marie Antoinette would have been a capable housewife: her abundant
+energy would have found a proper channel, and she was in no way by
+nature extravagant.
+
+She had a few very passionate and somewhat too sentimental friendships,
+some of which were returned, others of which their objects exploited to
+their own advantage. The two most famous were her friendship for the
+Princess de Lamballe and for Madame de Polignac. These moved her not
+infrequently to unwise acts of patronage which were immediately seized
+by the popular voice and turned against her. They were among the few
+weaknesses apparent in her general temper. They were certainly ill
+balanced and ill judged.
+
+She indulged also in a number of small and unimportant flirtations which
+might almost be called the routine of her rank and world; she had but
+one great affection in her life for the other sex, and it was most
+ardently returned. Its object was a Swedish noble of her own age, the
+very opposite of the French in his temper, romantically chivalrous,
+unpractical in the extreme, gentle, intensely reserved; his name Count
+Axel de Fersen. The affair remained pure, but she loved him with her
+whole heart, and in the last months of her tragedy this emotion must be
+regarded as the chief concern of her soul. They saw each other but very
+rarely, often they were separated for years; it was this, perhaps, which
+lent both glamour and fidelity to the strange romance.
+
+
+MIRABEAU
+
+Mirabeau, the chief of the “practical” men of the Revolution (as the
+English language would render the most salient point in their political
+attitude), needs a very particular examination. His influence upon the
+early part of the Revolution was so considerable, the effect of his
+death was so determinant and final, the speculation as to what _might_
+have happened had he survived is so fruitful, so entertaining, and so
+common, and the positive effect of his attitude upon the development of
+the Revolution after his death was so wide, that to misunderstand
+Mirabeau is in a large measure to misunderstand the whole movement; and
+Mirabeau has unfortunately been ill or superficially understood by many
+among now three generations of historians; for a comprehension of this
+character is not a matter for research nor for accumulated historic
+detail, but rather a task for sympathy.
+
+Mirabeau was essentially an artist, with the powers and the frailties
+which we properly associate with that term: that is, strong emotion
+appealed to him both internally and externally. He loved to enjoy it
+himself, he loved to create it in others. He studied, therefore, and was
+a master of, the material by which such emotion may be created; he
+himself yielded to strong emotion and sought it where it might be found.
+It is foolish alike to belittle and to exaggerate this type of
+temperament. Upon it or upon its admixture with other qualities is based
+the music, the plastic art, and in a large measure the permanent
+literature of the world. This aptitude for the enjoyment and for the
+creation in others of emotion clothes intellectual work in a manner
+which makes it permanent. This is what we mean when we say that _style_
+is necessary to a book; that a great civilisation may partly be judged
+by its architecture; that, as Plato says, music may be moral or immoral,
+and so forth. The artist, though he is not at the root of human affairs,
+is a necessary and proper ally in their development.
+
+When I say that Mirabeau was an artist I mean that wherever his energies
+might have found play he would there have desired to enjoy and to create
+enjoyment through some definite medium. This medium was in part
+literary, but much more largely oral expression. To be a _tribune_, that
+is the voice of great numbers, to persuade, nay, to please by his very
+accents and the very rhythm of his sentences, these things occupied the
+man; but he also brought into his art that without which no great art
+can exist: mere intellect.
+
+He believed in the main principles at least which underlay the
+revolutionary movement, he understood them and he was prepared to
+propagate them; but his power over men was not due to this conviction:
+his power over men was wholly that of the artist, and had he by some
+accident been engaged in maintaining the attack against democracy, he
+would have been nearly as famous as he became under the title of its
+defender. We must then always consider Mirabeau as an orator, though an
+orator endowed with a fine and clear intelligence and with no small
+measure of reasoned faith.
+
+Much else remains to be said of him.
+
+He was a gentleman; that is, he both enjoyed and suffered the
+consequences which attach to hereditary wealth and to the atmosphere
+that surrounds its expenditure. On this account, he being personally
+insufficiently provided with wealth, he was for ever in debt, and
+regarded the sums necessary to his station in life and to his large
+opportunities as things due to him, so to speak, from society. We are
+right when we say that he took bribes, but wrong if we imagine that
+those bribes bound him as they would bind a man meaner in character or
+less lucky in his birth. He stooped as gentlemen will to all manner of
+low intrigues, to obtain “the necessary and the wherewith”; that is,
+money for his _rôle_. But there was a driving power behind him, bound up
+with his whole character, which made it impossible for any such sums to
+control his diction or to make of such a man a mere advocate. He was
+never that dirtiest of political phenomena, the “party man.” He would
+never have been, had he been born a hundred years later and thrust into
+the nastiness of modern parliamentary life, “a parliamentary hand.”
+
+Mirabeau had behind him a certain personal history which we must read in
+connection with his temperament.
+
+He had travelled widely, he knew Englishmen and Germans of the wealthier
+classes well. The populace he knew ill even in his own country; abroad
+he knew it not at all. He had suffered from his father’s dislike of him,
+from the consequence of his own unbridled passions, also not a little
+from mere accidental misfortune. Capable of prolonged and faithful
+attachment to some woman, the opportunity for that attachment had never
+been afforded him until the last few months before his death. Capable of
+paying loyal and industrious service to some political system, no
+political system had chosen him for its servant. It is a fruitful matter
+of speculation to consider what he might have done for the French
+monarchy had Fate put him early at Court and given him some voice in the
+affairs of the French Executive before the Revolution broke out. As it
+was, the Revolution provided him with his opportunity merely because it
+broke down old barriers and conventions and was destructive of the
+framework of the State in which he lived. He was compelled to enter the
+Revolution as something of a destroyer, for by no other avenue could he
+be given his chance; but by nature he detested destruction. I mean
+(since this phrase is somewhat vague) he detested that spirit which will
+disendow a nation of certain permanent institutions serving definite
+ends, without a clear scheme of how those institutions should be
+replaced by others to serve similar ends. It was on this account that he
+was most genuinely and sincerely a defender of the monarchy: a permanent
+institution serving the definite ends of national unity and the
+repression of tendencies to oligarchy in the State.
+
+Mirabeau had none of the revolutionary Vision. In mind he was
+prematurely aged, for his mind had worked very rapidly over a very
+varied field of experience. The pure doctrine of democracy which was a
+religion to many of his contemporaries, with all the consequences of a
+religion, he had never thought of accepting. But certain consequences of
+the proposed reforms strongly appealed to him. He loved to be rid of
+meaningless and dead barriers, privileges which no longer corresponded
+to real social differences, old traditions in the management of trade
+which no longer corresponded to the economic circumstances of his time,
+and (this is the pivotal point) the fossils of an old religious creed
+which, like nearly all of his rank, he simply took for granted to be
+dead: for Mirabeau was utterly divorced from the Catholic Church.
+
+Much has been said and will be said in these pages concerning the
+religious quarrel which, though men hardly knew it at the time, cut
+right across the revolutionary effort, and was destined to form the
+lasting line of cleavage in French life. There will be repeated again
+and again what has already been written, that a reconciliation between
+the Catholic Church and the reconstruction of democracy was, though men
+did not know it, the chief temporal business of the time, and the reader
+of these pages will be made well acquainted in them with the degradation
+to which religion had fallen among the cultivated of that generation.
+But in the case of Mirabeau this absence of religion must be
+particularly insisted upon. It would no more have occurred to Mirabeau
+that the Catholic Faith had a future than it could occur to (let us say)
+an English politician of thirty years ago that the Irish might become a
+wealthy community or that an English Government might within his own
+lifetime find itself embarrassed for money. I use this parallel for the
+sake of strengthening my contention, but it is indeed a weak parallel.
+No contemporary parallel in our strange and rapidly changing times
+corresponds to the fixed certitude which permeated the whole of the end
+of the eighteenth century that the Catholic Faith was dead. Mirabeau had
+perhaps never engaged in his life in intimate conversation a single man
+who took the Catholic sacraments seriously, or suffered a moment’s
+anxiety upon the tenets of the creed.
+
+He knew, indeed, that certain women and a much smaller number of
+insignificant men wrapped themselves up in old practices of an odd,
+superstitious kind; he knew that great, dull areas of ignorant
+peasantry, in proportion to their poverty and isolation, repeated by
+rote the old formulae of the Faith. But of the Faith as a living thing
+he could have no conception.
+
+He saw on the one hand a clerical institution, economic in character,
+providing places and revenues for men of his own rank; he met those men
+and never discovered them to have any religion at all. He saw on the
+other hand a proposed society in which such a fossil, unjust and
+meaningless, must relinquish its grip upon those large revenues. But of
+the Faith as a social force, as a thing able to revive, he could have
+no conception. It would have seemed to him a mere folly to suggest that
+the future might contain the possibility of such a resurrection. The
+dissolution of the religious orders, which was largely his work, the
+civil constitution of the clergy which he presided over, were to him the
+most natural acts in the world. They were the mere sweeping away of a
+quantity of inorganic stuff which cumbered the modern State. He felt of
+them as we might feel of the purchase of waste spaces in our cities, of
+the confiscation of some bad landlords’ property in them. The Church
+served no kind of purpose, no one who counted believed in it, it was
+defended only by people who enjoyed large revenues from the survival of
+what had once been, but was now no longer, a living, social function.
+
+In everything of the Revolution which he understood Mirabeau was upon
+the side of caution. He was not oblivious to the conception of popular
+government, he was not even mistrustful of it, but he could not conceive
+of it save as acting through the established strength of the wealthier
+classes. Of military power he judged very largely through Prussian eyes.
+And in long and enthusiastic passages he described the Prussian army as
+invincible. Had he lived to see the military enthusiasm of the
+Republicans he would utterly have distrusted it. He favoured in his
+heart an aristocratic machinery of society--though not an aristocratic
+theory of the State; he was quite determined to preserve as a living
+but diminished national organ the traditional monarchy of France; he was
+curious upon a number of details which were present and close to his
+eyes: methods of voting, constitutional checks, commercial codes and the
+rest of it. The little equilibriums of diplomacy interested him also,
+and the watching of men immediately under his eye in the Parliament.
+
+It was in the Parliament that his whole activity lay, it was there that
+he began to guide the Revolution, it was his absence from the Parliament
+after his death that the Revolution most feels in the summer of 1791.
+
+This very brief sketch does not present Mirabeau to the reader. He can
+only be properly presented in his speeches and in the more rhetorical of
+his documents. It is probable as time proceeds that his reputation in
+this department will grow. His constitutional ideas, based as they were
+upon foreign institutions, and especially upon the English of that time,
+were not applicable to his own people and are now nearly forgotten: he
+was wrong upon English politics as he was wrong upon the German armies,
+but he had art over men and his personality endures and increases with
+time.
+
+
+LA FAYETTE
+
+The character of La Fayette has suffered chiefly from his own aloofness
+towards his contemporaries on the one hand, and from his rigid adherence
+to principle upon the other. Both these causes are clearly connected.
+The same quality in him which made him so tenacious of principle made
+him contemptuous of the run of men about him. Fundamentally, he was
+nearer the extreme Republicans than any other class, from the very fact
+of his possessing a clear political creed and a determination to follow
+it out to its logical consequence. But there was no chance of his
+comprehending the concrete side of the movement or the men engaged upon
+it, for his great wealth, inherited in very early life, had cut him off
+from experience. His moral fault was undoubtedly ambition. It was an
+ambition which worked in the void, as it were, and never measured itself
+with other men’s capacities or opportunities. He made no plans for
+advancement, not because he would have despised the use of intrigue in
+reason, but because he was incapable of working it. He was exceedingly
+attached to popularity, when it came he thought it his due; unpopularity
+in its turn seemed to him a proof of the vileness of those who despised
+him. He made himself too much the measure of his world.
+
+Undoubtedly a very great part in the moulding of his character proceeded
+from his experience in the United States of America. He was then at the
+most impressionable and formative period of human life, little more than
+a boy, or at least just entering early manhood. He had just married, he
+had just come into the administration of his vast fortune. At such a
+moment he took part in the victorious rebellion of the English colonies,
+and it may be imagined how powerful was the effect of this youthful
+vision upon the whole of the man’s future life; because there was no
+proletariat in the colonies, he never saw or comprehended the
+dispossessed classes of Paris--for that matter he never saw or
+comprehended the French peasantry upon his own lands; because a chance
+and volunteer soldiery had, under the peculiar conditions of the
+half-populated Atlantic seaboard in conjunction with the French fleet
+and with the aid of French money and arms, got the better of the small
+and heterogeneous forces of George III, he believed that a military
+nation like the French, in the midst of powerful enemies, could make
+something of an amateur civic force; because a certain type of ease in
+social relations was the ideal of many, perhaps of most, of those with
+whom he had served in America, he confused so simple and mundane an
+ideal with the fierce crusading blast and the sacred passion for
+equality which was stirring his own nation when his opportunity for
+leadership came.
+
+It may be said of La Fayette with justice that he never upon a single
+occasion did the right thing. It may also be said with justice that he
+never did politically any major thing for which his own conscience would
+later reproach him. It is noticeable that the Queen held him in
+particular odium. He had been a wealthy young noble about the Court, the
+friend of all her women friends, and his sympathy with the revolutionary
+movement at its inception therefore seemed to her nothing better than
+treason. There was also undoubtedly something in his manner which
+grievously repelled her; that it was self-sufficient we cannot doubt,
+and that it was often futile and therefore exasperating to women, events
+are sufficient to show. But Marie Antoinette’s violent personal
+antagonism towards La Fayette was not common, though several ardent
+spirits (Danton’s, for instance) shared it. The mass of those who came
+across La Fayette felt in connection with him a certain irritation or a
+certain contempt or a certain rather small and distant respect; he
+inspired no enthusiasms, and when he timidly attempted a rebellion
+against the new Government after the fall of the monarchy, no one would
+sacrifice himself or follow him.
+
+It may be affirmed of La Fayette that if he had not existed the
+Revolution would have pursued much the same course as it did, with this
+exception: that there would not have been formed a definitely middle
+class armed guard to provoke friction in Paris: the National Guard would
+have been more open to all ranks.
+
+In religion the man was anodyne, Catholic of course by baptism, but
+distinctly Protestant in morals and in general tone, in dogma (until the
+end of his life) freethinking, of course, like all his contemporaries.
+He was personally courageous but foolishly despised the duel. One
+anecdote out of many will help to fix his nature in the mind of the
+reader. Mirabeau, casting about as usual for aid in his indebtedness,
+sent urgently to him as to a fellow noble, a fellow politician and a
+fellow supporter of the Crown, begging a loan of £2000. La Fayette
+accorded him £1000.
+
+
+DUMOURIEZ
+
+Dumouriez presents a character particularly difficult for the modern
+Englishman to comprehend, so remote is it in circumstance and
+fundamentals from those of our time.
+
+Of good birth, but born in a generation when social differences had
+become a jest for intelligent and active men (and he was intelligent and
+active), courageous, with a good knowledge of his trade of soldiering,
+of rapid decision and excellent judgment where troops or _terrain_ were
+concerned, he was all at sea in the comprehension of men, and he bore no
+loyalty to the State.
+
+It is this last feature which will particularly surprise the English
+reader, for it is the singular and permanent advantage of oligarchic
+communities such as the British that they retain under any stress and
+show throughout the whole commonwealth the sense of the State. To betray
+the State, to act against its interests, to be imperfectly conscious of
+its existence, are crimes or weaknesses unknown to the citizens of an
+oligarchy, and a citizen of this country cannot easily conceive of them
+to-day. In democracies and despotisms, on the other hand, to forget
+one’s duty to the State, to be almost oblivious of its corporate
+existence, is a common weakness. There is here a compensation, and by
+just so much as despotism and democracy permit rapid, effective and
+all-compelling action on the part of the State, by just so much as they
+permit sudden and sometimes miraculous enthusiasms which save or which
+confirm a State, by that also do they lack the quiet and persistent
+consciousness of the State which oligarchy fosters and determines.
+
+Dumouriez’ excellence as a general can only be appreciated by those who
+have looked closely into the constitution of the forces which he was to
+command and the adversaries with whom he had to deal. It is the prime
+quality of a great commander that his mind stands ready for any change
+in circumstances or in the material to his hand, and even when we have
+allowed for the element of luck which is so considerable in military
+affairs, we must not forget that Dumouriez saved without disaster the
+wretched and disorganised bands, inchoate and largely mutinous as to
+their old units, worthless and amateur as to their new, which had to
+meet, in and behind the Argonne, the model army of Prussia.
+
+We must not forget that his plan for the invasion of the Low Countries
+was a just and sensible one, nor with what skill, after the inevitable
+defeat and retreat of the spring of 1793, he saved his command intact.
+
+As a subordinate to an armed executive, to the Government of Napoleon,
+for instance, the man would have been priceless. Nay, had circumstances
+permitted him to retain supreme command of civil as of military power,
+he would have made no bad dictator. His mere technical skill was so
+considerable as to make the large sums paid him by the English
+Government seem a good bargain even at our distance of time, and his
+plans for the defence of England and for the attack on Napoleon are a
+proof of the value at which he was estimated.
+
+But Dumouriez was quite unable to act under the special circumstances in
+which he happened to be placed at the moment of his treason. A mere
+ambition had carried him from intrigue to intrigue among the
+politicians. He despised them as an active and capable soldier was
+compelled to despise them; he was too old to share any of their
+enthusiasms, even had his temperament permitted him to entertain any
+vision, political or religious. He certainly never felt the least moral
+bond attaching him to what was in his eyes the chance anarchy of the
+last six months of French Government under which he served, and if he is
+to be branded with the title of traitor, then we must brand with the
+same title all that multitude of varied men who escaped from the country
+in the Emigration, who left it in disgust, or even who remained in
+France, but despaired of French fortunes, in the turmoil of 1793.
+
+It is perhaps a worthy excuse for Dumouriez’ failure to point out that
+he also was one of those whom the Court might have used had it known how
+to use men; but the Court had no such knowledge.
+
+
+DANTON
+
+The character of Danton has more widely impressed the world than that of
+any other revolutionary leader, because it contained elements
+permanently human, independent of the democratic theory of the time, and
+necessary neither to the support of that theory nor to the criticism of
+it.
+
+The character of Danton appeals to that sense in man which is interested
+in action, and which in the field of letters takes the form of drama.
+His vigour, his personal strength of mind and body, the individuality of
+his outline, arrest equally the man who loves the Revolution, and the
+man who hates it, and the man who is quite indifferent to its success or
+failure.
+
+It is on this very account that historians, especially foreign
+historians, have tended to misinterpret the man. Thus Carlyle, who has
+great intuition in the matter, yet makes him out farmer-like--which he
+certainly was not; Michelet, fascinated by his energy, presents him as
+something uncouth, and in general those who would describe Danton stand
+at a distance, as it were, where his loud voice and forcible gesture may
+best be appreciated; but a man to be seen truly must be seen in
+intimacy.
+
+Danton was essentially a compound of two powerful characters in man. He
+was amative or constructive, and at the same time he not only possessed
+but liked to exercise lucidity of thought. The combination is among the
+strongest of all those that go to build up human personalities.
+
+That which was amative and constructive in him, his virility if you
+will, brought him into close touch with reality; he knew and loved his
+own country, for instance, and infinitely preferred its happy survival
+to the full development of any political theory. He also knew and loved
+his fellow countrymen in detail and as persons; he knew what made a
+Frenchman weak and what made him strong. The vein of Huguenotry, though
+he did not know it for what it was, he disliked in his compatriots. On
+the other hand, the salt and freshness of the French was native to him
+and he delighted in it; the freedom of their expression, the noise of
+their rhetoric, and the military subsoil of them, were things to all of
+which he immediately responded. He understood their sort of laughter,
+nor was he shocked, as a man less national would have been, at their
+peculiarly national vices, and in especial their lapses into rage. It is
+this which must account for what all impartial judgment most blames in
+him, which is, his indifference to the cruelties, his absorbed interest
+in foreign and military affairs, at the moment of the Massacres of
+September.
+
+This touch with reality made him understand in some fashion (though only
+from without) the nature of the Germans. The foolish mania of their
+rulers for mere territorial expansion unaccompanied by persuasion or the
+spread of their ideas, he comprehended. The vast superiority of their
+armies over the disorganised forces of the French in 1792 he clearly
+seized: hence on the one hand his grasp of their foreign policy, and on
+the other his able negotiation of the retreat after Valmy. He also
+understood, however, and more profoundly, the rapid self-organisation of
+which his own countrymen were capable, and it was upon this knowledge
+that his determination to risk the continuance of the war reposed. It
+should be remarked that both in his military and in his quasi-military
+action he was himself endowed in a singular degree with that power of
+immediate decision which is characteristic of his nation.
+
+His lucidity of thought permitted him to foresee the consequences of
+many a revolutionary decision, and at the same time inclined him to a
+strong sympathy with the democratic creed, with the doctrine of
+equality, and especially with the remoulding of the national
+institutions--particularly his own profession of the law--upon simple
+lines. He was undoubtedly a sincere and a convinced revolutionary, and
+one whose doctrine more permeated him than did that of many of his
+contemporaries their less solid minds. He was not on that account
+necessarily republican. Had some accident called his genius into play
+earlier in the development of the struggle, he might well, like
+Mirabeau, with whom he presents so curious a parallel, have thought it
+better for the country to save the Monarchy.
+
+It must always be remembered that he was a man of wide culture and one
+who had achieved an early and satisfactory professional success; he was
+earning a sound income at the moment of his youthful marriage; he read
+English largely and could speak it. His dress was not inexpensive, and
+though somewhat disordered (as it often is with men of intense energy
+and constant gesture) it never gave an impression of carelessness or
+disarray. He had many and indifferent intellectual interests, and was
+capable, therefore, of intelligent application in several fields. He
+appreciated the rapid growth of physical science, and at the same time
+the complexity of the old social conditions--too widely different from
+contemporary truths.
+
+To religion he was, of course, like all men of that time, utterly
+indifferent, but unlike many of them he seized the precise proportion of
+its remaining effect upon certain districts and certain sections of the
+countrysides. There has been a tendency latterly to exaggerate the part
+which Freemasonry played in the launching of him; he was indeed a member
+of a masonic lodge, as were, for that matter, all the men, conspicuous
+or obscure, democratic or utterly reactionary, who appeared upon the
+revolutionary stage: probably the king, certainly old aristocrats like
+the father of Madame de Lamballe, and the whole host of the middle
+class, from men like Bailly to men like Condorcet. But it is reading
+history backwards, and imagining the features of our own time to have
+been present a century ago, to make of Masonry the determining element
+in his career.
+
+Danton failed and died from two combined causes: first his health gave
+way, secondly he obtruded his sanity and civilian sense into the heated
+fury and calculated martial law of the second year of the Republic. To
+both that fury and that calculation he was an obstacle; his opposition
+to the Terror lost him the support of the enthusiasts, but it was the
+interference which such a judgment made in the plans of the soldiers,
+and notably of Carnot, that determined his condemnation and death. He
+also, like Mirabeau, will undoubtedly increase as the years proceed,
+and, if only as a representative of the national temper, become more and
+more the typical figure of the Revolution in action.
+
+
+CARNOT
+
+Carnot, the predecessor of Napoleon, and the organising soldier of the
+early revolutionary wars, owed his power to backbone.
+
+He had not only a good solidity of brain, but an astonishing power of
+using it for hours and hours on end. This he owed perhaps to the
+excellent physical stock of which he came, the eldest of a very large
+family born to a notable lawyer in Burgundy.
+
+It was Carnot’s pride to hold a commission in the learned arms which
+were to transform at that moment the art of war: for as Bonaparte, his
+successor, was a gunner, so he was a sapper. His practice of exact
+knowledge in application, and the liberal education which his career
+demanded, further strengthened the strong character he had inherited.
+More important still, in his democratic views he was what none of the
+older officers had been, convinced and sincere. He had not come within
+the influence of the very wealthy or of the very powerful. He was
+young, and he knew his own mind not only in matters of political faith
+but in the general domain of philosophy, and in the particular one of
+military science.
+
+It has been said of him that he invented the revolutionary method of
+strategical concentration and tactical massing in the field. There is
+some truth in this; but the method would not have been possible had he
+not also invented, in company with Danton, and supported after Danton
+left power, a universal system of conscription.
+
+Carnot understood, as only trained soldiers can, the value of numbers,
+and _he depended with great sagacity upon the national temper_; thus at
+Wattignies, which was a victory directly due to his genius, though it
+was novel in him to have massed troops suddenly upon the right after a
+check on the extreme left of the field, yet the novelty would have been
+of no effect had he not comprehended that, with his young fellow
+countrymen as troopers, he could depend upon a charge delivered after
+thirty-six hours of vigil.
+
+He used not only the national but also the revolutionary temper in war.
+One of the chief features, for instance, of the revolutionary armies
+when they began to be successful, was the development of lines of
+skirmishers who pushed out hardily before the main bodies and were the
+first in the history of modern warfare to learn the use of cover. This
+development was spontaneous: it was produced within and by each unit,
+not by any general command. But Carnot recognised it at Hoondschoote
+and used it ever after.
+
+The stoical inflexibility of his temper is the noblest among the many
+noble characters of his soul. He never admitted the empire, and he
+suffered exile, seeming thereby in the eyes of the vilest and most
+intelligent of his contemporaries, Fouché, to be a mere fool. He was as
+hard with himself as with others, wholly military in the framework of
+his mind, and the chief controller of the Terror, which he used, as it
+was intended to be used, for the military salvation of the republic.
+
+
+MARAT
+
+Marat is easily judged. The complete sincerity of the enthusiast is not
+difficult to appreciate when his enthusiasm is devoted to a simple human
+ideal which has been, as it were, fundamental and common to the human
+race.
+
+Equality within the State and the government of the State by its general
+will: these primal dogmas, on the reversion to which the whole
+Revolution turned, were Marat’s creed.
+
+Those who would ridicule or condemn him because he held such a creed,
+are manifestly incapable of discussing the matter at all. The ridicule
+and condemnation under which Marat justly falls do not attach to the
+patent moral truths he held, but to the manner in which he held them. He
+did not only hold them isolated from other truths--it is the fault of
+the fanatic so to hold any truth--but he held them as though no other
+truths existed. And whenever he found his ideal to be in practice
+working at a friction or stopped dead, his unnourished and acute
+enthusiasms at once sought a scapegoat, discovered a responsible agent,
+and suggested a violent outlet, for the delay.
+
+He was often right when he denounced a political intriguer: he often
+would have sacrificed a victim not unjustly condemned, he often
+discovered an agent partially responsible, and even the violent
+solutions that he suggested were not always impracticable. But it was
+the prime error of his tortured mind that beyond victims, and sudden
+violent clutches at the success of democracy, there was nothing else he
+could conceive. He was incapable of allowing for imperfections, for
+stupidities, for the misapprehension of mind by mind, for the mere
+action of time, and for all that renders human life infinitely complex
+and infinitely adjustable.
+
+Humour, the reflection of such wisdom, he lacked;--“judgment” (as the
+English idiom has it) he lacked still more--if a comparative term may be
+attached to two such absolute vacuities.
+
+It must not be forgotten that so complete an absence of certain
+necessary qualities in the building up of a mind are equivalent to
+madness. Marat was not sane. His insanity was often generous, the creed
+to which it was attached was obvious enough, and in the eyes of most of
+us it is a creed to be accepted. But he worked with it as a madman who
+is mad on collectivism, let us say, or the rights of property, might
+work in our society, thinking of his one thesis, shrieking it and
+foaming at the mouth upon it, losing all control when its acceptance was
+not even opposed but merely delayed. He was valueless for the
+accomplishment of the ends of the Revolution. His doctrine and his
+adherence to it were so conspicuously simple and sincere that it is no
+wonder the populace made him (for a few months) a sort of symbol of
+their demand.
+
+For the rest, his face, like his character, was tortured; he carried
+with him a disease of the skin that irritated perpetually his wholly
+unbalanced temper.
+
+Some say (but one must always beware of so-called “Science” in the
+reading of history) that a mixture of racial types produced in him a
+perpetual physical disturbance: his face was certainly distorted and
+ill-balanced--but physical suggestions of that sort are very
+untrustworthy.
+
+Those who met him in the management of affairs thought him worthless
+enough; a few who knew him intimately loved him dearly; more who came
+across him continually were fatigued and irritated by his empty
+violence. He was, among those young revolutionaries, almost an elderly
+man; he was (this should never be forgotten) a distinguished scholar in
+his own trade, that of medicine; and he effected less in the Revolution
+than any man to whom a reputation of equal prominence happened to
+attach. He must stand responsible for the massacres of September.[2]
+
+
+ROBESPIERRE
+
+No character in the Revolution needs for its comprehension a wider
+reading and a greater knowledge of the national character than
+Robespierre’s.
+
+Upon no character does the comprehension of the period more depend, and
+none (for reasons I will give in a moment) has been more misunderstood,
+not only in the popular legend but in the weighed decisions of competent
+historians.
+
+So true is this that even time, which (in company with scholarship)
+usually redresses such errors, has not yet permitted modern authors to
+give a true picture of the man.
+
+The reason of so conspicuous a failure in the domain of history is this:
+that side by side with the real Robespierre there existed in the minds
+of all his contemporaries _save those who actually came across him in
+the junctions of government_, a legendary Robespierre--a Robespierre
+popularly imagined; and that this imaginary Robespierre, while it (or
+he) has proved odious to posterity, seemed, while he lived, a
+fascinating portrait to the man himself, and therefore he accepted it.
+For Robespierre, though just, lacked humility.
+
+The problem is an exceedingly subtle as well as an exceedingly difficult
+one. The historian, as he reads his authorities, has perpetually to
+distinguish between what is strong and what is weak evidence, and to
+recall himself, as he reads, to reality by a recollection of what
+Robespierre himself was. If he does not do so he falls at once into the
+legend; so powerful is that legend in the numbers that supported it, and
+so strongly did Robespierre himself support it by his own attitude. The
+legendary Robespierre may be described in a very few lines.
+
+Conceive a man sincerely convinced of the purest democratic theory, a
+man who cared for nothing else but the realisation of that theory, and
+who had never sacrificed his pursuit of its realisation in the State to
+any personal advantage whatsoever. This man, trusted by the people and
+at last idolised by them, becomes more and more powerful. He enters the
+governing body (the Committee of Public Safety), he is the master both
+within and without that body, and uses his mastery for establishing an
+ideal democracy which shall recognise the existence of God and repose
+upon civic virtue; and to establish this ideal he has recourse to
+terror. He finds that human defections from his ideal are increasingly
+numerous: he punishes them by death. The slaughter grows to be enormous;
+the best of Democrats are involved in it; at last it can be tolerated no
+longer, his immediate subordinates revolt against him in the Committee,
+he is outlawed, fails to raise a popular rebellion in his favour in
+Paris, is executed, and his system of terror falls to the ground.
+
+This picture, though purely legendary in tone, contains not only much
+truth, but truth of precisely that sort which conspires to make credible
+what is false in the whole.
+
+Robespierre was sincerely attached to the conception of an ideal
+democracy; he was incorruptible in the pursuit of it--and to be a
+politician and incorruptible amounts to something like what the Church
+calls heroic virtue in a man. He _did_ enter the Committee of Public
+Safety; he _did_ support the Terror, and when he was overthrown the
+Terror _did_ come to an end. Where, then, does the legend differ from
+the truth?
+
+In these capital points, which change it altogether: that Robespierre
+was not the chief influence in the Committee of Public Safety, _i.e._
+the all powerful executive of the Republic; that he did not desire the
+Terror, that he did not use it, that he even grew disgusted with it, and
+that, in general, he was never the man who governed France.
+
+It need hardly be pointed out how such a truth destroys such a legend.
+The whole nature of the twelve months between the summer of 1793 and the
+summer of 1794 must vary according as we regard them as Robespierrean or
+no: and they were not Robespierrean.
+
+What were they then, and why has the error that Robespierre was then
+master, arisen?
+
+Those months, which may be roughly called the months of the Terror,
+were, as we shall see later in this book, months of martial law; and the
+Terror was simply martial law in action--a method of enforcing the
+military defence of the country and of punishing all those who
+interfered with it or were supposed by the Committee to interfere with
+it.
+
+No one man in the Committee was the author of this system, but the one
+most determined to use it and the one who had most occasion to use it,
+was undoubtedly the military organiser, Carnot. Side by side with him
+one man, such as Barrère, supported it because it kept up the Committee
+of Public Safety which gave him all his political position. Another,
+such as Saint-Just, supported it because he believed that the winning of
+the war (in which he took an active part) would secure democracy
+everywhere and for ever. Another, such as Jean Bon, supported it from
+the old sectarian bitterness of the Huguenot. But of all men in the
+Committee, Robespierre supported the Terror least, and was most
+suspected by his colleagues--and increasingly suspected as time went
+on--of desiring to interfere with the martial system of the Terror and
+to modify it.
+
+Why, then, was Robespierre popularly identified with the Terror, and
+why, when he was executed, did the Terror cease?
+
+Robespierre was identified with the Terror because he was identified
+with the popular clamour of the time, with the extreme democratic
+feeling of the time, and its extreme fear of a reaction. Robespierre
+being the popular idol, had become also the symbol of a popular frenzy
+which was supposed to be ruling the country. But that frenzy was not
+ruling the country. What was ruling the country was the Committee of
+Public Safety, in which Carnot’s was the chief brain. Robespierre was
+indeed the idol of the populace; he was in no way the agent of their
+power or of any power.
+
+Why, when he fell, did the Terror cease if he were not its author?
+Because the Terror was acting under a strain; it was with the utmost
+difficulty that this absolute, intolerant and intolerable martial system
+could be continued when once the fear of invasion was removed. For some
+weeks before Robespierre fell the victories had begun to render it
+unnecessary. When the Committee saw to it that Robespierre should be
+outlawed by the Parliament, they knocked away, without knowing it, the
+keystone of their own policy; it was _his_ popular position which made
+_their_ policy possible. When he was destroyed they suddenly found that
+the Terror could no longer be maintained. Men had borne with it because
+of Robespierre, falsely imagining that Robespierre had desired it.
+Robespierre gone, men would not bear with it any more.
+
+Now, finally, if Robespierre himself had always felt opposed to the
+system of the Terror, why did he not take the lead in the popular
+reaction against it?
+
+He had his opportunity given him by Danton in December 1793--seven
+months before his own catastrophe. The Committee determined to put
+Danton out of the way because Danton, in appealing for mercy, was
+weakening the martial power of their government. Robespierre might have
+saved Danton: he preferred to let him be sacrificed. The reason was that
+Robespierre wrongly believed popularity to lie upon the side of the
+Terror and against Danton; he was in no way a leader (save in rhetoric
+and in rhetoric directed towards what men already desired), and his own
+great weakness or vice was the love of popular acclaim.
+
+Later on, in the summer of 1794, when he actually began to move against
+the Terror, he only did so privately. He so misread men that he still
+believed the Terror to be popular, and dared not lose his popular name.
+A man by nature as sincere as crystal, he was tempted to insincerity in
+this major thing, during the last months of his life, and he yielded
+completely to the temptation. For the sake of his memory it was
+deplorable, and deplorable also for history. His weakness has been the
+cause of an historical error as grave as any that can be discovered in
+modern letters, and at the same time has wholly maligned him to
+posterity.
+
+A factor in Robespierre’s great public position which is often forgotten
+is the great effect of his speeches. That men should still debate, after
+so vast a change in taste, whether those speeches were eloquent or no,
+is a sufficient proof of their effect. He spoke in an ordered and a
+reasoned manner, which bored the fine spirits of the earlier
+Parliaments, but well suited the violent convictions of the later
+Revolution. His phraseology, his point of view, just jumped with that of
+his audience. He could express what they felt, and express it in terms
+which they knew to be exact, and which they believed to be grand. For
+his manner was never excessive, and those excessive men who heard him in
+an excessive mood, were proud to know that their violence could be
+expressed with so much scholarship and moderated skill.
+
+By birth he was of the smaller gentry, though poor. It is an indication
+of his character that he had thought of taking Orders, and that in early
+youth literary vanity had affected him. He has left no monument; but
+from the intensity of his faith and from his practice of it, his name,
+though it will hardly increase, will certainly endure.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[2] There is but one trustworthy monograph on Marat. It will interest
+the student as a proof of the enthusiasm which Marat can inspire. It is
+by Champfleury.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+THE PHASES OF THE REVOLUTION
+
+
+I
+
+_From May 1789 to 17th of July 1789._
+
+The first point which the reader must hold in the story of the
+Revolution is the quarrel between its first Parliament and the Crown.
+
+Of what nature was that quarrel?
+
+It was not, as it has sometimes been represented, a simple issue between
+privilege and a democratic demand for equality, or between traditional
+organs of government and a democratic demand for self-government by the
+nation. To imagine this is to read history backwards, and to see in the
+untried conditions of 1789 the matured results which only appeared after
+years of struggle.
+
+The prime issue lay between legality and illegality.
+
+The forms of French law and all the inherited method of French
+administration demanded a certain form of authority; a centralised
+government of unlimited power. The King was absolute. From him proceeded
+in the simplest fashion whatever will was paramount in the State. He
+could suspend a debtor’s liabilities, imprison a man without trial,
+release him without revision of his case, make war or peace, and in
+minor details such as the discipline and administration of public
+bodies, the power of the Crown was theoretically and legally equally
+supreme. It was not exercised as the enormous power of modern government
+is exercised, it did not perpetually enter into every detail of the life
+of the poor in the way in which the power of a modern English Government
+enters into it; it is in the very nature of such autocratic power that,
+while unlimited in theory, it is compelled to an instinctive and
+perpetual self-limitation lest it break down; and autocracy maybe
+compared in this to aristocracy, or more properly speaking to oligarchy,
+the government of a few: for where a few govern they know that their
+government reposes upon public opinion or public tolerance; they are
+very careful not to exceed certain limits the transgression of which
+would weaken the moral foundation of their power; they welcome allies,
+they recruit themselves perpetually from other classes in the community.
+
+In the same way an autocracy always has the desire to be popular. Its
+strokes affect the great and the powerful, and are hardly ever aimed at
+the mass of the community. The intellectual, the wealthy, the privileged
+by birth, fortune or exceptional personal powers, are suspect to it. As
+for the mass of men an Autocracy attempts to represent and, in a certain
+sense, to obey them.
+
+Now the French autocracy (for it was no less) erred not in the will to
+act thus popularly in the early part of the Revolution, but in the
+_knowledge_ requisite for such action.
+
+The Parliament, shortly after it had met in May 1789, began to show, in
+the Commons part of it, the working of that great theory which had
+leavened all France for a generation. The Commons said, “We are the
+people; at once the symbols of the people, the direct mandatory servants
+of the people, and” (though this was a fiction) “we are of the people in
+our birth and origin. We are therefore the true sovereign; and the
+prince, the head of the Executive, is no more than an organ of
+government, morally less in authority than ourselves, who are the true
+source of government.” This attitude, which was at the back of all men’s
+minds, and which was concentrated, of course, in the Commons, clashed
+with legality. It could not express itself in the terms of law, it could
+not act save in a fashion which should be, in the strictest sense of the
+word, _revolutionary_.
+
+Now the Crown, on the whole national in sympathy, and comprehending this
+new theory well (I mean by the Crown the general body of advisers round
+the King, and the King himself), was offended at the illegality not of
+the theory or of the pretence (for these were not illegal), but of the
+action of the Commons. And this comparatively small source of friction
+was the irritant upon which we must fix as the cause of what followed.
+The Nobles, by 108 to 47, decided, the day after the opening of the
+Parliament, to sit as a separate House. The Clergy, by a much smaller
+majority, 133 to 114, came to the same decision, but carefully qualified
+it as provisional. The Commons declared that the hall in which they met
+should be regarded as the hall of the National Assembly, and later made
+it their business (to quote the phrase of the motion) “to attempt to
+unite in common all the deputies of the nation in that hall and never to
+abandon the principle of voting individually” (that is, not by separate
+Houses) “or the principle that the States-General formed one undivided
+body.” This attitude was qualified and compromised with to some extent
+in the days that followed, but it held the field, and while the Commons
+were insisting upon this attitude as a moral right, the Nobles countered
+by a reaffirmation of the right of each House to a separate judgment
+upon public matters. The Nobles were standing upon legal precedent: the
+Commons had nothing in their favour but political theory; if the orders
+sat all together and voted as individuals, the Commons, who were in
+number equal to the two other Houses combined, would, with their noble
+and clerical sympathisers, have a majority.
+
+Now the King and his advisers, notably Necker, who still had great
+weight, were by no means “Impossiblists” in this struggle. They desired
+an understanding, and through the last days of May and the first days of
+June the attempt at an understanding was made. But the attempt dragged,
+and as it seemed that nothing would come of it, on the 10th of June
+Sièyes moved that the Assembly should “verify its powers” (a French
+phrase for admitting and registering the presence of each member as
+acceptable to the whole body, and to the theory of its Constitution),
+and that this should be done “in the case of each member” (meaning
+members of all the three orders and _not_ of the Commons alone),
+“whether the members of the two privileged Houses were present or
+absent.” The roll was called and completed upon the 15th. None of the
+nobles attended the common roll-call, three of the parish clergy (they
+were from the province of Poitou) did so, and thus admitted the right of
+the Commons so to act. A dozen of their colleagues joined them later;
+but that was all.
+
+So far there had been no action which could be precisely called illegal
+or revolutionary. The Commons had affirmed a right based upon a
+political theory which the vast majority of the nation admitted, and the
+legal depositary of power, the King, had not yet reproved. One may draw
+a parallel and compare the action of the Commons so far to some action
+which a trade union, for instance, may take in England; some action the
+legality of which is doubtful but upon which the courts have not yet
+decided.
+
+It was upon the 17th of June, two days after the completion of the
+roll-call by the Commons, that the first revolutionary act took place,
+and the student of the Revolution will do well to put his finger upon
+that date and to regard it not indeed as the moral origin of the
+movement, but as the precise moment from which the Revolution, as a
+Revolution, begins to act. For upon that day the Commons, though in fact
+only joined by a handful of the Clerical House, and by none of the
+nobility, _declared themselves to be the National Assembly_; that is,
+asserted the fiction that Clergy, Nobles and Commons were all present
+and voted together. To this declaration they added a definite act of
+sovereignty which trespassed upon and contradicted the legal authority
+of the Crown. True, the motion was only moved and passed
+“provisionally,” but the words used were final, for in this motion the
+self-styled “National Assembly” declared that “provisionally” taxes and
+dues might be raised upon the old authority but that only until the
+National Assembly should disperse; “after which day”--and here we reach
+the sacramental formula, as it were, of the crisis--“the National
+Assembly _wills and decrees_ that all taxes and dues of whatever nature
+which have not been specifically formally and freely granted by the said
+Assembly shall cease in every province of the kingdom no matter how such
+that province may be administered.” (This is an allusion to the fact
+that in some provinces there was a representative machinery, in others
+nothing but the direct action of the Crown.) “The Assembly declares that
+when it has _in concert with_ (not in obedience to) the King laid down
+the principle of a national re-settlement, it will busy itself with the
+examination and ordering of the public debt.” Etc., etc.
+
+Such was the point of departure after which sovereignty was at issue
+between the Crown and the States-General; the Crown a known institution
+with its traditions stretching back to the Roman Empire, and the
+National Assembly a wholly new organ according to its own claims, basing
+its authority upon a political theory stretching back to the very
+origins of human society.
+
+Two days later, on the 19th of June, the “National Assembly,” still only
+self-styled and possessing only the powers which it had ascribed to
+itself beyond all forms of law, set to work, nominated its committees,
+and assumed the sovereignty thus claimed. The Nobles protested (notably
+the Bishops), and the King, on the advice of Barentin, keeper of the
+Seals, determined upon immediate resistance. The excuse was taken that
+the Royal Session, as it was called, in which the King would declare his
+will, needed the preparation of the hall, and when the Commons presented
+themselves at the door of that hall on the next day, the 20th, they
+found it shut against them. They adjourned to a neighbouring tennis
+court, and took a solemn corporate oath that they would not separate
+without giving France a Constitution. They continued to meet, using a
+church for that purpose, but on the 23rd the Royal Session was opened
+and the King declared his will.
+
+The reader must especially note that even in this crisis the Crown did
+not offer a complete resistance. There was an attempt at compromise.
+Necker would have had a more or less complete surrender, the Queen and
+her set would have preferred an act of authority which should have
+annulled all that the Commons had done. What actually happened was a
+permission by the Crown that the three Orders should meet as one body
+for certain common interests, but should preserve the system of voting
+as separate Houses in “all that might regard the ancient and
+constitutional rights of the three Orders, the Constitution to be given
+to future Parliaments, feudal property, and the rights and prerogatives
+of the two senior Houses.” As a mere numerical test, such a conclusion
+would have destroyed the power of the Commons, since, as we have seen,
+numbers were the weapon of the Commons, who were equal to the two other
+Houses combined, and if all sat together would, with the Liberal
+members of the clergy and the nobility, be supreme. But apart from this
+numerical test, the act of sovereignty affirmed by the National Assembly
+when it declared itself, and itself only, competent to vote taxes, was
+annulled. Moreover, the royal declaration ended with a command that on
+the next day the three Orders should meet separately.
+
+Now at this critical point the King was disobeyed. The current of the
+time chose the revolutionary bed, and as it began to flow deepened and
+confirmed its course with every passing day and event. Already the
+majority of the clergy had joined the National Assembly when it had
+affirmed its right to sit in spite of the check of the 20th of June.
+There was a half-hour on that decisive day of the Royal Session, the
+23rd of June, when armed force might have been used for the arrest and
+dispersion of the Deputies. They declared themselves inviolable and
+their arrest illegal, but there was, of course, no sanction for this
+decree. As a fact, not a corporal’s file was used against them. The next
+day, the 24th, the majority of the clergy again joined the Commons in
+their session (in flat defiance of the King’s orders), and on the 25th,
+forty-seven of the nobles followed their example. The King yielded, and
+on the 27th, two days later, ordered the three Houses to meet together.
+
+The National Assembly was now legally constituted, and set out upon its
+career. The Crown, the old centre of authority, had abandoned its
+position, and had confirmed the Revolution, but in doing so it had acted
+as it were in contradiction with itself. It had made technically legal
+an illegality which destroyed its own old legal position, but it had
+done so with ill-will, and it was evident that some counter-stroke would
+be attempted to restore the full powers of the Crown.
+
+At this point the reader must appreciate what forces were face to face
+in the coming struggle. So far, the illegal and revolutionary act of the
+17th of June, the Royal Session which replied to that act upon the 23rd,
+the King’s decree which yielded to the Commons upon the 27th, had all of
+them been but words. If it came to action, what physical forces were
+opposed?
+
+On the side of the Crown was the organised armed force which it
+commanded. For it must never be forgotten that the Crown was the
+Executive, and remained the Executive right on to the capture of the
+palace three years later, and the consummation of the Revolution on the
+10th of August, 1792. On the side of the National Assembly was without
+doubt the public opinion of the country (but that is not a force that
+can be used under arms), and, what was much more to the point, the
+municipal organisation of France.
+
+Space forbids a full description of the origins and strength of the
+French municipal system; it is enough to point out that the whole of
+Gallic civilisation, probably from a moment earlier than Cæsar’s
+invasion, and certainly from the moment when Roman rule was paramount
+in Gaul, was a _municipal_ one. It is so still. The countrysides take
+their names mainly from their chief towns. The towns were the seats of
+the bishops, whose hierarchy had preserved whatever could be preserved
+of the ancient world. In the towns were the colleges, the guilds, the
+discussion and the corporations which built up the life of the nation.
+The chief of these towns was Paris. The old systems of municipal
+government, corrupt and varied as they were, could still give the towns
+a power of corporate expression. And even where that might be lacking it
+was certain that some engine would be found for expressing municipal
+action in a crisis of the sort through which France was now passing. In
+Paris, for instance, it was seen when the time came for physical force
+that the College of Electors, who had chosen the representatives for
+that city, were willing to act at once and spontaneously as a municipal
+body which should express the initiative of the people. It was the
+towns, and especially Paris, prompt at spontaneous organisation, ready
+to arm, and when armed competent to frame a fighting force, which was
+the physical power behind the Assembly.
+
+What of the physical power behind the King? His power was, as we have
+said, the Regular Armed forces of the country: the army. But it is
+characteristic of the moment that only a part of that armed force could
+be trusted. For an army is never a mere weapon: it consists of living
+men; and though it will act against the general opinion of its members
+and will obey orders long after civilians would have broken with the
+ties of technical and legal authority, yet there is for armies also a
+breaking point in those ties, and the Crown, I repeat, could not use as
+a whole the French-speaking and French-born soldiery. Luckily for it, a
+very great proportion of the French army at that moment consisted of
+foreign mercenaries.
+
+Since the position was virtually one of war, we must consider what was
+the strategical object of this force. Its object was Paris, the chief of
+the towns; and round Paris, in the early days of July, the mercenary
+regiments were gathered from all quarters. That military concentration
+once effected, the gates of the city held, especially upon the north and
+upon the west, by encamped regiments and by a particularly large force
+of cavalry (ever the arm chosen for the repression of civilians), the
+Crown was ready to act.
+
+On the 11th of July, Necker, who stood for Liberal opinions, was
+dismissed. A new ministry was formed, and the counter-revolution begun.
+What followed was the immediate rising of Paris.
+
+The news of Necker’s dismissal reached the masses of the capital (only
+an hour’s ride from Versailles) on the afternoon of the 12th, Sunday.
+Crowds began to gather; an ineffectual cavalry charge in one of the
+outer open spaces of the city only inflamed the popular enthusiasm, for
+the soldiers who charged were German mercenary soldiers under the
+command of a noble. Public forces were at once organised, arms were
+commandeered from the armourers’ shops, the Electoral College, which had
+chosen the members of the Assembly for Paris, took command at the Guild
+Hall, but the capital point of the insurrection--what made it
+possible--was the seizure of a great stock of arms and ammunition,
+including cannon, in the depot at the Invalides.
+
+With such resources the crowd attacked, at the other end of the city, a
+fortress and arsenal which had long stood in the popular eye as the
+symbol of absolute monarchy, the Bastille. With the absurdly
+insufficient garrison of the Bastille, its apparent impregnability to
+anything the mob might attempt, the supposed but doubtful treason of its
+governor in firing upon those whom he had admitted to parley, we are not
+here concerned. The Bastille was rushed, after very considerable efforts
+and an appreciable loss in killed and wounded. By the evening of that
+day, Tuesday, the 14th of July, 1789, Paris had become a formidable
+instrument of war. The next news was the complete capitulation of the
+King.
+
+He came on the morrow to the National Assembly, promising to send away
+the troops; he promised to recall Necker, a municipal organisation was
+granted to the city, with Bailly for its first mayor, and--a point of
+capital importance--an armed militia dependent upon that municipality
+was legally formed, with La Fayette at its head. On the 17th Louis
+entered Paris to consummate his capitulation, went to the Guild Hall,
+appeared in the tricoloured cockade, and the popular battle was won.
+
+It behoves us here to consider the military aspect of this definitive
+act from which the sanction of the Revolution, the physical power behind
+it, dates.
+
+Paris numbered somewhat under a million souls: perhaps no more than
+600,000: the number fluctuated with the season. The foreign mercenary
+troops who were mainly employed in the repression of the popular feeling
+therein, were not sufficient to impose anything like a siege. They could
+at the various gates have stopped the provisioning of the city, but then
+at any one of those separate points, any one of their detachments upon a
+long perimeter more than a day’s march in circumference would certainly
+have been attacked and almost as certainly overwhelmed by masses of
+partially armed civilians.
+
+Could the streets have been cleared while the ferment was rising? It is
+very doubtful. They were narrow and tortuous in the extreme, the area to
+be dealt with was enormous, the tradition of barricades not forgotten,
+and the spontaneous action of that excellent fighting material which a
+Paris mob contains, had been quite as rapid as anything that could have
+been effected by military orders.
+
+The one great fault was the neglect to cover the Invalides, but even had
+the Invalides not been looted, the stock of arms and powder in the city
+would have been sufficient to have organised a desperate and prolonged
+resistance. The local auxiliary force (of slight military value, it is
+true), the “French Guards,” as they were called, were wholly with the
+people. And in general, the Crown must be acquitted of any considerable
+blunder on the military side of this struggle. It certainly did not fail
+from lack of will.
+
+The truth is (if we consider merely the military aspect of this military
+event) that in dealing with large bodies of men who are (a) not
+previously disarmed, (b) under conditions where they cannot be
+dispersed, and (c) capable by a national tradition or character of some
+sort of rapid, spontaneous organisation, the issue will always be
+doubtful, and the uncertain factor (which is the tenacity, decision and
+common will of the civilians, to which soldiers are to be opposed) is
+one that varies within the very widest limits.
+
+In massing the troops originally, the Crown and its advisers estimated
+that uncertain factor at far too low a point. Even contemporary educated
+opinion, which was in sympathy with Paris, put it too low. That factor
+was, as a fact, so high that no armed force of the size and quality
+which the Crown then disposed of, could achieve its object or hold down
+the capital.
+
+As for the absurd conception that any body of men in uniform, however
+small, could always have the better of civilian resistance, however
+large and well organised, it is not worthy of a moment’s consideration
+by those who interest themselves in the realities of military history.
+It is worthy only of the academies.
+
+So ends the first phase of the Revolution. It had lasted from the
+opening of the States-General in May to the middle of July 1789.
+
+
+II
+
+_From the 17th of July 1789 to the 6th of Oct. 1789._
+
+We have seen the military conditions under which the attempt at an armed
+counter-revolution failed. There follows a short phase of less than
+three months, whose character can be quickly described.
+
+It was that moment of the Revolution in which ideas had the freest play,
+in which least had been done to test their application, and most scope
+remained for pure enthusiasm. That is why we find in the midst of that
+short phase the spontaneous abandonment of the feudal rights by the
+nobility. And that is why the violent uprisings all over France
+continued. It is the period in which the Declaration of the Rights of
+Man and of the Citizen, a document which may fittingly stand side by
+side with the Declaration of Independence (for together they form the
+noblest monuments of our modern origins), was promulgated. In the same
+period were the elements of the future Constitution rapidly debated and
+laid down, and notably that national policy of a _Single Chamber_ which
+the modern French have imprudently abandoned. In that same period,
+however, appeared, and towards the close of it, another form of
+resistance on the part of the Crown and of those who advised the Crown.
+The King hesitated to accept the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and
+similarly hesitated to promulgate the Decree of the 4th of August in
+which the nobility had abandoned their feudal dues. It would be foolish
+to exaggerate the military aspect of what followed. Louis did call in
+troops, but only in numbers sufficient for personal defence, and we can
+hardly believe that he intended anything more than to police the
+surroundings of his throne. But the brigade (for it was no more, nor was
+it of full strength) which he summoned was sufficient to kindle
+suspicion; and the determinedly false position of the Queen (who all her
+life was haunted by the idea that the regular soldiers, especially if
+they were well dressed and held themselves rigidly, were a sort of
+talisman) provoked an explosion. A feast was given in which the officers
+of the Regiment of Flanders, which had just reached Versailles, were
+entertained by the officers of the Guard. It was made the occasion for a
+good deal of drunkenness and a violent Royalist manifestation, at which
+the Queen was present, which she approved, and which some thought she
+had designed.
+
+The failure of the harvest to relieve the scarcity of bread in Paris,
+the permanent state of alarm in which Paris had remained, and of
+suspicion for the safety of the Parliament which it continually
+entertained since the early part of the summer, needed no more to
+provoke an outbreak. It is an error to imagine that that outbreak was
+engineered or that such a movement could have been factitious. Great
+masses of women (in whom the movement originated), and after them a
+whole flood of the populace, marched upon Versailles.
+
+There was no direct attack upon the palace, though the palace feared
+such an attack at any moment. The troops present were sufficient to
+prevent violence.
+
+La Fayette followed in the night at the head of his new Parisian militia
+force.
+
+Too much reliance was placed upon the military character of this force;
+the palace was invaded in the early morning, an attempt to assassinate
+the Queen on the part of the mob failed, though two of the Guards were
+killed. And after scenes whose violence and apparent anarchy only masked
+the common determination of the populace, the royal family were
+compelled to abandon Versailles and to take up their place in the
+Tuileries; the Parliament followed them to Paris, and neither King nor
+Parliament returned again to the suburban palace.
+
+This recapture of the King by Paris is much more significant than a mere
+impulse of the mob. The King in Paris, the unison of his person with the
+capital city, had been the very sacrament of French life for century
+upon century. It was precisely a hundred years since Paris had been
+abandoned by Louis XIV for Versailles. The significance of that error
+may be understood by the citizens of an aristocratic country if they
+will imagine the abandonment of their countrysides by the squires, or,
+again, the future historian of our modern industrial civilisation may
+understand it when he describes how the wealthy manufacturers abandoned
+the cities in which their wealth was made, to dwell outside and apart
+from the living interests of their people.
+
+With the return of the royal family to Paris, and with the presence of
+the Assembly within the heart of the national life, one prime factor
+appears, which is this: that while the National Assembly proceeds step
+by step to what it imagines to be a complete attainment of democracy
+(though how partial will soon be seen), the resistance of the Crown is
+transformed into a resistance of the mere Court. The attack on the
+Revolution becomes a personal thing. The King is still wholly the chief
+of the Executive; he can give what commands he wills to the armed force;
+he controls receipts and payments; he is for all active purposes the
+Government. But he is no longer considering that prime function of his,
+nor even using it to restore his old power. He acts henceforward as an
+individual, and an individual in danger. The Queen, whose view of the
+Revolution and its dangers had always been a purely personal one, is the
+directing will in the court-group from this moment, October 1789,
+onwards; and the chief preoccupation of that group for eighteen months
+is personal safety. Surrounded by the pomp of the Tuileries and amid all
+the external appearances of a power still greater than that of any other
+monarch in Europe, Louis and his wife and their very few immediate and
+devoted friends and followers thought of the palace as a prison, and
+never considered their position save as one intolerable.
+
+
+III
+
+_From October 1789 to June 1791._
+
+It is this which must explain all that followed in the succeeding phase,
+which lasted from these early days of October 1789 to the last week of
+June 1791. Throughout that period of twenty-one months the King is
+letting the Revolution take its course, with the fixed idea of thwarting
+it at last by flying from it, and perhaps conquering it by foreign aid.
+But even this policy is not consecutively followed. The increasing
+repugnance of the Court and of the King himself to the revolutionary
+development forbids a consecutive and purely hypocritical acceptation of
+the National Assembly’s decrees.
+
+Deliberate and calculated intrigue might yet have saved the monarchy and
+the persons of the royal family. Oddly enough, an ally in the struggle,
+an excellent intriguer, a saviour of the monarchical institution and a
+true defender of the royal persons was at hand: it was at hand in the
+person of Mirabeau.
+
+This man had more and more dominated the Assembly; he had been
+conspicuous from its first opening days; he had been its very voice in
+the resistance to the King at Versailles; it was he who had replied to
+the Master of Ceremonies on June 23, that the Commons would not
+disperse; it was he who had moved that the persons of the Commons were
+privileged against arrest. He was of a family noble in station and
+conspicuous before the people by the wealth and eccentricities of its
+head, Mirabeau’s father. He himself was not unknown even before the
+Revolution broke out, for his violence, his amours, his intelligence and
+his debts. He was a few years older than the King and Queen: his
+personality repelled them; none the less his desire to serve them was
+sincere; and it was his plan, while retaining the great hold over the
+National Assembly which his rhetoric and his use of men furnished him,
+to give to the Court and in particular to the Queen, whom he very
+greatly and almost reverently admired, such secret advice as might save
+them. This advice, as we shall see in a moment, tended more and more to
+be an advice for civil war. But Mirabeau’s death at the close of the
+phase we are now entering (on April 2, 1791), and the increasing fears
+of the King and Queen, between them prevented any statesmanship at all;
+they prevented even the statesmanship of intrigue; and the period
+became, on the side of the Revolution, a rapid and uncontrolled
+development of its democratic theory (limited by the hesitation of the
+middle class), and on the side of the Court an increasing demand for
+mere physical security and flight, coupled with an increasing
+determination to return, and to restore as a popular monarchy the scheme
+of the past.
+
+The eighteen months that intervened between the fixing of the Assembly
+and the royal family in Paris, and the death of Mirabeau, are remarkable
+for the following points, which must all be considered abreast, as it
+were, if we are to understand their combined effects.
+
+1. This was the period in which the constructive work of the National
+Assembly was done, and in which the whole face of the nation was
+changed. The advising bodies of lawyers called “Parliaments” were
+abolished (eleven months after the King had come to Paris), the Modern
+Departments were organised in the place of the old provinces, the old
+national and provincial militia was destroyed; but (as it is very
+important to remember) _the old regular army was left untouched_. A new
+judicature and new rules of procedure were established. A new code
+sketched out in the place of “Common Law” muddle. In a word, it was the
+period during which most of those things which we regard as
+characteristic of the revolutionary work were either brought to their
+theoretic conclusion or given at least their main lines.
+
+2. Among these constructive acts, but so important that it must be
+regarded separately, was the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which
+will be dealt with at length further in this book; it was the principal
+work (and the principal error) of that year and a half.
+
+3. The general spirit of the Revolution, more difficult to define than
+its theory but easy to appreciate as one follows the development of the
+movement, increased regularly and enormously in intensity during the
+period. The power of the King, who was still at the head of the
+Executive, acted more and more as an irritant against public opinion,
+and--
+
+4. That public opinion began to express itself in a centralised and
+national fashion, of which the great federation of the 14th of July
+1790, in Paris, on the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, was the
+nucleus and also the symbol. This federation consisted in delegates from
+the National Guard throughout the country, and it was of this capital
+importance: that it introduced into the revolutionary movement a feature
+of soldiery which made even the regular troops for the most part
+sympathetic with the enthusiasm of the time.
+
+5. These eighteen months were, again, filled with the movement of the
+“Emigration.” That movement was, of course, the departure of many of the
+more prominent of the privileged orders and of a crowd of humbler
+nobles, as also of a few ecclesiastics, from France. The King’s brothers
+(one fled at the beginning of the emigration, the younger, the Comte
+d’Artois; the other, the elder, at its close, and coincidently with the
+flight of the King) must especially be noted in this connection; they
+formed in company with the more notable of the other emigrants a regular
+political body, which intrigued continually beyond the frontiers, in
+Germany and Italy, against the Revolution. And--
+
+6. It was therefore during these months that the ultimate origins of the
+large European war must be found. The armed body of the emigrants under
+Condé formed an organised corps upon the Rhine, and though there was not
+yet the semblance of an armed movement in Europe besides theirs against
+the French, yet by the _émigrés_, as they were called, were sown the
+seeds the harvest of which was to be the war of 1792.
+
+I have said that during these months in which most of the constructive
+work of the Revolution was done, in which the seeds of the great war
+were sown, and in which the absolute position of the Crown as the head
+of the Executive was increasingly irritating to the public opinion of
+the French, and especially of the capital, Mirabeau was the one man who
+might have preserved the continuity of national institutions by the
+preservation of the monarchy. He received money from the Court and in
+return gave it advice. The advice was the advice of genius, but it was
+listened to less and less in proportion as it was more and more
+practical. Mirabeau also favoured the abandonment of Paris by the King,
+but he would have had the King leave Paris openly and with an armed
+force, withdraw to a neighbouring and loyal centre such as Compiègne,
+and thence depend upon the fortunes of civil war.
+
+Meanwhile the Queen was determined upon a very different and much more
+personal plan, into which no conception of statesmanship entered. She
+was determined to save the persons of her children, herself and her
+husband. Plans of flight were made, postponed and re-postponed. It was
+already agreed at the Court that not Mirabeau’s plan should be followed,
+but this plan of mere evasion. The army which Bouillé commanded upon the
+frontier was to send small detachments along the great road from Paris
+to the east; the first of these were to meet the royal fugitives a
+little beyond Chalôns and to escort their carriage eastward; each armed
+detachment in the chain, as the flight proceeded, was to fall in for its
+defence, until, once the town of Varennes was reached, the King and
+Queen should be in touch with the main body of the army.
+
+What was then intended to follow remains obscure. It is fairly certain
+that the King did not intend to pass the frontier but to take refuge at
+Montmédy. The conflict that would have inevitably broken out could
+hardly have been confined to a civil war: foreign armies and the German
+mercenaries in the French service were presumably to be organised, in
+case the flight succeeded, for a march upon Paris and the complete
+restoration of the old state of affairs.
+
+Had Mirabeau lived this rash and unstatesmanlike plan might yet have
+been avoided; it so happened that he died upon April 2, 1791, and soon
+after we enter the third phase of the Revolution, which is that leading
+directly to the great war, and to the fall of the monarchy.
+
+Shortly after Mirabeau’s death a tumult, which excessively frightened
+the royal family, prevented the King and Queen from leaving the palace
+and passing Easter at St. Cloud, in the suburbs. Though further
+postponements of their flight followed, the evasion actually took place
+in the night of the 20th to 21st of June. It very nearly succeeded, but
+by a series of small accidents, the last of which, the famous ride of
+Drouet to intercept the fugitives, is among the best-known episodes in
+history, the King and Queen and their children were discovered and
+arrested at Varennes, within a few hundred yards of safety, and were
+brought back to Paris, surrounded by enormous and hostile crowds. With
+the failure of this attempt at flight in the end of June 1791, ends the
+third phase of the Revolution.
+
+
+IV
+
+_From June 1791 to September 1792._
+
+To understand the capital effect both of this flight and of its failure,
+we must once more insist upon the supreme position of the monarchy in
+the traditions and instinct of French polity. The unwisdom of the flight
+it would be difficult to exaggerate: it is impossible to exaggerate the
+moral revolution caused by its failure. It was regarded as virtually an
+abdication. The strong body of provincial, silent, and moderate opinion,
+which still centred on the King and regarded it as his function to lead
+and to govern, was bewildered, and in the main divorced, in the future,
+from the Crown.
+
+It is an excellent proof of what the monarchy had for so long been to
+France, that even in such a crisis barely the name of “a republic” was
+mentioned, and that only in the intellectual circles in Paris. All the
+constitutional and standing forces of society conspired to preserve the
+monarchy at the expense of no matter what fictions. The middle class
+Militia Guard under La Fayette repressed, in what is known as the
+Massacre of the Champ-de-Mars, the beginnings of a popular movement. The
+more Radical leaders (among whom was Danton) fled abroad or hid. The
+Duke of Orleans utterly failed to take advantage of the moment, or to
+get himself proclaimed regent: the monarchical tradition was too strong.
+
+Immediately after the second anniversary of the taking of the Bastille,
+in July, the decrees of Parliament created the fiction that the King was
+not responsible for the flight, that he “had been carried off,” and in
+the following September, though until then suspended from executive
+power, the King, on taking the oath to the Constitution, was once more
+at the head of all the forces of the nation.
+
+But all this patching and reparation of the façade of constitutional
+monarchy (a fiction whose tawdriness is more offensive to the French
+temper than its falsehood) had come too late. Already the Queen had
+written to her brother, the Emperor of Austria, suggesting the
+mobilisation of a considerable force, and its encampment on the
+frontier, to overawe the revolutionary movement. Her action coincided
+within a few days with the end of that great Parliament, which had been
+chosen on the most democratic suffrage, and which had transformed the
+whole of society and laid the basis of the revolutionary Constitution.
+With the meeting of the National Assembly’s successor on the 1st of
+October, 1791, war was already possible; that possibility was to be
+transformed very soon into probability, and at last into actuality.
+
+In the new Parliament the weight, not of numbers but of leadership, fell
+to a group of enthusiastic and eloquent men who, from the fact that
+certain of their principal members came from the Gironde, were called
+_The Girondins_. They represented the purest and the most enthusiastic
+ideal of democracy, less national, perhaps, than that advocated by men
+more extreme than they, but of a sort which, from that time to this, has
+been able to rouse the enthusiasm of historians.
+
+Vergniaud and Isnard were their great orators, Brissot was their
+intellectual intriguer, and the wife of Roland, one of their members,
+was, as it were, the soul of the whole group. It was the fact that these
+men desired war which made war certain, once the temper of this new
+second Assembly should be felt.
+
+The extremists over against them, to whom I have alluded (known as “the
+Mountain”), were especially Parisian in character. Robespierre, who had
+been first an obscure, and later a sectarian orator of the National
+Assembly, though not sitting in this second Parliament, was perhaps the
+most prominent figure in that group, for he was the public orator of
+Paris; and indeed the Mountain was Paris; Paris, whether inside or
+outside the Parliament; Paris acting as the responsible brain of France.
+Later, it was the Mountain (that had first opposed the war) which was to
+ensure the success of the French arms by a rigidity and despotism in
+action such as the purer and less practical minds of the Girondins
+abhorred.
+
+On the 3rd of December, 1791 (to quote a fundamental date in the rapid
+progress towards the war which was to transform the Revolution), the
+King--writing in a manner which betrays dictation by his wife--begged
+the King of Prussia (as _she_ had begged the Emperor) to mobilise an
+armed force, and with it to back a Congress that should have for its
+object the prevention of the spread of the Revolution. That letter was
+typical of the moment. From both sides tension was rapidly proceeding to
+the breaking point. Nor was the tension merely upon generalities. The
+Revolution had broken a European treaty in the annexation of the Papal
+State of Avignon, and it had broken European conventions when it had
+abolished in Alsace feudal rights that were possessed by the princes of
+the empire. It was as though some State to-day, attempting Collectivism,
+should confiscate, along with other property, securities lying in its
+banks, but held by the nationals of a foreign State.
+
+On the revolutionary side also there was a definite point at issue,
+which was the permission accorded within the empire for the emigrants to
+meet in arms and to threaten the French frontier.
+
+But these precise and legal points were not the true causes of the war.
+The true causes of the war were the desire of the unreformed European
+Governments (notably those of Prussia and Austria) that the Revolution
+should, in their own interests, be checked, and the conviction that
+their armed forces were easily capable of effecting the destruction of
+the new French _régime_.
+
+The Court of Vienna refused to accept a just indemnity that was offered
+the princes of the empire in Alsace for the loss of their old feudal
+rights; Leopold, the emperor, who was one of the same generation as the
+French King and Queen, died upon the 1st of March, 1792, and was
+succeeded by a son only twenty-four years of age and easily persuaded to
+war.
+
+On the French side, with the exception of the Mountain and notably of
+Robespierre, there was a curious coalition of opinion demanding war.
+
+The Court and the reactionaries were sufficiently certain of the victory
+of the Allies to find their salvation in war.
+
+The revolutionary party, that is, the mass of public opinion and the
+“patriots,” as they called themselves, the Girondins, also, and
+especially, desired war as a sort of crusade for the Revolution; they
+suffered grievous illusions, as enthusiasts always must, and believed
+the French armed forces capable of sustaining the shock. The plans had
+already been drawn up for the campaign (and promptly betrayed to the
+enemy by the Queen); Dumouriez, an excellent soldier, had from the
+middle of March 1792 been the chief person in the ministry, and the
+director of foreign affairs, and a month later, on the 20th of April,
+war was declared against Austria, or, to be accurate, against “the King
+of Hungary and Bohemia.”
+
+Such was still the official title of Marie Antoinette’s nephew, who,
+though now succeeded to the empire, had not yet been crowned emperor. It
+was hoped to confine the war to this monarch, and, indeed, the German
+princes of the empire did not join him (the Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel
+was an exception). But the one German power that counted most, the
+kingdom of Prussia, which Dumouriez had especially hoped to keep
+neutral, joined forces with Austria. The royal letters had done their
+work.
+
+At this critical moment the French armed forces and the French
+strongholds were at their worst. The discipline of the army was
+deplorable. The regular soldiers of the old _régime_ had lost from six
+to nine thousand officers by emigration, and mixed no better than water
+and oil with the revolutionary volunteers who had been drafted (to the
+number of over two hundred battalions) into the ranks of the army;
+moreover, these volunteer battalions were for the most part ill
+provided, far below their establishment, some only existed on paper;
+none were trained as soldiers should be trained. In a more orderly time,
+when the decrees of the Government corresponded with reality, four
+hundred thousand men would have held the frontier; such a number was in
+the estimates. As it was, from the Swiss mountains to the English
+Channel, the French could count on no more than _one-fifth_ of that
+number. Eighty thousand alone were under arms. The full Prussian army
+was, alone, apart from its allies, close upon treble the size of this
+disorganised and insufficient force.
+
+Panics at once ludicrous and tragic opened the campaign upon the French
+side. The King took advantage of them to dismiss his Girondin Ministry
+and to form a reactionary Government. The Parliament replied by measures
+useless to the conduct of war, and designed only to exasperate the
+Crown, which was betraying the nation. It ordered the dismissal of the
+royal Guard, the formation of a camp of revolutionary Federals outside
+Paris, the transportation of the orthodox priests; in pursuit of the
+Court’s determination to resist the Assembly and to await the victorious
+allies, Louis vetoed the last two decrees. La Fayette, who was now in
+command of the army of the centre, with his headquarters at Sedan, right
+upon the route of the invasion, declared for the King.
+
+Had the armies of Austria and Prussia moved with rapidity at this
+moment, the Revolution was at an end. As it was, their mobilisation was
+slow, and their march, though accurate, leisurely. It gave time for the
+populace of Paris to demonstrate against the palace and the royal family
+on the 20th of June. It was not until the first days of August that the
+main force of the combined monarchs, under the generalship-in-chief of
+the Duke of Brunswick (who had the reputation of being the best general
+of his time), set out for the march on Paris. It was not until the 23rd
+of August that the invaders took the first French frontier town, Longwy.
+
+Meanwhile two very important things had lent to the French, in spite of
+the wretched insufficiency of their armed force, an intensity of feeling
+which did something to supply that insufficiency. In the first place,
+the third anniversary of the Fall of the Bastille, the 14th of July, had
+called to Paris deputations from all the provinces, many of them armed;
+this gave the national feeling unity. In the second place, Brunswick had
+issued from Coblentz, which was his base, upon the 25th of that same
+month of July, a manifesto which was known in Paris three days later,
+and which (though certain modern historians have questioned this)
+undoubtedly set revolutionary opinion ablaze.
+
+This manifesto demanded, in the name of the Allied Army, a complete
+restoration of the old _régime_, professed to treat the French and their
+new authorities as rebels subject to military execution, and contained a
+clause of peculiar gravity, which excited an immediate and exasperated
+response from Paris. The authorship of this clause lay with Marie
+Antoinette, and it threatened, if there were any attack upon the palace,
+to give the capital over to military execution and total subversion.
+
+Two days later the Federals from Marseilles, a middle-class body of
+excellent citizens, though merely amateurs at soldiering and small in
+numbers, marched into the city. Their marching song has become famous
+under the title of the “Marseillaise.” They had accomplished the
+astonishing feat of traversing France, drawing cannon with them, at the
+rate of eighteen miles a day, in the height of a torrid summer, for
+close upon a month on end. There is no parallel to such an effort in the
+history of war, nor did contemporary opinion exaggerate when it saw in
+the battalion of Marseilles the centre of the coming fight.
+
+The shock between the palace and the populace was joined in the morning
+of the 10th of August. The palace was held by about six thousand men,[3]
+of whom some twelve hundred were regulars of the Swiss Guard. The palace
+(the Tuileries) was, or should have been, impregnable. The popular
+attack, we may be certain, would have been beaten back had the
+connection between the Tuileries and the Louvre on the south been
+properly cut. The flooring had indeed been removed at this point for
+some distance, but either the gap was not wide enough or the post was
+insufficiently guarded; the populace and the Federals, badly beaten in
+their main attack upon the long front of the palace, succeeded in
+turning its flank where it joined on to the Louvre; they thus enfiladed
+the suites of rooms and utterly put an end to the resistance of its
+garrison.
+
+Meanwhile the King and Queen, the Dauphin and his little sister, with
+others of the royal household, had taken refuge during the fighting in
+the hall of the Parliament.
+
+After the victory of the populace their fate was debated and decided
+upon; they were imprisoned in the Tower of the Temple, a mediæval
+fortress still standing in the north-east of Paris, and though monarchy
+was not yet formally abolished, the most extreme spirits which the
+Revolution then contained, and the most vigorous, stepped into the place
+of the old Executive, with Danton at their head. With them appeared in
+the seat of Government the spirit of military action, its contempt for
+forms and its rapid decision. The known accomplices of the supporters of
+the Court’s resistance and alliance with the invaders were arrested by
+the hundred. The enrolment of volunteers, already enthusiastic
+throughout France, was supported with the new vigour of official aid;
+and the Revolution left at once all its old moorings to enter an extreme
+phase. At the same moment the frontier was crossed and the national soil
+invaded on the 19th of August.
+
+It is possible that the delay of the Prussians until that moment had
+been calculated, for the position in France was complicated and their
+decision to fight had been tardily arrived at. It was the news of the
+fall of the palace that seems to have decided them. The place, like the
+date, of this grave event, deserves to be more famous than it is.
+Brunswick touched what was then French soil, in that little triangle
+where now German and French Lorraine and Luxembourg meet. The village is
+called Redange: thence did the privileged of Europe set out to reach
+Paris and to destroy democracy. The first task occupied them for full
+twenty-two years, upon the latter they are still engaged.
+
+What forces the French could there bring against Brunswick were
+contemptuously brushed aside. Four days later he had, as we have seen,
+taken the frontier stronghold of Longwy; within a week he was in front
+of Verdun.
+
+Verdun had no chance of resistance, no garrison to call a garrison, and
+no opportunity for defence. The news that it must fall reached Paris on
+the morning of a fatal date, the 2nd of September; after its fall there
+would lie nothing between it and the capital; and from that moment the
+whole nature of the Revolution is wholly transformed by the
+psychological effect of war.
+
+
+V
+
+_From the invasion of September 1792 to the establishment of the
+Committee of Public Safety, April 1793._
+
+The fifth phase of the French Revolution may be said to date from these
+first days of September 1792, when the news of the successful invasion
+was maddening Paris, and when the revolutionary Executive, established
+upon the ruins of the old dead monarchy and in its image, was firmly in
+the saddle, up to the establishment of the yet more monarchical
+“Committee of Public Safety,” seven months later. And these seven months
+may be characterised as follows:--
+
+They were a period during which it was attempted to carry on the
+revolutionary war against the Governments of Europe upon democratic
+principles. The attempt failed. In the place of discipline and
+comprehension and foresight the rising and intense enthusiasm of the
+moment was depended upon for victory. The pure ideal of the Girondin
+faction, with the model republic which it hoped to establish, proved
+wholly insufficient for the conduct of a war; and to save the nation
+from foreign conquest and the great democratic experiment of the
+Revolution from disaster, it was necessary that the military and
+disciplined side of the French, with all the tyranny that accompanies
+that aspect of their national genius, should undertake the completion of
+the adventure.
+
+This period opens with what are called the Massacres of September. I
+have said upon a former page that “the known accomplices and supporters
+of the Court’s alliance with the invaders were arrested by the hundred,”
+upon the fall of the palace and the establishment of a revolutionary
+Executive with Danton at its head.
+
+These prisoners, massed in the jails of the city, were massacred to the
+number of eleven hundred by a small but organised band of assassins
+during the days when the news of the fall of Verdun was expected and
+reached the capital. Such a crime appalled the public conscience of
+Europe and of the French people. It must never be confused with the
+judicial and military acts of the Terror, nor with the reprisals
+undertaken against rebellion, nor with the gross excesses of mob
+violence; for though votes in favour of the immediate execution of those
+who had sided with the enemies of the country were passed in certain
+primary assemblies, the act itself was the mechanical, deliberate and
+voluntary choice of a few determined men. It had, therefore, a character
+of its own, and that character made it stand out for its contemporaries
+as it should stand out for us: it was murder.
+
+The prisoners were unarmed--nay, though treasonable, they had not
+actually taken arms; their destruction was inspired, in most of those
+who ordered it, by mere hatred. Those who ordered it were a small
+committee acting spontaneously, and Marat was their chief.[4]
+
+It was under the impression of these massacres that the Deputies of the
+new or third Assembly of the Revolution, known to history as _The
+Convention_, met in Paris.
+
+This Parliament was to be at first the actual, later the nominal
+governing power in France during the three critical years that followed;
+years which were the military salvation of the Revolution, and which
+therefore permitted the establishment of the democratic experiment in
+modern Europe.
+
+It was on the 20th of September that the Convention met for its first
+sitting, which was held in the palace of the Tuileries. During the hours
+of that day, while it was electing its officials, choosing its Speaker
+and the rest, the French Army upon the frontier, to its own astonishment
+and to that of its enemy, managed to hold in check at the cannonade of
+_Valmy_ the allied invaders.
+
+Upon the morrow the new Assembly met in the riding school (the Manège),
+where the two former Assemblies had also sat. It was about to separate
+after that day’s sitting when one of the members proposed the abolition
+of Royalty; the Convention voted the reform unanimously and dispersed.
+
+On the third day, the 22nd of September, it was decreed that the public
+documents should henceforward bear the date “First Year of the
+Republic”; but there was no solemnity on the occasion; the idea of “No
+King” was novel and untried; there was as yet no enthusiasm for any save
+the monarchic form of government. It was not until the title “Republic”
+began to connote in men’s minds political liberty, and had become also
+the flag, as it were, for the victorious national defence, that the
+Republican name acquired in our Europe, and from France, that strong and
+almost religious force which it has since retained.
+
+The check given to the invaders at Valmy (again to the astonishment of
+both soldiers and statesmen!) determined the campaign. Sickness and the
+difficulty of communications made the further advance of the invaders
+impossible. They negotiated for and obtained an unmolested retreat, and
+a few weeks later they had re-crossed the frontier.
+
+Meanwhile, in Paris the great quarrel had begun between the Municipal
+and the National Government, which, because Paris was more decided, more
+revolutionary, and, above all, more military in temper than the
+Parliament, was destined to terminate in the victory of the capital. The
+Girondins still stood in the Assembly for an ideal republic; a republic
+enjoying to the utmost limit individual liberty in its citizens and the
+autonomy of local government in every city and parish; but opposed to
+this ideal, and far more national, was that of the revolutionary
+extremists, called in the Convention “the Mountain,” who had the support
+of the Municipal Government of Paris (known as “the Commune”), and were
+capable of French victories in the field. These stood for the old French
+and soldierly conception of a strong central Government, wherewith to
+carry on the life-and-death struggle into which the Revolution had now
+entered: therefore they conquered.
+
+All that autumn the quarrel between France and Europe remained doubtful,
+for though the armies of the Republic under Dumouriez won the battle of
+Jemappes, swept across the north-eastern frontier and occupied Belgium,
+while to the south another French army swept right up to the Rhine,
+Dumouriez himself knew well enough that a campaign undertaken merely
+upon enthusiasm, and with troops so mixed in character and many of them
+so undisciplined, would end fatally. But until the advent of the new
+year public opinion was not instructed upon these lines, and the
+revolutionary war seemed to have passed suddenly from the defence of the
+national territory to a crusade against the kings and the aristocratic
+Governments of Europe. Enthusiasm, and enthusiasm alone, was the force
+of the moment. Violent decrees such as the Declaration of Fraternity
+(which decreed an alliance with all people struggling to be free) and
+the opening of the Scheldt (a direct violation of treaty rights to which
+England, among other nations, was a partner) were characteristic of the
+moment; chief act of all, the King was put upon his trial at the bar of
+the Parliament.
+
+It was upon the 4th of January, 1793 (the King had already made his will
+upon Christmas Day), that the chief orator of the Girondins moved that
+the sentence should be referred to the people for ratification. The fear
+of civil war more than anything else forbade this just suggestion to
+pass. Upon the 15th of January the question was put to the Parliament,
+“whether the King had been guilty of conspiring against public liberty
+and of attempting the general safety of the State.” Many were absent and
+many abstained: none replied in the negative; the condemnation of Louis
+was therefore technically almost a unanimous one.
+
+The voting on these grave issues was what the French call “nominal”:
+that is, each member was called upon “by name” to give his vote--and an
+expression of opinion as well if he so chose. A second attempt to appeal
+to the people was rejected by 424 to 283. On the third question, which
+was the decisive one of the penalty, 721 only could be found to vote,
+and of these a bare majority of 53 declared for death as against the
+minority, of whom some voted for the death penalty “conditionally”--that
+is, not at all--or voted against it. A respite was lost by a majority of
+70; and on the 21st of January, 1793, at about ten in the morning, Louis
+XVI was guillotined.
+
+Then followed war with England, with Holland, and with Spain; and almost
+at that moment began the inevitable reflux of the military tide. For the
+French eruption up to the Rhine in the Low Countries and the Palatinate,
+had no permanent military basis upon which to depend. Dumouriez began to
+retreat a month after the King’s execution, and on the 18th of March
+suffered a decisive defeat at Neerwinden. It was this retreat, followed
+by that disaster, which decided the fate of the Girondin attempt to
+found a republic ideally, individually, and locally free. Already,
+before the battle of Neerwinden was fought, Danton, no longer a
+minister, but still the most powerful orator in the Convention, proposed
+a special court for trying cases of treason--a court which was later
+called “the Revolutionary Tribunal.” The news of Neerwinden prepared the
+way for a stronger measure and some exceptional form of government; a
+special Parliamentary committee already formed for the control of
+ministers was strengthened when, on the 5th of April, after some
+negotiation and doubt, Dumouriez, despairing of the armies of the
+Republic, thought to ally his forces with the invaders and to restore
+order. His soldiers refused to follow him; his treason was apparent;
+upon the morrow the Convention nominated that first “Committee of Public
+Safety” which, with its successor of the same name, was henceforward the
+true despotic and military centre of revolutionary government. It was
+granted secrecy in deliberation, the virtual though not the theoretic
+control of the Ministry, sums of money for secret expenditure, and, in a
+word, all the machinery necessary to a military executive. Rousseau’s
+_Dictator_ had appeared, the great mind which had given the _Contrat
+Social_ to be the gospel of the Revolution had also foreseen one of the
+necessary organs of democracy in its hardest trial; his theory had been
+proved necessary and true in fact. Nine members formed this first
+Committee: Barère, who may be called the clerk of it, Danton its genius,
+and Cambon its financier, were the leading names.
+
+With the establishment of this truly national and traditional thing,
+whose form alone was novel, but whose power and method were native to
+all the military tradition of Gaul, the Revolution was saved. We have
+now chiefly to follow the way in which the Committee governed and in
+which it directed affairs in the great crisis of the war. This sixth
+phase lasts for nearly sixteen months, from the beginning of April 1793
+to the 28th of July 1794, and it is convenient to divide those sixteen
+months into two divisions.
+
+
+VI
+
+_From April 1793 to July 1794._
+
+The first division of this period, which ends in the height of the
+summer of 1793, is the gradual consolidation of the Committee as a new
+organ of government and the peril of destruction which it runs, in
+common with the nation it governs at the hands of allied Europe.
+
+The second period includes part of August and all the rest of 1793, and
+the first seven months of 1794, during which time the Committee is
+successful in its military effort, the nation is saved, and in a manner
+curiously dramatic and curiously inconsequential, the martial _régime_
+of the Terror abruptly ceases.
+
+The first step in the consolidation of the power of the Committee was
+their letting loose of the Commune of Paris and the populace it governed
+against the Girondins.
+
+Looked at merely from the point of view of internal politics (upon
+which most historians have concentrated) the attack of the populace of
+Paris and their Commune against the Parliament seems to be no more than
+the end of the long quarrel between the Girondins with their ideal
+federal republic, and the capital with its instinct for strong
+centralised government. But in the light of the military situation, of
+which the Committee of Public Safety were vividly aware, and which it
+was their business to control, a very different tale may be told.
+
+When the defeats began the Parliament had voted a levy of three hundred
+thousand men. It was a mere vote which came to very little: not enough
+in numbers and still less in moral, for the type of troops recruited
+under a system of money forfeit and purchased substitutes was wholly
+beneath the task of the great war.
+
+This law of conscription had been passed upon the 24th of February. The
+date for its first application was, in many villages, fixed for the 10th
+of March. All that country which borders the estuary of the Loire, to
+the north and to the south, a country whose geographical and political
+peculiarities need not here detain us, but which is still curiously
+individual, began to resist. The decree was unpopular everywhere, of
+course, as military service is everywhere unpopular with a settled
+population. But here it had no ally, for the Revolution and all its
+works were grossly unpopular as well. The error of the Civil
+Constitution of the Clergy was a powerful factor in this revolt. The
+piety and the orthodoxy of this district were and are exceptional. Some
+such resistance in some such quarter was perhaps expected: what was not
+expected was its military success.
+
+Four days before the defeat of Neerwinden itself, and four days after
+the decree of conscription in the villages, a horde of peasantry had
+taken possession of the town of Chollet in the southern part of this
+district, Vendée. Three days before the Committee of Public Safety was
+formed the insurgents had defeated regular forces at Machecoul, and had
+tortured and put to death their prisoners. The month of April, when the
+Committee of Public Safety was first finding its seat in the saddle, saw
+the complete success of the rebels. The forces sent against them were
+worthless, for all military effort had been concentrated upon the
+frontier. Most of them were not even what we should call militia. A
+small force of regulars was to have moved from Orleans, but, before they
+could attack, Thouars, Parthenay, and Fontenay fell into the power of
+the rebels. These posts afforded an advanced triangle right into the
+regularly administered territory of the Republic: the great town of
+Nantes was outflanked. Even in such a moment the Girondins still clung
+to their ideal: an individually free and locally autonomous republic. It
+is little wonder that the temper of Paris refused to support them, or
+their influence over the Parliament, and we can easily understand how
+the new Committee supported Paris in its revolt.
+
+That revolt took place on the 31st of May. The forces under the command
+of the capital did not march, but a deputation of the sections of Paris
+demanded the arrest of the leading Girondins. The body of the debating
+hall was invaded by the mob. The Committee of Public Safety pretended to
+compromise between Paris and the Parliament, but a document, recently
+analysed, sufficiently proves that their sympathy was with the Parisian
+attack. They proposed, indeed, to put the armed force of Paris at the
+disposition of the Assembly: that is, in their own hands.
+
+That day nothing of moment was done, but the Parliament had proved of no
+strength in the face of the capital. On the frontier the advance of the
+invaders had begun. The great barrier fortress of Valenciennes relied
+for its defence upon the neighbouring camp of Famars. The garrison of
+that camp had been compelled to evacuate it by the advance of the Allied
+Army upon the 23rd of May, and though some days were to be spent before
+the heavy artillery of the Austrians could be emplaced, Valenciennes was
+henceforward at the mercy of its besiegers. There was news that La
+Vendée was not the only rebellion. Lyons had risen three days before.
+There had been heavy fighting. The Royalists and the Girondins had
+combined and had carried the town hall and established an
+insurrectionary and unelected Municipal Government. Such news, coming
+immediately after the 31st of May, roused the capital to action. This
+time the Parisian forces actually marched against the Parliament. The
+demand for the suspension of the twenty-two named Girondin deputies was
+made under arms. Much has been written, and by the best historians, to
+make of this successful day a mere conquest by the Commune of Paris over
+the Parliament. Though Barère and Danton both protested in public, it
+was in reality their politics that conquered with Paris. To the
+twenty-two names that the forces of Paris had listed, seven were added.
+The great Girondins, Brissot, Vergniaud and the rest, were not indeed
+imprisoned, they were considered “under arrest in their houses.” But the
+moral authority of the Convention as an administrative machine, not as a
+legislative one, was broken on this day, the 2nd of June, 1793. Paris
+had ostensibly conquered, but the master who was stronger than ever and
+whom Paris had served, was the Committee of Public Safety.
+
+This first Committee of Public Safety endured to the 10th of July. In
+the midst of such a war and of such an internal struggle the Convention
+had voted (upon the initiative of the Committee of Public Safety) the
+famous Constitution of ’93, that prime document of democracy which, as
+though to mock its own ideal, has remained no more than a written thing
+from then until now. Therein will be found universal suffrage, therein
+the yearly Parliament, therein the referendum, therein the elected
+Executive--a thing no Parliament would ever give us to-day. The
+Constitution was passed but three weeks after the successful
+insurrection of Paris. A fortnight later still, on the 10th of July, the
+first of the Committees of Public Safety was followed by its successor.
+
+All this while the Vendeans were advancing. Nantes, indeed, had held out
+against the rebels, but as we shall see in a moment, the Republican
+troops had not yet made themselves good. The rebellion of Lyons was
+fortifying itself, and a week later was to execute the Radical Chalier.
+Marseilles was rising. On the 10th of July the Convention summoned to
+its bar Westermann, the friend of Danton, who had just suffered defeat
+at the hands of the western rebels.
+
+It is well to note at this point one of those small individual factors
+which determine the fate of States. Danton, the master of all that first
+movement towards centralisation, the man who had made the 10th of
+August, who had negotiated with the Prussians after Valmy, who had
+determined upon and formed a central government against the Girondin
+anarchy--had broken down. His health was gone. He was a giant in body,
+but for the moment he had tired himself out.
+
+The renewing of his Committee was proposed: he was thrust out from the
+new choice. Barère remained to link the old Committee with the new. A
+violent sectarian Calvinist pastor, Jeanbon Saint-André, among the
+bravest and most warped of the Revolutionaries; Couthon, a friend of
+Robespierre; Saint-Just, a still more intimate friend (a young,
+handsome, enormously courageous and decisive man), entered, with others
+to the number of nine, the new Committee. Seventeen days later, on the
+27th of July, Robespierre replaced one of the minor members thus chosen.
+He had precisely a year to live, and it is the moment for fixing before
+the reader’s mind the nature of his career.
+
+Robespierre was at this moment the chief figure in the eyes of the
+crowd, and was soon to be the chief revolutionary figure in the eyes of
+Europe: that is the first point. The second is of equal importance, and
+is far less generally recognised. He was not, and was never destined to
+be, the chief force in the revolutionary Government.
+
+As to the first point, Robespierre had attained this position from the
+following combination of circumstances: first, alone of the
+revolutionary personalities, he had been continually before the public
+eye from the beginning; he had been a member of the first Parliament of
+all and had spoken in that Parliament in the first month of its
+sessions. Though then obscure in Versailles, he was already well known
+in his province and native town of Arras.
+
+Secondly, this position of his in the public eye was maintained without
+a break, and his position and reputation had increased by accumulation
+month after month for the whole four years. No one else was left in the
+political arena of whom this could be said. All the old reactionaries
+had gone, all the moderate men had gone; the figures of 1793 were all
+new figures--except Robespierre; and he owed this continued and steady
+increase of fame to:--
+
+Thirdly, his conspicuous and vivid sincerity. He was more wholly
+possessed of the democratic faith of the _Contrat Social_ than any other
+man of his time: he had never swerved from an article of it. There is no
+better engine for enduring fame than the expression of real convictions.
+Moreover--
+
+Fourthly, his speeches exactly echoed the opinions of his audience, and
+echoed them with a lucidity which his audience could not have commanded.
+Whether he possessed true eloquence or no is a matter still debated by
+those who are scholars in French letters. But it is certain that he had
+in his own time all the effects of a great orator, though his manner was
+precise and cold.
+
+Fifthly, he was possessed of a consistent body of doctrine: that is, he
+was not only convinced of the general democratic creed which his
+contemporaries held, and he not only held it unswervingly and
+uncorruptedly, but he could supplement it with a system of morals and
+even something which was the adumbration of religion.
+
+Sixthly, he had, as such characters always can, but not often do, gather
+round themselves, a group of intensely devoted personal admirers and
+supporters, chief of whom was the young and splendidly courageous
+Saint-Just.
+
+It was the combination of all these things, I say, which made
+Robespierre the chief personality in the public eye when he entered the
+Committee of Public Safety on the 27th of July, 1793.
+
+Now let it be noted that, unlike his follower Saint-Just, and
+exceedingly unlike Danton, Robespierre possessed none of those military
+qualities without which it is impossible to be responsible for
+government over a military nation--especially if that nation be in the
+act of war: and such a war! The Committee of Public Safety was the Cæsar
+of revolutionary France. Robespierre as a member of that Cæsar was
+hopeless. His popularity was an advantage to his colleagues in the
+Committee, but his conception of action upon the frontiers was vague,
+personal, and futile. His ambition for leadership, if it existed, was
+subordinate to his ambition to be the saviour of his people and of their
+democratic experiment, and he had no comprehension of those functions of
+leadership by which it can co-ordinate detail and impose a plan of
+action. Robespierre, therefore, in every crisis of the last year we are
+about to study, yielded to his colleagues, never impressed them and
+never led them, and yet (it was the irony of his fate) was imagined by
+his fellow countrymen and by the warring Governments of Europe to be the
+master of them all.
+
+The first weeks after his appearance in the Committee of Public Safety
+were the critical weeks of the whole revolutionary movement. The
+despotic action of Paris (which I have concluded to be secretly
+supported by the Committee)[5] had provoked insurrection upon all sides
+in the provinces. Normandy had protested, and on the 13th of July a
+Norman girl stabbed Marat to death. Lyons, as we have seen, had been
+some weeks in revolt; Marseilles had rebelled in the first week of June,
+Bordeaux and the whole department of the Gironde had of course risen,
+for their men were at stake. Later Toulon, the great naval depot of
+France, revolted: a reactionary municipal provincial Government was
+formed in that port, the little boy imprisoned in the Temple, heir to
+the kingdom, was proclaimed under the title of Louis XVII, and before
+the end of August the English and Spanish fleets had been admitted into
+the harbour and an excellent foreign garrison was defending the town
+against the national Government.
+
+Meanwhile the Allies upon the Belgian frontier were doing what they
+could, taking fortress after fortress, and while Mayence was falling on
+the Rhine, Valenciennes and Condé were capitulating on the north-eastern
+border, and a portion of the Allied Army was marching to besiege
+Dunquerque. The insurrection in Vendée, which had broken out in the
+early part of the year, though checked by the resistance of Nantes, was
+still successful in the field.
+
+It was in the month of August that a successful effort was made. Carnot,
+who soon proved the military genius of the Revolution, entered the
+Committee of Public Safety. On the 23rd of the month a true levy, very
+different from the futile and insufficiently applied attempt of the
+spring, was forced upon the nation by a vote in Parliament. It was a
+levy of men, vehicles, animals and provision, and soon furnished
+something not far short of half a million soldiers. With September the
+tide turned, the first victory in this crisis of the struggle,
+Hoondschoote, relieved Dunquerque in the early days of September. By
+mid-October a second and decisive victory, that of Wattignies, relieved
+Maubeuge. Lyons had been taken, Normandy was pacified long before; by
+the end of the year Toulon was reoccupied, and at the same time the last
+cohesive force of the Vendeans destroyed.
+
+But meanwhile the crisis had had a double effect, moral and material.
+The moral effect had been a sort of national madness in which the most
+extreme measures were proposed and many of them carried through with
+what one may call a creative audacity. The calendar itself was changed,
+the week itself abolished, the months re-named and re-adjusted. Such an
+act sufficiently symbolises the mental attitude of the Revolutionaries.
+They were determined upon a new earth.
+
+There went with this the last and most violent attack upon what was
+believed to be the last remnants of Catholicism in the country, a
+hideous persecution of the priesthood, in which an uncounted number of
+priests died under the rigours of transportation or of violence. The
+reprisals against the rebels varied from severity of the most awful kind
+to cruelty that was clearly insane, and of which the worst examples took
+place at Arras and at Nantes.
+
+In all this turmoil the governing centre of the country, the Committee
+of Public Safety, not only kept its head but used the enormous forces of
+the storm for the purposes of achieving military success, under that
+system known as “the Terror,” which was for them no more than martial
+law, and an engine of their despotic control. Of the two thousand and
+more that passed before the revolutionary tribunal and were executed in
+Paris, the large majority were those whom the Committee of Public Safety
+judged to be obstacles to their military policy; and most were men or
+women who had broken some specific part of the martial code which the
+Government had laid down. Some were generals who had failed or were
+suspected of treason; and some, among the most conspicuous, were
+politicians who had attempted to check so absolute a method of
+conducting the war.
+
+Of these the greatest was Danton. Before the end of 1793 he began to
+protest against the system of the Terror; he believed, perhaps, that the
+country was now safe in the military sense and needed such rigours no
+more. But the Committee disagreed, and were evidence available we should
+perceive that Carnot in particular determined that such opposition must
+cease. Danton and his colleagues--including Desmoulins, the journalist
+of the Revolution and the chief publicist who promoted the days of July
+1789--were executed in the first week of April 1794.
+
+Parallel to this action on the part of the Committee was their sudden
+attack upon men of the other extreme: the men whose violence, excessive
+even for that time, threatened to provoke reaction. Hébert was the chief
+of these, the spokesman of the Commune of Paris; and he also perished.
+
+Meanwhile the Committee had permitted other persecutions and other
+deaths, notably that of the Queen. A sane policy would have demanded
+that she should be kept a hostage: she was sacrificed to the desire for
+vengeance, and her head fell on the same day on which the decisive
+battle of Wattignies was won. Later the King’s sister, Madame Elisabeth,
+was sacrificed to the same passions, and with her must be counted a
+certain proportion of the victims whose destruction could be no part of
+the Committee’s scheme, and proceeded purely from the motives of an
+ancient hatred, though in the case of many of these who were of
+aristocratic birth or of influence through their wealth, it is not easy
+to determine how far the possibility of their intrigue with the
+foreigner may not have led them to the scaffold.
+
+In the last four months of the period we are considering in this book,
+through April, that is, after the execution of Danton, through May and
+June and almost to the end of July, Robespierre appears with a
+particular prominence. Fads or doctrines of his own are admitted upon
+the Statute Book of the Revolution, notably his religious dogmas of a
+personal God and of the immortality of the soul. Nay, a public solemnity
+is arranged in honour of such matters, and he is the high priest
+therein. The intensity of the idolatry he received was never greater;
+the numbers that shared it were, perhaps, diminishing. It is certain
+that he did not appreciate how far the supports of his great popularity
+were failing. It is certain that he saw only the increasing enthusiasm
+of his immediate followers. The Committee still used him as their
+tool--notably for an increase of the Terror in June, but it is possible
+that for the first time in all these months he began to attempt some
+sort of authority within the Committee: we know, for instance, that he
+quarrelled with Carnot, who was easily the strongest man therein.
+
+In the past they had permitted him to indulge a private policy where it
+did not interfere with the general military plan. He was largely
+responsible, not through his own judgment but from his desire to voice
+opinion, for the trial and execution of the Queen. He had temporised
+when Danton was beginning his campaign against the Terror at the end of
+1793, and it is an ineffaceable blot upon his memory and his justly
+earned reputation for integrity and sincerity, that he first permitted
+and then helped towards Danton’s execution. We may presume from the few
+indications we have that he protested against it in the secret counsels
+of the Committee, but he had yielded, and what is more, since Saint-Just
+desired to be Danton’s accuser he had furnished Saint-Just with notes
+against Danton. Though it was the Committee who were morally responsible
+for the extreme extension of the Terror which proceeded during those
+last few months, Robespierre had the unwisdom to act as their
+instrument, to draft their last decrees, and, believing the Terror to be
+popular, to support it in public. It was this that ruined him. The
+extreme Terrorists, those who were not yet satiated with vengeance, and
+who hated and feared a popular idol, determined to overthrow him.
+
+The mass of those who might be the next victims and who, knowing nothing
+of the secret councils of the Committee, imagined Robespierre to be what
+he posed as being, the master of the Committee, were eager for his
+removal. In his fictitious character as the supposed chief power in the
+State, all the growing nausea against the Terror was directed against
+his person.
+
+Coincidently with such forces, the Committee, whom, relying upon his
+public position, he had begun to interfere with, and probably to check
+in their military action (he certainly had attempted unsuccessfully to
+save certain lives against the decision of his colleagues), determined
+to be rid of him. The crisis came in the fourth week of July: or as the
+revolutionary calendar then went, in the second week of Thermidor. He
+was howled down in the Parliament, an active and clever conspiracy had
+organised all the latent forces of opposition to him; he still so
+trusted in his popularity that the scene bewildered him, and he was
+still so beloved and so ardently followed, that when at that same
+sitting he was outlawed, his brother sacrificed himself to follow him.
+Saint-Just was included in the sentence, and his strict friend Lebas
+voluntarily accepted the same doom.
+
+What followed was at first a confusion of authority; put under arrest,
+the governor of the prison to which Robespierre was dispatched refused
+to receive him. He and his sympathisers met in the Hôtel de Ville after
+the fall of darkness, and an attempt was made to provoke an
+insurrection. There are many and confused accounts of what immediately
+followed at midnight, but two things are certain: the populace refused
+to rise for Robespierre, and the Parliament, with the Committee at its
+back, organised an armed force which easily had the better of the
+incipient rebellion at the Hôtel de Ville. It is probable that
+Robespierre’s signature was needed to the proclamation of insurrection:
+it is certain that he did not complete it, and presumable that he would
+not act against all his own theories of popular sovereignty and the
+general will. As he sat there with the paper before him and his
+signature still unfinished, the armed force of the Parliament burst into
+the room, a lad of the name of Merda aimed a pistol from the door at
+Robespierre, and shot him in the jaw. (The evidence in favour of this
+version is conclusive.) Of his companions, some fled and were captured,
+some killed themselves, most were arrested. The next day, the 10th
+Thermidor, or 28th of July, 1794, at half-past seven in the evening,
+Robespierre, with twenty-one others, was guillotined.
+
+The irony of history would have it that the fall of this man, which was
+chiefly due to his interference with the system of the Terror, broke all
+the moral force upon which the Terror itself had resided; for men had
+imagined that the Terror was his work, and that, he gone, no excuse was
+left for it. A reaction began which makes of this date the true term in
+that ascending series of revolutionary effort which had by then
+discussed every aspect of democracy, succeeded in the military defence
+of that experiment, and laid down, though so far in words only, the
+basis of the modern State.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[3] The reader should be warned that these numbers are hotly disputed.
+The latest authority will allow no more than 4000. After a full
+consultation of the evidence I can reduce the garrison to no less than
+6000.
+
+[4] The legend that Danton was connected with the massacres is based on
+insufficient historical foundation. There are several second or third
+hand stories in support of it, but the chief positive evidence brought
+forward in this connection is the stamped paper of the Minister of
+Justice which, it has been amply proved by Dr. Robinet, was taken by a
+subordinate and without Danton’s knowledge or complicity. To the much
+stupider story that the Federals of Marseilles took part in the
+massacres, the modern student need pay no attention; it has been
+destroyed piecemeal and on indefeasible documentary evidence in the
+monograph of Pollio and Marcel.
+
+[5] On p. 403 of my monograph on Danton (Nisbet & Co., 1899) the reader
+will find an unpublished report of the Committee of Public Safety, drawn
+up immediately before the destruction of the Girondins on the 31st of
+May. It forms, in my view, conclusive evidence, read in the light of
+their other actions, of the Committee’s determination to side with
+Paris.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+THE MILITARY ASPECT OF THE REVOLUTION
+
+
+The Revolution would never have achieved its object: on the contrary, it
+would have led to no less than a violent reaction against those
+principles which were maturing before it broke out, and which it carried
+to triumph, had not the armies of revolutionary France proved successful
+in the field; but the grasping of this mere historic fact, I mean the
+success of the revolutionary armies, is unfortunately no simple matter.
+
+We all know that as a matter of fact the Revolution was, upon the whole,
+successful in imposing its view upon Europe. We all know that from that
+success as from a germ has proceeded, and is still proceeding, modern
+society. But the nature, the cause and the extent of the military
+success which alone made this possible, is widely ignored and still more
+widely misunderstood. No other signal military effort which achieved its
+object has in history ended in military disaster--yet this was the case
+with the revolutionary wars. After twenty years of advance, during which
+the ideas of the Revolution were sown throughout Western civilisation,
+and had time to take root, the armies of the Revolution stumbled into
+the vast trap or blunder of the Russian campaign; this was succeeded by
+the decisive defeat of the democratic armies at Leipsic, and the superb
+strategy of the campaign of 1814, the brilliant rally of what is called
+the Hundred Days, only served to emphasise the completeness of the
+apparent failure. For that masterly campaign was followed by Napoleon’s
+first abdication, that brilliant rally ended in Waterloo and the ruin of
+the French army. When we consider the spread of Grecian culture over
+the East by the parallel military triumph of Alexander, or the conquest
+of Gaul by the Roman armies under Cæsar, we are met by political
+phenomena and a political success no more striking than the success of
+the Revolution. The Revolution did as much by the sword as ever did
+Alexander or Cæsar, and as surely compelled one of the great
+transformations of Europe. But the fact that the great story can be read
+to a conclusion of defeat disturbs the mind of the student.
+
+Again, that element fatal to all accurate study of military history, the
+imputation of civilian virtues and motives, enters the mind of the
+reader with fatal facility when he studies the revolutionary wars.
+
+He is tempted to ascribe to the enthusiasm of the troops, nay, to the
+political movement itself, a sort of miraculous power. He is apt to use
+with regard to the revolutionary victories the word “inevitable,” which,
+if ever it applies to the reasoned, willing and conscious action of men,
+certainly applies least of all to men when they act as soldiers.
+
+There are three points which we must carefully bear in mind when we
+consider the military history of the Revolution.
+
+First, that it succeeded: the Revolution, regarded as the political
+motive of its armies, won.
+
+Secondly, that it succeeded through those military aptitudes and
+conditions which happened to accompany, but by no means necessarily
+accompanied, the strong convictions and the civic enthusiasm of the
+time.
+
+Thirdly, that the element of chance, which every wise and prudent
+reasoner will very largely admit into all military affairs, worked in
+favour of the Revolution in the critical moments of the early wars.
+
+With these points fixed, and with a readiness to return to them when we
+have appreciated the military story, it is well to begin our study by
+telling that story briefly, and upon its most general lines. In so
+doing, it will be necessary to cover here and there points which have
+already been dealt with in this book, but that is inevitable where one
+is writing of the military aspect of any movement, for it is impossible
+to deal with that aspect save as a living part of the whole: so knit
+into national life is the business of war.
+
+
+ONE
+
+When the Revolution first approached action, the prospect of a war
+between France and any other great Power of the time--England, Prussia,
+the Empire, or let us say Russia, or even Spain--was such a prospect as
+might have been entertained at any time during the past two or three
+generations of men.
+
+For pretty well a hundred years men had been accustomed to the
+consideration of dynastic quarrels supported by a certain type of army,
+which in a moment I shall describe.
+
+I have called these quarrels dynastic; that is, they were mainly
+quarrels between the ruling houses of Europe: were mainly motived by
+the desire of each ruling house to acquire greater territory and
+revenue, and were limited by the determination of all the ruling houses
+to maintain certain ideas inviolate, as, for instance, the sacredness of
+monarchy, the independence of individual States, etc. Though they were
+in the main dynastic, yet in proportion as a dynasty might represent a
+united nation, they were national also. The English oligarchy was in
+this respect peculiar and more national than any European Government of
+its time. It is also true to say that the Russian despotism had behind
+it, in most of its military adventures and in all its spirit of
+expansion, the subconscious agreement of the people.
+
+Still, however national, the wars of the time preceding the Revolution
+moved within a fixed framework of ideas, as it were, which no commander
+and no diplomatist dreamed of exceeding. A, the crowned head of a State,
+would have some claims against B, the crowned head of another State,
+with regard to certain territories. C, the crowned head or Government of
+a third State, would remain neutral or ally himself with either of the
+two; if he allied himself, then, as a rule, it was with the weaker
+against the stronger, in order to guarantee himself against too great an
+increase on the part of a rival. Or, again, a rebellion would break out
+against the power of A in some part of his dominions; then would B,
+somewhat reluctantly (as the almost unlimited right of an existing
+executive was still a strong dogma in men’s minds), tend to ally
+himself with the rebels in order to diminish the power of A.
+
+Human affairs have always in them very strongly and permanently
+inherent, the character of a sport: the interest (at any rate of males)
+in the conduct of human life is always largely an interest of seeing
+that certain rules are kept, and certain points won, according to those
+rules. We must, therefore, beware of ridiculing the warfare of the
+century preceding the Revolution under the epithet of “a game.” But it
+is true of that warfare, and honourably true, that it attempted limited
+things in a limited manner; it did not attempt any fundamental change in
+society; it was not overtly--since the Thirty Years’ War at least--a
+struggle of ideas; it was conducted on behalf of known and limited
+interests for known and highly limited objects, and the instruments with
+which it was conducted were instruments artificial and segregated from
+the general life of nations.
+
+These instruments were what have been called the “professional” armies.
+The term is very insufficient, and, in part, misleading. The gentry of
+the various Powers, mixed with whom were certain adventurers not always
+of gentle blood, were the officers that led these forces; and for the
+major part of the gentry in most European countries, the military career
+was the chief field of activity. The men whom they led were not a
+peasantry nor a working class, still less a civic force in which the
+middle class would find itself engaged: they were the poorest and the
+least settled, some would have said the dregs of European life. With the
+exception here and there of a man--usually a very young man whom the
+fabled romance of this hard but glorious trade had attracted--and with
+the exception of certain bodies that followed in a mass and by order the
+relics of a feudal lordship, the armies of the period immediately
+preceding the Revolution were armies of very poor men, who had sold
+themselves into a sort of servitude often exciting and even adventurous,
+but not, when we examine it minutely, a career that a free man would
+choose. The men were caught by economic necessity, by fraud, and in
+other ways, and once caught were held. No better proof of this could be
+found than the barbarous severity of the punishments attached to
+desertion, or to minor forms of indiscipline. So held, they were used
+for the purposes of the game, not only in what would make them
+serviceable instruments of war, but also in what would make them
+pleasing to their masters. Strict alignment, certain frills of parade
+and appearance, all that is required in a theatre or in a pretentious
+household, appear in the military regulations of the time.
+
+I must not in all this be supposed to be belittling that great period
+between 1660 and 1789, during which the art of war was most thoroughly
+thought out, the traditions of most of our great European armies fixed,
+and the permanent military qualities which we still inherit developed.
+The men so caught as private soldiers could not but enjoy the game when
+it was actively played, for men of European stock will always enjoy the
+game of war; they took glory in its recital and in its memories; to be a
+soldier, even under the servile conditions of the time, was a proper
+subject for pride, and it is further to be remarked that the excesses of
+cruelty discoverable in the establishment of their discipline were also
+accompanied by very high and lasting examples of military virtue. The
+behaviour of the English contingents at Fontenoy afford but one of many
+examples of what I mean.
+
+Still, to understand the wars of the Revolution we must clearly
+establish the contrast between the so-called professional armies which
+preceded that movement and the armies which the Revolution invented,
+used, and bequeathed to the modern world.
+
+So also, to revert to what was said above, we must recall the dynastic
+and limited character of the wars in which the eighteenth century had
+been engaged; at the outbreak of the Revolution no other wars were
+contemplated by men.
+
+Had you spoken, for instance, at any moment in 1789, to a statesman,
+whether of old experience or only introduced to political life by the
+new movement, of the position of Great Britain, he would at once have
+discussed that position in the terms of Great Britain’s recent defeat at
+the hands of France in the affair of the American colonies. Had you
+discussed with him the position of Prussia he would at once have argued
+it in connection with Prussia’s secular opposition to Austria and the
+Empire. Had you asked him how he considered Spain, he would have spoken
+of the situation of Spain as against France in the light of the fact
+that Spain was a Bourbon monarchy allied in blood to the French throne.
+And so forth. No true statesman imagined at the time, nor, indeed, for
+many years, that a war of _ideas_, nor even, strictly speaking, of
+_nations_, was possible. Even when such a war was actually in process of
+waging, the diplomacy which attempted to establish a peace, the
+intrigues whereby alliances were sought, or neutrality negotiated, were
+dependent upon the older conception of things; and the historian is
+afforded, as he regards this gigantic struggle, the ironic satisfaction
+of seeing men fighting upon doctrines the most universal conceivable and
+yet perpetually changing their conduct during the struggle according to
+conceptions wholly particular, local and ephemeral, and soon to be
+entirely swept away by time.
+
+Napoleon himself must needs marry an Austrian archduchess as part of
+this old prejudice, and for years brains as excellent as Danton’s or
+Talleyrand’s conjecture the possibility of treating now England, now
+Prussia, as neutral to the vast attempt of the French to destroy
+privilege in European society!
+
+One may say that for two years the connection of the revolutionary
+movement with arms had no aspect save that of civil war. True, whenever
+a considerable change is in progress in society the possibility of
+foreign war in connection with it must always arise. Were some European
+State, for instance, to make an experiment in Collectivism to-day, the
+chance of foreign intervention would certainly be discussed by the
+promoters of that experiment. But no serious danger of an armed struggle
+between the French and any of their neighbours in connection with the
+political experiment of the Revolution was imagined by the mass of
+educated men in France itself nor without the boundaries of France
+during those first two years. And, I repeat, the military aspect of
+those years was confined to civil tumult. Nevertheless, that aspect is
+not to be neglected. The way in which the French organised their civil
+war (and there was always something of it present from the summer of
+1789 onwards) profoundly affected the foreign war that was to follow:
+for in their internal struggles great masses of Frenchmen became
+habituated to the physical presence, millions to the discussion, of
+arms.
+
+It is, as we have seen in another part of this book, a repeated and
+conspicuous error to imagine that the first revolutionary outbreaks were
+not met sufficiently sternly by royal troops. On the contrary, the royal
+troops were used to the utmost and were defeated. The populace of the
+large towns, and especially of Paris, proved itself capable of military
+organisation and of military action. When to this capacity had been
+added the institution of the militia called the National Guard, there
+were already the makings of a nation wholly military.
+
+Much in this exceptional and new position must be ascribed to the Gallic
+character. It may be said that from the fall of the Roman Empire to the
+present day that character has been permanently and of its own volition
+steeped in the experience of organised fighting. Civil tumult has been
+native to it, the risk of death in defence of political objects has been
+equally familiar, and the whole trade of arms, its necessary
+organisation, its fatigues and its limiting conditions, have been very
+familiar to the population throughout all these centuries. But beyond
+this the fact that the Revolution prepared men in the school of civil
+tumult was of the first advantage for its later aptitude against foreign
+Powers.
+
+It is always well in history to fix a definite starting-point for any
+political development, and the starting-point of the revolutionary wars
+may easily be fixed at the moment when Louis, his queen and the royal
+children attempted to escape to the frontier and to the Army of the
+Centre under the command of Bouillé. This happened, as we have seen, in
+June 1791.
+
+Many factors combine to make that date the starting-point. In the first
+place, until that moment no actual proof had been apparent in the eyes
+of European monarchs of the captivity of their chief exemplar, the king
+of France.
+
+The wild march upon Versailles, in the days of October 1789, had its
+parallel in a hundred popular tumults with which Europe was familiar
+enough for centuries. But the rapidly succeeding reforms of the year
+1790, and even the great religious blunder of 1791, had received the
+signature and the public assent of the Crown. The Court, though no
+longer at Versailles, was splendid, the power of the King over the
+Executive still far greater than that of any other organ in the State,
+and indefinitely greater than that of any other individual in the State.
+The talk of captivity, of insult and the rest, the outcries of the
+emigrants and the perpetual complaint of the French royal family in its
+private relations, seemed exaggerated, or at any rate nothing to act
+upon, until there came the shock of the King’s attempted flight and
+recapture. This clinched things; and it clinched them all the more
+because more than one Court, and especially that of Austria, believed
+for some days that the escape had been successful.
+
+Again, the flight and its failure put the army into a ridiculous
+posture. Action against the Revolution was never likely, so long as the
+discipline and steadiness of the French army were believed in abroad.
+But the chief command had hopelessly failed upon that occasion, and it
+was evident that the French-speaking troops could not easily be trusted
+by the Executive Government or by their own commanders. Furthermore, the
+failure of the flight leads the Queen, with her vivacity of spirit and
+her rapid though ill-formed plans, to turn for the first time to the
+idea of military intervention. Her letters suggesting this (in the form
+of a threat rather than a war, it is true) do not begin until after her
+capture at Varennes.
+
+Finally, coincident with that disaster was the open mention of a
+Republic, the open suggestion that the King should be deposed, and the
+first definite and public challenge to the principles of monarchy which
+the Revolution had thrown down before Europe.
+
+We are, therefore, not surprised to find that this origin of the
+military movement was followed in two months by the Declaration of
+Pillnitz.
+
+With the political nature of that Declaration one must deal elsewhere.
+Its military character must here be observed.
+
+The Declaration of Pillnitz corresponded as nearly as possible to what
+in the present day would be an order preparatory to mobilising a certain
+proportion of the reserve. It cannot with justice be called equivalent
+to an order _calling out_ all the reserves, still less equivalent to an
+order mobilising upon a war footing the forces of a modern nation, for
+such an action is tantamount to a declaration of war (as, for instance,
+was the action of the English Government before the South African
+struggle), and Pillnitz was very far from that. But Pillnitz was
+certainly as drastic a military proceeding as would be the public
+intimation by a group of Powers that the reserves had been warned in
+connection with their quarrel against another Power. It was, for
+instance, quite as drastic as the action of Austria against Servia in
+1908. And it was intended to be followed by such submission as is
+expected to follow upon the threat of superior force.
+
+Such was the whole burden of Marie Antoinette’s letters to her brother
+(who had called the meeting at Pillnitz), and such was the sense in
+which the politicians of the Revolution understood it.
+
+All that autumn and winter the matter chiefly watched by foreign
+diplomatists and the clearest of French thinkers was the condition of
+the French forces and of their command. Narbonne’s appointment to the
+War Office counted more than any political move, Dumouriez’ succession
+to him was the event of the time. Plans of campaign were drawn up (and
+promptly betrayed by Marie Antoinette to the enemy), manifold occasions
+for actual hostilities were discovered, the Revolution challenged the
+Emperor in the matter of the Alsatian princes, the Emperor challenged,
+through Kaunitz, the Revolution in a letter directly interfering with
+the internal affairs of France, and pretending to a right of _ingérence_
+therein; and on the 20th of April, 1792, war was declared against the
+Empire. Prussia thereupon informed the French Government that she made
+common cause with the Emperor, and the revolutionary struggle had begun.
+
+The war discovered no serious features during its first four months: so
+slow was the gathering and march of the Allies; but the panics into
+which the revolutionary troops fell in the first skirmishes, their lack
+of discipline, and the apparent breakdown of the French military power,
+made the success of the Invasion in Force, when it should come, seem
+certain. The invading army did not cross the frontier until more than a
+week after the fall of the palace. Longwy capitulated at once; a week
+later, in the last days of August, the great frontier fortress of Verdun
+was summoned. It capitulated almost immediately.
+
+
+TWO
+
+On the 2nd of September Verdun was entered by the Prussians, and a
+little outside the gates of the town, near a village bearing the name of
+Regret, the allied camp was fixed. Rather more than a week later, on the
+11th, the Allies marched against the line of the Argonne.
+
+The reader will remember that this moment, with the loss of the frontier
+fortresses Longwy and Verdun, and the evidence of demoralisation which
+that afforded, was also the moment of the September massacres and of the
+horrors in Paris. Dumouriez and the mixed French force which he
+commanded had been ordered by the Ministers of War to hold the line of
+the Argonne against which the Allies were marching. And here it is well
+to explain what was meant in a military sense by this word “line.”
+
+The Argonne is a long, nearly straight range of hills running from the
+south northward, a good deal to the west of north.
+
+Their soil is clay, and though the height of the hills is only three
+hundred feet above the plain, their escarpment or steep side is towards
+the east, whence an invasion may be expected. They are densely wooded,
+from five to eight miles broad, the supply of water in them is bad, in
+many parts undrinkable; habitation with its provision for armies and
+roads extremely rare. It is necessary to insist upon all these details
+because the greater part of civilian readers find it difficult to
+understand how formidable an obstacle so comparatively unimportant a
+feature in the landscape may be to an army upon the march. It was quite
+impossible for the guns, the wagons, and therefore the food and the
+ammunition of the invading army, to pass through the forest over the
+drenched clay land of that wet autumn save where proper roads existed.
+These were only to be found wherever a sort of natural pass negotiated
+the range.
+
+Three of these passes alone existed, and to this day there is very
+little choice in the crossing of these hills. The accompanying sketch
+will explain their disposition. Through the southernmost went the great
+high road from the frontier and Verdun to Paris. At the middle one
+(which is called the Gap of Grandpré) Dumouriez was waiting with his
+incongruous army. The third and northern one was also held, but less
+strongly. The obvious march for an unimpeded invader would have been
+from Verdun along the high road, through the southern pass at “Les
+Islettes,” and so to Chalôns and on to Paris. But Dumouriez, marching
+down rapidly from the north, had set an advanced guard to hold that pass
+and was lying himself with the mass of the army on the pass to the north
+of it at Grandpré. Against Grandpré the Prussians marched, and meanwhile
+the Austrians were attacking the further pass to the north. Both were
+forced. Dumouriez fell back southward to St. Menehould. Meanwhile
+Kellermann was coming up from Metz to join him, and all the while the
+main pass at “Les Islettes,” through which the great road to Paris went,
+continued to be held by the French.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch Map, showing the turning of the positions on the
+Argonne and the Cannonade at Valmy, September 1792.]
+
+The Prussians and the Austrians joined forces in the plain known as the
+Champagne Pouilleuse, which lies westward of Argonne. It will be seen
+that as they marched south along this plain to meet Dumouriez and to
+defeat him, their position was a peculiar one: they were nearer the
+enemy’s capital than the enemy’s army was, and yet they had to fight
+with their backs to that capital, and their enemy the French had to
+fight with their faces towards it. Moreover, it must be remarked that
+the communications of the Allied Army were now of a twisted, roundabout
+sort, which made the conveyance of provisions and ammunition slow and
+difficult--but they counted upon an immediate destruction of Dumouriez’
+force and after that a rapid march on the capital.
+
+On September 19 Kellermann came up from the south and joined hands with
+Dumouriez near St. Menehould, and on the morning of the 20th his force
+occupied a roll of land on which there was a windmill and immediately
+behind which was the village of Valmy; from this village the ensuing
+action was to take its name. It must here be insisted upon that both
+armies had been subjected to the very worst weather for more than a
+fortnight, but of the two the Prussian force had suffered from this
+accident much more severely than the French. Dysentery had already
+broken out, and the length and tortuousness of their communications were
+greatly emphasised by the condition of the roads.
+
+On the morning of that day, the 20th of September, a mist impeded all
+decisive movements. There was an encounter, half accidental, between an
+advanced French battery and the enemy’s guns, but it was not until
+mid-morning that the weather lifted enough to show each force its
+opponent. Then there took place an action, or rather a cannonade, the
+result of which is more difficult to explain, perhaps, than any other
+considerable action of the revolutionary wars. For some hours the
+Prussian artillery, later reinforced by the Austrian, cannonaded the
+French position, having for its central mark the windmill of Valmy,
+round which the French forces were grouped. At one moment this cannonade
+took effect upon the limbers and ammunition wagons of the French; there
+was an explosion which all eye-witnesses have remembered as the chief
+feature of the firing, and which certainly threw into confusion for some
+moments the ill-assorted troops under Kellermann’s command. At what hour
+this took place the witnesses who have left us accounts differ to an
+extraordinary extent. Some will have it at noon, others towards the
+middle of the afternoon--so difficult is it to have any accurate account
+of what happens in the heat of an action. At any rate, if not
+coincidently with this success, at some moment not far removed from it,
+the Prussian charge was ordered, and it is here that the difficulties of
+the historian chiefly appear. That charge was never carried home;
+whether, as some believe, because it was discovered, after it was
+ordered, to be impossible in the face of the accuracy and intensity of
+the French fire, or whether, as is more probably the case, because the
+drenched soil compelled the commanders to abandon the movement after it
+had begun--whatever the cause may have been, the Prussian force, though
+admirably disciplined and led, and though advancing in the most exact
+order, failed to carry out its original purpose. It halted halfway up
+the slope, and the action remained a mere cannonade without immediate
+result apparent upon either side.
+
+Nevertheless that result ultimately turned out to be very great, and if
+we consider its place in history, quite as important as might have been
+the result of a decisive action. In the first place, the one day’s delay
+which it involved was just more than the calculations of the Allies,
+with their long impeded line of communications, had allowed for. In the
+next place, a singular increase in determination and moral force was
+infused into the disheartened and ill-matched troops of the French
+commanders by this piece of resistance.
+
+We must remember that the French force upon the whole expected and
+discounted a defeat, the private soldier especially had no confidence in
+the result; and to find that at the first action which had been so long
+threatened and had now at last come, he could stand up to the enemy,
+produced upon him an exaggerated effect which it would never have had
+under other circumstances.
+
+Finally, we must recollect that whatever causes had forbidden the
+Prussian charge forbade on the next day a general advance against the
+French position. And all the time the sickness in the Prussian camp was
+rapidly increasing. Even that short check of twenty-four hours made a
+considerable difference. A further delay of but yet another day, during
+which the Allied Army could not decide whether to attack at once or to
+stand as they were, very greatly increased the list of inefficients from
+illness.
+
+For a whole week of increasing anxiety and increasing inefficiency the
+Allied Army hung thus, impotent, though they were between the French
+forces and the capital. Dumouriez ably entertained this hesitation, with
+all its accumulating dangers for the enemy, by prolonged negotiations,
+until upon the 30th of September the Prussian and Austrian organisation
+could stand the strain no longer, and its commanders determined upon
+retreat. It was the genius of Danton, as we now know, that chiefly
+organised the withdrawal of what might still have been a dangerous
+invading force. It is principally due to him that no unwise Jingoism was
+permitted to claim a trial of strength with the invader, that he was
+allowed to retire with all his guns, his colours and his train. The
+retreat was lengthy and unmolested, though watched by the French forces
+that discreetly shepherded it but were kept tightly in hand from Paris.
+It was more than three weeks later when the Allied Army, upon which
+Europe and the French monarchy had counted for an immediate settlement
+of the Revolution, re-crossed the frontier, and in this doubtful and
+perhaps inexplicable fashion the first campaign of the European Powers
+against the Revolution utterly failed.
+
+
+THREE
+
+Following upon this success, Dumouriez pressed on to what had been, from
+the first moment of his power at the head of the army, his personal
+plan--to wit, the invasion of the Low Countries.
+
+To understand why this invasion failed and why Dumouriez thought it
+might succeed, we must appreciate the military and political situation
+of the Low Countries at the time. They then formed a very wealthy and
+cherished portion of the Austrian dominions; they had latterly suffered
+from deep disaffection culminating in an open revolution, which was due
+to the Emperor of Austria’s narrow and intolerant contempt of religion.
+From his first foolish policy of persecution and confiscation he had
+indeed retreated, but the feeling of the people was still strongly
+opposed to the Government at Vienna. It is remarkable, indeed, and in
+part due to the pressure of a strongly Protestant and aristocratic
+state, Holland, to the north of them, that the people of the Austrian
+Netherlands retained at that time a peculiar attachment to the Catholic
+religion. The Revolution was quite as anti-Catholic as the Austrian
+Emperor, but of the persecution of the latter the Belgians (as we now
+call them) knew something; that of the former they had not yet learnt to
+dread. It was, therefore, Dumouriez’ calculation that, in invading this
+province of the Austrian power, he would be fighting in friendly
+territory. Again, it was separated from the political centre of the
+empire; it was, therefore, more or less isolated politically, and even
+for military purposes communication with it was not so easy, unless,
+indeed, Austria could count on a complete co-operation with Prussia,
+which Power had been for now so long her ruthless and persistent rival.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch Map of towns occupied by French in 1792 and
+evacuated in March 1793, with sites of battles of Jemappes and of
+Neerwinden, and of Dumouriez’ treason.]
+
+Favourable, however, as the circumstances appeared for an invasion, two
+factors telling heavily against the French had to be counted: the first
+was the formation of their army, the second the spirit of rebellion
+against any anti-Catholic Government which had given such trouble to
+Joseph II.
+
+Of these two factors by far the most important was, of course, the
+first. If the French forces had been homogeneous, in good spirit, and
+well trained, they might have held what they won; as a fact, they were
+most unhomogeneous, great portions of them were ill trained, and, worst
+of all, there was no consistent theory of subordinate command. Men who
+imagined that subordinate, that is, regimental, command in an army
+could be erected from below, and that a fighting force could resemble a
+somewhat lax and turbulent democracy, marched alongside of and were
+actually incorporated with old soldiers who had spent their whole
+careers under an unquestioned discipline, and under a subordinate
+command which came to them they knew not whence, and as it were by fate.
+The mere mixture of two such different classes of men in one force would
+have been bad enough to deal with, but what was worse, the political
+theories of the day fostered the military error of the new battalions
+though the politicians dared not interfere with the valuable
+organisation of the old.
+
+The invasion of the Low Countries began with a great, though somewhat
+informal and unfruitful success, in the victory of Jemappes. It was the
+first striking and dramatic decisive action which the French, always of
+an eager appetite for such news, had been given since between forty and
+fifty years. The success in America against the English, though
+brilliantly won and solidly founded, had not presented occasions of this
+character, and Fontenoy was the last national victory which Paris could
+remember. Men elderly or old in this autumn of 1792 would have been boys
+or very young men when Fontenoy was fought. The eager generation of the
+Revolution, with its military appetites and aptitudes, as yet had hardly
+expected victory, though victory was ardently desired by them and
+peculiarly suitable to their temper.
+
+It may be imagined, therefore, what an effect the news of Jemappes had
+upon the political world in Paris. The action was fought just below the
+town of Mons, a few miles over the frontier, and consisted in a somewhat
+ill-ordered but successful advance across the River Haine. Whether
+because the Austrians, with an inferior force, attempted to hold too
+long a line, or because the infantry and even the new French volunteer
+battalions, as yet untried by fatigue, proved irresistible in the centre
+of the movement, Jemappes was a victory so complete that the attempts of
+apologists to belittle it only serve to enhance its character.
+
+Like many another great and apparently decisive action, however, it bore
+no lasting fruit. Both the factors of which I have spoken above appeared
+immediately after this success. Belgium was, indeed, over-run by the
+French, but in their over-running of it with something like eighty
+thousand men, they made no attempt to spare the traditions or to
+conciliate the sympathies of the inhabitants. Hardly was Jemappes won
+when Mons, the neighbouring fortified frontier town, was at once endowed
+with the whole machinery of revolutionary government. Church property
+was invaded and occasionally rifled, and the French paper money, the
+assignats of which we have heard, poured in to disturb and in places to
+ruin the excellent commercial system upon which Belgium then as now
+reposed.
+
+Jemappes was fought upon the 6th of November, 1792. Brussels was entered
+upon the 14th, and throughout that winter the Low Countries lay
+entirely in the hands of the French. The Commissioners from the
+Convention, though endowing Belgium with republican institutions,
+treated it as a conquered country, and before the breaking of spring,
+the French Parliament voted its annexation to France. This annexation,
+the determination of the politicians in Paris that the new Belgian
+Government should be republican and anti-Catholic, the maltreatment of
+the Church in the occupied country and the increasing ill discipline and
+lack of cohesion in his army, left Dumouriez in a position which grew
+more and more difficult as the new year, 1793, advanced. It must be
+remembered that this moment exactly corresponded with the execution of
+the King and the consequent declaration of war by or against France in
+the case of one Power after another throughout Europe. Meanwhile, it was
+decided, foolishly enough, to proceed from the difficult occupation of
+Belgium to the still more difficult occupation of Holland, and the siege
+of Maestricht was planned.
+
+The moment was utterly ill-suited for such a plan. Every Executive in
+the civilised world was coalescing openly or secretly, directly or
+indirectly, against the revolutionary Government. The first order to
+retreat came upon the 8th of March, when the siege of Maestricht was
+seen to be impossible, and when the great forces of the Allies were
+gathered again to attempt what was to be the really serious attack upon
+the Revolution: something far more dangerous, something which much more
+nearly achieved success, than the march of the comparatively small force
+which had been checked at Valmy.
+
+For ten days the French retreat continued, when, upon the 18th of March,
+Dumouriez risked battle at Neerwinden. His army was defeated.
+
+The defeat was not disastrous, the retreat was continued in fairly good
+order, but a civilian population understands nothing besides the words
+defeat and victory; it can appreciate a battle, not a campaign. The news
+of the defeat, coming at a moment of crisis in the politics of Paris,
+was decisive; it led to grave doubts of Dumouriez’ loyalty to the
+revolutionary Government, it shattered his popularity with those who had
+continued to believe in him, while the general himself could not but
+believe that the material under his command was rapidly deteriorating.
+Before the end of the month the army had abandoned all its conquests,
+and Valenciennes, in French territory, was reached upon the 27th. The
+dash upon Belgium had wholly failed.
+
+At this moment came one of those political acts which so considerably
+disturb any purely military conspectus of the revolutionary wars.
+Dumouriez, at the head of his army, which, though in retreat and
+defeated, was still intact, determined upon what posterity has justly
+called treason, but what to his own mind must have seemed no more than
+statesmanship. He proposed an understanding with the enemy and a
+combined march upon Paris to restore the monarchical government, and
+put an end to what seemed to him, as a soldier, a perfectly hopeless
+situation. He certainly believed it impossible for the French army, in
+the welter of 1793, to defeat the invader. He saw his own life in peril
+merely because he was defeated. He had no toleration for the rising
+enthusiasm or delirium of the political theory which had sent him out,
+and, even before he had reached French territory, his negotiations with
+Coburg, the Austrian commander, had begun. They lasted long. Dumouriez
+agreed to put the frontier fortresses of the French into the hands of
+the enemy as a guarantee and a pledge; and on the 5th of April all was
+ready for the alliance of the two armed forces.
+
+But just as the treason of Dumouriez is, in the military sense, abnormal
+and disturbing to any general conspectus of the campaign, so was the
+action of his army.
+
+The doubtful point of a general command which is political in nature,
+and may be unpopular with the rank and file, lies, of course, in the
+attitude of the commanders of units, and these unanimously refused to
+obey the orders of their chief. It was known that Dumouriez had been
+summoned to the bar of the Convention, which body had sent commissioners
+to apprehend him. He had arrested the commissioners, and had handed them
+over as hostages and prisoners to Coburg. So far from Dumouriez upon the
+critical day handing over his force to the enemy, or constituting it a
+part of an allied army to march upon the capital, he was compelled to
+fly upon the 8th of April; all that disappeared with him, counting many
+who later deserted back again to the French colours, was less than a
+thousand men--and these foreign mercenaries.
+
+The consequence of this strange passage upon the political history of
+the time we have already seen. Its consequence upon the military history
+of it was indirect but profound. The French forces, such as they were,
+were still intact, but no general officer could in future be trusted by
+Paris, and the stimulus which nations in the critical moments of
+invasion and of danger during foreign war seek in patriotism, in the
+offering of a high wage to the men and of honours and fortunes to their
+commanders, was now sought by the French in the singular, novel and
+abnormal experiment of the Terror. Command upon the frontier throughout
+1793 and the first part of 1794, during the critical fourteen months,
+that is, which decided the fate of the Revolution, and which turned the
+tide of arms in favour of the French, was a task accomplished under the
+motive power of capital punishment. A blunder was taken as a proof of
+treason, and there lay over the ordering of every general movement the
+threat of the guillotine.
+
+What we have now to follow is somewhat over a year of a struggle thus
+abnormally organised upon the French side, and finally successful
+through the genius of a great organiser, once a soldier, now a
+politician, Carnot. The French succeeded by the unshakable conviction
+which permitted the political leaders to proceed to all extremity in
+their determination to save the Revolution; by the peculiar physical
+powers of endurance which their army displayed, and finally, of course,
+by certain accidents--for accident will always be a determining factor
+in war.
+
+The spring of 1793, the months of April and May, form the first crisis
+of the revolutionary war. The attack about to be delivered is universal,
+and seems absolutely certain to succeed. With the exception of the rush
+at Jemappes, where less than thirty thousand Austrians were broken
+through by a torrent superior in numbers (though even there obviously
+ill-organised), no success had attended the revolutionary armies. Their
+condition was, even to the eye of the layman, bad, and to the eye of the
+expert hopeless. There was no unity apparent in direction, there were
+vast lesions in the discipline of the ranks like great holes torn in
+some rotten fabric. Even against the forces already mobilised against
+it, it had proved powerless, and it might be taken for granted that by
+an act more nearly resembling police work than a true campaign, the
+Allies would reach Paris and something resembling the old order be soon
+restored. What remains is to follow the process by which this
+expectation was disappointed.
+
+The situation at this moment can best be understood by a glance at the
+sketch map on p. 178. Two great French advances had been made in the
+winter of 1792-93; the one a northern advance, which we have just
+detailed, the over-running of Belgium; the other an eastern advance
+right up to the Rhine and to the town of Mayence. Both had failed. The
+failure in Belgium, culminating in the treason of Dumouriez, has been
+read. On the Rhine (where Mayence had been annexed by the French
+Parliament just as Belgium had been) the active hostility of the
+population and the gathering of the organised forces of the Allies had
+the same effect as had been produced in the Low Countries.
+
+It was on March 21, 1793, that the Prussians crossed the Rhine at
+Bacharach, and within that week the French commander, Custine, began to
+fall back. On the first of April he was back again in French territory,
+leaving the garrison of Mayence, somewhat over twenty thousand men, to
+hold out as best it could; a fortnight later the Prussians had
+surrounded the town and the siege had begun.
+
+On the north-eastern front, stretching from the Ardennes to the sea, a
+similar state of things was developing. There, a barrier of fortresses
+stood between the Allies and Paris, and a series of sieges corresponding
+to the siege of Mayence in the east had to be undertaken. At much the
+same time as the investment of Mayence, on April 9, the first step in
+this military task was taken by the Allies moving in between the
+fortress of Condé and the fortress of Valenciennes. Thenceforward it was
+the business of the Austrians under Coburg, with the Allies that were to
+reach him, to reduce the frontier fortresses one by one, and when his
+communications were thus secure, to march upon Paris.
+
+It is here necessary for the reader unacquainted with military history
+to appreciate two points upon which not a little of contemporary
+historical writing may mislead him. The first is that both in the Rhine
+valley and on the Belgian frontier the forces of the Allies in their
+numbers and their organisation were conceived to be overwhelming. The
+second is that no competent commander on the spot would have thought of
+leaving behind him the garrison of even one untaken fortress. It is
+important to insist upon these points, because the political passions
+roused by the Revolution are still so strong that men can hardly write
+of it without prejudice and bias, and two errors continually present in
+these descriptions of the military situation in the spring of 1793, are,
+first, that the Allies were weakened by the Polish question, which was
+then active, and secondly, that the delay of their commanders before the
+French fortresses was unnecessary.
+
+Both these propositions are put forward with the object of explaining
+the ultimate defeat of the enemies of the Revolution: both, however
+great the authority behind them, are unhistorical and worthless. The
+French success was a military success due to certain military factors
+both of design and accident, which will appear in what follows. The
+Allies played their part as all the art of war demanded it to be played;
+they were ultimately defeated, not from the commission of any such
+gross and obvious error in policy or strategy as historians with too
+little comprehension of military affairs sometimes pretend, but from the
+military superiority of their opponents.
+
+It is true that the Polish question (that is the necessity the Austrian
+and Prussian Governments were each under of watching that the other was
+not lessened in importance by the approaching annexations of further
+Polish territory with the consequent jealousy and mistrust that arose
+from this between Austria and Prussia) was a very important feature of
+the moment. But it is bad military history to pretend that this affected
+the military situation on the Rhine or in the Netherlands.
+
+Every campaign is conditioned by its political object. The political
+object in this case was to march upon and to occupy Paris. The political
+object of a campaign once determined, the size and the organisation of
+the enemy are calculated and a certain force is brought against it. No
+much larger force is brought than is necessary: to act in such a fashion
+would be in military art what paying two or three times the price of an
+article would be in commerce. The forces of the Allies upon the Rhine
+and in the Netherlands were, in the opinion of every authority of the
+time, amply sufficient for their purpose; and more than sufficient: so
+much more than sufficient that the attitude of that military opinion
+which had to meet the attack--to wit, the professional military opinion
+of the French republican soldiers, was that the situation was
+desperate, nor indeed was it attempted to be met save by a violent and,
+as it were, irrational enthusiasm.
+
+The second point, the so-called “delay” involved in the sieges
+undertaken by the Allies, proves, when it is put forward, an
+insufficient acquaintance with contemporary conditions. Any fortress
+with a considerable garrison left behind untaken would have meant the
+destruction of the Austrian or Prussian communications, and their
+destruction at a moment when the Austrian and Prussian forces were
+actually advancing over a desperately hostile country. Moreover, when
+acting against forces wholly inferior in discipline and organisation, an
+untaken fortress is a refuge which one must take peculiar pains to
+destroy. To throw himself into such a refuge will always stand before
+the commander of those inferior forces as a last resource. It is a
+refuge which he will certainly avail himself of ultimately, if it is
+permitted to him. And when he has so availed himself of it, it means the
+indefinite survival of an armed organisation in the rear of the
+advancing invaders. We must conclude, if we are to understand this
+critical campaign which changed the history of the world, that Coburg
+did perfectly right in laying siege to one fortress after another before
+he began what every one expected to be the necessarily successful
+advance on Paris. The French despair, as one town after another
+surrendered, is an amply sufficient proof of the excellence of his
+judgment.
+
+We approach the military problem of 1793, therefore, with the following
+two fields clear before us:--
+
+1. In the north-east an advance on Paris, the way to which is blocked by
+a quadrilateral of fortresses: Mons, Maubeuge, Condé, and Valenciennes,
+with the subsidiary stronghold of Lequesnoy in the neighbourhood of the
+last. Mons has been in Austrian hands since Dumouriez’ retreat; Condé is
+just cut off from Valenciennes by Coburg’s advance, but has not fallen;
+Valenciennes and the neighbouring Lequesnoy are still intact, and so is
+Maubeuge. All must be reduced before the advance on Paris can begin.
+Behind these fortresses is a French army incapable as yet of attacking
+Coburg’s command with any hope of success. Such is the position in the
+last fortnight of April.
+
+2. Meanwhile, on the Rhine the French garrison in Mayence is besieged;
+Custine, the French commander in that quarter, has fallen back on the
+French town of Landau, and is drawing up what are known in history as
+the Lines of Weissembourg. The accompanying sketch map explains their
+importance. Reposing upon the two obstacles of the river on the right
+and the mountains on the left, they fulfilled precisely the same
+functions as a fortress; and those functions we have just described.
+Until these lines were carried, the whole of Alsace may be regarded as a
+fortress defended by the mountains and the river on two sides, and by
+the Lines of Weissembourg on the third.
+
+A reader unacquainted with military history may ask why the obstruction
+was not drawn upon the line of the Prussian advance on Paris. The answer
+is that the presence of a force behind fortifications anywhere in the
+neighbourhood of a line of communication is precisely equivalent to an
+obstacle lying right upon those lines. For no commander can go forward
+along the line of his advance and leave a large undestroyed force close
+to one side of that line, and so situated that it can come out when he
+has passed and cut off his communications; for it is by communications
+that an army lives, especially when it is marching in hostile country.
+
+[Illustration: Strategic situation in early summer of 1793. Mayence
+besieged, Condé and Valenciennes about to be besieged. Conditions of the
+double advance on Paris.]
+
+Custine, therefore, behind his Lines of Weissembourg, and the besieged
+garrison in Mayence, correspond to the barrier of fortresses on the
+north-east and delayed the advance of the Prussians under Wurmser and
+Brunswick from the Rhine, just as Condé, Valenciennes, and Maubeuge
+prevented the advance of Coburg on the north-east. Such in general was
+the situation upon the eastern frontier at the end of that month of
+April, 1793.
+
+
+FOUR
+
+Let us first follow the development of the northern position. It will be
+remembered that all Europe was at war against the French. The Austrians
+had for allies Dutch troops which joined them at this moment, and
+certain English and Hanoverian troops under the Duke of York who also
+joined them.
+
+At this moment, when Coburg found himself in increasing strength, a
+tentative French attack upon him was delivered and failed. Dampierre,
+who was in command of all this French “Army of the North,” was killed,
+and Custine was sent to replace him. The Army of the North did not, as
+perhaps it should have done, concentrate into one body to meet Coburg’s
+threatened advance; it was perpetually attempting diversions which were
+useless because its strength was insufficient. Now it feinted upon the
+right towards Namur, now along the sea coast on the left; and these
+diversions failed in their object. Before the end of the month, Coburg,
+to give himself elbow room, as it were, for the sieges which he was
+preparing, compelled the main French force to retreat to a position well
+behind Valenciennes. It was immediately after this success of Coburg’s
+that Custine arrived to take command on the Belgian frontier, his place
+on the Rhine being taken by Houchard.
+
+Custine was a very able commander, but a most unlucky one. His plan was
+the right one: to concentrate all the French forces (abandoning the
+Rhine) and so form an army sufficient to cope with Coburg’s. The
+Government would not meet him in this, and he devoted himself
+immediately to the reorganisation of the Army of the North alone. The
+month of June and half of July was taken up in that task.
+
+Meanwhile, the Austrian siege work had begun, and Condé was the first
+object of its attention. Upon July 10 Condé fell. Meanwhile Custine had
+been recalled to Paris, and Valenciennes was invested. Custine was
+succeeded by Kilmaine, a general of Irish extraction, who maintained his
+position for but a short time, and was unable while he maintained it to
+do anything. The forces of the Allies continually increased. The number
+at Coburg’s disposal free from the business of besieging Valenciennes
+was already larger than the force required for that purpose. And yet
+another fifteen thousand Hessian troops marched in while the issue of
+that siege was in doubt. This great advantage in numbers permitted him
+to get rid of the main French force that was still present in front of
+him, though not seriously annoying him.
+
+This force lay due south-west of Valenciennes, and about a day’s march
+distant. He depended for the capture of it upon his English and
+Hanoverian Allies under the Duke of York, but that general’s march
+failed. The distance was too much for his troops in the hot summer
+weather, and the French were able to retreat behind the line of the
+Scarpe and save their army intact.
+
+The Duke of York’s talents have been patriotically exaggerated in many a
+treatise. He always failed: and this was among the most signal of his
+failures.
+
+Kilmaine had hardly escaped from York, drawn up his army behind the
+Scarpe and put it into a position of safety when he in his turn was
+deprived of the command, and Houchard was taken from the Rhine just as
+Custine had been, and put at the head of the Army of the North. Before
+the main French army had taken up this position of safety, Valenciennes
+had fallen. It fell on the 28th of July, and its fall, inevitable though
+it was and, as one may say, taken for granted by military opinion, was
+much the heaviest blow yet delivered. Nothing of importance remained to
+block the march of the Armies of the Allies, save Maubeuge.
+
+At about the same moment occurred three very important changes in the
+general military situation, which the reader must note if he is to
+understand what follows.
+
+The first was the sudden serious internal menace opposed to the
+Republican Government; the second was the advent of Carnot to power; the
+third was the English diversion upon Dunquerque.
+
+The serious internal menace which the Government of the Republic had to
+face was the widespread rebellion which has been dealt with in the
+earlier part of this book. The action of the Paris Radicals against the
+Girondins had raised whole districts in the provinces. Marseilles, which
+had shown signs of disaffection since April, and had begun to raise a
+local reactionary force, revolted. So did Bordeaux, Nîmes, and other
+great southern towns. Lyons had risen at the end of May and had killed
+the Jacobin mayor of the town in the period between the fall of Condé
+and that of Valenciennes. The troop which Marseilles had raised against
+the Republic was defeated in the field only the day before Valenciennes
+fell, but the great seaport was still unoccupied by the forces of the
+Government. The Norman march upon Paris had also failed between those
+two dates, the fall of Condé and the fall of Valenciennes. The Norman
+bark had proved worse than the Norman bite; but the force was so
+neighbouring to the capital that it took a very large place in the
+preoccupations of the time. The Vendean revolt, though its triumphant
+advance was checked before Nantes a fortnight before the fall of Condé,
+was still vigorous, and the terrible reprisals against it were hardly
+begun. Worst of all, or at least, worst perhaps, after the revolt of
+Lyons, was the defection of Toulon. Toulon rose two days before the fall
+of Valenciennes, and was prepared to hand itself over (as at last it did
+hand itself over) to occupation by the English fleet.
+
+The dates thus set in their order may somewhat confuse the reader, and I
+will therefore summarise the general position of the internal danger
+thus: A man in the French camp on the Scheldt, listening to the guns
+before Valenciennes fifteen miles away, and hourly expecting their
+silence as a signal that the city had surrendered, would have heard by
+one post after another how Marseilles still held out against the
+Government; how the counter-attack against the successful Vendeans had
+but doubtfully begun (all July was full of disasters in that quarter);
+how Lyons was furiously successful in her rebellion and had dared to put
+to death the Republican mayor of the town; and that the great arsenal
+and port at Toulon, the Portsmouth of France upon the Mediterranean, had
+sickened of the Government and was about to admit the English fleet. His
+only comfort would have been to hear that the Norman march on Paris had
+failed--but he would still be under the impression of it and of the
+murder of Marat by a Norman woman.
+
+There is the picture of that sudden internal struggle which coincides
+with this moment of the revolutionary war, the moment of the fall of
+Condé and of Valenciennes, and the exposure of the frontier.
+
+The second point, the advent of Carnot into the Committee of Public
+Safety, which has already been touched upon in the political part of
+this work, has so preponderating a military significance that we must
+consider it here also.
+
+The old Committee of Public Safety, it will be remembered, reached the
+end of its legal term on July 10. It was the Committee which the wisdom
+of Danton had controlled. The members elected to the new Committee did
+not include Carnot, but the military genius of this man was already
+public. He came of that strong middle class which is the pivot upon
+which the history of modern Europe turns; a Burgundian with lineage,
+intensely republican, he had been returned to the Convention and had
+voted for the death of the King; a sapper before the Revolution, and one
+thoroughly well grounded in his arm and in general reading of military
+things, he had been sent by the Convention to the Army of the North on
+commission, he had seen its weakness and had watched its experiments.
+Upon his return he was not immediately selected for the post in which he
+was to transform the revolutionary war. It was not until the 14th of
+August that he was given a temporary place upon the Committee which his
+talents very soon made permanent. He was given the place merely as a
+stopgap to the odious and incompetent fanatic, Saint-André, who was for
+the moment away on mission. But from the day of his admission his
+superiority in military affairs was so incontestable that he was
+virtually a dictator therein, and his first action after the general
+lines of organisation had been laid down by him was to impose upon the
+frontier armies the necessity of concentration. He introduced what
+afterwards Napoleon inherited from him, the tactical venture of “all
+upon one throw.”
+
+It must be remembered that Carnot’s success did not lie in any
+revolutionary discovery in connection with the art of war, but rather in
+that vast capacity for varied detail which marks the organiser, and in
+an intimate sympathy with the national character. He understood the
+contempt for parade, the severity or brutality of discipline, the
+consciousness of immense powers of endurance which are in the Frenchman
+when he becomes a soldier;--and he made use of this understanding of
+his.
+
+It must be further remembered that this powerful genius had behind him
+in these first days of his activity the equally powerful genius of
+Danton; for it was Danton and he who gave practical shape to that law of
+conscription by which the French Revolution suddenly increased its armed
+forces by nearly half a million of men, restored the Roman tradition,
+and laid the foundation of the armed system on which Europe to-day
+depends. With Carnot virtually commander-in-chief of all the armies, and
+enabled to impose his decisions in particular upon that Army of the
+North which he had studied so recently as a commissioner, the second
+factor of the situation I am describing is comprehended.
+
+The third, as I have said, was the English diversion upon Dunquerque.
+
+The subsequent failure of the Allies has led to bitter criticism of this
+movement. Had the Allies not failed, history would have treated it as
+its contemporaries treated it. The forces of the Allies on the
+north-eastern frontier were so great and their confidence so
+secure--especially after the fall of Valenciennes--that the English
+proposal to withdraw their forces for the moment from Coburg’s and to
+secure Dunquerque, was not received with any destructive criticism.
+Eighteen battalions and fourteen squadrons of the Imperial forces were
+actually lent to the Duke of York for this expedition. What is more,
+even after that diversion failed, the plan was fixed to begin again when
+the last of the other fortresses should have fallen: so little was the
+English plan for the capture of the seaport disfavoured by the
+commander-in-chief of the Allies.
+
+That diversion on Dunquerque turned out, however, to be an error of
+capital importance. The attempt to capture the city utterly failed, and
+the victory which accompanied its repulsion had upon the French that
+indefinable but powerful moral effect which largely contributed to their
+future successes.
+
+The accompanying sketch map will explain the position. Valenciennes and
+Condé have fallen; Lequesnoy, the small fortress subsidiary to
+Valenciennes, has not yet been attacked but comes next in the series,
+when the moment was judged propitious for the detachment of the
+Anglo-Hanoverian force with a certain number of Imperial Allies to march
+to the sea.
+
+It must always be remembered by the reader of history that military
+situations, like the situations upon a chess board, rather happen than
+are designed; and the situation which developed at the end of September
+upon the extreme north and west of the line which the French were
+attempting to hold against the Allies was strategically of this nature.
+When the Duke of York insisted upon a division of the forces of the
+Allies and an attack upon Dunquerque, no living contemporary foresaw
+disaster.
+
+[Illustration: Showing condition of the frontier fortresses blocking the
+road to Paris when the expedition to Dunquerque was decided upon. August
+1793.]
+
+Coburg, indeed, would have preferred the English to remain with him, and
+asked them to do so, but he felt in no sort of danger through their
+temporary absence, nor, as a matter of fact, was he in any danger
+through it.
+
+Again, though the positions which the Duke of York took up when he
+arrived in front of Dunquerque were bad, neither his critics at home,
+nor any of his own subordinates, nor any of the enemy, perceived fully
+how bad they were. It was, as will presently be seen, a sort of drift,
+bad luck combined with bad management, which led to this British
+disaster, and (what was all-important for the conduct of the war) to the
+first success in a general action which the French had to flatter and
+encourage themselves with during all that fatal summer.
+
+The Duke of York separated his force from that of Coburg just before the
+middle of August; besides the British, who were not quite 7,000 strong,
+11,000 Austrians, over 10,000 Hanoverians and 7,000 Hessians were under
+his command. The total force, therefore, was nearly 37,000 strong. No
+one could imagine that, opposed by such troops as the French were able
+to put into line, and marching against such wretched defences as those
+of Dunquerque then were, the Duke’s army had not a perfectly easy task
+before it; and the plan, which was to take Dunquerque and upon the
+return to join the Austrian march on Paris, was reasonable and feasible.
+
+It is important that the reader should firmly seize this and not read
+history backward from future events.
+
+Certain faults are to be observed in the first conduct of the march. It
+began on the 15th of August, proceeding from Marchiennes to Menin, and
+at the outset displayed that deplorable lack of marching power which the
+Duke of York’s command had shown throughout the campaign.[6] From
+Marchiennes to Tourcoing is a long day’s march: it took the Duke of York
+four days; and, take the march altogether, nine days were spent in
+covering less than forty miles. In the course of that march, the British
+troops had an opportunity of learning to despise their adversary: they
+found at Linselles, upon the flank of their advance, a number of
+undisciplined boys who broke the moment the Guards were upon them, and
+whose physical condition excited the ridicule of their assailants. The
+army proceeded after this purposeless and unfruitful skirmish to the
+neighbourhood of the sea coast, and the siege of Dunquerque was
+undertaken under conditions which will be clear to the reader from the
+following sketch map.
+
+[Illustration: Operations round Dunquerque. September 1793.]
+
+The date of the 20th of August must first be fixed in the mind: on that
+date the army which was to take Dunquerque was separated into its two
+component parts. The first, under the Duke of York, was to attack the
+town itself; the second, under the aged Austrian general, Freytag, was
+to watch the movement of any approaching enemy and to cover the force
+which was besieging the town. Two days later, the Duke of York was
+leaving Furnes, which he had made his base for the advance, and Freytag
+had with the greatest ease brushed the French posts--mainly of
+volunteers--from before him, and was beginning to take up the flanking
+positions south and east of Bergues which covered the siege of
+Dunquerque.
+
+Two days later again, on August 24, Freytag had occupied Wormhoudt and
+Esquelbecque, capturing guns by the dozen, doing pretty well what he
+would with the French outposts, and quite surrounding the town of
+Bergues. Wilder was his headquarters. On the same day, the 24th, the
+Duke of York had with the greatest ease driven in the advanced posts of
+the French before Dunquerque, and shut up the enemy within the town,
+while he formed his besieging force outside of it, entrenched in a
+position which he had chosen beforehand, reposing upon the sea at his
+right, his left on the village of Tetteghem. He was then about 3,000
+yards from the fortifications at Dunquerque.
+
+Such was the situation upon the dawn of the 25th, when everything was
+ready for active operations. And here the reader must look upon the map
+for what ultimately proved the ruin of the situation.
+
+Supposing Freytag round Bergues in the position which the map shows; the
+Duke of York in front of Dunquerque as the map also shows him; the two
+forces are in touch across the road and the belt of country which unites
+Bergues and Dunquerque. The covering army and the besieging force which
+it covers are each a wing of one combined body; each communicates with
+the other, each can support the other at the main point of effort, and
+though between the one and the other eastward there stretches a line of
+marshy country--the “meres” which the map indicates--yet a junction
+between the two forces exists westward of these, and the two armies can
+co-operate by the Bergues-Dunquerque road.
+
+A factor which the Duke of York may have neglected was the power of
+flooding all that flat country round, the road which the French in
+Dunquerque, being in possession of the sluices, possessed. They used it
+at once: they drowned the low lands to the south of Dunquerque, upon the
+very day when the last dispositions of the attacking force were
+completed. But more important--and never yet explained--was the
+Austrians’ abandonment of Coudequerque. By this error, the main road
+itself, standing above the flood, was lost, and from being one strong
+army the force of the Allies became two weak ones. Communication was no
+longer possible between the Duke of York’s and Freytag’s territories,
+and it was of this separation that the French, in spite of their
+deplorable organisation and more deplorable personnel, took advantage.
+
+They took advantage of it slowly. Houchard gathered altogether forty
+thousand men near Cassel, but it was ten days before they could be
+concentrated. It must again be insisted upon and repeated that, large as
+the number was--it was four times as great as Freytag’s now isolated
+force--Houchard’s command was made up of men quite two-thirds of whom
+were hardly soldiers: volunteers both new and recent, ill-trained
+conscripts and so forth. There was no basis of discipline, hardly any
+power to enforce it; the men had behaved disgracefully in all the
+affairs of outposts, they had been brushed away contemptuously by the
+small Austrian force from every position they had held. With all his
+numerical superiority the attempt which Houchard was about to make was
+very hazardous: and Houchard was a hesitating and uncertain commander.
+Furthermore, of the forty thousand men one quarter at least remained out
+of action through the ineptitude and political terror of Dumesny,
+Houchard’s lieutenant upon the right.
+
+It was upon the 6th of September that the French advance began along the
+whole line; it was a mere pushing in of inferior numbers by superior
+numbers, the superior numbers perpetually proving themselves inferior to
+the Austrians in military value. Thus, the capture of old Freytag
+himself in a night skirmish was at once avenged by the storming of the
+village near which he had been caught, and he was re-taken. In actual
+fighting and force for force, Houchard’s command found nothing to
+encourage it during these first operations.
+
+The Austrians in falling back concentrated and were soon one compact
+body: to attack and dislodge it was the object of the French advance,
+but an object hardly to be attained.
+
+What happened was not only the unexpected success of this advance, but
+the gaining by the French of the first decisive action in the long
+series which was to terminate twenty years later at Leipsic.
+
+The army of Freytag fell back upon the village of Hondschoote and stood
+there in full force upon the morning of Sunday, the 8th of September.
+Houchard attacked it with a force greatly lessened but still double that
+of the defenders. So conspicuous, however, was the superiority of the
+Austrian regulars over the French raw troops and volunteers that during
+this morning of the 8th the result was still doubtful. By the afternoon,
+however, the work was done, and the enemy were in a retreat which might
+easily have been turned into a rout. A glance at the map will show that
+Houchard, had he possessed the initiative common to so many of his
+contemporaries, might at once have driven the numerically inferior and
+heavily defeated force (it had lost one-third of its men) to the right,
+and proceeded himself to cut the communications of the Duke of York and
+to destroy his army, which lay packed upon the waterless sand dunes
+where the village of Malo-les-Bains now stands. Houchard hesitated;
+Freytag escaped; the Duke of York, abandoning his siege-pieces to the
+number of forty and much of his heavy baggage, retreated precipitately
+through the night to Furnes, right across the front of the French army,
+and escaped destruction.
+
+The Battle of Hoondschoote, therefore, as it is called, raised the siege
+of Dunquerque. It was, as I have said, the first successful decisive
+action which the Revolution could count since the moment of its extreme
+danger and the opening of the general European war. But it was nothing
+like what it might have been had Houchard been willing to risk a hardy
+stroke. Houchard was therefore recalled, condemned to death, and
+executed by the Committee of Public Safety, whose pitiless despotism was
+alone capable of saving the nation. He remains the single example of a
+general officer who has suffered death for military incompetence after
+the gaining of a victory, and his execution is an excellent example of
+the way in which the military temper of the Committee, and particularly
+of Carnot, refused to consider any factor in the war save those that
+make for military success.
+
+Carnot and the Committee had no patience with the illusions which a
+civilian crowd possesses upon mere individual actions: what they saw was
+the campaign as a whole, and they knew that Houchard had left the armies
+opposite him intact.
+
+Perhaps his execution was made more certain by the continuance of bad
+news from that more important point of the frontier--the direct line of
+Austrian advance upon Paris. Here, already, Valenciennes had fallen two
+months before, and Condé also. Lequesnoy, the third point of the barrier
+line, capitulated on the 11th of September, and the news of that
+capitulation reached Paris immediately after the news of Hondschoote. No
+fortress was now left between the Allies and the capital but Maubeuge.
+Coburg marched upon it at once.
+
+Not only had he that immense superiority in the quality of his troops
+which must be still insisted upon, but numerically also he was three to
+one when, on the 28th of September, at dawn, he crossed the Sambre above
+and below Maubeuge, and by noon of that day had contained the French
+army in that neighbourhood within the lines of the fortress.
+
+The situation was critical in the extreme: Maubeuge was ill prepared to
+stand siege; it was hardly provisioned; its garrison was of varied and,
+on the whole, of bad quality. In mere victuals it could stand out for
+but a few days, and, worst of all, it had behind it the continued
+example of necessary and fatal surrenders which had marked the whole
+summer. The orders of the Committee of Public Safety to its commander
+were terse: “Your head shall answer for Maubeuge.” After the receipt of
+that message no more came through the lines.
+
+The reader, if he be unaccustomed to military history, does well to note
+that in every action and in every campaign there is some one factor of
+position or of arms or of time which explains the result. Each has a
+pivot or hinge, as it were, upon which the whole turns. It was now upon
+Maubeuge that the revolutionary war thus depended. At risk of
+oversimplifying a complex story, I would lay this down as the prime
+condition for the understanding of the early revolutionary wars: had
+Maubeuge fallen, the road to Paris lay open and the trick was
+done[7]--and here we must consider again the effect in the field of
+Carnot’s genius.
+
+In the first place, he had provided numbers not on paper, but in
+reality; the Committee, through a decree of the Assembly, had
+despotically “requisitioned” men, animals, vehicles and supplies. The
+levy was a reality. Mere numbers then raw, but increasing, had begun to
+pour into the north-east. It was they that had told at Hoondschoote, it
+was they that were to tell in front of Maubeuge.
+
+Secondly, as the Committee supplied the necessary initiative, Carnot
+supplied the necessary personality of war. His own will and own brain
+could come to one decision in one moment, and did so. It was he, as we
+shall see, who won the critical action. He chose Jourdan, a man whose
+quaint military career we must reluctantly leave aside in so brief a
+study as this, but at any rate an amateur, and put him in Houchard’s
+command over the Army of the Northern Frontier, and that command was
+extended from right away beyond the Ardennes to the sea. He ordered (and
+Jourdan obeyed) the concentration of men from all down that lengthy line
+to the right and the left upon one point, Guise. To leave the rest of
+the frontier weak was a grave risk only to be excused by very rapid
+action and success: both these were to follow. The concentration was
+effected in four days. Troops from the extreme north could not come in
+time. The furthest called upon were beyond Arras, with sixty-five miles
+of route between them and Guise. This division (which shall be typical
+of many), not quite eight thousand strong, left on receiving orders in
+the morning of the 3rd of October and entered Guise in the course of the
+6th. The rate of marching and the synchrony of these movements of
+imperfect troops should especially be noted by any one who would
+understand how the Revolution succeeded.
+
+[Illustration: The rapid eight days’ concentration in front of Maubeuge.
+October 1783.]
+
+A second division of over thirteen thousand men followed along the
+parallel road, with a similar time table. From the other end of his
+line, a detachment under Beauregard, just over four thousand men, was
+called up from the extreme right. It will serve as a typical example
+upon the eastern side of this lightning concentration. It had been
+gathered near Carignan, a town full fourteen miles beyond Sedan. It
+picked up reinforcements on the way and marched into Fourmies upon the
+11th, after covering just seventy miles in the three and a half days.
+With its arrival the concentration was complete, and not a moment too
+soon, for the bombardment of Maubeuge was about to begin. From the 11th
+to the 15th of October the army was advanced and drawn up in line, a
+day’s march in front of Guise, with its centre at Avesnes and facing the
+covering army of Coburg, which lay entrenched upon a long wooded crest
+with the valley of the Sambre upon its right and the village of
+Wattignies, on a sort of promontory of high land, upon its left.
+
+The Austrian position was reconnoitred upon the 14th. Upon the 15th the
+general attack was delivered and badly repelled. When darkness fell upon
+that day few in the army could have believed that Maubeuge was
+succourable--and it was a question of hours.
+
+Carnot, however, sufficiently knew the virtues as the vices of his novel
+troops, the troops of the great levy, stiffened with a proportion of
+regulars, to attempt an extraordinary thing. He marched eight thousand
+from his left and centre, over to his right during the night, and in the
+morning of the 16th his right, in front of the Austrian left at
+Wattignies had, by this conversion, become far the strongest point of
+the whole line.
+
+A dense mist had covered the end of this operation as the night had
+covered its inception, and that mist endured until nearly midday. The
+Austrians upon the heights had no hint of the conversion, and Wattignies
+was only held by three regiments. If they expected a renewed attack at
+all, they can only have expected it in the centre, or even upon the left
+where the French had suffered most the day before.
+
+Initiative in war is essentially a calculation of risk, and with high
+initiative the risk is high. What Carnot gambled upon (for Jourdan was
+against the experiment) when he moved those young men through the night,
+was the possibility of getting active work out of them after a day’s
+furious action, the forced marches of the preceding week and on top of
+it all a sleepless night of further marching. Most of the men who were
+prepared to charge on the French right as the day broadened and the mist
+lifted on that 16th of October, had been on foot for thirty hours. The
+charge was delivered, and was successful. The unexpected numbers thus
+concentrated under Wattignies carried that extreme position, held the
+height, and arrived, therefore, on the flank of the whole Austrian line,
+which, had not the effort of the aggressors exhausted them, would have
+been rolled up in its whole length. As it was, the Austrians retreated
+unmolested and in good order across the Sambre. The siege of Maubeuge
+was raised; and the next day the victorious French army entered the
+fortress.
+
+Thus was successfully passed the turning-point of the revolutionary
+wars.
+
+Two months later the other gate of the country was recovered. In the
+moment when Maubeuge was relieved, the enemy had pierced the lines of
+Wissembourg. It is possible that an immediate and decisive understanding
+among the Allies might then have swept all Alsace; but such an
+understanding was lacking. The disarrayed “Army of the Rhine” was got
+into some sort of order, notably through the enthusiasm of Hoche and the
+silent control of Pichegru. At the end of November the Prussians stood
+on the defensive at Kaiserslautern. Hoche hammered at them for three
+days without success. What really turned the scale was the floods of men
+and material that the levy and the requisitioning were pouring in. Just
+before Christmas the enemy evacuated Haguenau. Landau they still held;
+but a decisive action fought upon Boxing Day, a true soldiers’ battle,
+determined by the bayonet, settled the fate of the Allies on this point.
+The French entered Wissembourg again, and Landau was relieved after a
+siege of four months and a display of tenacity which had done not a
+little to turn the tide of the war.
+
+Meanwhile the news had come in that the last of the serious internal
+rebellions was crushed. Toulon had been re-captured, the English fleet
+driven out; the town, the harbour and the arsenal had fallen into the
+hands of the French largely through the science of a young major of
+artillery (not captain: I have discussed the point elsewhere),
+Bonaparte, and this had taken place a week before the relief of Landau.
+The last confused horde of La Vendée had been driven from the walls of
+Granville in Normandy, to which it had erred and drifted rather than
+retreated. At Mans on the 13th of December it was cut to pieces, and at
+Savenay on the 23rd, three days before the great victory in Alsace, it
+was destroyed. A long peasant-and-bandit struggle, desperate yet hardly
+to be called guerilla, continued through the next year behind the hedges
+of Lower Brittany and of Vendée, but the danger to the State and to the
+Revolution was over. The year 1793 ended, therefore, with the complete
+relief of the whole territory of the Republic, save a narrow strip upon
+the Belgian frontier, complete domination of it by its Cæsar, the
+Committee of Public Safety; with two-thirds of a million of men under
+arms, and the future of the great experiment apparently secure.
+
+The causes of the wonder have been discussed, and will be discussed
+indefinitely. Primarily, they resided in the re-creation of a strong
+central power; secondly, in the combination of vast numbers and of a
+reckless spirit of sacrifice. The losses on the National side were
+perpetually and heavily superior to those of the Allies--in Alsace they
+had been three to one; and we shall better understand the duel when we
+appreciate that in the short eight years between the opening of the war
+and the triumph of Napoleon at Marengo, there had fallen in killed and
+wounded, on the French side, over seven hundred thousand men.
+
+
+FIVE
+
+The story of 1794 is but the consequence of what we have just read. It
+was the little belt or patch upon the Belgian frontier which was still
+in the hands of the enemy that determined the nature of the campaign.
+
+It was not until spring that the issue was joined. The Emperor of
+Austria reached Brussels on the 2nd day of April, and a fortnight later
+reviewed his army. The French line drawn up in opposition to it suffered
+small but continual reverses until the close of the month.
+
+On the 29th Clerfayt suffered a defeat which led to the fall, or rather
+the escape, of the small garrison of Menin. Clerfayt was beaten again at
+Courtray a fortnight later; but all these early engagements in the
+campaign were of no decisive moment. Tourcoing was to be the first heavy
+blow that should begin to settle matters, Fleurus was to clinch them.
+
+No battle can be less satisfactorily described in a few lines than that
+of Tourcoing, so different did it appear to either combatant, so
+opposite are the plans of what was expected on either side, and of what
+happened, so confused are the various accounts of contemporaries. The
+accusations of treason which nearly always arise after a disaster, and
+especially a disaster overtaking an allied force, are particularly
+monstrous, and may be dismissed: in particular the childish legend which
+pretends that the Austrians desired an English defeat.
+
+What the French say is that excellent forced marching and scientific
+concentration permitted them to attack the enemy before the junction of
+his various forces was effected. What the Allies say is (if they are
+speaking for their centre) that it was shamefully abandoned and
+unsupported by the two wings; if they are speaking for the wings, that
+the centre had no business to advance, when it saw that the two wings
+were not up in time to co-operate.
+
+One story goes that the Archduke Charles was incapacitated by a fit;
+Lord Acton has lent his considerable authority to this amusing version.
+At any rate, what happened was this:--
+
+The Allies lay along the river Scheldt on Friday, the 16th of May:
+Tournay was their centre, with the Duke of York in command of the chief
+force there; five or six miles north, down the river, was one extremity
+of their line at a place called Warcoing: it was a body of Hanoverians.
+The left, under the Archduke Charles, was Austrian and had reached a
+place a day’s march south of Tournay called St. Amand. Over against the
+Allies lay a large French force also occupying a wide front of over
+fifteen miles, the centre of which was Tourcoing, then a village. Its
+left was in front of the fortress of Courtrai. Now, behind the French,
+up country northward in the opposite direction from the line of the
+Allies on the Scheldt was another force of the Allies under Clerfayt.
+The plan was that the Allied right should advance on to Mouscron and
+take it. The Allied centre should advance on to Tourcoing and Mouveaux
+and take them, while the left should march across the upper waters of
+the river Marque, forcing the bridges that crossed that marshy stream,
+and come up alongside the centre. In other words, there was to be an
+attack all along the French line from the south, and while it was
+proceeding, Clerfayt, from the north of the French, was to cross the Lys
+and attack also.
+
+On the day of the 17th what happened was this: The left of the Allies,
+marching from St. Amand, came up half a day late; the right of the
+Allies took Mouscron, but were beaten out of it by the French. The
+centre of the Allies fulfilled their programme, reaching Tourcoing and
+its neighbourhood by noon and holding their positions. It is to the
+honour of English arms that this success was accomplished by a force a
+third of which was British and the most notable bayonet work in which
+was done by the Guards. Meanwhile, Clerfayt was late in moving and in
+crossing the river Lys, which lay between him and his objective.
+
+[Illustration: Tourcoing. May 16 to 18, 1794.
+
+The breakdown of the attempt of the Allies to cut off the French near
+Courtrai from Lille was due to their failure to synchronise They should
+have been in line from A to B at noon of the 17th with Clerfayt at C.]
+
+When night fell, therefore, on the first day of the action, a glance at
+the map will show that instead of one solid line advancing against the
+French from A to B, and the northern force in touch with it at C, the
+Allied formation was an absurd projection in the middle, due to the
+success of the mixed and half-British force under the Duke of York: a
+success which had not been maintained on the two wings. A bulge of this
+sort in an attacking line is on the face of it disastrous. The enemy
+have only to be rapid in falling upon either flank of it and the bulge
+can be burst in. The French were rapid, and burst in the bulge was. By
+concentrating their forces against this one central part of the Allies
+they fought three to one.
+
+That same capacity which at Wattignies had permitted them to scorn sleep
+and to be indefatigable in marching, put them on the road before three
+o’clock in the morning of Sunday, the 18th, and with the dawn they fell
+upon the central force of the Allies, attacking it from all three sides.
+
+It is on this account that the battle is called the Battle of Tourcoing,
+for Tourcoing was the most advanced point to which the centre of the
+Allies had reached. The Germans, upon the Duke of York’s right at
+Tourcoing, felt the first brunt of the attack. The Duke of York himself,
+with his mixed, half-British force, came in for the blow immediately
+afterwards, and while it was still early morning. The Germans at
+Tourcoing began to fall back. The Duke of York’s force, to the left of
+them, was left isolated: its commander ought not to have hung on so
+long. But the defence was maintained with the utmost gallantry for the
+short time during which it was still possible. The retreat began about
+nine in the morning and was kept orderly for the first two miles, but
+after that point it was a rout. The drivers of the British cannon fled,
+and the guns, left without teams, blocked the precipitate flight of the
+cavalry. Their disorder communicated itself at once to the Guards, and
+to the line.
+
+Even in this desperate strait some sort of order was restored, notably
+by the Guards Brigade, which were apparently the first to form, and a
+movement that could still be called a retreat was pursued towards the
+south. The Duke of York himself was chased from spinney to spinney and
+escaped by a stroke of luck, finding a bridge across the last brook held
+by a detachment of Hessians. In this way were the central columns, who
+between them numbered not a third of the total force of the Allies,
+destroyed.
+
+Clerfayt had first advanced--but far too late to save the centre--and
+then retreated. The Archduke Charles, upon the left, was four hours late
+in marching to the help of the Duke of York; the right wing of the
+Allies was not even late: it spent the morning in an orderly artillery
+duel with the French force opposed to it. By five in the afternoon
+defeat was admitted and a general retreat of the Allies ordered.
+
+I have said that many reasons are given to account for the disaster of
+Tourcoing, one of the very few in which a British force has been routed
+upon the Continent; but I confess that if I were asked for an
+explanation of my own, I would say that it was simply due to the gross
+lack of synchrony on the part of the Allies, and that this in its turn
+was taken advantage of by the power both of vigil and of marching which
+the French troops, still inferior in most military characteristics, had
+developed and maintained, and which (a more important matter) their
+commanders knew how to use.
+
+This heavy blow, delivered on the 18th of May, in spite of a successful
+rally a week later, finally convinced the Emperor that the march on
+Paris was impossible. Eleven days later, on the 29th, it was announced
+in the camp of Tournay, upon which the Allied army had fallen back, that
+the Emperor had determined to return to Vienna. The Allied army was
+indeed still left upon that front, but the French continued to pour up
+against it. It was again their numbers that brought about the next and
+the final victory.
+
+Far off, upon the east of that same line, the army which is famous in
+history and in song as that of the Sambre et Meuse was violently
+attempting to cross the Sambre and to turn the line of the Allies.
+Coburg reinforced his right opposite the French left, but numbers had
+begun to bewilder him. The enthusiasm of Saint-Just, the science of
+Carnot, decided victory at this eastern end of the line.
+
+Six times the passage of the Sambre had failed. Reinforcements continued
+to reach the army, and the seventh attempt succeeded.
+
+Charleroi, which is the main fortress blocking the passage of the
+Sambre at this place, could be, and was, invested when once the river
+was crossed by the French. It capitulated in a week. But the evacuation
+of Charleroi was but just accomplished when Coburg, seventy thousand
+strong, appeared in relief of the city.
+
+[Illustration: Showing effect of _Ypres_, _Charleroi_ and _Fleurus_ in
+wholly throwing back the Allies in June 1794.
+
+_Ypres_ captured on June 19 by the French, they march on Oudenarde and
+pass it on June 25 to 27. Meanwhile _Charleroi_ has also surrendered to
+the French, and when, immediately afterwards, the Austrians try to
+relieve it, they are beaten at _Fleurus_ and retire on Brussels.
+
+Thus the English at _Tournai_ and all the Allied Forces at _Condé_,
+_Valenciennes_, _Landrecies_, and _Mons_ are imperilled and must
+surrender or retire.]
+
+The plateau above the town where the great struggle was decided, is
+known as that of Fleurus, and it was upon the 26th of June that the
+armies were there engaged. Never before had forces so equal permitted
+the French any success. It had hitherto been the ceaseless
+requisitioning of men to supply their insufficient training and command,
+which had accomplished the salvation of the country. At Fleurus, though
+there was still some advantage on the French side, the numbers were
+more nearly equal.
+
+The action was not determined for ten hours, and on the French centre
+and left was nearly lost, when the Reserves’ and Marceau’s obstinacy in
+front of Fleurus village itself at last decided it.
+
+The consequences of the victory were final. As the French right advanced
+from Fleurus the French left advanced from Ypres, and the centre became
+untenable for the Allies. The four French fortresses which the enemy
+still garrisoned in that Belgian “belt” of which I have spoken, were
+invested and re-captured. By the 10th of July the French were in
+Brussels, the English were beaten back upon Holland, the Austrians
+retreating upon the Rhine, and the continuous success of the
+revolutionary armies was assured.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+While these things were proceeding upon land, however, there had
+appeared a factor in the war which modern desire for comfort and, above
+all, for commercial security has greatly exaggerated, but which the
+student will do well to note in its due proportion. This factor was the
+military weakness of France at sea.
+
+In mere numbers the struggle was entered upon with fleets in the ratio
+of about two to one, while to the fleet of Great Britain, already twice
+as large as its opponent, must be added the fleets of the Allies. But
+numbers did not then, nor will they in the future, really decide the
+issue of maritime war. It was the supremacy of English gunnery which
+turned the scale. This triumphant superiority was proved in the battle
+of the 1st of June, 1794.
+
+The English fleet under Lord Howe attacked the French fleet which was
+waiting to escort a convoy of grain into Brest; the forces came in
+contact upon the 28th of May, and the action was a running one of three
+days.
+
+Two examples must suffice to prove how determining was the superiority
+of the British fire. The _Queen Charlotte_, in the final action, found
+herself caught between the _Montagne_ and the _Jacobin_. We have the
+figures of the losses during the duel of these two flagships. The _Queen
+Charlotte_ lost forty-two men in the short and furious exchange, the
+_Montagne_ alone three hundred. Again, consider the total figures. The
+number of the crews on both sides was nearly equal, but their losses
+were as eleven to five. It cannot be too often repeated that the initial
+advantage which the English fleet gained in the great war, which it
+maintained and increased as that war proceeded, and which it made
+absolute at Trafalgar, was an advantage mainly due to the guns.
+
+The reader must not expect in a sketch which ends with the fall of
+Robespierre any treatise, however short, upon the effect of sea power in
+the revolutionary wars. It has of late years been grossly exaggerated,
+the reaction which will follow this exaggeration may as grossly belittle
+it. It prevented the invasion of England, it permitted the exasperation
+and wearing out of the French forces in the Peninsula. But it could not
+have determined the fate of Napoleon. That was determined by his Russian
+miscalculation and by his subsequent and consequent defeat at Leipsic.
+
+Upon the early success of the Revolution and the resulting establishment
+of European democracy, with which alone these pages deal, sea power was
+of no considerable effect.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[6] Incidentally it should be noted how true it is that this supreme
+military quality is a matter of organisation rather than of the physical
+power of troops; in the Napoleonic wars the marching power of the
+English troops was often proved exceptional, and perhaps the greatest of
+all feats accomplished by a small body was that of the Light Brigade
+marching to the succour of Wellington at Talavera.
+
+[7] I must not, in fairness to the reader, neglect the great mass of
+opinion, from Jomini to Mr. Fortescue’s classic work upon the British
+Army, which lays it down that the Allies had but to mask the frontier
+fortresses and to advance their cavalry rapidly along the Paris road.
+Historical hypothesis can never be more than a matter of judgment, but I
+confess that this view has always seemed to me to ignore--as purely
+military historians and especially foreign ones might well ignore--the
+social condition of “’93.” Cavalry is the weakest of all arms with which
+to deal with sporadic, unorganised, but determined resistance. To pass
+through the densely populated country of the Paris road may be compared
+to the forcing of an open town, and cavalry can never be relied upon for
+_that_. As for the army moving as a whole without a perfect security in
+its communications, the matter need not even be discussed; and it must
+further be remembered that, the moment such an advance began, an
+immediate concentration from the north would have fallen upon the
+ill-guarded lines of supply. It may be taken that Coburg knew his
+business when he sat down before this, the last of the fortresses.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+THE REVOLUTION AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH
+
+
+The last and the most important of the aspects which the French
+Revolution presents to a foreign, and in particular to an English
+reader, is the antagonism which arose between it and the Church.
+
+As this is the most important so it is the most practical of the
+historical problems which the Revolution sets the student to solve; for
+the opposition of the Church’s organisation in France has at once been
+the most profound which the Revolution has had to encounter, the most
+active in its methods, and the only one which has increased in strength
+as time proceeded. It is hardly too much to say that the Revolution
+would, in France at least, have achieved its object and created a
+homogeneous, centralised democracy, had not this great quarrel between
+the Republic and the Church arisen; and one may legitimately contrast
+the ready pliancy of men to political suggestion and the easy story of
+their institutions where men knew nothing of the Church, with the great
+storms that arise and the fundamental quarrels that are challenged
+wherever men are acquainted with the burning truths of Catholicism.
+
+Finally, the struggle between the Catholic Church and the Revolution is
+not only the most important and the most practical, but also by an
+unhappy coincidence the most difficult of comprehension of all the
+matters presented to us by the great change.
+
+We have seen in this book that one department of revolutionary history,
+the second in importance, perhaps, to the religious department, was also
+difficult of comprehension--to wit, the military department. And we have
+seen (or at least I have postulated) that the difficulty of following
+the military fortunes of the Republic was due to the mass of detail, to
+the technical character of the information to be acquired and to the
+natural unfamiliarity of the general reader with the elements of
+military science. In other words, an accurate knowledge of great numbers
+of facts, the proper disposition of these facts in their order of
+military importance, and the correlation of a great number of
+disconnected actions and plans will alone permit us to grasp the
+function of the armies in the development and establishment of the
+modern State through the revolutionary wars.
+
+Now in this second and greater problem, the problem of the function
+played by religion, it is an exactly opposite method which can alone be
+of service.
+
+We must examine the field generally, and still more generally we must
+forget details that here only bewilder, and see in the largest possible
+outline what forces were really at issue, why their conflict occurred,
+upon what points that conflict was vital. Any more particular plan will
+land us, as it has landed so many thousands of controversialists, in
+mere invective on one side or the other, till we come to see nothing but
+a welter of treason on the part of priests, and of massacre upon the
+part of democrats.
+
+Men would, did they try to unravel the skein by analysing the documents
+of the Vatican or of the French archives, come apparently upon nothing
+but a host of petty, base, and often personal calculations; or again,
+did they attempt to take a local sample of the struggle and to follow it
+in one department of thought, they would come upon nothing but a whirl
+of conflict with no sort of clue to the motives that lay behind.
+
+The contrast between the military and the religious problem of the
+French Revolution is like the contrast between the geological
+composition and the topographical contours of a countryside. To
+understand the first we must bore and dig, we must take numerous samples
+of soil and subject them to analysis, we must make ourselves acquainted
+with detail in its utmost recesses. But for the second, the more general
+our standpoint, the wider our gaze, and the more comprehensive our
+judgment, the more accurately do we grasp the knowledge we have set out
+to seek.
+
+We must, then, approach our business by asking at the outset the most
+general question of all: “_Was there a necessary and fundamental quarrel
+between the doctrines of the Revolution and those of the Catholic
+Church?_”
+
+Those ill acquainted with either party, and therefore ill equipped for
+reply, commonly reply with assurance in the affirmative. The French (and
+still more the non-French) Republican who may happen, by the accident of
+his life, to have missed the Catholic Church, to have had no intimacy
+with any Catholic character, no reading of Catholic philosophy, and
+perhaps even no chance view of so much as an external Catholic ceremony,
+replies unhesitatingly that the Church is the necessary enemy of the
+Revolution. Again, the _émigré_, the wealthy woman, the recluse, any one
+of the many contemporary types to whom the democratic theory of the
+Revolution came as a complete novelty, and to-day the wealthy families
+in that tradition, reply as unhesitatingly that the Revolution is the
+necessary enemy of the Church. The reply seems quite sufficient to the
+Tory squire in England or Germany, who may happen to be a Catholic by
+birth or by conversion; and it seems equally obvious to (let us say) a
+democratic member of some Protestant Church in one of the new countries.
+
+Historically and logically, theologically also, those who affirm a
+necessary antagonism between the Republic and the Church are in error.
+Those who are best fitted to approach the problem by their knowledge
+both of what the Revolution attempted and of what Catholic philosophy
+is, find it in proportion to their knowledge difficult or impossible to
+answer that fundamental question in the affirmative. They cannot call
+the Revolution a necessary enemy of the Church, nor the Church of
+Democracy.
+
+What is more, minds at once of the most active and of the best
+instructed sort are the very minds which find it difficult to explain
+how any such quarrel can have arisen. French history itself is full of
+the names of those for whom not so much a reconciliation between the
+Revolution and the Church, as a statement that no real quarrel existed
+between them, was the motive of politics; and almost in proportion to a
+man’s knowledge of his fellows in Catholic societies, almost in that
+proportion is the prime question I have asked answered by such a man in
+the negative. A man who knows both the Faith and the Republic will tell
+you that there is not and cannot be any necessary or fundamental reason
+why conflict should have arisen between a European Democracy and the
+Catholic Church.
+
+When we examine those who concern themselves with the deepest and most
+abstract side of the quarrel, we find the same thing. It is impossible
+for the theologian, or even for the practical ecclesiastical teacher, to
+put his finger upon a political doctrine essential to the Revolution and
+to say, “This doctrine is opposed to Catholic dogma or to Catholic
+morals.” Conversely, it is impossible for the Republican to put his
+finger upon a matter of ecclesiastical discipline or religious dogma and
+to say, “This Catholic point is at issue with my political theory of the
+State.”
+
+Thousands of active men upon either side would have been only too
+willing during the last hundred years to discover some such issue, and
+it has proved undiscoverable. In a word, only those Democrats who know
+little of the Catholic Church can say that of its nature it forbids
+democracy; and only those Catholics who have a confused or imperfect
+conception of democracy can say that of its nature it is antagonistic to
+the Catholic Church.
+
+Much that is taught by the purely temporal theory of the one is
+indifferent to the transcendental and supernatural philosophy of the
+other. In some points, where there is contact (as in the conception of
+the dignity of man and of the equality of men) there is agreement. To
+sum up, the Republican cannot by his theory persecute the Church; the
+Church cannot by her theory excommunicate the Republican.
+
+Why, then, it must next be asked, has there in practice arisen so
+furious and so enormous a conflict, a conflict whose activity and whose
+consequence are not narrowing but broadening to-day?
+
+It may be replied to this second question, which is only less general
+than the first, in one of two manners.
+
+One may say that the actions of men are divided not by theories but by
+spiritual atmospheres, as it were. According to this view men act under
+impulses not ideal but actual: impulses which affect great numbers and
+yet in their texture correspond to the complex but united impulses of an
+individual personality. Thus, though there be no conflict demonstrable
+between the theology of the Catholic Church and the political theory of
+the Revolution, yet there may be necessary and fundamental conflict
+between the _Persons_ we call the Revolution and the Church, and between
+the vivifying principles by which either lives. That is one answer that
+can be, and is, given.
+
+Or one may give a totally different answer and say, “There was no
+quarrel between the theology of the Catholic Church and the political
+theory of the Revolution; but the folly of this statesman, the ill
+drafting of that law, the misconception of such and such an institution,
+the coincidence of war breaking out at such and such a moment and
+affecting men in such and such a fashion--all these material accidents
+bred a misunderstanding between the two great forces, led into conflict
+the human officers and the human organisations which directed them; and
+conflict once established feeds upon, and grows from, its own
+substance.”
+
+Now, if that first form of reply be given to the question we have posed,
+though it is sufficient for the type of philosophy which uses it, though
+it is certainly explanatory of all human quarrels, and though it in
+particular satisfies a particular modern school of thought, it is
+evident that history, properly so called, cannot deal with it.
+
+You may say that the Revolution was the expression of a spirit far more
+real than any theory, that this spirit is no more susceptible of
+analysis or definition than is the personality of a single human
+character, and that this reality was in conflict with another
+reality--to wit, the Catholic Church. You may even (as some minds by no
+means negligible have done) pass into the field of mysticism in the
+matter, and assert that really personal forces, wills superior and
+external to man, Demons and Angels, drove the Revolution against the
+Catholic Church, and created The Republic to be an anti-Catholic force
+capable of meeting and of defeating that Church, which (by its own
+definition of itself) is not a theory, but the expression of a
+Personality and a Will. To put it in old-fashioned terms, you may say
+that the Revolution was the work of antichrist;--but with that kind of
+reply, I repeat, history cannot deal.
+
+If it be true that, in spite of an absence of contradictory intellectual
+theories, there is a fundamental spiritual contradiction between the
+Revolution and the Catholic Church, then time will test the business; we
+shall see in that case a perpetual extension of the quarrel until the
+Revolution becomes principally a force for the extinction of
+Catholicism, and the Catholic Church appears to the supporter of the
+Revolution not as his principal, but as his only enemy. Such a
+development has not arisen in a hundred years; a process of time far
+more lengthy will alone permit us to judge whether the supposed duello
+is a real matter or a phantasm.
+
+The second type of answer, the answer which pretends to explain the
+antagonism by a definite series of events, does concern the historian.
+
+Proceeding upon the lines of that second answer, he can bring his
+science to bear and use the instruments of his trade; and he can show
+(as I propose to show in what follows) how, although no quarrel can be
+found between the theory of the Revolution and that of the Church, an
+active quarrel did in fact spring up between the Revolution in action
+and the authorities of Catholicism; a quarrel which a hundred years has
+not appeased, but accentuated.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Behind the revolutionary quarrel lay the condition of the Church in the
+French State since the settlement of the quarrel of the Reformation.
+
+With what that quarrel of the Reformation was, the reader is
+sufficiently familiar. For, roughly speaking, a hundred years, from the
+first years of the sixteenth century to the first years of the
+seventeenth (from the youth of Henry VIII to the boyhood of Charles I in
+England), a great attempt was made to change (as one party would have
+said to amend, as the other would have said to denaturalise) the _whole
+body_ of Western Christendom. A _general_ movement of attack upon the
+inherited form of the Church, and a general resistance to that attack,
+was at work throughout European civilisation; and either antagonist
+hoped for a universal success, the one of what he called “The
+Reformation of religion,” the other of what he called “The Divine
+Institution and visible unity of the Catholic Church.”
+
+At the end of such a period it became apparent that no such general
+result had been, or could be, attained. All that part of the West which
+had rejected the authority of the See of Rome began to appear as a
+separate territorial region permanently divided from the rest; all that
+part of Europe which had retained the Authority of the See of Rome began
+to appear as another region of territory. The line of cleavage between
+the two was beginning to define itself as a geographical line, and
+nearly corresponded to the line which, centuries before, had divided the
+Roman and civilised world from the Barbarians.
+
+The Province of Britain had an exceptional fate. Though Roman in origin
+and of the ancient civilisation in its foundation, it fell upon the
+non-Roman side of the new boundary; while Ireland, which the Roman
+Empire had never organised or instructed, remained, alone of the
+external parts of Europe, in communion with Rome. Italy, Spain, and in
+the main southern or Romanised Germany, refused ultimately to abandon
+their tradition of civilisation and of religion. But in Gaul it was
+otherwise--and the action of Gaul during the Reformation must be seized
+if its modern religious quarrels are to be apprehended. A very
+considerable proportion of the French landed and mercantile classes,
+that is of the wealthy men of the country, were in sympathy with the new
+religious doctrines and the new social organisation which had now taken
+root in England, Scotland, Holland, northern Germany and Scandinavia,
+and which were destined in those countries to lead to the domination of
+wealth. These French squires and traders were called the Huguenots.
+
+The succeeding hundred years, from 1615 to 1715, let us say, were a
+settlement, not without bloodshed, of the unsatisfied quarrel of the
+preceding century. All Englishmen know what happened in England; how the
+last vestiges of Catholicism were crushed out and all the social and
+political consequences of Protestantism established in the State.
+
+There was, even in that same seventeenth century, a separate, but
+futile, attempt to destroy Catholicism in Ireland. In Germany a struggle
+of the utmost violence had only led to a similar regional result. The
+first third of that hundred years concluded in the Peace of Westphalia,
+and left the Protestant and Catholic territorial divisions much what we
+now know them.
+
+In France, however, the peculiar phenomenon remained of a body powerful
+in numbers and (what was far more important) in wealth and social power,
+scattered throughout the territory of the kingdom, organised and, by
+this time, fixedly anti-Catholic, and therefore anti-national.
+
+The nation had recovered its traditional line and had insisted upon the
+victory of a strong executive, and that executive Catholic. France,
+therefore, in this period of settlement, became an absolute monarchy
+whose chief possessed tremendous and immediate powers, and a monarchy
+which incorporated with itself all the great elements of the national
+tradition, _including the Church_.
+
+It is the name of Louis XIV, of course, which symbolises this great
+time; his very long reign precisely corresponds to it. He was born
+coincidently with that universal struggle for a religious settlement in
+Europe, which I have described as characteristic of the time; he died
+precisely at its close; and under him it seemed as though the
+reconstructed power of Gaul and the defence of organised Catholicism
+were to be synonymous.
+
+But there were two elements of disruption in that homogeneous body which
+Louis XIV apparently commanded. The very fact that the Church had thus
+become in France an unshakable national institution, chilled the vital
+source of Catholicism. Not only did the hierarchy stand in a perpetual
+suspicion of the Roman See, and toy with the conception of national
+independence, but they, and all the official organisation of French
+Catholicism, put the security of the national establishment and its
+intimate attachment to the general political structure of the State, far
+beyond the sanctity of Catholic dogma or the practice of Catholic
+morals.
+
+That political structure--the French monarchy--seemed to be of granite
+and eternal. Had it indeed survived, the Church in Gaul would doubtless,
+in spite of its attachment to so mundane a thing as the crown, have
+still survived to enjoy one of those resurrections which have never
+failed it in the past, and would have returned, by some creative
+reaction, to its principle of life. But for the moment the consequence
+of this fixed political establishment was that scepticism, and all those
+other active forces of the mind which play upon religion in any Catholic
+State, had full opportunity. The Church was, so to speak, not concerned
+to defend itself but only its method of existence. It was as though a
+garrison, forgetting the main defences of a place, had concentrated all
+its efforts upon the security of one work which contained its supplies
+of food.
+
+Wit, good verse, sincere enthusiasm, a lucid exposition of whatever in
+the human mind perpetually rebels against transcendental affirmations,
+were allowed every latitude and provoked no effective reply. But overt
+acts of disrespect to ecclesiastical authority were punished with
+rigour.
+
+While in the wealthy, the bureaucratic, and the governing classes, to
+ridicule the Faith was an attitude taken for granted, seriously to
+attack the privileges or position of its ministers was ungentlemanly,
+and was not allowed. It did not shock the hierarchy that one of its
+Apostolic members should be a witty atheist; that another should go
+hunting upon Corpus Christi, nearly upset the Blessed Sacrament in his
+gallop, and forget what day it was when the accident occurred. The
+bishops found nothing remarkable in seeing a large proportion of their
+body to be loose livers, or in some of them openly presenting their
+friends to their mistresses as might be done by any great lay noble
+round them. That a diocese or any other spiritual charge should be
+divorced from its titular chief, seemed to them as natural as does to us
+the absence from his modern regiment of some titular foreign colonel.
+Unquestioned also by the bishops were the poverty, the neglect, and the
+uninstruction of the parish clergy; nay--and this is by far the
+principal feature--the abandonment of religion by all but a very few of
+the French millions, no more affected the ecclesiastical officials of
+the time than does the starvation of our poor affect, let us say, one of
+our professional politicians. It was a thing simply taken for granted.
+
+The reader must seize that moribund condition of the religious life of
+France upon the eve of the Revolution, for it is at once imperfectly
+grasped by the general run of historians, and is also the only fact
+which thoroughly explains what followed. The swoon of the Faith in the
+eighteenth century is the negative foundation upon which the strange
+religious experience of the French was about to rise. France, in the
+generation before the Revolution, was passing through a phase in which
+the Catholic Faith was at a lower ebb than it had ever been since the
+preaching and establishment of it in Gaul.
+
+This truth is veiled by more than one circumstance. Thus many official
+acts, notably marriages and the registration of births, took place under
+a Catholic form, and indeed Catholic forms had a monopoly of them.
+Again, the State wore Catholic clothes, as it were: the public occasions
+of pomp were full of religious ceremony. Few of the middle classes went
+to Mass in the great towns, hardly any of the artisans; but the Churches
+were “official.” Great sums of money--including official money--were at
+the disposal of the Church; and the great ecclesiastics were men from
+whom solid favours could be got. Again, the historic truth is masked by
+the language and point of view of the great Catholic reaction which has
+taken place in our own time.
+
+It is safe to say that where one adult of the educated classes concerned
+himself seriously with the Catholic Faith and Practice in France before
+the Revolution, there are five to-day. But in between lies the violent
+episode of the persecution, and the Catholic reaction in our time
+perpetually tends to contrast a supposed pre-revolutionary “Catholic”
+society with the revolutionary fury. “Look,” say its champions, “at the
+dreadful way in which the Revolution treated the Church.” And as they
+say this the converse truth appears obvious and they seem to imply,
+“Think how different it must have been before the Revolution persecuted
+the Church!” The very violence of the modern reaction towards
+Catholicism has exaggerated the revolutionary persecution, and in doing
+so has made men forget that apart from other evidence of the decline of
+religion, it is obvious that persecution could never have arisen without
+a strong and continuous historical backing. You could not have had a
+Diocletian in the thirteenth century with the spirit of the Crusaders
+just preceding him; you could not have had Henry VIII if the England of
+the fifteenth century just preceding him had been an England devoted to
+the monastic profession. And you could not have had the revolutionary
+fury against the Catholic Church in France if the preceding generation
+had been actively Catholic even in a considerable portion.
+
+As a fact, of course it was not: and in the popular indifference to or
+hatred of the Church the principal factor was the strict brotherhood not
+so much of Church and State as of Church and executive Government.
+
+But there was another factor. We were describing a little way back how
+in France there had arisen, during the movement of the Reformation, a
+wealthy, powerful and numerically large Huguenot body. In mere numbers
+it dwindled, but it maintained throughout the seventeenth century a very
+high position, both of privilege and (what was its characteristic) of
+money-power; and even to-day, though their birth-rate is, of course,
+lower than the average of the nation, the French Huguenots number close
+upon a million, and are far wealthier, upon the average, than their
+fellow citizens. It is their wealth which dominates the trade of
+certain districts, which exercises so great an effect upon the
+universities, the publishing trade, and the press; and in general lends
+them such weight in the affairs of the nation.
+
+Now the Huguenot had in France a special and permanent quarrel with the
+monarchy, and therefore with the Catholic Church, which, precisely
+because it was not of the vivid and intense kind which is associated
+with popular and universal religions, was the more secretly ubiquitous.
+His quarrel was that, having been highly privileged for nearly a
+century, the member of “a State within a State,” and for more than a
+generation free to hold assemblies separate from and often antagonistic
+to the national Government, these privileges had been suddenly removed
+from him by the Government of Louis XIV a century before the Revolution.
+The quarrel was more political than religious; it was a sort of “Home
+Rule” quarrel. For though the Huguenots were spread throughout France,
+they had possessed special cities and territories wherein their spirit
+and, to a certain extent, their private self-government, formed
+_enclaves_ of particularism within the State.
+
+They had held this position, as I have said, for close upon a hundred
+years, and it was not until a date contemporary with the violent
+settlement of the religious trouble in England by the expulsion of James
+II that a similar settlement, less violent, achieved (as it was thought)
+a similar religious unity in France. But that unity was not achieved.
+The Huguenots, though no longer permitted to exist as a State within a
+State, remained, for the hundred years between the Revocation of the
+Edict of Nantes and the outbreak of the Revolution, a powerful and
+ever-watchful body. They stood upon the flank of the attack which
+intellectual scepticism was making upon the Catholic Church, they were
+prepared to take advantage of that scepticism’s first political victory,
+and since the Revolution they have been the most powerful and, after the
+Freemasons, with whom they are largely identified, the most strongly
+organised, of the anti-clerical forces in the country.
+
+The Jews, whose action since the Revolution has been so remarkable in
+this same business, were not, in the period immediately preceding it, of
+any considerable influence, and their element in the coalition may be
+neglected.
+
+Such, then, was the position when the Revolution was preparing. Within
+memory of all men living, the Church had become more and more official,
+the masses of the great towns had wholly lost touch with it; the
+intelligence of the country was in the main drawn to the Deist or even
+to the purely sceptical propaganda, the powerful Huguenot body was ready
+prepared for an alliance with any foe of Catholicism, and in the eyes of
+the impoverished town populace--notably in Paris, which had long
+abandoned the practice of religion--the human organisation of the
+Church, the hierarchy, the priesthood, and the few but very wealthy
+religious orders which still lingered on in dwindling numbers, were but
+a portion of the privileged world which the populace hated and was
+prepared to destroy.
+
+It is upon such a spirit and in such conditions of the national
+religious life that the Revolution begins to work. In the National
+Assembly you have the great body of the Commons which determines the
+whole, touched only here and there with men in any way acquainted with
+or devoted to Catholic practice, and those men for the most part
+individual and eccentric, that is, uncatholic, almost in proportion to
+the genuineness of their religious feeling. Among the nobility the
+practice of religion was a social habit with some--as a mental attitude
+the Faith was forgotten among all but a very few. Among the clergy a
+very wealthy hierarchy, no one of them prepared to defend the Church
+with philosophical argument, and almost unanimous in regarding itself as
+a part of the old political machine, was dominant; while the
+representatives of the lower clergy, strongly democratic in character,
+were at first more occupied with the establishment of democracy than
+with the impending attack upon the material and temporal organisation of
+the Church.
+
+Now, that material and temporal organisation offered at the very
+beginning of the debates an opportunity for attack which no other
+department of the old _régime_ could show.
+
+The immediate peril of the State was financial. The pretext and even to
+some extent the motive for the calling of the States-General was the
+necessity for finding money. The old fiscal machinery had broken down,
+and as always happens when a fiscal machine breaks down, the hardship it
+involved, and the pressure upon individuals which it involved, appeared
+to be universal. _There was no immediate and easily available fund of
+wealth upon which the Executive could lay hands save the wealth of the
+clergy._
+
+The feudal dues of the nobles, if abandoned, must fall rather to the
+peasantry than to the State. Of the existing taxes few could be
+increased without peril, and none with any prospect of a large
+additional revenue. The charge for debt alone was one-half of the total
+receipts of the State, the deficit was, in proportion to the revenue,
+overwhelming. Face to face with that you had an institution not popular,
+one whose public functions were followed by but a small proportion of
+the population, one in which income was most unequally distributed, and
+one whose feudal property yielded in dues an amount equal to more than a
+quarter of the total revenue of the State. Add to this a system of
+tithes which produced nearly as much again, and it will be apparent
+under what a financial temptation the Assembly lay.
+
+It may be argued, of course, that the right of the Church to this
+ecclesiastical property, whether in land or in tithes, was absolute, and
+that the confiscation of the one or of the other form of revenue was
+mere theft. But such was not the legal conception of the moment. The
+wealth of the Church was not even (and this is most remarkable)
+defended as absolute property by the generality of those who enjoyed it.
+The tone of the debates which suppressed the tithes, and later
+confiscated the Church lands, was a tone of discussion upon legal
+points, precedents, public utility, and so forth. There was not heard in
+it, in any effective degree, the assertion of mere moral right; though
+in that time the moral rights of property were among the first of
+political doctrines.
+
+It was not, however, the confiscation of the Church lands and the
+suppression of the tithe which founded the quarrel between the
+Revolution and the clergy. No financial or economic change is ever more
+than a preparation for, or a permissive condition of, a moral change. It
+is never the cause of a moral change. Even the suppression of the
+religious houses in the beginning of 1790 must not be taken as the point
+of departure in the great quarrel. The religious orders in France were
+at that moment too decayed in zeal and in numbers, too wealthy and much
+too removed from the life of the nation, for this to be the case. The
+true historical point of departure from which we must date the beginning
+of this profound debate between the Revolution and Catholicism, is to be
+found in the morning of the 30th of May, 1790, when a parliamentary
+committee (the Ecclesiastical Committee) presented to the House its plan
+for the reform of the Constitution of the Church in Gaul.
+
+The enormity of that act is now apparent to the whole world. The
+proposal, at the bidding of chance representatives not elected _ad hoc_,
+to change the dioceses and the sees of Catholic France, the decision of
+an ephemeral political body to limit to such and such ties (and very
+feeble they were) the bond between the Church of France and the Holy
+See, the suppression of the Cathedral Chapters, the seemingly farcical
+proposal that bishops should be elected, nay, priests also thus chosen,
+the submission of the hierarchy in the matter of residence and travel to
+a civil authority which openly declared itself indifferent in matters of
+religion,--all this bewilders the modern mind. How, we ask, could men so
+learned, so enthusiastic, so laborious and so closely in touch with all
+the realities of their time, make a blunder of that magnitude? Much
+more, how did such a blunder escape the damnation of universal mockery
+and immediate impotence? The answer is to be discovered in what has just
+been laid down with so much insistence: the temporary eclipse of
+religion in France before the Revolution broke out.
+
+The men who framed the Constitution of the Clergy, the men who voted it,
+nay, even the men who argued against it, all had at the back of their
+minds three conceptions which they were attempting to reconcile: of
+those three conceptions one was wholly wrong, one was imperfect because
+superficial, the third alone was true. And these three conceptions were,
+first, that the Catholic Church was a moribund superstition, secondly,
+that it possessed in its organisation and tradition a power to be
+reckoned with, and thirdly, that the State, its organs, and their
+corporate inheritance of action, were so bound up with the Catholic
+Church that it was impossible to effect any general political settlement
+in which that body both external to France and internal, should be
+neglected.
+
+Of these three conceptions, had the first been as true as the last, it
+would have saved the Constitution of the Clergy and the reputation for
+common-sense of those who framed it.
+
+It was certainly true that Catholicism had for so many centuries been
+bound up in the framework of the State that the Parliament must
+therefore do something with the Church in the general settlement of the
+nation: it could not merely leave the Church on one side.
+
+It was also superficially true that the Church was a power to be
+reckoned with politically, quite apart from the traditional union of
+Church and State--but only superficially true. What the revolutionary
+politicians feared was the intrigue of those who commanded the
+organisation of the Catholic Church, men whom they knew for the most
+part to be without religion, and the sincerity of all of whom they
+naturally doubted. A less superficial and a more solid judgment of the
+matter would have discovered that the real danger lay in the animosity
+or intrigue against the Civil Constitution, not of the corrupt
+hierarchy, but of the sincere though ill-instructed and dwindling
+minority which was still loyally attached to the doctrines and
+discipline of the Church. But even this superficial judgment would not
+have been fatal, had not the judgment of the National Assembly been
+actually erroneous upon the first point--the vitality of the Faith.
+
+Had the Catholic Church been, as nearly all educated men then imagined,
+a moribund superstition, had the phase of decline through which it was
+passing been a phase comparable to that through which other religions
+have passed in their last moments, had it been supported by ancient
+families from mere tradition, clung to by remote peasants from mere
+ignorance and isolation, abandoned (as it was) in the towns simply
+because the towns had better opportunities of intellectual enlightenment
+and of acquiring elementary knowledge in history and the sciences; had,
+in a word, the imaginary picture which these men drew in their minds of
+the Catholic Church and its fortunes been an exact one, then the Civil
+Constitution of the Clergy would have been a statesmanlike act. It would
+have permitted the hold of the Catholic Church upon such districts as it
+still retained to vanish slowly and without shock. It proposed to keep
+alive at a reasonable salary the ministers of a ritual which would
+presumably have lost all vitality before the last of its pensioners was
+dead; it would have prepared a bed, as it were, upon which the last of
+Catholicism in Gaul could peacefully pass away. The action of the
+politicians in framing the Constitution would have seemed more generous
+with every passing decade and their wisdom in avoiding offence to the
+few who still remained faithful, would have been increasingly applauded.
+
+On the other hand, and from the point of view of the statesman, the
+Civil Constitution of the Clergy bound strictly to the State and made
+responsible to it those ancient functions, not yet dead, of the
+episcopacy and all its train. It was a wise and a just consideration on
+the part of the Assembly that religions retain their machinery long
+after they are dead, and if that machinery has ever been a State
+machinery it must remain subject to the control of the State: and
+subject not only up to the moment when the living force which once
+animated it is fled, but much longer; up, indeed, to the moment when the
+surviving institutions of the dead religion break down and perish.
+
+So argued the National Assembly and its committee, and, I repeat, the
+argument was just and statesmanlike, prudent and full of foresight, save
+for one miscalculation. The Catholic Church was not dead, and was not
+even dying. It was exhibiting many of the symptoms which in other
+organisms and institutions correspond to the approach of death, but the
+Catholic Church is an organism and an institution quite unlike any
+other. It fructifies and expands immediately under the touch of a lethal
+weapon; it has at its very roots the conception that material prosperity
+is stifling to it, poverty and misfortune nutritious.
+
+The men of the National Assembly would have acted more wisely had they
+closely studied the story of Ireland (then but little known), or had
+they even made themselves acquainted with the methods by which the
+Catholic Church in Britain, after passing in the fifteenth century
+through a phase somewhat similar to that under which it was sinking in
+Gaul in the eighteenth, was stifled under Henry and Elizabeth.
+
+But the desire of the men of 1789 was not to kill the Church but to let
+it die; they thought it dying. Their desire was only to make that death
+decent and of no hurt to the nation, and to control the political action
+of a hierarchy that had been wealthy and was bound up with the old
+society that was crumbling upon every side.
+
+The Civil Constitution of the Clergy failed: it lit the civil war, it
+dug the pit which divided Catholicism from the Revolution at the moment
+of the foreign invasion, it segregated the loyal priest in such a
+fashion that his order could not but appear to the populace as an order
+of traitors, and it led, in the furnace of 1793, to the great
+persecution from the memories of which the relations between the French
+democracy and the Church have not recovered.
+
+It is important to trace the actual steps of the failure; for when we
+appreciate what the dates were, how short the time which was left for
+judgment or for revision, and how immediately disaster followed upon
+error, we can understand what followed and we can understand it in no
+other way.
+
+If we find an enduring quarrel between two families whose cause of
+contention we cannot seize and whose mutual hostility we find
+unreasonable, to learn that it proceeded from a cataclysm too rapid and
+too violent for either to have exercised judgment upon it will enable us
+to excuse or at least to comprehend the endurance of their antagonism.
+Now, it was a cataclysm which fell upon the relations of the Church and
+State immediately after the error which the Parliament had committed; a
+cataclysm quite out of proportion to their intentions, as indeed are
+most sudden disasters quite out of proportion to the forces that bring
+them about.
+
+It was, as we have seen, in the summer of 1790--upon the 12th of
+July--that the Civil Constitution of the Clergy was approved by the
+Assembly. But it was not until the 26th of August that the King
+consented to sign. Nor was there at the moment any attempt to give the
+law effect. The protests of the bishops, for instance, came out quite at
+leisure, in the month of October, and the active principle of the whole
+of the Civil Constitution--to wit, the presentation of the Civic Oath
+which the clergy were required to take, was not even debated until the
+end of the year.
+
+This Civic Oath, which is sometimes used as a bugbear in the matter, was
+no more than an engagement under the sanction of an oath that the bishop
+or priest taking it would maintain the new _régime_--though that
+_régime_ included the constitution of the clergy; the oath involved no
+direct breach with Catholic doctrine or practice. It was, indeed, a
+folly to impose it, and it was a folly based upon the ignorance of the
+politicians (and of many of the bishops of the day) as to the nature of
+the Catholic Church. But the oath was not, nor was it intended to be, a
+measure of persecution. Many of the parish clergy took it, and most of
+them probably took it in good faith: nor did it discredit the oath with
+the public that it was refused by all save four of the acting bishops,
+for the condition of the hierarchy in pre-revolutionary France was
+notorious. The action of the bishops appeared in the public eye to be
+purely political, and the ready acceptance of the oath by so many,
+though a minority, of the lower clergy argued strongly in its favour.
+
+Nevertheless, no Catholic priest or bishop or layman could take that
+oath without landing himself in disloyalty to his religion; and that for
+the same reason which led St. Thomas of Canterbury to make his curious
+and fruitful stand against the reasonable and inevitable, as much as
+against the unreasonable, governmental provisions of his time. The
+Catholic Church is an institution of necessity autonomous. It cannot
+admit the right of any other power exterior to its own organisation to
+impose upon it a modification of its discipline, nor, above all, a new
+conception of its hieratic organisation.
+
+The reader must carefully distinguish between the acceptation by the
+Church of a detail of economic reform, the consent to suppress a
+corporation at the request of the civil power, or even to forego certain
+traditional political rights, and the admission of the general principle
+of civil control. To that general principle the Assembly, in framing the
+Constitution of the Clergy, was quite evidently committed. To admit such
+a co-ordinate external and civil power, or rather to admit a _superior_
+external power, is in theory to deny the principle of Catholicism, and
+in practice to make of the Catholic Church what the other State
+religions of Christendom have become.
+
+I have said that not until the end of the year 1790 was the debate
+opened upon the proposition to compel the clergy to take the oath.
+
+It is a singular commentary upon the whole affair that compulsion should
+have been the subject for debate at all. It should have followed, one
+would have imagined, normally from the law. But so exceptional had been
+the action of the Assembly and, as they now were beginning to find, so
+perilous, that a special decree was necessary--and the King’s signature
+to it--before this normal consequence of a measure which had been law
+for months, could be acted upon.
+
+Here let the reader pause and consider with what that moment--the end of
+1790--coincided.
+
+The assignats, paper-money issued upon the security of the confiscated
+estates of the Church, had already depreciated 10 per cent. Those who
+had first accepted them were paying throughout France a penny in the
+livre, or as we may put it, a penny farthing on the shilling, for what
+must have seemed to most of them the obstinacy of one single
+corporation--and that an unpopular one--against the decrees of the
+National Assembly.
+
+It was now the moment when a definite reaction against the Revolution
+was first taking shape, and when the populace was first beginning
+uneasily to have suspicion of it; it was the moment when the Court was
+beginning to negotiate for flight; it was the moment when (though the
+populace did not know it) Mirabeau was advising the King with all his
+might to seize upon the enforcement of the priests’ oath as an
+opportunity for civil war.
+
+The whole air of that winter was charged with doubt and mystery: in the
+minds of all who had enthusiastically followed the march of the
+Revolution, the short days of that rigorous cold of 1790-91 contained
+passages of despair, and a very brief period was to suffice for making
+the clerical oath not only the test of democracy against reaction, but
+the wedge that should split the nation in two.
+
+With the very opening of the new year, on the 4th of January, the
+bishops and priests in the Assembly were summoned to take the oath to
+the King, the Nation, and the Law; but that law included the Civil
+Constitution of the Clergy, and they refused. Within three months
+Mirabeau was dead, the flight of the King determined on, the suspicion
+of Paris at white heat, the oath taken or refused throughout France,
+and the schismatic priests introduced into their parishes--it may be
+imagined with what a clamour and with how many village quarrels! In that
+same fortnight appeared the papal brief, long delayed, and known as the
+Brief “_Caritas_,” denouncing the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. Six
+weeks later, at the end of May, the papal representative at the French
+Court was withdrawn, and in that act religious war declared.
+
+Throughout this quarrel, which was now exactly of a year’s duration, but
+the acute phase of which had lasted only six months, every act of either
+party to it necessarily tended to make the conflict more violent. Not
+only was there no opportunity for conciliation, but in the very nature
+of things the most moderate counsel had to range itself on one side or
+the other, and every public act which touched in any way upon the sore
+point, though it touched but indirectly, and with no desire on the part
+of the actors to rouse the passions of the moment, immediately appeared
+as a provocation upon one side or the other.
+
+It was inevitable that it should be so, with a population which had
+abandoned the practice of religion, with the attachment of the clerical
+organisation to the organisation of the old _régime_, with the strict
+bond of discipline that united the priesthood of the Church in France
+into one whole, and above all with the necessity under which the
+Revolution was, at this stage, of finding a definite and tangible
+enemy.
+
+This last point is of the very first importance. Public opinion was
+exasperated and inflamed, for the King was known to be an opponent of
+the democratic movement; yet he signed the bills and could not be
+overtly attacked. The Queen was known to be a violent opponent of it;
+but she did not actually govern. The Governments of Europe were known to
+be opponents; but no diplomatic note had yet appeared of which public
+opinion could make an object for attack.
+
+The resistance, therefore, offered by the clergy to the Civil
+Constitution, had just that effect which a nucleus will have in the
+crystallisation of some solution. It polarised the energies of the
+Revolution, it provided a definite foil, a definite negative, a definite
+counterpoint, a definite butt. Here was a simple issue. Men wearing a
+special uniform, pursuing known functions, performing a known part in
+society--to wit, the priests--were now for the most part the enemies of
+the new democratic Constitution that was in preparation. They would not
+take the oath of loyalty to it: they were everywhere in secret rebellion
+against it and, where they were dispossessed of their cures, in open
+rebellion. The clergy, therefore, that is the non-juring clergy (and the
+conforming clergy were an experiment that soon became a fiction), were
+after April 1791, in the eyes of all the democrats of the time, the
+plainest and most tangible form of the opposition to democracy.
+
+To the way in which I have presented the problem a great deal more might
+be added. The very fact that the democratic movement had come after a
+period of unfaith, and was non-Catholic in its springs, would have
+tended to produce that quarrel. So would the necessary attachment of the
+Catholic to authority and the easy confusion between the principle of
+authority and claims of a traditional monarchy. Again, the elements of
+vanity, of material greed, and of a false finality which are to be
+discovered in any purely democratic theory of the State, will between
+them always bring this theory into some conflict with religion. The
+centuries during which the throne and the altar had stood as twin
+symbols, especially in France, the very terminology of religious
+metaphor which had been forged during the centuries of monarchical
+institutions in Europe, helped to found the great quarrel. But, I
+repeat, the overt act without which the quarrel could never have become
+the terribly great thing it did, the master blunder which destroyed the
+unity of the revolutionary movement, was the Civil Constitution of the
+Clergy.
+
+So much for the first year of the schism, May 1790 to May 1791. The
+second year is but an intensification of the process apparent in the
+first.
+
+It opens with the King’s flight in June 1791: that is, with the first
+open act of enmity taken against the authority of the National
+Parliament since, two years before, the National Parliament had declared
+itself supreme. Already the Court had been generally identified with the
+resistance of the clergy, and a particular example of this had appeared
+in the opinion that the King’s attempted journey to St. Cloud in April
+had been prompted by a desire to have communion at the hands of a
+non-juring priest.[8] When, therefore, the King fled, though his flight
+had nothing whatsoever to do with the clerical quarrel, it was
+associated in men’s minds with the clerical quarrel through his attempt
+to leave Paris in April and from a long association of the Court with
+the clerical resistance. The outburst of anti-monarchical feeling which
+followed the flight was at the same time an outburst of anti-clerical
+feeling; but the clergy were everywhere and could be attacked
+everywhere. The Declaration of Pillnitz, which the nation very rightly
+interpreted as the beginning of an armed European advance against the
+French democracy, was felt to be a threat not only in favour of the King
+but in favour also of the rebellious ecclesiastics.
+
+And so forth. The uneasy approach of war throughout that autumn and
+winter of 1791-92, the peculiar transformation of the French
+temperament which war or its approach invariably produces--a sort of
+constructive exaltation and creative passion--began to turn a great part
+of its energy or fury against the very persons of the orthodox priests.
+
+The new Parliament, the “Legislative” as it was called, had not been
+sitting two months when it passed, upon November 29, 1791, the decree
+that non-juring priests should be deprived of their stipend. And here
+again we must note the curious lack of adjustment between law and fact
+in all this clerical quarrel! For more than a year public money had been
+paid to men who, under the law, should not during the whole of that year
+have touched any salary! Yet, as in the case of the oath, special action
+was necessary, and moreover the Parliament added to this tardy and
+logical consequence of the law a declaration that those who had not so
+taken the oath within eight days of their decree should be rendered
+“suspect.”
+
+The word “suspect” is significant. The Parliament even now could not
+act, at least it could not act without the King; and this word
+“suspect,” which carried no material consequences with it, was one that
+might cover a threat of things worse than regular and legal punishment.
+It was like the mark that some power not authorised or legal makes upon
+the door of those whom that power has singled out for massacre in some
+city.
+
+Three weeks later Louis vetoed the decree refusing stipends to
+non-jurors, and the year 1791 ended with the whole matter in suspense
+but with exasperation increasing to madness.
+
+The first three months of 1792 saw no change. The non-juring clergy were
+still tolerated by the Executive in their illegal position, and, what is
+more extraordinary, still received public money and were still for the
+most part in possession of their cures; the conception that the clergy
+were the prime, or at any rate the most obvious, enemies of the new
+_régime_ now hardened into a fixed opinion which the attempted
+persecution of religion, as the one party called it, the obstinate and
+anti-national rebellion of factious priests, as the other party called
+it, was rapidly approaching real persecution and real rebellion.
+
+With April 1792 came the war, and all the passions of the war.
+
+The known hostility of the King to the Revolution was now become
+something far worse: his known sympathy with an enemy under arms. To
+force the King into the open was henceforward the main tactic of the
+revolutionary body.
+
+Now for those whose object was forcing Louis XVI to open declarations of
+hostility against the nation, his religion was an obvious instrument. In
+no point could one come to closer grips with the King than on this
+question of the Church, where already, in December 1791, he had
+exercised his veto.
+
+On May 27, 1792, therefore, Guadet and Vergniaud, the Girondins, moved
+that a priest who had refused to take the oath should be subjected to
+transportation upon the mere demand of any twenty taxpayers within that
+assembly of parishes known as a “Canton.” It was almost exactly two
+years since the Civil Constitution of the Clergy had first been reported
+to the House by the Ecclesiastical Committee of the Constituent or
+National Assembly.
+
+It must not be forgotten under what external conditions this violent
+act, the first true act of persecution, was demanded. It was already a
+month since, upon the 20th of April, the war had opened upon the Belgian
+frontier by a disgraceful panic and the murder of General Dillon; almost
+contemporaneous with that breakdown was the corresponding panic and
+flight of the French troops in their advance to Mons. All Europe was
+talking of the facile march upon Paris which could now be undertaken;
+and in general this decree against the priests was but part of the
+exasperated policy which was rising to meet the terror of the invasion.
+
+It was followed, of course, by the decree dismissing the Royal Guard,
+and, rather more than a week later, by the demand for the formation of a
+camp of volunteers under the walls of Paris. But with this we are not
+here concerned. The King vetoed the decree against the non-juring
+priests, and in the wild two months that followed the orthodox clergy
+were, in the mind of the populace, and particularly the populace of
+Paris, identified with the cause of the re-establishment of the old
+_régime_ and the success of the invading foreign armies.
+
+With the crash of the 10th of August the persecution began: the true
+persecution, which was to the growing bitterness of the previous two
+years what a blow is to the opening words of a quarrel.
+
+The decree of the 27th of May was put into force within eleven days of
+the fall of the Tuileries. True, it was not put into force in that
+crudity which the Parliament had demanded: the non-juring priests were
+given a fortnight to leave the kingdom, and if they failed to avail
+themselves of the delay were to be transported.
+
+From this date to the end of the Terror, twenty-three months later, the
+story of the relations between the Revolution and the Church, though
+wild and terrible, is simple: it is a story of mere persecution
+culminating in extremes of cruelty and in the supposed uprooting of
+Christianity in France.
+
+The orthodox clergy were everywhere regarded by this time as the typical
+enemies of the revolutionary movement; they themselves regarded the
+revolutionary movement, by this time, as being principally an attempt to
+destroy the Catholic Church.
+
+Within seven months of the fall of the monarchy, from the 18th of March,
+1793, the priests, whether non-juring or schismatic, might, on the
+denunciation of any six citizens, be subjected to transportation.
+
+There followed immediately a general attack upon religion. The attempted
+closing of all churches was, of course, a failure, but it was firmly
+believed that such attachment as yet remained to the Catholic Church was
+due only to the ignorance of the provincial districts which displayed
+it, or to the self-seeking of those who fostered it. The attempt at mere
+“de-christianisation,” as it was called, failed, but the months of
+terror and cruelty, the vast number of martyrdoms (for they were no
+less) and the incredible sufferings and indignities to which the priests
+who attempted to remain in the country were subjected, burnt itself, as
+it were, into the very fibre of the Catholic organisation in France, and
+remained, in spite of political theory one way or the other, and in
+spite of the national sympathies of the priesthood, the one great active
+memory inherited from that time.
+
+Conversely, the picture of the priest, his habit and character, as the
+fatal and necessary opponent of the revolutionary theory, became so
+fixed in the mind of the Republican that two generations did nothing to
+eliminate it, and that even in our time the older men, in spite of pure
+theory, cannot rid themselves of an imagined connection between the
+Catholic Church and an international conspiracy against democracy. Nor
+does this non-rational but very real feeling lack support from the
+utterances of those who, in opposing the political theory of the French
+Revolution, consistently quote the Catholic Church as its necessary and
+holy antagonist.
+
+The attempt to “de-christianise” France failed, as I have said,
+completely. Public worship was restored, and the Concordat of Napoleon
+was believed to have settled the relations between Church and State in a
+permanent fashion. We have lived to see it dissolved; but this
+generation will not see, nor perhaps the generation succeeding it, the
+issue of the struggle between two bodies of thought which are divided by
+no process of reason, but profoundly divorced by the action of vivid and
+tragic historical memories.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[8] This opinion has entered into so many Protestant and non-Catholic
+histories of the Revolution that it is worth criticising once again in
+this little book. The King was perfectly free to receive communion
+privately from the hands of orthodox priests, did so receive it, and had
+received communion well within the canonical times. There was little
+ecclesiastical reason for the attempted leaving of Paris for St. Cloud
+on Monday the 18th April, 1791, save the _custom_ (not the religious
+duty) of communicating in public on Easter Sunday itself; it was a
+political move.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+  Alexander the Great, 144
+  Argonne, the, 156
+  Arras, 132, 137
+  Artois, Comte d’, 105
+  Avignon, 111
+
+  Bacharach, 173
+  Bailly, 71, 95
+  Barentin, 89
+  Barrère, 80, 125, 130, 131
+  Bastille, the, 95, 105, 109, 115
+  Beauregard, 200
+  Belgium, 123, 167, 169, 173
+  Bergues, 191
+  Bordeaux, 135
+  Bouillé, 107, 152
+  Brissot, 110, 130
+  Brunswick, Duke of, 115, 118, 178
+  Brussels, 168
+
+  Cæsar, 144
+  Calonne, 46
+  Cambon, 125
+  Carignan, 200
+  Carlyle, Thomas, 68
+  Carnot, 72-74, 80, 81, 136, 139, 171, 184, 186, 195, 197, 198, 200,
+    201
+  Cassel, 192
+  Chalôns, 107, 158
+  Champ-de-Mars, Massacre of, 109
+  Champfleury, 77
+  Charleroi, 210, 211
+  Charles I of England, 222
+  Chollet, 128
+  Clerfayt, 206, 207, 209
+  Coblentz, 115
+  Coburg, 170, 173, 176, 177, 179, 186, 188, 196, 210
+  Committee of Public Safety, 78, 79, 80, 81, 119, 125, 126, 128, 129,
+    131, 134, 136, 137, 140, 183, 195, 196, 203
+  Condé, 106
+  Condé, fortress of, 135, 173, 177, 178, 180, 182, 183, 186, 195
+  Condorcet, 71
+  _Contrat Social_, 21, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 37, 125, 133
+  Coudequerque, 192
+  Couthon, 131
+  Custine, 177, 178, 179, 180
+
+  Danton, 64, 67-72, 73, 81, 82, 109, 117, 119, 120, 125, 130, 131, 135,
+    137, 138, 139, 150, 162, 184, 185
+  Desmoulins, 138
+  Dillon, General, 250
+  Drouet, 108
+  Dumouriez, 43, 65-67, 113, 123, 124, 125, 155, 157, 158, 159, 162,
+    163, 165, 168, 169, 170, 173
+  Dunquerque, 135, 136, 181, 185, 186, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 195
+
+  England, 14, 124, 145
+  Elizabeth, Queen of England, 239
+  Esquelbecque, 191
+
+  Fersen, Count Axel de, 53
+  Fleurus, 211, 212
+  Fontenay, 128
+  Fontenoy, 149, 166
+  Fouché, 74
+  Freemasonry, 71, 231
+  Freytag, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194
+  Furnes, 190, 194
+
+  George III of England, 63
+  Gironde, 110
+  _Girondins, The_, 110, 112, 119, 122, 123, 129, 249
+  Grandpré, 158
+  Guadet, 249
+  Guise, 198, 200
+
+  Haguenau, 202
+  Haine, the River, 167
+  Hébert, 138
+  Henry VIII of England, 222, 229, 239
+  Hesse-Cassel, Landgrave of, 113
+  Hoche, 202
+  Holland, 124, 163
+  Hoondschoote, 74, 136, 195, 196, 197
+  Houchard, 179, 181, 192, 193, 194, 195, 198
+  Howe, Lord, 213
+
+  Ireland, 239
+  Isnard, 110
+
+  James II of England, 230
+  Jefferson, 21
+  Jemappes, 123, 166, 167
+  Joseph II of Austria, 112, 163, 165
+  Jourdan, 198
+
+  Kaiserslautern, 202
+  Kaunitz, 155
+  Kellermann, 159, 160
+  Kilmaine, 180, 181
+
+  La Fayette, 43, 51, 61-65, 95, 100, 109, 114
+  Lamballe, Princess de, 53, 71
+  Landau, 177, 202, 203
+  Lebas, 141
+  Leipsic, 143, 214
+  Lequesnoy, 177, 186, 195
+  Linselles, 189
+  Longwy, 115, 118, 156
+  Lorraine, 118
+  Louis XIV of France, 100, 225, 230
+  Louis XVI of France, vi, 37-45, 71, 84, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92,
+    93, 95, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 107, 108, 109, 111, 114,
+    117, 123, 124, 152, 153, 243, 245, 246, 247, 248, 249, 250
+  Louis XVII of France, 135
+  Louvre, the, 116, 117
+  Luxembourg, 118
+  Lyons, 129, 136, 182, 183
+  Lys, the River, 206, 207
+
+  Machecoul, 128
+  Maestricht, 168
+  Malo-les-Bains, 194
+  Marat, 74-77, 120, 135, 183
+  Marcel, 120
+  Marchionnes, 189
+  Marie Antoinette, Queen of France, vi, 45-53, 63, 64, 90, 99, 100,
+    101, 102, 103, 106, 107, 108, 109, 113, 116, 117, 138, 139, 152,
+    153, 155, 245
+  Marque, the River, 206
+  “Marseillaise,” the, 116
+  Marseilles, 116, 131, 135, 182
+  Maubeuge, 136, 177, 178, 181, 196, 197, 202
+  Mayence, 135, 173, 177, 178
+  Merda, 142
+  Metz, 159
+  Michelet, 68
+  Mirabeau, 44, 53-61, 64, 70, 72, 102, 103, 104, 106, 107, 243
+  Mons, 167, 177, 250
+  Montmédy, 107
+  Mouveau, 206
+
+  Namur, 179
+  Nantes, 128, 131, 136, 137, 182
+  Napoleon I, 66, 67, 72, 143, 150, 205, 214, 253
+  Narbonne, 43, 155
+  Necker, 46, 90, 94, 95
+  Neerwinden, 124, 125, 128, 169
+
+  Orleans, 128
+  Orleans, Duke of, 109
+
+  Parthenay, 128
+  Pichegru, 202
+  Pillnitz, 154, 247
+  Poland, 31
+  Polignac, Madame de, 53
+  Pollio, 120
+
+  Redange, 118
+  Robespierre, 77-83, 111, 112, 132, 133, 134, 140, 141, 142, 213
+  Robinet, Dr., 120
+  Roland, 110
+  Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 20, 21, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35,
+    36, 37, 125
+  Russia, 14
+
+  St. Amand, 206
+  Saint-André, Jeanbon, 80, 131, 185
+  St. Cloud, 108, 247
+  Saint-Just, 80, 131, 133, 140, 141, 210
+  St. Menehould, 159
+  Scheldt, the, 123, 183, 205, 206
+  Sedan, 114
+  Servia, 155
+  Sièyes, 87
+  Spain, 24, 44, 124, 150
+
+  Talavera, 189
+  Talleyrand, 150
+  Terror, the, 79, 80, 81, 82, 120, 137, 139, 140, 142, 251
+  Tetteghem, 191
+  Thouars, 128
+  Toulon, 135, 136, 182, 183, 203
+  Tourcoing, 189, 206, 208, 209
+  Tournay, 210
+  Trafalgar, 213
+  Tuileries, the, 100, 101, 116, 121, 251
+
+  Valenciennes, 129, 135, 169, 173, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183,
+    186, 195
+  Valmy, 121, 122, 131, 158, 159, 160, 169
+  Varennes, 107, 108, 154
+  Vendée, 128, 135, 203
+  Verdun, 118, 120, 156, 157
+  Vergniaud, 110, 130, 249
+  Versailles, 52, 94, 99, 100, 102, 152, 153
+  Vienna, 163, 210
+
+  Warcoing, 205
+  Waterloo, 143
+  Wattignies, 73, 136, 201, 208
+  Wellington, Duke of, 189
+  Westermann, 131
+  Wilder, 191
+  Wissembourg, 202
+  Wormhoudt, 191
+  Wurmser, 178
+
+  York, Duke of, 179, 181, 186, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 194, 205, 208,
+    209
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_Richard Clay & Sons, Limited, London and Bungay._
+
+
+
+
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+<div style='text-align:center; font-size:1.2em; font-weight:bold'>The Project Gutenberg eBook of The French Revolution, by Hilaire Belloc</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
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+</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Title: The French Revolution</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Author: Hilaire Belloc</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Release Date: February 8, 2011 [EBook #35215]<br />
+[Most recently updated: March 25, 2022]</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Language: English</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Character set encoding: UTF-8</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Produced by: Steven Gibbs, Richard J. Shiffer and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net</div>
+<div style='margin-top:2em; margin-bottom:4em'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FRENCH REVOLUTION ***</div>
+
+
+
+
+<div class="titlePage">
+<h1>THE FRENCH<br />
+REVOLUTION</h1>
+
+<p>BY</p>
+
+<p>HILAIRE BELLOC, M.A.</p>
+
+
+<p><small>AUTHOR OF “DANTON,” “ROBESPIERRE,” “MARIE ANTOINETTE,” “THE OLD ROAD,”
+“THE PATH TO ROME,” “PARIS,” “THE HILLS AND THE SEA,” “THE HISTORIC
+THAMES,” ETC., ETC.</small></p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>LONDON<br />
+WILLIAMS AND NORGATE</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class="sc">Richard Clay and Sons, Limited</span>,<br />
+<small>BRUNSWICK STREET, STAMFORD STREET, S.E.,<br />
+AND BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.</small></p>
+</div>
+
+<hr />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_v" id="Page_v">[Pg v]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="PREFACE" id="PREFACE"></a>PREFACE</h2>
+
+
+<p>The object of these few pages is not to recount once more the history of
+the Revolution: that can be followed in any one of a hundred text-books.
+Their object is rather to lay, if that be possible, an explanation of it
+before the English reader; so that he may understand both what it was
+and how it proceeded, and also why certain problems hitherto unfamiliar
+to Englishmen have risen out of it.</p>
+
+<p>First, therefore, it is necessary to set down, clearly without modern
+accretion, that political theory which was a sort of religious creed,
+supplying the motive force of the whole business; of the new Civil Code
+as of the massacres; of the panics and capitulations as of the
+victories; of the successful transformation of society as of the
+conspicuous failures in detail which still menace the achievement of the
+Revolution.</p>
+
+<p>This grasped, the way in which the main events followed each other, and
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_vi" id="Page_vi">[Pg vi]</a></span>the reason of their interlocking and proceeding as they did must be put
+forward&mdash;not, I repeat, in the shape of a chronicle, but in the shape of
+a thesis. Thus the reader must know not only that the failure of the
+royal family’s flight was followed by war, but how and why it was
+followed by war. He must not only appreciate the severity of the
+government of the great Committee, but why that severity was present,
+and of the conditions of war upon which it reposed. But in so explaining
+the development of the movement it is necessary to select for
+appreciation as the chief figures the characters of the time, since upon
+their will and manner depended the fate of the whole. For instance, had
+the Queen been French either in blood or in sympathy, had the King been
+alert, had any one character retained the old religious motives, all
+history would have been changed, and this human company must be seen if
+its action and drama are to be comprehended.</p>
+
+<p>The reader interested in that capital event should further seize (and
+but too rarely has an opportunity for seizing) its military aspect; and
+this difficulty of his proceeds from two causes: the first, that
+historians, even when they recognise the importance of the military side
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_vii" id="Page_vii">[Pg vii]</a></span>of some past movement, are careless of the military aspect, and think
+it sufficient to relate particular victories and general actions. The
+military aspect of any period does not consist in these, but in the
+campaigns of which actions, however decisive, are but incidental parts.
+In other words, the reader must seize the movement and design of armies
+if he is to seize a military period, and these are not commonly given
+him. In the second place, the historian, however much alive to the
+importance of military affairs, too rarely presents them as part of a
+general position. He will make his story a story of war, or again, a
+story of civilian development, and the reader will fail to see how the
+two combine.</p>
+
+<p>Now, the Revolution, more than any other modern period, turns upon, and
+is explained by, its military history. On this account has so
+considerable a space been devoted to the explaining of that feature.</p>
+
+<p>The reader will note, again, that the quarrel between the Revolution and
+the Catholic Church has also been dealt with at length.</p>
+
+<p>To emphasise this aspect of the revolutionary struggle may seem unusual
+and perhaps deserves a word of apology.</p>
+
+<p>The reader is invited to consider the fact that the Revolution took
+place in a country which had, in the first place, definitely determined
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_viii" id="Page_viii">[Pg viii]</a></span>during the religious struggle of the sixteenth and seventeenth
+centuries to remain in communion with Rome; and had, in the second
+place, admitted a very large and important body of converts to the
+doctrines of the Reformation.</p>
+
+<p>The determination of the French people, in the crisis of 1572-1610, to
+remain Catholic under a strong central Government, was a capital point
+in the future history of France. So was the presence of a wealthy, very
+large, and highly cultivated body of dissentients in the midst of the
+nation. The two phenomena hardly co-existed elsewhere in Europe. Between
+them they lent to the political history of France a peculiar character
+which the nineteenth century, even more than the Revolution itself, has
+emphasised; and it is the opinion of the present writer that it is
+impossible to understand the Revolution unless very high relief is given
+to the religious problem.</p>
+
+<p>If a personal point may be noted, the fact that the writer of these
+pages is himself a Catholic and in political sympathy strongly attached
+to the political theory of the Revolution, should not be hidden from the
+reader. Such personal conditions have perhaps enabled him to treat the
+matter more thoroughly than it might have been treated by one who
+rejected either Republicanism upon the one hand, or Catholicism upon the
+other; but he<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_ix" id="Page_ix">[Pg ix]</a></span> believes that no personal and therefore exaggerated note
+has been allowed to intrude upon his description of what is a definite
+piece of objective history lying in the field of record rather than in
+that of opinion.</p>
+
+<p>Some years ago the paramount importance of the quarrel between the
+Church and the Revolution might still have been questioned by men who
+had no personal experience of the struggle, and of its vast results.
+To-day the increasing consequences and the contemporary violence of that
+quarrel make its presentation an essential part of any study of the
+period.</p>
+
+<p>The scheme thus outlined will show why I have given this sketch the
+divisions in which it lies.</p>
+
+<p class="author">H. Belloc.</p>
+<p class="addr"><i>King’s Land,<br />
+January 1911.</i></p>
+
+
+<hr />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_x" id="Page_x">[Pg x]</a></span><br /></p>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xi" id="Page_xi">[Pg xi]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CONTENTS" id="CONTENTS"></a>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+
+
+<div class="center">
+<table class="toc" summary="toc">
+<tr><td class="right">&nbsp;</td><td class="left">&nbsp;</td><td class="right"><span class="sc">page</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right">&nbsp;</td><td class="left"><span class="sc">Preface</span></td><td class="right"><a href="#Page_v"><b>v</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right">I</td><td class="left"><span class="sc">The Political Theory of The Revolution</span></td><td class="right"><a href="#I"><b>13</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right">II</td><td class="left"><span class="sc">Rousseau</span></td><td class="right"><a href="#II"><b>29</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right">III</td><td class="left"><span class="sc">The Characters of the Revolution:</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right">&nbsp;</td><td class="indent left">King Louis XVI</td><td class="right"><a href="#III_1"><b>37</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right">&nbsp;</td><td class="indent left">The Queen</td><td class="right"><a href="#III_2"><b>45</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right">&nbsp;</td><td class="indent left">Mirabeau</td><td class="right"><a href="#III_3"><b>53</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right">&nbsp;</td><td class="indent left">La Fayette</td><td class="right"><a href="#III_4"><b>61</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right">&nbsp;</td><td class="indent left">Dumouriez</td><td class="right"><a href="#III_5"><b>65</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right">&nbsp;</td><td class="indent left">Danton</td><td class="right"><a href="#III_6"><b>67</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right">&nbsp;</td><td class="indent left">Carnot</td><td class="right"><a href="#III_7"><b>72</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right">&nbsp;</td><td class="indent left">Marat</td><td class="right"><a href="#III_8"><b>74</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right">&nbsp;</td><td class="indent left">Robespierre</td><td class="right"><a href="#III_9"><b>77</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right">IV</td><td class="left"><span class="sc">The Phases of the Revolution:</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right">&nbsp;</td><td class="indent left">i. From May 1789 to 17th of July 1789</td><td class="right"><a href="#IV_1"><b>83</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right">&nbsp;</td><td class="indent left">ii. From the 17th of July 1789 to the 6th of October 1789</td><td class="right"><a href="#IV_2"><b>98</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right">&nbsp;</td><td class="indent left">iii. From October 1789 to June 1791</td><td class="right"><a href="#IV_3"><b>102</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right">&nbsp;</td><td class="indent left">iv. From June 1791 to September 1792</td><td class="right"><a href="#IV_4"><b>108</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right">&nbsp;</td><td class="indent left">v. From the Invasion of September 1792 to the Establishment of the Committee of Public Safety, April 1793</td><td class="right"><a href="#IV_5"><b>118</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right">&nbsp;</td><td class="indent left">vi. From April 1793 to July 1794</td><td class="right"><a href="#IV_6"><b>126</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right">V</td><td class="left"><span class="sc">The Military Aspect of the Revolution</span></td><td class="right"><a href="#V"><b>142</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right">&nbsp;</td><td class="indent left">One</td><td class="right"><a href="#V_1"><b>145</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right">&nbsp;</td><td class="indent left">Two</td><td class="right"><a href="#V_2"><b>156</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right">&nbsp;</td><td class="indent left">Three</td><td class="right"><a href="#V_3"><b>163</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right">&nbsp;</td><td class="indent left">Four</td><td class="right"><a href="#V_4"><b>179</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right">&nbsp;</td><td class="indent left">Five</td><td class="right"><a href="#V_5"><b>204</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right">VI</td><td class="left"><span class="sc">The Revolution and the Catholic Church</span></td><td class="right"><a href="#VI"><b>214</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right">&nbsp;</td><td class="left"><span class="sc">Index</span></td><td class="right"><a href="#INDEX"><b>255</b></a></td></tr>
+</table></div>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xii" id="Page_xii">[Pg xii]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="THE_FRENCH_REVOLUTION" id="THE_FRENCH_REVOLUTION"></a>THE FRENCH REVOLUTION</h2>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="I" id="I"></a>I<br /><br />
+<small>THE POLITICAL THEORY OF THE REVOLUTION</small></h2>
+
+<p><span class="sc">The</span> political theory upon which the Revolution proceeded has, especially
+in this country, suffered ridicule as local, as ephemeral, and as
+fallacious. It is universal, it is eternal, and it is true.</p>
+
+<p>It may be briefly stated thus: that a political community pretending to
+sovereignty, that is, pretending to a moral right of defending its
+existence against all other communities, derives the civil and temporal
+authority of its laws not from its actual rulers, nor even from its
+magistracy, but from itself.</p>
+
+<p>But the community cannot express authority unless it possesses
+<i>corporate initiative</i>; that is, unless the mass of its component units
+are able to combine for the purpose of a common expression, are
+conscious of a common will, and have something in common which makes the
+whole sovereign indeed.</p>
+
+<p>It may be that this power of corporate initiative and of corresponding
+corporate expression is forbidden to men. In that case<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span> no such thing as
+a sovereign community can be said to exist. In that case “patriotism,”
+“public opinion,” “the genius of a people,” are terms without meaning.
+But the human race in all times and in all places has agreed that such
+terms have meaning, and the conception that a community can so live,
+order and be itself, is a human conception as consonant to the nature of
+man as is his sense of right and wrong; it is much more intimately a
+part of that nature than are the common accidents determining human
+life, such as nourishment, generation or repose: nay, more intimate a
+part of it than anything which attaches to the body.</p>
+
+<p>This theory of political morals, though subject to a limitless
+degradation in practice, underlies the argument of every man who
+pretends to regard the conduct of the State as a business affecting the
+conscience of citizens. Upon it relies every protest against tyranny and
+every denunciation of foreign aggression.</p>
+
+<p>He that is most enamoured of some set machinery for the government of
+men, and who regards the sacramental function of an hereditary monarch
+(as in Russia), the organic character of a native oligarchy (as in
+England), the mechanical arrangement of election by majorities, or even
+in a crisis the intense conviction and therefore the intense activity
+and conclusive power of great crowds as salutary to the State, will
+invariably, if any one of these engines fail him in the achievement of
+what he desires for his country, fall back upon the doctrine of an
+ultimately sovereign community.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span> He will complain that though an
+election has defeated his ideal, yet true national tradition and true
+national sentiment were upon his side. If he defends the action of a
+native oligarchy against the leaders of the populace, he does so by an
+explanation (more or less explicit) that the oligarchy is more truly
+national, that is more truly communal, than the engineered expression of
+opinion of which the demagogues (as he will call them) have been the
+mouthpieces. Even in blaming men for criticising or restraining an
+hereditary monarch the adherent of that monarch will blame them upon the
+ground that their action is anti-national, that is anti-communal; and,
+in a word, no man pretending to sanity can challenge in matters temporal
+and civil the ultimate authority of whatever is felt to be (though with
+what difficulty is it not defined!) the general civic sense which builds
+up a State.</p>
+
+<p>Those words “civil” and “temporal” must lead the reader to the next
+consideration; which is, that the last authority of all does not reside
+even in the community.</p>
+
+<p>It must be admitted by all those who have considered their own nature
+and that of their fellow beings that the ultimate authority in any act
+is God. Or if the name of God sound unusual in an English publication
+to-day, then what now takes the place of it for many (an imperfect
+phrase), “the moral sense.”</p>
+
+<p>Thus if there be cast together in some abandoned place a community of a
+few families so depraved or so necessitous that, against the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span> teachings
+of their own consciences, and well knowing that what they are doing is
+what we call <i>wrong</i>, yet they will unanimously agree to do it, then
+that agreement of theirs, though certainly no temporal or civil
+authority can be quoted against it, is yet unjustifiable. Another
+authority lies behind. Still more evidently would this be true if, of
+say, twelve, seven decided (knowing the thing to be wrong) that the
+wrong thing should be done, five stood out for the right&mdash;and yet the
+majority possessed by the seven should be determined a sufficient
+authority for the wrongful command.</p>
+
+<p>But it is to be noted that this axiom only applies where the authority
+of the moral law (God, as the author of this book, with due deference to
+his readers, would prefer to say) is recognised and yet flouted. If
+those twelve families do sincerely believe such and such a general
+action to be right, then not only is their authority when they carry it
+into practice a civil and a temporal authority; it is an authority
+absolute in all respects; and further, if, upon a division of opinion
+among them not perhaps a bare majority, nay, perhaps not a majority at
+all, but at any rate a determinant current of opinion&mdash;determinant in
+intensity and in weight, that is, as well as in numbers&mdash;declares an
+action to be right, then that determinant weight of opinion gives to its
+resolve a political authority not only civil and temporal but absolute.
+Beyond it and above it there is no appeal.</p>
+
+<p>In other words, men may justly condemn,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span> and justly have in a thousand
+circumstances condemned, the theory that a mere decision on the major
+part of the community was necessarily right in morals. It is, for that
+matter, self-evident that if one community decides in one fashion,
+another, also sovereign, in the opposite fashion, both cannot be right.
+Reasoning men have also protested, and justly, against the conception
+that what a majority in numbers, or even (what is more compelling still)
+a unanimity of decision in a community may order, may not only be wrong
+but may be something which that community has no authority to order
+since, though it possesses a civil and temporal authority, it acts
+against that ultimate authority which is its own consciousness of right.
+Men may and do justly protest against the doctrine that a community is
+incapable of doing deliberate evil; it is as capable of such an action
+as is an individual. But men nowhere do or can deny that the community
+acting as it thinks right is ultimately sovereign: there is no
+alternative to so plain a truth.</p>
+
+<p>Let us take it, then, as indubitable that where civil government is
+concerned, the community is supreme, if only from the argument that no
+organ within the community can prove its right to withstand the
+corporate will when once that corporate will shall find expression.</p>
+
+<p>All arguments which are advanced against this prime axiom of political
+ethics are, when they are analysed, found to repose upon a confusion of
+thought. Thus a man will say, “This doctrine would lead my country to<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span>
+abandon her suzerainty over that other nation, but were I to consent to
+this, I should be weakening my country, to which I owe allegiance.” The
+doctrine compels him to no such muddlement. The community of which he is
+a member is free to make its dispositions for safety, and is bound to
+preserve its own life. It is for the oppressed to protest and to rebel.</p>
+
+<p>Similarly, men think that this doctrine in some way jars with the actual
+lethargy and actual imbecility of men in their corporate action. It does
+nothing of the kind. This lethargy, that imbecility, and all the other
+things that limit the application of the doctrine, in no way touch its
+right reason, any more than the fact that the speech of all men is
+imperfect contradicts the principle that man has a moral right to
+self-expression. That a dumb man cannot speak at all, but must write,
+is, so far from a contradiction, a proof of the truth that speech is the
+prime expression of man; and in the same way a community utterly without
+the power of expressing its corporate will is no contradiction, but a
+proof, of the general rule that such expression and the imposing of such
+decisions are normal to mankind. The very oddity of the contrast between
+the abnormal and the normal aids us in our decision, and when we see a
+people conquered and not persuaded, yet making no attempt at rebellion,
+or a people free from foreign oppression yet bewildered at the prospect
+of self-government, the oddity of the phenomenon proves our rule.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>But though all this be true, there stands against the statement of our
+political axiom not a contradiction added, but a criticism; and all men
+with some knowledge of their fellows and of themselves at once perceive,
+<i>first</i>, that the psychology of corporate action differs essentially
+from the psychology of individual action, and <i>secondly</i>, that in
+proportion to the number, the discussions, the lack of intimacy, and in
+general the friction of the many, corporate action by a community,
+corporate self-realisation and the imposition of a corporate will,
+varies from the difficult to the impossible.</p>
+
+<p>On this no words need be wasted. All men who reason and who observe are
+agreed that, in proportion to distance, numbers, and complexity, the
+difficulty of self-expression within a community increases. We may get
+in a lively people explosions of popular will violent, acute, and
+certainly real; but rare. We may attempt with a people more lethargic to
+obtain some reflection of popular will through the medium of a permanent
+machinery of deputation which, less than any other, perhaps, permits a
+great community to express itself truly. We may rely upon the national
+sympathies of an aristocracy or of a king. But in any case we know that
+large communities can only indirectly and imperfectly express themselves
+where the permanent government of their whole interest is concerned. Our
+attachment, which may be passionate, to the rights of the Common Will we
+must satisfy either by demanding a loose federation of small,
+self-governing states, or submitting the central<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span> government of large
+ones to occasional insurrection and to violent corporate expressions of
+opinion which shall readjust the relations between the governor and the
+governed.</p>
+
+<p>All this is true: but such a criticism of the theory in political morals
+which lay behind the Revolution, the theory that the community is
+sovereign, is no contradiction. It only tells us that pure right cannot
+act untrammelled in human affairs and that it acts in some conditions
+more laboriously than in others: it gives not a jot of authority to any
+alternative thesis.<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a></p>
+
+<p>Such is the general theory of the Revolution to which the command of
+Jean Jacques Rousseau over the French tongue gave imperishable<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span>
+expression in that book whose style and logical connection may be
+compared to some exact and strong piece of engineering. He entitled it
+the <i>Contrat Social</i>, and it became the formula of the Revolutionary
+Creed. But though no man, perhaps, has put the prime truth of political
+morals so well, that truth was as old as the world; it appears in the
+passionate rhetoric of a hundred leaders and has stood at the head or
+has been woven into the laws of free States without number. In the
+English language the Declaration of Independence is perhaps its noblest
+expression. And though this document was posterior to the great work of
+Rousseau and (through the genius of Jefferson) was in some part
+descended from it, its language, and still more the actions of those who
+drafted and supported it, are sufficient to explain what I mean to
+English readers.</p>
+
+<p>Now with this general theory there stand connected on the one hand
+certain great principles without which it would have no meaning, and
+also on the other hand a number of minor points concerning no more than
+the machinery of politics. The first are vital to democracy. The second,
+in spite of their great popularity at the time of the Revolution and of
+the sanction which the Revolution gave them, nay, of their universality
+since the Revolution, have in reality nothing to do with the
+revolutionary theory itself.</p>
+
+<p>Of these two categories the type of the first is the doctrine of the
+equality of man; the type of the second is the mere machinery called
+“representative.”<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The doctrine of the equality of the man is a transcendent doctrine: a
+“dogma,” as we call such doctrines in the field of transcendental
+religion. It corresponds to no physical reality which we can grasp, it
+is hardly to be adumbrated even by metaphors drawn from physical
+objects. We may attempt to rationalise it by saying that what is common
+to all men is not <i>more</i> important but <i>infinitely more</i> important than
+the accidents by which men differ. We may compare human attributes to
+tri-dimensional, and personal attributes to bi-dimensional measurements;
+we may say that whatever man has of his nature is the standard of man,
+and we may show that in all such things men are potentially equal. None
+of these metaphors explains the matter; still less do any of them
+satisfy the demand of those to whom the dogma may be incomprehensible.</p>
+
+<p>Its truth is to be arrived at (for these) in a negative manner. If men
+are <i>not</i> equal then no scheme of jurisprudence, no act of justice, no
+movement of human indignation, no exaltation of fellowship, has any
+meaning. The doctrine of the equality of man is one which, like many of
+the great transcendental doctrines, may be proved by the results
+consequent upon its absence. It is in man to believe it&mdash;and all lively
+societies believe it.</p>
+
+<p>It is certainly not in man to prove the equality of men save, as I have
+said, by negation; but it demands no considerable intellectual faculty
+to perceive that, void of the doctrine of equality, the conception of
+political freedom and of a community’s moral<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span> right to self-government
+disappear. Now to believe that doctrine positively, and to believe it
+ardently, to go on crusade for that religious point, was indeed
+characteristic of the French. It required the peculiar and inherited
+religious temper of the French which had for so many hundred years
+seized and defined point after point in the character of man, to grow
+enamoured of this definition and to feel it not in the intellect, but as
+it were in their bones. They became soldiers for it, and that enormous
+march of theirs, overrunning Europe, which may not inaptly be compared
+to their adventures in the twelfth century, when they engaged upon the
+Crusades, was inspired by no one part of the doctrine of political
+freedom more strongly than by this doctrine of equality.</p>
+
+<p>The scorn which was in those days universally felt for that pride which
+associates itself with things not inherent to a man (notably and most
+absurdly with capricious differences of wealth) never ran higher; and
+the passionate sense of justice which springs from this profound and
+fundamental social dogma of equality, as it moved France during the
+Revolution to frenzy, so also moved it to creation.</p>
+
+<p>Those who ask how it was that a group of men sustaining all the weight
+of civil conflict within and of universal war without, yet made time
+enough in twenty years to frame the codes which govern modern Europe, to
+lay down the foundations of universal education, of a strictly
+impersonal scheme of administration,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span> and even in detail to remodel the
+material face of society&mdash;in a word, to make modern Europe&mdash;must be
+content for their reply to learn that the Republican Energy had for its
+flame and excitant this vision: a sense almost physical of the equality
+of man.</p>
+
+<p>The minor points which wove themselves into the political practice of
+democracy during the Revolution, which are not of its principles, and
+which would not, were they abstracted, affect its essence, are of quite
+another and less noble kind. I have taken as the chief of these the
+machinery of deputation or of “representation.”</p>
+
+<p>The representative system had been designed for a particular purpose
+under the influence of the Church and especially of the monastic orders
+(who invented it) in the Middle Ages. It had been practised as a useful
+check upon the national monarchy in France, and as a useful form of
+national expression in times of crisis or when national initiative was
+peculiarly demanded.</p>
+
+<p>In Spain it became, as the Middle Ages proceeded, a very vital national
+and local thing, varying from place to place. It is not surprising that
+Spain (seeing that in her territory the first experiments in
+representation were made) should have thus preserved it, popular and
+alive.</p>
+
+<p>In England Representation, vigorous as everywhere else in the true
+Middle Ages, narrowed and decayed at their close, until in the
+seventeenth century it had become a mere scheme for aristocratic
+government.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In France for nearly two hundred years before the Revolution it had
+fallen into disuse, but an active memory of it still remained;
+especially a memory of its value in critical moments when a consultation
+of the whole people was required, and when the corporate initiative of
+the whole people must be set at work in order to save the State.</p>
+
+<p>It is no wonder, therefore, that the French, on the eve of the
+Revolution, clamoured for a revival of representation, or, as the system
+was called in the French tongue, “the States-General.” But as a
+permanent machine of government no one in Europe had the least idea how
+the system might serve the ends of democracy. In England democracy was
+not practised nor was representation connected with the conception of
+it. The nation had forgotten democracy as completely as it had forgotten
+the religion and the old ideals of the Middle Ages.</p>
+
+<p>In those parts of Christendom in which this ancient Christian
+institution of a parliament had not narrowed to be the mask of an
+oligarchy or dwindled to be a mere provincial custom, its use had
+disappeared. The ancient function of Representation, when it had been
+most lively and vigorous, that is, in the Middle Ages, was occasionally
+to initiate a national policy in critical moments, but more generally to
+grant taxes. What a democratic parliament might do, no one in 1789 could
+conceive.</p>
+
+<p>There was indeed one great example of democratic representation in
+existence: the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span> example of the United States; but the conditions were
+wholly different from those of Europe. No true central power yet existed
+there; no ancient central institution, no Crown nor any Custom of the
+City. The numbers over which American representative democracy then held
+power were not to be compared to the twenty-five millions who inhabited
+the French realm. And even so, most of what counted in their lives was
+regulated by a system of highly local autonomy: for they were as
+scattered as they were few, and the wisest and strongest and best were
+dependent upon slaves. In Europe, I repeat, the experiment was untried;
+and it is one of the chief faults of the French revolutionaries that,
+having been compelled in the critical moment of the opening of the
+Revolution to the use of election and representation, they envisaged the
+permanent use of a similar machinery as a something sacred to and normal
+in the democratic State.</p>
+
+<p>True, they could not foresee modern parliamentarism. Nothing could be
+more alien to their conception of the State than the deplorable method
+of government which parliamentarism everywhere tends to introduce
+to-day.</p>
+
+<p>True, the French people during the revolutionary wars made short work of
+parliamentary theory, and found it a more national thing to follow a
+soldier (being by that time all soldiers themselves), and to incarnate
+in a dictator the will of the nation.</p>
+
+<p>But though the French revolutionaries<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span> could not have foreseen what we
+call “Parliamentarism” to-day, and though the society from which they
+sprang made short work of the oligarchic pretensions of a parliament
+when the realities of the national struggle had to be considered, yet
+they did as a fact pay an almost absurd reverence to the machinery of
+representation and election.</p>
+
+<p>They went so far as to introduce it into their attempted reform of the
+Church; they introduced it everywhere into civil government, from the
+smallest units to the highest. They even for a moment played with the
+illusion in that most real of games which men can ever play at&mdash;the
+business of arms: they allowed the election of officers. They were led
+to do this by that common fallacy, more excusable in them than in us,
+which confounds the individual will with the corporate. A representative
+(they thought) could in some way be the permanent receptacle of his
+electorate. They imagined that corporate initiative was always
+sufficiently active, in no matter what divisions or subdivisions, to
+react at once upon the delegate, to guide him as may be guided a driven
+animal, or to command him as may be commanded a servant.</p>
+
+<p>It was in vain that Rousseau, the great exponent of the democratic
+theory upon which France attempted to proceed, had warned posterity
+against the possible results of the representative system: they fell
+into the error, and it possesses many of their descendants to this day.</p>
+
+<p>Rousseau’s searching mind perceived indeed<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span> no more than the general
+truth that men who consent to a representative system are free only
+while the representatives are not sitting. But (as is so often the case
+with intuitions of genius) though he saw not the whole of the evil, he
+had put his finger upon its central spot, and from that main and just
+principle which he laid down&mdash;that under a merely representative system
+men cannot be really free&mdash;flow all those evils which we now know to
+attach to this method of government. What a rather clumsy epigram has
+called “the audacity of elected persons” is part of this truth. The
+evident spectacle of modern parliamentary nations driven against their
+will into economic conditions which appal them, proceeds again from the
+same truth; the conspicuous and hearty contempt into which parliamentary
+institutions have everywhere fallen again proceeds from it, and there
+proceeds from it that further derivative plague that the representatives
+themselves have now everywhere become more servile than the electorate
+and that in all parliamentary countries a few intriguers are the
+unworthy depositories of power, and by their service of finance permit
+the money-dealers to govern us all to-day. Rousseau, I say, the chief
+prophet of the Revolution, had warned the French of this danger. It is a
+capital example of his talent, for the experiment of democratic
+representation had not yet, in his time, been tried. But much more is
+that power of his by which he not only stamped and issued the gold of
+democracy as it had<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span> never till then been minted. No one man makes a
+people or their creed, but Rousseau more than any other man made vocal
+the creed of a people, and it is advisable or necessary for the reader
+of the Revolution to consider at the outset of his reading of what
+nature was Rousseau’s abundant influence upon the men who remodelled the
+society of Europe between 1789 and 1794.</p>
+
+<p>Why did he dominate those five years, and how was it that he dominated
+them increasingly?</p>
+
+<p>An explanation of Rousseau’s power merits a particular digression, for
+few who express themselves in the English tongue have cared to
+understand it, and in the academies provincial men have been content to
+deal with this great writer as though he were in some way inferior to
+themselves.</p>
+
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> We need not waste any time upon those who talk about such
+and such a form of government being good because “it works.” The use of
+such language connotes that the user of it is fatigued by the effort of
+thought. For what is “working,” <i>i.e.</i> successful action, in any sphere?
+The attainment of certain ends in that sphere. What are those ends in a
+State? If material well-being, then there is an end to talk of
+patriotism, the nation, public opinion and the rest of it which, as we
+all very well know, men always have regarded and always will regard as
+the supreme matters of public interest. If the end is not material
+well-being, but a sense of political freedom and of the power of the
+citizen to react upon the State, then to say that an institution “works”
+though apparently not democratic, is simply to say that under such and
+such conditions that institution achieves the ends of democracy most
+nearly. In other words, to contrast the good “working” of an institution
+superficially undemocratic with democratic theory is meaningless. The
+institution “works” in proportion as it satisfies that political sense
+which perfect democracy would, were it attainable, completely satisfy.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="II" id="II"></a>II<br /><br />
+<small>ROUSSEAU</small></h2>
+
+<p><span class="sc">In</span> order to appreciate what Rousseau meant to the revolutionary
+movement, it is necessary to consider the effect of style upon men.</p>
+
+<p>Men are influenced by the word. Spoken or written, the <i>word</i> is the
+organ of persuasion and, therefore, of moral government.</p>
+
+<p>Now, degraded as that term has become in our time, there is no proper
+term to express the exact use of words save the term “style.”<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>What words we use, and in what order we put them, is the whole matter of
+style; and a man desiring to influence his fellow men has therefore not
+one, but two co-related instruments at his disposal. He cannot use one
+without the other. The weakness of the one will ruin the other. These
+two instruments are his idea and his style.</p>
+
+<p>However powerful, native, sympathetic to his hearers’ mood or cogently
+provable by reference to new things may be a man’s idea, he cannot
+persuade his fellow men to it if he have not words that express it. And
+he will persuade them more and more in proportion as his words are well
+chosen and in the right order, such order being determined by the genius
+of the language whence they are drawn.</p>
+
+<p>Whether the idea of which Rousseau made himself the exponent in his
+famous tract be true or false, need not further concern us in this
+little book. We all know that the difficult attempt to realise political
+freedom has attracted various communities of men at various times and
+repelled others. What English readers rarely hear is that the triumph of
+Rousseau depended not only on the first element in persuasion, which is
+vision, but also upon the second of the two co-related instruments by
+which a man may influence his fellows&mdash;to wit, style. It was his choice
+of French words and the order in which he arranged them, that gave him
+his enormous ascendancy over the generation which was young when he was
+old.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>I have alluded to his famous tract, the <i>Contrat Social</i>, and here a
+second point concerning it may be introduced. This book which gave a
+text for the Revolution, the document to which its political theory
+could refer, was by no means (as foreign observers have sometimes
+imagined) the whole body of writing for which Rousseau was responsible.
+To imagine that is to make the very common error of confusing a man with
+his books.</p>
+
+<p>Rousseau wrote on many things: his character was of an exalted, nervous
+and diseased sort. Its excessive sensibility degenerated with advancing
+years into something not distinguishable from mania. He wrote upon
+education, and the glory of his style carried conviction both where he
+was right and where the short experience of a hundred years has proved
+him to have been wholly wrong. He wrote upon love, and half the lessons
+to be drawn from his writing will be condemned by the sane. He wrote
+upon botany at vast length; he wrote also upon music&mdash;with what success
+in either department I am incompetent to determine. He wrote upon human
+inequality: and though the sentences were beautiful and the sentiment
+just, the analysis was very insufficient and the historical conception
+bad. He wrote upon a project for perpetual peace, which was rubbish; and
+he wrote upon the government of Poland an essay which was a perfect
+masterpiece.</p>
+
+<p>But when a great writer writes, each of his great writings has a life of
+its own, and it was<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span> not any of these other writings of Rousseau, on
+love or botany, which were the text of the Revolution. The text of the
+Revolution was his <i>Contrat Social</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Now it is not too much to say that never in the history of political
+theory has a political theory been put forward so lucidly, so
+convincingly, so tersely or so accurately as in this short and wonderful
+book. The modern publisher in this country would be ashamed to print it:
+not for its views (which would now seem commonplace), nor for its
+excellence, which would ensure it a failure, but for its brevity. It is
+as short as a gospel, and would cover but a hundred pages of one of our
+serious reviews. A modern publisher in this city would not know what
+price to set upon such a work, and the modern reader in this country
+would be puzzled to understand how a great thing could be got within so
+narrow a compass. A debate in Parliament or the libretto of a long
+pantomime is of greater volume.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, if it be closely read the <i>Contrat Social</i> will be
+discovered to say all that can be said of the moral basis of democracy.
+Our ignorance of the historical basis of the State is presumed in the
+very opening lines of it. The logical priority of the family to the
+State is the next statement. The ridiculous and shameful argument that
+strength is the basis of authority&mdash;which has never had standing save
+among the uninstructed or the superficial&mdash;is contemptuously dismissed
+in a very simple proof which forms the third chapter,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span> and that chapter
+is not a page of a book in length. It is with the fifth chapter that the
+powerful argument begins, and the logical precedence of <i>human
+association</i> to any particular form of government is the foundation
+stone of that analysis. It is this indeed which gives its title to the
+book: the moral authority of men in community arises from <i>conscious
+association</i>; or, as an exact phraseology would have it, a “social
+contract.” All the business of democracy as based upon the only moral
+authority in a State follows from this first principle, and is developed
+in Rousseau’s extraordinary achievement which, much more than any other
+writing not religious, has affected the destiny of mankind.</p>
+
+<p>It is indeed astonishing to one who is well acquainted not only with the
+matter, but with the manner of the <i>Contrat Social</i>, to remark what
+criticisms have been passed upon it by those who either have not read
+the work or, having read it, did so with an imperfect knowledge of the
+meaning of French words. The two great counter arguments, the one
+theoretic the other practical, which democracy has to meet, stand
+luminously exposed in these pages, though in so short a treatise the
+author might have been excused from considering them. The theoretical
+argument against democracy is, of course, that man being prone to evil,
+something external to him and indifferent to his passions must be put up
+to govern him; the people will corrupt themselves, but a despot or an
+oligarchy, when it has satisfied its corrupt desires, still has a wide
+margin<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span> over which it may rule well because it is indifferent. You
+cannot bribe the despot or the oligarch beyond the limit of his desires,
+but a whole people can follow its own corrupt desires to the full, and
+they will infect all government.</p>
+
+<p>The full practice of democracy, therefore, says Rousseau, is better
+suited to angels than to men.</p>
+
+<p>As to the practical argument that men are not sufficiently conscious of
+the State to practise democracy, save in small communities, that plea
+also is recognised and stated better than any one else has stated it.
+For there is not in this book an apology for democracy as a method of
+government, but a statement of why and how democracy is right.</p>
+
+<p>The silly confusion which regards a representative method as essentially
+democratic has never been more contemptuously dealt with, nor more
+thoroughly, than in the few words in which the <i>Contrat Social</i>
+dismisses it for ever; though it was left to our own time to discover,
+in the school of unpleasant experience, how right was Rousseau in this
+particular condemnation.</p>
+
+<p>Exiguous as are the limits within which the great writer has finally
+decided the theory of democracy, he finds space for side issues which
+nowhere else but in this book had been orderly considered, and which,
+when once one has heard them mentioned, one sees to be of the most
+excellent wisdom: that the fundamental laws, or original and particular
+bonds, of a new democracy must come from a<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span> source external to itself;
+that to the nature of the people for whom one is legislating, however
+democratic the form of the State, we must conform the particulars of
+law; that a democracy cannot live without “tribunes”; that no utterly
+inflexible law can be permitted in the State&mdash;and hence the necessity
+for dictatorship in exceptional times; that no code can foresee future
+details&mdash;and so forth.</p>
+
+<p>It would be a legitimate and entertaining task to challenge any man who
+had not read the <i>Contrat Social</i> (and this would include most academic
+writers upon the treatise) to challenge any such one, I say, to put down
+an argument against democratic theory which could not be found within
+those few pages, or to suggest a limitation of it which Rousseau had not
+touched on.</p>
+
+<p>If proof were needed of what particular merits this pamphlet displayed,
+it would be sufficient to point out that in a time when the problem
+represented by religion was least comprehended, when the practice of
+religion was at its lowest, and when the meaning, almost, of religion
+had left men’s minds, Rousseau was capable of writing his final chapter.</p>
+
+<p>That the great religious revival of the nineteenth century should have
+proved Rousseau’s view of religion in the State to be insufficient is in
+no way remarkable, for when Rousseau wrote, that revival was undreamt
+of; what is remarkable is that he should have allowed as he did for the
+religious sentiment, and above all, that he should have seen how<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span>
+impossible it is for a selection of Christian dogma to be accepted as a
+civic religion.</p>
+
+<p>It is further amazing that at such a time a man could be found who
+should appreciate that for the State, to have unity, it must possess a
+religion, and Rousseau’s attempt to define that minimum or substratum of
+religion without which unity could not exist in the State unfortunately
+became the commonplace of the politicians, and particularly of the
+English politicians who succeeded him. Who might not think, for
+instance, that he was reading&mdash;though better expressed, of course, than
+a politician could put it&mdash;some “Liberal” politician at Westminster, if
+he were to come on such phrases as these with regard to what should be
+taught in the schools of the country?</p>
+
+<p>“The doctrines taught by the State should be simple, few in number,
+expressed with precision and without explanation or commentary. The
+existence of a powerful God, beneficent, providential and good; the
+future life; the happiness of the good and the punishment of evil; the
+sanctity of the agreements which bind society together and of laws;
+while as for negative doctrines, one is sufficient, and that one is the
+wickedness of intolerance.”</p>
+
+<p>Rousseau’s hundred pages are the direct source of the theory of the
+modern State; their lucidity and unmatched economy of diction; their
+rigid analysis, their epigrammatic judgment and wisdom&mdash;these are the
+reservoirs from whence modern democracy has flowed; what are now proved
+to be the errors of democracy are errors against which<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span> the <i>Contrat
+Social</i> warned men; the moral apology of democracy is the moral apology
+written by Rousseau; and if in this one point of religion he struck a
+more confused and a less determined note than in the rest, it must be
+remembered that in his time no other man understood what part religion
+played in human affairs; for in his days the few who studied religion
+and observed it could not connect it in any way with the political
+nature of man, and of those who counted in the intellect of Europe, by
+far the greater number thought political problems better solved if
+religion (which they had lost) were treated as negligible. They were
+wrong&mdash;and Rousseau, in his generalities upon the soul, was
+insufficient; both were beneath the height of a final theory of man, but
+Rousseau came much nearer to comprehension, even in this point of
+religion, than did any of his contemporaries.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="III" id="III"></a>III<br /><br />
+<small>THE CHARACTERS OF THE REVOLUTION</small></h2>
+
+
+<h3><a name="III_1" id="III_1"></a>KING LOUIS XVI</h3>
+
+<p><span class="sc">As</span> might be expected, the character of King Louis XVI has suffered more
+distortion at the hands of historians than has any other of the
+revolutionary figures; and this because he combined with that personal
+character of his a certain office to<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span> which were traditionally attached
+certain points of view and methods of action which the historian takes
+for granted when he deals with the character of the man. As any one
+thinking of a judge of some standing upon the English bench cannot but
+believe that he is possessed of some learning or some gravity, etc.; as
+any one hearing of a famous soldier cannot but believe that he has
+certain qualities associated with the business of soldiering, so
+historians tend to confuse the personality and character of Louis XVI
+with that of his office; they either by contrast exaggerate his unkingly
+defects or by sympathy exaggerate his kingly opposition to reform.</p>
+
+<p>The student will do well to avoid this error and its source, and to
+think of Louis as of a man who had been casually introduced, almost
+without preparation, into the office which he held. In other words, the
+student will do well, in his reading of the Revolution, to consider
+Louis XVI simply as a man, and his character as a private character. For
+this last of the long, unbroken line of Capetians possessed a character
+essentially individual. It was of a type which, no matter what accidents
+of fortune might have fallen upon its possessor, would have remained the
+same. Nor was ever a man possessed of high office whom high office had
+less moulded.</p>
+
+<p>Men thus impervious to their environment are commonly so from two
+causes: either from an intense and vivid personal initiative<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span> which may
+border upon madness, or from something thick and heavy in their moral
+accoutrement which defends against external action the inner personal
+temperament. The latter was the case with Louis.</p>
+
+<p>He was very slow of thought, and very slow of decision. His physical
+movements were slow. The movement of his eyes was notably slow. He had a
+way of falling asleep under the effort of fatigue at the most
+incongruous moments. The things that amused him were of the largest and
+most superficial kind. Horse-play, now and then a little touched with
+eccentricity, and very plain but unexpected jokes. One may express him
+from one aspect by saying that he was one of those men whom you could
+never by any chance have hoped to convince of anything. The few things
+which he accepted he accepted quite simply, and the process of reasoning
+in the mouth of any who approached him was always too rapid for him to
+follow. But it must not be imagined on this account that the moral
+integument so described was wrapped about a void. On the contrary, it
+enclosed a very definite character. Louis possessed a number of intimate
+convictions upon which he was not to be shaken. He was profoundly
+convinced of the existence and value of a certain corporate tradition in
+the organism which he ruled: the French nation. He was national. In this
+he differed from many a pedant, many a courtier, many an ecclesiastic,
+and many a woman about him, especially his wife.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He was, again, possessed of all the elements of the Catholic faith.</p>
+
+<p>It was, indeed, a singular thing for a man of his position at such a
+time to hold intimately to religion, but Louis held to it. He confessed,
+he communicated, he attended mass, he performed his ordinary
+devotions&mdash;not by way of tradition or political duty, or State function,
+to which religious performance was now reduced in the vast majority of
+his wealthy contemporaries, but as an individual for whom these things
+had a personal value. Had he, with precisely the same interior spirit,
+woken in his bed some morning to find himself a country squire, and to
+discover that all his past kingship had been a dream of the night, he
+would have continued the practice of his religion as before.</p>
+
+<p>Now this is a sufficiently remarkable point, for the country squire, the
+noble, the lawyer, the university professor of the generation
+immediately preceding the Revolution had, as a rule, no conception of
+the Catholic Church. With them the faith was dead, save in the case of a
+very few who made it, if one may say so without disrespect, a mania, and
+in their exaggerations were themselves the proofs of the depth of decay
+into which the Church of Gaul had fallen.</p>
+
+<p>Louis XVI was possessed, then, of religion: it appeared in many of his
+acts, in his hesitation to appoint not a few of the many atheist bishops
+of the time, in his real agony of responsibility upon the Civil
+Constitution of<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span> the clergy, and in nothing more than the peculiar
+sobriety and solid ritual whereby he prepared for a tragic, sudden, and
+ignominious death.</p>
+
+<p>It is next to be observed that though he was a man not yet in middle
+age, and though he was quite devoid of ardour in any form, he had from
+the first matured a great basis of courage. It is well to admit that
+this quality in him was connected with those slow processes of thought
+and action which hampered him, but it is not to be explained by them. No
+man yet has become brave through mere stupidity.</p>
+
+<p>It was not only the accidents of the Revolution that proved this quality
+in him: his physical habits proved it long before. He was a resolute and
+capable rider of the horse: an aptitude in that exercise is impossible
+to the coward. Again, in those by-products of courage which are
+apparent, even where no physical danger threatens, he was conspicuous;
+he had no hesitation in facing a number of men, and he had aptitude in a
+mechanical trade&mdash;a business by no means unconnected with virility.</p>
+
+<p>Now in mentioning his virility, it is of prime importance for the
+student to remember, though the matter can be touched upon but lightly,
+that Louis, in this department of physical life, suffered from a
+mechanical impediment which gravely distorted the first years of his
+marriage, which undoubtedly wounded his self-respect, and which was
+perhaps the only thing that caused him permanent<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span> anxiety. He was cured
+by medical aid in the summer of the year 1777, but he was already three
+years a king and seven years a husband before that relief came to him.
+The tragedy affected his whole life, and, I repeat, must never be
+forgotten when one considers either him or Marie Antoinette in their
+intimate character, and in their effect as actors in the great drama.</p>
+
+<p>For the rest, the character of Louis betrayed certain ineptitudes (the
+word ineptitude is far more accurate in this connection than the word
+weakness), which ineptitudes were peculiarly fatal for the military
+office which he held and for the belligerent crisis which he had to
+meet.</p>
+
+<p>Few men are possessed of the eye, the subtle sympathy, the very rapid
+power of decision, and the comprehension of human contrasts and
+differences which build up the apt leader of an armed force great or
+small. Most men are mediocre in the combination of these qualities. But
+Louis was quite exceptionally hopeless where they were concerned. He
+could never have seen the simplest position nor have appreciated the
+military aspects of any character or of any body of men. He could ride,
+but he could not ride at the head of a column. He was not merely bad at
+this trade, he was nul. Drafted as a private into a conscript army, he
+would never have been entrusted with the duties of a corporal. He would
+have been impossible as a sergeant; and, possessed of commissioned rank,
+ridicule would have compelled him to take his discharge.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>This lack did not only, or chiefly, betray itself in his inability to
+meet personally the armed crisis of a revolution; it was not only, or
+chiefly, apparent in his complete breakdown during the assault upon the
+palace on the 10th of August: it was also, and much more, the disastrous
+cause of his inability to oversee, or even to choose, military advisers.</p>
+
+<p>Those who propose in the early part of the Revolution to check the mob
+in Paris, are excellent commanders: but Louis does not know it. Those
+who succeed each other at the Ministry of War, or at the head of the
+armies during the active part of the revolution are various in the
+extreme: but they all seem one to him. Between a fop like Narbonne and a
+subtle, trained cavalry man like Dumouriez, Louis made no distinction.
+The military qualities of La Fayette (which were not to be despised)
+meant no more to him than does music, good or bad, to a deaf man. From
+the beginning to the end of the movement, the whole of the military
+problem escaped him.</p>
+
+<p>Another hole in his character, which was of prime importance at such a
+time, was his inability to grasp in a clear vision any general social
+problem. Maps he could well comprehend, and he could well retain
+statistics; but the landscape, as it were, of the Revolution his
+protuberant and lethargic eyes completely missed. He was quite unable to
+see where lay danger and where support, in what large masses such and
+such forces were<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span> grouped, and the directions in which they were
+advancing, or upon which they must retreat. In this matter he was, as
+will be seen in a moment, the very opposite of Mirabeau, and it was on
+account of this weakness, or rather this form of nullity, that all
+Mirabeau’s vision was wasted upon Louis.</p>
+
+<p>Finally, he had no working comprehension of Europe. He did not even
+exaggerate the powers of the allies in the later phases of the
+Revolution when they were marching upon France. He did not either
+under-estimate or over-estimate the policy and naval force of Great
+Britain, the military resources of his own subjects, the probable
+sympathies of the Netherlands (anti-Austrian but Catholic), the decay of
+Spain, the division and impotence of the Italian Peninsula. Louis saw
+nothing of all these things.</p>
+
+<p>One may conclude the picture (for the purposes of such a short study as
+this) by saying that only one coincidence could have led him through the
+labyrinth of the time with success. That coincidence would have been the
+presence at his side of a friend fully trusted from childhood, loved, as
+religious as himself, and yet possessing precisely those qualities which
+he himself lacked. Had Louis found to hand such a lieutenant, the
+qualities I have mentioned would have been a sort of keel and ballast
+which would have secured the monarchy, for he was not weak, he was not
+impulsive, he was not even foolish: he was only wretchedly alone in his
+incapacities. Certainly such a nature could trust<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span> and rely upon no one
+who was not of this intimate kind, and he possessed no such intimate,
+let alone an intimate who could command the qualities I have suggested.</p>
+
+<p>Being what he was, his character is among the half-dozen which
+determined the Revolution to take the course which it did.</p>
+
+
+<h3><a name="III_2" id="III_2"></a>THE QUEEN</h3>
+
+<p>Marie Antoinette presents to history a character which it is of the
+highest interest to regard as a whole. It is the business of her
+biographers to consider that character as a whole; but in her connection
+with the Revolution there is but one aspect of it which is of
+importance, and that is the attitude which such a character was bound to
+take towards the French nation in the midst of which the Queen found
+herself.</p>
+
+<p>It is the solution of the whole problem which the Queen’s action sets
+before us to apprehend the gulf that separated her not only from the
+French temperament, but from a comprehension of all French society. Had
+she been a woman lacking in energy or in decision, this alien character
+in her would have been a small matter, and her ignorance of the French
+in every form of their activity, or rather her inability to comprehend
+them, would have been but a private failing productive only of certain
+local and immediate consequences, and not in any way determining the
+great lines of the revolutionary movement.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>As it was, her energy was not only abundant but steadfast; it grew more
+secure in its action as it increased with her years, and the initiative
+which gave that energy its course never vacillated, but was always
+direct. She knew her own mind, and she attempted, often with a partial
+success, to realise her convictions. There was no character in touch
+with the Executive during the first years of the Revolution comparable
+to hers for fixity of purpose and definition of view.</p>
+
+<p>It was due to this energy and singleness of aim that her
+misunderstanding of the material with which she had to deal was of such
+fatal importance.</p>
+
+<p>It was she who chose, before the outbreak of the Revolution, the
+succession of those ministers both Liberal and Reactionary, whose unwise
+plans upon either side precipitated violence. It was she who called and
+then revoked, and later recalled to office the wealthy and
+over-estimated Necker; she who substituted for him, and then so
+inopportunely threw over Calonne, the most national of the precursors of
+the Revolution, and ever after her most bitter enemy; it was she who
+advised the more particularly irritating details of resistance after the
+meeting of the first revolutionary Parliament; it was she who presided
+over (and helped to warp) the plans for the flight of the royal family;
+it was she who, after this flight had failed, framed a definite scheme
+for the coercion of the French people by the Governments of Europe; it
+was she who betrayed to foreign chanceries<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span> the French plan of campaign
+when war had become inevitable; finally, it was she who inspired the
+declaration of Brunswick which accompanied the invasion of French
+territory, and she was in particular the author of the famous threat
+therein contained to give over Paris to military execution, and to hold
+all the popular authorities responsible with their lives for the
+restoration of the pre-revolutionary state of affairs.</p>
+
+<p>As research proceeds, the capital effect of this woman’s continual and
+decided interference will be more and more apparent to historians.</p>
+
+<p>Now Marie Antoinette’s conception of mankind in general was the
+conception that you will find prevalent in such societies as that
+domestic and warm centre which had nourished her childhood. The romantic
+affection of a few equals, the personal loyalty of a handful of personal
+servants, the vague histrionic content which permeates the poor at the
+sight of great equipages and rich accoutrements, the cheers of a crowd
+when such symbols accompanying monarchy are displayed in the
+streets&mdash;all these were for Marie Antoinette the fundamental political
+feelings of mankind. An absence of them she regarded with bewilderment,
+an active opposition to them she hated as something at once
+incomprehensible and positively evil.</p>
+
+<p>There was in all this illusion, of course, a great element of what the
+English call middle class, and the French bourgeois. To be quite
+ignorant of what servitors will say of their masters behind their backs;
+not to appreciate<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span> that heroic devotion is the faculty of a few; never
+to have imagined the discontents of men in general, and the creative
+desire for self-expression which inspires men when they act politically;
+not to know that men as a whole (and particularly the French people) are
+not deceived by the accidents of wealth, nor attach any real inferiority
+to poverty; to despise the common will of numbers or to doubt its
+existence; to see society established in a hierarchy not of office but
+of leisure: all this may seem to the democrat a very unnatural and
+despicable mood. But it was not despicable, still less unnatural; in the
+case of Marie Antoinette: it was the only experience and the only
+conception of society which had ever been given her. She had always
+believed, when she gazed upon a mass of the populace, that the
+difference between the crowd and herself was a moral reality. The
+contrast in external habits between the wealthy, the middle class, and
+the poor&mdash;a contrast ultimately produced by differences in the
+opportunity and leisure which wealth affords&mdash;she thought to be
+fundamental. Just as children and certain domestic pet animals regard
+such economic accidents in society as something real which
+differentiates men, so did she;&mdash;but she happened to nourish this
+illusion in the midst of a people, and within a day’s walk of a capital,
+where the misconception had less hold than in any other district of
+Europe.</p>
+
+<p>Of the traits peculiar to the French she<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span> knew nothing, or, to put it
+more strongly, she could not believe that they really existed.</p>
+
+<p>The extremes of cruelty into which this people could fall were
+inconceivable to her, as were also the extremes of courage to which they
+can rise under the same excitements as arouse them to an excess of
+hatred. But that character in the French which she most utterly failed
+to foresee or to comprehend, was their power of <i>corporate
+organisation</i>.</p>
+
+<p>That a multitude could instruct and order themselves for a common
+purpose, rapidly acquire and nominate the officers who should bring that
+purpose to fruition, and in general pass in one moment from a mere
+multitude to an incipient army&mdash;that was a faculty which the French had
+and have to a peculiar degree, and which she (like so many of our own
+contemporaries, and especially those of German blood) could not believe
+to be real. This faculty in the French, when it took action and was
+apparent in the physical struggles of the Revolution, seemed to her, to
+the very end, a sort of nightmare; something which, by all the laws of
+reality, <i>ought not</i> to be happening, but somehow or other <i>was</i>
+happening in a manner evilly miraculous. It was her ignorance upon this
+main point of all that caused her to rely so continually upon the use of
+the regular forces, and of those forces in insufficient numbers. She
+could not but believe that a few trained soldiery were necessarily the
+masters of great civilian bodies; their uniforms were a powerful
+argument with her, and mere civilian bodies,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span> however numerous, were
+always, in her conception, a dust of disparate and inchoate humanity.
+She believed there was nothing to attack or resist in popular numbers
+but the opinion, the fear, or the cupidity of the individual. In this
+error of judgment concerning the French people she was not peculiar: it
+is an error repeated over and over again by foreigners, and even by some
+native commentators when they seek to account for some national movement
+of the Gauls. The unlearning of it is the first lesson which those who
+would either administrate or resist the French should learn.</p>
+
+<p>In the matter of religion (which the reader may see in these pages to be
+of such moment in the revolutionary story), the queen was originally far
+more indifferent than her husband, though she observed a certain measure
+of personal practice. It was not until her heavy misfortunes came upon
+her that any degree of personal devotion appeared in her daily life,
+though it must be admitted that, by a sort of premonition of disaster,
+she turned to religion in the months immediately preceding the outbreak
+of the reform.</p>
+
+<p>It remains to describe the personal effect she had upon those who were
+in her immediate presence. Most of the French aristocracy she repelled.
+The same misfortune which made her unable to understand the French
+temperament as a whole divorced her from that particular corner of it
+which took the shape of French aristocratic tradition. She did not
+understand its stiffness,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span> its exactitude, its brilliancy or its
+hardness: and she heartily disliked all four.</p>
+
+<p>On this account she produced on the great families of her court, and
+especially upon the women of them, an effect of vulgarity. Had she
+survived, and had her misfortunes not been of so tragic an intensity,
+the legend she would have left in French society would certainly have
+been one of off-handed carelessness, self-indulgence, and lack of
+dignity which have for the French of that rank the savour that a loud
+voice, a bad accent, an insufficient usage in the rules of daily
+conduct, leave upon what is left of a corresponding rank in England
+to-day.</p>
+
+<p>She was, on the other hand, easily deceived by the flattery of place
+seekers, and the great power which she wielded in politics just before
+the Revolution broke out made her, as it were, a sort of <i>butt</i> of the
+politicians.</p>
+
+<p>They haunted her presence, they depended upon her patronage, and, at the
+same time, they secretly ridiculed her. Her carriage, which was designed
+to impress onlookers and did have that effect upon most foreigners,
+seemed to most of the French observers (of a rank which permitted them
+to approach her familiarly) somewhat theatrical and sometimes actually
+absurd. The earnestness which she displayed in several lines of conduct,
+and notably in her determined animosity to certain characters (as that
+of La Fayette, for instance), was of an open and violent sort which
+seemed to them merely brutal and unintelligent; her luxury, moreover,
+was noticed by the refined<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span> world of Versailles to be hardly ever of her
+own choosing, but nearly always practised in imitation of others.</p>
+
+<p>In connection with that trait of luxury, the reader must appreciate at
+the outset that it was grievously exaggerated by her contemporaries, and
+has been still more exaggerated by posterity. She was not a very
+frivolous, still less a dissipated, woman. She was woefully loose in
+tongue, but she was certainly virtuous.</p>
+
+<p>She gambled, but as the times went, and the supposed unlimited fortune
+of the Crown, her gambling was not often excessive; her expenditure upon
+jewellery and dress would be thought most moderate to-day in the case of
+any lady of our wealthier families. On the other hand, her whims were
+continual and as continually changing, especially in the earlier part of
+her life.</p>
+
+<p>Since that surrounding world of the Court which she misunderstood and
+which had no sympathy with her was ready to find some handle against
+her, that handle of dissipation was the easiest for them to seize; but
+the accusation was not a just one.</p>
+
+<p>Had fortune made her the wife of a poor man in a lower class of society,
+Marie Antoinette would have been a capable housewife: her abundant
+energy would have found a proper channel, and she was in no way by
+nature extravagant.</p>
+
+<p>She had a few very passionate and somewhat too sentimental friendships,
+some of which were returned, others of which their objects<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span> exploited to
+their own advantage. The two most famous were her friendship for the
+Princess de Lamballe and for Madame de Polignac. These moved her not
+infrequently to unwise acts of patronage which were immediately seized
+by the popular voice and turned against her. They were among the few
+weaknesses apparent in her general temper. They were certainly ill
+balanced and ill judged.</p>
+
+<p>She indulged also in a number of small and unimportant flirtations which
+might almost be called the routine of her rank and world; she had but
+one great affection in her life for the other sex, and it was most
+ardently returned. Its object was a Swedish noble of her own age, the
+very opposite of the French in his temper, romantically chivalrous,
+unpractical in the extreme, gentle, intensely reserved; his name Count
+Axel de Fersen. The affair remained pure, but she loved him with her
+whole heart, and in the last months of her tragedy this emotion must be
+regarded as the chief concern of her soul. They saw each other but very
+rarely, often they were separated for years; it was this, perhaps, which
+lent both glamour and fidelity to the strange romance.</p>
+
+
+<h3><a name="III_3" id="III_3"></a>MIRABEAU</h3>
+
+<p>Mirabeau, the chief of the “practical” men of the Revolution (as the
+English language would render the most salient point in their political
+attitude), needs a very particular<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span> examination. His influence upon the
+early part of the Revolution was so considerable, the effect of his
+death was so determinant and final, the speculation as to what <i>might</i>
+have happened had he survived is so fruitful, so entertaining, and so
+common, and the positive effect of his attitude upon the development of
+the Revolution after his death was so wide, that to misunderstand
+Mirabeau is in a large measure to misunderstand the whole movement; and
+Mirabeau has unfortunately been ill or superficially understood by many
+among now three generations of historians; for a comprehension of this
+character is not a matter for research nor for accumulated historic
+detail, but rather a task for sympathy.</p>
+
+<p>Mirabeau was essentially an artist, with the powers and the frailties
+which we properly associate with that term: that is, strong emotion
+appealed to him both internally and externally. He loved to enjoy it
+himself, he loved to create it in others. He studied, therefore, and was
+a master of, the material by which such emotion may be created; he
+himself yielded to strong emotion and sought it where it might be found.
+It is foolish alike to belittle and to exaggerate this type of
+temperament. Upon it or upon its admixture with other qualities is based
+the music, the plastic art, and in a large measure the permanent
+literature of the world. This aptitude for the enjoyment and for the
+creation in others of emotion clothes intellectual work in a manner
+which makes it permanent. This<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span> is what we mean when we say that <i>style</i>
+is necessary to a book; that a great civilisation may partly be judged
+by its architecture; that, as Plato says, music may be moral or immoral,
+and so forth. The artist, though he is not at the root of human affairs,
+is a necessary and proper ally in their development.</p>
+
+<p>When I say that Mirabeau was an artist I mean that wherever his energies
+might have found play he would there have desired to enjoy and to create
+enjoyment through some definite medium. This medium was in part
+literary, but much more largely oral expression. To be a <i>tribune</i>, that
+is the voice of great numbers, to persuade, nay, to please by his very
+accents and the very rhythm of his sentences, these things occupied the
+man; but he also brought into his art that without which no great art
+can exist: mere intellect.</p>
+
+<p>He believed in the main principles at least which underlay the
+revolutionary movement, he understood them and he was prepared to
+propagate them; but his power over men was not due to this conviction:
+his power over men was wholly that of the artist, and had he by some
+accident been engaged in maintaining the attack against democracy, he
+would have been nearly as famous as he became under the title of its
+defender. We must then always consider Mirabeau as an orator, though an
+orator endowed with a fine and clear intelligence and with no small
+measure of reasoned faith.</p>
+
+<p>Much else remains to be said of him.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He was a gentleman; that is, he both enjoyed and suffered the
+consequences which attach to hereditary wealth and to the atmosphere
+that surrounds its expenditure. On this account, he being personally
+insufficiently provided with wealth, he was for ever in debt, and
+regarded the sums necessary to his station in life and to his large
+opportunities as things due to him, so to speak, from society. We are
+right when we say that he took bribes, but wrong if we imagine that
+those bribes bound him as they would bind a man meaner in character or
+less lucky in his birth. He stooped as gentlemen will to all manner of
+low intrigues, to obtain “the necessary and the wherewith”; that is,
+money for his <i>rôle</i>. But there was a driving power behind him, bound up
+with his whole character, which made it impossible for any such sums to
+control his diction or to make of such a man a mere advocate. He was
+never that dirtiest of political phenomena, the “party man.” He would
+never have been, had he been born a hundred years later and thrust into
+the nastiness of modern parliamentary life, “a parliamentary hand.”</p>
+
+<p>Mirabeau had behind him a certain personal history which we must read in
+connection with his temperament.</p>
+
+<p>He had travelled widely, he knew Englishmen and Germans of the wealthier
+classes well. The populace he knew ill even in his own country; abroad
+he knew it not at all. He had suffered from his father’s dislike of him,
+from the consequence of his own unbridled<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span> passions, also not a little
+from mere accidental misfortune. Capable of prolonged and faithful
+attachment to some woman, the opportunity for that attachment had never
+been afforded him until the last few months before his death. Capable of
+paying loyal and industrious service to some political system, no
+political system had chosen him for its servant. It is a fruitful matter
+of speculation to consider what he might have done for the French
+monarchy had Fate put him early at Court and given him some voice in the
+affairs of the French Executive before the Revolution broke out. As it
+was, the Revolution provided him with his opportunity merely because it
+broke down old barriers and conventions and was destructive of the
+framework of the State in which he lived. He was compelled to enter the
+Revolution as something of a destroyer, for by no other avenue could he
+be given his chance; but by nature he detested destruction. I mean
+(since this phrase is somewhat vague) he detested that spirit which will
+disendow a nation of certain permanent institutions serving definite
+ends, without a clear scheme of how those institutions should be
+replaced by others to serve similar ends. It was on this account that he
+was most genuinely and sincerely a defender of the monarchy: a permanent
+institution serving the definite ends of national unity and the
+repression of tendencies to oligarchy in the State.</p>
+
+<p>Mirabeau had none of the revolutionary Vision. In mind he was
+prematurely aged, for his mind had worked very rapidly over<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span> a very
+varied field of experience. The pure doctrine of democracy which was a
+religion to many of his contemporaries, with all the consequences of a
+religion, he had never thought of accepting. But certain consequences of
+the proposed reforms strongly appealed to him. He loved to be rid of
+meaningless and dead barriers, privileges which no longer corresponded
+to real social differences, old traditions in the management of trade
+which no longer corresponded to the economic circumstances of his time,
+and (this is the pivotal point) the fossils of an old religious creed
+which, like nearly all of his rank, he simply took for granted to be
+dead: for Mirabeau was utterly divorced from the Catholic Church.</p>
+
+<p>Much has been said and will be said in these pages concerning the
+religious quarrel which, though men hardly knew it at the time, cut
+right across the revolutionary effort, and was destined to form the
+lasting line of cleavage in French life. There will be repeated again
+and again what has already been written, that a reconciliation between
+the Catholic Church and the reconstruction of democracy was, though men
+did not know it, the chief temporal business of the time, and the reader
+of these pages will be made well acquainted in them with the degradation
+to which religion had fallen among the cultivated of that generation.
+But in the case of Mirabeau this absence of religion must be
+particularly insisted upon. It would no more have occurred to Mirabeau<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span>
+that the Catholic Faith had a future than it could occur to (let us say)
+an English politician of thirty years ago that the Irish might become a
+wealthy community or that an English Government might within his own
+lifetime find itself embarrassed for money. I use this parallel for the
+sake of strengthening my contention, but it is indeed a weak parallel.
+No contemporary parallel in our strange and rapidly changing times
+corresponds to the fixed certitude which permeated the whole of the end
+of the eighteenth century that the Catholic Faith was dead. Mirabeau had
+perhaps never engaged in his life in intimate conversation a single man
+who took the Catholic sacraments seriously, or suffered a moment’s
+anxiety upon the tenets of the creed.</p>
+
+<p>He knew, indeed, that certain women and a much smaller number of
+insignificant men wrapped themselves up in old practices of an odd,
+superstitious kind; he knew that great, dull areas of ignorant
+peasantry, in proportion to their poverty and isolation, repeated by
+rote the old formulae of the Faith. But of the Faith as a living thing
+he could have no conception.</p>
+
+<p>He saw on the one hand a clerical institution, economic in character,
+providing places and revenues for men of his own rank; he met those men
+and never discovered them to have any religion at all. He saw on the
+other hand a proposed society in which such a fossil, unjust and
+meaningless, must relinquish its grip upon those large revenues. But of
+the Faith<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span> as a social force, as a thing able to revive, he could have
+no conception. It would have seemed to him a mere folly to suggest that
+the future might contain the possibility of such a resurrection. The
+dissolution of the religious orders, which was largely his work, the
+civil constitution of the clergy which he presided over, were to him the
+most natural acts in the world. They were the mere sweeping away of a
+quantity of inorganic stuff which cumbered the modern State. He felt of
+them as we might feel of the purchase of waste spaces in our cities, of
+the confiscation of some bad landlords’ property in them. The Church
+served no kind of purpose, no one who counted believed in it, it was
+defended only by people who enjoyed large revenues from the survival of
+what had once been, but was now no longer, a living, social function.</p>
+
+<p>In everything of the Revolution which he understood Mirabeau was upon
+the side of caution. He was not oblivious to the conception of popular
+government, he was not even mistrustful of it, but he could not conceive
+of it save as acting through the established strength of the wealthier
+classes. Of military power he judged very largely through Prussian eyes.
+And in long and enthusiastic passages he described the Prussian army as
+invincible. Had he lived to see the military enthusiasm of the
+Republicans he would utterly have distrusted it. He favoured in his
+heart an aristocratic machinery of society&mdash;though not an aristocratic
+theory of the State; he was quite determined to preserve as a<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span> living
+but diminished national organ the traditional monarchy of France; he was
+curious upon a number of details which were present and close to his
+eyes: methods of voting, constitutional checks, commercial codes and the
+rest of it. The little equilibriums of diplomacy interested him also,
+and the watching of men immediately under his eye in the Parliament.</p>
+
+<p>It was in the Parliament that his whole activity lay, it was there that
+he began to guide the Revolution, it was his absence from the Parliament
+after his death that the Revolution most feels in the summer of 1791.</p>
+
+<p>This very brief sketch does not present Mirabeau to the reader. He can
+only be properly presented in his speeches and in the more rhetorical of
+his documents. It is probable as time proceeds that his reputation in
+this department will grow. His constitutional ideas, based as they were
+upon foreign institutions, and especially upon the English of that time,
+were not applicable to his own people and are now nearly forgotten: he
+was wrong upon English politics as he was wrong upon the German armies,
+but he had art over men and his personality endures and increases with
+time.</p>
+
+
+<h3><a name="III_4" id="III_4"></a>LA FAYETTE</h3>
+
+<p>The character of La Fayette has suffered chiefly from his own aloofness
+towards his contemporaries on the one hand, and from his rigid adherence
+to principle upon the other. Both these causes are clearly connected.
+The<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span> same quality in him which made him so tenacious of principle made
+him contemptuous of the run of men about him. Fundamentally, he was
+nearer the extreme Republicans than any other class, from the very fact
+of his possessing a clear political creed and a determination to follow
+it out to its logical consequence. But there was no chance of his
+comprehending the concrete side of the movement or the men engaged upon
+it, for his great wealth, inherited in very early life, had cut him off
+from experience. His moral fault was undoubtedly ambition. It was an
+ambition which worked in the void, as it were, and never measured itself
+with other men’s capacities or opportunities. He made no plans for
+advancement, not because he would have despised the use of intrigue in
+reason, but because he was incapable of working it. He was exceedingly
+attached to popularity, when it came he thought it his due; unpopularity
+in its turn seemed to him a proof of the vileness of those who despised
+him. He made himself too much the measure of his world.</p>
+
+<p>Undoubtedly a very great part in the moulding of his character proceeded
+from his experience in the United States of America. He was then at the
+most impressionable and formative period of human life, little more than
+a boy, or at least just entering early manhood. He had just married, he
+had just come into the administration of his vast fortune. At such a
+moment he took part in the victorious rebellion of the English colonies,
+and it may be imagined how powerful was the effect of<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span> this youthful
+vision upon the whole of the man’s future life; because there was no
+proletariat in the colonies, he never saw or comprehended the
+dispossessed classes of Paris&mdash;for that matter he never saw or
+comprehended the French peasantry upon his own lands; because a chance
+and volunteer soldiery had, under the peculiar conditions of the
+half-populated Atlantic seaboard in conjunction with the French fleet
+and with the aid of French money and arms, got the better of the small
+and heterogeneous forces of George III, he believed that a military
+nation like the French, in the midst of powerful enemies, could make
+something of an amateur civic force; because a certain type of ease in
+social relations was the ideal of many, perhaps of most, of those with
+whom he had served in America, he confused so simple and mundane an
+ideal with the fierce crusading blast and the sacred passion for
+equality which was stirring his own nation when his opportunity for
+leadership came.</p>
+
+<p>It may be said of La Fayette with justice that he never upon a single
+occasion did the right thing. It may also be said with justice that he
+never did politically any major thing for which his own conscience would
+later reproach him. It is noticeable that the Queen held him in
+particular odium. He had been a wealthy young noble about the Court, the
+friend of all her women friends, and his sympathy with the revolutionary
+movement at its inception therefore seemed to her nothing better than
+treason. There was also undoubtedly<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span> something in his manner which
+grievously repelled her; that it was self-sufficient we cannot doubt,
+and that it was often futile and therefore exasperating to women, events
+are sufficient to show. But Marie Antoinette’s violent personal
+antagonism towards La Fayette was not common, though several ardent
+spirits (Danton’s, for instance) shared it. The mass of those who came
+across La Fayette felt in connection with him a certain irritation or a
+certain contempt or a certain rather small and distant respect; he
+inspired no enthusiasms, and when he timidly attempted a rebellion
+against the new Government after the fall of the monarchy, no one would
+sacrifice himself or follow him.</p>
+
+<p>It may be affirmed of La Fayette that if he had not existed the
+Revolution would have pursued much the same course as it did, with this
+exception: that there would not have been formed a definitely middle
+class armed guard to provoke friction in Paris: the National Guard would
+have been more open to all ranks.</p>
+
+<p>In religion the man was anodyne, Catholic of course by baptism, but
+distinctly Protestant in morals and in general tone, in dogma (until the
+end of his life) freethinking, of course, like all his contemporaries.
+He was personally courageous but foolishly despised the duel. One
+anecdote out of many will help to fix his nature in the mind of the
+reader. Mirabeau, casting about as usual for aid in his indebtedness,
+sent urgently to him as to a fellow noble, a fellow politician and a
+fellow supporter of the Crown, begging<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span> a loan of £2000. La Fayette
+accorded him £1000.</p>
+
+
+<h3><a name="III_5" id="III_5"></a>DUMOURIEZ</h3>
+
+<p>Dumouriez presents a character particularly difficult for the modern
+Englishman to comprehend, so remote is it in circumstance and
+fundamentals from those of our time.</p>
+
+<p>Of good birth, but born in a generation when social differences had
+become a jest for intelligent and active men (and he was intelligent and
+active), courageous, with a good knowledge of his trade of soldiering,
+of rapid decision and excellent judgment where troops or <i>terrain</i> were
+concerned, he was all at sea in the comprehension of men, and he bore no
+loyalty to the State.</p>
+
+<p>It is this last feature which will particularly surprise the English
+reader, for it is the singular and permanent advantage of oligarchic
+communities such as the British that they retain under any stress and
+show throughout the whole commonwealth the sense of the State. To betray
+the State, to act against its interests, to be imperfectly conscious of
+its existence, are crimes or weaknesses unknown to the citizens of an
+oligarchy, and a citizen of this country cannot easily conceive of them
+to-day. In democracies and despotisms, on the other hand, to forget
+one’s duty to the State, to be almost oblivious of its corporate
+existence, is a common weakness. There is here a compensation, and by
+just so much as despotism and democracy permit rapid, effective and
+all-compelling action on<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span> the part of the State, by just so much as they
+permit sudden and sometimes miraculous enthusiasms which save or which
+confirm a State, by that also do they lack the quiet and persistent
+consciousness of the State which oligarchy fosters and determines.</p>
+
+<p>Dumouriez’ excellence as a general can only be appreciated by those who
+have looked closely into the constitution of the forces which he was to
+command and the adversaries with whom he had to deal. It is the prime
+quality of a great commander that his mind stands ready for any change
+in circumstances or in the material to his hand, and even when we have
+allowed for the element of luck which is so considerable in military
+affairs, we must not forget that Dumouriez saved without disaster the
+wretched and disorganised bands, inchoate and largely mutinous as to
+their old units, worthless and amateur as to their new, which had to
+meet, in and behind the Argonne, the model army of Prussia.</p>
+
+<p>We must not forget that his plan for the invasion of the Low Countries
+was a just and sensible one, nor with what skill, after the inevitable
+defeat and retreat of the spring of 1793, he saved his command intact.</p>
+
+<p>As a subordinate to an armed executive, to the Government of Napoleon,
+for instance, the man would have been priceless. Nay, had circumstances
+permitted him to retain supreme command of civil as of military power,
+he would have made no bad dictator. His mere technical skill was so
+considerable as to make the large sums paid him by the English<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span>
+Government seem a good bargain even at our distance of time, and his
+plans for the defence of England and for the attack on Napoleon are a
+proof of the value at which he was estimated.</p>
+
+<p>But Dumouriez was quite unable to act under the special circumstances in
+which he happened to be placed at the moment of his treason. A mere
+ambition had carried him from intrigue to intrigue among the
+politicians. He despised them as an active and capable soldier was
+compelled to despise them; he was too old to share any of their
+enthusiasms, even had his temperament permitted him to entertain any
+vision, political or religious. He certainly never felt the least moral
+bond attaching him to what was in his eyes the chance anarchy of the
+last six months of French Government under which he served, and if he is
+to be branded with the title of traitor, then we must brand with the
+same title all that multitude of varied men who escaped from the country
+in the Emigration, who left it in disgust, or even who remained in
+France, but despaired of French fortunes, in the turmoil of 1793.</p>
+
+<p>It is perhaps a worthy excuse for Dumouriez’ failure to point out that
+he also was one of those whom the Court might have used had it known how
+to use men; but the Court had no such knowledge.</p>
+
+
+<h3><a name="III_6" id="III_6"></a>DANTON</h3>
+
+<p>The character of Danton has more widely impressed the world than that of
+any other<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span> revolutionary leader, because it contained elements
+permanently human, independent of the democratic theory of the time, and
+necessary neither to the support of that theory nor to the criticism of
+it.</p>
+
+<p>The character of Danton appeals to that sense in man which is interested
+in action, and which in the field of letters takes the form of drama.
+His vigour, his personal strength of mind and body, the individuality of
+his outline, arrest equally the man who loves the Revolution, and the
+man who hates it, and the man who is quite indifferent to its success or
+failure.</p>
+
+<p>It is on this very account that historians, especially foreign
+historians, have tended to misinterpret the man. Thus Carlyle, who has
+great intuition in the matter, yet makes him out farmer-like&mdash;which he
+certainly was not; Michelet, fascinated by his energy, presents him as
+something uncouth, and in general those who would describe Danton stand
+at a distance, as it were, where his loud voice and forcible gesture may
+best be appreciated; but a man to be seen truly must be seen in
+intimacy.</p>
+
+<p>Danton was essentially a compound of two powerful characters in man. He
+was amative or constructive, and at the same time he not only possessed
+but liked to exercise lucidity of thought. The combination is among the
+strongest of all those that go to build up human personalities.</p>
+
+<p>That which was amative and constructive in him, his virility if you
+will, brought him<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span> into close touch with reality; he knew and loved his
+own country, for instance, and infinitely preferred its happy survival
+to the full development of any political theory. He also knew and loved
+his fellow countrymen in detail and as persons; he knew what made a
+Frenchman weak and what made him strong. The vein of Huguenotry, though
+he did not know it for what it was, he disliked in his compatriots. On
+the other hand, the salt and freshness of the French was native to him
+and he delighted in it; the freedom of their expression, the noise of
+their rhetoric, and the military subsoil of them, were things to all of
+which he immediately responded. He understood their sort of laughter,
+nor was he shocked, as a man less national would have been, at their
+peculiarly national vices, and in especial their lapses into rage. It is
+this which must account for what all impartial judgment most blames in
+him, which is, his indifference to the cruelties, his absorbed interest
+in foreign and military affairs, at the moment of the Massacres of
+September.</p>
+
+<p>This touch with reality made him understand in some fashion (though only
+from without) the nature of the Germans. The foolish mania of their
+rulers for mere territorial expansion unaccompanied by persuasion or the
+spread of their ideas, he comprehended. The vast superiority of their
+armies over the disorganised forces of the French in 1792 he clearly
+seized: hence on the one hand his grasp of their foreign policy, and on
+the other his able negotiation of the retreat after Valmy.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span> He also
+understood, however, and more profoundly, the rapid self-organisation of
+which his own countrymen were capable, and it was upon this knowledge
+that his determination to risk the continuance of the war reposed. It
+should be remarked that both in his military and in his quasi-military
+action he was himself endowed in a singular degree with that power of
+immediate decision which is characteristic of his nation.</p>
+
+<p>His lucidity of thought permitted him to foresee the consequences of
+many a revolutionary decision, and at the same time inclined him to a
+strong sympathy with the democratic creed, with the doctrine of
+equality, and especially with the remoulding of the national
+institutions&mdash;particularly his own profession of the law&mdash;upon simple
+lines. He was undoubtedly a sincere and a convinced revolutionary, and
+one whose doctrine more permeated him than did that of many of his
+contemporaries their less solid minds. He was not on that account
+necessarily republican. Had some accident called his genius into play
+earlier in the development of the struggle, he might well, like
+Mirabeau, with whom he presents so curious a parallel, have thought it
+better for the country to save the Monarchy.</p>
+
+<p>It must always be remembered that he was a man of wide culture and one
+who had achieved an early and satisfactory professional success; he was
+earning a sound income at the moment of his youthful marriage; he read
+English largely and could speak it. His dress was not inexpensive, and
+though somewhat<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span> disordered (as it often is with men of intense energy
+and constant gesture) it never gave an impression of carelessness or
+disarray. He had many and indifferent intellectual interests, and was
+capable, therefore, of intelligent application in several fields. He
+appreciated the rapid growth of physical science, and at the same time
+the complexity of the old social conditions&mdash;too widely different from
+contemporary truths.</p>
+
+<p>To religion he was, of course, like all men of that time, utterly
+indifferent, but unlike many of them he seized the precise proportion of
+its remaining effect upon certain districts and certain sections of the
+countrysides. There has been a tendency latterly to exaggerate the part
+which Freemasonry played in the launching of him; he was indeed a member
+of a masonic lodge, as were, for that matter, all the men, conspicuous
+or obscure, democratic or utterly reactionary, who appeared upon the
+revolutionary stage: probably the king, certainly old aristocrats like
+the father of Madame de Lamballe, and the whole host of the middle
+class, from men like Bailly to men like Condorcet. But it is reading
+history backwards, and imagining the features of our own time to have
+been present a century ago, to make of Masonry the determining element
+in his career.</p>
+
+<p>Danton failed and died from two combined causes: first his health gave
+way, secondly he obtruded his sanity and civilian sense into the heated
+fury and calculated martial law of the second year of the Republic. To
+both that<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span> fury and that calculation he was an obstacle; his opposition
+to the Terror lost him the support of the enthusiasts, but it was the
+interference which such a judgment made in the plans of the soldiers,
+and notably of Carnot, that determined his condemnation and death. He
+also, like Mirabeau, will undoubtedly increase as the years proceed,
+and, if only as a representative of the national temper, become more and
+more the typical figure of the Revolution in action.</p>
+
+
+<h3><a name="III_7" id="III_7"></a>CARNOT</h3>
+
+<p>Carnot, the predecessor of Napoleon, and the organising soldier of the
+early revolutionary wars, owed his power to backbone.</p>
+
+<p>He had not only a good solidity of brain, but an astonishing power of
+using it for hours and hours on end. This he owed perhaps to the
+excellent physical stock of which he came, the eldest of a very large
+family born to a notable lawyer in Burgundy.</p>
+
+<p>It was Carnot’s pride to hold a commission in the learned arms which
+were to transform at that moment the art of war: for as Bonaparte, his
+successor, was a gunner, so he was a sapper. His practice of exact
+knowledge in application, and the liberal education which his career
+demanded, further strengthened the strong character he had inherited.
+More important still, in his democratic views he was what none of the
+older officers had been, convinced and sincere. He had not come within
+the influence of the very wealthy or of<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span> the very powerful. He was
+young, and he knew his own mind not only in matters of political faith
+but in the general domain of philosophy, and in the particular one of
+military science.</p>
+
+<p>It has been said of him that he invented the revolutionary method of
+strategical concentration and tactical massing in the field. There is
+some truth in this; but the method would not have been possible had he
+not also invented, in company with Danton, and supported after Danton
+left power, a universal system of conscription.</p>
+
+<p>Carnot understood, as only trained soldiers can, the value of numbers,
+and <i>he depended with great sagacity upon the national temper</i>; thus at
+Wattignies, which was a victory directly due to his genius, though it
+was novel in him to have massed troops suddenly upon the right after a
+check on the extreme left of the field, yet the novelty would have been
+of no effect had he not comprehended that, with his young fellow
+countrymen as troopers, he could depend upon a charge delivered after
+thirty-six hours of vigil.</p>
+
+<p>He used not only the national but also the revolutionary temper in war.
+One of the chief features, for instance, of the revolutionary armies
+when they began to be successful, was the development of lines of
+skirmishers who pushed out hardily before the main bodies and were the
+first in the history of modern warfare to learn the use of cover. This
+development was spontaneous: it was produced within and by each unit,
+not by any general<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span> command. But Carnot recognised it at Hoondschoote
+and used it ever after.</p>
+
+<p>The stoical inflexibility of his temper is the noblest among the many
+noble characters of his soul. He never admitted the empire, and he
+suffered exile, seeming thereby in the eyes of the vilest and most
+intelligent of his contemporaries, Fouché, to be a mere fool. He was as
+hard with himself as with others, wholly military in the framework of
+his mind, and the chief controller of the Terror, which he used, as it
+was intended to be used, for the military salvation of the republic.</p>
+
+
+<h3><a name="III_8" id="III_8"></a>MARAT</h3>
+
+<p>Marat is easily judged. The complete sincerity of the enthusiast is not
+difficult to appreciate when his enthusiasm is devoted to a simple human
+ideal which has been, as it were, fundamental and common to the human
+race.</p>
+
+<p>Equality within the State and the government of the State by its general
+will: these primal dogmas, on the reversion to which the whole
+Revolution turned, were Marat’s creed.</p>
+
+<p>Those who would ridicule or condemn him because he held such a creed,
+are manifestly incapable of discussing the matter at all. The ridicule
+and condemnation under which Marat justly falls do not attach to the
+patent moral truths he held, but to the manner in which he held them. He
+did not only hold them isolated from other truths&mdash;it is the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span> fault of
+the fanatic so to hold any truth&mdash;but he held them as though no other
+truths existed. And whenever he found his ideal to be in practice
+working at a friction or stopped dead, his unnourished and acute
+enthusiasms at once sought a scapegoat, discovered a responsible agent,
+and suggested a violent outlet, for the delay.</p>
+
+<p>He was often right when he denounced a political intriguer: he often
+would have sacrificed a victim not unjustly condemned, he often
+discovered an agent partially responsible, and even the violent
+solutions that he suggested were not always impracticable. But it was
+the prime error of his tortured mind that beyond victims, and sudden
+violent clutches at the success of democracy, there was nothing else he
+could conceive. He was incapable of allowing for imperfections, for
+stupidities, for the misapprehension of mind by mind, for the mere
+action of time, and for all that renders human life infinitely complex
+and infinitely adjustable.</p>
+
+<p>Humour, the reflection of such wisdom, he lacked;&mdash;“judgment” (as the
+English idiom has it) he lacked still more&mdash;if a comparative term may be
+attached to two such absolute vacuities.</p>
+
+<p>It must not be forgotten that so complete an absence of certain
+necessary qualities in the building up of a mind are equivalent to
+madness. Marat was not sane. His insanity was often generous, the creed
+to which it was attached was obvious enough, and in the eyes of most of
+us it is a creed to be<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span> accepted. But he worked with it as a madman who
+is mad on collectivism, let us say, or the rights of property, might
+work in our society, thinking of his one thesis, shrieking it and
+foaming at the mouth upon it, losing all control when its acceptance was
+not even opposed but merely delayed. He was valueless for the
+accomplishment of the ends of the Revolution. His doctrine and his
+adherence to it were so conspicuously simple and sincere that it is no
+wonder the populace made him (for a few months) a sort of symbol of
+their demand.</p>
+
+<p>For the rest, his face, like his character, was tortured; he carried
+with him a disease of the skin that irritated perpetually his wholly
+unbalanced temper.</p>
+
+<p>Some say (but one must always beware of so-called “Science” in the
+reading of history) that a mixture of racial types produced in him a
+perpetual physical disturbance: his face was certainly distorted and
+ill-balanced&mdash;but physical suggestions of that sort are very
+untrustworthy.</p>
+
+<p>Those who met him in the management of affairs thought him worthless
+enough; a few who knew him intimately loved him dearly; more who came
+across him continually were fatigued and irritated by his empty
+violence. He was, among those young revolutionaries, almost an elderly
+man; he was (this should never be forgotten) a distinguished scholar in
+his own trade, that of medicine; and he effected less in the Revolution
+than any man to whom a reputation of equal prominence<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span> happened to
+attach. He must stand responsible for the massacres of September.<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a></p>
+
+
+<h3><a name="III_9" id="III_9"></a>ROBESPIERRE</h3>
+
+<p>No character in the Revolution needs for its comprehension a wider
+reading and a greater knowledge of the national character than
+Robespierre’s.</p>
+
+<p>Upon no character does the comprehension of the period more depend, and
+none (for reasons I will give in a moment) has been more misunderstood,
+not only in the popular legend but in the weighed decisions of competent
+historians.</p>
+
+<p>So true is this that even time, which (in company with scholarship)
+usually redresses such errors, has not yet permitted modern authors to
+give a true picture of the man.</p>
+
+<p>The reason of so conspicuous a failure in the domain of history is this:
+that side by side with the real Robespierre there existed in the minds
+of all his contemporaries <i>save those who actually came across him in
+the junctions of government</i>, a legendary Robespierre&mdash;a Robespierre
+popularly imagined; and that this imaginary Robespierre, while it (or
+he) has proved odious to posterity, seemed, while he lived, a
+fascinating portrait to the man himself, and therefore he accepted it.
+For Robespierre, though just, lacked humility.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The problem is an exceedingly subtle as well as an exceedingly difficult
+one. The historian, as he reads his authorities, has perpetually to
+distinguish between what is strong and what is weak evidence, and to
+recall himself, as he reads, to reality by a recollection of what
+Robespierre himself was. If he does not do so he falls at once into the
+legend; so powerful is that legend in the numbers that supported it, and
+so strongly did Robespierre himself support it by his own attitude. The
+legendary Robespierre may be described in a very few lines.</p>
+
+<p>Conceive a man sincerely convinced of the purest democratic theory, a
+man who cared for nothing else but the realisation of that theory, and
+who had never sacrificed his pursuit of its realisation in the State to
+any personal advantage whatsoever. This man, trusted by the people and
+at last idolised by them, becomes more and more powerful. He enters the
+governing body (the Committee of Public Safety), he is the master both
+within and without that body, and uses his mastery for establishing an
+ideal democracy which shall recognise the existence of God and repose
+upon civic virtue; and to establish this ideal he has recourse to
+terror. He finds that human defections from his ideal are increasingly
+numerous: he punishes them by death. The slaughter grows to be enormous;
+the best of Democrats are involved in it; at last it can be tolerated no
+longer, his immediate subordinates revolt against him in the Committee,
+he is outlawed, fails to raise a popular rebellion<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span> in his favour in
+Paris, is executed, and his system of terror falls to the ground.</p>
+
+<p>This picture, though purely legendary in tone, contains not only much
+truth, but truth of precisely that sort which conspires to make credible
+what is false in the whole.</p>
+
+<p>Robespierre was sincerely attached to the conception of an ideal
+democracy; he was incorruptible in the pursuit of it&mdash;and to be a
+politician and incorruptible amounts to something like what the Church
+calls heroic virtue in a man. He <i>did</i> enter the Committee of Public
+Safety; he <i>did</i> support the Terror, and when he was overthrown the
+Terror <i>did</i> come to an end. Where, then, does the legend differ from
+the truth?</p>
+
+<p>In these capital points, which change it altogether: that Robespierre
+was not the chief influence in the Committee of Public Safety, <i>i.e.</i>
+the all powerful executive of the Republic; that he did not desire the
+Terror, that he did not use it, that he even grew disgusted with it, and
+that, in general, he was never the man who governed France.</p>
+
+<p>It need hardly be pointed out how such a truth destroys such a legend.
+The whole nature of the twelve months between the summer of 1793 and the
+summer of 1794 must vary according as we regard them as Robespierrean or
+no: and they were not Robespierrean.</p>
+
+<p>What were they then, and why has the error that Robespierre was then
+master, arisen?</p>
+
+<p>Those months, which may be roughly called<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span> the months of the Terror,
+were, as we shall see later in this book, months of martial law; and the
+Terror was simply martial law in action&mdash;a method of enforcing the
+military defence of the country and of punishing all those who
+interfered with it or were supposed by the Committee to interfere with
+it.</p>
+
+<p>No one man in the Committee was the author of this system, but the one
+most determined to use it and the one who had most occasion to use it,
+was undoubtedly the military organiser, Carnot. Side by side with him
+one man, such as Barrère, supported it because it kept up the Committee
+of Public Safety which gave him all his political position. Another,
+such as Saint-Just, supported it because he believed that the winning of
+the war (in which he took an active part) would secure democracy
+everywhere and for ever. Another, such as Jean Bon, supported it from
+the old sectarian bitterness of the Huguenot. But of all men in the
+Committee, Robespierre supported the Terror least, and was most
+suspected by his colleagues&mdash;and increasingly suspected as time went
+on&mdash;of desiring to interfere with the martial system of the Terror and
+to modify it.</p>
+
+<p>Why, then, was Robespierre popularly identified with the Terror, and
+why, when he was executed, did the Terror cease?</p>
+
+<p>Robespierre was identified with the Terror because he was identified
+with the popular clamour of the time, with the extreme democratic
+feeling of the time, and its extreme fear of a reaction. Robespierre
+being the popular<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span> idol, had become also the symbol of a popular frenzy
+which was supposed to be ruling the country. But that frenzy was not
+ruling the country. What was ruling the country was the Committee of
+Public Safety, in which Carnot’s was the chief brain. Robespierre was
+indeed the idol of the populace; he was in no way the agent of their
+power or of any power.</p>
+
+<p>Why, when he fell, did the Terror cease if he were not its author?
+Because the Terror was acting under a strain; it was with the utmost
+difficulty that this absolute, intolerant and intolerable martial system
+could be continued when once the fear of invasion was removed. For some
+weeks before Robespierre fell the victories had begun to render it
+unnecessary. When the Committee saw to it that Robespierre should be
+outlawed by the Parliament, they knocked away, without knowing it, the
+keystone of their own policy; it was <i>his</i> popular position which made
+<i>their</i> policy possible. When he was destroyed they suddenly found that
+the Terror could no longer be maintained. Men had borne with it because
+of Robespierre, falsely imagining that Robespierre had desired it.
+Robespierre gone, men would not bear with it any more.</p>
+
+<p>Now, finally, if Robespierre himself had always felt opposed to the
+system of the Terror, why did he not take the lead in the popular
+reaction against it?</p>
+
+<p>He had his opportunity given him by Danton in December 1793&mdash;seven
+months before his own catastrophe. The Committee<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span> determined to put
+Danton out of the way because Danton, in appealing for mercy, was
+weakening the martial power of their government. Robespierre might have
+saved Danton: he preferred to let him be sacrificed. The reason was that
+Robespierre wrongly believed popularity to lie upon the side of the
+Terror and against Danton; he was in no way a leader (save in rhetoric
+and in rhetoric directed towards what men already desired), and his own
+great weakness or vice was the love of popular acclaim.</p>
+
+<p>Later on, in the summer of 1794, when he actually began to move against
+the Terror, he only did so privately. He so misread men that he still
+believed the Terror to be popular, and dared not lose his popular name.
+A man by nature as sincere as crystal, he was tempted to insincerity in
+this major thing, during the last months of his life, and he yielded
+completely to the temptation. For the sake of his memory it was
+deplorable, and deplorable also for history. His weakness has been the
+cause of an historical error as grave as any that can be discovered in
+modern letters, and at the same time has wholly maligned him to
+posterity.</p>
+
+<p>A factor in Robespierre’s great public position which is often forgotten
+is the great effect of his speeches. That men should still debate, after
+so vast a change in taste, whether those speeches were eloquent or no,
+is a sufficient proof of their effect. He spoke in an ordered and a
+reasoned manner, which bored the fine spirits of the earlier
+Parliaments,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span> but well suited the violent convictions of the later
+Revolution. His phraseology, his point of view, just jumped with that of
+his audience. He could express what they felt, and express it in terms
+which they knew to be exact, and which they believed to be grand. For
+his manner was never excessive, and those excessive men who heard him in
+an excessive mood, were proud to know that their violence could be
+expressed with so much scholarship and moderated skill.</p>
+
+<p>By birth he was of the smaller gentry, though poor. It is an indication
+of his character that he had thought of taking Orders, and that in early
+youth literary vanity had affected him. He has left no monument; but
+from the intensity of his faith and from his practice of it, his name,
+though it will hardly increase, will certainly endure.</p>
+
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> There is but one trustworthy monograph on Marat. It will
+interest the student as a proof of the enthusiasm which Marat can
+inspire. It is by Champfleury.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="IV" id="IV"></a>IV<br /><br />
+<small>THE PHASES OF THE REVOLUTION</small></h2>
+
+
+<h3><a name="IV_1" id="IV_1"></a>I<br />
+<small><i>From May 1789 to 17th of July 1789.</i></small></h3>
+
+<p><span class="sc">The</span> first point which the reader must hold in the story of the
+Revolution is the quarrel between its first Parliament and the Crown.</p>
+
+<p>Of what nature was that quarrel?</p>
+
+<p>It was not, as it has sometimes been represented, a simple issue between
+privilege and<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span> a democratic demand for equality, or between traditional
+organs of government and a democratic demand for self-government by the
+nation. To imagine this is to read history backwards, and to see in the
+untried conditions of 1789 the matured results which only appeared after
+years of struggle.</p>
+
+<p>The prime issue lay between legality and illegality.</p>
+
+<p>The forms of French law and all the inherited method of French
+administration demanded a certain form of authority; a centralised
+government of unlimited power. The King was absolute. From him proceeded
+in the simplest fashion whatever will was paramount in the State. He
+could suspend a debtor’s liabilities, imprison a man without trial,
+release him without revision of his case, make war or peace, and in
+minor details such as the discipline and administration of public
+bodies, the power of the Crown was theoretically and legally equally
+supreme. It was not exercised as the enormous power of modern government
+is exercised, it did not perpetually enter into every detail of the life
+of the poor in the way in which the power of a modern English Government
+enters into it; it is in the very nature of such autocratic power that,
+while unlimited in theory, it is compelled to an instinctive and
+perpetual self-limitation lest it break down; and autocracy maybe
+compared in this to aristocracy, or more properly speaking to oligarchy,
+the government of a few: for where a few govern they know that their
+government reposes upon<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span> public opinion or public tolerance; they are
+very careful not to exceed certain limits the transgression of which
+would weaken the moral foundation of their power; they welcome allies,
+they recruit themselves perpetually from other classes in the community.</p>
+
+<p>In the same way an autocracy always has the desire to be popular. Its
+strokes affect the great and the powerful, and are hardly ever aimed at
+the mass of the community. The intellectual, the wealthy, the privileged
+by birth, fortune or exceptional personal powers, are suspect to it. As
+for the mass of men an Autocracy attempts to represent and, in a certain
+sense, to obey them.</p>
+
+<p>Now the French autocracy (for it was no less) erred not in the will to
+act thus popularly in the early part of the Revolution, but in the
+<i>knowledge</i> requisite for such action.</p>
+
+<p>The Parliament, shortly after it had met in May 1789, began to show, in
+the Commons part of it, the working of that great theory which had
+leavened all France for a generation. The Commons said, “We are the
+people; at once the symbols of the people, the direct mandatory servants
+of the people, and” (though this was a fiction) “we are of the people in
+our birth and origin. We are therefore the true sovereign; and the
+prince, the head of the Executive, is no more than an organ of
+government, morally less in authority than ourselves, who are the true
+source of government.” This attitude, which was at the back of all men’s
+minds, and which was concentrated, of course, in the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span> Commons, clashed
+with legality. It could not express itself in the terms of law, it could
+not act save in a fashion which should be, in the strictest sense of the
+word, <i>revolutionary</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Now the Crown, on the whole national in sympathy, and comprehending this
+new theory well (I mean by the Crown the general body of advisers round
+the King, and the King himself), was offended at the illegality not of
+the theory or of the pretence (for these were not illegal), but of the
+action of the Commons. And this comparatively small source of friction
+was the irritant upon which we must fix as the cause of what followed.
+The Nobles, by 108 to 47, decided, the day after the opening of the
+Parliament, to sit as a separate House. The Clergy, by a much smaller
+majority, 133 to 114, came to the same decision, but carefully qualified
+it as provisional. The Commons declared that the hall in which they met
+should be regarded as the hall of the National Assembly, and later made
+it their business (to quote the phrase of the motion) “to attempt to
+unite in common all the deputies of the nation in that hall and never to
+abandon the principle of voting individually” (that is, not by separate
+Houses) “or the principle that the States-General formed one undivided
+body.” This attitude was qualified and compromised with to some extent
+in the days that followed, but it held the field, and while the Commons
+were insisting upon this attitude as a moral right, the Nobles countered
+by a reaffirmation of the right of each House to a<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span> separate judgment
+upon public matters. The Nobles were standing upon legal precedent: the
+Commons had nothing in their favour but political theory; if the orders
+sat all together and voted as individuals, the Commons, who were in
+number equal to the two other Houses combined, would, with their noble
+and clerical sympathisers, have a majority.</p>
+
+<p>Now the King and his advisers, notably Necker, who still had great
+weight, were by no means “Impossiblists” in this struggle. They desired
+an understanding, and through the last days of May and the first days of
+June the attempt at an understanding was made. But the attempt dragged,
+and as it seemed that nothing would come of it, on the 10th of June
+Sièyes moved that the Assembly should “verify its powers” (a French
+phrase for admitting and registering the presence of each member as
+acceptable to the whole body, and to the theory of its Constitution),
+and that this should be done “in the case of each member” (meaning
+members of all the three orders and <i>not</i> of the Commons alone),
+“whether the members of the two privileged Houses were present or
+absent.” The roll was called and completed upon the 15th. None of the
+nobles attended the common roll-call, three of the parish clergy (they
+were from the province of Poitou) did so, and thus admitted the right of
+the Commons so to act. A dozen of their colleagues joined them later;
+but that was all.</p>
+
+<p>So far there had been no action which could be precisely called illegal
+or revolutionary.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span> The Commons had affirmed a right based upon a
+political theory which the vast majority of the nation admitted, and the
+legal depositary of power, the King, had not yet reproved. One may draw
+a parallel and compare the action of the Commons so far to some action
+which a trade union, for instance, may take in England; some action the
+legality of which is doubtful but upon which the courts have not yet
+decided.</p>
+
+<p>It was upon the 17th of June, two days after the completion of the
+roll-call by the Commons, that the first revolutionary act took place,
+and the student of the Revolution will do well to put his finger upon
+that date and to regard it not indeed as the moral origin of the
+movement, but as the precise moment from which the Revolution, as a
+Revolution, begins to act. For upon that day the Commons, though in fact
+only joined by a handful of the Clerical House, and by none of the
+nobility, <i>declared themselves to be the National Assembly</i>; that is,
+asserted the fiction that Clergy, Nobles and Commons were all present
+and voted together. To this declaration they added a definite act of
+sovereignty which trespassed upon and contradicted the legal authority
+of the Crown. True, the motion was only moved and passed
+“provisionally,” but the words used were final, for in this motion the
+self-styled “National Assembly” declared that “provisionally” taxes and
+dues might be raised upon the old authority but that only until the
+National Assembly should disperse;<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span> “after which day”&mdash;and here we reach
+the sacramental formula, as it were, of the crisis&mdash;“the National
+Assembly <i>wills and decrees</i> that all taxes and dues of whatever nature
+which have not been specifically formally and freely granted by the said
+Assembly shall cease in every province of the kingdom no matter how such
+that province may be administered.” (This is an allusion to the fact
+that in some provinces there was a representative machinery, in others
+nothing but the direct action of the Crown.) “The Assembly declares that
+when it has <i>in concert with</i> (not in obedience to) the King laid down
+the principle of a national re-settlement, it will busy itself with the
+examination and ordering of the public debt.” Etc., etc.</p>
+
+<p>Such was the point of departure after which sovereignty was at issue
+between the Crown and the States-General; the Crown a known institution
+with its traditions stretching back to the Roman Empire, and the
+National Assembly a wholly new organ according to its own claims, basing
+its authority upon a political theory stretching back to the very
+origins of human society.</p>
+
+<p>Two days later, on the 19th of June, the “National Assembly,” still only
+self-styled and possessing only the powers which it had ascribed to
+itself beyond all forms of law, set to work, nominated its committees,
+and assumed the sovereignty thus claimed. The Nobles protested (notably
+the Bishops), and the King, on the advice of Barentin, keeper of the
+Seals, determined upon immediate<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span> resistance. The excuse was taken that
+the Royal Session, as it was called, in which the King would declare his
+will, needed the preparation of the hall, and when the Commons presented
+themselves at the door of that hall on the next day, the 20th, they
+found it shut against them. They adjourned to a neighbouring tennis
+court, and took a solemn corporate oath that they would not separate
+without giving France a Constitution. They continued to meet, using a
+church for that purpose, but on the 23rd the Royal Session was opened
+and the King declared his will.</p>
+
+<p>The reader must especially note that even in this crisis the Crown did
+not offer a complete resistance. There was an attempt at compromise.
+Necker would have had a more or less complete surrender, the Queen and
+her set would have preferred an act of authority which should have
+annulled all that the Commons had done. What actually happened was a
+permission by the Crown that the three Orders should meet as one body
+for certain common interests, but should preserve the system of voting
+as separate Houses in “all that might regard the ancient and
+constitutional rights of the three Orders, the Constitution to be given
+to future Parliaments, feudal property, and the rights and prerogatives
+of the two senior Houses.” As a mere numerical test, such a conclusion
+would have destroyed the power of the Commons, since, as we have seen,
+numbers were the weapon of the Commons, who were equal to the two other
+Houses combined, and if all<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span> sat together would, with the Liberal
+members of the clergy and the nobility, be supreme. But apart from this
+numerical test, the act of sovereignty affirmed by the National Assembly
+when it declared itself, and itself only, competent to vote taxes, was
+annulled. Moreover, the royal declaration ended with a command that on
+the next day the three Orders should meet separately.</p>
+
+<p>Now at this critical point the King was disobeyed. The current of the
+time chose the revolutionary bed, and as it began to flow deepened and
+confirmed its course with every passing day and event. Already the
+majority of the clergy had joined the National Assembly when it had
+affirmed its right to sit in spite of the check of the 20th of June.
+There was a half-hour on that decisive day of the Royal Session, the
+23rd of June, when armed force might have been used for the arrest and
+dispersion of the Deputies. They declared themselves inviolable and
+their arrest illegal, but there was, of course, no sanction for this
+decree. As a fact, not a corporal’s file was used against them. The next
+day, the 24th, the majority of the clergy again joined the Commons in
+their session (in flat defiance of the King’s orders), and on the 25th,
+forty-seven of the nobles followed their example. The King yielded, and
+on the 27th, two days later, ordered the three Houses to meet together.</p>
+
+<p>The National Assembly was now legally constituted, and set out upon its
+career. The Crown, the old centre of authority, had<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span> abandoned its
+position, and had confirmed the Revolution, but in doing so it had acted
+as it were in contradiction with itself. It had made technically legal
+an illegality which destroyed its own old legal position, but it had
+done so with ill-will, and it was evident that some counter-stroke would
+be attempted to restore the full powers of the Crown.</p>
+
+<p>At this point the reader must appreciate what forces were face to face
+in the coming struggle. So far, the illegal and revolutionary act of the
+17th of June, the Royal Session which replied to that act upon the 23rd,
+the King’s decree which yielded to the Commons upon the 27th, had all of
+them been but words. If it came to action, what physical forces were
+opposed?</p>
+
+<p>On the side of the Crown was the organised armed force which it
+commanded. For it must never be forgotten that the Crown was the
+Executive, and remained the Executive right on to the capture of the
+palace three years later, and the consummation of the Revolution on the
+10th of August, 1792. On the side of the National Assembly was without
+doubt the public opinion of the country (but that is not a force that
+can be used under arms), and, what was much more to the point, the
+municipal organisation of France.</p>
+
+<p>Space forbids a full description of the origins and strength of the
+French municipal system; it is enough to point out that the whole of
+Gallic civilisation, probably from a moment earlier than Cæsar’s
+invasion, and certainly from the moment when Roman rule<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span> was paramount
+in Gaul, was a <i>municipal</i> one. It is so still. The countrysides take
+their names mainly from their chief towns. The towns were the seats of
+the bishops, whose hierarchy had preserved whatever could be preserved
+of the ancient world. In the towns were the colleges, the guilds, the
+discussion and the corporations which built up the life of the nation.
+The chief of these towns was Paris. The old systems of municipal
+government, corrupt and varied as they were, could still give the towns
+a power of corporate expression. And even where that might be lacking it
+was certain that some engine would be found for expressing municipal
+action in a crisis of the sort through which France was now passing. In
+Paris, for instance, it was seen when the time came for physical force
+that the College of Electors, who had chosen the representatives for
+that city, were willing to act at once and spontaneously as a municipal
+body which should express the initiative of the people. It was the
+towns, and especially Paris, prompt at spontaneous organisation, ready
+to arm, and when armed competent to frame a fighting force, which was
+the physical power behind the Assembly.</p>
+
+<p>What of the physical power behind the King? His power was, as we have
+said, the Regular Armed forces of the country: the army. But it is
+characteristic of the moment that only a part of that armed force could
+be trusted. For an army is never a mere weapon: it consists of living
+men; and though it will<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span> act against the general opinion of its members
+and will obey orders long after civilians would have broken with the
+ties of technical and legal authority, yet there is for armies also a
+breaking point in those ties, and the Crown, I repeat, could not use as
+a whole the French-speaking and French-born soldiery. Luckily for it, a
+very great proportion of the French army at that moment consisted of
+foreign mercenaries.</p>
+
+<p>Since the position was virtually one of war, we must consider what was
+the strategical object of this force. Its object was Paris, the chief of
+the towns; and round Paris, in the early days of July, the mercenary
+regiments were gathered from all quarters. That military concentration
+once effected, the gates of the city held, especially upon the north and
+upon the west, by encamped regiments and by a particularly large force
+of cavalry (ever the arm chosen for the repression of civilians), the
+Crown was ready to act.</p>
+
+<p>On the 11th of July, Necker, who stood for Liberal opinions, was
+dismissed. A new ministry was formed, and the counter-revolution begun.
+What followed was the immediate rising of Paris.</p>
+
+<p>The news of Necker’s dismissal reached the masses of the capital (only
+an hour’s ride from Versailles) on the afternoon of the 12th, Sunday.
+Crowds began to gather; an ineffectual cavalry charge in one of the
+outer open spaces of the city only inflamed the popular enthusiasm, for
+the soldiers who charged were German mercenary soldiers<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span> under the
+command of a noble. Public forces were at once organised, arms were
+commandeered from the armourers’ shops, the Electoral College, which had
+chosen the members of the Assembly for Paris, took command at the Guild
+Hall, but the capital point of the insurrection&mdash;what made it
+possible&mdash;was the seizure of a great stock of arms and ammunition,
+including cannon, in the depot at the Invalides.</p>
+
+<p>With such resources the crowd attacked, at the other end of the city, a
+fortress and arsenal which had long stood in the popular eye as the
+symbol of absolute monarchy, the Bastille. With the absurdly
+insufficient garrison of the Bastille, its apparent impregnability to
+anything the mob might attempt, the supposed but doubtful treason of its
+governor in firing upon those whom he had admitted to parley, we are not
+here concerned. The Bastille was rushed, after very considerable efforts
+and an appreciable loss in killed and wounded. By the evening of that
+day, Tuesday, the 14th of July, 1789, Paris had become a formidable
+instrument of war. The next news was the complete capitulation of the
+King.</p>
+
+<p>He came on the morrow to the National Assembly, promising to send away
+the troops; he promised to recall Necker, a municipal organisation was
+granted to the city, with Bailly for its first mayor, and&mdash;a point of
+capital importance&mdash;an armed militia dependent upon that municipality
+was legally formed, with La Fayette at its head. On the 17th Louis
+entered Paris to consummate his<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span> capitulation, went to the Guild Hall,
+appeared in the tricoloured cockade, and the popular battle was won.</p>
+
+<p>It behoves us here to consider the military aspect of this definitive
+act from which the sanction of the Revolution, the physical power behind
+it, dates.</p>
+
+<p>Paris numbered somewhat under a million souls: perhaps no more than
+600,000: the number fluctuated with the season. The foreign mercenary
+troops who were mainly employed in the repression of the popular feeling
+therein, were not sufficient to impose anything like a siege. They could
+at the various gates have stopped the provisioning of the city, but then
+at any one of those separate points, any one of their detachments upon a
+long perimeter more than a day’s march in circumference would certainly
+have been attacked and almost as certainly overwhelmed by masses of
+partially armed civilians.</p>
+
+<p>Could the streets have been cleared while the ferment was rising? It is
+very doubtful. They were narrow and tortuous in the extreme, the area to
+be dealt with was enormous, the tradition of barricades not forgotten,
+and the spontaneous action of that excellent fighting material which a
+Paris mob contains, had been quite as rapid as anything that could have
+been effected by military orders.</p>
+
+<p>The one great fault was the neglect to cover the Invalides, but even had
+the Invalides not been looted, the stock of arms and powder in the city
+would have been sufficient to have organised a desperate and prolonged
+resistance.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span> The local auxiliary force (of slight military value, it is
+true), the “French Guards,” as they were called, were wholly with the
+people. And in general, the Crown must be acquitted of any considerable
+blunder on the military side of this struggle. It certainly did not fail
+from lack of will.</p>
+
+<p>The truth is (if we consider merely the military aspect of this military
+event) that in dealing with large bodies of men who are (a) not
+previously disarmed, (b) under conditions where they cannot be
+dispersed, and (c) capable by a national tradition or character of some
+sort of rapid, spontaneous organisation, the issue will always be
+doubtful, and the uncertain factor (which is the tenacity, decision and
+common will of the civilians, to which soldiers are to be opposed) is
+one that varies within the very widest limits.</p>
+
+<p>In massing the troops originally, the Crown and its advisers estimated
+that uncertain factor at far too low a point. Even contemporary educated
+opinion, which was in sympathy with Paris, put it too low. That factor
+was, as a fact, so high that no armed force of the size and quality
+which the Crown then disposed of, could achieve its object or hold down
+the capital.</p>
+
+<p>As for the absurd conception that any body of men in uniform, however
+small, could always have the better of civilian resistance, however
+large and well organised, it is not worthy of a moment’s consideration
+by those who interest themselves in the realities of military history.
+It is worthy only of the academies.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>So ends the first phase of the Revolution. It had lasted from the
+opening of the States-General in May to the middle of July 1789.</p>
+
+
+<h3><a name="IV_2" id="IV_2"></a>II<br />
+<small><i>From the 17th of July 1789 to the 6th of Oct. 1789.</i></small></h3>
+
+<p>We have seen the military conditions under which the attempt at an armed
+counter-revolution failed. There follows a short phase of less than
+three months, whose character can be quickly described.</p>
+
+<p>It was that moment of the Revolution in which ideas had the freest play,
+in which least had been done to test their application, and most scope
+remained for pure enthusiasm. That is why we find in the midst of that
+short phase the spontaneous abandonment of the feudal rights by the
+nobility. And that is why the violent uprisings all over France
+continued. It is the period in which the Declaration of the Rights of
+Man and of the Citizen, a document which may fittingly stand side by
+side with the Declaration of Independence (for together they form the
+noblest monuments of our modern origins), was promulgated. In the same
+period were the elements of the future Constitution rapidly debated and
+laid down, and notably that national policy of a <i>Single Chamber</i> which
+the modern French have imprudently abandoned. In that same period,
+however, appeared, and towards the close of it, another form of
+resistance on the part of the Crown and<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span> of those who advised the Crown.
+The King hesitated to accept the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and
+similarly hesitated to promulgate the Decree of the 4th of August in
+which the nobility had abandoned their feudal dues. It would be foolish
+to exaggerate the military aspect of what followed. Louis did call in
+troops, but only in numbers sufficient for personal defence, and we can
+hardly believe that he intended anything more than to police the
+surroundings of his throne. But the brigade (for it was no more, nor was
+it of full strength) which he summoned was sufficient to kindle
+suspicion; and the determinedly false position of the Queen (who all her
+life was haunted by the idea that the regular soldiers, especially if
+they were well dressed and held themselves rigidly, were a sort of
+talisman) provoked an explosion. A feast was given in which the officers
+of the Regiment of Flanders, which had just reached Versailles, were
+entertained by the officers of the Guard. It was made the occasion for a
+good deal of drunkenness and a violent Royalist manifestation, at which
+the Queen was present, which she approved, and which some thought she
+had designed.</p>
+
+<p>The failure of the harvest to relieve the scarcity of bread in Paris,
+the permanent state of alarm in which Paris had remained, and of
+suspicion for the safety of the Parliament which it continually
+entertained since the early part of the summer, needed no more to
+provoke an outbreak. It is an error to imagine that that outbreak was
+engineered<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span> or that such a movement could have been factitious. Great
+masses of women (in whom the movement originated), and after them a
+whole flood of the populace, marched upon Versailles.</p>
+
+<p>There was no direct attack upon the palace, though the palace feared
+such an attack at any moment. The troops present were sufficient to
+prevent violence.</p>
+
+<p>La Fayette followed in the night at the head of his new Parisian militia
+force.</p>
+
+<p>Too much reliance was placed upon the military character of this force;
+the palace was invaded in the early morning, an attempt to assassinate
+the Queen on the part of the mob failed, though two of the Guards were
+killed. And after scenes whose violence and apparent anarchy only masked
+the common determination of the populace, the royal family were
+compelled to abandon Versailles and to take up their place in the
+Tuileries; the Parliament followed them to Paris, and neither King nor
+Parliament returned again to the suburban palace.</p>
+
+<p>This recapture of the King by Paris is much more significant than a mere
+impulse of the mob. The King in Paris, the unison of his person with the
+capital city, had been the very sacrament of French life for century
+upon century. It was precisely a hundred years since Paris had been
+abandoned by Louis XIV for Versailles. The significance of that error
+may be understood by the citizens of an aristocratic country if they
+will imagine the abandonment of their countrysides<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span> by the squires, or,
+again, the future historian of our modern industrial civilisation may
+understand it when he describes how the wealthy manufacturers abandoned
+the cities in which their wealth was made, to dwell outside and apart
+from the living interests of their people.</p>
+
+<p>With the return of the royal family to Paris, and with the presence of
+the Assembly within the heart of the national life, one prime factor
+appears, which is this: that while the National Assembly proceeds step
+by step to what it imagines to be a complete attainment of democracy
+(though how partial will soon be seen), the resistance of the Crown is
+transformed into a resistance of the mere Court. The attack on the
+Revolution becomes a personal thing. The King is still wholly the chief
+of the Executive; he can give what commands he wills to the armed force;
+he controls receipts and payments; he is for all active purposes the
+Government. But he is no longer considering that prime function of his,
+nor even using it to restore his old power. He acts henceforward as an
+individual, and an individual in danger. The Queen, whose view of the
+Revolution and its dangers had always been a purely personal one, is the
+directing will in the court-group from this moment, October 1789,
+onwards; and the chief preoccupation of that group for eighteen months
+is personal safety. Surrounded by the pomp of the Tuileries and amid all
+the external appearances of a power still greater than that of any other
+monarch<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span> in Europe, Louis and his wife and their very few immediate and
+devoted friends and followers thought of the palace as a prison, and
+never considered their position save as one intolerable.</p>
+
+
+<h3><a name="IV_3" id="IV_3"></a>III<br />
+<small><i>From October 1789 to June 1791.</i></small></h3>
+
+<p>It is this which must explain all that followed in the succeeding phase,
+which lasted from these early days of October 1789 to the last week of
+June 1791. Throughout that period of twenty-one months the King is
+letting the Revolution take its course, with the fixed idea of thwarting
+it at last by flying from it, and perhaps conquering it by foreign aid.
+But even this policy is not consecutively followed. The increasing
+repugnance of the Court and of the King himself to the revolutionary
+development forbids a consecutive and purely hypocritical acceptation of
+the National Assembly’s decrees.</p>
+
+<p>Deliberate and calculated intrigue might yet have saved the monarchy and
+the persons of the royal family. Oddly enough, an ally in the struggle,
+an excellent intriguer, a saviour of the monarchical institution and a
+true defender of the royal persons was at hand: it was at hand in the
+person of Mirabeau.</p>
+
+<p>This man had more and more dominated the Assembly; he had been
+conspicuous from its first opening days; he had been its very voice in
+the resistance to the King at Versailles; it was he who had replied to
+the Master of<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span> Ceremonies on June 23, that the Commons would not
+disperse; it was he who had moved that the persons of the Commons were
+privileged against arrest. He was of a family noble in station and
+conspicuous before the people by the wealth and eccentricities of its
+head, Mirabeau’s father. He himself was not unknown even before the
+Revolution broke out, for his violence, his amours, his intelligence and
+his debts. He was a few years older than the King and Queen: his
+personality repelled them; none the less his desire to serve them was
+sincere; and it was his plan, while retaining the great hold over the
+National Assembly which his rhetoric and his use of men furnished him,
+to give to the Court and in particular to the Queen, whom he very
+greatly and almost reverently admired, such secret advice as might save
+them. This advice, as we shall see in a moment, tended more and more to
+be an advice for civil war. But Mirabeau’s death at the close of the
+phase we are now entering (on April 2, 1791), and the increasing fears
+of the King and Queen, between them prevented any statesmanship at all;
+they prevented even the statesmanship of intrigue; and the period
+became, on the side of the Revolution, a rapid and uncontrolled
+development of its democratic theory (limited by the hesitation of the
+middle class), and on the side of the Court an increasing demand for
+mere physical security and flight, coupled with an increasing
+determination to return, and to restore as a popular monarchy the scheme
+of the past.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The eighteen months that intervened between the fixing of the Assembly
+and the royal family in Paris, and the death of Mirabeau, are remarkable
+for the following points, which must all be considered abreast, as it
+were, if we are to understand their combined effects.</p>
+
+<p>1. This was the period in which the constructive work of the National
+Assembly was done, and in which the whole face of the nation was
+changed. The advising bodies of lawyers called “Parliaments” were
+abolished (eleven months after the King had come to Paris), the Modern
+Departments were organised in the place of the old provinces, the old
+national and provincial militia was destroyed; but (as it is very
+important to remember) <i>the old regular army was left untouched</i>. A new
+judicature and new rules of procedure were established. A new code
+sketched out in the place of “Common Law” muddle. In a word, it was the
+period during which most of those things which we regard as
+characteristic of the revolutionary work were either brought to their
+theoretic conclusion or given at least their main lines.</p>
+
+<p>2. Among these constructive acts, but so important that it must be
+regarded separately, was the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which
+will be dealt with at length further in this book; it was the principal
+work (and the principal error) of that year and a half.</p>
+
+<p>3. The general spirit of the Revolution, more difficult to define than
+its theory but easy to appreciate as one follows the development<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span> of the
+movement, increased regularly and enormously in intensity during the
+period. The power of the King, who was still at the head of the
+Executive, acted more and more as an irritant against public opinion,
+and&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>4. That public opinion began to express itself in a centralised and
+national fashion, of which the great federation of the 14th of July
+1790, in Paris, on the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, was the
+nucleus and also the symbol. This federation consisted in delegates from
+the National Guard throughout the country, and it was of this capital
+importance: that it introduced into the revolutionary movement a feature
+of soldiery which made even the regular troops for the most part
+sympathetic with the enthusiasm of the time.</p>
+
+<p>5. These eighteen months were, again, filled with the movement of the
+“Emigration.” That movement was, of course, the departure of many of the
+more prominent of the privileged orders and of a crowd of humbler
+nobles, as also of a few ecclesiastics, from France. The King’s brothers
+(one fled at the beginning of the emigration, the younger, the Comte
+d’Artois; the other, the elder, at its close, and coincidently with the
+flight of the King) must especially be noted in this connection; they
+formed in company with the more notable of the other emigrants a regular
+political body, which intrigued continually beyond the frontiers, in
+Germany and Italy, against the Revolution. And<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>6. It was therefore during these months that the ultimate origins of the
+large European war must be found. The armed body of the emigrants under
+Condé formed an organised corps upon the Rhine, and though there was not
+yet the semblance of an armed movement in Europe besides theirs against
+the French, yet by the <i>émigrés</i>, as they were called, were sown the
+seeds the harvest of which was to be the war of 1792.</p>
+
+<p>I have said that during these months in which most of the constructive
+work of the Revolution was done, in which the seeds of the great war
+were sown, and in which the absolute position of the Crown as the head
+of the Executive was increasingly irritating to the public opinion of
+the French, and especially of the capital, Mirabeau was the one man who
+might have preserved the continuity of national institutions by the
+preservation of the monarchy. He received money from the Court and in
+return gave it advice. The advice was the advice of genius, but it was
+listened to less and less in proportion as it was more and more
+practical. Mirabeau also favoured the abandonment of Paris by the King,
+but he would have had the King leave Paris openly and with an armed
+force, withdraw to a neighbouring and loyal centre such as Compiègne,
+and thence depend upon the fortunes of civil war.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile the Queen was determined upon a very different and much more
+personal plan, into which no conception of statesmanship entered. She
+was determined to save<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span> the persons of her children, herself and her
+husband. Plans of flight were made, postponed and re-postponed. It was
+already agreed at the Court that not Mirabeau’s plan should be followed,
+but this plan of mere evasion. The army which Bouillé commanded upon the
+frontier was to send small detachments along the great road from Paris
+to the east; the first of these were to meet the royal fugitives a
+little beyond Chalôns and to escort their carriage eastward; each armed
+detachment in the chain, as the flight proceeded, was to fall in for its
+defence, until, once the town of Varennes was reached, the King and
+Queen should be in touch with the main body of the army.</p>
+
+<p>What was then intended to follow remains obscure. It is fairly certain
+that the King did not intend to pass the frontier but to take refuge at
+Montmédy. The conflict that would have inevitably broken out could
+hardly have been confined to a civil war: foreign armies and the German
+mercenaries in the French service were presumably to be organised, in
+case the flight succeeded, for a march upon Paris and the complete
+restoration of the old state of affairs.</p>
+
+<p>Had Mirabeau lived this rash and unstatesmanlike plan might yet have
+been avoided; it so happened that he died upon April 2, 1791, and soon
+after we enter the third phase of the Revolution, which is that leading
+directly to the great war, and to the fall of the monarchy.</p>
+
+<p>Shortly after Mirabeau’s death a tumult,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span> which excessively frightened
+the royal family, prevented the King and Queen from leaving the palace
+and passing Easter at St. Cloud, in the suburbs. Though further
+postponements of their flight followed, the evasion actually took place
+in the night of the 20th to 21st of June. It very nearly succeeded, but
+by a series of small accidents, the last of which, the famous ride of
+Drouet to intercept the fugitives, is among the best-known episodes in
+history, the King and Queen and their children were discovered and
+arrested at Varennes, within a few hundred yards of safety, and were
+brought back to Paris, surrounded by enormous and hostile crowds. With
+the failure of this attempt at flight in the end of June 1791, ends the
+third phase of the Revolution.</p>
+
+
+<h3><a name="IV_4" id="IV_4"></a>IV<br />
+<small><i>From June 1791 to September 1792.</i></small></h3>
+
+<p>To understand the capital effect both of this flight and of its failure,
+we must once more insist upon the supreme position of the monarchy in
+the traditions and instinct of French polity. The unwisdom of the flight
+it would be difficult to exaggerate: it is impossible to exaggerate the
+moral revolution caused by its failure. It was regarded as virtually an
+abdication. The strong body of provincial, silent, and moderate opinion,
+which still centred on the King and regarded it as his function to lead
+and to<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span> govern, was bewildered, and in the main divorced, in the future,
+from the Crown.</p>
+
+<p>It is an excellent proof of what the monarchy had for so long been to
+France, that even in such a crisis barely the name of “a republic” was
+mentioned, and that only in the intellectual circles in Paris. All the
+constitutional and standing forces of society conspired to preserve the
+monarchy at the expense of no matter what fictions. The middle class
+Militia Guard under La Fayette repressed, in what is known as the
+Massacre of the Champ-de-Mars, the beginnings of a popular movement. The
+more Radical leaders (among whom was Danton) fled abroad or hid. The
+Duke of Orleans utterly failed to take advantage of the moment, or to
+get himself proclaimed regent: the monarchical tradition was too strong.</p>
+
+<p>Immediately after the second anniversary of the taking of the Bastille,
+in July, the decrees of Parliament created the fiction that the King was
+not responsible for the flight, that he “had been carried off,” and in
+the following September, though until then suspended from executive
+power, the King, on taking the oath to the Constitution, was once more
+at the head of all the forces of the nation.</p>
+
+<p>But all this patching and reparation of the façade of constitutional
+monarchy (a fiction whose tawdriness is more offensive to the French
+temper than its falsehood) had come too late. Already the Queen had
+written to her brother, the Emperor of<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span> Austria, suggesting the
+mobilisation of a considerable force, and its encampment on the
+frontier, to overawe the revolutionary movement. Her action coincided
+within a few days with the end of that great Parliament, which had been
+chosen on the most democratic suffrage, and which had transformed the
+whole of society and laid the basis of the revolutionary Constitution.
+With the meeting of the National Assembly’s successor on the 1st of
+October, 1791, war was already possible; that possibility was to be
+transformed very soon into probability, and at last into actuality.</p>
+
+<p>In the new Parliament the weight, not of numbers but of leadership, fell
+to a group of enthusiastic and eloquent men who, from the fact that
+certain of their principal members came from the Gironde, were called
+<i>The Girondins</i>. They represented the purest and the most enthusiastic
+ideal of democracy, less national, perhaps, than that advocated by men
+more extreme than they, but of a sort which, from that time to this, has
+been able to rouse the enthusiasm of historians.</p>
+
+<p>Vergniaud and Isnard were their great orators, Brissot was their
+intellectual intriguer, and the wife of Roland, one of their members,
+was, as it were, the soul of the whole group. It was the fact that these
+men desired war which made war certain, once the temper of this new
+second Assembly should be felt.</p>
+
+<p>The extremists over against them, to whom I have alluded (known as “the
+Mountain”), were especially Parisian in character. Robespierre,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span> who had
+been first an obscure, and later a sectarian orator of the National
+Assembly, though not sitting in this second Parliament, was perhaps the
+most prominent figure in that group, for he was the public orator of
+Paris; and indeed the Mountain was Paris; Paris, whether inside or
+outside the Parliament; Paris acting as the responsible brain of France.
+Later, it was the Mountain (that had first opposed the war) which was to
+ensure the success of the French arms by a rigidity and despotism in
+action such as the purer and less practical minds of the Girondins
+abhorred.</p>
+
+<p>On the 3rd of December, 1791 (to quote a fundamental date in the rapid
+progress towards the war which was to transform the Revolution), the
+King&mdash;writing in a manner which betrays dictation by his wife&mdash;begged
+the King of Prussia (as <i>she</i> had begged the Emperor) to mobilise an
+armed force, and with it to back a Congress that should have for its
+object the prevention of the spread of the Revolution. That letter was
+typical of the moment. From both sides tension was rapidly proceeding to
+the breaking point. Nor was the tension merely upon generalities. The
+Revolution had broken a European treaty in the annexation of the Papal
+State of Avignon, and it had broken European conventions when it had
+abolished in Alsace feudal rights that were possessed by the princes of
+the empire. It was as though some State to-day, attempting Collectivism,
+should confiscate, along with other property,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span> securities lying in its
+banks, but held by the nationals of a foreign State.</p>
+
+<p>On the revolutionary side also there was a definite point at issue,
+which was the permission accorded within the empire for the emigrants to
+meet in arms and to threaten the French frontier.</p>
+
+<p>But these precise and legal points were not the true causes of the war.
+The true causes of the war were the desire of the unreformed European
+Governments (notably those of Prussia and Austria) that the Revolution
+should, in their own interests, be checked, and the conviction that
+their armed forces were easily capable of effecting the destruction of
+the new French <i>régime</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The Court of Vienna refused to accept a just indemnity that was offered
+the princes of the empire in Alsace for the loss of their old feudal
+rights; Leopold, the emperor, who was one of the same generation as the
+French King and Queen, died upon the 1st of March, 1792, and was
+succeeded by a son only twenty-four years of age and easily persuaded to
+war.</p>
+
+<p>On the French side, with the exception of the Mountain and notably of
+Robespierre, there was a curious coalition of opinion demanding war.</p>
+
+<p>The Court and the reactionaries were sufficiently certain of the victory
+of the Allies to find their salvation in war.</p>
+
+<p>The revolutionary party, that is, the mass of public opinion and the
+“patriots,” as they called themselves, the Girondins, also, and
+especially, desired war as a sort of crusade for<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span> the Revolution; they
+suffered grievous illusions, as enthusiasts always must, and believed
+the French armed forces capable of sustaining the shock. The plans had
+already been drawn up for the campaign (and promptly betrayed to the
+enemy by the Queen); Dumouriez, an excellent soldier, had from the
+middle of March 1792 been the chief person in the ministry, and the
+director of foreign affairs, and a month later, on the 20th of April,
+war was declared against Austria, or, to be accurate, against “the King
+of Hungary and Bohemia.”</p>
+
+<p>Such was still the official title of Marie Antoinette’s nephew, who,
+though now succeeded to the empire, had not yet been crowned emperor. It
+was hoped to confine the war to this monarch, and, indeed, the German
+princes of the empire did not join him (the Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel
+was an exception). But the one German power that counted most, the
+kingdom of Prussia, which Dumouriez had especially hoped to keep
+neutral, joined forces with Austria. The royal letters had done their
+work.</p>
+
+<p>At this critical moment the French armed forces and the French
+strongholds were at their worst. The discipline of the army was
+deplorable. The regular soldiers of the old <i>régime</i> had lost from six
+to nine thousand officers by emigration, and mixed no better than water
+and oil with the revolutionary volunteers who had been drafted (to the
+number of over two hundred battalions) into the ranks of the army;
+moreover, these<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span> volunteer battalions were for the most part ill
+provided, far below their establishment, some only existed on paper;
+none were trained as soldiers should be trained. In a more orderly time,
+when the decrees of the Government corresponded with reality, four
+hundred thousand men would have held the frontier; such a number was in
+the estimates. As it was, from the Swiss mountains to the English
+Channel, the French could count on no more than <i>one-fifth</i> of that
+number. Eighty thousand alone were under arms. The full Prussian army
+was, alone, apart from its allies, close upon treble the size of this
+disorganised and insufficient force.</p>
+
+<p>Panics at once ludicrous and tragic opened the campaign upon the French
+side. The King took advantage of them to dismiss his Girondin Ministry
+and to form a reactionary Government. The Parliament replied by measures
+useless to the conduct of war, and designed only to exasperate the
+Crown, which was betraying the nation. It ordered the dismissal of the
+royal Guard, the formation of a camp of revolutionary Federals outside
+Paris, the transportation of the orthodox priests; in pursuit of the
+Court’s determination to resist the Assembly and to await the victorious
+allies, Louis vetoed the last two decrees. La Fayette, who was now in
+command of the army of the centre, with his headquarters at Sedan, right
+upon the route of the invasion, declared for the King.</p>
+
+<p>Had the armies of Austria and Prussia moved with rapidity at this
+moment, the Revolution was at an end. As it was, their<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span> mobilisation was
+slow, and their march, though accurate, leisurely. It gave time for the
+populace of Paris to demonstrate against the palace and the royal family
+on the 20th of June. It was not until the first days of August that the
+main force of the combined monarchs, under the generalship-in-chief of
+the Duke of Brunswick (who had the reputation of being the best general
+of his time), set out for the march on Paris. It was not until the 23rd
+of August that the invaders took the first French frontier town, Longwy.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile two very important things had lent to the French, in spite of
+the wretched insufficiency of their armed force, an intensity of feeling
+which did something to supply that insufficiency. In the first place,
+the third anniversary of the Fall of the Bastille, the 14th of July, had
+called to Paris deputations from all the provinces, many of them armed;
+this gave the national feeling unity. In the second place, Brunswick had
+issued from Coblentz, which was his base, upon the 25th of that same
+month of July, a manifesto which was known in Paris three days later,
+and which (though certain modern historians have questioned this)
+undoubtedly set revolutionary opinion ablaze.</p>
+
+<p>This manifesto demanded, in the name of the Allied Army, a complete
+restoration of the old <i>régime</i>, professed to treat the French and their
+new authorities as rebels subject to military execution, and contained a
+clause of peculiar gravity, which excited an immediate and exasperated
+response from Paris. The authorship of this clause lay with Marie<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span>
+Antoinette, and it threatened, if there were any attack upon the palace,
+to give the capital over to military execution and total subversion.</p>
+
+<p>Two days later the Federals from Marseilles, a middle-class body of
+excellent citizens, though merely amateurs at soldiering and small in
+numbers, marched into the city. Their marching song has become famous
+under the title of the “Marseillaise.” They had accomplished the
+astonishing feat of traversing France, drawing cannon with them, at the
+rate of eighteen miles a day, in the height of a torrid summer, for
+close upon a month on end. There is no parallel to such an effort in the
+history of war, nor did contemporary opinion exaggerate when it saw in
+the battalion of Marseilles the centre of the coming fight.</p>
+
+<p>The shock between the palace and the populace was joined in the morning
+of the 10th of August. The palace was held by about six thousand men,<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a>
+of whom some twelve hundred were regulars of the Swiss Guard. The palace
+(the Tuileries) was, or should have been, impregnable. The popular
+attack, we may be certain, would have been beaten back had the
+connection between the Tuileries and the Louvre on the south been
+properly cut. The flooring had indeed been removed at this point for
+some distance, but either the gap was not wide enough or the post was
+insufficiently guarded; the populace and the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span> Federals, badly beaten in
+their main attack upon the long front of the palace, succeeded in
+turning its flank where it joined on to the Louvre; they thus enfiladed
+the suites of rooms and utterly put an end to the resistance of its
+garrison.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile the King and Queen, the Dauphin and his little sister, with
+others of the royal household, had taken refuge during the fighting in
+the hall of the Parliament.</p>
+
+<p>After the victory of the populace their fate was debated and decided
+upon; they were imprisoned in the Tower of the Temple, a mediæval
+fortress still standing in the north-east of Paris, and though monarchy
+was not yet formally abolished, the most extreme spirits which the
+Revolution then contained, and the most vigorous, stepped into the place
+of the old Executive, with Danton at their head. With them appeared in
+the seat of Government the spirit of military action, its contempt for
+forms and its rapid decision. The known accomplices of the supporters of
+the Court’s resistance and alliance with the invaders were arrested by
+the hundred. The enrolment of volunteers, already enthusiastic
+throughout France, was supported with the new vigour of official aid;
+and the Revolution left at once all its old moorings to enter an extreme
+phase. At the same moment the frontier was crossed and the national soil
+invaded on the 19th of August.</p>
+
+<p>It is possible that the delay of the Prussians until that moment had
+been calculated, for the position in France was complicated and their
+decision to fight had been tardily arrived<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span> at. It was the news of the
+fall of the palace that seems to have decided them. The place, like the
+date, of this grave event, deserves to be more famous than it is.
+Brunswick touched what was then French soil, in that little triangle
+where now German and French Lorraine and Luxembourg meet. The village is
+called Redange: thence did the privileged of Europe set out to reach
+Paris and to destroy democracy. The first task occupied them for full
+twenty-two years, upon the latter they are still engaged.</p>
+
+<p>What forces the French could there bring against Brunswick were
+contemptuously brushed aside. Four days later he had, as we have seen,
+taken the frontier stronghold of Longwy; within a week he was in front
+of Verdun.</p>
+
+<p>Verdun had no chance of resistance, no garrison to call a garrison, and
+no opportunity for defence. The news that it must fall reached Paris on
+the morning of a fatal date, the 2nd of September; after its fall there
+would lie nothing between it and the capital; and from that moment the
+whole nature of the Revolution is wholly transformed by the
+psychological effect of war.</p>
+
+
+<h3><a name="IV_5" id="IV_5"></a>V<br />
+<small><i>From the invasion of September 1792 to the establishment of the
+Committee of Public Safety, April 1793.</i></small></h3>
+
+<p>The fifth phase of the French Revolution may be said to date from these
+first days of<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span> September 1792, when the news of the successful invasion
+was maddening Paris, and when the revolutionary Executive, established
+upon the ruins of the old dead monarchy and in its image, was firmly in
+the saddle, up to the establishment of the yet more monarchical
+“Committee of Public Safety,” seven months later. And these seven months
+may be characterised as follows:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>They were a period during which it was attempted to carry on the
+revolutionary war against the Governments of Europe upon democratic
+principles. The attempt failed. In the place of discipline and
+comprehension and foresight the rising and intense enthusiasm of the
+moment was depended upon for victory. The pure ideal of the Girondin
+faction, with the model republic which it hoped to establish, proved
+wholly insufficient for the conduct of a war; and to save the nation
+from foreign conquest and the great democratic experiment of the
+Revolution from disaster, it was necessary that the military and
+disciplined side of the French, with all the tyranny that accompanies
+that aspect of their national genius, should undertake the completion of
+the adventure.</p>
+
+<p>This period opens with what are called the Massacres of September. I
+have said upon a former page that “the known accomplices and supporters
+of the Court’s alliance with the invaders were arrested by the hundred,”
+upon the fall of the palace and the establishment of a revolutionary
+Executive with Danton at its head.</p>
+
+<p>These prisoners, massed in the jails of the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span> city, were massacred to the
+number of eleven hundred by a small but organised band of assassins
+during the days when the news of the fall of Verdun was expected and
+reached the capital. Such a crime appalled the public conscience of
+Europe and of the French people. It must never be confused with the
+judicial and military acts of the Terror, nor with the reprisals
+undertaken against rebellion, nor with the gross excesses of mob
+violence; for though votes in favour of the immediate execution of those
+who had sided with the enemies of the country were passed in certain
+primary assemblies, the act itself was the mechanical, deliberate and
+voluntary choice of a few determined men. It had, therefore, a character
+of its own, and that character made it stand out for its contemporaries
+as it should stand out for us: it was murder.</p>
+
+<p>The prisoners were unarmed&mdash;nay, though treasonable, they had not
+actually taken arms; their destruction was inspired, in most of those
+who ordered it, by mere hatred. Those who ordered it were a small
+committee acting spontaneously, and Marat was their chief.<a name="FNanchor_4_4" id="FNanchor_4_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It was under the impression of these massacres that the Deputies of the
+new or third Assembly of the Revolution, known to history as <i>The
+Convention</i>, met in Paris.</p>
+
+<p>This Parliament was to be at first the actual, later the nominal
+governing power in France during the three critical years that followed;
+years which were the military salvation of the Revolution, and which
+therefore permitted the establishment of the democratic experiment in
+modern Europe.</p>
+
+<p>It was on the 20th of September that the Convention met for its first
+sitting, which was held in the palace of the Tuileries. During the hours
+of that day, while it was electing its officials, choosing its Speaker
+and the rest, the French Army upon the frontier, to its own astonishment
+and to that of its enemy, managed to hold in check at the cannonade of
+<i>Valmy</i> the allied invaders.</p>
+
+<p>Upon the morrow the new Assembly met in the riding school (the Manège),
+where the two former Assemblies had also sat. It was about to separate
+after that day’s sitting when one of the members proposed the abolition
+of Royalty; the Convention voted the reform unanimously and dispersed.</p>
+
+<p>On the third day, the 22nd of September, it was decreed that the public
+documents should henceforward bear the date “First Year of the
+Republic”; but there was no solemnity on the occasion; the idea of “No
+King” was novel and untried; there was as yet no enthusiasm for any save
+the monarchic form of government. It was not until the title “Republic”
+began to connote in men’s<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span> minds political liberty, and had become also
+the flag, as it were, for the victorious national defence, that the
+Republican name acquired in our Europe, and from France, that strong and
+almost religious force which it has since retained.</p>
+
+<p>The check given to the invaders at Valmy (again to the astonishment of
+both soldiers and statesmen!) determined the campaign. Sickness and the
+difficulty of communications made the further advance of the invaders
+impossible. They negotiated for and obtained an unmolested retreat, and
+a few weeks later they had re-crossed the frontier.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, in Paris the great quarrel had begun between the Municipal
+and the National Government, which, because Paris was more decided, more
+revolutionary, and, above all, more military in temper than the
+Parliament, was destined to terminate in the victory of the capital. The
+Girondins still stood in the Assembly for an ideal republic; a republic
+enjoying to the utmost limit individual liberty in its citizens and the
+autonomy of local government in every city and parish; but opposed to
+this ideal, and far more national, was that of the revolutionary
+extremists, called in the Convention “the Mountain,” who had the support
+of the Municipal Government of Paris (known as “the Commune”), and were
+capable of French victories in the field. These stood for the old French
+and soldierly conception of a strong central Government, wherewith to
+carry on the life-and-death struggle into which the Revolution had now
+entered: therefore they conquered.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>All that autumn the quarrel between France and Europe remained doubtful,
+for though the armies of the Republic under Dumouriez won the battle of
+Jemappes, swept across the north-eastern frontier and occupied Belgium,
+while to the south another French army swept right up to the Rhine,
+Dumouriez himself knew well enough that a campaign undertaken merely
+upon enthusiasm, and with troops so mixed in character and many of them
+so undisciplined, would end fatally. But until the advent of the new
+year public opinion was not instructed upon these lines, and the
+revolutionary war seemed to have passed suddenly from the defence of the
+national territory to a crusade against the kings and the aristocratic
+Governments of Europe. Enthusiasm, and enthusiasm alone, was the force
+of the moment. Violent decrees such as the Declaration of Fraternity
+(which decreed an alliance with all people struggling to be free) and
+the opening of the Scheldt (a direct violation of treaty rights to which
+England, among other nations, was a partner) were characteristic of the
+moment; chief act of all, the King was put upon his trial at the bar of
+the Parliament.</p>
+
+<p>It was upon the 4th of January, 1793 (the King had already made his will
+upon Christmas Day), that the chief orator of the Girondins moved that
+the sentence should be referred to the people for ratification. The fear
+of civil war more than anything else forbade this just suggestion to
+pass. Upon the 15th of January the question was put to the Parliament,
+“whether the King had been<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span> guilty of conspiring against public liberty
+and of attempting the general safety of the State.” Many were absent and
+many abstained: none replied in the negative; the condemnation of Louis
+was therefore technically almost a unanimous one.</p>
+
+<p>The voting on these grave issues was what the French call “nominal”:
+that is, each member was called upon “by name” to give his vote&mdash;and an
+expression of opinion as well if he so chose. A second attempt to appeal
+to the people was rejected by 424 to 283. On the third question, which
+was the decisive one of the penalty, 721 only could be found to vote,
+and of these a bare majority of 53 declared for death as against the
+minority, of whom some voted for the death penalty “conditionally”&mdash;that
+is, not at all&mdash;or voted against it. A respite was lost by a majority of
+70; and on the 21st of January, 1793, at about ten in the morning, Louis
+XVI was guillotined.</p>
+
+<p>Then followed war with England, with Holland, and with Spain; and almost
+at that moment began the inevitable reflux of the military tide. For the
+French eruption up to the Rhine in the Low Countries and the Palatinate,
+had no permanent military basis upon which to depend. Dumouriez began to
+retreat a month after the King’s execution, and on the 18th of March
+suffered a decisive defeat at Neerwinden. It was this retreat, followed
+by that disaster, which decided the fate of the Girondin attempt to
+found a republic ideally, individually, and locally free. Already,
+before the battle of Neerwinden<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span> was fought, Danton, no longer a
+minister, but still the most powerful orator in the Convention, proposed
+a special court for trying cases of treason&mdash;a court which was later
+called “the Revolutionary Tribunal.” The news of Neerwinden prepared the
+way for a stronger measure and some exceptional form of government; a
+special Parliamentary committee already formed for the control of
+ministers was strengthened when, on the 5th of April, after some
+negotiation and doubt, Dumouriez, despairing of the armies of the
+Republic, thought to ally his forces with the invaders and to restore
+order. His soldiers refused to follow him; his treason was apparent;
+upon the morrow the Convention nominated that first “Committee of Public
+Safety” which, with its successor of the same name, was henceforward the
+true despotic and military centre of revolutionary government. It was
+granted secrecy in deliberation, the virtual though not the theoretic
+control of the Ministry, sums of money for secret expenditure, and, in a
+word, all the machinery necessary to a military executive. Rousseau’s
+<i>Dictator</i> had appeared, the great mind which had given the <i>Contrat
+Social</i> to be the gospel of the Revolution had also foreseen one of the
+necessary organs of democracy in its hardest trial; his theory had been
+proved necessary and true in fact. Nine members formed this first
+Committee: Barère, who may be called the clerk of it, Danton its genius,
+and Cambon its financier, were the leading names.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>With the establishment of this truly national and traditional thing,
+whose form alone was novel, but whose power and method were native to
+all the military tradition of Gaul, the Revolution was saved. We have
+now chiefly to follow the way in which the Committee governed and in
+which it directed affairs in the great crisis of the war. This sixth
+phase lasts for nearly sixteen months, from the beginning of April 1793
+to the 28th of July 1794, and it is convenient to divide those sixteen
+months into two divisions.</p>
+
+
+<h3><a name="IV_6" id="IV_6"></a>VI<br />
+<small><i>From April 1793 to July 1794.</i></small></h3>
+
+<p>The first division of this period, which ends in the height of the
+summer of 1793, is the gradual consolidation of the Committee as a new
+organ of government and the peril of destruction which it runs, in
+common with the nation it governs at the hands of allied Europe.</p>
+
+<p>The second period includes part of August and all the rest of 1793, and
+the first seven months of 1794, during which time the Committee is
+successful in its military effort, the nation is saved, and in a manner
+curiously dramatic and curiously inconsequential, the martial <i>régime</i>
+of the Terror abruptly ceases.</p>
+
+<p>The first step in the consolidation of the power of the Committee was
+their letting loose of the Commune of Paris and the populace it governed
+against the Girondins.</p>
+
+<p>Looked at merely from the point of view of<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span> internal politics (upon
+which most historians have concentrated) the attack of the populace of
+Paris and their Commune against the Parliament seems to be no more than
+the end of the long quarrel between the Girondins with their ideal
+federal republic, and the capital with its instinct for strong
+centralised government. But in the light of the military situation, of
+which the Committee of Public Safety were vividly aware, and which it
+was their business to control, a very different tale may be told.</p>
+
+<p>When the defeats began the Parliament had voted a levy of three hundred
+thousand men. It was a mere vote which came to very little: not enough
+in numbers and still less in moral, for the type of troops recruited
+under a system of money forfeit and purchased substitutes was wholly
+beneath the task of the great war.</p>
+
+<p>This law of conscription had been passed upon the 24th of February. The
+date for its first application was, in many villages, fixed for the 10th
+of March. All that country which borders the estuary of the Loire, to
+the north and to the south, a country whose geographical and political
+peculiarities need not here detain us, but which is still curiously
+individual, began to resist. The decree was unpopular everywhere, of
+course, as military service is everywhere unpopular with a settled
+population. But here it had no ally, for the Revolution and all its
+works were grossly unpopular as well. The error of the Civil
+Constitution of the Clergy was a powerful factor in this revolt. The
+piety and the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span> orthodoxy of this district were and are exceptional. Some
+such resistance in some such quarter was perhaps expected: what was not
+expected was its military success.</p>
+
+<p>Four days before the defeat of Neerwinden itself, and four days after
+the decree of conscription in the villages, a horde of peasantry had
+taken possession of the town of Chollet in the southern part of this
+district, Vendée. Three days before the Committee of Public Safety was
+formed the insurgents had defeated regular forces at Machecoul, and had
+tortured and put to death their prisoners. The month of April, when the
+Committee of Public Safety was first finding its seat in the saddle, saw
+the complete success of the rebels. The forces sent against them were
+worthless, for all military effort had been concentrated upon the
+frontier. Most of them were not even what we should call militia. A
+small force of regulars was to have moved from Orleans, but, before they
+could attack, Thouars, Parthenay, and Fontenay fell into the power of
+the rebels. These posts afforded an advanced triangle right into the
+regularly administered territory of the Republic: the great town of
+Nantes was outflanked. Even in such a moment the Girondins still clung
+to their ideal: an individually free and locally autonomous republic. It
+is little wonder that the temper of Paris refused to support them, or
+their influence over the Parliament, and we can easily understand how
+the new Committee supported Paris in its revolt.</p>
+
+<p>That revolt took place on the 31st of May.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span> The forces under the command
+of the capital did not march, but a deputation of the sections of Paris
+demanded the arrest of the leading Girondins. The body of the debating
+hall was invaded by the mob. The Committee of Public Safety pretended to
+compromise between Paris and the Parliament, but a document, recently
+analysed, sufficiently proves that their sympathy was with the Parisian
+attack. They proposed, indeed, to put the armed force of Paris at the
+disposition of the Assembly: that is, in their own hands.</p>
+
+<p>That day nothing of moment was done, but the Parliament had proved of no
+strength in the face of the capital. On the frontier the advance of the
+invaders had begun. The great barrier fortress of Valenciennes relied
+for its defence upon the neighbouring camp of Famars. The garrison of
+that camp had been compelled to evacuate it by the advance of the Allied
+Army upon the 23rd of May, and though some days were to be spent before
+the heavy artillery of the Austrians could be emplaced, Valenciennes was
+henceforward at the mercy of its besiegers. There was news that La
+Vendée was not the only rebellion. Lyons had risen three days before.
+There had been heavy fighting. The Royalists and the Girondins had
+combined and had carried the town hall and established an
+insurrectionary and unelected Municipal Government. Such news, coming
+immediately after the 31st of May, roused the capital to action. This
+time the Parisian forces actually marched against the Parliament.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span> The
+demand for the suspension of the twenty-two named Girondin deputies was
+made under arms. Much has been written, and by the best historians, to
+make of this successful day a mere conquest by the Commune of Paris over
+the Parliament. Though Barère and Danton both protested in public, it
+was in reality their politics that conquered with Paris. To the
+twenty-two names that the forces of Paris had listed, seven were added.
+The great Girondins, Brissot, Vergniaud and the rest, were not indeed
+imprisoned, they were considered “under arrest in their houses.” But the
+moral authority of the Convention as an administrative machine, not as a
+legislative one, was broken on this day, the 2nd of June, 1793. Paris
+had ostensibly conquered, but the master who was stronger than ever and
+whom Paris had served, was the Committee of Public Safety.</p>
+
+<p>This first Committee of Public Safety endured to the 10th of July. In
+the midst of such a war and of such an internal struggle the Convention
+had voted (upon the initiative of the Committee of Public Safety) the
+famous Constitution of ’93, that prime document of democracy which, as
+though to mock its own ideal, has remained no more than a written thing
+from then until now. Therein will be found universal suffrage, therein
+the yearly Parliament, therein the referendum, therein the elected
+Executive&mdash;a thing no Parliament would ever give us to-day. The
+Constitution was passed but three weeks<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span> after the successful
+insurrection of Paris. A fortnight later still, on the 10th of July, the
+first of the Committees of Public Safety was followed by its successor.</p>
+
+<p>All this while the Vendeans were advancing. Nantes, indeed, had held out
+against the rebels, but as we shall see in a moment, the Republican
+troops had not yet made themselves good. The rebellion of Lyons was
+fortifying itself, and a week later was to execute the Radical Chalier.
+Marseilles was rising. On the 10th of July the Convention summoned to
+its bar Westermann, the friend of Danton, who had just suffered defeat
+at the hands of the western rebels.</p>
+
+<p>It is well to note at this point one of those small individual factors
+which determine the fate of States. Danton, the master of all that first
+movement towards centralisation, the man who had made the 10th of
+August, who had negotiated with the Prussians after Valmy, who had
+determined upon and formed a central government against the Girondin
+anarchy&mdash;had broken down. His health was gone. He was a giant in body,
+but for the moment he had tired himself out.</p>
+
+<p>The renewing of his Committee was proposed: he was thrust out from the
+new choice. Barère remained to link the old Committee with the new. A
+violent sectarian Calvinist pastor, Jeanbon Saint-André, among the
+bravest and most warped of the Revolutionaries; Couthon, a friend of
+Robespierre; Saint-Just, a still more intimate friend (a young,
+handsome, enormously courageous<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span> and decisive man), entered, with others
+to the number of nine, the new Committee. Seventeen days later, on the
+27th of July, Robespierre replaced one of the minor members thus chosen.
+He had precisely a year to live, and it is the moment for fixing before
+the reader’s mind the nature of his career.</p>
+
+<p>Robespierre was at this moment the chief figure in the eyes of the
+crowd, and was soon to be the chief revolutionary figure in the eyes of
+Europe: that is the first point. The second is of equal importance, and
+is far less generally recognised. He was not, and was never destined to
+be, the chief force in the revolutionary Government.</p>
+
+<p>As to the first point, Robespierre had attained this position from the
+following combination of circumstances: first, alone of the
+revolutionary personalities, he had been continually before the public
+eye from the beginning; he had been a member of the first Parliament of
+all and had spoken in that Parliament in the first month of its
+sessions. Though then obscure in Versailles, he was already well known
+in his province and native town of Arras.</p>
+
+<p>Secondly, this position of his in the public eye was maintained without
+a break, and his position and reputation had increased by accumulation
+month after month for the whole four years. No one else was left in the
+political arena of whom this could be said. All the old reactionaries
+had gone, all the moderate men had gone; the figures of 1793 were all
+new figures&mdash;except Robespierre;<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span> and he owed this continued and steady
+increase of fame to:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Thirdly, his conspicuous and vivid sincerity. He was more wholly
+possessed of the democratic faith of the <i>Contrat Social</i> than any other
+man of his time: he had never swerved from an article of it. There is no
+better engine for enduring fame than the expression of real convictions.
+Moreover&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Fourthly, his speeches exactly echoed the opinions of his audience, and
+echoed them with a lucidity which his audience could not have commanded.
+Whether he possessed true eloquence or no is a matter still debated by
+those who are scholars in French letters. But it is certain that he had
+in his own time all the effects of a great orator, though his manner was
+precise and cold.</p>
+
+<p>Fifthly, he was possessed of a consistent body of doctrine: that is, he
+was not only convinced of the general democratic creed which his
+contemporaries held, and he not only held it unswervingly and
+uncorruptedly, but he could supplement it with a system of morals and
+even something which was the adumbration of religion.</p>
+
+<p>Sixthly, he had, as such characters always can, but not often do, gather
+round themselves, a group of intensely devoted personal admirers and
+supporters, chief of whom was the young and splendidly courageous
+Saint-Just.</p>
+
+<p>It was the combination of all these things, I say, which made
+Robespierre the chief<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span> personality in the public eye when he entered the
+Committee of Public Safety on the 27th of July, 1793.</p>
+
+<p>Now let it be noted that, unlike his follower Saint-Just, and
+exceedingly unlike Danton, Robespierre possessed none of those military
+qualities without which it is impossible to be responsible for
+government over a military nation&mdash;especially if that nation be in the
+act of war: and such a war! The Committee of Public Safety was the Cæsar
+of revolutionary France. Robespierre as a member of that Cæsar was
+hopeless. His popularity was an advantage to his colleagues in the
+Committee, but his conception of action upon the frontiers was vague,
+personal, and futile. His ambition for leadership, if it existed, was
+subordinate to his ambition to be the saviour of his people and of their
+democratic experiment, and he had no comprehension of those functions of
+leadership by which it can co-ordinate detail and impose a plan of
+action. Robespierre, therefore, in every crisis of the last year we are
+about to study, yielded to his colleagues, never impressed them and
+never led them, and yet (it was the irony of his fate) was imagined by
+his fellow countrymen and by the warring Governments of Europe to be the
+master of them all.</p>
+
+<p>The first weeks after his appearance in the Committee of Public Safety
+were the critical weeks of the whole revolutionary movement. The
+despotic action of Paris (which I have concluded to be secretly
+supported<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span> by the Committee)<a name="FNanchor_5_5" id="FNanchor_5_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a> had provoked insurrection upon all sides
+in the provinces. Normandy had protested, and on the 13th of July a
+Norman girl stabbed Marat to death. Lyons, as we have seen, had been
+some weeks in revolt; Marseilles had rebelled in the first week of June,
+Bordeaux and the whole department of the Gironde had of course risen,
+for their men were at stake. Later Toulon, the great naval depot of
+France, revolted: a reactionary municipal provincial Government was
+formed in that port, the little boy imprisoned in the Temple, heir to
+the kingdom, was proclaimed under the title of Louis XVII, and before
+the end of August the English and Spanish fleets had been admitted into
+the harbour and an excellent foreign garrison was defending the town
+against the national Government.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile the Allies upon the Belgian frontier were doing what they
+could, taking fortress after fortress, and while Mayence was falling on
+the Rhine, Valenciennes and Condé were capitulating on the north-eastern
+border, and a portion of the Allied Army was marching to besiege
+Dunquerque. The insurrection in Vendée, which had broken out in the
+early part of the year, though<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span> checked by the resistance of Nantes, was
+still successful in the field.</p>
+
+<p>It was in the month of August that a successful effort was made. Carnot,
+who soon proved the military genius of the Revolution, entered the
+Committee of Public Safety. On the 23rd of the month a true levy, very
+different from the futile and insufficiently applied attempt of the
+spring, was forced upon the nation by a vote in Parliament. It was a
+levy of men, vehicles, animals and provision, and soon furnished
+something not far short of half a million soldiers. With September the
+tide turned, the first victory in this crisis of the struggle,
+Hoondschoote, relieved Dunquerque in the early days of September. By
+mid-October a second and decisive victory, that of Wattignies, relieved
+Maubeuge. Lyons had been taken, Normandy was pacified long before; by
+the end of the year Toulon was reoccupied, and at the same time the last
+cohesive force of the Vendeans destroyed.</p>
+
+<p>But meanwhile the crisis had had a double effect, moral and material.
+The moral effect had been a sort of national madness in which the most
+extreme measures were proposed and many of them carried through with
+what one may call a creative audacity. The calendar itself was changed,
+the week itself abolished, the months re-named and re-adjusted. Such an
+act sufficiently symbolises the mental attitude of the Revolutionaries.
+They were determined upon a new earth.</p>
+
+<p>There went with this the last and most<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span> violent attack upon what was
+believed to be the last remnants of Catholicism in the country, a
+hideous persecution of the priesthood, in which an uncounted number of
+priests died under the rigours of transportation or of violence. The
+reprisals against the rebels varied from severity of the most awful kind
+to cruelty that was clearly insane, and of which the worst examples took
+place at Arras and at Nantes.</p>
+
+<p>In all this turmoil the governing centre of the country, the Committee
+of Public Safety, not only kept its head but used the enormous forces of
+the storm for the purposes of achieving military success, under that
+system known as “the Terror,” which was for them no more than martial
+law, and an engine of their despotic control. Of the two thousand and
+more that passed before the revolutionary tribunal and were executed in
+Paris, the large majority were those whom the Committee of Public Safety
+judged to be obstacles to their military policy; and most were men or
+women who had broken some specific part of the martial code which the
+Government had laid down. Some were generals who had failed or were
+suspected of treason; and some, among the most conspicuous, were
+politicians who had attempted to check so absolute a method of
+conducting the war.</p>
+
+<p>Of these the greatest was Danton. Before the end of 1793 he began to
+protest against the system of the Terror; he believed, perhaps, that the
+country was now safe in the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span> military sense and needed such rigours no
+more. But the Committee disagreed, and were evidence available we should
+perceive that Carnot in particular determined that such opposition must
+cease. Danton and his colleagues&mdash;including Desmoulins, the journalist
+of the Revolution and the chief publicist who promoted the days of July
+1789&mdash;were executed in the first week of April 1794.</p>
+
+<p>Parallel to this action on the part of the Committee was their sudden
+attack upon men of the other extreme: the men whose violence, excessive
+even for that time, threatened to provoke reaction. Hébert was the chief
+of these, the spokesman of the Commune of Paris; and he also perished.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile the Committee had permitted other persecutions and other
+deaths, notably that of the Queen. A sane policy would have demanded
+that she should be kept a hostage: she was sacrificed to the desire for
+vengeance, and her head fell on the same day on which the decisive
+battle of Wattignies was won. Later the King’s sister, Madame Elisabeth,
+was sacrificed to the same passions, and with her must be counted a
+certain proportion of the victims whose destruction could be no part of
+the Committee’s scheme, and proceeded purely from the motives of an
+ancient hatred, though in the case of many of these who were of
+aristocratic birth or of influence through their wealth, it is not easy
+to determine how far the possibility of their intrigue with the
+foreigner may not have led them to the scaffold.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In the last four months of the period we are considering in this book,
+through April, that is, after the execution of Danton, through May and
+June and almost to the end of July, Robespierre appears with a
+particular prominence. Fads or doctrines of his own are admitted upon
+the Statute Book of the Revolution, notably his religious dogmas of a
+personal God and of the immortality of the soul. Nay, a public solemnity
+is arranged in honour of such matters, and he is the high priest
+therein. The intensity of the idolatry he received was never greater;
+the numbers that shared it were, perhaps, diminishing. It is certain
+that he did not appreciate how far the supports of his great popularity
+were failing. It is certain that he saw only the increasing enthusiasm
+of his immediate followers. The Committee still used him as their
+tool&mdash;notably for an increase of the Terror in June, but it is possible
+that for the first time in all these months he began to attempt some
+sort of authority within the Committee: we know, for instance, that he
+quarrelled with Carnot, who was easily the strongest man therein.</p>
+
+<p>In the past they had permitted him to indulge a private policy where it
+did not interfere with the general military plan. He was largely
+responsible, not through his own judgment but from his desire to voice
+opinion, for the trial and execution of the Queen. He had temporised
+when Danton was beginning his campaign against the Terror at the end of
+1793, and it is an ineffaceable<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span> blot upon his memory and his justly
+earned reputation for integrity and sincerity, that he first permitted
+and then helped towards Danton’s execution. We may presume from the few
+indications we have that he protested against it in the secret counsels
+of the Committee, but he had yielded, and what is more, since Saint-Just
+desired to be Danton’s accuser he had furnished Saint-Just with notes
+against Danton. Though it was the Committee who were morally responsible
+for the extreme extension of the Terror which proceeded during those
+last few months, Robespierre had the unwisdom to act as their
+instrument, to draft their last decrees, and, believing the Terror to be
+popular, to support it in public. It was this that ruined him. The
+extreme Terrorists, those who were not yet satiated with vengeance, and
+who hated and feared a popular idol, determined to overthrow him.</p>
+
+<p>The mass of those who might be the next victims and who, knowing nothing
+of the secret councils of the Committee, imagined Robespierre to be what
+he posed as being, the master of the Committee, were eager for his
+removal. In his fictitious character as the supposed chief power in the
+State, all the growing nausea against the Terror was directed against
+his person.</p>
+
+<p>Coincidently with such forces, the Committee, whom, relying upon his
+public position, he had begun to interfere with, and probably to check
+in their military action (he certainly had attempted unsuccessfully to
+save certain lives against the decision of his colleagues),<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span> determined
+to be rid of him. The crisis came in the fourth week of July: or as the
+revolutionary calendar then went, in the second week of Thermidor. He
+was howled down in the Parliament, an active and clever conspiracy had
+organised all the latent forces of opposition to him; he still so
+trusted in his popularity that the scene bewildered him, and he was
+still so beloved and so ardently followed, that when at that same
+sitting he was outlawed, his brother sacrificed himself to follow him.
+Saint-Just was included in the sentence, and his strict friend Lebas
+voluntarily accepted the same doom.</p>
+
+<p>What followed was at first a confusion of authority; put under arrest,
+the governor of the prison to which Robespierre was dispatched refused
+to receive him. He and his sympathisers met in the Hôtel de Ville after
+the fall of darkness, and an attempt was made to provoke an
+insurrection. There are many and confused accounts of what immediately
+followed at midnight, but two things are certain: the populace refused
+to rise for Robespierre, and the Parliament, with the Committee at its
+back, organised an armed force which easily had the better of the
+incipient rebellion at the Hôtel de Ville. It is probable that
+Robespierre’s signature was needed to the proclamation of insurrection:
+it is certain that he did not complete it, and presumable that he would
+not act against all his own theories of popular sovereignty and the
+general will. As he sat there with the paper before him and his<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span>
+signature still unfinished, the armed force of the Parliament burst into
+the room, a lad of the name of Merda aimed a pistol from the door at
+Robespierre, and shot him in the jaw. (The evidence in favour of this
+version is conclusive.) Of his companions, some fled and were captured,
+some killed themselves, most were arrested. The next day, the 10th
+Thermidor, or 28th of July, 1794, at half-past seven in the evening,
+Robespierre, with twenty-one others, was guillotined.</p>
+
+<p>The irony of history would have it that the fall of this man, which was
+chiefly due to his interference with the system of the Terror, broke all
+the moral force upon which the Terror itself had resided; for men had
+imagined that the Terror was his work, and that, he gone, no excuse was
+left for it. A reaction began which makes of this date the true term in
+that ascending series of revolutionary effort which had by then
+discussed every aspect of democracy, succeeded in the military defence
+of that experiment, and laid down, though so far in words only, the
+basis of the modern State.</p>
+
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> The reader should be warned that these numbers are hotly
+disputed. The latest authority will allow no more than 4000. After a
+full consultation of the evidence I can reduce the garrison to no less
+than 6000.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_4" id="Footnote_4_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_4"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> The legend that Danton was connected with the massacres is
+based on insufficient historical foundation. There are several second or
+third hand stories in support of it, but the chief positive evidence
+brought forward in this connection is the stamped paper of the Minister
+of Justice which, it has been amply proved by Dr. Robinet, was taken by
+a subordinate and without Danton’s knowledge or complicity. To the much
+stupider story that the Federals of Marseilles took part in the
+massacres, the modern student need pay no attention; it has been
+destroyed piecemeal and on indefeasible documentary evidence in the
+monograph of Pollio and Marcel.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_5" id="Footnote_5_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_5"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> On p. 403 of my monograph on Danton (Nisbet &amp; Co., 1899)
+the reader will find an unpublished report of the Committee of Public
+Safety, drawn up immediately before the destruction of the Girondins on
+the 31st of May. It forms, in my view, conclusive evidence, read in the
+light of their other actions, of the Committee’s determination to side
+with Paris.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="V" id="V"></a>V<br /><br />
+<small>THE MILITARY ASPECT OF THE REVOLUTION</small></h2>
+
+
+<p><span class="sc">The</span> Revolution would never have achieved its object: on the contrary, it
+would have led to no less than a violent reaction against<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span> those
+principles which were maturing before it broke out, and which it carried
+to triumph, had not the armies of revolutionary France proved successful
+in the field; but the grasping of this mere historic fact, I mean the
+success of the revolutionary armies, is unfortunately no simple matter.</p>
+
+<p>We all know that as a matter of fact the Revolution was, upon the whole,
+successful in imposing its view upon Europe. We all know that from that
+success as from a germ has proceeded, and is still proceeding, modern
+society. But the nature, the cause and the extent of the military
+success which alone made this possible, is widely ignored and still more
+widely misunderstood. No other signal military effort which achieved its
+object has in history ended in military disaster&mdash;yet this was the case
+with the revolutionary wars. After twenty years of advance, during which
+the ideas of the Revolution were sown throughout Western civilisation,
+and had time to take root, the armies of the Revolution stumbled into
+the vast trap or blunder of the Russian campaign; this was succeeded by
+the decisive defeat of the democratic armies at Leipsic, and the superb
+strategy of the campaign of 1814, the brilliant rally of what is called
+the Hundred Days, only served to emphasise the completeness of the
+apparent failure. For that masterly campaign was followed by Napoleon’s
+first abdication, that brilliant rally ended in Waterloo and the ruin of
+the French army. When we consider the spread of Grecian culture over<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span>
+the East by the parallel military triumph of Alexander, or the conquest
+of Gaul by the Roman armies under Cæsar, we are met by political
+phenomena and a political success no more striking than the success of
+the Revolution. The Revolution did as much by the sword as ever did
+Alexander or Cæsar, and as surely compelled one of the great
+transformations of Europe. But the fact that the great story can be read
+to a conclusion of defeat disturbs the mind of the student.</p>
+
+<p>Again, that element fatal to all accurate study of military history, the
+imputation of civilian virtues and motives, enters the mind of the
+reader with fatal facility when he studies the revolutionary wars.</p>
+
+<p>He is tempted to ascribe to the enthusiasm of the troops, nay, to the
+political movement itself, a sort of miraculous power. He is apt to use
+with regard to the revolutionary victories the word “inevitable,” which,
+if ever it applies to the reasoned, willing and conscious action of men,
+certainly applies least of all to men when they act as soldiers.</p>
+
+<p>There are three points which we must carefully bear in mind when we
+consider the military history of the Revolution.</p>
+
+<p>First, that it succeeded: the Revolution, regarded as the political
+motive of its armies, won.</p>
+
+<p>Secondly, that it succeeded through those military aptitudes and
+conditions which happened to accompany, but by no means necessarily
+accompanied, the strong convictions and the civic enthusiasm of the
+time.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Thirdly, that the element of chance, which every wise and prudent
+reasoner will very largely admit into all military affairs, worked in
+favour of the Revolution in the critical moments of the early wars.</p>
+
+<p>With these points fixed, and with a readiness to return to them when we
+have appreciated the military story, it is well to begin our study by
+telling that story briefly, and upon its most general lines. In so
+doing, it will be necessary to cover here and there points which have
+already been dealt with in this book, but that is inevitable where one
+is writing of the military aspect of any movement, for it is impossible
+to deal with that aspect save as a living part of the whole: so knit
+into national life is the business of war.</p>
+
+
+<h3><a name="V_1" id="V_1"></a>ONE</h3>
+
+<p>When the Revolution first approached action, the prospect of a war
+between France and any other great Power of the time&mdash;England, Prussia,
+the Empire, or let us say Russia, or even Spain&mdash;was such a prospect as
+might have been entertained at any time during the past two or three
+generations of men.</p>
+
+<p>For pretty well a hundred years men had been accustomed to the
+consideration of dynastic quarrels supported by a certain type of army,
+which in a moment I shall describe.</p>
+
+<p>I have called these quarrels dynastic; that is, they were mainly
+quarrels between the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span> ruling houses of Europe: were mainly motived by
+the desire of each ruling house to acquire greater territory and
+revenue, and were limited by the determination of all the ruling houses
+to maintain certain ideas inviolate, as, for instance, the sacredness of
+monarchy, the independence of individual States, etc. Though they were
+in the main dynastic, yet in proportion as a dynasty might represent a
+united nation, they were national also. The English oligarchy was in
+this respect peculiar and more national than any European Government of
+its time. It is also true to say that the Russian despotism had behind
+it, in most of its military adventures and in all its spirit of
+expansion, the subconscious agreement of the people.</p>
+
+<p>Still, however national, the wars of the time preceding the Revolution
+moved within a fixed framework of ideas, as it were, which no commander
+and no diplomatist dreamed of exceeding. A, the crowned head of a State,
+would have some claims against B, the crowned head of another State,
+with regard to certain territories. C, the crowned head or Government of
+a third State, would remain neutral or ally himself with either of the
+two; if he allied himself, then, as a rule, it was with the weaker
+against the stronger, in order to guarantee himself against too great an
+increase on the part of a rival. Or, again, a rebellion would break out
+against the power of A in some part of his dominions; then would B,
+somewhat reluctantly (as the almost unlimited right of an existing
+executive<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span> was still a strong dogma in men’s minds), tend to ally
+himself with the rebels in order to diminish the power of A.</p>
+
+<p>Human affairs have always in them very strongly and permanently
+inherent, the character of a sport: the interest (at any rate of males)
+in the conduct of human life is always largely an interest of seeing
+that certain rules are kept, and certain points won, according to those
+rules. We must, therefore, beware of ridiculing the warfare of the
+century preceding the Revolution under the epithet of “a game.” But it
+is true of that warfare, and honourably true, that it attempted limited
+things in a limited manner; it did not attempt any fundamental change in
+society; it was not overtly&mdash;since the Thirty Years’ War at least&mdash;a
+struggle of ideas; it was conducted on behalf of known and limited
+interests for known and highly limited objects, and the instruments with
+which it was conducted were instruments artificial and segregated from
+the general life of nations.</p>
+
+<p>These instruments were what have been called the “professional” armies.
+The term is very insufficient, and, in part, misleading. The gentry of
+the various Powers, mixed with whom were certain adventurers not always
+of gentle blood, were the officers that led these forces; and for the
+major part of the gentry in most European countries, the military career
+was the chief field of activity. The men whom they led were not a
+peasantry nor a working class, still less a civic force<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span> in which the
+middle class would find itself engaged: they were the poorest and the
+least settled, some would have said the dregs of European life. With the
+exception here and there of a man&mdash;usually a very young man whom the
+fabled romance of this hard but glorious trade had attracted&mdash;and with
+the exception of certain bodies that followed in a mass and by order the
+relics of a feudal lordship, the armies of the period immediately
+preceding the Revolution were armies of very poor men, who had sold
+themselves into a sort of servitude often exciting and even adventurous,
+but not, when we examine it minutely, a career that a free man would
+choose. The men were caught by economic necessity, by fraud, and in
+other ways, and once caught were held. No better proof of this could be
+found than the barbarous severity of the punishments attached to
+desertion, or to minor forms of indiscipline. So held, they were used
+for the purposes of the game, not only in what would make them
+serviceable instruments of war, but also in what would make them
+pleasing to their masters. Strict alignment, certain frills of parade
+and appearance, all that is required in a theatre or in a pretentious
+household, appear in the military regulations of the time.</p>
+
+<p>I must not in all this be supposed to be belittling that great period
+between 1660 and 1789, during which the art of war was most thoroughly
+thought out, the traditions of most of our great European armies fixed,
+and the permanent military qualities which<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span> we still inherit developed.
+The men so caught as private soldiers could not but enjoy the game when
+it was actively played, for men of European stock will always enjoy the
+game of war; they took glory in its recital and in its memories; to be a
+soldier, even under the servile conditions of the time, was a proper
+subject for pride, and it is further to be remarked that the excesses of
+cruelty discoverable in the establishment of their discipline were also
+accompanied by very high and lasting examples of military virtue. The
+behaviour of the English contingents at Fontenoy afford but one of many
+examples of what I mean.</p>
+
+<p>Still, to understand the wars of the Revolution we must clearly
+establish the contrast between the so-called professional armies which
+preceded that movement and the armies which the Revolution invented,
+used, and bequeathed to the modern world.</p>
+
+<p>So also, to revert to what was said above, we must recall the dynastic
+and limited character of the wars in which the eighteenth century had
+been engaged; at the outbreak of the Revolution no other wars were
+contemplated by men.</p>
+
+<p>Had you spoken, for instance, at any moment in 1789, to a statesman,
+whether of old experience or only introduced to political life by the
+new movement, of the position of Great Britain, he would at once have
+discussed that position in the terms of Great Britain’s recent defeat at
+the hands of France in the affair of the American colonies. Had<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span> you
+discussed with him the position of Prussia he would at once have argued
+it in connection with Prussia’s secular opposition to Austria and the
+Empire. Had you asked him how he considered Spain, he would have spoken
+of the situation of Spain as against France in the light of the fact
+that Spain was a Bourbon monarchy allied in blood to the French throne.
+And so forth. No true statesman imagined at the time, nor, indeed, for
+many years, that a war of <i>ideas</i>, nor even, strictly speaking, of
+<i>nations</i>, was possible. Even when such a war was actually in process of
+waging, the diplomacy which attempted to establish a peace, the
+intrigues whereby alliances were sought, or neutrality negotiated, were
+dependent upon the older conception of things; and the historian is
+afforded, as he regards this gigantic struggle, the ironic satisfaction
+of seeing men fighting upon doctrines the most universal conceivable and
+yet perpetually changing their conduct during the struggle according to
+conceptions wholly particular, local and ephemeral, and soon to be
+entirely swept away by time.</p>
+
+<p>Napoleon himself must needs marry an Austrian archduchess as part of
+this old prejudice, and for years brains as excellent as Danton’s or
+Talleyrand’s conjecture the possibility of treating now England, now
+Prussia, as neutral to the vast attempt of the French to destroy
+privilege in European society!</p>
+
+<p>One may say that for two years the connection of the revolutionary
+movement with arms had no aspect save that of civil war.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span> True, whenever
+a considerable change is in progress in society the possibility of
+foreign war in connection with it must always arise. Were some European
+State, for instance, to make an experiment in Collectivism to-day, the
+chance of foreign intervention would certainly be discussed by the
+promoters of that experiment. But no serious danger of an armed struggle
+between the French and any of their neighbours in connection with the
+political experiment of the Revolution was imagined by the mass of
+educated men in France itself nor without the boundaries of France
+during those first two years. And, I repeat, the military aspect of
+those years was confined to civil tumult. Nevertheless, that aspect is
+not to be neglected. The way in which the French organised their civil
+war (and there was always something of it present from the summer of
+1789 onwards) profoundly affected the foreign war that was to follow:
+for in their internal struggles great masses of Frenchmen became
+habituated to the physical presence, millions to the discussion, of
+arms.</p>
+
+<p>It is, as we have seen in another part of this book, a repeated and
+conspicuous error to imagine that the first revolutionary outbreaks were
+not met sufficiently sternly by royal troops. On the contrary, the royal
+troops were used to the utmost and were defeated. The populace of the
+large towns, and especially of Paris, proved itself capable of military
+organisation and of military action. When to this capacity had been
+added the institution of the militia called<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span> the National Guard, there
+were already the makings of a nation wholly military.</p>
+
+<p>Much in this exceptional and new position must be ascribed to the Gallic
+character. It may be said that from the fall of the Roman Empire to the
+present day that character has been permanently and of its own volition
+steeped in the experience of organised fighting. Civil tumult has been
+native to it, the risk of death in defence of political objects has been
+equally familiar, and the whole trade of arms, its necessary
+organisation, its fatigues and its limiting conditions, have been very
+familiar to the population throughout all these centuries. But beyond
+this the fact that the Revolution prepared men in the school of civil
+tumult was of the first advantage for its later aptitude against foreign
+Powers.</p>
+
+<p>It is always well in history to fix a definite starting-point for any
+political development, and the starting-point of the revolutionary wars
+may easily be fixed at the moment when Louis, his queen and the royal
+children attempted to escape to the frontier and to the Army of the
+Centre under the command of Bouillé. This happened, as we have seen, in
+June 1791.</p>
+
+<p>Many factors combine to make that date the starting-point. In the first
+place, until that moment no actual proof had been apparent in the eyes
+of European monarchs of the captivity of their chief exemplar, the king
+of France.</p>
+
+<p>The wild march upon Versailles, in the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span> days of October 1789, had its
+parallel in a hundred popular tumults with which Europe was familiar
+enough for centuries. But the rapidly succeeding reforms of the year
+1790, and even the great religious blunder of 1791, had received the
+signature and the public assent of the Crown. The Court, though no
+longer at Versailles, was splendid, the power of the King over the
+Executive still far greater than that of any other organ in the State,
+and indefinitely greater than that of any other individual in the State.
+The talk of captivity, of insult and the rest, the outcries of the
+emigrants and the perpetual complaint of the French royal family in its
+private relations, seemed exaggerated, or at any rate nothing to act
+upon, until there came the shock of the King’s attempted flight and
+recapture. This clinched things; and it clinched them all the more
+because more than one Court, and especially that of Austria, believed
+for some days that the escape had been successful.</p>
+
+<p>Again, the flight and its failure put the army into a ridiculous
+posture. Action against the Revolution was never likely, so long as the
+discipline and steadiness of the French army were believed in abroad.
+But the chief command had hopelessly failed upon that occasion, and it
+was evident that the French-speaking troops could not easily be trusted
+by the Executive Government or by their own commanders. Furthermore, the
+failure of the flight leads the Queen, with her vivacity of spirit and
+her rapid though<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span> ill-formed plans, to turn for the first time to the
+idea of military intervention. Her letters suggesting this (in the form
+of a threat rather than a war, it is true) do not begin until after her
+capture at Varennes.</p>
+
+<p>Finally, coincident with that disaster was the open mention of a
+Republic, the open suggestion that the King should be deposed, and the
+first definite and public challenge to the principles of monarchy which
+the Revolution had thrown down before Europe.</p>
+
+<p>We are, therefore, not surprised to find that this origin of the
+military movement was followed in two months by the Declaration of
+Pillnitz.</p>
+
+<p>With the political nature of that Declaration one must deal elsewhere.
+Its military character must here be observed.</p>
+
+<p>The Declaration of Pillnitz corresponded as nearly as possible to what
+in the present day would be an order preparatory to mobilising a certain
+proportion of the reserve. It cannot with justice be called equivalent
+to an order <i>calling out</i> all the reserves, still less equivalent to an
+order mobilising upon a war footing the forces of a modern nation, for
+such an action is tantamount to a declaration of war (as, for instance,
+was the action of the English Government before the South African
+struggle), and Pillnitz was very far from that. But Pillnitz was
+certainly as drastic a military proceeding as would be the public
+intimation by a group of Powers that the reserves had been warned in
+connection with their quarrel against another Power. It was, for
+instance,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span> quite as drastic as the action of Austria against Servia in
+1908. And it was intended to be followed by such submission as is
+expected to follow upon the threat of superior force.</p>
+
+<p>Such was the whole burden of Marie Antoinette’s letters to her brother
+(who had called the meeting at Pillnitz), and such was the sense in
+which the politicians of the Revolution understood it.</p>
+
+<p>All that autumn and winter the matter chiefly watched by foreign
+diplomatists and the clearest of French thinkers was the condition of
+the French forces and of their command. Narbonne’s appointment to the
+War Office counted more than any political move, Dumouriez’ succession
+to him was the event of the time. Plans of campaign were drawn up (and
+promptly betrayed by Marie Antoinette to the enemy), manifold occasions
+for actual hostilities were discovered, the Revolution challenged the
+Emperor in the matter of the Alsatian princes, the Emperor challenged,
+through Kaunitz, the Revolution in a letter directly interfering with
+the internal affairs of France, and pretending to a right of <i>ingérence</i>
+therein; and on the 20th of April, 1792, war was declared against the
+Empire. Prussia thereupon informed the French Government that she made
+common cause with the Emperor, and the revolutionary struggle had begun.</p>
+
+<p>The war discovered no serious features during its first four months: so
+slow was the gathering and march of the Allies; but the panics into
+which the revolutionary troops<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span> fell in the first skirmishes, their lack
+of discipline, and the apparent breakdown of the French military power,
+made the success of the Invasion in Force, when it should come, seem
+certain. The invading army did not cross the frontier until more than a
+week after the fall of the palace. Longwy capitulated at once; a week
+later, in the last days of August, the great frontier fortress of Verdun
+was summoned. It capitulated almost immediately.</p>
+
+
+<h3><a name="V_2" id="V_2"></a>TWO</h3>
+
+<p>On the 2nd of September Verdun was entered by the Prussians, and a
+little outside the gates of the town, near a village bearing the name of
+Regret, the allied camp was fixed. Rather more than a week later, on the
+11th, the Allies marched against the line of the Argonne.</p>
+
+<p>The reader will remember that this moment, with the loss of the frontier
+fortresses Longwy and Verdun, and the evidence of demoralisation which
+that afforded, was also the moment of the September massacres and of the
+horrors in Paris. Dumouriez and the mixed French force which he
+commanded had been ordered by the Ministers of War to hold the line of
+the Argonne against which the Allies were marching. And here it is well
+to explain what was meant in a military sense by this word “line.”</p>
+
+<p>The Argonne is a long, nearly straight range of hills running from the
+south northward, a good deal to the west of north.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Their soil is clay, and though the height of the hills is only three
+hundred feet above the plain, their escarpment or steep side is towards
+the east, whence an invasion may be expected. They are densely wooded,
+from five to eight miles broad, the supply of water in them is bad, in
+many parts undrinkable; habitation with its provision for armies and
+roads extremely rare. It is necessary to insist upon all these details
+because the greater part of civilian readers find it difficult to
+understand how formidable an obstacle so comparatively unimportant a
+feature in the landscape may be to an army upon the march. It was quite
+impossible for the guns, the wagons, and therefore the food and the
+ammunition of the invading army, to pass through the forest over the
+drenched clay land of that wet autumn save where proper roads existed.
+These were only to be found wherever a sort of natural pass negotiated
+the range.</p>
+
+<p>Three of these passes alone existed, and to this day there is very
+little choice in the crossing of these hills. The accompanying sketch
+will explain their disposition. Through the southernmost went the great
+high road from the frontier and Verdun to Paris. At the middle one
+(which is called the Gap of Grandpré) Dumouriez was waiting with his
+incongruous army. The third and northern one was also held, but less
+strongly. The obvious march for an unimpeded invader would have been
+from Verdun along the high road, through the southern pass at “Les<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span>
+Islettes,” and so to Chalôns and on to Paris. But Dumouriez, marching
+down rapidly from the north, had set an advanced guard to hold that pass
+and was lying himself with the mass of the army on the pass to the north
+of it at Grandpré. Against Grandpré the Prussians marched, and meanwhile
+the Austrians were<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span> attacking the further pass to the north. Both were
+forced. Dumouriez fell back southward to St. Menehould. Meanwhile
+Kellermann was coming up from Metz to join him, and all the while the
+main pass at “Les Islettes,” through which the great road to Paris went,
+continued to be held by the French.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 450px;">
+<img src="images/p158.png" width="450" height="500" alt="Sketch Map, showing the turning of the positions on the
+Argonne and the Cannonade at Valmy, September 1792." title="" />
+<span class="caption">Sketch Map, showing the turning of the positions on the
+Argonne and the Cannonade at Valmy, September 1792.</span>
+<p class="right"><a href="images/p158-lg.png" name="fig001" id="fig001">Enlarge Map</a></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The Prussians and the Austrians joined forces in the plain known as the
+Champagne Pouilleuse, which lies westward of Argonne. It will be seen
+that as they marched south along this plain to meet Dumouriez and to
+defeat him, their position was a peculiar one: they were nearer the
+enemy’s capital than the enemy’s army was, and yet they had to fight
+with their backs to that capital, and their enemy the French had to
+fight with their faces towards it. Moreover, it must be remarked that
+the communications of the Allied Army were now of a twisted, roundabout
+sort, which made the conveyance of provisions and ammunition slow and
+difficult&mdash;but they counted upon an immediate destruction of Dumouriez’
+force and after that a rapid march on the capital.</p>
+
+<p>On September 19 Kellermann came up from the south and joined hands with
+Dumouriez near St. Menehould, and on the morning of the 20th his force
+occupied a roll of land on which there was a windmill and immediately
+behind which was the village of Valmy; from this village the ensuing
+action was to take its name. It must here be insisted upon that both
+armies had been subjected to the very worst weather for more than a
+fortnight,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span> but of the two the Prussian force had suffered from this
+accident much more severely than the French. Dysentery had already
+broken out, and the length and tortuousness of their communications were
+greatly emphasised by the condition of the roads.</p>
+
+<p>On the morning of that day, the 20th of September, a mist impeded all
+decisive movements. There was an encounter, half accidental, between an
+advanced French battery and the enemy’s guns, but it was not until
+mid-morning that the weather lifted enough to show each force its
+opponent. Then there took place an action, or rather a cannonade, the
+result of which is more difficult to explain, perhaps, than any other
+considerable action of the revolutionary wars. For some hours the
+Prussian artillery, later reinforced by the Austrian, cannonaded the
+French position, having for its central mark the windmill of Valmy,
+round which the French forces were grouped. At one moment this cannonade
+took effect upon the limbers and ammunition wagons of the French; there
+was an explosion which all eye-witnesses have remembered as the chief
+feature of the firing, and which certainly threw into confusion for some
+moments the ill-assorted troops under Kellermann’s command. At what hour
+this took place the witnesses who have left us accounts differ to an
+extraordinary extent. Some will have it at noon, others towards the
+middle of the afternoon&mdash;so difficult is it to have any accurate account
+of what happens in the heat of an action. At any rate, if not
+coincidently<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span> with this success, at some moment not far removed from it,
+the Prussian charge was ordered, and it is here that the difficulties of
+the historian chiefly appear. That charge was never carried home;
+whether, as some believe, because it was discovered, after it was
+ordered, to be impossible in the face of the accuracy and intensity of
+the French fire, or whether, as is more probably the case, because the
+drenched soil compelled the commanders to abandon the movement after it
+had begun&mdash;whatever the cause may have been, the Prussian force, though
+admirably disciplined and led, and though advancing in the most exact
+order, failed to carry out its original purpose. It halted halfway up
+the slope, and the action remained a mere cannonade without immediate
+result apparent upon either side.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless that result ultimately turned out to be very great, and if
+we consider its place in history, quite as important as might have been
+the result of a decisive action. In the first place, the one day’s delay
+which it involved was just more than the calculations of the Allies,
+with their long impeded line of communications, had allowed for. In the
+next place, a singular increase in determination and moral force was
+infused into the disheartened and ill-matched troops of the French
+commanders by this piece of resistance.</p>
+
+<p>We must remember that the French force upon the whole expected and
+discounted a defeat, the private soldier especially had no confidence in
+the result; and to find that at<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span> the first action which had been so long
+threatened and had now at last come, he could stand up to the enemy,
+produced upon him an exaggerated effect which it would never have had
+under other circumstances.</p>
+
+<p>Finally, we must recollect that whatever causes had forbidden the
+Prussian charge forbade on the next day a general advance against the
+French position. And all the time the sickness in the Prussian camp was
+rapidly increasing. Even that short check of twenty-four hours made a
+considerable difference. A further delay of but yet another day, during
+which the Allied Army could not decide whether to attack at once or to
+stand as they were, very greatly increased the list of inefficients from
+illness.</p>
+
+<p>For a whole week of increasing anxiety and increasing inefficiency the
+Allied Army hung thus, impotent, though they were between the French
+forces and the capital. Dumouriez ably entertained this hesitation, with
+all its accumulating dangers for the enemy, by prolonged negotiations,
+until upon the 30th of September the Prussian and Austrian organisation
+could stand the strain no longer, and its commanders determined upon
+retreat. It was the genius of Danton, as we now know, that chiefly
+organised the withdrawal of what might still have been a dangerous
+invading force. It is principally due to him that no unwise Jingoism was
+permitted to claim a trial of strength with the invader, that he was
+allowed to retire with all his guns, his colours and his train. The
+retreat was lengthy and unmolested,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span> though watched by the French forces
+that discreetly shepherded it but were kept tightly in hand from Paris.
+It was more than three weeks later when the Allied Army, upon which
+Europe and the French monarchy had counted for an immediate settlement
+of the Revolution, re-crossed the frontier, and in this doubtful and
+perhaps inexplicable fashion the first campaign of the European Powers
+against the Revolution utterly failed.</p>
+
+
+<h3><a name="V_3" id="V_3"></a>THREE</h3>
+
+<p>Following upon this success, Dumouriez pressed on to what had been, from
+the first moment of his power at the head of the army, his personal
+plan&mdash;to wit, the invasion of the Low Countries.</p>
+
+<p>To understand why this invasion failed and why Dumouriez thought it
+might succeed, we must appreciate the military and political situation
+of the Low Countries at the time. They then formed a very wealthy and
+cherished portion of the Austrian dominions; they had latterly suffered
+from deep disaffection culminating in an open revolution, which was due
+to the Emperor of Austria’s narrow and intolerant contempt of religion.
+From his first foolish policy of persecution and confiscation he had
+indeed retreated, but the feeling of the people was still strongly
+opposed to the Government at Vienna. It is remarkable, indeed, and in
+part due to the pressure of a strongly Protestant and aristocratic
+state, Holland, to the north of them,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span> that the people of the Austrian
+Netherlands retained at that time a peculiar attachment to the Catholic
+religion. The Revolution was quite as anti-Catholic as the Austrian
+Emperor, but of the persecution of the latter the Belgians (as we now
+call them) knew something; that of the former they had not yet learnt to
+dread. It was, therefore, Dumouriez’ calculation that, in invading this
+province of the Austrian power, he would be fighting in friendly
+territory. Again, it was separated from the political centre of the
+empire; it was, therefore, more or less isolated politically, and even
+for military purposes communication with it was not so easy, unless,
+indeed, Austria could count on a complete co-operation with Prussia,
+which Power had been for now so long her ruthless and persistent rival.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/p164.png" width="500" height="279" alt="Sketch Map of towns occupied by French in 1792 and
+evacuated in March 1793, with sites of battles of Jemappes and of
+Neerwinden, and of Dumouriez&#39; treason." title="" />
+<span class="caption">Sketch Map of towns occupied by French in 1792 and
+evacuated in March 1793, with sites of battles of Jemappes and of
+Neerwinden, and of Dumouriez’ treason.</span>
+<p class="right"><a href="images/p164-lg.png" name="fig002" id="fig002">Enlarge Map</a></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Favourable, however, as the circumstances appeared for an invasion, two
+factors telling heavily against the French had to be counted: the first
+was the formation of their army, the second the spirit of rebellion
+against any anti-Catholic Government which had given such trouble to
+Joseph II.</p>
+
+<p>Of these two factors by far the most important was, of course, the
+first. If the French forces had been homogeneous, in good spirit, and
+well trained, they might have held what they won; as a fact, they were
+most unhomogeneous, great portions of them were ill trained, and, worst
+of all, there was no consistent theory of subordinate command. Men who
+imagined that subordinate, that is,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span> regimental, command in an army
+could be erected from below, and that a fighting force could resemble a
+somewhat lax and turbulent democracy, marched alongside of and were
+actually incorporated with old soldiers who had spent their whole
+careers under an unquestioned discipline, and under a subordinate
+command which came to them they knew not whence, and as it were by fate.
+The mere mixture of two such different classes of men in one force would
+have been bad enough to deal with, but what was worse, the political
+theories of the day fostered the military error of the new battalions
+though the politicians dared not interfere with the valuable
+organisation of the old.</p>
+
+<p>The invasion of the Low Countries began with a great, though somewhat
+informal and unfruitful success, in the victory of Jemappes. It was the
+first striking and dramatic decisive action which the French, always of
+an eager appetite for such news, had been given since between forty and
+fifty years. The success in America against the English, though
+brilliantly won and solidly founded, had not presented occasions of this
+character, and Fontenoy was the last national victory which Paris could
+remember. Men elderly or old in this autumn of 1792 would have been boys
+or very young men when Fontenoy was fought. The eager generation of the
+Revolution, with its military appetites and aptitudes, as yet had hardly
+expected victory, though victory was ardently desired by them and
+peculiarly suitable to their temper.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It may be imagined, therefore, what an effect the news of Jemappes had
+upon the political world in Paris. The action was fought just below the
+town of Mons, a few miles over the frontier, and consisted in a somewhat
+ill-ordered but successful advance across the River Haine. Whether
+because the Austrians, with an inferior force, attempted to hold too
+long a line, or because the infantry and even the new French volunteer
+battalions, as yet untried by fatigue, proved irresistible in the centre
+of the movement, Jemappes was a victory so complete that the attempts of
+apologists to belittle it only serve to enhance its character.</p>
+
+<p>Like many another great and apparently decisive action, however, it bore
+no lasting fruit. Both the factors of which I have spoken above appeared
+immediately after this success. Belgium was, indeed, over-run by the
+French, but in their over-running of it with something like eighty
+thousand men, they made no attempt to spare the traditions or to
+conciliate the sympathies of the inhabitants. Hardly was Jemappes won
+when Mons, the neighbouring fortified frontier town, was at once endowed
+with the whole machinery of revolutionary government. Church property
+was invaded and occasionally rifled, and the French paper money, the
+assignats of which we have heard, poured in to disturb and in places to
+ruin the excellent commercial system upon which Belgium then as now
+reposed.</p>
+
+<p>Jemappes was fought upon the 6th of November, 1792. Brussels was entered
+upon<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span> the 14th, and throughout that winter the Low Countries lay
+entirely in the hands of the French. The Commissioners from the
+Convention, though endowing Belgium with republican institutions,
+treated it as a conquered country, and before the breaking of spring,
+the French Parliament voted its annexation to France. This annexation,
+the determination of the politicians in Paris that the new Belgian
+Government should be republican and anti-Catholic, the maltreatment of
+the Church in the occupied country and the increasing ill discipline and
+lack of cohesion in his army, left Dumouriez in a position which grew
+more and more difficult as the new year, 1793, advanced. It must be
+remembered that this moment exactly corresponded with the execution of
+the King and the consequent declaration of war by or against France in
+the case of one Power after another throughout Europe. Meanwhile, it was
+decided, foolishly enough, to proceed from the difficult occupation of
+Belgium to the still more difficult occupation of Holland, and the siege
+of Maestricht was planned.</p>
+
+<p>The moment was utterly ill-suited for such a plan. Every Executive in
+the civilised world was coalescing openly or secretly, directly or
+indirectly, against the revolutionary Government. The first order to
+retreat came upon the 8th of March, when the siege of Maestricht was
+seen to be impossible, and when the great forces of the Allies were
+gathered again to attempt what was to be the really serious attack upon
+the Revolution:<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span> something far more dangerous, something which much more
+nearly achieved success, than the march of the comparatively small force
+which had been checked at Valmy.</p>
+
+<p>For ten days the French retreat continued, when, upon the 18th of March,
+Dumouriez risked battle at Neerwinden. His army was defeated.</p>
+
+<p>The defeat was not disastrous, the retreat was continued in fairly good
+order, but a civilian population understands nothing besides the words
+defeat and victory; it can appreciate a battle, not a campaign. The news
+of the defeat, coming at a moment of crisis in the politics of Paris,
+was decisive; it led to grave doubts of Dumouriez’ loyalty to the
+revolutionary Government, it shattered his popularity with those who had
+continued to believe in him, while the general himself could not but
+believe that the material under his command was rapidly deteriorating.
+Before the end of the month the army had abandoned all its conquests,
+and Valenciennes, in French territory, was reached upon the 27th. The
+dash upon Belgium had wholly failed.</p>
+
+<p>At this moment came one of those political acts which so considerably
+disturb any purely military conspectus of the revolutionary wars.
+Dumouriez, at the head of his army, which, though in retreat and
+defeated, was still intact, determined upon what posterity has justly
+called treason, but what to his own mind must have seemed no more than
+statesmanship. He proposed an understanding with the enemy and a
+combined march<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span> upon Paris to restore the monarchical government, and
+put an end to what seemed to him, as a soldier, a perfectly hopeless
+situation. He certainly believed it impossible for the French army, in
+the welter of 1793, to defeat the invader. He saw his own life in peril
+merely because he was defeated. He had no toleration for the rising
+enthusiasm or delirium of the political theory which had sent him out,
+and, even before he had reached French territory, his negotiations with
+Coburg, the Austrian commander, had begun. They lasted long. Dumouriez
+agreed to put the frontier fortresses of the French into the hands of
+the enemy as a guarantee and a pledge; and on the 5th of April all was
+ready for the alliance of the two armed forces.</p>
+
+<p>But just as the treason of Dumouriez is, in the military sense, abnormal
+and disturbing to any general conspectus of the campaign, so was the
+action of his army.</p>
+
+<p>The doubtful point of a general command which is political in nature,
+and may be unpopular with the rank and file, lies, of course, in the
+attitude of the commanders of units, and these unanimously refused to
+obey the orders of their chief. It was known that Dumouriez had been
+summoned to the bar of the Convention, which body had sent commissioners
+to apprehend him. He had arrested the commissioners, and had handed them
+over as hostages and prisoners to Coburg. So far from Dumouriez upon the
+critical day handing over his force to the enemy, or constituting it a
+part of an allied army to march<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span> upon the capital, he was compelled to
+fly upon the 8th of April; all that disappeared with him, counting many
+who later deserted back again to the French colours, was less than a
+thousand men&mdash;and these foreign mercenaries.</p>
+
+<p>The consequence of this strange passage upon the political history of
+the time we have already seen. Its consequence upon the military history
+of it was indirect but profound. The French forces, such as they were,
+were still intact, but no general officer could in future be trusted by
+Paris, and the stimulus which nations in the critical moments of
+invasion and of danger during foreign war seek in patriotism, in the
+offering of a high wage to the men and of honours and fortunes to their
+commanders, was now sought by the French in the singular, novel and
+abnormal experiment of the Terror. Command upon the frontier throughout
+1793 and the first part of 1794, during the critical fourteen months,
+that is, which decided the fate of the Revolution, and which turned the
+tide of arms in favour of the French, was a task accomplished under the
+motive power of capital punishment. A blunder was taken as a proof of
+treason, and there lay over the ordering of every general movement the
+threat of the guillotine.</p>
+
+<p>What we have now to follow is somewhat over a year of a struggle thus
+abnormally organised upon the French side, and finally successful
+through the genius of a great organiser, once a soldier, now a
+politician, Carnot. The French succeeded by the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span> unshakable conviction
+which permitted the political leaders to proceed to all extremity in
+their determination to save the Revolution; by the peculiar physical
+powers of endurance which their army displayed, and finally, of course,
+by certain accidents&mdash;for accident will always be a determining factor
+in war.</p>
+
+<p>The spring of 1793, the months of April and May, form the first crisis
+of the revolutionary war. The attack about to be delivered is universal,
+and seems absolutely certain to succeed. With the exception of the rush
+at Jemappes, where less than thirty thousand Austrians were broken
+through by a torrent superior in numbers (though even there obviously
+ill-organised), no success had attended the revolutionary armies. Their
+condition was, even to the eye of the layman, bad, and to the eye of the
+expert hopeless. There was no unity apparent in direction, there were
+vast lesions in the discipline of the ranks like great holes torn in
+some rotten fabric. Even against the forces already mobilised against
+it, it had proved powerless, and it might be taken for granted that by
+an act more nearly resembling police work than a true campaign, the
+Allies would reach Paris and something resembling the old order be soon
+restored. What remains is to follow the process by which this
+expectation was disappointed.</p>
+
+<p>The situation at this moment can best be understood by a glance at the
+sketch map on p. 178. Two great French advances had been made in the
+winter of 1792-93; the one a northern advance, which we have just<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span>
+detailed, the over-running of Belgium; the other an eastern advance
+right up to the Rhine and to the town of Mayence. Both had failed. The
+failure in Belgium, culminating in the treason of Dumouriez, has been
+read. On the Rhine (where Mayence had been annexed by the French
+Parliament just as Belgium had been) the active hostility of the
+population and the gathering of the organised forces of the Allies had
+the same effect as had been produced in the Low Countries.</p>
+
+<p>It was on March 21, 1793, that the Prussians crossed the Rhine at
+Bacharach, and within that week the French commander, Custine, began to
+fall back. On the first of April he was back again in French territory,
+leaving the garrison of Mayence, somewhat over twenty thousand men, to
+hold out as best it could; a fortnight later the Prussians had
+surrounded the town and the siege had begun.</p>
+
+<p>On the north-eastern front, stretching from the Ardennes to the sea, a
+similar state of things was developing. There, a barrier of fortresses
+stood between the Allies and Paris, and a series of sieges corresponding
+to the siege of Mayence in the east had to be undertaken. At much the
+same time as the investment of Mayence, on April 9, the first step in
+this military task was taken by the Allies moving in between the
+fortress of Condé and the fortress of Valenciennes. Thenceforward it was
+the business of the Austrians under Coburg, with the Allies that were to
+reach him, to reduce the frontier fortresses<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span> one by one, and when his
+communications were thus secure, to march upon Paris.</p>
+
+<p>It is here necessary for the reader unacquainted with military history
+to appreciate two points upon which not a little of contemporary
+historical writing may mislead him. The first is that both in the Rhine
+valley and on the Belgian frontier the forces of the Allies in their
+numbers and their organisation were conceived to be overwhelming. The
+second is that no competent commander on the spot would have thought of
+leaving behind him the garrison of even one untaken fortress. It is
+important to insist upon these points, because the political passions
+roused by the Revolution are still so strong that men can hardly write
+of it without prejudice and bias, and two errors continually present in
+these descriptions of the military situation in the spring of 1793, are,
+first, that the Allies were weakened by the Polish question, which was
+then active, and secondly, that the delay of their commanders before the
+French fortresses was unnecessary.</p>
+
+<p>Both these propositions are put forward with the object of explaining
+the ultimate defeat of the enemies of the Revolution: both, however
+great the authority behind them, are unhistorical and worthless. The
+French success was a military success due to certain military factors
+both of design and accident, which will appear in what follows. The
+Allies played their part as all the art of war demanded it to be played;
+they were ultimately defeated, not from the commission<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span> of any such
+gross and obvious error in policy or strategy as historians with too
+little comprehension of military affairs sometimes pretend, but from the
+military superiority of their opponents.</p>
+
+<p>It is true that the Polish question (that is the necessity the Austrian
+and Prussian Governments were each under of watching that the other was
+not lessened in importance by the approaching annexations of further
+Polish territory with the consequent jealousy and mistrust that arose
+from this between Austria and Prussia) was a very important feature of
+the moment. But it is bad military history to pretend that this affected
+the military situation on the Rhine or in the Netherlands.</p>
+
+<p>Every campaign is conditioned by its political object. The political
+object in this case was to march upon and to occupy Paris. The political
+object of a campaign once determined, the size and the organisation of
+the enemy are calculated and a certain force is brought against it. No
+much larger force is brought than is necessary: to act in such a fashion
+would be in military art what paying two or three times the price of an
+article would be in commerce. The forces of the Allies upon the Rhine
+and in the Netherlands were, in the opinion of every authority of the
+time, amply sufficient for their purpose; and more than sufficient: so
+much more than sufficient that the attitude of that military opinion
+which had to meet the attack&mdash;to wit, the professional military opinion
+of the French republican soldiers, was that the situation<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span> was
+desperate, nor indeed was it attempted to be met save by a violent and,
+as it were, irrational enthusiasm.</p>
+
+<p>The second point, the so-called “delay” involved in the sieges
+undertaken by the Allies, proves, when it is put forward, an
+insufficient acquaintance with contemporary conditions. Any fortress
+with a considerable garrison left behind untaken would have meant the
+destruction of the Austrian or Prussian communications, and their
+destruction at a moment when the Austrian and Prussian forces were
+actually advancing over a desperately hostile country. Moreover, when
+acting against forces wholly inferior in discipline and organisation, an
+untaken fortress is a refuge which one must take peculiar pains to
+destroy. To throw himself into such a refuge will always stand before
+the commander of those inferior forces as a last resource. It is a
+refuge which he will certainly avail himself of ultimately, if it is
+permitted to him. And when he has so availed himself of it, it means the
+indefinite survival of an armed organisation in the rear of the
+advancing invaders. We must conclude, if we are to understand this
+critical campaign which changed the history of the world, that Coburg
+did perfectly right in laying siege to one fortress after another before
+he began what every one expected to be the necessarily successful
+advance on Paris. The French despair, as one town after another
+surrendered, is an amply sufficient proof of the excellence of his
+judgment.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>We approach the military problem of 1793, therefore, with the following
+two fields clear before us:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>1. In the north-east an advance on Paris, the way to which is blocked by
+a quadrilateral of fortresses: Mons, Maubeuge, Condé, and Valenciennes,
+with the subsidiary stronghold of Lequesnoy in the neighbourhood of the
+last. Mons has been in Austrian hands since Dumouriez’ retreat; Condé is
+just cut off from Valenciennes by Coburg’s advance, but has not fallen;
+Valenciennes and the neighbouring Lequesnoy are still intact, and so is
+Maubeuge. All must be reduced before the advance on Paris can begin.
+Behind these fortresses is a French army incapable as yet of attacking
+Coburg’s command with any hope of success. Such is the position in the
+last fortnight of April.</p>
+
+<p>2. Meanwhile, on the Rhine the French garrison in Mayence is besieged;
+Custine, the French commander in that quarter, has fallen back on the
+French town of Landau, and is drawing up what are known in history as
+the Lines of Weissembourg. The accompanying sketch map explains their
+importance. Reposing upon the two obstacles of the river on the right
+and the mountains on the left, they fulfilled precisely the same
+functions as a fortress; and those functions we have just described.
+Until these lines were carried, the whole of Alsace may be regarded as a
+fortress defended by the mountains and the river on two sides, and by
+the Lines of Weissembourg on the third.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>A reader unacquainted with military history may ask why the obstruction
+was not drawn upon the line of the Prussian advance on Paris. The answer
+is that the presence of a force behind fortifications anywhere in the
+neighbourhood of a line of communication is precisely equivalent to an
+obstacle lying right upon those lines. For no commander can go forward
+along the line of his advance and leave a large undestroyed force close
+to one side of that line, and so situated that it can come out when he
+has passed and cut off his communications; for it is by communications
+that an army lives, especially when it is marching in hostile country.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/p178.png" width="500" height="220" alt="Strategic situation in early summer of 1793. Mayence
+besieged, Condé and Valenciennes about to be besieged. Conditions of the
+double advance on Paris." title="" />
+<span class="caption">Strategic situation in early summer of 1793. Mayence
+besieged, Condé and Valenciennes about to be besieged. Conditions of the
+double advance on Paris.</span>
+<p class="right"><a href="images/p178-lg.png" name="fig003" id="fig003">Enlarge Map</a></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Custine, therefore, behind his Lines of Weissembourg, and the besieged
+garrison in Mayence, correspond to the barrier of fortresses on the
+north-east and delayed the advance of the Prussians under Wurmser and
+Brunswick from the Rhine, just as Condé, Valenciennes, and Maubeuge
+prevented the advance of<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span> Coburg on the north-east. Such in general was
+the situation upon the eastern frontier at the end of that month of
+April, 1793.</p>
+
+
+<h3><a name="V_4" id="V_4"></a>FOUR</h3>
+
+<p>Let us first follow the development of the northern position. It will be
+remembered that all Europe was at war against the French. The Austrians
+had for allies Dutch troops which joined them at this moment, and
+certain English and Hanoverian troops under the Duke of York who also
+joined them.</p>
+
+<p>At this moment, when Coburg found himself in increasing strength, a
+tentative French attack upon him was delivered and failed. Dampierre,
+who was in command of all this French “Army of the North,” was killed,
+and Custine was sent to replace him. The Army of the North did not, as
+perhaps it should have done, concentrate into one body to meet Coburg’s
+threatened advance; it was perpetually attempting diversions which were
+useless because its strength was insufficient. Now it feinted upon the
+right towards Namur, now along the sea coast on the left; and these
+diversions failed in their object. Before the end of the month, Coburg,
+to give himself elbow room, as it were, for the sieges which he was
+preparing, compelled the main French force to retreat to a position well
+behind Valenciennes. It was immediately after this success of Coburg’s
+that Custine arrived to take command on the Belgian frontier, his place
+on the Rhine being taken by Houchard.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Custine was a very able commander, but a most unlucky one. His plan was
+the right one: to concentrate all the French forces (abandoning the
+Rhine) and so form an army sufficient to cope with Coburg’s. The
+Government would not meet him in this, and he devoted himself
+immediately to the reorganisation of the Army of the North alone. The
+month of June and half of July was taken up in that task.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, the Austrian siege work had begun, and Condé was the first
+object of its attention. Upon July 10 Condé fell. Meanwhile Custine had
+been recalled to Paris, and Valenciennes was invested. Custine was
+succeeded by Kilmaine, a general of Irish extraction, who maintained his
+position for but a short time, and was unable while he maintained it to
+do anything. The forces of the Allies continually increased. The number
+at Coburg’s disposal free from the business of besieging Valenciennes
+was already larger than the force required for that purpose. And yet
+another fifteen thousand Hessian troops marched in while the issue of
+that siege was in doubt. This great advantage in numbers permitted him
+to get rid of the main French force that was still present in front of
+him, though not seriously annoying him.</p>
+
+<p>This force lay due south-west of Valenciennes, and about a day’s march
+distant. He depended for the capture of it upon his English and
+Hanoverian Allies under the Duke of York, but that general’s march
+failed. The distance was too much for his troops in<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span> the hot summer
+weather, and the French were able to retreat behind the line of the
+Scarpe and save their army intact.</p>
+
+<p>The Duke of York’s talents have been patriotically exaggerated in many a
+treatise. He always failed: and this was among the most signal of his
+failures.</p>
+
+<p>Kilmaine had hardly escaped from York, drawn up his army behind the
+Scarpe and put it into a position of safety when he in his turn was
+deprived of the command, and Houchard was taken from the Rhine just as
+Custine had been, and put at the head of the Army of the North. Before
+the main French army had taken up this position of safety, Valenciennes
+had fallen. It fell on the 28th of July, and its fall, inevitable though
+it was and, as one may say, taken for granted by military opinion, was
+much the heaviest blow yet delivered. Nothing of importance remained to
+block the march of the Armies of the Allies, save Maubeuge.</p>
+
+<p>At about the same moment occurred three very important changes in the
+general military situation, which the reader must note if he is to
+understand what follows.</p>
+
+<p>The first was the sudden serious internal menace opposed to the
+Republican Government; the second was the advent of Carnot to power; the
+third was the English diversion upon Dunquerque.</p>
+
+<p>The serious internal menace which the Government of the Republic had to
+face was the widespread rebellion which has been dealt with in the
+earlier part of this book. The<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span> action of the Paris Radicals against the
+Girondins had raised whole districts in the provinces. Marseilles, which
+had shown signs of disaffection since April, and had begun to raise a
+local reactionary force, revolted. So did Bordeaux, Nîmes, and other
+great southern towns. Lyons had risen at the end of May and had killed
+the Jacobin mayor of the town in the period between the fall of Condé
+and that of Valenciennes. The troop which Marseilles had raised against
+the Republic was defeated in the field only the day before Valenciennes
+fell, but the great seaport was still unoccupied by the forces of the
+Government. The Norman march upon Paris had also failed between those
+two dates, the fall of Condé and the fall of Valenciennes. The Norman
+bark had proved worse than the Norman bite; but the force was so
+neighbouring to the capital that it took a very large place in the
+preoccupations of the time. The Vendean revolt, though its triumphant
+advance was checked before Nantes a fortnight before the fall of Condé,
+was still vigorous, and the terrible reprisals against it were hardly
+begun. Worst of all, or at least, worst perhaps, after the revolt of
+Lyons, was the defection of Toulon. Toulon rose two days before the fall
+of Valenciennes, and was prepared to hand itself over (as at last it did
+hand itself over) to occupation by the English fleet.</p>
+
+<p>The dates thus set in their order may somewhat confuse the reader, and I
+will therefore summarise the general position of<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span> the internal danger
+thus: A man in the French camp on the Scheldt, listening to the guns
+before Valenciennes fifteen miles away, and hourly expecting their
+silence as a signal that the city had surrendered, would have heard by
+one post after another how Marseilles still held out against the
+Government; how the counter-attack against the successful Vendeans had
+but doubtfully begun (all July was full of disasters in that quarter);
+how Lyons was furiously successful in her rebellion and had dared to put
+to death the Republican mayor of the town; and that the great arsenal
+and port at Toulon, the Portsmouth of France upon the Mediterranean, had
+sickened of the Government and was about to admit the English fleet. His
+only comfort would have been to hear that the Norman march on Paris had
+failed&mdash;but he would still be under the impression of it and of the
+murder of Marat by a Norman woman.</p>
+
+<p>There is the picture of that sudden internal struggle which coincides
+with this moment of the revolutionary war, the moment of the fall of
+Condé and of Valenciennes, and the exposure of the frontier.</p>
+
+<p>The second point, the advent of Carnot into the Committee of Public
+Safety, which has already been touched upon in the political part of
+this work, has so preponderating a military significance that we must
+consider it here also.</p>
+
+<p>The old Committee of Public Safety, it will be remembered, reached the
+end of its legal term on July 10. It was the Committee<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span> which the wisdom
+of Danton had controlled. The members elected to the new Committee did
+not include Carnot, but the military genius of this man was already
+public. He came of that strong middle class which is the pivot upon
+which the history of modern Europe turns; a Burgundian with lineage,
+intensely republican, he had been returned to the Convention and had
+voted for the death of the King; a sapper before the Revolution, and one
+thoroughly well grounded in his arm and in general reading of military
+things, he had been sent by the Convention to the Army of the North on
+commission, he had seen its weakness and had watched its experiments.
+Upon his return he was not immediately selected for the post in which he
+was to transform the revolutionary war. It was not until the 14th of
+August that he was given a temporary place upon the Committee which his
+talents very soon made permanent. He was given the place merely as a
+stopgap to the odious and incompetent fanatic, Saint-André, who was for
+the moment away on mission. But from the day of his admission his
+superiority in military affairs was so incontestable that he was
+virtually a dictator therein, and his first action after the general
+lines of organisation had been laid down by him was to impose upon the
+frontier armies the necessity of concentration. He introduced what
+afterwards Napoleon inherited from him, the tactical venture of “all
+upon one throw.”</p>
+
+<p>It must be remembered that Carnot’s<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span> success did not lie in any
+revolutionary discovery in connection with the art of war, but rather in
+that vast capacity for varied detail which marks the organiser, and in
+an intimate sympathy with the national character. He understood the
+contempt for parade, the severity or brutality of discipline, the
+consciousness of immense powers of endurance which are in the Frenchman
+when he becomes a soldier;&mdash;and he made use of this understanding of
+his.</p>
+
+<p>It must be further remembered that this powerful genius had behind him
+in these first days of his activity the equally powerful genius of
+Danton; for it was Danton and he who gave practical shape to that law of
+conscription by which the French Revolution suddenly increased its armed
+forces by nearly half a million of men, restored the Roman tradition,
+and laid the foundation of the armed system on which Europe to-day
+depends. With Carnot virtually commander-in-chief of all the armies, and
+enabled to impose his decisions in particular upon that Army of the
+North which he had studied so recently as a commissioner, the second
+factor of the situation I am describing is comprehended.</p>
+
+<p>The third, as I have said, was the English diversion upon Dunquerque.</p>
+
+<p>The subsequent failure of the Allies has led to bitter criticism of this
+movement. Had the Allies not failed, history would have treated it as
+its contemporaries treated it. The forces of the Allies on the
+north-eastern frontier were so great and their confidence<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span> so
+secure&mdash;especially after the fall of Valenciennes&mdash;that the English
+proposal to withdraw their forces for the moment from Coburg’s and to
+secure Dunquerque, was not received with any destructive criticism.
+Eighteen battalions and fourteen squadrons of the Imperial forces were
+actually lent to the Duke of York for this expedition. What is more,
+even after that diversion failed, the plan was fixed to begin again when
+the last of the other fortresses should have fallen: so little was the
+English plan for the capture of the seaport disfavoured by the
+commander-in-chief of the Allies.</p>
+
+<p>That diversion on Dunquerque turned out, however, to be an error of
+capital importance. The attempt to capture the city utterly failed, and
+the victory which accompanied its repulsion had upon the French that
+indefinable but powerful moral effect which largely contributed to their
+future successes.</p>
+
+<p>The accompanying sketch map will explain the position. Valenciennes and
+Condé have fallen; Lequesnoy, the small fortress subsidiary to
+Valenciennes, has not yet been attacked but comes next in the series,
+when the moment was judged propitious for the detachment of the
+Anglo-Hanoverian force with a certain number of Imperial Allies to march
+to the sea.</p>
+
+<p>It must always be remembered by the reader of history that military
+situations, like the situations upon a chess board, rather happen than
+are designed; and the situation which developed at the end of September
+upon the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span> extreme north and west of the line which the French were
+attempting to hold against the Allies was strategically of this nature.
+When the Duke of York insisted upon a division of the forces of the
+Allies and an attack upon Dunquerque, no living contemporary foresaw
+disaster.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/p187.png" width="500" height="287" alt="Showing condition of the frontier fortresses blocking the
+road to Paris when the expedition to Dunquerque was decided upon. August
+1793." title="" />
+<span class="caption">Showing condition of the frontier fortresses blocking the
+road to Paris when the expedition to Dunquerque was decided upon. August
+1793.</span>
+<p class="right"><a href="images/p187-lg.png" name="fig004" id="fig004">Enlarge Map</a></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Coburg, indeed, would have preferred the English to remain with him, and
+asked them to do so, but he felt in no sort of danger through their
+temporary absence, nor, as a matter of fact, was he in any danger
+through it.</p>
+
+<p>Again, though the positions which the Duke of York took up when he
+arrived in front of Dunquerque were bad, neither his critics at home,
+nor any of his own subordinates, nor any of the enemy, perceived fully
+how bad they were. It was, as will presently be seen, a sort of drift,
+bad luck combined with bad management, which led to this British
+disaster, and (what was all-important for the conduct of the war) to the
+first success in a general action which the French had to flatter and
+encourage themselves with during all that fatal summer.</p>
+
+<p>The Duke of York separated his force from that of Coburg just before the
+middle of August; besides the British, who were not quite 7,000 strong,
+11,000 Austrians, over 10,000 Hanoverians and 7,000 Hessians were under
+his command. The total force, therefore, was nearly 37,000 strong. No
+one could imagine that, opposed by such troops as the French were able
+to put into line,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span> and marching against such wretched defences as those
+of Dunquerque then were, the Duke’s army had not a perfectly easy task
+before it; and the plan, which was to take Dunquerque and upon the
+return to join the Austrian march on Paris, was reasonable and feasible.</p>
+
+<p>It is important that the reader should firmly seize this and not read
+history backward from future events.</p>
+
+<p>Certain faults are to be observed in the first conduct of the march. It
+began on the 15th of August, proceeding from Marchiennes to Menin, and
+at the outset displayed that deplorable lack of marching power which the
+Duke of York’s command had shown throughout the campaign.<a name="FNanchor_6_6" id="FNanchor_6_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_6" class="fnanchor">[6]</a> From
+Marchiennes to Tourcoing is a long day’s march: it took the Duke of York
+four days; and, take the march altogether, nine days were spent in
+covering less than forty miles. In the course of that march, the British
+troops had an opportunity of learning to despise their adversary: they
+found at Linselles, upon the flank of their advance, a number of
+undisciplined boys who broke the moment the Guards were upon them, and
+whose physical condition excited the ridicule of their assailants. The
+army proceeded after this purposeless<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span> and unfruitful skirmish to the
+neighbourhood of the sea coast, and the siege of Dunquerque was
+undertaken under conditions which will be clear to the reader from the
+following sketch map.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/p190.png" width="500" height="355" alt="Operations round Dunquerque. September 1793." title="" />
+<span class="caption">Operations round Dunquerque. September 1793.</span>
+<p class="right"><a href="images/p190-lg.png" name="fig005" id="fig005">Enlarge Map</a></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The date of the 20th of August must first be fixed in the mind: on that
+date the army which was to take Dunquerque was separated into its two
+component parts. The first, under the Duke of York, was to attack the
+town itself; the second, under the aged Austrian general, Freytag, was
+to watch the movement of any approaching enemy and to cover the force
+which was besieging the town. Two days later, the Duke of York was
+leaving Furnes, which he had made his base for the advance, and Freytag
+had with the greatest<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span> ease brushed the French posts&mdash;mainly of
+volunteers&mdash;from before him, and was beginning to take up the flanking
+positions south and east of Bergues which covered the siege of
+Dunquerque.</p>
+
+<p>Two days later again, on August 24, Freytag had occupied Wormhoudt and
+Esquelbecque, capturing guns by the dozen, doing pretty well what he
+would with the French outposts, and quite surrounding the town of
+Bergues. Wilder was his headquarters. On the same day, the 24th, the
+Duke of York had with the greatest ease driven in the advanced posts of
+the French before Dunquerque, and shut up the enemy within the town,
+while he formed his besieging force outside of it, entrenched in a
+position which he had chosen beforehand, reposing upon the sea at his
+right, his left on the village of Tetteghem. He was then about 3,000
+yards from the fortifications at Dunquerque.</p>
+
+<p>Such was the situation upon the dawn of the 25th, when everything was
+ready for active operations. And here the reader must look upon the map
+for what ultimately proved the ruin of the situation.</p>
+
+<p>Supposing Freytag round Bergues in the position which the map shows; the
+Duke of York in front of Dunquerque as the map also shows him; the two
+forces are in touch across the road and the belt of country which unites
+Bergues and Dunquerque. The covering army and the besieging force which
+it covers are each a wing of one combined<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span> body; each communicates with
+the other, each can support the other at the main point of effort, and
+though between the one and the other eastward there stretches a line of
+marshy country&mdash;the “meres” which the map indicates&mdash;yet a junction
+between the two forces exists westward of these, and the two armies can
+co-operate by the Bergues-Dunquerque road.</p>
+
+<p>A factor which the Duke of York may have neglected was the power of
+flooding all that flat country round, the road which the French in
+Dunquerque, being in possession of the sluices, possessed. They used it
+at once: they drowned the low lands to the south of Dunquerque, upon the
+very day when the last dispositions of the attacking force were
+completed. But more important&mdash;and never yet explained&mdash;was the
+Austrians’ abandonment of Coudequerque. By this error, the main road
+itself, standing above the flood, was lost, and from being one strong
+army the force of the Allies became two weak ones. Communication was no
+longer possible between the Duke of York’s and Freytag’s territories,
+and it was of this separation that the French, in spite of their
+deplorable organisation and more deplorable personnel, took advantage.</p>
+
+<p>They took advantage of it slowly. Houchard gathered altogether forty
+thousand men near Cassel, but it was ten days before they could be
+concentrated. It must again be insisted upon and repeated that, large as
+the number was&mdash;it was four times as great as Freytag’s<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span> now isolated
+force&mdash;Houchard’s command was made up of men quite two-thirds of whom
+were hardly soldiers: volunteers both new and recent, ill-trained
+conscripts and so forth. There was no basis of discipline, hardly any
+power to enforce it; the men had behaved disgracefully in all the
+affairs of outposts, they had been brushed away contemptuously by the
+small Austrian force from every position they had held. With all his
+numerical superiority the attempt which Houchard was about to make was
+very hazardous: and Houchard was a hesitating and uncertain commander.
+Furthermore, of the forty thousand men one quarter at least remained out
+of action through the ineptitude and political terror of Dumesny,
+Houchard’s lieutenant upon the right.</p>
+
+<p>It was upon the 6th of September that the French advance began along the
+whole line; it was a mere pushing in of inferior numbers by superior
+numbers, the superior numbers perpetually proving themselves inferior to
+the Austrians in military value. Thus, the capture of old Freytag
+himself in a night skirmish was at once avenged by the storming of the
+village near which he had been caught, and he was re-taken. In actual
+fighting and force for force, Houchard’s command found nothing to
+encourage it during these first operations.</p>
+
+<p>The Austrians in falling back concentrated and were soon one compact
+body: to attack and dislodge it was the object of the French advance,
+but an object hardly to be attained.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>What happened was not only the unexpected success of this advance, but
+the gaining by the French of the first decisive action in the long
+series which was to terminate twenty years later at Leipsic.</p>
+
+<p>The army of Freytag fell back upon the village of Hondschoote and stood
+there in full force upon the morning of Sunday, the 8th of September.
+Houchard attacked it with a force greatly lessened but still double that
+of the defenders. So conspicuous, however, was the superiority of the
+Austrian regulars over the French raw troops and volunteers that during
+this morning of the 8th the result was still doubtful. By the afternoon,
+however, the work was done, and the enemy were in a retreat which might
+easily have been turned into a rout. A glance at the map will show that
+Houchard, had he possessed the initiative common to so many of his
+contemporaries, might at once have driven the numerically inferior and
+heavily defeated force (it had lost one-third of its men) to the right,
+and proceeded himself to cut the communications of the Duke of York and
+to destroy his army, which lay packed upon the waterless sand dunes
+where the village of Malo-les-Bains now stands. Houchard hesitated;
+Freytag escaped; the Duke of York, abandoning his siege-pieces to the
+number of forty and much of his heavy baggage, retreated precipitately
+through the night to Furnes, right across the front of the French army,
+and escaped destruction.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The Battle of Hoondschoote, therefore, as it is called, raised the siege
+of Dunquerque. It was, as I have said, the first successful decisive
+action which the Revolution could count since the moment of its extreme
+danger and the opening of the general European war. But it was nothing
+like what it might have been had Houchard been willing to risk a hardy
+stroke. Houchard was therefore recalled, condemned to death, and
+executed by the Committee of Public Safety, whose pitiless despotism was
+alone capable of saving the nation. He remains the single example of a
+general officer who has suffered death for military incompetence after
+the gaining of a victory, and his execution is an excellent example of
+the way in which the military temper of the Committee, and particularly
+of Carnot, refused to consider any factor in the war save those that
+make for military success.</p>
+
+<p>Carnot and the Committee had no patience with the illusions which a
+civilian crowd possesses upon mere individual actions: what they saw was
+the campaign as a whole, and they knew that Houchard had left the armies
+opposite him intact.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps his execution was made more certain by the continuance of bad
+news from that more important point of the frontier&mdash;the direct line of
+Austrian advance upon Paris. Here, already, Valenciennes had fallen two
+months before, and Condé also. Lequesnoy, the third point of the barrier
+line, capitulated on the 11th of September, and<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span> the news of that
+capitulation reached Paris immediately after the news of Hondschoote. No
+fortress was now left between the Allies and the capital but Maubeuge.
+Coburg marched upon it at once.</p>
+
+<p>Not only had he that immense superiority in the quality of his troops
+which must be still insisted upon, but numerically also he was three to
+one when, on the 28th of September, at dawn, he crossed the Sambre above
+and below Maubeuge, and by noon of that day had contained the French
+army in that neighbourhood within the lines of the fortress.</p>
+
+<p>The situation was critical in the extreme: Maubeuge was ill prepared to
+stand siege; it was hardly provisioned; its garrison was of varied and,
+on the whole, of bad quality. In mere victuals it could stand out for
+but a few days, and, worst of all, it had behind it the continued
+example of necessary and fatal surrenders which had marked the whole
+summer. The orders of the Committee of Public Safety to its commander
+were terse: “Your head shall answer for Maubeuge.” After the receipt of
+that message no more came through the lines.</p>
+
+<p>The reader, if he be unaccustomed to military history, does well to note
+that in every action and in every campaign there is some one factor of
+position or of arms or of time which explains the result. Each has a
+pivot or hinge, as it were, upon which the whole turns. It was now upon
+Maubeuge that the revolutionary war thus depended.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span> At risk of
+oversimplifying a complex story, I would lay this down as the prime
+condition for the understanding of the early revolutionary wars: had
+Maubeuge fallen, the road to Paris lay open and the trick was
+done<a name="FNanchor_7_7" id="FNanchor_7_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_7" class="fnanchor">[7]</a>&mdash;and here we must consider again the effect in the field of
+Carnot’s genius.</p>
+
+<p>In the first place, he had provided numbers not on paper, but in
+reality; the Committee, through a decree of the Assembly, had
+despotically “requisitioned” men, animals, vehicles and supplies. The
+levy was a reality. Mere numbers then raw, but increasing, had begun to
+pour into the north-east. It was they that had told at Hoondschoote, it
+was they that were to tell in front of Maubeuge.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Secondly, as the Committee supplied the necessary initiative, Carnot
+supplied the necessary personality of war. His own will and own brain
+could come to one decision in one moment, and did so. It was he, as we
+shall see, who won the critical action. He chose Jourdan, a man whose
+quaint military career we must reluctantly leave aside in so brief a
+study as this, but at any rate an amateur, and put him in Houchard’s
+command over the Army of the Northern Frontier, and that command was
+extended from right away beyond the Ardennes to the sea. He ordered (and
+Jourdan obeyed) the concentration of men from all down that lengthy line
+to the right and the left upon one point, Guise. To leave the rest of
+the frontier weak was a grave risk only to be excused by very rapid
+action and success: both these were to follow. The concentration was
+effected in four days. Troops from the extreme north could not come in
+time. The furthest called upon were beyond Arras, with sixty-five miles
+of route between them and Guise. This division (which shall be typical
+of many), not quite eight thousand strong, left on receiving orders in
+the morning of the 3rd of October and entered Guise in the course of the
+6th. The rate of marching and the synchrony of these movements of
+imperfect troops should especially be noted by any one who would
+understand how the Revolution succeeded.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/p199.png" width="500" height="272" alt="The rapid eight days&#39; concentration in front of Maubeuge.
+October 1783." title="" />
+<span class="caption">The rapid eight days’ concentration in front of Maubeuge.
+October 1783.</span>
+<p class="right"><a href="images/p199-lg.png" name="fig006" id="fig006">Enlarge Map</a></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>A second division of over thirteen thousand men followed along the
+parallel road, with<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span> a similar time table. From the other end of his
+line, a detachment under Beauregard, just over four thousand men, was
+called up from the extreme right. It will serve as a typical example
+upon the eastern side of this lightning concentration. It had been
+gathered near Carignan, a town full fourteen miles beyond Sedan. It
+picked up reinforcements on the way and marched into Fourmies upon the
+11th, after covering just seventy miles in the three and a half days.
+With its arrival the concentration was complete, and not a moment too
+soon, for the bombardment of Maubeuge was about to begin. From the 11th
+to the 15th of October the army was advanced and drawn up in line, a
+day’s march in front of Guise, with its centre at Avesnes and facing the
+covering army of Coburg, which lay entrenched upon a long wooded crest
+with the valley of the Sambre upon its right and the village of
+Wattignies, on a sort of promontory of high land, upon its left.</p>
+
+<p>The Austrian position was reconnoitred upon the 14th. Upon the 15th the
+general attack was delivered and badly repelled. When darkness fell upon
+that day few in the army could have believed that Maubeuge was
+succourable&mdash;and it was a question of hours.</p>
+
+<p>Carnot, however, sufficiently knew the virtues as the vices of his novel
+troops, the troops of the great levy, stiffened with a proportion of
+regulars, to attempt an extraordinary thing. He marched eight thousand<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span>
+from his left and centre, over to his right during the night, and in the
+morning of the 16th his right, in front of the Austrian left at
+Wattignies had, by this conversion, become far the strongest point of
+the whole line.</p>
+
+<p>A dense mist had covered the end of this operation as the night had
+covered its inception, and that mist endured until nearly midday. The
+Austrians upon the heights had no hint of the conversion, and Wattignies
+was only held by three regiments. If they expected a renewed attack at
+all, they can only have expected it in the centre, or even upon the left
+where the French had suffered most the day before.</p>
+
+<p>Initiative in war is essentially a calculation of risk, and with high
+initiative the risk is high. What Carnot gambled upon (for Jourdan was
+against the experiment) when he moved those young men through the night,
+was the possibility of getting active work out of them after a day’s
+furious action, the forced marches of the preceding week and on top of
+it all a sleepless night of further marching. Most of the men who were
+prepared to charge on the French right as the day broadened and the mist
+lifted on that 16th of October, had been on foot for thirty hours. The
+charge was delivered, and was successful. The unexpected numbers thus
+concentrated under Wattignies carried that extreme position, held the
+height, and arrived, therefore, on the flank of the whole Austrian line,
+which, had not the effort of the aggressors exhausted them, would have
+been rolled up<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span> in its whole length. As it was, the Austrians retreated
+unmolested and in good order across the Sambre. The siege of Maubeuge
+was raised; and the next day the victorious French army entered the
+fortress.</p>
+
+<p>Thus was successfully passed the turning-point of the revolutionary
+wars.</p>
+
+<p>Two months later the other gate of the country was recovered. In the
+moment when Maubeuge was relieved, the enemy had pierced the lines of
+Wissembourg. It is possible that an immediate and decisive understanding
+among the Allies might then have swept all Alsace; but such an
+understanding was lacking. The disarrayed “Army of the Rhine” was got
+into some sort of order, notably through the enthusiasm of Hoche and the
+silent control of Pichegru. At the end of November the Prussians stood
+on the defensive at Kaiserslautern. Hoche hammered at them for three
+days without success. What really turned the scale was the floods of men
+and material that the levy and the requisitioning were pouring in. Just
+before Christmas the enemy evacuated Haguenau. Landau they still held;
+but a decisive action fought upon Boxing Day, a true soldiers’ battle,
+determined by the bayonet, settled the fate of the Allies on this point.
+The French entered Wissembourg again, and Landau was relieved after a
+siege of four months and a display of tenacity which had done not a
+little to turn the tide of the war.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile the news had come in that the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span> last of the serious internal
+rebellions was crushed. Toulon had been re-captured, the English fleet
+driven out; the town, the harbour and the arsenal had fallen into the
+hands of the French largely through the science of a young major of
+artillery (not captain: I have discussed the point elsewhere),
+Bonaparte, and this had taken place a week before the relief of Landau.
+The last confused horde of La Vendée had been driven from the walls of
+Granville in Normandy, to which it had erred and drifted rather than
+retreated. At Mans on the 13th of December it was cut to pieces, and at
+Savenay on the 23rd, three days before the great victory in Alsace, it
+was destroyed. A long peasant-and-bandit struggle, desperate yet hardly
+to be called guerilla, continued through the next year behind the hedges
+of Lower Brittany and of Vendée, but the danger to the State and to the
+Revolution was over. The year 1793 ended, therefore, with the complete
+relief of the whole territory of the Republic, save a narrow strip upon
+the Belgian frontier, complete domination of it by its Cæsar, the
+Committee of Public Safety; with two-thirds of a million of men under
+arms, and the future of the great experiment apparently secure.</p>
+
+<p>The causes of the wonder have been discussed, and will be discussed
+indefinitely. Primarily, they resided in the re-creation of a strong
+central power; secondly, in the combination of vast numbers and of a
+reckless spirit of sacrifice. The losses on the National side<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span> were
+perpetually and heavily superior to those of the Allies&mdash;in Alsace they
+had been three to one; and we shall better understand the duel when we
+appreciate that in the short eight years between the opening of the war
+and the triumph of Napoleon at Marengo, there had fallen in killed and
+wounded, on the French side, over seven hundred thousand men.</p>
+
+
+<h3><a name="V_5" id="V_5"></a>FIVE</h3>
+
+<p>The story of 1794 is but the consequence of what we have just read. It
+was the little belt or patch upon the Belgian frontier which was still
+in the hands of the enemy that determined the nature of the campaign.</p>
+
+<p>It was not until spring that the issue was joined. The Emperor of
+Austria reached Brussels on the 2nd day of April, and a fortnight later
+reviewed his army. The French line drawn up in opposition to it suffered
+small but continual reverses until the close of the month.</p>
+
+<p>On the 29th Clerfayt suffered a defeat which led to the fall, or rather
+the escape, of the small garrison of Menin. Clerfayt was beaten again at
+Courtray a fortnight later; but all these early engagements in the
+campaign were of no decisive moment. Tourcoing was to be the first heavy
+blow that should begin to settle matters, Fleurus was to clinch them.</p>
+
+<p>No battle can be less satisfactorily described<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span> in a few lines than that
+of Tourcoing, so different did it appear to either combatant, so
+opposite are the plans of what was expected on either side, and of what
+happened, so confused are the various accounts of contemporaries. The
+accusations of treason which nearly always arise after a disaster, and
+especially a disaster overtaking an allied force, are particularly
+monstrous, and may be dismissed: in particular the childish legend which
+pretends that the Austrians desired an English defeat.</p>
+
+<p>What the French say is that excellent forced marching and scientific
+concentration permitted them to attack the enemy before the junction of
+his various forces was effected. What the Allies say is (if they are
+speaking for their centre) that it was shamefully abandoned and
+unsupported by the two wings; if they are speaking for the wings, that
+the centre had no business to advance, when it saw that the two wings
+were not up in time to co-operate.</p>
+
+<p>One story goes that the Archduke Charles was incapacitated by a fit;
+Lord Acton has lent his considerable authority to this amusing version.
+At any rate, what happened was this:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>The Allies lay along the river Scheldt on Friday, the 16th of May:
+Tournay was their centre, with the Duke of York in command of the chief
+force there; five or six miles north, down the river, was one extremity
+of their line at a place called Warcoing: it was a body of Hanoverians.
+The left, under the Archduke<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span> Charles, was Austrian and had reached a
+place a day’s march south of Tournay called St. Amand. Over against the
+Allies lay a large French force also occupying a wide front of over
+fifteen miles, the centre of which was Tourcoing, then a village. Its
+left was in front of the fortress of Courtrai. Now, behind the French,
+up country northward in the opposite direction from the line of the
+Allies on the Scheldt was another force of the Allies under Clerfayt.
+The plan was that the Allied right should advance on to Mouscron and
+take it. The Allied centre should advance on to Tourcoing and Mouveaux
+and take them, while the left should march across the upper waters of
+the river Marque, forcing the bridges that crossed that marshy stream,
+and come up alongside the centre. In other words, there was to be an
+attack all along the French line from the south, and while it was
+proceeding, Clerfayt, from the north of the French, was to cross the Lys
+and attack also.</p>
+
+<p>On the day of the 17th what happened was this: The left of the Allies,
+marching from St. Amand, came up half a day late; the right of the
+Allies took Mouscron, but were beaten out of it by the French. The
+centre of the Allies fulfilled their programme, reaching Tourcoing and
+its neighbourhood by noon and holding their positions. It is to the
+honour of English arms that this success was accomplished by a force a
+third of which was British and the most notable bayonet work in which
+was done by the Guards. Meanwhile,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span> Clerfayt was late in moving and in
+crossing the river Lys, which lay between him and his objective.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 496px;">
+<img src="images/p207.png" width="496" height="500" alt="Tourcoing. May 16 to 18, 1794. The breakdown of the attempt of the Allies to cut off the French near
+Courtrai from Lille was due to their failure to synchronise They should
+have been in line from A to B at noon of the 17th with Clerfayt at C." title="" />
+<span class="caption">Tourcoing. May 16 to 18, 1794.</span>
+<p>The breakdown of the attempt of the Allies to cut off the French near
+Courtrai from Lille was due to their failure to synchronise They should
+have been in line from A to B at noon of the 17th with Clerfayt at C.</p>
+<p class="right"><a href="images/p207-lg.png" name="fig007" id="fig007">Enlarge Map</a></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>When night fell, therefore, on the first day of the action, a glance at
+the map will show that instead of one solid line advancing against the
+French from A to B, and the northern force in touch with it at C, the
+Allied formation was an absurd projection in the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span> middle, due to the
+success of the mixed and half-British force under the Duke of York: a
+success which had not been maintained on the two wings. A bulge of this
+sort in an attacking line is on the face of it disastrous. The enemy
+have only to be rapid in falling upon either flank of it and the bulge
+can be burst in. The French were rapid, and burst in the bulge was. By
+concentrating their forces against this one central part of the Allies
+they fought three to one.</p>
+
+<p>That same capacity which at Wattignies had permitted them to scorn sleep
+and to be indefatigable in marching, put them on the road before three
+o’clock in the morning of Sunday, the 18th, and with the dawn they fell
+upon the central force of the Allies, attacking it from all three sides.</p>
+
+<p>It is on this account that the battle is called the Battle of Tourcoing,
+for Tourcoing was the most advanced point to which the centre of the
+Allies had reached. The Germans, upon the Duke of York’s right at
+Tourcoing, felt the first brunt of the attack. The Duke of York himself,
+with his mixed, half-British force, came in for the blow immediately
+afterwards, and while it was still early morning. The Germans at
+Tourcoing began to fall back. The Duke of York’s force, to the left of
+them, was left isolated: its commander ought not to have hung on so
+long. But the defence was maintained with the utmost gallantry for the
+short time during which it was still possible. The retreat began about
+nine in the morning and<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span> was kept orderly for the first two miles, but
+after that point it was a rout. The drivers of the British cannon fled,
+and the guns, left without teams, blocked the precipitate flight of the
+cavalry. Their disorder communicated itself at once to the Guards, and
+to the line.</p>
+
+<p>Even in this desperate strait some sort of order was restored, notably
+by the Guards Brigade, which were apparently the first to form, and a
+movement that could still be called a retreat was pursued towards the
+south. The Duke of York himself was chased from spinney to spinney and
+escaped by a stroke of luck, finding a bridge across the last brook held
+by a detachment of Hessians. In this way were the central columns, who
+between them numbered not a third of the total force of the Allies,
+destroyed.</p>
+
+<p>Clerfayt had first advanced&mdash;but far too late to save the centre&mdash;and
+then retreated. The Archduke Charles, upon the left, was four hours late
+in marching to the help of the Duke of York; the right wing of the
+Allies was not even late: it spent the morning in an orderly artillery
+duel with the French force opposed to it. By five in the afternoon
+defeat was admitted and a general retreat of the Allies ordered.</p>
+
+<p>I have said that many reasons are given to account for the disaster of
+Tourcoing, one of the very few in which a British force has been routed
+upon the Continent; but I confess that if I were asked for an
+explanation of my own, I would say that it was<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span> simply due to the gross
+lack of synchrony on the part of the Allies, and that this in its turn
+was taken advantage of by the power both of vigil and of marching which
+the French troops, still inferior in most military characteristics, had
+developed and maintained, and which (a more important matter) their
+commanders knew how to use.</p>
+
+<p>This heavy blow, delivered on the 18th of May, in spite of a successful
+rally a week later, finally convinced the Emperor that the march on
+Paris was impossible. Eleven days later, on the 29th, it was announced
+in the camp of Tournay, upon which the Allied army had fallen back, that
+the Emperor had determined to return to Vienna. The Allied army was
+indeed still left upon that front, but the French continued to pour up
+against it. It was again their numbers that brought about the next and
+the final victory.</p>
+
+<p>Far off, upon the east of that same line, the army which is famous in
+history and in song as that of the Sambre et Meuse was violently
+attempting to cross the Sambre and to turn the line of the Allies.
+Coburg reinforced his right opposite the French left, but numbers had
+begun to bewilder him. The enthusiasm of Saint-Just, the science of
+Carnot, decided victory at this eastern end of the line.</p>
+
+<p>Six times the passage of the Sambre had failed. Reinforcements continued
+to reach the army, and the seventh attempt succeeded.</p>
+
+<p>Charleroi, which is the main fortress blocking<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span> the passage of the
+Sambre at this place, could be, and was, invested when once the river
+was crossed by the French. It capitulated in a week. But the evacuation
+of Charleroi was but just accomplished when Coburg, seventy thousand
+strong, appeared in relief of the city.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/p211.png" width="500" height="228" alt="Showing effect of Ypres, Charleroi and Fleurus in
+wholly throwing back the Allies in June 1794. Ypres captured on June 19 by the French, they march on Oudenarde and
+pass it on June 25 to 27. Meanwhile Charleroi has also surrendered to
+the French, and when, immediately afterwards, the Austrians try to
+relieve it, they are beaten at Fleurus and retire on Brussels. English at Tournai and all the Allied Forces at Condé,
+Valenciennes, Landrecies, and Mons are imperilled and must
+surrender or retire." title="" />
+<span class="caption">Showing effect of Ypres, Charleroi and Fleurus in
+wholly throwing back the Allies in June 1794.</span>
+<p>
+Ypres captured on June 19 by the French, they march on Oudenarde and
+pass it on June 25 to 27. Meanwhile Charleroi has also surrendered to
+the French, and when, immediately afterwards, the Austrians try to
+relieve it, they are beaten at Fleurus and retire on Brussels.</p>
+
+<p>Thus the English at Tournai and all the Allied Forces at Condé,
+Valenciennes, Landrecies, and Mons are imperilled and must
+surrender or retire.</p>
+<p class="right"><a href="images/p211-lg.png" name="fig008" id="fig008">Enlarge Map</a></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The plateau above the town where the great struggle was decided, is
+known as that of Fleurus, and it was upon the 26th of June that the
+armies were there engaged. Never before had forces so equal permitted
+the French any success. It had hitherto been the ceaseless
+requisitioning of men to supply their insufficient training and command,
+which had accomplished the salvation of the country. At Fleurus, though
+there<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span> was still some advantage on the French side, the numbers were
+more nearly equal.</p>
+
+<p>The action was not determined for ten hours, and on the French centre
+and left was nearly lost, when the Reserves’ and Marceau’s obstinacy in
+front of Fleurus village itself at last decided it.</p>
+
+<p>The consequences of the victory were final. As the French right advanced
+from Fleurus the French left advanced from Ypres, and the centre became
+untenable for the Allies. The four French fortresses which the enemy
+still garrisoned in that Belgian “belt” of which I have spoken, were
+invested and re-captured. By the 10th of July the French were in
+Brussels, the English were beaten back upon Holland, the Austrians
+retreating upon the Rhine, and the continuous success of the
+revolutionary armies was assured.</p>
+
+<hr class="short" />
+
+<p>While these things were proceeding upon land, however, there had
+appeared a factor in the war which modern desire for comfort and, above
+all, for commercial security has greatly exaggerated, but which the
+student will do well to note in its due proportion. This factor was the
+military weakness of France at sea.</p>
+
+<p>In mere numbers the struggle was entered upon with fleets in the ratio
+of about two to one, while to the fleet of Great Britain, already twice
+as large as its opponent, must be added the fleets of the Allies. But
+numbers did not then, nor will they in the future, really decide the
+issue of maritime war. It<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span> was the supremacy of English gunnery which
+turned the scale. This triumphant superiority was proved in the battle
+of the 1st of June, 1794.</p>
+
+<p>The English fleet under Lord Howe attacked the French fleet which was
+waiting to escort a convoy of grain into Brest; the forces came in
+contact upon the 28th of May, and the action was a running one of three
+days.</p>
+
+<p>Two examples must suffice to prove how determining was the superiority
+of the British fire. The <i>Queen Charlotte</i>, in the final action, found
+herself caught between the <i>Montagne</i> and the <i>Jacobin</i>. We have the
+figures of the losses during the duel of these two flagships. The <i>Queen
+Charlotte</i> lost forty-two men in the short and furious exchange, the
+<i>Montagne</i> alone three hundred. Again, consider the total figures. The
+number of the crews on both sides was nearly equal, but their losses
+were as eleven to five. It cannot be too often repeated that the initial
+advantage which the English fleet gained in the great war, which it
+maintained and increased as that war proceeded, and which it made
+absolute at Trafalgar, was an advantage mainly due to the guns.</p>
+
+<p>The reader must not expect in a sketch which ends with the fall of
+Robespierre any treatise, however short, upon the effect of sea power in
+the revolutionary wars. It has of late years been grossly exaggerated,
+the reaction which will follow this exaggeration may as grossly belittle
+it. It prevented the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span> invasion of England, it permitted the exasperation
+and wearing out of the French forces in the Peninsula. But it could not
+have determined the fate of Napoleon. That was determined by his Russian
+miscalculation and by his subsequent and consequent defeat at Leipsic.</p>
+
+<p>Upon the early success of the Revolution and the resulting establishment
+of European democracy, with which alone these pages deal, sea power was
+of no considerable effect.</p>
+
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_6" id="Footnote_6_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_6"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> Incidentally it should be noted how true it is that this
+supreme military quality is a matter of organisation rather than of the
+physical power of troops; in the Napoleonic wars the marching power of
+the English troops was often proved exceptional, and perhaps the
+greatest of all feats accomplished by a small body was that of the Light
+Brigade marching to the succour of Wellington at Talavera.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_7_7" id="Footnote_7_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_7"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> I must not, in fairness to the reader, neglect the great
+mass of opinion, from Jomini to Mr. Fortescue’s classic work upon the
+British Army, which lays it down that the Allies had but to mask the
+frontier fortresses and to advance their cavalry rapidly along the Paris
+road. Historical hypothesis can never be more than a matter of judgment,
+but I confess that this view has always seemed to me to ignore&mdash;as
+purely military historians and especially foreign ones might well
+ignore&mdash;the social condition of “’93.” Cavalry is the weakest of all
+arms with which to deal with sporadic, unorganised, but determined
+resistance. To pass through the densely populated country of the Paris
+road may be compared to the forcing of an open town, and cavalry can
+never be relied upon for <i>that</i>. As for the army moving as a whole
+without a perfect security in its communications, the matter need not
+even be discussed; and it must further be remembered that, the moment
+such an advance began, an immediate concentration from the north would
+have fallen upon the ill-guarded lines of supply. It may be taken that
+Coburg knew his business when he sat down before this, the last of the
+fortresses.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="VI" id="VI"></a>VI<br /><br />
+<small>THE REVOLUTION AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH</small></h2>
+
+
+<p><span class="sc">The</span> last and the most important of the aspects which the French
+Revolution presents to a foreign, and in particular to an English
+reader, is the antagonism which arose between it and the Church.</p>
+
+<p>As this is the most important so it is the most practical of the
+historical problems which the Revolution sets the student to solve; for
+the opposition of the Church’s organisation in France has at once been
+the most profound which the Revolution has had to encounter, the most
+active in its methods, and the only one which has increased in strength
+as time proceeded. It is hardly too much to say that the Revolution
+would, in France at least, have achieved its object and created a
+homogeneous, centralised democracy, had not this great quarrel between
+the Republic and the Church<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span> arisen; and one may legitimately contrast
+the ready pliancy of men to political suggestion and the easy story of
+their institutions where men knew nothing of the Church, with the great
+storms that arise and the fundamental quarrels that are challenged
+wherever men are acquainted with the burning truths of Catholicism.</p>
+
+<p>Finally, the struggle between the Catholic Church and the Revolution is
+not only the most important and the most practical, but also by an
+unhappy coincidence the most difficult of comprehension of all the
+matters presented to us by the great change.</p>
+
+<p>We have seen in this book that one department of revolutionary history,
+the second in importance, perhaps, to the religious department, was also
+difficult of comprehension&mdash;to wit, the military department. And we have
+seen (or at least I have postulated) that the difficulty of following
+the military fortunes of the Republic was due to the mass of detail, to
+the technical character of the information to be acquired and to the
+natural unfamiliarity of the general reader with the elements of
+military science. In other words, an accurate knowledge of great numbers
+of facts, the proper disposition of these facts in their order of
+military importance, and the correlation of a great number of
+disconnected actions and plans will alone permit us to grasp the
+function of the armies in the development and establishment of the
+modern State through the revolutionary wars.</p>
+
+<p>Now in this second and greater problem, the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span> problem of the function
+played by religion, it is an exactly opposite method which can alone be
+of service.</p>
+
+<p>We must examine the field generally, and still more generally we must
+forget details that here only bewilder, and see in the largest possible
+outline what forces were really at issue, why their conflict occurred,
+upon what points that conflict was vital. Any more particular plan will
+land us, as it has landed so many thousands of controversialists, in
+mere invective on one side or the other, till we come to see nothing but
+a welter of treason on the part of priests, and of massacre upon the
+part of democrats.</p>
+
+<p>Men would, did they try to unravel the skein by analysing the documents
+of the Vatican or of the French archives, come apparently upon nothing
+but a host of petty, base, and often personal calculations; or again,
+did they attempt to take a local sample of the struggle and to follow it
+in one department of thought, they would come upon nothing but a whirl
+of conflict with no sort of clue to the motives that lay behind.</p>
+
+<p>The contrast between the military and the religious problem of the
+French Revolution is like the contrast between the geological
+composition and the topographical contours of a countryside. To
+understand the first we must bore and dig, we must take numerous samples
+of soil and subject them to analysis, we must make ourselves acquainted
+with detail in its utmost recesses. But for the second, the more general
+our standpoint, the wider<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span> our gaze, and the more comprehensive our
+judgment, the more accurately do we grasp the knowledge we have set out
+to seek.</p>
+
+<p>We must, then, approach our business by asking at the outset the most
+general question of all: “<i>Was there a necessary and fundamental quarrel
+between the doctrines of the Revolution and those of the Catholic
+Church?</i>”</p>
+
+<p>Those ill acquainted with either party, and therefore ill equipped for
+reply, commonly reply with assurance in the affirmative. The French (and
+still more the non-French) Republican who may happen, by the accident of
+his life, to have missed the Catholic Church, to have had no intimacy
+with any Catholic character, no reading of Catholic philosophy, and
+perhaps even no chance view of so much as an external Catholic ceremony,
+replies unhesitatingly that the Church is the necessary enemy of the
+Revolution. Again, the <i>émigré</i>, the wealthy woman, the recluse, any one
+of the many contemporary types to whom the democratic theory of the
+Revolution came as a complete novelty, and to-day the wealthy families
+in that tradition, reply as unhesitatingly that the Revolution is the
+necessary enemy of the Church. The reply seems quite sufficient to the
+Tory squire in England or Germany, who may happen to be a Catholic by
+birth or by conversion; and it seems equally obvious to (let us say) a
+democratic member of some Protestant Church in one of the new countries.</p>
+
+<p>Historically and logically, theologically also, those who affirm a
+necessary antagonism<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span> between the Republic and the Church are in error.
+Those who are best fitted to approach the problem by their knowledge
+both of what the Revolution attempted and of what Catholic philosophy
+is, find it in proportion to their knowledge difficult or impossible to
+answer that fundamental question in the affirmative. They cannot call
+the Revolution a necessary enemy of the Church, nor the Church of
+Democracy.</p>
+
+<p>What is more, minds at once of the most active and of the best
+instructed sort are the very minds which find it difficult to explain
+how any such quarrel can have arisen. French history itself is full of
+the names of those for whom not so much a reconciliation between the
+Revolution and the Church, as a statement that no real quarrel existed
+between them, was the motive of politics; and almost in proportion to a
+man’s knowledge of his fellows in Catholic societies, almost in that
+proportion is the prime question I have asked answered by such a man in
+the negative. A man who knows both the Faith and the Republic will tell
+you that there is not and cannot be any necessary or fundamental reason
+why conflict should have arisen between a European Democracy and the
+Catholic Church.</p>
+
+<p>When we examine those who concern themselves with the deepest and most
+abstract side of the quarrel, we find the same thing. It is impossible
+for the theologian, or even for the practical ecclesiastical teacher, to
+put his finger upon a political doctrine essential to the Revolution and
+to say, “This doctrine<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span> is opposed to Catholic dogma or to Catholic
+morals.” Conversely, it is impossible for the Republican to put his
+finger upon a matter of ecclesiastical discipline or religious dogma and
+to say, “This Catholic point is at issue with my political theory of the
+State.”</p>
+
+<p>Thousands of active men upon either side would have been only too
+willing during the last hundred years to discover some such issue, and
+it has proved undiscoverable. In a word, only those Democrats who know
+little of the Catholic Church can say that of its nature it forbids
+democracy; and only those Catholics who have a confused or imperfect
+conception of democracy can say that of its nature it is antagonistic to
+the Catholic Church.</p>
+
+<p>Much that is taught by the purely temporal theory of the one is
+indifferent to the transcendental and supernatural philosophy of the
+other. In some points, where there is contact (as in the conception of
+the dignity of man and of the equality of men) there is agreement. To
+sum up, the Republican cannot by his theory persecute the Church; the
+Church cannot by her theory excommunicate the Republican.</p>
+
+<p>Why, then, it must next be asked, has there in practice arisen so
+furious and so enormous a conflict, a conflict whose activity and whose
+consequence are not narrowing but broadening to-day?</p>
+
+<p>It may be replied to this second question, which is only less general
+than the first, in one of two manners.</p>
+
+<p>One may say that the actions of men are<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span> divided not by theories but by
+spiritual atmospheres, as it were. According to this view men act under
+impulses not ideal but actual: impulses which affect great numbers and
+yet in their texture correspond to the complex but united impulses of an
+individual personality. Thus, though there be no conflict demonstrable
+between the theology of the Catholic Church and the political theory of
+the Revolution, yet there may be necessary and fundamental conflict
+between the <i>Persons</i> we call the Revolution and the Church, and between
+the vivifying principles by which either lives. That is one answer that
+can be, and is, given.</p>
+
+<p>Or one may give a totally different answer and say, “There was no
+quarrel between the theology of the Catholic Church and the political
+theory of the Revolution; but the folly of this statesman, the ill
+drafting of that law, the misconception of such and such an institution,
+the coincidence of war breaking out at such and such a moment and
+affecting men in such and such a fashion&mdash;all these material accidents
+bred a misunderstanding between the two great forces, led into conflict
+the human officers and the human organisations which directed them; and
+conflict once established feeds upon, and grows from, its own
+substance.”</p>
+
+<p>Now, if that first form of reply be given to the question we have posed,
+though it is sufficient for the type of philosophy which uses it, though
+it is certainly explanatory of all human quarrels, and though it in
+particular<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span> satisfies a particular modern school of thought, it is
+evident that history, properly so called, cannot deal with it.</p>
+
+<p>You may say that the Revolution was the expression of a spirit far more
+real than any theory, that this spirit is no more susceptible of
+analysis or definition than is the personality of a single human
+character, and that this reality was in conflict with another
+reality&mdash;to wit, the Catholic Church. You may even (as some minds by no
+means negligible have done) pass into the field of mysticism in the
+matter, and assert that really personal forces, wills superior and
+external to man, Demons and Angels, drove the Revolution against the
+Catholic Church, and created The Republic to be an anti-Catholic force
+capable of meeting and of defeating that Church, which (by its own
+definition of itself) is not a theory, but the expression of a
+Personality and a Will. To put it in old-fashioned terms, you may say
+that the Revolution was the work of antichrist;&mdash;but with that kind of
+reply, I repeat, history cannot deal.</p>
+
+<p>If it be true that, in spite of an absence of contradictory intellectual
+theories, there is a fundamental spiritual contradiction between the
+Revolution and the Catholic Church, then time will test the business; we
+shall see in that case a perpetual extension of the quarrel until the
+Revolution becomes principally a force for the extinction of
+Catholicism, and the Catholic Church appears to the supporter of the
+Revolution not as his principal, but as his only enemy. Such<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span> a
+development has not arisen in a hundred years; a process of time far
+more lengthy will alone permit us to judge whether the supposed duello
+is a real matter or a phantasm.</p>
+
+<p>The second type of answer, the answer which pretends to explain the
+antagonism by a definite series of events, does concern the historian.</p>
+
+<p>Proceeding upon the lines of that second answer, he can bring his
+science to bear and use the instruments of his trade; and he can show
+(as I propose to show in what follows) how, although no quarrel can be
+found between the theory of the Revolution and that of the Church, an
+active quarrel did in fact spring up between the Revolution in action
+and the authorities of Catholicism; a quarrel which a hundred years has
+not appeased, but accentuated.</p>
+
+<hr class="short" />
+
+<p>Behind the revolutionary quarrel lay the condition of the Church in the
+French State since the settlement of the quarrel of the Reformation.</p>
+
+<p>With what that quarrel of the Reformation was, the reader is
+sufficiently familiar. For, roughly speaking, a hundred years, from the
+first years of the sixteenth century to the first years of the
+seventeenth (from the youth of Henry VIII to the boyhood of Charles I in
+England), a great attempt was made to change (as one party would have
+said to amend, as the other would have said to denaturalise) the <i>whole
+body</i> of Western Christendom. A <i>general</i> movement of attack upon the
+inherited<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span> form of the Church, and a general resistance to that attack,
+was at work throughout European civilisation; and either antagonist
+hoped for a universal success, the one of what he called “The
+Reformation of religion,” the other of what he called “The Divine
+Institution and visible unity of the Catholic Church.”</p>
+
+<p>At the end of such a period it became apparent that no such general
+result had been, or could be, attained. All that part of the West which
+had rejected the authority of the See of Rome began to appear as a
+separate territorial region permanently divided from the rest; all that
+part of Europe which had retained the Authority of the See of Rome began
+to appear as another region of territory. The line of cleavage between
+the two was beginning to define itself as a geographical line, and
+nearly corresponded to the line which, centuries before, had divided the
+Roman and civilised world from the Barbarians.</p>
+
+<p>The Province of Britain had an exceptional fate. Though Roman in origin
+and of the ancient civilisation in its foundation, it fell upon the
+non-Roman side of the new boundary; while Ireland, which the Roman
+Empire had never organised or instructed, remained, alone of the
+external parts of Europe, in communion with Rome. Italy, Spain, and in
+the main southern or Romanised Germany, refused ultimately to abandon
+their tradition of civilisation and of religion. But in Gaul it was
+otherwise&mdash;and the action of Gaul during the Reformation must be seized
+if its modern religious quarrels are to be apprehended.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span> A very
+considerable proportion of the French landed and mercantile classes,
+that is of the wealthy men of the country, were in sympathy with the new
+religious doctrines and the new social organisation which had now taken
+root in England, Scotland, Holland, northern Germany and Scandinavia,
+and which were destined in those countries to lead to the domination of
+wealth. These French squires and traders were called the Huguenots.</p>
+
+<p>The succeeding hundred years, from 1615 to 1715, let us say, were a
+settlement, not without bloodshed, of the unsatisfied quarrel of the
+preceding century. All Englishmen know what happened in England; how the
+last vestiges of Catholicism were crushed out and all the social and
+political consequences of Protestantism established in the State.</p>
+
+<p>There was, even in that same seventeenth century, a separate, but
+futile, attempt to destroy Catholicism in Ireland. In Germany a struggle
+of the utmost violence had only led to a similar regional result. The
+first third of that hundred years concluded in the Peace of Westphalia,
+and left the Protestant and Catholic territorial divisions much what we
+now know them.</p>
+
+<p>In France, however, the peculiar phenomenon remained of a body powerful
+in numbers and (what was far more important) in wealth and social power,
+scattered throughout the territory of the kingdom, organised and, by
+this time, fixedly anti-Catholic, and therefore anti-national.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The nation had recovered its traditional line and had insisted upon the
+victory of a strong executive, and that executive Catholic. France,
+therefore, in this period of settlement, became an absolute monarchy
+whose chief possessed tremendous and immediate powers, and a monarchy
+which incorporated with itself all the great elements of the national
+tradition, <i>including the Church</i>.</p>
+
+<p>It is the name of Louis XIV, of course, which symbolises this great
+time; his very long reign precisely corresponds to it. He was born
+coincidently with that universal struggle for a religious settlement in
+Europe, which I have described as characteristic of the time; he died
+precisely at its close; and under him it seemed as though the
+reconstructed power of Gaul and the defence of organised Catholicism
+were to be synonymous.</p>
+
+<p>But there were two elements of disruption in that homogeneous body which
+Louis XIV apparently commanded. The very fact that the Church had thus
+become in France an unshakable national institution, chilled the vital
+source of Catholicism. Not only did the hierarchy stand in a perpetual
+suspicion of the Roman See, and toy with the conception of national
+independence, but they, and all the official organisation of French
+Catholicism, put the security of the national establishment and its
+intimate attachment to the general political structure of the State, far
+beyond the sanctity of Catholic dogma or the practice of Catholic
+morals.</p>
+
+<p>That political structure&mdash;the French monarchy&mdash;seemed<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span> to be of granite
+and eternal. Had it indeed survived, the Church in Gaul would doubtless,
+in spite of its attachment to so mundane a thing as the crown, have
+still survived to enjoy one of those resurrections which have never
+failed it in the past, and would have returned, by some creative
+reaction, to its principle of life. But for the moment the consequence
+of this fixed political establishment was that scepticism, and all those
+other active forces of the mind which play upon religion in any Catholic
+State, had full opportunity. The Church was, so to speak, not concerned
+to defend itself but only its method of existence. It was as though a
+garrison, forgetting the main defences of a place, had concentrated all
+its efforts upon the security of one work which contained its supplies
+of food.</p>
+
+<p>Wit, good verse, sincere enthusiasm, a lucid exposition of whatever in
+the human mind perpetually rebels against transcendental affirmations,
+were allowed every latitude and provoked no effective reply. But overt
+acts of disrespect to ecclesiastical authority were punished with
+rigour.</p>
+
+<p>While in the wealthy, the bureaucratic, and the governing classes, to
+ridicule the Faith was an attitude taken for granted, seriously to
+attack the privileges or position of its ministers was ungentlemanly,
+and was not allowed. It did not shock the hierarchy that one of its
+Apostolic members should be a witty atheist; that another should go
+hunting upon Corpus Christi, nearly upset the Blessed<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span> Sacrament in his
+gallop, and forget what day it was when the accident occurred. The
+bishops found nothing remarkable in seeing a large proportion of their
+body to be loose livers, or in some of them openly presenting their
+friends to their mistresses as might be done by any great lay noble
+round them. That a diocese or any other spiritual charge should be
+divorced from its titular chief, seemed to them as natural as does to us
+the absence from his modern regiment of some titular foreign colonel.
+Unquestioned also by the bishops were the poverty, the neglect, and the
+uninstruction of the parish clergy; nay&mdash;and this is by far the
+principal feature&mdash;the abandonment of religion by all but a very few of
+the French millions, no more affected the ecclesiastical officials of
+the time than does the starvation of our poor affect, let us say, one of
+our professional politicians. It was a thing simply taken for granted.</p>
+
+<p>The reader must seize that moribund condition of the religious life of
+France upon the eve of the Revolution, for it is at once imperfectly
+grasped by the general run of historians, and is also the only fact
+which thoroughly explains what followed. The swoon of the Faith in the
+eighteenth century is the negative foundation upon which the strange
+religious experience of the French was about to rise. France, in the
+generation before the Revolution, was passing through a phase in which
+the Catholic Faith was at a lower ebb than it had ever been since the
+preaching and establishment of it in Gaul.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>This truth is veiled by more than one circumstance. Thus many official
+acts, notably marriages and the registration of births, took place under
+a Catholic form, and indeed Catholic forms had a monopoly of them.
+Again, the State wore Catholic clothes, as it were: the public occasions
+of pomp were full of religious ceremony. Few of the middle classes went
+to Mass in the great towns, hardly any of the artisans; but the Churches
+were “official.” Great sums of money&mdash;including official money&mdash;were at
+the disposal of the Church; and the great ecclesiastics were men from
+whom solid favours could be got. Again, the historic truth is masked by
+the language and point of view of the great Catholic reaction which has
+taken place in our own time.</p>
+
+<p>It is safe to say that where one adult of the educated classes concerned
+himself seriously with the Catholic Faith and Practice in France before
+the Revolution, there are five to-day. But in between lies the violent
+episode of the persecution, and the Catholic reaction in our time
+perpetually tends to contrast a supposed pre-revolutionary “Catholic”
+society with the revolutionary fury. “Look,” say its champions, “at the
+dreadful way in which the Revolution treated the Church.” And as they
+say this the converse truth appears obvious and they seem to imply,
+“Think how different it must have been before the Revolution persecuted
+the Church!” The very violence of the modern reaction towards
+Catholicism has exaggerated the revolutionary<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span> persecution, and in doing
+so has made men forget that apart from other evidence of the decline of
+religion, it is obvious that persecution could never have arisen without
+a strong and continuous historical backing. You could not have had a
+Diocletian in the thirteenth century with the spirit of the Crusaders
+just preceding him; you could not have had Henry VIII if the England of
+the fifteenth century just preceding him had been an England devoted to
+the monastic profession. And you could not have had the revolutionary
+fury against the Catholic Church in France if the preceding generation
+had been actively Catholic even in a considerable portion.</p>
+
+<p>As a fact, of course it was not: and in the popular indifference to or
+hatred of the Church the principal factor was the strict brotherhood not
+so much of Church and State as of Church and executive Government.</p>
+
+<p>But there was another factor. We were describing a little way back how
+in France there had arisen, during the movement of the Reformation, a
+wealthy, powerful and numerically large Huguenot body. In mere numbers
+it dwindled, but it maintained throughout the seventeenth century a very
+high position, both of privilege and (what was its characteristic) of
+money-power; and even to-day, though their birth-rate is, of course,
+lower than the average of the nation, the French Huguenots number close
+upon a million, and are far wealthier, upon the average, than their
+fellow citizens. It is their wealth which<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span> dominates the trade of
+certain districts, which exercises so great an effect upon the
+universities, the publishing trade, and the press; and in general lends
+them such weight in the affairs of the nation.</p>
+
+<p>Now the Huguenot had in France a special and permanent quarrel with the
+monarchy, and therefore with the Catholic Church, which, precisely
+because it was not of the vivid and intense kind which is associated
+with popular and universal religions, was the more secretly ubiquitous.
+His quarrel was that, having been highly privileged for nearly a
+century, the member of “a State within a State,” and for more than a
+generation free to hold assemblies separate from and often antagonistic
+to the national Government, these privileges had been suddenly removed
+from him by the Government of Louis XIV a century before the Revolution.
+The quarrel was more political than religious; it was a sort of “Home
+Rule” quarrel. For though the Huguenots were spread throughout France,
+they had possessed special cities and territories wherein their spirit
+and, to a certain extent, their private self-government, formed
+<i>enclaves</i> of particularism within the State.</p>
+
+<p>They had held this position, as I have said, for close upon a hundred
+years, and it was not until a date contemporary with the violent
+settlement of the religious trouble in England by the expulsion of James
+II that a similar settlement, less violent, achieved (as it was thought)
+a similar religious unity in France. But that unity was not achieved.
+The<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span> Huguenots, though no longer permitted to exist as a State within a
+State, remained, for the hundred years between the Revocation of the
+Edict of Nantes and the outbreak of the Revolution, a powerful and
+ever-watchful body. They stood upon the flank of the attack which
+intellectual scepticism was making upon the Catholic Church, they were
+prepared to take advantage of that scepticism’s first political victory,
+and since the Revolution they have been the most powerful and, after the
+Freemasons, with whom they are largely identified, the most strongly
+organised, of the anti-clerical forces in the country.</p>
+
+<p>The Jews, whose action since the Revolution has been so remarkable in
+this same business, were not, in the period immediately preceding it, of
+any considerable influence, and their element in the coalition may be
+neglected.</p>
+
+<p>Such, then, was the position when the Revolution was preparing. Within
+memory of all men living, the Church had become more and more official,
+the masses of the great towns had wholly lost touch with it; the
+intelligence of the country was in the main drawn to the Deist or even
+to the purely sceptical propaganda, the powerful Huguenot body was ready
+prepared for an alliance with any foe of Catholicism, and in the eyes of
+the impoverished town populace&mdash;notably in Paris, which had long
+abandoned the practice of religion&mdash;the human organisation of the
+Church, the hierarchy, the priesthood, and the few but very wealthy
+religious orders which still lingered on in dwindling numbers, were but<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span>
+a portion of the privileged world which the populace hated and was
+prepared to destroy.</p>
+
+<p>It is upon such a spirit and in such conditions of the national
+religious life that the Revolution begins to work. In the National
+Assembly you have the great body of the Commons which determines the
+whole, touched only here and there with men in any way acquainted with
+or devoted to Catholic practice, and those men for the most part
+individual and eccentric, that is, uncatholic, almost in proportion to
+the genuineness of their religious feeling. Among the nobility the
+practice of religion was a social habit with some&mdash;as a mental attitude
+the Faith was forgotten among all but a very few. Among the clergy a
+very wealthy hierarchy, no one of them prepared to defend the Church
+with philosophical argument, and almost unanimous in regarding itself as
+a part of the old political machine, was dominant; while the
+representatives of the lower clergy, strongly democratic in character,
+were at first more occupied with the establishment of democracy than
+with the impending attack upon the material and temporal organisation of
+the Church.</p>
+
+<p>Now, that material and temporal organisation offered at the very
+beginning of the debates an opportunity for attack which no other
+department of the old <i>régime</i> could show.</p>
+
+<p>The immediate peril of the State was financial. The pretext and even to
+some extent the motive for the calling of the States-General<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span> was the
+necessity for finding money. The old fiscal machinery had broken down,
+and as always happens when a fiscal machine breaks down, the hardship it
+involved, and the pressure upon individuals which it involved, appeared
+to be universal. <i>There was no immediate and easily available fund of
+wealth upon which the Executive could lay hands save the wealth of the
+clergy.</i></p>
+
+<p>The feudal dues of the nobles, if abandoned, must fall rather to the
+peasantry than to the State. Of the existing taxes few could be
+increased without peril, and none with any prospect of a large
+additional revenue. The charge for debt alone was one-half of the total
+receipts of the State, the deficit was, in proportion to the revenue,
+overwhelming. Face to face with that you had an institution not popular,
+one whose public functions were followed by but a small proportion of
+the population, one in which income was most unequally distributed, and
+one whose feudal property yielded in dues an amount equal to more than a
+quarter of the total revenue of the State. Add to this a system of
+tithes which produced nearly as much again, and it will be apparent
+under what a financial temptation the Assembly lay.</p>
+
+<p>It may be argued, of course, that the right of the Church to this
+ecclesiastical property, whether in land or in tithes, was absolute, and
+that the confiscation of the one or of the other form of revenue was
+mere theft. But such was not the legal conception of the moment. The
+wealth of the Church was not<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span> even (and this is most remarkable)
+defended as absolute property by the generality of those who enjoyed it.
+The tone of the debates which suppressed the tithes, and later
+confiscated the Church lands, was a tone of discussion upon legal
+points, precedents, public utility, and so forth. There was not heard in
+it, in any effective degree, the assertion of mere moral right; though
+in that time the moral rights of property were among the first of
+political doctrines.</p>
+
+<p>It was not, however, the confiscation of the Church lands and the
+suppression of the tithe which founded the quarrel between the
+Revolution and the clergy. No financial or economic change is ever more
+than a preparation for, or a permissive condition of, a moral change. It
+is never the cause of a moral change. Even the suppression of the
+religious houses in the beginning of 1790 must not be taken as the point
+of departure in the great quarrel. The religious orders in France were
+at that moment too decayed in zeal and in numbers, too wealthy and much
+too removed from the life of the nation, for this to be the case. The
+true historical point of departure from which we must date the beginning
+of this profound debate between the Revolution and Catholicism, is to be
+found in the morning of the 30th of May, 1790, when a parliamentary
+committee (the Ecclesiastical Committee) presented to the House its plan
+for the reform of the Constitution of the Church in Gaul.</p>
+
+<p>The enormity of that act is now apparent<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span> to the whole world. The
+proposal, at the bidding of chance representatives not elected <i>ad hoc</i>,
+to change the dioceses and the sees of Catholic France, the decision of
+an ephemeral political body to limit to such and such ties (and very
+feeble they were) the bond between the Church of France and the Holy
+See, the suppression of the Cathedral Chapters, the seemingly farcical
+proposal that bishops should be elected, nay, priests also thus chosen,
+the submission of the hierarchy in the matter of residence and travel to
+a civil authority which openly declared itself indifferent in matters of
+religion,&mdash;all this bewilders the modern mind. How, we ask, could men so
+learned, so enthusiastic, so laborious and so closely in touch with all
+the realities of their time, make a blunder of that magnitude? Much
+more, how did such a blunder escape the damnation of universal mockery
+and immediate impotence? The answer is to be discovered in what has just
+been laid down with so much insistence: the temporary eclipse of
+religion in France before the Revolution broke out.</p>
+
+<p>The men who framed the Constitution of the Clergy, the men who voted it,
+nay, even the men who argued against it, all had at the back of their
+minds three conceptions which they were attempting to reconcile: of
+those three conceptions one was wholly wrong, one was imperfect because
+superficial, the third alone was true. And these three conceptions were,
+first, that the Catholic Church was a moribund superstition, secondly,
+that it possessed<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span> in its organisation and tradition a power to be
+reckoned with, and thirdly, that the State, its organs, and their
+corporate inheritance of action, were so bound up with the Catholic
+Church that it was impossible to effect any general political settlement
+in which that body both external to France and internal, should be
+neglected.</p>
+
+<p>Of these three conceptions, had the first been as true as the last, it
+would have saved the Constitution of the Clergy and the reputation for
+common-sense of those who framed it.</p>
+
+<p>It was certainly true that Catholicism had for so many centuries been
+bound up in the framework of the State that the Parliament must
+therefore do something with the Church in the general settlement of the
+nation: it could not merely leave the Church on one side.</p>
+
+<p>It was also superficially true that the Church was a power to be
+reckoned with politically, quite apart from the traditional union of
+Church and State&mdash;but only superficially true. What the revolutionary
+politicians feared was the intrigue of those who commanded the
+organisation of the Catholic Church, men whom they knew for the most
+part to be without religion, and the sincerity of all of whom they
+naturally doubted. A less superficial and a more solid judgment of the
+matter would have discovered that the real danger lay in the animosity
+or intrigue against the Civil Constitution, not of the corrupt
+hierarchy, but of the sincere though ill-instructed and dwindling
+minority which was still loyally attached to the doctrines<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span> and
+discipline of the Church. But even this superficial judgment would not
+have been fatal, had not the judgment of the National Assembly been
+actually erroneous upon the first point&mdash;the vitality of the Faith.</p>
+
+<p>Had the Catholic Church been, as nearly all educated men then imagined,
+a moribund superstition, had the phase of decline through which it was
+passing been a phase comparable to that through which other religions
+have passed in their last moments, had it been supported by ancient
+families from mere tradition, clung to by remote peasants from mere
+ignorance and isolation, abandoned (as it was) in the towns simply
+because the towns had better opportunities of intellectual enlightenment
+and of acquiring elementary knowledge in history and the sciences; had,
+in a word, the imaginary picture which these men drew in their minds of
+the Catholic Church and its fortunes been an exact one, then the Civil
+Constitution of the Clergy would have been a statesmanlike act. It would
+have permitted the hold of the Catholic Church upon such districts as it
+still retained to vanish slowly and without shock. It proposed to keep
+alive at a reasonable salary the ministers of a ritual which would
+presumably have lost all vitality before the last of its pensioners was
+dead; it would have prepared a bed, as it were, upon which the last of
+Catholicism in Gaul could peacefully pass away. The action of the
+politicians in framing the Constitution would have seemed more generous
+with every passing decade<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span> and their wisdom in avoiding offence to the
+few who still remained faithful, would have been increasingly applauded.</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand, and from the point of view of the statesman, the
+Civil Constitution of the Clergy bound strictly to the State and made
+responsible to it those ancient functions, not yet dead, of the
+episcopacy and all its train. It was a wise and a just consideration on
+the part of the Assembly that religions retain their machinery long
+after they are dead, and if that machinery has ever been a State
+machinery it must remain subject to the control of the State: and
+subject not only up to the moment when the living force which once
+animated it is fled, but much longer; up, indeed, to the moment when the
+surviving institutions of the dead religion break down and perish.</p>
+
+<p>So argued the National Assembly and its committee, and, I repeat, the
+argument was just and statesmanlike, prudent and full of foresight, save
+for one miscalculation. The Catholic Church was not dead, and was not
+even dying. It was exhibiting many of the symptoms which in other
+organisms and institutions correspond to the approach of death, but the
+Catholic Church is an organism and an institution quite unlike any
+other. It fructifies and expands immediately under the touch of a lethal
+weapon; it has at its very roots the conception that material prosperity
+is stifling to it, poverty and misfortune nutritious.</p>
+
+<p>The men of the National Assembly would<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span> have acted more wisely had they
+closely studied the story of Ireland (then but little known), or had
+they even made themselves acquainted with the methods by which the
+Catholic Church in Britain, after passing in the fifteenth century
+through a phase somewhat similar to that under which it was sinking in
+Gaul in the eighteenth, was stifled under Henry and Elizabeth.</p>
+
+<p>But the desire of the men of 1789 was not to kill the Church but to let
+it die; they thought it dying. Their desire was only to make that death
+decent and of no hurt to the nation, and to control the political action
+of a hierarchy that had been wealthy and was bound up with the old
+society that was crumbling upon every side.</p>
+
+<p>The Civil Constitution of the Clergy failed: it lit the civil war, it
+dug the pit which divided Catholicism from the Revolution at the moment
+of the foreign invasion, it segregated the loyal priest in such a
+fashion that his order could not but appear to the populace as an order
+of traitors, and it led, in the furnace of 1793, to the great
+persecution from the memories of which the relations between the French
+democracy and the Church have not recovered.</p>
+
+<p>It is important to trace the actual steps of the failure; for when we
+appreciate what the dates were, how short the time which was left for
+judgment or for revision, and how immediately disaster followed upon
+error, we can understand what followed and we can understand it in no
+other way.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>If we find an enduring quarrel between two families whose cause of
+contention we cannot seize and whose mutual hostility we find
+unreasonable, to learn that it proceeded from a cataclysm too rapid and
+too violent for either to have exercised judgment upon it will enable us
+to excuse or at least to comprehend the endurance of their antagonism.
+Now, it was a cataclysm which fell upon the relations of the Church and
+State immediately after the error which the Parliament had committed; a
+cataclysm quite out of proportion to their intentions, as indeed are
+most sudden disasters quite out of proportion to the forces that bring
+them about.</p>
+
+<p>It was, as we have seen, in the summer of 1790&mdash;upon the 12th of
+July&mdash;that the Civil Constitution of the Clergy was approved by the
+Assembly. But it was not until the 26th of August that the King
+consented to sign. Nor was there at the moment any attempt to give the
+law effect. The protests of the bishops, for instance, came out quite at
+leisure, in the month of October, and the active principle of the whole
+of the Civil Constitution&mdash;to wit, the presentation of the Civic Oath
+which the clergy were required to take, was not even debated until the
+end of the year.</p>
+
+<p>This Civic Oath, which is sometimes used as a bugbear in the matter, was
+no more than an engagement under the sanction of an oath that the bishop
+or priest taking it would maintain the new <i>régime</i>&mdash;though that
+<i>régime</i> included the constitution of the clergy; the oath involved<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span> no
+direct breach with Catholic doctrine or practice. It was, indeed, a
+folly to impose it, and it was a folly based upon the ignorance of the
+politicians (and of many of the bishops of the day) as to the nature of
+the Catholic Church. But the oath was not, nor was it intended to be, a
+measure of persecution. Many of the parish clergy took it, and most of
+them probably took it in good faith: nor did it discredit the oath with
+the public that it was refused by all save four of the acting bishops,
+for the condition of the hierarchy in pre-revolutionary France was
+notorious. The action of the bishops appeared in the public eye to be
+purely political, and the ready acceptance of the oath by so many,
+though a minority, of the lower clergy argued strongly in its favour.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, no Catholic priest or bishop or layman could take that
+oath without landing himself in disloyalty to his religion; and that for
+the same reason which led St. Thomas of Canterbury to make his curious
+and fruitful stand against the reasonable and inevitable, as much as
+against the unreasonable, governmental provisions of his time. The
+Catholic Church is an institution of necessity autonomous. It cannot
+admit the right of any other power exterior to its own organisation to
+impose upon it a modification of its discipline, nor, above all, a new
+conception of its hieratic organisation.</p>
+
+<p>The reader must carefully distinguish between the acceptation by the
+Church of a detail of economic reform, the consent to<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span> suppress a
+corporation at the request of the civil power, or even to forego certain
+traditional political rights, and the admission of the general principle
+of civil control. To that general principle the Assembly, in framing the
+Constitution of the Clergy, was quite evidently committed. To admit such
+a co-ordinate external and civil power, or rather to admit a <i>superior</i>
+external power, is in theory to deny the principle of Catholicism, and
+in practice to make of the Catholic Church what the other State
+religions of Christendom have become.</p>
+
+<p>I have said that not until the end of the year 1790 was the debate
+opened upon the proposition to compel the clergy to take the oath.</p>
+
+<p>It is a singular commentary upon the whole affair that compulsion should
+have been the subject for debate at all. It should have followed, one
+would have imagined, normally from the law. But so exceptional had been
+the action of the Assembly and, as they now were beginning to find, so
+perilous, that a special decree was necessary&mdash;and the King’s signature
+to it&mdash;before this normal consequence of a measure which had been law
+for months, could be acted upon.</p>
+
+<p>Here let the reader pause and consider with what that moment&mdash;the end of
+1790&mdash;coincided.</p>
+
+<p>The assignats, paper-money issued upon the security of the confiscated
+estates of the Church, had already depreciated 10 per cent. Those who
+had first accepted them were paying<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span> throughout France a penny in the
+livre, or as we may put it, a penny farthing on the shilling, for what
+must have seemed to most of them the obstinacy of one single
+corporation&mdash;and that an unpopular one&mdash;against the decrees of the
+National Assembly.</p>
+
+<p>It was now the moment when a definite reaction against the Revolution
+was first taking shape, and when the populace was first beginning
+uneasily to have suspicion of it; it was the moment when the Court was
+beginning to negotiate for flight; it was the moment when (though the
+populace did not know it) Mirabeau was advising the King with all his
+might to seize upon the enforcement of the priests’ oath as an
+opportunity for civil war.</p>
+
+<p>The whole air of that winter was charged with doubt and mystery: in the
+minds of all who had enthusiastically followed the march of the
+Revolution, the short days of that rigorous cold of 1790-91 contained
+passages of despair, and a very brief period was to suffice for making
+the clerical oath not only the test of democracy against reaction, but
+the wedge that should split the nation in two.</p>
+
+<p>With the very opening of the new year, on the 4th of January, the
+bishops and priests in the Assembly were summoned to take the oath to
+the King, the Nation, and the Law; but that law included the Civil
+Constitution of the Clergy, and they refused. Within three months
+Mirabeau was dead, the flight of the King determined on, the suspicion
+of Paris at white heat, the oath taken or refused<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span> throughout France,
+and the schismatic priests introduced into their parishes&mdash;it may be
+imagined with what a clamour and with how many village quarrels! In that
+same fortnight appeared the papal brief, long delayed, and known as the
+Brief “<i>Caritas</i>,” denouncing the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. Six
+weeks later, at the end of May, the papal representative at the French
+Court was withdrawn, and in that act religious war declared.</p>
+
+<p>Throughout this quarrel, which was now exactly of a year’s duration, but
+the acute phase of which had lasted only six months, every act of either
+party to it necessarily tended to make the conflict more violent. Not
+only was there no opportunity for conciliation, but in the very nature
+of things the most moderate counsel had to range itself on one side or
+the other, and every public act which touched in any way upon the sore
+point, though it touched but indirectly, and with no desire on the part
+of the actors to rouse the passions of the moment, immediately appeared
+as a provocation upon one side or the other.</p>
+
+<p>It was inevitable that it should be so, with a population which had
+abandoned the practice of religion, with the attachment of the clerical
+organisation to the organisation of the old <i>régime</i>, with the strict
+bond of discipline that united the priesthood of the Church in France
+into one whole, and above all with the necessity under which the
+Revolution was, at this stage, of finding a definite and tangible
+enemy.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>This last point is of the very first importance. Public opinion was
+exasperated and inflamed, for the King was known to be an opponent of
+the democratic movement; yet he signed the bills and could not be
+overtly attacked. The Queen was known to be a violent opponent of it;
+but she did not actually govern. The Governments of Europe were known to
+be opponents; but no diplomatic note had yet appeared of which public
+opinion could make an object for attack.</p>
+
+<p>The resistance, therefore, offered by the clergy to the Civil
+Constitution, had just that effect which a nucleus will have in the
+crystallisation of some solution. It polarised the energies of the
+Revolution, it provided a definite foil, a definite negative, a definite
+counterpoint, a definite butt. Here was a simple issue. Men wearing a
+special uniform, pursuing known functions, performing a known part in
+society&mdash;to wit, the priests&mdash;were now for the most part the enemies of
+the new democratic Constitution that was in preparation. They would not
+take the oath of loyalty to it: they were everywhere in secret rebellion
+against it and, where they were dispossessed of their cures, in open
+rebellion. The clergy, therefore, that is the non-juring clergy (and the
+conforming clergy were an experiment that soon became a fiction), were
+after April 1791, in the eyes of all the democrats of the time, the
+plainest and most tangible form of the opposition to democracy.</p>
+
+<p>To the way in which I have presented the problem a great deal more might
+be added.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span> The very fact that the democratic movement had come after a
+period of unfaith, and was non-Catholic in its springs, would have
+tended to produce that quarrel. So would the necessary attachment of the
+Catholic to authority and the easy confusion between the principle of
+authority and claims of a traditional monarchy. Again, the elements of
+vanity, of material greed, and of a false finality which are to be
+discovered in any purely democratic theory of the State, will between
+them always bring this theory into some conflict with religion. The
+centuries during which the throne and the altar had stood as twin
+symbols, especially in France, the very terminology of religious
+metaphor which had been forged during the centuries of monarchical
+institutions in Europe, helped to found the great quarrel. But, I
+repeat, the overt act without which the quarrel could never have become
+the terribly great thing it did, the master blunder which destroyed the
+unity of the revolutionary movement, was the Civil Constitution of the
+Clergy.</p>
+
+<p>So much for the first year of the schism, May 1790 to May 1791. The
+second year is but an intensification of the process apparent in the
+first.</p>
+
+<p>It opens with the King’s flight in June 1791: that is, with the first
+open act of enmity taken against the authority of the National
+Parliament since, two years before, the National Parliament had declared
+itself supreme. Already the Court had been generally identified with the
+resistance of the clergy, and a<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span> particular example of this had appeared
+in the opinion that the King’s attempted journey to St. Cloud in April
+had been prompted by a desire to have communion at the hands of a
+non-juring priest.<a name="FNanchor_8_8" id="FNanchor_8_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_8" class="fnanchor">[8]</a> When, therefore, the King fled, though his flight
+had nothing whatsoever to do with the clerical quarrel, it was
+associated in men’s minds with the clerical quarrel through his attempt
+to leave Paris in April and from a long association of the Court with
+the clerical resistance. The outburst of anti-monarchical feeling which
+followed the flight was at the same time an outburst of anti-clerical
+feeling; but the clergy were everywhere and could be attacked
+everywhere. The Declaration of Pillnitz, which the nation very rightly
+interpreted as the beginning of an armed European advance against the
+French democracy, was felt to be a threat not only in favour of the King
+but in favour also of the rebellious ecclesiastics.</p>
+
+<p>And so forth. The uneasy approach of war throughout that autumn and
+winter of 1791-92, the peculiar transformation of the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span> French
+temperament which war or its approach invariably produces&mdash;a sort of
+constructive exaltation and creative passion&mdash;began to turn a great part
+of its energy or fury against the very persons of the orthodox priests.</p>
+
+<p>The new Parliament, the “Legislative” as it was called, had not been
+sitting two months when it passed, upon November 29, 1791, the decree
+that non-juring priests should be deprived of their stipend. And here
+again we must note the curious lack of adjustment between law and fact
+in all this clerical quarrel! For more than a year public money had been
+paid to men who, under the law, should not during the whole of that year
+have touched any salary! Yet, as in the case of the oath, special action
+was necessary, and moreover the Parliament added to this tardy and
+logical consequence of the law a declaration that those who had not so
+taken the oath within eight days of their decree should be rendered
+“suspect.”</p>
+
+<p>The word “suspect” is significant. The Parliament even now could not
+act, at least it could not act without the King; and this word
+“suspect,” which carried no material consequences with it, was one that
+might cover a threat of things worse than regular and legal punishment.
+It was like the mark that some power not authorised or legal makes upon
+the door of those whom that power has singled out for massacre in some
+city.</p>
+
+<p>Three weeks later Louis vetoed the decree<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span> refusing stipends to
+non-jurors, and the year 1791 ended with the whole matter in suspense
+but with exasperation increasing to madness.</p>
+
+<p>The first three months of 1792 saw no change. The non-juring clergy were
+still tolerated by the Executive in their illegal position, and, what is
+more extraordinary, still received public money and were still for the
+most part in possession of their cures; the conception that the clergy
+were the prime, or at any rate the most obvious, enemies of the new
+<i>régime</i> now hardened into a fixed opinion which the attempted
+persecution of religion, as the one party called it, the obstinate and
+anti-national rebellion of factious priests, as the other party called
+it, was rapidly approaching real persecution and real rebellion.</p>
+
+<p>With April 1792 came the war, and all the passions of the war.</p>
+
+<p>The known hostility of the King to the Revolution was now become
+something far worse: his known sympathy with an enemy under arms. To
+force the King into the open was henceforward the main tactic of the
+revolutionary body.</p>
+
+<p>Now for those whose object was forcing Louis XVI to open declarations of
+hostility against the nation, his religion was an obvious instrument. In
+no point could one come to closer grips with the King than on this
+question of the Church, where already, in December 1791, he had
+exercised his veto.</p>
+
+<p>On May 27, 1792, therefore, Guadet and Vergniaud, the Girondins, moved
+that a priest<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span> who had refused to take the oath should be subjected to
+transportation upon the mere demand of any twenty taxpayers within that
+assembly of parishes known as a “Canton.” It was almost exactly two
+years since the Civil Constitution of the Clergy had first been reported
+to the House by the Ecclesiastical Committee of the Constituent or
+National Assembly.</p>
+
+<p>It must not be forgotten under what external conditions this violent
+act, the first true act of persecution, was demanded. It was already a
+month since, upon the 20th of April, the war had opened upon the Belgian
+frontier by a disgraceful panic and the murder of General Dillon; almost
+contemporaneous with that breakdown was the corresponding panic and
+flight of the French troops in their advance to Mons. All Europe was
+talking of the facile march upon Paris which could now be undertaken;
+and in general this decree against the priests was but part of the
+exasperated policy which was rising to meet the terror of the invasion.</p>
+
+<p>It was followed, of course, by the decree dismissing the Royal Guard,
+and, rather more than a week later, by the demand for the formation of a
+camp of volunteers under the walls of Paris. But with this we are not
+here concerned. The King vetoed the decree against the non-juring
+priests, and in the wild two months that followed the orthodox clergy
+were, in the mind of the populace, and particularly the populace of
+Paris, identified with the cause of the re-establishment of the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span> old
+<i>régime</i> and the success of the invading foreign armies.</p>
+
+<p>With the crash of the 10th of August the persecution began: the true
+persecution, which was to the growing bitterness of the previous two
+years what a blow is to the opening words of a quarrel.</p>
+
+<p>The decree of the 27th of May was put into force within eleven days of
+the fall of the Tuileries. True, it was not put into force in that
+crudity which the Parliament had demanded: the non-juring priests were
+given a fortnight to leave the kingdom, and if they failed to avail
+themselves of the delay were to be transported.</p>
+
+<p>From this date to the end of the Terror, twenty-three months later, the
+story of the relations between the Revolution and the Church, though
+wild and terrible, is simple: it is a story of mere persecution
+culminating in extremes of cruelty and in the supposed uprooting of
+Christianity in France.</p>
+
+<p>The orthodox clergy were everywhere regarded by this time as the typical
+enemies of the revolutionary movement; they themselves regarded the
+revolutionary movement, by this time, as being principally an attempt to
+destroy the Catholic Church.</p>
+
+<p>Within seven months of the fall of the monarchy, from the 18th of March,
+1793, the priests, whether non-juring or schismatic, might, on the
+denunciation of any six citizens, be subjected to transportation.</p>
+
+<p>There followed immediately a general attack upon religion. The attempted
+closing<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span> of all churches was, of course, a failure, but it was firmly
+believed that such attachment as yet remained to the Catholic Church was
+due only to the ignorance of the provincial districts which displayed
+it, or to the self-seeking of those who fostered it. The attempt at mere
+“de-christianisation,” as it was called, failed, but the months of
+terror and cruelty, the vast number of martyrdoms (for they were no
+less) and the incredible sufferings and indignities to which the priests
+who attempted to remain in the country were subjected, burnt itself, as
+it were, into the very fibre of the Catholic organisation in France, and
+remained, in spite of political theory one way or the other, and in
+spite of the national sympathies of the priesthood, the one great active
+memory inherited from that time.</p>
+
+<p>Conversely, the picture of the priest, his habit and character, as the
+fatal and necessary opponent of the revolutionary theory, became so
+fixed in the mind of the Republican that two generations did nothing to
+eliminate it, and that even in our time the older men, in spite of pure
+theory, cannot rid themselves of an imagined connection between the
+Catholic Church and an international conspiracy against democracy. Nor
+does this non-rational but very real feeling lack support from the
+utterances of those who, in opposing the political theory of the French
+Revolution, consistently quote the Catholic Church as its necessary and
+holy antagonist.</p>
+
+<p>The attempt to “de-christianise” France<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span> failed, as I have said,
+completely. Public worship was restored, and the Concordat of Napoleon
+was believed to have settled the relations between Church and State in a
+permanent fashion. We have lived to see it dissolved; but this
+generation will not see, nor perhaps the generation succeeding it, the
+issue of the struggle between two bodies of thought which are divided by
+no process of reason, but profoundly divorced by the action of vivid and
+tragic historical memories.</p>
+
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_8_8" id="Footnote_8_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_8"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> This opinion has entered into so many Protestant and
+non-Catholic histories of the Revolution that it is worth criticising
+once again in this little book. The King was perfectly free to receive
+communion privately from the hands of orthodox priests, did so receive
+it, and had received communion well within the canonical times. There
+was little ecclesiastical reason for the attempted leaving of Paris for
+St. Cloud on Monday the 18th April, 1791, save the <i>custom</i> (not the
+religious duty) of communicating in public on Easter Sunday itself; it
+was a political move.</p></div>
+</div>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</a></span><br /></p>
+
+<hr />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="INDEX" id="INDEX"></a>INDEX</h2>
+
+<ul class="IX">
+<li><span class="sc">Alexander</span> the Great, <a href="#Page_144">144</a></li>
+<li>Argonne, the, <a href="#Page_156">156</a></li>
+<li>Arras, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>, <a href="#Page_137">137</a></li>
+<li>Artois, Comte d’, <a href="#Page_105">105</a></li>
+<li>Avignon, <a href="#Page_111">111</a></li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>Bacharach, <a href="#Page_173">173</a></li>
+<li>Bailly, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>, <a href="#Page_95">95</a></li>
+<li>Barentin, <a href="#Page_89">89</a></li>
+<li>Barrère, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>, <a href="#Page_125">125</a>, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>, <a href="#Page_131">131</a></li>
+<li>Bastille, the, <a href="#Page_95">95</a>, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>, <a href="#Page_115">115</a></li>
+<li>Beauregard, <a href="#Page_200">200</a></li>
+<li>Belgium, <a href="#Page_123">123</a>, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>, <a href="#Page_173">173</a></li>
+<li>Bergues, <a href="#Page_191">191</a></li>
+<li>Bordeaux, <a href="#Page_135">135</a></li>
+<li>Bouillé, <a href="#Page_107">107</a>, <a href="#Page_152">152</a></li>
+<li>Brissot, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>, <a href="#Page_130">130</a></li>
+<li>Brunswick, Duke of, <a href="#Page_115">115</a>, <a href="#Page_118">118</a>, <a href="#Page_178">178</a></li>
+<li>Brussels, <a href="#Page_168">168</a></li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>Cæsar, <a href="#Page_144">144</a></li>
+<li>Calonne, <a href="#Page_46">46</a></li>
+<li>Cambon, <a href="#Page_125">125</a></li>
+<li>Carignan, <a href="#Page_200">200</a></li>
+<li>Carlyle, Thomas, <a href="#Page_68">68</a></li>
+<li>Carnot, <a href="#Page_72">72-74</a>, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>, <a href="#Page_171">171</a>, <a href="#Page_184">184</a>, <a href="#Page_186">186</a>, <a href="#Page_195">195</a>, <a href="#Page_197">197</a>, <a href="#Page_198">198</a>, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>, <a href="#Page_201">201</a></li>
+<li>Cassel, <a href="#Page_192">192</a></li>
+<li>Chalôns, <a href="#Page_107">107</a>, <a href="#Page_158">158</a></li>
+<li>Champ-de-Mars, Massacre of, <a href="#Page_109">109</a></li>
+<li>Champfleury, <a href="#Page_77">77</a></li>
+<li>Charleroi, <a href="#Page_210">210</a>, <a href="#Page_211">211</a></li>
+<li>Charles I of England, <a href="#Page_222">222</a></li>
+<li>Chollet, <a href="#Page_128">128</a></li>
+<li>Clerfayt, <a href="#Page_206">206</a>, <a href="#Page_207">207</a>, <a href="#Page_209">209</a></li>
+<li>Coblentz, <a href="#Page_115">115</a></li>
+<li>Coburg, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>, <a href="#Page_176">176</a>, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>, <a href="#Page_179">179</a>, <a href="#Page_186">186</a>, <a href="#Page_188">188</a>, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>, <a href="#Page_210">210</a></li>
+<li>Committee of Public Safety, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>, <a href="#Page_125">125</a>, <a href="#Page_126">126</a>, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>, <a href="#Page_183">183</a>, <a href="#Page_195">195</a>, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>, <a href="#Page_203">203</a></li>
+<li>Condé, <a href="#Page_106">106</a></li>
+<li>Condé, fortress of, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>, <a href="#Page_180">180</a>, <a href="#Page_182">182</a>, <a href="#Page_183">183</a>, <a href="#Page_186">186</a>, <a href="#Page_195">195</a></li>
+<li>Condorcet, <a href="#Page_71">71</a></li>
+<li><i>Contrat Social</i>, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>, <a href="#Page_33">33</a>, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>, <a href="#Page_125">125</a>, <a href="#Page_133">133</a></li>
+<li>Coudequerque, <a href="#Page_192">192</a></li>
+<li>Couthon, <a href="#Page_131">131</a></li>
+<li>Custine, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>, <a href="#Page_179">179</a>, <a href="#Page_180">180</a></li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>Danton, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>, <a href="#Page_67">67-72</a>, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>, <a href="#Page_82">82</a>, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>, <a href="#Page_125">125</a>, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>, <a href="#Page_150">150</a>, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>, <a href="#Page_184">184</a>, <a href="#Page_185">185</a></li>
+<li>Desmoulins, <a href="#Page_138">138</a></li>
+<li>Dillon, General, <a href="#Page_250">250</a></li>
+<li>Drouet, <a href="#Page_108">108</a></li>
+<li>Dumouriez, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>, <a href="#Page_65">65-67</a>, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>, <a href="#Page_123">123</a>, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>, <a href="#Page_125">125</a>, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>, <a href="#Page_157">157</a>, <a href="#Page_158">158</a>, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>, <a href="#Page_173">173</a></li>
+<li>Dunquerque, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>, <a href="#Page_181">181</a>, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>, <a href="#Page_186">186</a>, <a href="#Page_188">188</a>, <a href="#Page_189">189</a>, <a href="#Page_190">190</a>, <a href="#Page_191">191</a>, <a href="#Page_192">192</a>, <a href="#Page_195">195</a></li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>England, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>, <a href="#Page_145">145</a></li>
+<li>Elizabeth, Queen of England, <a href="#Page_239">239</a></li>
+<li>Esquelbecque, <a href="#Page_191">191</a></li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>Fersen, Count Axel de, <a href="#Page_53">53</a></li>
+<li>Fleurus, <a href="#Page_211">211</a>, <a href="#Page_212">212</a></li>
+<li>Fontenay, <a href="#Page_128">128</a></li>
+<li>Fontenoy, <a href="#Page_149">149</a>, <a href="#Page_166">166</a></li>
+<li>Fouché, <a href="#Page_74">74</a></li>
+<li>Freemasonry, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>, <a href="#Page_231">231</a></li>
+<li>Freytag, <a href="#Page_190">190</a>, <a href="#Page_191">191</a>, <a href="#Page_192">192</a>, <a href="#Page_193">193</a>, <a href="#Page_194">194</a></li>
+<li>Furnes, <a href="#Page_190">190</a>, <a href="#Page_194">194</a></li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>George III of England, <a href="#Page_63">63</a></li>
+<li>Gironde, <a href="#Page_110">110</a></li>
+<li><i>Girondins, The</i>, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>, <a href="#Page_122">122</a>, <a href="#Page_123">123</a>, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>, <a href="#Page_249">249</a></li>
+<li>Grandpré, <a href="#Page_158">158</a></li>
+<li>Guadet, <a href="#Page_249">249</a></li>
+<li>Guise, <a href="#Page_198">198</a>, <a href="#Page_200">200</a></li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>Haguenau, <a href="#Page_202">202</a></li>
+<li>Haine, the River, <a href="#Page_167">167</a></li>
+<li>Hébert, <a href="#Page_138">138</a></li>
+<li>Henry VIII of England, <a href="#Page_222">222</a>, <a href="#Page_229">229</a>, <a href="#Page_239">239</a></li>
+<li>Hesse-Cassel, Landgrave of, <a href="#Page_113">113</a></li>
+<li>Hoche, <a href="#Page_202">202</a></li>
+<li>Holland, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>, <a href="#Page_163">163</a></li>
+<li>Hoondschoote, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>, <a href="#Page_195">195</a>, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>, <a href="#Page_197">197</a></li>
+<li>Houchard, <a href="#Page_179">179</a>, <a href="#Page_181">181</a>, <a href="#Page_192">192</a>, <a href="#Page_193">193</a>, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>, <a href="#Page_195">195</a>, <a href="#Page_198">198</a></li>
+<li>Howe, Lord, <a href="#Page_213">213</a></li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>Ireland, <a href="#Page_239">239</a></li>
+<li>Isnard, <a href="#Page_110">110</a></li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>James II of England, <a href="#Page_230">230</a></li>
+<li>Jefferson, <a href="#Page_21">21</a></li>
+<li>Jemappes, <a href="#Page_123">123</a>, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>, <a href="#Page_167">167</a></li>
+<li>Joseph II of Austria, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>, <a href="#Page_165">165</a></li>
+<li>Jourdan, <a href="#Page_198">198</a></li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>Kaiserslautern, <a href="#Page_202">202</a></li>
+<li>Kaunitz, <a href="#Page_155">155</a></li>
+<li>Kellermann, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>, <a href="#Page_160">160</a></li>
+<li>Kilmaine, <a href="#Page_180">180</a>, <a href="#Page_181">181</a></li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>La Fayette, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>, <a href="#Page_61">61-65</a>, <a href="#Page_95">95</a>, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>, <a href="#Page_114">114</a></li>
+<li>Lamballe, Princess de, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>, <a href="#Page_71">71</a></li>
+<li>Landau, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>, <a href="#Page_202">202</a>, <a href="#Page_203">203</a></li>
+<li>Lebas, <a href="#Page_141">141</a></li>
+<li>Leipsic, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>, <a href="#Page_214">214</a></li>
+<li>Lequesnoy, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>, <a href="#Page_186">186</a>, <a href="#Page_195">195</a></li>
+<li>Linselles, <a href="#Page_189">189</a></li>
+<li>Longwy, <a href="#Page_115">115</a>, <a href="#Page_118">118</a>, <a href="#Page_156">156</a></li>
+<li>Lorraine, <a href="#Page_118">118</a></li>
+<li>Louis XIV of France, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>, <a href="#Page_225">225</a>, <a href="#Page_230">230</a></li>
+<li>Louis XVI of France, <a href="#Page_vi">vi</a>, <a href="#Page_37">37-45</a>, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>, <a href="#Page_86">86</a>, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>, <a href="#Page_92">92</a>, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>, <a href="#Page_95">95</a>, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>, <a href="#Page_101">101</a>, <a href="#Page_102">102</a>, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>, <a href="#Page_107">107</a>, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>, <a href="#Page_111">111</a>, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>, <a href="#Page_123">123</a>, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>, <a href="#Page_243">243</a>, <a href="#Page_245">245</a>, <a href="#Page_246">246</a>, <a href="#Page_247">247</a>, <a href="#Page_248">248</a>, <a href="#Page_249">249</a>, <a href="#Page_250">250</a></li>
+<li>Louis XVII of France, <a href="#Page_135">135</a></li>
+<li>Louvre, the, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>, <a href="#Page_117">117</a></li>
+<li>Luxembourg, <a href="#Page_118">118</a></li>
+<li>Lyons, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>, <a href="#Page_182">182</a>, <a href="#Page_183">183</a></li>
+<li>Lys, the River, <a href="#Page_206">206</a>, <a href="#Page_207">207</a></li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>Machecoul, <a href="#Page_128">128</a></li>
+<li>Maestricht, <a href="#Page_168">168</a></li>
+<li>Malo-les-Bains, <a href="#Page_194">194</a></li>
+<li>Marat, <a href="#Page_74">74-77</a>, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>, <a href="#Page_183">183</a></li>
+<li>Marcel, <a href="#Page_120">120</a></li>
+<li>Marchionnes, <a href="#Page_189">189</a></li>
+<li>Marie Antoinette, Queen of France, <a href="#Page_vi">vi</a>, <a href="#Page_45">45-53</a>, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>, <a href="#Page_101">101</a>, <a href="#Page_102">102</a>, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>, <a href="#Page_106">106</a>, <a href="#Page_107">107</a>, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>, <a href="#Page_245">245</a></li>
+<li>Marque, the River, <a href="#Page_206">206</a></li>
+<li>“Marseillaise,” the, <a href="#Page_116">116</a></li>
+<li>Marseilles, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>, <a href="#Page_182">182</a></li>
+<li>Maubeuge, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>, <a href="#Page_181">181</a>, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>, <a href="#Page_197">197</a>, <a href="#Page_202">202</a></li>
+<li>Mayence, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>, <a href="#Page_178">178</a></li>
+<li>Merda, <a href="#Page_142">142</a></li>
+<li>Metz, <a href="#Page_159">159</a></li>
+<li>Michelet, <a href="#Page_68">68</a></li>
+<li>Mirabeau, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>, <a href="#Page_53">53-61</a>, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>, <a href="#Page_102">102</a>, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>, <a href="#Page_106">106</a>, <a href="#Page_107">107</a>, <a href="#Page_243">243</a></li>
+<li>Mons, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>, <a href="#Page_250">250</a></li>
+<li>Montmédy, <a href="#Page_107">107</a></li>
+<li>Mouveau, <a href="#Page_206">206</a></li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>Namur, <a href="#Page_179">179</a></li>
+<li>Nantes, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>, <a href="#Page_182">182</a></li>
+<li>Napoleon I, <a href="#Page_66">66</a>, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>, <a href="#Page_150">150</a>, <a href="#Page_205">205</a>, <a href="#Page_214">214</a>, <a href="#Page_253">253</a></li>
+<li>Narbonne, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>, <a href="#Page_155">155</a></li>
+<li>Necker, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>, <a href="#Page_95">95</a></li>
+<li>Neerwinden, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>, <a href="#Page_125">125</a>, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>, <a href="#Page_169">169</a></li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>Orleans, <a href="#Page_128">128</a></li>
+<li>Orleans, Duke of, <a href="#Page_109">109</a></li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>Parthenay, <a href="#Page_128">128</a></li>
+<li>Pichegru, <a href="#Page_202">202</a></li>
+<li>Pillnitz, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>, <a href="#Page_247">247</a></li>
+<li>Poland, <a href="#Page_31">31</a></li>
+<li>Polignac, Madame de, <a href="#Page_53">53</a></li>
+<li>Pollio, <a href="#Page_120">120</a></li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>Redange, <a href="#Page_118">118</a></li>
+<li>Robespierre, <a href="#Page_77">77-83</a>, <a href="#Page_111">111</a>, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>, <a href="#Page_213">213</a></li>
+<li>Robinet, Dr., <a href="#Page_120">120</a></li>
+<li>Roland, <a href="#Page_110">110</a></li>
+<li>Rousseau, Jean Jacques, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>, <a href="#Page_33">33</a>, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>, <a href="#Page_125">125</a></li>
+<li>Russia, <a href="#Page_14">14</a></li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>St. Amand, <a href="#Page_206">206</a></li>
+<li>Saint-André, Jeanbon, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>, <a href="#Page_185">185</a></li>
+<li>St. Cloud, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>, <a href="#Page_247">247</a></li>
+<li>Saint-Just, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>, <a href="#Page_210">210</a></li>
+<li>St. Menehould, <a href="#Page_159">159</a></li>
+<li>Scheldt, the, <a href="#Page_123">123</a>, <a href="#Page_183">183</a>, <a href="#Page_205">205</a>, <a href="#Page_206">206</a></li>
+<li>Sedan, <a href="#Page_114">114</a></li>
+<li>Servia, <a href="#Page_155">155</a></li>
+<li>Sièyes, <a href="#Page_87">87</a></li>
+<li>Spain, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>, <a href="#Page_150">150</a></li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>Talavera, <a href="#Page_189">189</a></li>
+<li>Talleyrand, <a href="#Page_150">150</a></li>
+<li>Terror, the, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>, <a href="#Page_82">82</a>, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>, <a href="#Page_251">251</a></li>
+<li>Tetteghem, <a href="#Page_191">191</a></li>
+<li>Thouars, <a href="#Page_128">128</a></li>
+<li>Toulon, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>, <a href="#Page_182">182</a>, <a href="#Page_183">183</a>, <a href="#Page_203">203</a></li>
+<li>Tourcoing, <a href="#Page_189">189</a>, <a href="#Page_206">206</a>, <a href="#Page_208">208</a>, <a href="#Page_209">209</a></li>
+<li>Tournay, <a href="#Page_210">210</a></li>
+<li>Trafalgar, <a href="#Page_213">213</a></li>
+<li>Tuileries, the, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>, <a href="#Page_101">101</a>, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>, <a href="#Page_251">251</a></li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>Valenciennes, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>, <a href="#Page_179">179</a>, <a href="#Page_180">180</a>, <a href="#Page_181">181</a>, <a href="#Page_182">182</a>, <a href="#Page_183">183</a>, <a href="#Page_186">186</a>, <a href="#Page_195">195</a></li>
+<li>Valmy, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>, <a href="#Page_122">122</a>, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>, <a href="#Page_158">158</a>, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>, <a href="#Page_160">160</a>, <a href="#Page_169">169</a></li>
+<li>Varennes, <a href="#Page_107">107</a>, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>, <a href="#Page_154">154</a></li>
+<li>Vendée, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>, <a href="#Page_203">203</a></li>
+<li>Verdun, <a href="#Page_118">118</a>, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>, <a href="#Page_157">157</a></li>
+<li>Vergniaud, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>, <a href="#Page_249">249</a></li>
+<li>Versailles, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>, <a href="#Page_102">102</a>, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>, <a href="#Page_153">153</a></li>
+<li>Vienna, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>, <a href="#Page_210">210</a></li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>Warcoing, <a href="#Page_205">205</a></li>
+<li>Waterloo, <a href="#Page_143">143</a></li>
+<li>Wattignies, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>, <a href="#Page_201">201</a>, <a href="#Page_208">208</a></li>
+<li>Wellington, Duke of, <a href="#Page_189">189</a></li>
+<li>Westermann, <a href="#Page_131">131</a></li>
+<li>Wilder, <a href="#Page_191">191</a></li>
+<li>Wissembourg, <a href="#Page_202">202</a></li>
+<li>Wormhoudt, <a href="#Page_191">191</a></li>
+<li>Wurmser, <a href="#Page_178">178</a></li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul class="IX">
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #35215 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/35215)
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The French Revolution, by Hilaire Belloc
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
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+
+Title: The French Revolution
+
+Author: Hilaire Belloc
+
+Release Date: February 8, 2011 [EBook #35215]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FRENCH REVOLUTION ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Steven Gibbs, Richard J. Shiffer and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+  THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
+
+  BY
+
+  HILAIRE BELLOC, M.A.
+
+
+  AUTHOR OF "DANTON," "ROBESPIERRE," "MARIE ANTOINETTE," "THE OLD ROAD,"
+  "THE PATH TO ROME," "PARIS," "THE HILLS AND THE SEA," "THE HISTORIC
+  THAMES," ETC., ETC.
+
+
+  LONDON
+
+  WILLIAMS AND NORGATE
+
+
+  RICHARD CLAY AND SONS, LIMITED,
+  BRUNSWICK STREET, STAMFORD STREET, S.E.,
+  AND BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+The object of these few pages is not to recount once more the history of
+the Revolution: that can be followed in any one of a hundred text-books.
+Their object is rather to lay, if that be possible, an explanation of it
+before the English reader; so that he may understand both what it was
+and how it proceeded, and also why certain problems hitherto unfamiliar
+to Englishmen have risen out of it.
+
+First, therefore, it is necessary to set down, clearly without modern
+accretion, that political theory which was a sort of religious creed,
+supplying the motive force of the whole business; of the new Civil Code
+as of the massacres; of the panics and capitulations as of the
+victories; of the successful transformation of society as of the
+conspicuous failures in detail which still menace the achievement of the
+Revolution.
+
+This grasped, the way in which the main events followed each other, and
+the reason of their interlocking and proceeding as they did must be put
+forward--not, I repeat, in the shape of a chronicle, but in the shape of
+a thesis. Thus the reader must know not only that the failure of the
+royal family's flight was followed by war, but how and why it was
+followed by war. He must not only appreciate the severity of the
+government of the great Committee, but why that severity was present,
+and of the conditions of war upon which it reposed. But in so explaining
+the development of the movement it is necessary to select for
+appreciation as the chief figures the characters of the time, since upon
+their will and manner depended the fate of the whole. For instance, had
+the Queen been French either in blood or in sympathy, had the King been
+alert, had any one character retained the old religious motives, all
+history would have been changed, and this human company must be seen if
+its action and drama are to be comprehended.
+
+The reader interested in that capital event should further seize (and
+but too rarely has an opportunity for seizing) its military aspect; and
+this difficulty of his proceeds from two causes: the first, that
+historians, even when they recognise the importance of the military side
+of some past movement, are careless of the military aspect, and think
+it sufficient to relate particular victories and general actions. The
+military aspect of any period does not consist in these, but in the
+campaigns of which actions, however decisive, are but incidental parts.
+In other words, the reader must seize the movement and design of armies
+if he is to seize a military period, and these are not commonly given
+him. In the second place, the historian, however much alive to the
+importance of military affairs, too rarely presents them as part of a
+general position. He will make his story a story of war, or again, a
+story of civilian development, and the reader will fail to see how the
+two combine.
+
+Now, the Revolution, more than any other modern period, turns upon, and
+is explained by, its military history. On this account has so
+considerable a space been devoted to the explaining of that feature.
+
+The reader will note, again, that the quarrel between the Revolution and
+the Catholic Church has also been dealt with at length.
+
+To emphasise this aspect of the revolutionary struggle may seem unusual
+and perhaps deserves a word of apology.
+
+The reader is invited to consider the fact that the Revolution took
+place in a country which had, in the first place, definitely determined
+during the religious struggle of the sixteenth and seventeenth
+centuries to remain in communion with Rome; and had, in the second
+place, admitted a very large and important body of converts to the
+doctrines of the Reformation.
+
+The determination of the French people, in the crisis of 1572-1610, to
+remain Catholic under a strong central Government, was a capital point
+in the future history of France. So was the presence of a wealthy, very
+large, and highly cultivated body of dissentients in the midst of the
+nation. The two phenomena hardly co-existed elsewhere in Europe. Between
+them they lent to the political history of France a peculiar character
+which the nineteenth century, even more than the Revolution itself, has
+emphasised; and it is the opinion of the present writer that it is
+impossible to understand the Revolution unless very high relief is given
+to the religious problem.
+
+If a personal point may be noted, the fact that the writer of these
+pages is himself a Catholic and in political sympathy strongly attached
+to the political theory of the Revolution, should not be hidden from the
+reader. Such personal conditions have perhaps enabled him to treat the
+matter more thoroughly than it might have been treated by one who
+rejected either Republicanism upon the one hand, or Catholicism upon the
+other; but he believes that no personal and therefore exaggerated note
+has been allowed to intrude upon his description of what is a definite
+piece of objective history lying in the field of record rather than in
+that of opinion.
+
+Some years ago the paramount importance of the quarrel between the
+Church and the Revolution might still have been questioned by men who
+had no personal experience of the struggle, and of its vast results.
+To-day the increasing consequences and the contemporary violence of that
+quarrel make its presentation an essential part of any study of the
+period.
+
+The scheme thus outlined will show why I have given this sketch the
+divisions in which it lies.
+
+                                             H. BELLOC.
+
+  _King's Land,
+    January 1911._
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+                                                                   PAGE
+
+      PREFACE                                                         v
+
+    I THE POLITICAL THEORY OF THE REVOLUTION                         13
+
+   II ROUSSEAU                                                       29
+
+  III THE CHARACTERS OF THE REVOLUTION:
+      King Louis XVI                                                 37
+      The Queen                                                      45
+      Mirabeau                                                       53
+      La Fayette                                                     61
+      Dumouriez                                                      65
+      Danton                                                         67
+      Carnot                                                         72
+      Marat                                                          74
+      Robespierre                                                    77
+
+   IV THE PHASES OF THE REVOLUTION:
+        i. From May 1789 to 17th of July 1789                        83
+       ii. From the 17th of July 1789 to the 6th of October 1789     98
+      iii. From October 1789 to June 1791                           102
+       iv. From June 1791 to September 1792                         108
+        v. From the Invasion of September 1792 to the Establishment
+           of the Committee of Public Safety, April 1793            118
+       vi. From April 1793 to July 1794                             126
+
+    V THE MILITARY ASPECT OF THE REVOLUTION                         142
+      One                                                           145
+      Two                                                           156
+      Three                                                         163
+      Four                                                          179
+      Five                                                          204
+
+   VI THE REVOLUTION AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH                        214
+
+     INDEX                                                          255
+
+
+
+
+THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+THE POLITICAL THEORY OF THE REVOLUTION
+
+
+The political theory upon which the Revolution proceeded has, especially
+in this country, suffered ridicule as local, as ephemeral, and as
+fallacious. It is universal, it is eternal, and it is true.
+
+It may be briefly stated thus: that a political community pretending to
+sovereignty, that is, pretending to a moral right of defending its
+existence against all other communities, derives the civil and temporal
+authority of its laws not from its actual rulers, nor even from its
+magistracy, but from itself.
+
+But the community cannot express authority unless it possesses
+_corporate initiative_; that is, unless the mass of its component units
+are able to combine for the purpose of a common expression, are
+conscious of a common will, and have something in common which makes the
+whole sovereign indeed.
+
+It may be that this power of corporate initiative and of corresponding
+corporate expression is forbidden to men. In that case no such thing as
+a sovereign community can be said to exist. In that case "patriotism,"
+"public opinion," "the genius of a people," are terms without meaning.
+But the human race in all times and in all places has agreed that such
+terms have meaning, and the conception that a community can so live,
+order and be itself, is a human conception as consonant to the nature of
+man as is his sense of right and wrong; it is much more intimately a
+part of that nature than are the common accidents determining human
+life, such as nourishment, generation or repose: nay, more intimate a
+part of it than anything which attaches to the body.
+
+This theory of political morals, though subject to a limitless
+degradation in practice, underlies the argument of every man who
+pretends to regard the conduct of the State as a business affecting the
+conscience of citizens. Upon it relies every protest against tyranny and
+every denunciation of foreign aggression.
+
+He that is most enamoured of some set machinery for the government of
+men, and who regards the sacramental function of an hereditary monarch
+(as in Russia), the organic character of a native oligarchy (as in
+England), the mechanical arrangement of election by majorities, or even
+in a crisis the intense conviction and therefore the intense activity
+and conclusive power of great crowds as salutary to the State, will
+invariably, if any one of these engines fail him in the achievement of
+what he desires for his country, fall back upon the doctrine of an
+ultimately sovereign community. He will complain that though an
+election has defeated his ideal, yet true national tradition and true
+national sentiment were upon his side. If he defends the action of a
+native oligarchy against the leaders of the populace, he does so by an
+explanation (more or less explicit) that the oligarchy is more truly
+national, that is more truly communal, than the engineered expression of
+opinion of which the demagogues (as he will call them) have been the
+mouthpieces. Even in blaming men for criticising or restraining an
+hereditary monarch the adherent of that monarch will blame them upon the
+ground that their action is anti-national, that is anti-communal; and,
+in a word, no man pretending to sanity can challenge in matters temporal
+and civil the ultimate authority of whatever is felt to be (though with
+what difficulty is it not defined!) the general civic sense which builds
+up a State.
+
+Those words "civil" and "temporal" must lead the reader to the next
+consideration; which is, that the last authority of all does not reside
+even in the community.
+
+It must be admitted by all those who have considered their own nature
+and that of their fellow beings that the ultimate authority in any act
+is God. Or if the name of God sound unusual in an English publication
+to-day, then what now takes the place of it for many (an imperfect
+phrase), "the moral sense."
+
+Thus if there be cast together in some abandoned place a community of a
+few families so depraved or so necessitous that, against the teachings
+of their own consciences, and well knowing that what they are doing is
+what we call _wrong_, yet they will unanimously agree to do it, then
+that agreement of theirs, though certainly no temporal or civil
+authority can be quoted against it, is yet unjustifiable. Another
+authority lies behind. Still more evidently would this be true if, of
+say, twelve, seven decided (knowing the thing to be wrong) that the
+wrong thing should be done, five stood out for the right--and yet the
+majority possessed by the seven should be determined a sufficient
+authority for the wrongful command.
+
+But it is to be noted that this axiom only applies where the authority
+of the moral law (God, as the author of this book, with due deference to
+his readers, would prefer to say) is recognised and yet flouted. If
+those twelve families do sincerely believe such and such a general
+action to be right, then not only is their authority when they carry it
+into practice a civil and a temporal authority; it is an authority
+absolute in all respects; and further, if, upon a division of opinion
+among them not perhaps a bare majority, nay, perhaps not a majority at
+all, but at any rate a determinant current of opinion--determinant in
+intensity and in weight, that is, as well as in numbers--declares an
+action to be right, then that determinant weight of opinion gives to its
+resolve a political authority not only civil and temporal but absolute.
+Beyond it and above it there is no appeal.
+
+In other words, men may justly condemn, and justly have in a thousand
+circumstances condemned, the theory that a mere decision on the major
+part of the community was necessarily right in morals. It is, for that
+matter, self-evident that if one community decides in one fashion,
+another, also sovereign, in the opposite fashion, both cannot be right.
+Reasoning men have also protested, and justly, against the conception
+that what a majority in numbers, or even (what is more compelling still)
+a unanimity of decision in a community may order, may not only be wrong
+but may be something which that community has no authority to order
+since, though it possesses a civil and temporal authority, it acts
+against that ultimate authority which is its own consciousness of right.
+Men may and do justly protest against the doctrine that a community is
+incapable of doing deliberate evil; it is as capable of such an action
+as is an individual. But men nowhere do or can deny that the community
+acting as it thinks right is ultimately sovereign: there is no
+alternative to so plain a truth.
+
+Let us take it, then, as indubitable that where civil government is
+concerned, the community is supreme, if only from the argument that no
+organ within the community can prove its right to withstand the
+corporate will when once that corporate will shall find expression.
+
+All arguments which are advanced against this prime axiom of political
+ethics are, when they are analysed, found to repose upon a confusion of
+thought. Thus a man will say, "This doctrine would lead my country to
+abandon her suzerainty over that other nation, but were I to consent to
+this, I should be weakening my country, to which I owe allegiance." The
+doctrine compels him to no such muddlement. The community of which he is
+a member is free to make its dispositions for safety, and is bound to
+preserve its own life. It is for the oppressed to protest and to rebel.
+
+Similarly, men think that this doctrine in some way jars with the actual
+lethargy and actual imbecility of men in their corporate action. It does
+nothing of the kind. This lethargy, that imbecility, and all the other
+things that limit the application of the doctrine, in no way touch its
+right reason, any more than the fact that the speech of all men is
+imperfect contradicts the principle that man has a moral right to
+self-expression. That a dumb man cannot speak at all, but must write,
+is, so far from a contradiction, a proof of the truth that speech is the
+prime expression of man; and in the same way a community utterly without
+the power of expressing its corporate will is no contradiction, but a
+proof, of the general rule that such expression and the imposing of such
+decisions are normal to mankind. The very oddity of the contrast between
+the abnormal and the normal aids us in our decision, and when we see a
+people conquered and not persuaded, yet making no attempt at rebellion,
+or a people free from foreign oppression yet bewildered at the prospect
+of self-government, the oddity of the phenomenon proves our rule.
+
+But though all this be true, there stands against the statement of our
+political axiom not a contradiction added, but a criticism; and all men
+with some knowledge of their fellows and of themselves at once perceive,
+_first_, that the psychology of corporate action differs essentially
+from the psychology of individual action, and _secondly_, that in
+proportion to the number, the discussions, the lack of intimacy, and in
+general the friction of the many, corporate action by a community,
+corporate self-realisation and the imposition of a corporate will,
+varies from the difficult to the impossible.
+
+On this no words need be wasted. All men who reason and who observe are
+agreed that, in proportion to distance, numbers, and complexity, the
+difficulty of self-expression within a community increases. We may get
+in a lively people explosions of popular will violent, acute, and
+certainly real; but rare. We may attempt with a people more lethargic to
+obtain some reflection of popular will through the medium of a permanent
+machinery of deputation which, less than any other, perhaps, permits a
+great community to express itself truly. We may rely upon the national
+sympathies of an aristocracy or of a king. But in any case we know that
+large communities can only indirectly and imperfectly express themselves
+where the permanent government of their whole interest is concerned. Our
+attachment, which may be passionate, to the rights of the Common Will we
+must satisfy either by demanding a loose federation of small,
+self-governing states, or submitting the central government of large
+ones to occasional insurrection and to violent corporate expressions of
+opinion which shall readjust the relations between the governor and the
+governed.
+
+All this is true: but such a criticism of the theory in political morals
+which lay behind the Revolution, the theory that the community is
+sovereign, is no contradiction. It only tells us that pure right cannot
+act untrammelled in human affairs and that it acts in some conditions
+more laboriously than in others: it gives not a jot of authority to any
+alternative thesis.[1]
+
+Such is the general theory of the Revolution to which the command of
+Jean Jacques Rousseau over the French tongue gave imperishable
+expression in that book whose style and logical connection may be
+compared to some exact and strong piece of engineering. He entitled it
+the _Contrat Social_, and it became the formula of the Revolutionary
+Creed. But though no man, perhaps, has put the prime truth of political
+morals so well, that truth was as old as the world; it appears in the
+passionate rhetoric of a hundred leaders and has stood at the head or
+has been woven into the laws of free States without number. In the
+English language the Declaration of Independence is perhaps its noblest
+expression. And though this document was posterior to the great work of
+Rousseau and (through the genius of Jefferson) was in some part
+descended from it, its language, and still more the actions of those who
+drafted and supported it, are sufficient to explain what I mean to
+English readers.
+
+Now with this general theory there stand connected on the one hand
+certain great principles without which it would have no meaning, and
+also on the other hand a number of minor points concerning no more than
+the machinery of politics. The first are vital to democracy. The second,
+in spite of their great popularity at the time of the Revolution and of
+the sanction which the Revolution gave them, nay, of their universality
+since the Revolution, have in reality nothing to do with the
+revolutionary theory itself.
+
+Of these two categories the type of the first is the doctrine of the
+equality of man; the type of the second is the mere machinery called
+"representative."
+
+The doctrine of the equality of the man is a transcendent doctrine: a
+"dogma," as we call such doctrines in the field of transcendental
+religion. It corresponds to no physical reality which we can grasp, it
+is hardly to be adumbrated even by metaphors drawn from physical
+objects. We may attempt to rationalise it by saying that what is common
+to all men is not _more_ important but _infinitely more_ important than
+the accidents by which men differ. We may compare human attributes to
+tri-dimensional, and personal attributes to bi-dimensional measurements;
+we may say that whatever man has of his nature is the standard of man,
+and we may show that in all such things men are potentially equal. None
+of these metaphors explains the matter; still less do any of them
+satisfy the demand of those to whom the dogma may be incomprehensible.
+
+Its truth is to be arrived at (for these) in a negative manner. If men
+are _not_ equal then no scheme of jurisprudence, no act of justice, no
+movement of human indignation, no exaltation of fellowship, has any
+meaning. The doctrine of the equality of man is one which, like many of
+the great transcendental doctrines, may be proved by the results
+consequent upon its absence. It is in man to believe it--and all lively
+societies believe it.
+
+It is certainly not in man to prove the equality of men save, as I have
+said, by negation; but it demands no considerable intellectual faculty
+to perceive that, void of the doctrine of equality, the conception of
+political freedom and of a community's moral right to self-government
+disappear. Now to believe that doctrine positively, and to believe it
+ardently, to go on crusade for that religious point, was indeed
+characteristic of the French. It required the peculiar and inherited
+religious temper of the French which had for so many hundred years
+seized and defined point after point in the character of man, to grow
+enamoured of this definition and to feel it not in the intellect, but as
+it were in their bones. They became soldiers for it, and that enormous
+march of theirs, overrunning Europe, which may not inaptly be compared
+to their adventures in the twelfth century, when they engaged upon the
+Crusades, was inspired by no one part of the doctrine of political
+freedom more strongly than by this doctrine of equality.
+
+The scorn which was in those days universally felt for that pride which
+associates itself with things not inherent to a man (notably and most
+absurdly with capricious differences of wealth) never ran higher; and
+the passionate sense of justice which springs from this profound and
+fundamental social dogma of equality, as it moved France during the
+Revolution to frenzy, so also moved it to creation.
+
+Those who ask how it was that a group of men sustaining all the weight
+of civil conflict within and of universal war without, yet made time
+enough in twenty years to frame the codes which govern modern Europe, to
+lay down the foundations of universal education, of a strictly
+impersonal scheme of administration, and even in detail to remodel the
+material face of society--in a word, to make modern Europe--must be
+content for their reply to learn that the Republican Energy had for its
+flame and excitant this vision: a sense almost physical of the equality
+of man.
+
+The minor points which wove themselves into the political practice of
+democracy during the Revolution, which are not of its principles, and
+which would not, were they abstracted, affect its essence, are of quite
+another and less noble kind. I have taken as the chief of these the
+machinery of deputation or of "representation."
+
+The representative system had been designed for a particular purpose
+under the influence of the Church and especially of the monastic orders
+(who invented it) in the Middle Ages. It had been practised as a useful
+check upon the national monarchy in France, and as a useful form of
+national expression in times of crisis or when national initiative was
+peculiarly demanded.
+
+In Spain it became, as the Middle Ages proceeded, a very vital national
+and local thing, varying from place to place. It is not surprising that
+Spain (seeing that in her territory the first experiments in
+representation were made) should have thus preserved it, popular and
+alive.
+
+In England Representation, vigorous as everywhere else in the true
+Middle Ages, narrowed and decayed at their close, until in the
+seventeenth century it had become a mere scheme for aristocratic
+government.
+
+In France for nearly two hundred years before the Revolution it had
+fallen into disuse, but an active memory of it still remained;
+especially a memory of its value in critical moments when a consultation
+of the whole people was required, and when the corporate initiative of
+the whole people must be set at work in order to save the State.
+
+It is no wonder, therefore, that the French, on the eve of the
+Revolution, clamoured for a revival of representation, or, as the system
+was called in the French tongue, "the States-General." But as a
+permanent machine of government no one in Europe had the least idea how
+the system might serve the ends of democracy. In England democracy was
+not practised nor was representation connected with the conception of
+it. The nation had forgotten democracy as completely as it had forgotten
+the religion and the old ideals of the Middle Ages.
+
+In those parts of Christendom in which this ancient Christian
+institution of a parliament had not narrowed to be the mask of an
+oligarchy or dwindled to be a mere provincial custom, its use had
+disappeared. The ancient function of Representation, when it had been
+most lively and vigorous, that is, in the Middle Ages, was occasionally
+to initiate a national policy in critical moments, but more generally to
+grant taxes. What a democratic parliament might do, no one in 1789 could
+conceive.
+
+There was indeed one great example of democratic representation in
+existence: the example of the United States; but the conditions were
+wholly different from those of Europe. No true central power yet existed
+there; no ancient central institution, no Crown nor any Custom of the
+City. The numbers over which American representative democracy then held
+power were not to be compared to the twenty-five millions who inhabited
+the French realm. And even so, most of what counted in their lives was
+regulated by a system of highly local autonomy: for they were as
+scattered as they were few, and the wisest and strongest and best were
+dependent upon slaves. In Europe, I repeat, the experiment was untried;
+and it is one of the chief faults of the French revolutionaries that,
+having been compelled in the critical moment of the opening of the
+Revolution to the use of election and representation, they envisaged the
+permanent use of a similar machinery as a something sacred to and normal
+in the democratic State.
+
+True, they could not foresee modern parliamentarism. Nothing could be
+more alien to their conception of the State than the deplorable method
+of government which parliamentarism everywhere tends to introduce
+to-day.
+
+True, the French people during the revolutionary wars made short work of
+parliamentary theory, and found it a more national thing to follow a
+soldier (being by that time all soldiers themselves), and to incarnate
+in a dictator the will of the nation.
+
+But though the French revolutionaries could not have foreseen what we
+call "Parliamentarism" to-day, and though the society from which they
+sprang made short work of the oligarchic pretensions of a parliament
+when the realities of the national struggle had to be considered, yet
+they did as a fact pay an almost absurd reverence to the machinery of
+representation and election.
+
+They went so far as to introduce it into their attempted reform of the
+Church; they introduced it everywhere into civil government, from the
+smallest units to the highest. They even for a moment played with the
+illusion in that most real of games which men can ever play at--the
+business of arms: they allowed the election of officers. They were led
+to do this by that common fallacy, more excusable in them than in us,
+which confounds the individual will with the corporate. A representative
+(they thought) could in some way be the permanent receptacle of his
+electorate. They imagined that corporate initiative was always
+sufficiently active, in no matter what divisions or subdivisions, to
+react at once upon the delegate, to guide him as may be guided a driven
+animal, or to command him as may be commanded a servant.
+
+It was in vain that Rousseau, the great exponent of the democratic
+theory upon which France attempted to proceed, had warned posterity
+against the possible results of the representative system: they fell
+into the error, and it possesses many of their descendants to this day.
+
+Rousseau's searching mind perceived indeed no more than the general
+truth that men who consent to a representative system are free only
+while the representatives are not sitting. But (as is so often the case
+with intuitions of genius) though he saw not the whole of the evil, he
+had put his finger upon its central spot, and from that main and just
+principle which he laid down--that under a merely representative system
+men cannot be really free--flow all those evils which we now know to
+attach to this method of government. What a rather clumsy epigram has
+called "the audacity of elected persons" is part of this truth. The
+evident spectacle of modern parliamentary nations driven against their
+will into economic conditions which appal them, proceeds again from the
+same truth; the conspicuous and hearty contempt into which parliamentary
+institutions have everywhere fallen again proceeds from it, and there
+proceeds from it that further derivative plague that the representatives
+themselves have now everywhere become more servile than the electorate
+and that in all parliamentary countries a few intriguers are the
+unworthy depositories of power, and by their service of finance permit
+the money-dealers to govern us all to-day. Rousseau, I say, the chief
+prophet of the Revolution, had warned the French of this danger. It is a
+capital example of his talent, for the experiment of democratic
+representation had not yet, in his time, been tried. But much more is
+that power of his by which he not only stamped and issued the gold of
+democracy as it had never till then been minted. No one man makes a
+people or their creed, but Rousseau more than any other man made vocal
+the creed of a people, and it is advisable or necessary for the reader
+of the Revolution to consider at the outset of his reading of what
+nature was Rousseau's abundant influence upon the men who remodelled the
+society of Europe between 1789 and 1794.
+
+Why did he dominate those five years, and how was it that he dominated
+them increasingly?
+
+An explanation of Rousseau's power merits a particular digression, for
+few who express themselves in the English tongue have cared to
+understand it, and in the academies provincial men have been content to
+deal with this great writer as though he were in some way inferior to
+themselves.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] We need not waste any time upon those who talk about such and such a
+form of government being good because "it works." The use of such
+language connotes that the user of it is fatigued by the effort of
+thought. For what is "working," _i.e._ successful action, in any sphere?
+The attainment of certain ends in that sphere. What are those ends in a
+State? If material well-being, then there is an end to talk of
+patriotism, the nation, public opinion and the rest of it which, as we
+all very well know, men always have regarded and always will regard as
+the supreme matters of public interest. If the end is not material
+well-being, but a sense of political freedom and of the power of the
+citizen to react upon the State, then to say that an institution "works"
+though apparently not democratic, is simply to say that under such and
+such conditions that institution achieves the ends of democracy most
+nearly. In other words, to contrast the good "working" of an institution
+superficially undemocratic with democratic theory is meaningless. The
+institution "works" in proportion as it satisfies that political sense
+which perfect democracy would, were it attainable, completely satisfy.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+ROUSSEAU
+
+
+In order to appreciate what Rousseau meant to the revolutionary
+movement, it is necessary to consider the effect of style upon men.
+
+Men are influenced by the word. Spoken or written, the _word_ is the
+organ of persuasion and, therefore, of moral government.
+
+Now, degraded as that term has become in our time, there is no proper
+term to express the exact use of words save the term "style."
+
+What words we use, and in what order we put them, is the whole matter of
+style; and a man desiring to influence his fellow men has therefore not
+one, but two co-related instruments at his disposal. He cannot use one
+without the other. The weakness of the one will ruin the other. These
+two instruments are his idea and his style.
+
+However powerful, native, sympathetic to his hearers' mood or cogently
+provable by reference to new things may be a man's idea, he cannot
+persuade his fellow men to it if he have not words that express it. And
+he will persuade them more and more in proportion as his words are well
+chosen and in the right order, such order being determined by the genius
+of the language whence they are drawn.
+
+Whether the idea of which Rousseau made himself the exponent in his
+famous tract be true or false, need not further concern us in this
+little book. We all know that the difficult attempt to realise political
+freedom has attracted various communities of men at various times and
+repelled others. What English readers rarely hear is that the triumph of
+Rousseau depended not only on the first element in persuasion, which is
+vision, but also upon the second of the two co-related instruments by
+which a man may influence his fellows--to wit, style. It was his choice
+of French words and the order in which he arranged them, that gave him
+his enormous ascendancy over the generation which was young when he was
+old.
+
+I have alluded to his famous tract, the _Contrat Social_, and here a
+second point concerning it may be introduced. This book which gave a
+text for the Revolution, the document to which its political theory
+could refer, was by no means (as foreign observers have sometimes
+imagined) the whole body of writing for which Rousseau was responsible.
+To imagine that is to make the very common error of confusing a man with
+his books.
+
+Rousseau wrote on many things: his character was of an exalted, nervous
+and diseased sort. Its excessive sensibility degenerated with advancing
+years into something not distinguishable from mania. He wrote upon
+education, and the glory of his style carried conviction both where he
+was right and where the short experience of a hundred years has proved
+him to have been wholly wrong. He wrote upon love, and half the lessons
+to be drawn from his writing will be condemned by the sane. He wrote
+upon botany at vast length; he wrote also upon music--with what success
+in either department I am incompetent to determine. He wrote upon human
+inequality: and though the sentences were beautiful and the sentiment
+just, the analysis was very insufficient and the historical conception
+bad. He wrote upon a project for perpetual peace, which was rubbish; and
+he wrote upon the government of Poland an essay which was a perfect
+masterpiece.
+
+But when a great writer writes, each of his great writings has a life of
+its own, and it was not any of these other writings of Rousseau, on
+love or botany, which were the text of the Revolution. The text of the
+Revolution was his _Contrat Social_.
+
+Now it is not too much to say that never in the history of political
+theory has a political theory been put forward so lucidly, so
+convincingly, so tersely or so accurately as in this short and wonderful
+book. The modern publisher in this country would be ashamed to print it:
+not for its views (which would now seem commonplace), nor for its
+excellence, which would ensure it a failure, but for its brevity. It is
+as short as a gospel, and would cover but a hundred pages of one of our
+serious reviews. A modern publisher in this city would not know what
+price to set upon such a work, and the modern reader in this country
+would be puzzled to understand how a great thing could be got within so
+narrow a compass. A debate in Parliament or the libretto of a long
+pantomime is of greater volume.
+
+Nevertheless, if it be closely read the _Contrat Social_ will be
+discovered to say all that can be said of the moral basis of democracy.
+Our ignorance of the historical basis of the State is presumed in the
+very opening lines of it. The logical priority of the family to the
+State is the next statement. The ridiculous and shameful argument that
+strength is the basis of authority--which has never had standing save
+among the uninstructed or the superficial--is contemptuously dismissed
+in a very simple proof which forms the third chapter, and that chapter
+is not a page of a book in length. It is with the fifth chapter that the
+powerful argument begins, and the logical precedence of _human
+association_ to any particular form of government is the foundation
+stone of that analysis. It is this indeed which gives its title to the
+book: the moral authority of men in community arises from _conscious
+association_; or, as an exact phraseology would have it, a "social
+contract." All the business of democracy as based upon the only moral
+authority in a State follows from this first principle, and is developed
+in Rousseau's extraordinary achievement which, much more than any other
+writing not religious, has affected the destiny of mankind.
+
+It is indeed astonishing to one who is well acquainted not only with the
+matter, but with the manner of the _Contrat Social_, to remark what
+criticisms have been passed upon it by those who either have not read
+the work or, having read it, did so with an imperfect knowledge of the
+meaning of French words. The two great counter arguments, the one
+theoretic the other practical, which democracy has to meet, stand
+luminously exposed in these pages, though in so short a treatise the
+author might have been excused from considering them. The theoretical
+argument against democracy is, of course, that man being prone to evil,
+something external to him and indifferent to his passions must be put up
+to govern him; the people will corrupt themselves, but a despot or an
+oligarchy, when it has satisfied its corrupt desires, still has a wide
+margin over which it may rule well because it is indifferent. You
+cannot bribe the despot or the oligarch beyond the limit of his desires,
+but a whole people can follow its own corrupt desires to the full, and
+they will infect all government.
+
+The full practice of democracy, therefore, says Rousseau, is better
+suited to angels than to men.
+
+As to the practical argument that men are not sufficiently conscious of
+the State to practise democracy, save in small communities, that plea
+also is recognised and stated better than any one else has stated it.
+For there is not in this book an apology for democracy as a method of
+government, but a statement of why and how democracy is right.
+
+The silly confusion which regards a representative method as essentially
+democratic has never been more contemptuously dealt with, nor more
+thoroughly, than in the few words in which the _Contrat Social_
+dismisses it for ever; though it was left to our own time to discover,
+in the school of unpleasant experience, how right was Rousseau in this
+particular condemnation.
+
+Exiguous as are the limits within which the great writer has finally
+decided the theory of democracy, he finds space for side issues which
+nowhere else but in this book had been orderly considered, and which,
+when once one has heard them mentioned, one sees to be of the most
+excellent wisdom: that the fundamental laws, or original and particular
+bonds, of a new democracy must come from a source external to itself;
+that to the nature of the people for whom one is legislating, however
+democratic the form of the State, we must conform the particulars of
+law; that a democracy cannot live without "tribunes"; that no utterly
+inflexible law can be permitted in the State--and hence the necessity
+for dictatorship in exceptional times; that no code can foresee future
+details--and so forth.
+
+It would be a legitimate and entertaining task to challenge any man who
+had not read the _Contrat Social_ (and this would include most academic
+writers upon the treatise) to challenge any such one, I say, to put down
+an argument against democratic theory which could not be found within
+those few pages, or to suggest a limitation of it which Rousseau had not
+touched on.
+
+If proof were needed of what particular merits this pamphlet displayed,
+it would be sufficient to point out that in a time when the problem
+represented by religion was least comprehended, when the practice of
+religion was at its lowest, and when the meaning, almost, of religion
+had left men's minds, Rousseau was capable of writing his final chapter.
+
+That the great religious revival of the nineteenth century should have
+proved Rousseau's view of religion in the State to be insufficient is in
+no way remarkable, for when Rousseau wrote, that revival was undreamt
+of; what is remarkable is that he should have allowed as he did for the
+religious sentiment, and above all, that he should have seen how
+impossible it is for a selection of Christian dogma to be accepted as a
+civic religion.
+
+It is further amazing that at such a time a man could be found who
+should appreciate that for the State, to have unity, it must possess a
+religion, and Rousseau's attempt to define that minimum or substratum of
+religion without which unity could not exist in the State unfortunately
+became the commonplace of the politicians, and particularly of the
+English politicians who succeeded him. Who might not think, for
+instance, that he was reading--though better expressed, of course, than
+a politician could put it--some "Liberal" politician at Westminster, if
+he were to come on such phrases as these with regard to what should be
+taught in the schools of the country?
+
+"The doctrines taught by the State should be simple, few in number,
+expressed with precision and without explanation or commentary. The
+existence of a powerful God, beneficent, providential and good; the
+future life; the happiness of the good and the punishment of evil; the
+sanctity of the agreements which bind society together and of laws;
+while as for negative doctrines, one is sufficient, and that one is the
+wickedness of intolerance."
+
+Rousseau's hundred pages are the direct source of the theory of the
+modern State; their lucidity and unmatched economy of diction; their
+rigid analysis, their epigrammatic judgment and wisdom--these are the
+reservoirs from whence modern democracy has flowed; what are now proved
+to be the errors of democracy are errors against which the _Contrat
+Social_ warned men; the moral apology of democracy is the moral apology
+written by Rousseau; and if in this one point of religion he struck a
+more confused and a less determined note than in the rest, it must be
+remembered that in his time no other man understood what part religion
+played in human affairs; for in his days the few who studied religion
+and observed it could not connect it in any way with the political
+nature of man, and of those who counted in the intellect of Europe, by
+far the greater number thought political problems better solved if
+religion (which they had lost) were treated as negligible. They were
+wrong--and Rousseau, in his generalities upon the soul, was
+insufficient; both were beneath the height of a final theory of man, but
+Rousseau came much nearer to comprehension, even in this point of
+religion, than did any of his contemporaries.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+THE CHARACTERS OF THE REVOLUTION
+
+
+KING LOUIS XVI
+
+As might be expected, the character of King Louis XVI has suffered more
+distortion at the hands of historians than has any other of the
+revolutionary figures; and this because he combined with that personal
+character of his a certain office to which were traditionally attached
+certain points of view and methods of action which the historian takes
+for granted when he deals with the character of the man. As any one
+thinking of a judge of some standing upon the English bench cannot but
+believe that he is possessed of some learning or some gravity, etc.; as
+any one hearing of a famous soldier cannot but believe that he has
+certain qualities associated with the business of soldiering, so
+historians tend to confuse the personality and character of Louis XVI
+with that of his office; they either by contrast exaggerate his unkingly
+defects or by sympathy exaggerate his kingly opposition to reform.
+
+The student will do well to avoid this error and its source, and to
+think of Louis as of a man who had been casually introduced, almost
+without preparation, into the office which he held. In other words, the
+student will do well, in his reading of the Revolution, to consider
+Louis XVI simply as a man, and his character as a private character. For
+this last of the long, unbroken line of Capetians possessed a character
+essentially individual. It was of a type which, no matter what accidents
+of fortune might have fallen upon its possessor, would have remained the
+same. Nor was ever a man possessed of high office whom high office had
+less moulded.
+
+Men thus impervious to their environment are commonly so from two
+causes: either from an intense and vivid personal initiative which may
+border upon madness, or from something thick and heavy in their moral
+accoutrement which defends against external action the inner personal
+temperament. The latter was the case with Louis.
+
+He was very slow of thought, and very slow of decision. His physical
+movements were slow. The movement of his eyes was notably slow. He had a
+way of falling asleep under the effort of fatigue at the most
+incongruous moments. The things that amused him were of the largest and
+most superficial kind. Horse-play, now and then a little touched with
+eccentricity, and very plain but unexpected jokes. One may express him
+from one aspect by saying that he was one of those men whom you could
+never by any chance have hoped to convince of anything. The few things
+which he accepted he accepted quite simply, and the process of reasoning
+in the mouth of any who approached him was always too rapid for him to
+follow. But it must not be imagined on this account that the moral
+integument so described was wrapped about a void. On the contrary, it
+enclosed a very definite character. Louis possessed a number of intimate
+convictions upon which he was not to be shaken. He was profoundly
+convinced of the existence and value of a certain corporate tradition in
+the organism which he ruled: the French nation. He was national. In this
+he differed from many a pedant, many a courtier, many an ecclesiastic,
+and many a woman about him, especially his wife.
+
+He was, again, possessed of all the elements of the Catholic faith.
+
+It was, indeed, a singular thing for a man of his position at such a
+time to hold intimately to religion, but Louis held to it. He confessed,
+he communicated, he attended mass, he performed his ordinary
+devotions--not by way of tradition or political duty, or State function,
+to which religious performance was now reduced in the vast majority of
+his wealthy contemporaries, but as an individual for whom these things
+had a personal value. Had he, with precisely the same interior spirit,
+woken in his bed some morning to find himself a country squire, and to
+discover that all his past kingship had been a dream of the night, he
+would have continued the practice of his religion as before.
+
+Now this is a sufficiently remarkable point, for the country squire, the
+noble, the lawyer, the university professor of the generation
+immediately preceding the Revolution had, as a rule, no conception of
+the Catholic Church. With them the faith was dead, save in the case of a
+very few who made it, if one may say so without disrespect, a mania, and
+in their exaggerations were themselves the proofs of the depth of decay
+into which the Church of Gaul had fallen.
+
+Louis XVI was possessed, then, of religion: it appeared in many of his
+acts, in his hesitation to appoint not a few of the many atheist bishops
+of the time, in his real agony of responsibility upon the Civil
+Constitution of the clergy, and in nothing more than the peculiar
+sobriety and solid ritual whereby he prepared for a tragic, sudden, and
+ignominious death.
+
+It is next to be observed that though he was a man not yet in middle
+age, and though he was quite devoid of ardour in any form, he had from
+the first matured a great basis of courage. It is well to admit that
+this quality in him was connected with those slow processes of thought
+and action which hampered him, but it is not to be explained by them. No
+man yet has become brave through mere stupidity.
+
+It was not only the accidents of the Revolution that proved this quality
+in him: his physical habits proved it long before. He was a resolute and
+capable rider of the horse: an aptitude in that exercise is impossible
+to the coward. Again, in those by-products of courage which are
+apparent, even where no physical danger threatens, he was conspicuous;
+he had no hesitation in facing a number of men, and he had aptitude in a
+mechanical trade--a business by no means unconnected with virility.
+
+Now in mentioning his virility, it is of prime importance for the
+student to remember, though the matter can be touched upon but lightly,
+that Louis, in this department of physical life, suffered from a
+mechanical impediment which gravely distorted the first years of his
+marriage, which undoubtedly wounded his self-respect, and which was
+perhaps the only thing that caused him permanent anxiety. He was cured
+by medical aid in the summer of the year 1777, but he was already three
+years a king and seven years a husband before that relief came to him.
+The tragedy affected his whole life, and, I repeat, must never be
+forgotten when one considers either him or Marie Antoinette in their
+intimate character, and in their effect as actors in the great drama.
+
+For the rest, the character of Louis betrayed certain ineptitudes (the
+word ineptitude is far more accurate in this connection than the word
+weakness), which ineptitudes were peculiarly fatal for the military
+office which he held and for the belligerent crisis which he had to
+meet.
+
+Few men are possessed of the eye, the subtle sympathy, the very rapid
+power of decision, and the comprehension of human contrasts and
+differences which build up the apt leader of an armed force great or
+small. Most men are mediocre in the combination of these qualities. But
+Louis was quite exceptionally hopeless where they were concerned. He
+could never have seen the simplest position nor have appreciated the
+military aspects of any character or of any body of men. He could ride,
+but he could not ride at the head of a column. He was not merely bad at
+this trade, he was nul. Drafted as a private into a conscript army, he
+would never have been entrusted with the duties of a corporal. He would
+have been impossible as a sergeant; and, possessed of commissioned rank,
+ridicule would have compelled him to take his discharge.
+
+This lack did not only, or chiefly, betray itself in his inability to
+meet personally the armed crisis of a revolution; it was not only, or
+chiefly, apparent in his complete breakdown during the assault upon the
+palace on the 10th of August: it was also, and much more, the disastrous
+cause of his inability to oversee, or even to choose, military advisers.
+
+Those who propose in the early part of the Revolution to check the mob
+in Paris, are excellent commanders: but Louis does not know it. Those
+who succeed each other at the Ministry of War, or at the head of the
+armies during the active part of the revolution are various in the
+extreme: but they all seem one to him. Between a fop like Narbonne and a
+subtle, trained cavalry man like Dumouriez, Louis made no distinction.
+The military qualities of La Fayette (which were not to be despised)
+meant no more to him than does music, good or bad, to a deaf man. From
+the beginning to the end of the movement, the whole of the military
+problem escaped him.
+
+Another hole in his character, which was of prime importance at such a
+time, was his inability to grasp in a clear vision any general social
+problem. Maps he could well comprehend, and he could well retain
+statistics; but the landscape, as it were, of the Revolution his
+protuberant and lethargic eyes completely missed. He was quite unable to
+see where lay danger and where support, in what large masses such and
+such forces were grouped, and the directions in which they were
+advancing, or upon which they must retreat. In this matter he was, as
+will be seen in a moment, the very opposite of Mirabeau, and it was on
+account of this weakness, or rather this form of nullity, that all
+Mirabeau's vision was wasted upon Louis.
+
+Finally, he had no working comprehension of Europe. He did not even
+exaggerate the powers of the allies in the later phases of the
+Revolution when they were marching upon France. He did not either
+under-estimate or over-estimate the policy and naval force of Great
+Britain, the military resources of his own subjects, the probable
+sympathies of the Netherlands (anti-Austrian but Catholic), the decay of
+Spain, the division and impotence of the Italian Peninsula. Louis saw
+nothing of all these things.
+
+One may conclude the picture (for the purposes of such a short study as
+this) by saying that only one coincidence could have led him through the
+labyrinth of the time with success. That coincidence would have been the
+presence at his side of a friend fully trusted from childhood, loved, as
+religious as himself, and yet possessing precisely those qualities which
+he himself lacked. Had Louis found to hand such a lieutenant, the
+qualities I have mentioned would have been a sort of keel and ballast
+which would have secured the monarchy, for he was not weak, he was not
+impulsive, he was not even foolish: he was only wretchedly alone in his
+incapacities. Certainly such a nature could trust and rely upon no one
+who was not of this intimate kind, and he possessed no such intimate,
+let alone an intimate who could command the qualities I have suggested.
+
+Being what he was, his character is among the half-dozen which
+determined the Revolution to take the course which it did.
+
+
+THE QUEEN
+
+Marie Antoinette presents to history a character which it is of the
+highest interest to regard as a whole. It is the business of her
+biographers to consider that character as a whole; but in her connection
+with the Revolution there is but one aspect of it which is of
+importance, and that is the attitude which such a character was bound to
+take towards the French nation in the midst of which the Queen found
+herself.
+
+It is the solution of the whole problem which the Queen's action sets
+before us to apprehend the gulf that separated her not only from the
+French temperament, but from a comprehension of all French society. Had
+she been a woman lacking in energy or in decision, this alien character
+in her would have been a small matter, and her ignorance of the French
+in every form of their activity, or rather her inability to comprehend
+them, would have been but a private failing productive only of certain
+local and immediate consequences, and not in any way determining the
+great lines of the revolutionary movement.
+
+As it was, her energy was not only abundant but steadfast; it grew more
+secure in its action as it increased with her years, and the initiative
+which gave that energy its course never vacillated, but was always
+direct. She knew her own mind, and she attempted, often with a partial
+success, to realise her convictions. There was no character in touch
+with the Executive during the first years of the Revolution comparable
+to hers for fixity of purpose and definition of view.
+
+It was due to this energy and singleness of aim that her
+misunderstanding of the material with which she had to deal was of such
+fatal importance.
+
+It was she who chose, before the outbreak of the Revolution, the
+succession of those ministers both Liberal and Reactionary, whose unwise
+plans upon either side precipitated violence. It was she who called and
+then revoked, and later recalled to office the wealthy and
+over-estimated Necker; she who substituted for him, and then so
+inopportunely threw over Calonne, the most national of the precursors of
+the Revolution, and ever after her most bitter enemy; it was she who
+advised the more particularly irritating details of resistance after the
+meeting of the first revolutionary Parliament; it was she who presided
+over (and helped to warp) the plans for the flight of the royal family;
+it was she who, after this flight had failed, framed a definite scheme
+for the coercion of the French people by the Governments of Europe; it
+was she who betrayed to foreign chanceries the French plan of campaign
+when war had become inevitable; finally, it was she who inspired the
+declaration of Brunswick which accompanied the invasion of French
+territory, and she was in particular the author of the famous threat
+therein contained to give over Paris to military execution, and to hold
+all the popular authorities responsible with their lives for the
+restoration of the pre-revolutionary state of affairs.
+
+As research proceeds, the capital effect of this woman's continual and
+decided interference will be more and more apparent to historians.
+
+Now Marie Antoinette's conception of mankind in general was the
+conception that you will find prevalent in such societies as that
+domestic and warm centre which had nourished her childhood. The romantic
+affection of a few equals, the personal loyalty of a handful of personal
+servants, the vague histrionic content which permeates the poor at the
+sight of great equipages and rich accoutrements, the cheers of a crowd
+when such symbols accompanying monarchy are displayed in the
+streets--all these were for Marie Antoinette the fundamental political
+feelings of mankind. An absence of them she regarded with bewilderment,
+an active opposition to them she hated as something at once
+incomprehensible and positively evil.
+
+There was in all this illusion, of course, a great element of what the
+English call middle class, and the French bourgeois. To be quite
+ignorant of what servitors will say of their masters behind their backs;
+not to appreciate that heroic devotion is the faculty of a few; never
+to have imagined the discontents of men in general, and the creative
+desire for self-expression which inspires men when they act politically;
+not to know that men as a whole (and particularly the French people) are
+not deceived by the accidents of wealth, nor attach any real inferiority
+to poverty; to despise the common will of numbers or to doubt its
+existence; to see society established in a hierarchy not of office but
+of leisure: all this may seem to the democrat a very unnatural and
+despicable mood. But it was not despicable, still less unnatural; in the
+case of Marie Antoinette: it was the only experience and the only
+conception of society which had ever been given her. She had always
+believed, when she gazed upon a mass of the populace, that the
+difference between the crowd and herself was a moral reality. The
+contrast in external habits between the wealthy, the middle class, and
+the poor--a contrast ultimately produced by differences in the
+opportunity and leisure which wealth affords--she thought to be
+fundamental. Just as children and certain domestic pet animals regard
+such economic accidents in society as something real which
+differentiates men, so did she;--but she happened to nourish this
+illusion in the midst of a people, and within a day's walk of a capital,
+where the misconception had less hold than in any other district of
+Europe.
+
+Of the traits peculiar to the French she knew nothing, or, to put it
+more strongly, she could not believe that they really existed.
+
+The extremes of cruelty into which this people could fall were
+inconceivable to her, as were also the extremes of courage to which they
+can rise under the same excitements as arouse them to an excess of
+hatred. But that character in the French which she most utterly failed
+to foresee or to comprehend, was their power of _corporate
+organisation_.
+
+That a multitude could instruct and order themselves for a common
+purpose, rapidly acquire and nominate the officers who should bring that
+purpose to fruition, and in general pass in one moment from a mere
+multitude to an incipient army--that was a faculty which the French had
+and have to a peculiar degree, and which she (like so many of our own
+contemporaries, and especially those of German blood) could not believe
+to be real. This faculty in the French, when it took action and was
+apparent in the physical struggles of the Revolution, seemed to her, to
+the very end, a sort of nightmare; something which, by all the laws of
+reality, _ought not_ to be happening, but somehow or other _was_
+happening in a manner evilly miraculous. It was her ignorance upon this
+main point of all that caused her to rely so continually upon the use of
+the regular forces, and of those forces in insufficient numbers. She
+could not but believe that a few trained soldiery were necessarily the
+masters of great civilian bodies; their uniforms were a powerful
+argument with her, and mere civilian bodies, however numerous, were
+always, in her conception, a dust of disparate and inchoate humanity.
+She believed there was nothing to attack or resist in popular numbers
+but the opinion, the fear, or the cupidity of the individual. In this
+error of judgment concerning the French people she was not peculiar: it
+is an error repeated over and over again by foreigners, and even by some
+native commentators when they seek to account for some national movement
+of the Gauls. The unlearning of it is the first lesson which those who
+would either administrate or resist the French should learn.
+
+In the matter of religion (which the reader may see in these pages to be
+of such moment in the revolutionary story), the queen was originally far
+more indifferent than her husband, though she observed a certain measure
+of personal practice. It was not until her heavy misfortunes came upon
+her that any degree of personal devotion appeared in her daily life,
+though it must be admitted that, by a sort of premonition of disaster,
+she turned to religion in the months immediately preceding the outbreak
+of the reform.
+
+It remains to describe the personal effect she had upon those who were
+in her immediate presence. Most of the French aristocracy she repelled.
+The same misfortune which made her unable to understand the French
+temperament as a whole divorced her from that particular corner of it
+which took the shape of French aristocratic tradition. She did not
+understand its stiffness, its exactitude, its brilliancy or its
+hardness: and she heartily disliked all four.
+
+On this account she produced on the great families of her court, and
+especially upon the women of them, an effect of vulgarity. Had she
+survived, and had her misfortunes not been of so tragic an intensity,
+the legend she would have left in French society would certainly have
+been one of off-handed carelessness, self-indulgence, and lack of
+dignity which have for the French of that rank the savour that a loud
+voice, a bad accent, an insufficient usage in the rules of daily
+conduct, leave upon what is left of a corresponding rank in England
+to-day.
+
+She was, on the other hand, easily deceived by the flattery of place
+seekers, and the great power which she wielded in politics just before
+the Revolution broke out made her, as it were, a sort of _butt_ of the
+politicians.
+
+They haunted her presence, they depended upon her patronage, and, at the
+same time, they secretly ridiculed her. Her carriage, which was designed
+to impress onlookers and did have that effect upon most foreigners,
+seemed to most of the French observers (of a rank which permitted them
+to approach her familiarly) somewhat theatrical and sometimes actually
+absurd. The earnestness which she displayed in several lines of conduct,
+and notably in her determined animosity to certain characters (as that
+of La Fayette, for instance), was of an open and violent sort which
+seemed to them merely brutal and unintelligent; her luxury, moreover,
+was noticed by the refined world of Versailles to be hardly ever of her
+own choosing, but nearly always practised in imitation of others.
+
+In connection with that trait of luxury, the reader must appreciate at
+the outset that it was grievously exaggerated by her contemporaries, and
+has been still more exaggerated by posterity. She was not a very
+frivolous, still less a dissipated, woman. She was woefully loose in
+tongue, but she was certainly virtuous.
+
+She gambled, but as the times went, and the supposed unlimited fortune
+of the Crown, her gambling was not often excessive; her expenditure upon
+jewellery and dress would be thought most moderate to-day in the case of
+any lady of our wealthier families. On the other hand, her whims were
+continual and as continually changing, especially in the earlier part of
+her life.
+
+Since that surrounding world of the Court which she misunderstood and
+which had no sympathy with her was ready to find some handle against
+her, that handle of dissipation was the easiest for them to seize; but
+the accusation was not a just one.
+
+Had fortune made her the wife of a poor man in a lower class of society,
+Marie Antoinette would have been a capable housewife: her abundant
+energy would have found a proper channel, and she was in no way by
+nature extravagant.
+
+She had a few very passionate and somewhat too sentimental friendships,
+some of which were returned, others of which their objects exploited to
+their own advantage. The two most famous were her friendship for the
+Princess de Lamballe and for Madame de Polignac. These moved her not
+infrequently to unwise acts of patronage which were immediately seized
+by the popular voice and turned against her. They were among the few
+weaknesses apparent in her general temper. They were certainly ill
+balanced and ill judged.
+
+She indulged also in a number of small and unimportant flirtations which
+might almost be called the routine of her rank and world; she had but
+one great affection in her life for the other sex, and it was most
+ardently returned. Its object was a Swedish noble of her own age, the
+very opposite of the French in his temper, romantically chivalrous,
+unpractical in the extreme, gentle, intensely reserved; his name Count
+Axel de Fersen. The affair remained pure, but she loved him with her
+whole heart, and in the last months of her tragedy this emotion must be
+regarded as the chief concern of her soul. They saw each other but very
+rarely, often they were separated for years; it was this, perhaps, which
+lent both glamour and fidelity to the strange romance.
+
+
+MIRABEAU
+
+Mirabeau, the chief of the "practical" men of the Revolution (as the
+English language would render the most salient point in their political
+attitude), needs a very particular examination. His influence upon the
+early part of the Revolution was so considerable, the effect of his
+death was so determinant and final, the speculation as to what _might_
+have happened had he survived is so fruitful, so entertaining, and so
+common, and the positive effect of his attitude upon the development of
+the Revolution after his death was so wide, that to misunderstand
+Mirabeau is in a large measure to misunderstand the whole movement; and
+Mirabeau has unfortunately been ill or superficially understood by many
+among now three generations of historians; for a comprehension of this
+character is not a matter for research nor for accumulated historic
+detail, but rather a task for sympathy.
+
+Mirabeau was essentially an artist, with the powers and the frailties
+which we properly associate with that term: that is, strong emotion
+appealed to him both internally and externally. He loved to enjoy it
+himself, he loved to create it in others. He studied, therefore, and was
+a master of, the material by which such emotion may be created; he
+himself yielded to strong emotion and sought it where it might be found.
+It is foolish alike to belittle and to exaggerate this type of
+temperament. Upon it or upon its admixture with other qualities is based
+the music, the plastic art, and in a large measure the permanent
+literature of the world. This aptitude for the enjoyment and for the
+creation in others of emotion clothes intellectual work in a manner
+which makes it permanent. This is what we mean when we say that _style_
+is necessary to a book; that a great civilisation may partly be judged
+by its architecture; that, as Plato says, music may be moral or immoral,
+and so forth. The artist, though he is not at the root of human affairs,
+is a necessary and proper ally in their development.
+
+When I say that Mirabeau was an artist I mean that wherever his energies
+might have found play he would there have desired to enjoy and to create
+enjoyment through some definite medium. This medium was in part
+literary, but much more largely oral expression. To be a _tribune_, that
+is the voice of great numbers, to persuade, nay, to please by his very
+accents and the very rhythm of his sentences, these things occupied the
+man; but he also brought into his art that without which no great art
+can exist: mere intellect.
+
+He believed in the main principles at least which underlay the
+revolutionary movement, he understood them and he was prepared to
+propagate them; but his power over men was not due to this conviction:
+his power over men was wholly that of the artist, and had he by some
+accident been engaged in maintaining the attack against democracy, he
+would have been nearly as famous as he became under the title of its
+defender. We must then always consider Mirabeau as an orator, though an
+orator endowed with a fine and clear intelligence and with no small
+measure of reasoned faith.
+
+Much else remains to be said of him.
+
+He was a gentleman; that is, he both enjoyed and suffered the
+consequences which attach to hereditary wealth and to the atmosphere
+that surrounds its expenditure. On this account, he being personally
+insufficiently provided with wealth, he was for ever in debt, and
+regarded the sums necessary to his station in life and to his large
+opportunities as things due to him, so to speak, from society. We are
+right when we say that he took bribes, but wrong if we imagine that
+those bribes bound him as they would bind a man meaner in character or
+less lucky in his birth. He stooped as gentlemen will to all manner of
+low intrigues, to obtain "the necessary and the wherewith"; that is,
+money for his _r�le_. But there was a driving power behind him, bound up
+with his whole character, which made it impossible for any such sums to
+control his diction or to make of such a man a mere advocate. He was
+never that dirtiest of political phenomena, the "party man." He would
+never have been, had he been born a hundred years later and thrust into
+the nastiness of modern parliamentary life, "a parliamentary hand."
+
+Mirabeau had behind him a certain personal history which we must read in
+connection with his temperament.
+
+He had travelled widely, he knew Englishmen and Germans of the wealthier
+classes well. The populace he knew ill even in his own country; abroad
+he knew it not at all. He had suffered from his father's dislike of him,
+from the consequence of his own unbridled passions, also not a little
+from mere accidental misfortune. Capable of prolonged and faithful
+attachment to some woman, the opportunity for that attachment had never
+been afforded him until the last few months before his death. Capable of
+paying loyal and industrious service to some political system, no
+political system had chosen him for its servant. It is a fruitful matter
+of speculation to consider what he might have done for the French
+monarchy had Fate put him early at Court and given him some voice in the
+affairs of the French Executive before the Revolution broke out. As it
+was, the Revolution provided him with his opportunity merely because it
+broke down old barriers and conventions and was destructive of the
+framework of the State in which he lived. He was compelled to enter the
+Revolution as something of a destroyer, for by no other avenue could he
+be given his chance; but by nature he detested destruction. I mean
+(since this phrase is somewhat vague) he detested that spirit which will
+disendow a nation of certain permanent institutions serving definite
+ends, without a clear scheme of how those institutions should be
+replaced by others to serve similar ends. It was on this account that he
+was most genuinely and sincerely a defender of the monarchy: a permanent
+institution serving the definite ends of national unity and the
+repression of tendencies to oligarchy in the State.
+
+Mirabeau had none of the revolutionary Vision. In mind he was
+prematurely aged, for his mind had worked very rapidly over a very
+varied field of experience. The pure doctrine of democracy which was a
+religion to many of his contemporaries, with all the consequences of a
+religion, he had never thought of accepting. But certain consequences of
+the proposed reforms strongly appealed to him. He loved to be rid of
+meaningless and dead barriers, privileges which no longer corresponded
+to real social differences, old traditions in the management of trade
+which no longer corresponded to the economic circumstances of his time,
+and (this is the pivotal point) the fossils of an old religious creed
+which, like nearly all of his rank, he simply took for granted to be
+dead: for Mirabeau was utterly divorced from the Catholic Church.
+
+Much has been said and will be said in these pages concerning the
+religious quarrel which, though men hardly knew it at the time, cut
+right across the revolutionary effort, and was destined to form the
+lasting line of cleavage in French life. There will be repeated again
+and again what has already been written, that a reconciliation between
+the Catholic Church and the reconstruction of democracy was, though men
+did not know it, the chief temporal business of the time, and the reader
+of these pages will be made well acquainted in them with the degradation
+to which religion had fallen among the cultivated of that generation.
+But in the case of Mirabeau this absence of religion must be
+particularly insisted upon. It would no more have occurred to Mirabeau
+that the Catholic Faith had a future than it could occur to (let us say)
+an English politician of thirty years ago that the Irish might become a
+wealthy community or that an English Government might within his own
+lifetime find itself embarrassed for money. I use this parallel for the
+sake of strengthening my contention, but it is indeed a weak parallel.
+No contemporary parallel in our strange and rapidly changing times
+corresponds to the fixed certitude which permeated the whole of the end
+of the eighteenth century that the Catholic Faith was dead. Mirabeau had
+perhaps never engaged in his life in intimate conversation a single man
+who took the Catholic sacraments seriously, or suffered a moment's
+anxiety upon the tenets of the creed.
+
+He knew, indeed, that certain women and a much smaller number of
+insignificant men wrapped themselves up in old practices of an odd,
+superstitious kind; he knew that great, dull areas of ignorant
+peasantry, in proportion to their poverty and isolation, repeated by
+rote the old formulae of the Faith. But of the Faith as a living thing
+he could have no conception.
+
+He saw on the one hand a clerical institution, economic in character,
+providing places and revenues for men of his own rank; he met those men
+and never discovered them to have any religion at all. He saw on the
+other hand a proposed society in which such a fossil, unjust and
+meaningless, must relinquish its grip upon those large revenues. But of
+the Faith as a social force, as a thing able to revive, he could have
+no conception. It would have seemed to him a mere folly to suggest that
+the future might contain the possibility of such a resurrection. The
+dissolution of the religious orders, which was largely his work, the
+civil constitution of the clergy which he presided over, were to him the
+most natural acts in the world. They were the mere sweeping away of a
+quantity of inorganic stuff which cumbered the modern State. He felt of
+them as we might feel of the purchase of waste spaces in our cities, of
+the confiscation of some bad landlords' property in them. The Church
+served no kind of purpose, no one who counted believed in it, it was
+defended only by people who enjoyed large revenues from the survival of
+what had once been, but was now no longer, a living, social function.
+
+In everything of the Revolution which he understood Mirabeau was upon
+the side of caution. He was not oblivious to the conception of popular
+government, he was not even mistrustful of it, but he could not conceive
+of it save as acting through the established strength of the wealthier
+classes. Of military power he judged very largely through Prussian eyes.
+And in long and enthusiastic passages he described the Prussian army as
+invincible. Had he lived to see the military enthusiasm of the
+Republicans he would utterly have distrusted it. He favoured in his
+heart an aristocratic machinery of society--though not an aristocratic
+theory of the State; he was quite determined to preserve as a living
+but diminished national organ the traditional monarchy of France; he was
+curious upon a number of details which were present and close to his
+eyes: methods of voting, constitutional checks, commercial codes and the
+rest of it. The little equilibriums of diplomacy interested him also,
+and the watching of men immediately under his eye in the Parliament.
+
+It was in the Parliament that his whole activity lay, it was there that
+he began to guide the Revolution, it was his absence from the Parliament
+after his death that the Revolution most feels in the summer of 1791.
+
+This very brief sketch does not present Mirabeau to the reader. He can
+only be properly presented in his speeches and in the more rhetorical of
+his documents. It is probable as time proceeds that his reputation in
+this department will grow. His constitutional ideas, based as they were
+upon foreign institutions, and especially upon the English of that time,
+were not applicable to his own people and are now nearly forgotten: he
+was wrong upon English politics as he was wrong upon the German armies,
+but he had art over men and his personality endures and increases with
+time.
+
+
+LA FAYETTE
+
+The character of La Fayette has suffered chiefly from his own aloofness
+towards his contemporaries on the one hand, and from his rigid adherence
+to principle upon the other. Both these causes are clearly connected.
+The same quality in him which made him so tenacious of principle made
+him contemptuous of the run of men about him. Fundamentally, he was
+nearer the extreme Republicans than any other class, from the very fact
+of his possessing a clear political creed and a determination to follow
+it out to its logical consequence. But there was no chance of his
+comprehending the concrete side of the movement or the men engaged upon
+it, for his great wealth, inherited in very early life, had cut him off
+from experience. His moral fault was undoubtedly ambition. It was an
+ambition which worked in the void, as it were, and never measured itself
+with other men's capacities or opportunities. He made no plans for
+advancement, not because he would have despised the use of intrigue in
+reason, but because he was incapable of working it. He was exceedingly
+attached to popularity, when it came he thought it his due; unpopularity
+in its turn seemed to him a proof of the vileness of those who despised
+him. He made himself too much the measure of his world.
+
+Undoubtedly a very great part in the moulding of his character proceeded
+from his experience in the United States of America. He was then at the
+most impressionable and formative period of human life, little more than
+a boy, or at least just entering early manhood. He had just married, he
+had just come into the administration of his vast fortune. At such a
+moment he took part in the victorious rebellion of the English colonies,
+and it may be imagined how powerful was the effect of this youthful
+vision upon the whole of the man's future life; because there was no
+proletariat in the colonies, he never saw or comprehended the
+dispossessed classes of Paris--for that matter he never saw or
+comprehended the French peasantry upon his own lands; because a chance
+and volunteer soldiery had, under the peculiar conditions of the
+half-populated Atlantic seaboard in conjunction with the French fleet
+and with the aid of French money and arms, got the better of the small
+and heterogeneous forces of George III, he believed that a military
+nation like the French, in the midst of powerful enemies, could make
+something of an amateur civic force; because a certain type of ease in
+social relations was the ideal of many, perhaps of most, of those with
+whom he had served in America, he confused so simple and mundane an
+ideal with the fierce crusading blast and the sacred passion for
+equality which was stirring his own nation when his opportunity for
+leadership came.
+
+It may be said of La Fayette with justice that he never upon a single
+occasion did the right thing. It may also be said with justice that he
+never did politically any major thing for which his own conscience would
+later reproach him. It is noticeable that the Queen held him in
+particular odium. He had been a wealthy young noble about the Court, the
+friend of all her women friends, and his sympathy with the revolutionary
+movement at its inception therefore seemed to her nothing better than
+treason. There was also undoubtedly something in his manner which
+grievously repelled her; that it was self-sufficient we cannot doubt,
+and that it was often futile and therefore exasperating to women, events
+are sufficient to show. But Marie Antoinette's violent personal
+antagonism towards La Fayette was not common, though several ardent
+spirits (Danton's, for instance) shared it. The mass of those who came
+across La Fayette felt in connection with him a certain irritation or a
+certain contempt or a certain rather small and distant respect; he
+inspired no enthusiasms, and when he timidly attempted a rebellion
+against the new Government after the fall of the monarchy, no one would
+sacrifice himself or follow him.
+
+It may be affirmed of La Fayette that if he had not existed the
+Revolution would have pursued much the same course as it did, with this
+exception: that there would not have been formed a definitely middle
+class armed guard to provoke friction in Paris: the National Guard would
+have been more open to all ranks.
+
+In religion the man was anodyne, Catholic of course by baptism, but
+distinctly Protestant in morals and in general tone, in dogma (until the
+end of his life) freethinking, of course, like all his contemporaries.
+He was personally courageous but foolishly despised the duel. One
+anecdote out of many will help to fix his nature in the mind of the
+reader. Mirabeau, casting about as usual for aid in his indebtedness,
+sent urgently to him as to a fellow noble, a fellow politician and a
+fellow supporter of the Crown, begging a loan of �2000. La Fayette
+accorded him �1000.
+
+
+DUMOURIEZ
+
+Dumouriez presents a character particularly difficult for the modern
+Englishman to comprehend, so remote is it in circumstance and
+fundamentals from those of our time.
+
+Of good birth, but born in a generation when social differences had
+become a jest for intelligent and active men (and he was intelligent and
+active), courageous, with a good knowledge of his trade of soldiering,
+of rapid decision and excellent judgment where troops or _terrain_ were
+concerned, he was all at sea in the comprehension of men, and he bore no
+loyalty to the State.
+
+It is this last feature which will particularly surprise the English
+reader, for it is the singular and permanent advantage of oligarchic
+communities such as the British that they retain under any stress and
+show throughout the whole commonwealth the sense of the State. To betray
+the State, to act against its interests, to be imperfectly conscious of
+its existence, are crimes or weaknesses unknown to the citizens of an
+oligarchy, and a citizen of this country cannot easily conceive of them
+to-day. In democracies and despotisms, on the other hand, to forget
+one's duty to the State, to be almost oblivious of its corporate
+existence, is a common weakness. There is here a compensation, and by
+just so much as despotism and democracy permit rapid, effective and
+all-compelling action on the part of the State, by just so much as they
+permit sudden and sometimes miraculous enthusiasms which save or which
+confirm a State, by that also do they lack the quiet and persistent
+consciousness of the State which oligarchy fosters and determines.
+
+Dumouriez' excellence as a general can only be appreciated by those who
+have looked closely into the constitution of the forces which he was to
+command and the adversaries with whom he had to deal. It is the prime
+quality of a great commander that his mind stands ready for any change
+in circumstances or in the material to his hand, and even when we have
+allowed for the element of luck which is so considerable in military
+affairs, we must not forget that Dumouriez saved without disaster the
+wretched and disorganised bands, inchoate and largely mutinous as to
+their old units, worthless and amateur as to their new, which had to
+meet, in and behind the Argonne, the model army of Prussia.
+
+We must not forget that his plan for the invasion of the Low Countries
+was a just and sensible one, nor with what skill, after the inevitable
+defeat and retreat of the spring of 1793, he saved his command intact.
+
+As a subordinate to an armed executive, to the Government of Napoleon,
+for instance, the man would have been priceless. Nay, had circumstances
+permitted him to retain supreme command of civil as of military power,
+he would have made no bad dictator. His mere technical skill was so
+considerable as to make the large sums paid him by the English
+Government seem a good bargain even at our distance of time, and his
+plans for the defence of England and for the attack on Napoleon are a
+proof of the value at which he was estimated.
+
+But Dumouriez was quite unable to act under the special circumstances in
+which he happened to be placed at the moment of his treason. A mere
+ambition had carried him from intrigue to intrigue among the
+politicians. He despised them as an active and capable soldier was
+compelled to despise them; he was too old to share any of their
+enthusiasms, even had his temperament permitted him to entertain any
+vision, political or religious. He certainly never felt the least moral
+bond attaching him to what was in his eyes the chance anarchy of the
+last six months of French Government under which he served, and if he is
+to be branded with the title of traitor, then we must brand with the
+same title all that multitude of varied men who escaped from the country
+in the Emigration, who left it in disgust, or even who remained in
+France, but despaired of French fortunes, in the turmoil of 1793.
+
+It is perhaps a worthy excuse for Dumouriez' failure to point out that
+he also was one of those whom the Court might have used had it known how
+to use men; but the Court had no such knowledge.
+
+
+DANTON
+
+The character of Danton has more widely impressed the world than that of
+any other revolutionary leader, because it contained elements
+permanently human, independent of the democratic theory of the time, and
+necessary neither to the support of that theory nor to the criticism of
+it.
+
+The character of Danton appeals to that sense in man which is interested
+in action, and which in the field of letters takes the form of drama.
+His vigour, his personal strength of mind and body, the individuality of
+his outline, arrest equally the man who loves the Revolution, and the
+man who hates it, and the man who is quite indifferent to its success or
+failure.
+
+It is on this very account that historians, especially foreign
+historians, have tended to misinterpret the man. Thus Carlyle, who has
+great intuition in the matter, yet makes him out farmer-like--which he
+certainly was not; Michelet, fascinated by his energy, presents him as
+something uncouth, and in general those who would describe Danton stand
+at a distance, as it were, where his loud voice and forcible gesture may
+best be appreciated; but a man to be seen truly must be seen in
+intimacy.
+
+Danton was essentially a compound of two powerful characters in man. He
+was amative or constructive, and at the same time he not only possessed
+but liked to exercise lucidity of thought. The combination is among the
+strongest of all those that go to build up human personalities.
+
+That which was amative and constructive in him, his virility if you
+will, brought him into close touch with reality; he knew and loved his
+own country, for instance, and infinitely preferred its happy survival
+to the full development of any political theory. He also knew and loved
+his fellow countrymen in detail and as persons; he knew what made a
+Frenchman weak and what made him strong. The vein of Huguenotry, though
+he did not know it for what it was, he disliked in his compatriots. On
+the other hand, the salt and freshness of the French was native to him
+and he delighted in it; the freedom of their expression, the noise of
+their rhetoric, and the military subsoil of them, were things to all of
+which he immediately responded. He understood their sort of laughter,
+nor was he shocked, as a man less national would have been, at their
+peculiarly national vices, and in especial their lapses into rage. It is
+this which must account for what all impartial judgment most blames in
+him, which is, his indifference to the cruelties, his absorbed interest
+in foreign and military affairs, at the moment of the Massacres of
+September.
+
+This touch with reality made him understand in some fashion (though only
+from without) the nature of the Germans. The foolish mania of their
+rulers for mere territorial expansion unaccompanied by persuasion or the
+spread of their ideas, he comprehended. The vast superiority of their
+armies over the disorganised forces of the French in 1792 he clearly
+seized: hence on the one hand his grasp of their foreign policy, and on
+the other his able negotiation of the retreat after Valmy. He also
+understood, however, and more profoundly, the rapid self-organisation of
+which his own countrymen were capable, and it was upon this knowledge
+that his determination to risk the continuance of the war reposed. It
+should be remarked that both in his military and in his quasi-military
+action he was himself endowed in a singular degree with that power of
+immediate decision which is characteristic of his nation.
+
+His lucidity of thought permitted him to foresee the consequences of
+many a revolutionary decision, and at the same time inclined him to a
+strong sympathy with the democratic creed, with the doctrine of
+equality, and especially with the remoulding of the national
+institutions--particularly his own profession of the law--upon simple
+lines. He was undoubtedly a sincere and a convinced revolutionary, and
+one whose doctrine more permeated him than did that of many of his
+contemporaries their less solid minds. He was not on that account
+necessarily republican. Had some accident called his genius into play
+earlier in the development of the struggle, he might well, like
+Mirabeau, with whom he presents so curious a parallel, have thought it
+better for the country to save the Monarchy.
+
+It must always be remembered that he was a man of wide culture and one
+who had achieved an early and satisfactory professional success; he was
+earning a sound income at the moment of his youthful marriage; he read
+English largely and could speak it. His dress was not inexpensive, and
+though somewhat disordered (as it often is with men of intense energy
+and constant gesture) it never gave an impression of carelessness or
+disarray. He had many and indifferent intellectual interests, and was
+capable, therefore, of intelligent application in several fields. He
+appreciated the rapid growth of physical science, and at the same time
+the complexity of the old social conditions--too widely different from
+contemporary truths.
+
+To religion he was, of course, like all men of that time, utterly
+indifferent, but unlike many of them he seized the precise proportion of
+its remaining effect upon certain districts and certain sections of the
+countrysides. There has been a tendency latterly to exaggerate the part
+which Freemasonry played in the launching of him; he was indeed a member
+of a masonic lodge, as were, for that matter, all the men, conspicuous
+or obscure, democratic or utterly reactionary, who appeared upon the
+revolutionary stage: probably the king, certainly old aristocrats like
+the father of Madame de Lamballe, and the whole host of the middle
+class, from men like Bailly to men like Condorcet. But it is reading
+history backwards, and imagining the features of our own time to have
+been present a century ago, to make of Masonry the determining element
+in his career.
+
+Danton failed and died from two combined causes: first his health gave
+way, secondly he obtruded his sanity and civilian sense into the heated
+fury and calculated martial law of the second year of the Republic. To
+both that fury and that calculation he was an obstacle; his opposition
+to the Terror lost him the support of the enthusiasts, but it was the
+interference which such a judgment made in the plans of the soldiers,
+and notably of Carnot, that determined his condemnation and death. He
+also, like Mirabeau, will undoubtedly increase as the years proceed,
+and, if only as a representative of the national temper, become more and
+more the typical figure of the Revolution in action.
+
+
+CARNOT
+
+Carnot, the predecessor of Napoleon, and the organising soldier of the
+early revolutionary wars, owed his power to backbone.
+
+He had not only a good solidity of brain, but an astonishing power of
+using it for hours and hours on end. This he owed perhaps to the
+excellent physical stock of which he came, the eldest of a very large
+family born to a notable lawyer in Burgundy.
+
+It was Carnot's pride to hold a commission in the learned arms which
+were to transform at that moment the art of war: for as Bonaparte, his
+successor, was a gunner, so he was a sapper. His practice of exact
+knowledge in application, and the liberal education which his career
+demanded, further strengthened the strong character he had inherited.
+More important still, in his democratic views he was what none of the
+older officers had been, convinced and sincere. He had not come within
+the influence of the very wealthy or of the very powerful. He was
+young, and he knew his own mind not only in matters of political faith
+but in the general domain of philosophy, and in the particular one of
+military science.
+
+It has been said of him that he invented the revolutionary method of
+strategical concentration and tactical massing in the field. There is
+some truth in this; but the method would not have been possible had he
+not also invented, in company with Danton, and supported after Danton
+left power, a universal system of conscription.
+
+Carnot understood, as only trained soldiers can, the value of numbers,
+and _he depended with great sagacity upon the national temper_; thus at
+Wattignies, which was a victory directly due to his genius, though it
+was novel in him to have massed troops suddenly upon the right after a
+check on the extreme left of the field, yet the novelty would have been
+of no effect had he not comprehended that, with his young fellow
+countrymen as troopers, he could depend upon a charge delivered after
+thirty-six hours of vigil.
+
+He used not only the national but also the revolutionary temper in war.
+One of the chief features, for instance, of the revolutionary armies
+when they began to be successful, was the development of lines of
+skirmishers who pushed out hardily before the main bodies and were the
+first in the history of modern warfare to learn the use of cover. This
+development was spontaneous: it was produced within and by each unit,
+not by any general command. But Carnot recognised it at Hoondschoote
+and used it ever after.
+
+The stoical inflexibility of his temper is the noblest among the many
+noble characters of his soul. He never admitted the empire, and he
+suffered exile, seeming thereby in the eyes of the vilest and most
+intelligent of his contemporaries, Fouch�, to be a mere fool. He was as
+hard with himself as with others, wholly military in the framework of
+his mind, and the chief controller of the Terror, which he used, as it
+was intended to be used, for the military salvation of the republic.
+
+
+MARAT
+
+Marat is easily judged. The complete sincerity of the enthusiast is not
+difficult to appreciate when his enthusiasm is devoted to a simple human
+ideal which has been, as it were, fundamental and common to the human
+race.
+
+Equality within the State and the government of the State by its general
+will: these primal dogmas, on the reversion to which the whole
+Revolution turned, were Marat's creed.
+
+Those who would ridicule or condemn him because he held such a creed,
+are manifestly incapable of discussing the matter at all. The ridicule
+and condemnation under which Marat justly falls do not attach to the
+patent moral truths he held, but to the manner in which he held them. He
+did not only hold them isolated from other truths--it is the fault of
+the fanatic so to hold any truth--but he held them as though no other
+truths existed. And whenever he found his ideal to be in practice
+working at a friction or stopped dead, his unnourished and acute
+enthusiasms at once sought a scapegoat, discovered a responsible agent,
+and suggested a violent outlet, for the delay.
+
+He was often right when he denounced a political intriguer: he often
+would have sacrificed a victim not unjustly condemned, he often
+discovered an agent partially responsible, and even the violent
+solutions that he suggested were not always impracticable. But it was
+the prime error of his tortured mind that beyond victims, and sudden
+violent clutches at the success of democracy, there was nothing else he
+could conceive. He was incapable of allowing for imperfections, for
+stupidities, for the misapprehension of mind by mind, for the mere
+action of time, and for all that renders human life infinitely complex
+and infinitely adjustable.
+
+Humour, the reflection of such wisdom, he lacked;--"judgment" (as the
+English idiom has it) he lacked still more--if a comparative term may be
+attached to two such absolute vacuities.
+
+It must not be forgotten that so complete an absence of certain
+necessary qualities in the building up of a mind are equivalent to
+madness. Marat was not sane. His insanity was often generous, the creed
+to which it was attached was obvious enough, and in the eyes of most of
+us it is a creed to be accepted. But he worked with it as a madman who
+is mad on collectivism, let us say, or the rights of property, might
+work in our society, thinking of his one thesis, shrieking it and
+foaming at the mouth upon it, losing all control when its acceptance was
+not even opposed but merely delayed. He was valueless for the
+accomplishment of the ends of the Revolution. His doctrine and his
+adherence to it were so conspicuously simple and sincere that it is no
+wonder the populace made him (for a few months) a sort of symbol of
+their demand.
+
+For the rest, his face, like his character, was tortured; he carried
+with him a disease of the skin that irritated perpetually his wholly
+unbalanced temper.
+
+Some say (but one must always beware of so-called "Science" in the
+reading of history) that a mixture of racial types produced in him a
+perpetual physical disturbance: his face was certainly distorted and
+ill-balanced--but physical suggestions of that sort are very
+untrustworthy.
+
+Those who met him in the management of affairs thought him worthless
+enough; a few who knew him intimately loved him dearly; more who came
+across him continually were fatigued and irritated by his empty
+violence. He was, among those young revolutionaries, almost an elderly
+man; he was (this should never be forgotten) a distinguished scholar in
+his own trade, that of medicine; and he effected less in the Revolution
+than any man to whom a reputation of equal prominence happened to
+attach. He must stand responsible for the massacres of September.[2]
+
+
+ROBESPIERRE
+
+No character in the Revolution needs for its comprehension a wider
+reading and a greater knowledge of the national character than
+Robespierre's.
+
+Upon no character does the comprehension of the period more depend, and
+none (for reasons I will give in a moment) has been more misunderstood,
+not only in the popular legend but in the weighed decisions of competent
+historians.
+
+So true is this that even time, which (in company with scholarship)
+usually redresses such errors, has not yet permitted modern authors to
+give a true picture of the man.
+
+The reason of so conspicuous a failure in the domain of history is this:
+that side by side with the real Robespierre there existed in the minds
+of all his contemporaries _save those who actually came across him in
+the junctions of government_, a legendary Robespierre--a Robespierre
+popularly imagined; and that this imaginary Robespierre, while it (or
+he) has proved odious to posterity, seemed, while he lived, a
+fascinating portrait to the man himself, and therefore he accepted it.
+For Robespierre, though just, lacked humility.
+
+The problem is an exceedingly subtle as well as an exceedingly difficult
+one. The historian, as he reads his authorities, has perpetually to
+distinguish between what is strong and what is weak evidence, and to
+recall himself, as he reads, to reality by a recollection of what
+Robespierre himself was. If he does not do so he falls at once into the
+legend; so powerful is that legend in the numbers that supported it, and
+so strongly did Robespierre himself support it by his own attitude. The
+legendary Robespierre may be described in a very few lines.
+
+Conceive a man sincerely convinced of the purest democratic theory, a
+man who cared for nothing else but the realisation of that theory, and
+who had never sacrificed his pursuit of its realisation in the State to
+any personal advantage whatsoever. This man, trusted by the people and
+at last idolised by them, becomes more and more powerful. He enters the
+governing body (the Committee of Public Safety), he is the master both
+within and without that body, and uses his mastery for establishing an
+ideal democracy which shall recognise the existence of God and repose
+upon civic virtue; and to establish this ideal he has recourse to
+terror. He finds that human defections from his ideal are increasingly
+numerous: he punishes them by death. The slaughter grows to be enormous;
+the best of Democrats are involved in it; at last it can be tolerated no
+longer, his immediate subordinates revolt against him in the Committee,
+he is outlawed, fails to raise a popular rebellion in his favour in
+Paris, is executed, and his system of terror falls to the ground.
+
+This picture, though purely legendary in tone, contains not only much
+truth, but truth of precisely that sort which conspires to make credible
+what is false in the whole.
+
+Robespierre was sincerely attached to the conception of an ideal
+democracy; he was incorruptible in the pursuit of it--and to be a
+politician and incorruptible amounts to something like what the Church
+calls heroic virtue in a man. He _did_ enter the Committee of Public
+Safety; he _did_ support the Terror, and when he was overthrown the
+Terror _did_ come to an end. Where, then, does the legend differ from
+the truth?
+
+In these capital points, which change it altogether: that Robespierre
+was not the chief influence in the Committee of Public Safety, _i.e._
+the all powerful executive of the Republic; that he did not desire the
+Terror, that he did not use it, that he even grew disgusted with it, and
+that, in general, he was never the man who governed France.
+
+It need hardly be pointed out how such a truth destroys such a legend.
+The whole nature of the twelve months between the summer of 1793 and the
+summer of 1794 must vary according as we regard them as Robespierrean or
+no: and they were not Robespierrean.
+
+What were they then, and why has the error that Robespierre was then
+master, arisen?
+
+Those months, which may be roughly called the months of the Terror,
+were, as we shall see later in this book, months of martial law; and the
+Terror was simply martial law in action--a method of enforcing the
+military defence of the country and of punishing all those who
+interfered with it or were supposed by the Committee to interfere with
+it.
+
+No one man in the Committee was the author of this system, but the one
+most determined to use it and the one who had most occasion to use it,
+was undoubtedly the military organiser, Carnot. Side by side with him
+one man, such as Barr�re, supported it because it kept up the Committee
+of Public Safety which gave him all his political position. Another,
+such as Saint-Just, supported it because he believed that the winning of
+the war (in which he took an active part) would secure democracy
+everywhere and for ever. Another, such as Jean Bon, supported it from
+the old sectarian bitterness of the Huguenot. But of all men in the
+Committee, Robespierre supported the Terror least, and was most
+suspected by his colleagues--and increasingly suspected as time went
+on--of desiring to interfere with the martial system of the Terror and
+to modify it.
+
+Why, then, was Robespierre popularly identified with the Terror, and
+why, when he was executed, did the Terror cease?
+
+Robespierre was identified with the Terror because he was identified
+with the popular clamour of the time, with the extreme democratic
+feeling of the time, and its extreme fear of a reaction. Robespierre
+being the popular idol, had become also the symbol of a popular frenzy
+which was supposed to be ruling the country. But that frenzy was not
+ruling the country. What was ruling the country was the Committee of
+Public Safety, in which Carnot's was the chief brain. Robespierre was
+indeed the idol of the populace; he was in no way the agent of their
+power or of any power.
+
+Why, when he fell, did the Terror cease if he were not its author?
+Because the Terror was acting under a strain; it was with the utmost
+difficulty that this absolute, intolerant and intolerable martial system
+could be continued when once the fear of invasion was removed. For some
+weeks before Robespierre fell the victories had begun to render it
+unnecessary. When the Committee saw to it that Robespierre should be
+outlawed by the Parliament, they knocked away, without knowing it, the
+keystone of their own policy; it was _his_ popular position which made
+_their_ policy possible. When he was destroyed they suddenly found that
+the Terror could no longer be maintained. Men had borne with it because
+of Robespierre, falsely imagining that Robespierre had desired it.
+Robespierre gone, men would not bear with it any more.
+
+Now, finally, if Robespierre himself had always felt opposed to the
+system of the Terror, why did he not take the lead in the popular
+reaction against it?
+
+He had his opportunity given him by Danton in December 1793--seven
+months before his own catastrophe. The Committee determined to put
+Danton out of the way because Danton, in appealing for mercy, was
+weakening the martial power of their government. Robespierre might have
+saved Danton: he preferred to let him be sacrificed. The reason was that
+Robespierre wrongly believed popularity to lie upon the side of the
+Terror and against Danton; he was in no way a leader (save in rhetoric
+and in rhetoric directed towards what men already desired), and his own
+great weakness or vice was the love of popular acclaim.
+
+Later on, in the summer of 1794, when he actually began to move against
+the Terror, he only did so privately. He so misread men that he still
+believed the Terror to be popular, and dared not lose his popular name.
+A man by nature as sincere as crystal, he was tempted to insincerity in
+this major thing, during the last months of his life, and he yielded
+completely to the temptation. For the sake of his memory it was
+deplorable, and deplorable also for history. His weakness has been the
+cause of an historical error as grave as any that can be discovered in
+modern letters, and at the same time has wholly maligned him to
+posterity.
+
+A factor in Robespierre's great public position which is often forgotten
+is the great effect of his speeches. That men should still debate, after
+so vast a change in taste, whether those speeches were eloquent or no,
+is a sufficient proof of their effect. He spoke in an ordered and a
+reasoned manner, which bored the fine spirits of the earlier
+Parliaments, but well suited the violent convictions of the later
+Revolution. His phraseology, his point of view, just jumped with that of
+his audience. He could express what they felt, and express it in terms
+which they knew to be exact, and which they believed to be grand. For
+his manner was never excessive, and those excessive men who heard him in
+an excessive mood, were proud to know that their violence could be
+expressed with so much scholarship and moderated skill.
+
+By birth he was of the smaller gentry, though poor. It is an indication
+of his character that he had thought of taking Orders, and that in early
+youth literary vanity had affected him. He has left no monument; but
+from the intensity of his faith and from his practice of it, his name,
+though it will hardly increase, will certainly endure.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[2] There is but one trustworthy monograph on Marat. It will interest
+the student as a proof of the enthusiasm which Marat can inspire. It is
+by Champfleury.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+THE PHASES OF THE REVOLUTION
+
+
+I
+
+_From May 1789 to 17th of July 1789._
+
+The first point which the reader must hold in the story of the
+Revolution is the quarrel between its first Parliament and the Crown.
+
+Of what nature was that quarrel?
+
+It was not, as it has sometimes been represented, a simple issue between
+privilege and a democratic demand for equality, or between traditional
+organs of government and a democratic demand for self-government by the
+nation. To imagine this is to read history backwards, and to see in the
+untried conditions of 1789 the matured results which only appeared after
+years of struggle.
+
+The prime issue lay between legality and illegality.
+
+The forms of French law and all the inherited method of French
+administration demanded a certain form of authority; a centralised
+government of unlimited power. The King was absolute. From him proceeded
+in the simplest fashion whatever will was paramount in the State. He
+could suspend a debtor's liabilities, imprison a man without trial,
+release him without revision of his case, make war or peace, and in
+minor details such as the discipline and administration of public
+bodies, the power of the Crown was theoretically and legally equally
+supreme. It was not exercised as the enormous power of modern government
+is exercised, it did not perpetually enter into every detail of the life
+of the poor in the way in which the power of a modern English Government
+enters into it; it is in the very nature of such autocratic power that,
+while unlimited in theory, it is compelled to an instinctive and
+perpetual self-limitation lest it break down; and autocracy maybe
+compared in this to aristocracy, or more properly speaking to oligarchy,
+the government of a few: for where a few govern they know that their
+government reposes upon public opinion or public tolerance; they are
+very careful not to exceed certain limits the transgression of which
+would weaken the moral foundation of their power; they welcome allies,
+they recruit themselves perpetually from other classes in the community.
+
+In the same way an autocracy always has the desire to be popular. Its
+strokes affect the great and the powerful, and are hardly ever aimed at
+the mass of the community. The intellectual, the wealthy, the privileged
+by birth, fortune or exceptional personal powers, are suspect to it. As
+for the mass of men an Autocracy attempts to represent and, in a certain
+sense, to obey them.
+
+Now the French autocracy (for it was no less) erred not in the will to
+act thus popularly in the early part of the Revolution, but in the
+_knowledge_ requisite for such action.
+
+The Parliament, shortly after it had met in May 1789, began to show, in
+the Commons part of it, the working of that great theory which had
+leavened all France for a generation. The Commons said, "We are the
+people; at once the symbols of the people, the direct mandatory servants
+of the people, and" (though this was a fiction) "we are of the people in
+our birth and origin. We are therefore the true sovereign; and the
+prince, the head of the Executive, is no more than an organ of
+government, morally less in authority than ourselves, who are the true
+source of government." This attitude, which was at the back of all men's
+minds, and which was concentrated, of course, in the Commons, clashed
+with legality. It could not express itself in the terms of law, it could
+not act save in a fashion which should be, in the strictest sense of the
+word, _revolutionary_.
+
+Now the Crown, on the whole national in sympathy, and comprehending this
+new theory well (I mean by the Crown the general body of advisers round
+the King, and the King himself), was offended at the illegality not of
+the theory or of the pretence (for these were not illegal), but of the
+action of the Commons. And this comparatively small source of friction
+was the irritant upon which we must fix as the cause of what followed.
+The Nobles, by 108 to 47, decided, the day after the opening of the
+Parliament, to sit as a separate House. The Clergy, by a much smaller
+majority, 133 to 114, came to the same decision, but carefully qualified
+it as provisional. The Commons declared that the hall in which they met
+should be regarded as the hall of the National Assembly, and later made
+it their business (to quote the phrase of the motion) "to attempt to
+unite in common all the deputies of the nation in that hall and never to
+abandon the principle of voting individually" (that is, not by separate
+Houses) "or the principle that the States-General formed one undivided
+body." This attitude was qualified and compromised with to some extent
+in the days that followed, but it held the field, and while the Commons
+were insisting upon this attitude as a moral right, the Nobles countered
+by a reaffirmation of the right of each House to a separate judgment
+upon public matters. The Nobles were standing upon legal precedent: the
+Commons had nothing in their favour but political theory; if the orders
+sat all together and voted as individuals, the Commons, who were in
+number equal to the two other Houses combined, would, with their noble
+and clerical sympathisers, have a majority.
+
+Now the King and his advisers, notably Necker, who still had great
+weight, were by no means "Impossiblists" in this struggle. They desired
+an understanding, and through the last days of May and the first days of
+June the attempt at an understanding was made. But the attempt dragged,
+and as it seemed that nothing would come of it, on the 10th of June
+Si�yes moved that the Assembly should "verify its powers" (a French
+phrase for admitting and registering the presence of each member as
+acceptable to the whole body, and to the theory of its Constitution),
+and that this should be done "in the case of each member" (meaning
+members of all the three orders and _not_ of the Commons alone),
+"whether the members of the two privileged Houses were present or
+absent." The roll was called and completed upon the 15th. None of the
+nobles attended the common roll-call, three of the parish clergy (they
+were from the province of Poitou) did so, and thus admitted the right of
+the Commons so to act. A dozen of their colleagues joined them later;
+but that was all.
+
+So far there had been no action which could be precisely called illegal
+or revolutionary. The Commons had affirmed a right based upon a
+political theory which the vast majority of the nation admitted, and the
+legal depositary of power, the King, had not yet reproved. One may draw
+a parallel and compare the action of the Commons so far to some action
+which a trade union, for instance, may take in England; some action the
+legality of which is doubtful but upon which the courts have not yet
+decided.
+
+It was upon the 17th of June, two days after the completion of the
+roll-call by the Commons, that the first revolutionary act took place,
+and the student of the Revolution will do well to put his finger upon
+that date and to regard it not indeed as the moral origin of the
+movement, but as the precise moment from which the Revolution, as a
+Revolution, begins to act. For upon that day the Commons, though in fact
+only joined by a handful of the Clerical House, and by none of the
+nobility, _declared themselves to be the National Assembly_; that is,
+asserted the fiction that Clergy, Nobles and Commons were all present
+and voted together. To this declaration they added a definite act of
+sovereignty which trespassed upon and contradicted the legal authority
+of the Crown. True, the motion was only moved and passed
+"provisionally," but the words used were final, for in this motion the
+self-styled "National Assembly" declared that "provisionally" taxes and
+dues might be raised upon the old authority but that only until the
+National Assembly should disperse; "after which day"--and here we reach
+the sacramental formula, as it were, of the crisis--"the National
+Assembly _wills and decrees_ that all taxes and dues of whatever nature
+which have not been specifically formally and freely granted by the said
+Assembly shall cease in every province of the kingdom no matter how such
+that province may be administered." (This is an allusion to the fact
+that in some provinces there was a representative machinery, in others
+nothing but the direct action of the Crown.) "The Assembly declares that
+when it has _in concert with_ (not in obedience to) the King laid down
+the principle of a national re-settlement, it will busy itself with the
+examination and ordering of the public debt." Etc., etc.
+
+Such was the point of departure after which sovereignty was at issue
+between the Crown and the States-General; the Crown a known institution
+with its traditions stretching back to the Roman Empire, and the
+National Assembly a wholly new organ according to its own claims, basing
+its authority upon a political theory stretching back to the very
+origins of human society.
+
+Two days later, on the 19th of June, the "National Assembly," still only
+self-styled and possessing only the powers which it had ascribed to
+itself beyond all forms of law, set to work, nominated its committees,
+and assumed the sovereignty thus claimed. The Nobles protested (notably
+the Bishops), and the King, on the advice of Barentin, keeper of the
+Seals, determined upon immediate resistance. The excuse was taken that
+the Royal Session, as it was called, in which the King would declare his
+will, needed the preparation of the hall, and when the Commons presented
+themselves at the door of that hall on the next day, the 20th, they
+found it shut against them. They adjourned to a neighbouring tennis
+court, and took a solemn corporate oath that they would not separate
+without giving France a Constitution. They continued to meet, using a
+church for that purpose, but on the 23rd the Royal Session was opened
+and the King declared his will.
+
+The reader must especially note that even in this crisis the Crown did
+not offer a complete resistance. There was an attempt at compromise.
+Necker would have had a more or less complete surrender, the Queen and
+her set would have preferred an act of authority which should have
+annulled all that the Commons had done. What actually happened was a
+permission by the Crown that the three Orders should meet as one body
+for certain common interests, but should preserve the system of voting
+as separate Houses in "all that might regard the ancient and
+constitutional rights of the three Orders, the Constitution to be given
+to future Parliaments, feudal property, and the rights and prerogatives
+of the two senior Houses." As a mere numerical test, such a conclusion
+would have destroyed the power of the Commons, since, as we have seen,
+numbers were the weapon of the Commons, who were equal to the two other
+Houses combined, and if all sat together would, with the Liberal
+members of the clergy and the nobility, be supreme. But apart from this
+numerical test, the act of sovereignty affirmed by the National Assembly
+when it declared itself, and itself only, competent to vote taxes, was
+annulled. Moreover, the royal declaration ended with a command that on
+the next day the three Orders should meet separately.
+
+Now at this critical point the King was disobeyed. The current of the
+time chose the revolutionary bed, and as it began to flow deepened and
+confirmed its course with every passing day and event. Already the
+majority of the clergy had joined the National Assembly when it had
+affirmed its right to sit in spite of the check of the 20th of June.
+There was a half-hour on that decisive day of the Royal Session, the
+23rd of June, when armed force might have been used for the arrest and
+dispersion of the Deputies. They declared themselves inviolable and
+their arrest illegal, but there was, of course, no sanction for this
+decree. As a fact, not a corporal's file was used against them. The next
+day, the 24th, the majority of the clergy again joined the Commons in
+their session (in flat defiance of the King's orders), and on the 25th,
+forty-seven of the nobles followed their example. The King yielded, and
+on the 27th, two days later, ordered the three Houses to meet together.
+
+The National Assembly was now legally constituted, and set out upon its
+career. The Crown, the old centre of authority, had abandoned its
+position, and had confirmed the Revolution, but in doing so it had acted
+as it were in contradiction with itself. It had made technically legal
+an illegality which destroyed its own old legal position, but it had
+done so with ill-will, and it was evident that some counter-stroke would
+be attempted to restore the full powers of the Crown.
+
+At this point the reader must appreciate what forces were face to face
+in the coming struggle. So far, the illegal and revolutionary act of the
+17th of June, the Royal Session which replied to that act upon the 23rd,
+the King's decree which yielded to the Commons upon the 27th, had all of
+them been but words. If it came to action, what physical forces were
+opposed?
+
+On the side of the Crown was the organised armed force which it
+commanded. For it must never be forgotten that the Crown was the
+Executive, and remained the Executive right on to the capture of the
+palace three years later, and the consummation of the Revolution on the
+10th of August, 1792. On the side of the National Assembly was without
+doubt the public opinion of the country (but that is not a force that
+can be used under arms), and, what was much more to the point, the
+municipal organisation of France.
+
+Space forbids a full description of the origins and strength of the
+French municipal system; it is enough to point out that the whole of
+Gallic civilisation, probably from a moment earlier than C�sar's
+invasion, and certainly from the moment when Roman rule was paramount
+in Gaul, was a _municipal_ one. It is so still. The countrysides take
+their names mainly from their chief towns. The towns were the seats of
+the bishops, whose hierarchy had preserved whatever could be preserved
+of the ancient world. In the towns were the colleges, the guilds, the
+discussion and the corporations which built up the life of the nation.
+The chief of these towns was Paris. The old systems of municipal
+government, corrupt and varied as they were, could still give the towns
+a power of corporate expression. And even where that might be lacking it
+was certain that some engine would be found for expressing municipal
+action in a crisis of the sort through which France was now passing. In
+Paris, for instance, it was seen when the time came for physical force
+that the College of Electors, who had chosen the representatives for
+that city, were willing to act at once and spontaneously as a municipal
+body which should express the initiative of the people. It was the
+towns, and especially Paris, prompt at spontaneous organisation, ready
+to arm, and when armed competent to frame a fighting force, which was
+the physical power behind the Assembly.
+
+What of the physical power behind the King? His power was, as we have
+said, the Regular Armed forces of the country: the army. But it is
+characteristic of the moment that only a part of that armed force could
+be trusted. For an army is never a mere weapon: it consists of living
+men; and though it will act against the general opinion of its members
+and will obey orders long after civilians would have broken with the
+ties of technical and legal authority, yet there is for armies also a
+breaking point in those ties, and the Crown, I repeat, could not use as
+a whole the French-speaking and French-born soldiery. Luckily for it, a
+very great proportion of the French army at that moment consisted of
+foreign mercenaries.
+
+Since the position was virtually one of war, we must consider what was
+the strategical object of this force. Its object was Paris, the chief of
+the towns; and round Paris, in the early days of July, the mercenary
+regiments were gathered from all quarters. That military concentration
+once effected, the gates of the city held, especially upon the north and
+upon the west, by encamped regiments and by a particularly large force
+of cavalry (ever the arm chosen for the repression of civilians), the
+Crown was ready to act.
+
+On the 11th of July, Necker, who stood for Liberal opinions, was
+dismissed. A new ministry was formed, and the counter-revolution begun.
+What followed was the immediate rising of Paris.
+
+The news of Necker's dismissal reached the masses of the capital (only
+an hour's ride from Versailles) on the afternoon of the 12th, Sunday.
+Crowds began to gather; an ineffectual cavalry charge in one of the
+outer open spaces of the city only inflamed the popular enthusiasm, for
+the soldiers who charged were German mercenary soldiers under the
+command of a noble. Public forces were at once organised, arms were
+commandeered from the armourers' shops, the Electoral College, which had
+chosen the members of the Assembly for Paris, took command at the Guild
+Hall, but the capital point of the insurrection--what made it
+possible--was the seizure of a great stock of arms and ammunition,
+including cannon, in the depot at the Invalides.
+
+With such resources the crowd attacked, at the other end of the city, a
+fortress and arsenal which had long stood in the popular eye as the
+symbol of absolute monarchy, the Bastille. With the absurdly
+insufficient garrison of the Bastille, its apparent impregnability to
+anything the mob might attempt, the supposed but doubtful treason of its
+governor in firing upon those whom he had admitted to parley, we are not
+here concerned. The Bastille was rushed, after very considerable efforts
+and an appreciable loss in killed and wounded. By the evening of that
+day, Tuesday, the 14th of July, 1789, Paris had become a formidable
+instrument of war. The next news was the complete capitulation of the
+King.
+
+He came on the morrow to the National Assembly, promising to send away
+the troops; he promised to recall Necker, a municipal organisation was
+granted to the city, with Bailly for its first mayor, and--a point of
+capital importance--an armed militia dependent upon that municipality
+was legally formed, with La Fayette at its head. On the 17th Louis
+entered Paris to consummate his capitulation, went to the Guild Hall,
+appeared in the tricoloured cockade, and the popular battle was won.
+
+It behoves us here to consider the military aspect of this definitive
+act from which the sanction of the Revolution, the physical power behind
+it, dates.
+
+Paris numbered somewhat under a million souls: perhaps no more than
+600,000: the number fluctuated with the season. The foreign mercenary
+troops who were mainly employed in the repression of the popular feeling
+therein, were not sufficient to impose anything like a siege. They could
+at the various gates have stopped the provisioning of the city, but then
+at any one of those separate points, any one of their detachments upon a
+long perimeter more than a day's march in circumference would certainly
+have been attacked and almost as certainly overwhelmed by masses of
+partially armed civilians.
+
+Could the streets have been cleared while the ferment was rising? It is
+very doubtful. They were narrow and tortuous in the extreme, the area to
+be dealt with was enormous, the tradition of barricades not forgotten,
+and the spontaneous action of that excellent fighting material which a
+Paris mob contains, had been quite as rapid as anything that could have
+been effected by military orders.
+
+The one great fault was the neglect to cover the Invalides, but even had
+the Invalides not been looted, the stock of arms and powder in the city
+would have been sufficient to have organised a desperate and prolonged
+resistance. The local auxiliary force (of slight military value, it is
+true), the "French Guards," as they were called, were wholly with the
+people. And in general, the Crown must be acquitted of any considerable
+blunder on the military side of this struggle. It certainly did not fail
+from lack of will.
+
+The truth is (if we consider merely the military aspect of this military
+event) that in dealing with large bodies of men who are (a) not
+previously disarmed, (b) under conditions where they cannot be
+dispersed, and (c) capable by a national tradition or character of some
+sort of rapid, spontaneous organisation, the issue will always be
+doubtful, and the uncertain factor (which is the tenacity, decision and
+common will of the civilians, to which soldiers are to be opposed) is
+one that varies within the very widest limits.
+
+In massing the troops originally, the Crown and its advisers estimated
+that uncertain factor at far too low a point. Even contemporary educated
+opinion, which was in sympathy with Paris, put it too low. That factor
+was, as a fact, so high that no armed force of the size and quality
+which the Crown then disposed of, could achieve its object or hold down
+the capital.
+
+As for the absurd conception that any body of men in uniform, however
+small, could always have the better of civilian resistance, however
+large and well organised, it is not worthy of a moment's consideration
+by those who interest themselves in the realities of military history.
+It is worthy only of the academies.
+
+So ends the first phase of the Revolution. It had lasted from the
+opening of the States-General in May to the middle of July 1789.
+
+
+II
+
+_From the 17th of July 1789 to the 6th of Oct. 1789._
+
+We have seen the military conditions under which the attempt at an armed
+counter-revolution failed. There follows a short phase of less than
+three months, whose character can be quickly described.
+
+It was that moment of the Revolution in which ideas had the freest play,
+in which least had been done to test their application, and most scope
+remained for pure enthusiasm. That is why we find in the midst of that
+short phase the spontaneous abandonment of the feudal rights by the
+nobility. And that is why the violent uprisings all over France
+continued. It is the period in which the Declaration of the Rights of
+Man and of the Citizen, a document which may fittingly stand side by
+side with the Declaration of Independence (for together they form the
+noblest monuments of our modern origins), was promulgated. In the same
+period were the elements of the future Constitution rapidly debated and
+laid down, and notably that national policy of a _Single Chamber_ which
+the modern French have imprudently abandoned. In that same period,
+however, appeared, and towards the close of it, another form of
+resistance on the part of the Crown and of those who advised the Crown.
+The King hesitated to accept the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and
+similarly hesitated to promulgate the Decree of the 4th of August in
+which the nobility had abandoned their feudal dues. It would be foolish
+to exaggerate the military aspect of what followed. Louis did call in
+troops, but only in numbers sufficient for personal defence, and we can
+hardly believe that he intended anything more than to police the
+surroundings of his throne. But the brigade (for it was no more, nor was
+it of full strength) which he summoned was sufficient to kindle
+suspicion; and the determinedly false position of the Queen (who all her
+life was haunted by the idea that the regular soldiers, especially if
+they were well dressed and held themselves rigidly, were a sort of
+talisman) provoked an explosion. A feast was given in which the officers
+of the Regiment of Flanders, which had just reached Versailles, were
+entertained by the officers of the Guard. It was made the occasion for a
+good deal of drunkenness and a violent Royalist manifestation, at which
+the Queen was present, which she approved, and which some thought she
+had designed.
+
+The failure of the harvest to relieve the scarcity of bread in Paris,
+the permanent state of alarm in which Paris had remained, and of
+suspicion for the safety of the Parliament which it continually
+entertained since the early part of the summer, needed no more to
+provoke an outbreak. It is an error to imagine that that outbreak was
+engineered or that such a movement could have been factitious. Great
+masses of women (in whom the movement originated), and after them a
+whole flood of the populace, marched upon Versailles.
+
+There was no direct attack upon the palace, though the palace feared
+such an attack at any moment. The troops present were sufficient to
+prevent violence.
+
+La Fayette followed in the night at the head of his new Parisian militia
+force.
+
+Too much reliance was placed upon the military character of this force;
+the palace was invaded in the early morning, an attempt to assassinate
+the Queen on the part of the mob failed, though two of the Guards were
+killed. And after scenes whose violence and apparent anarchy only masked
+the common determination of the populace, the royal family were
+compelled to abandon Versailles and to take up their place in the
+Tuileries; the Parliament followed them to Paris, and neither King nor
+Parliament returned again to the suburban palace.
+
+This recapture of the King by Paris is much more significant than a mere
+impulse of the mob. The King in Paris, the unison of his person with the
+capital city, had been the very sacrament of French life for century
+upon century. It was precisely a hundred years since Paris had been
+abandoned by Louis XIV for Versailles. The significance of that error
+may be understood by the citizens of an aristocratic country if they
+will imagine the abandonment of their countrysides by the squires, or,
+again, the future historian of our modern industrial civilisation may
+understand it when he describes how the wealthy manufacturers abandoned
+the cities in which their wealth was made, to dwell outside and apart
+from the living interests of their people.
+
+With the return of the royal family to Paris, and with the presence of
+the Assembly within the heart of the national life, one prime factor
+appears, which is this: that while the National Assembly proceeds step
+by step to what it imagines to be a complete attainment of democracy
+(though how partial will soon be seen), the resistance of the Crown is
+transformed into a resistance of the mere Court. The attack on the
+Revolution becomes a personal thing. The King is still wholly the chief
+of the Executive; he can give what commands he wills to the armed force;
+he controls receipts and payments; he is for all active purposes the
+Government. But he is no longer considering that prime function of his,
+nor even using it to restore his old power. He acts henceforward as an
+individual, and an individual in danger. The Queen, whose view of the
+Revolution and its dangers had always been a purely personal one, is the
+directing will in the court-group from this moment, October 1789,
+onwards; and the chief preoccupation of that group for eighteen months
+is personal safety. Surrounded by the pomp of the Tuileries and amid all
+the external appearances of a power still greater than that of any other
+monarch in Europe, Louis and his wife and their very few immediate and
+devoted friends and followers thought of the palace as a prison, and
+never considered their position save as one intolerable.
+
+
+III
+
+_From October 1789 to June 1791._
+
+It is this which must explain all that followed in the succeeding phase,
+which lasted from these early days of October 1789 to the last week of
+June 1791. Throughout that period of twenty-one months the King is
+letting the Revolution take its course, with the fixed idea of thwarting
+it at last by flying from it, and perhaps conquering it by foreign aid.
+But even this policy is not consecutively followed. The increasing
+repugnance of the Court and of the King himself to the revolutionary
+development forbids a consecutive and purely hypocritical acceptation of
+the National Assembly's decrees.
+
+Deliberate and calculated intrigue might yet have saved the monarchy and
+the persons of the royal family. Oddly enough, an ally in the struggle,
+an excellent intriguer, a saviour of the monarchical institution and a
+true defender of the royal persons was at hand: it was at hand in the
+person of Mirabeau.
+
+This man had more and more dominated the Assembly; he had been
+conspicuous from its first opening days; he had been its very voice in
+the resistance to the King at Versailles; it was he who had replied to
+the Master of Ceremonies on June 23, that the Commons would not
+disperse; it was he who had moved that the persons of the Commons were
+privileged against arrest. He was of a family noble in station and
+conspicuous before the people by the wealth and eccentricities of its
+head, Mirabeau's father. He himself was not unknown even before the
+Revolution broke out, for his violence, his amours, his intelligence and
+his debts. He was a few years older than the King and Queen: his
+personality repelled them; none the less his desire to serve them was
+sincere; and it was his plan, while retaining the great hold over the
+National Assembly which his rhetoric and his use of men furnished him,
+to give to the Court and in particular to the Queen, whom he very
+greatly and almost reverently admired, such secret advice as might save
+them. This advice, as we shall see in a moment, tended more and more to
+be an advice for civil war. But Mirabeau's death at the close of the
+phase we are now entering (on April 2, 1791), and the increasing fears
+of the King and Queen, between them prevented any statesmanship at all;
+they prevented even the statesmanship of intrigue; and the period
+became, on the side of the Revolution, a rapid and uncontrolled
+development of its democratic theory (limited by the hesitation of the
+middle class), and on the side of the Court an increasing demand for
+mere physical security and flight, coupled with an increasing
+determination to return, and to restore as a popular monarchy the scheme
+of the past.
+
+The eighteen months that intervened between the fixing of the Assembly
+and the royal family in Paris, and the death of Mirabeau, are remarkable
+for the following points, which must all be considered abreast, as it
+were, if we are to understand their combined effects.
+
+1. This was the period in which the constructive work of the National
+Assembly was done, and in which the whole face of the nation was
+changed. The advising bodies of lawyers called "Parliaments" were
+abolished (eleven months after the King had come to Paris), the Modern
+Departments were organised in the place of the old provinces, the old
+national and provincial militia was destroyed; but (as it is very
+important to remember) _the old regular army was left untouched_. A new
+judicature and new rules of procedure were established. A new code
+sketched out in the place of "Common Law" muddle. In a word, it was the
+period during which most of those things which we regard as
+characteristic of the revolutionary work were either brought to their
+theoretic conclusion or given at least their main lines.
+
+2. Among these constructive acts, but so important that it must be
+regarded separately, was the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which
+will be dealt with at length further in this book; it was the principal
+work (and the principal error) of that year and a half.
+
+3. The general spirit of the Revolution, more difficult to define than
+its theory but easy to appreciate as one follows the development of the
+movement, increased regularly and enormously in intensity during the
+period. The power of the King, who was still at the head of the
+Executive, acted more and more as an irritant against public opinion,
+and--
+
+4. That public opinion began to express itself in a centralised and
+national fashion, of which the great federation of the 14th of July
+1790, in Paris, on the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, was the
+nucleus and also the symbol. This federation consisted in delegates from
+the National Guard throughout the country, and it was of this capital
+importance: that it introduced into the revolutionary movement a feature
+of soldiery which made even the regular troops for the most part
+sympathetic with the enthusiasm of the time.
+
+5. These eighteen months were, again, filled with the movement of the
+"Emigration." That movement was, of course, the departure of many of the
+more prominent of the privileged orders and of a crowd of humbler
+nobles, as also of a few ecclesiastics, from France. The King's brothers
+(one fled at the beginning of the emigration, the younger, the Comte
+d'Artois; the other, the elder, at its close, and coincidently with the
+flight of the King) must especially be noted in this connection; they
+formed in company with the more notable of the other emigrants a regular
+political body, which intrigued continually beyond the frontiers, in
+Germany and Italy, against the Revolution. And--
+
+6. It was therefore during these months that the ultimate origins of the
+large European war must be found. The armed body of the emigrants under
+Cond� formed an organised corps upon the Rhine, and though there was not
+yet the semblance of an armed movement in Europe besides theirs against
+the French, yet by the _�migr�s_, as they were called, were sown the
+seeds the harvest of which was to be the war of 1792.
+
+I have said that during these months in which most of the constructive
+work of the Revolution was done, in which the seeds of the great war
+were sown, and in which the absolute position of the Crown as the head
+of the Executive was increasingly irritating to the public opinion of
+the French, and especially of the capital, Mirabeau was the one man who
+might have preserved the continuity of national institutions by the
+preservation of the monarchy. He received money from the Court and in
+return gave it advice. The advice was the advice of genius, but it was
+listened to less and less in proportion as it was more and more
+practical. Mirabeau also favoured the abandonment of Paris by the King,
+but he would have had the King leave Paris openly and with an armed
+force, withdraw to a neighbouring and loyal centre such as Compi�gne,
+and thence depend upon the fortunes of civil war.
+
+Meanwhile the Queen was determined upon a very different and much more
+personal plan, into which no conception of statesmanship entered. She
+was determined to save the persons of her children, herself and her
+husband. Plans of flight were made, postponed and re-postponed. It was
+already agreed at the Court that not Mirabeau's plan should be followed,
+but this plan of mere evasion. The army which Bouill� commanded upon the
+frontier was to send small detachments along the great road from Paris
+to the east; the first of these were to meet the royal fugitives a
+little beyond Chal�ns and to escort their carriage eastward; each armed
+detachment in the chain, as the flight proceeded, was to fall in for its
+defence, until, once the town of Varennes was reached, the King and
+Queen should be in touch with the main body of the army.
+
+What was then intended to follow remains obscure. It is fairly certain
+that the King did not intend to pass the frontier but to take refuge at
+Montm�dy. The conflict that would have inevitably broken out could
+hardly have been confined to a civil war: foreign armies and the German
+mercenaries in the French service were presumably to be organised, in
+case the flight succeeded, for a march upon Paris and the complete
+restoration of the old state of affairs.
+
+Had Mirabeau lived this rash and unstatesmanlike plan might yet have
+been avoided; it so happened that he died upon April 2, 1791, and soon
+after we enter the third phase of the Revolution, which is that leading
+directly to the great war, and to the fall of the monarchy.
+
+Shortly after Mirabeau's death a tumult, which excessively frightened
+the royal family, prevented the King and Queen from leaving the palace
+and passing Easter at St. Cloud, in the suburbs. Though further
+postponements of their flight followed, the evasion actually took place
+in the night of the 20th to 21st of June. It very nearly succeeded, but
+by a series of small accidents, the last of which, the famous ride of
+Drouet to intercept the fugitives, is among the best-known episodes in
+history, the King and Queen and their children were discovered and
+arrested at Varennes, within a few hundred yards of safety, and were
+brought back to Paris, surrounded by enormous and hostile crowds. With
+the failure of this attempt at flight in the end of June 1791, ends the
+third phase of the Revolution.
+
+
+IV
+
+_From June 1791 to September 1792._
+
+To understand the capital effect both of this flight and of its failure,
+we must once more insist upon the supreme position of the monarchy in
+the traditions and instinct of French polity. The unwisdom of the flight
+it would be difficult to exaggerate: it is impossible to exaggerate the
+moral revolution caused by its failure. It was regarded as virtually an
+abdication. The strong body of provincial, silent, and moderate opinion,
+which still centred on the King and regarded it as his function to lead
+and to govern, was bewildered, and in the main divorced, in the future,
+from the Crown.
+
+It is an excellent proof of what the monarchy had for so long been to
+France, that even in such a crisis barely the name of "a republic" was
+mentioned, and that only in the intellectual circles in Paris. All the
+constitutional and standing forces of society conspired to preserve the
+monarchy at the expense of no matter what fictions. The middle class
+Militia Guard under La Fayette repressed, in what is known as the
+Massacre of the Champ-de-Mars, the beginnings of a popular movement. The
+more Radical leaders (among whom was Danton) fled abroad or hid. The
+Duke of Orleans utterly failed to take advantage of the moment, or to
+get himself proclaimed regent: the monarchical tradition was too strong.
+
+Immediately after the second anniversary of the taking of the Bastille,
+in July, the decrees of Parliament created the fiction that the King was
+not responsible for the flight, that he "had been carried off," and in
+the following September, though until then suspended from executive
+power, the King, on taking the oath to the Constitution, was once more
+at the head of all the forces of the nation.
+
+But all this patching and reparation of the fa�ade of constitutional
+monarchy (a fiction whose tawdriness is more offensive to the French
+temper than its falsehood) had come too late. Already the Queen had
+written to her brother, the Emperor of Austria, suggesting the
+mobilisation of a considerable force, and its encampment on the
+frontier, to overawe the revolutionary movement. Her action coincided
+within a few days with the end of that great Parliament, which had been
+chosen on the most democratic suffrage, and which had transformed the
+whole of society and laid the basis of the revolutionary Constitution.
+With the meeting of the National Assembly's successor on the 1st of
+October, 1791, war was already possible; that possibility was to be
+transformed very soon into probability, and at last into actuality.
+
+In the new Parliament the weight, not of numbers but of leadership, fell
+to a group of enthusiastic and eloquent men who, from the fact that
+certain of their principal members came from the Gironde, were called
+_The Girondins_. They represented the purest and the most enthusiastic
+ideal of democracy, less national, perhaps, than that advocated by men
+more extreme than they, but of a sort which, from that time to this, has
+been able to rouse the enthusiasm of historians.
+
+Vergniaud and Isnard were their great orators, Brissot was their
+intellectual intriguer, and the wife of Roland, one of their members,
+was, as it were, the soul of the whole group. It was the fact that these
+men desired war which made war certain, once the temper of this new
+second Assembly should be felt.
+
+The extremists over against them, to whom I have alluded (known as "the
+Mountain"), were especially Parisian in character. Robespierre, who had
+been first an obscure, and later a sectarian orator of the National
+Assembly, though not sitting in this second Parliament, was perhaps the
+most prominent figure in that group, for he was the public orator of
+Paris; and indeed the Mountain was Paris; Paris, whether inside or
+outside the Parliament; Paris acting as the responsible brain of France.
+Later, it was the Mountain (that had first opposed the war) which was to
+ensure the success of the French arms by a rigidity and despotism in
+action such as the purer and less practical minds of the Girondins
+abhorred.
+
+On the 3rd of December, 1791 (to quote a fundamental date in the rapid
+progress towards the war which was to transform the Revolution), the
+King--writing in a manner which betrays dictation by his wife--begged
+the King of Prussia (as _she_ had begged the Emperor) to mobilise an
+armed force, and with it to back a Congress that should have for its
+object the prevention of the spread of the Revolution. That letter was
+typical of the moment. From both sides tension was rapidly proceeding to
+the breaking point. Nor was the tension merely upon generalities. The
+Revolution had broken a European treaty in the annexation of the Papal
+State of Avignon, and it had broken European conventions when it had
+abolished in Alsace feudal rights that were possessed by the princes of
+the empire. It was as though some State to-day, attempting Collectivism,
+should confiscate, along with other property, securities lying in its
+banks, but held by the nationals of a foreign State.
+
+On the revolutionary side also there was a definite point at issue,
+which was the permission accorded within the empire for the emigrants to
+meet in arms and to threaten the French frontier.
+
+But these precise and legal points were not the true causes of the war.
+The true causes of the war were the desire of the unreformed European
+Governments (notably those of Prussia and Austria) that the Revolution
+should, in their own interests, be checked, and the conviction that
+their armed forces were easily capable of effecting the destruction of
+the new French _r�gime_.
+
+The Court of Vienna refused to accept a just indemnity that was offered
+the princes of the empire in Alsace for the loss of their old feudal
+rights; Leopold, the emperor, who was one of the same generation as the
+French King and Queen, died upon the 1st of March, 1792, and was
+succeeded by a son only twenty-four years of age and easily persuaded to
+war.
+
+On the French side, with the exception of the Mountain and notably of
+Robespierre, there was a curious coalition of opinion demanding war.
+
+The Court and the reactionaries were sufficiently certain of the victory
+of the Allies to find their salvation in war.
+
+The revolutionary party, that is, the mass of public opinion and the
+"patriots," as they called themselves, the Girondins, also, and
+especially, desired war as a sort of crusade for the Revolution; they
+suffered grievous illusions, as enthusiasts always must, and believed
+the French armed forces capable of sustaining the shock. The plans had
+already been drawn up for the campaign (and promptly betrayed to the
+enemy by the Queen); Dumouriez, an excellent soldier, had from the
+middle of March 1792 been the chief person in the ministry, and the
+director of foreign affairs, and a month later, on the 20th of April,
+war was declared against Austria, or, to be accurate, against "the King
+of Hungary and Bohemia."
+
+Such was still the official title of Marie Antoinette's nephew, who,
+though now succeeded to the empire, had not yet been crowned emperor. It
+was hoped to confine the war to this monarch, and, indeed, the German
+princes of the empire did not join him (the Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel
+was an exception). But the one German power that counted most, the
+kingdom of Prussia, which Dumouriez had especially hoped to keep
+neutral, joined forces with Austria. The royal letters had done their
+work.
+
+At this critical moment the French armed forces and the French
+strongholds were at their worst. The discipline of the army was
+deplorable. The regular soldiers of the old _r�gime_ had lost from six
+to nine thousand officers by emigration, and mixed no better than water
+and oil with the revolutionary volunteers who had been drafted (to the
+number of over two hundred battalions) into the ranks of the army;
+moreover, these volunteer battalions were for the most part ill
+provided, far below their establishment, some only existed on paper;
+none were trained as soldiers should be trained. In a more orderly time,
+when the decrees of the Government corresponded with reality, four
+hundred thousand men would have held the frontier; such a number was in
+the estimates. As it was, from the Swiss mountains to the English
+Channel, the French could count on no more than _one-fifth_ of that
+number. Eighty thousand alone were under arms. The full Prussian army
+was, alone, apart from its allies, close upon treble the size of this
+disorganised and insufficient force.
+
+Panics at once ludicrous and tragic opened the campaign upon the French
+side. The King took advantage of them to dismiss his Girondin Ministry
+and to form a reactionary Government. The Parliament replied by measures
+useless to the conduct of war, and designed only to exasperate the
+Crown, which was betraying the nation. It ordered the dismissal of the
+royal Guard, the formation of a camp of revolutionary Federals outside
+Paris, the transportation of the orthodox priests; in pursuit of the
+Court's determination to resist the Assembly and to await the victorious
+allies, Louis vetoed the last two decrees. La Fayette, who was now in
+command of the army of the centre, with his headquarters at Sedan, right
+upon the route of the invasion, declared for the King.
+
+Had the armies of Austria and Prussia moved with rapidity at this
+moment, the Revolution was at an end. As it was, their mobilisation was
+slow, and their march, though accurate, leisurely. It gave time for the
+populace of Paris to demonstrate against the palace and the royal family
+on the 20th of June. It was not until the first days of August that the
+main force of the combined monarchs, under the generalship-in-chief of
+the Duke of Brunswick (who had the reputation of being the best general
+of his time), set out for the march on Paris. It was not until the 23rd
+of August that the invaders took the first French frontier town, Longwy.
+
+Meanwhile two very important things had lent to the French, in spite of
+the wretched insufficiency of their armed force, an intensity of feeling
+which did something to supply that insufficiency. In the first place,
+the third anniversary of the Fall of the Bastille, the 14th of July, had
+called to Paris deputations from all the provinces, many of them armed;
+this gave the national feeling unity. In the second place, Brunswick had
+issued from Coblentz, which was his base, upon the 25th of that same
+month of July, a manifesto which was known in Paris three days later,
+and which (though certain modern historians have questioned this)
+undoubtedly set revolutionary opinion ablaze.
+
+This manifesto demanded, in the name of the Allied Army, a complete
+restoration of the old _r�gime_, professed to treat the French and their
+new authorities as rebels subject to military execution, and contained a
+clause of peculiar gravity, which excited an immediate and exasperated
+response from Paris. The authorship of this clause lay with Marie
+Antoinette, and it threatened, if there were any attack upon the palace,
+to give the capital over to military execution and total subversion.
+
+Two days later the Federals from Marseilles, a middle-class body of
+excellent citizens, though merely amateurs at soldiering and small in
+numbers, marched into the city. Their marching song has become famous
+under the title of the "Marseillaise." They had accomplished the
+astonishing feat of traversing France, drawing cannon with them, at the
+rate of eighteen miles a day, in the height of a torrid summer, for
+close upon a month on end. There is no parallel to such an effort in the
+history of war, nor did contemporary opinion exaggerate when it saw in
+the battalion of Marseilles the centre of the coming fight.
+
+The shock between the palace and the populace was joined in the morning
+of the 10th of August. The palace was held by about six thousand men,[3]
+of whom some twelve hundred were regulars of the Swiss Guard. The palace
+(the Tuileries) was, or should have been, impregnable. The popular
+attack, we may be certain, would have been beaten back had the
+connection between the Tuileries and the Louvre on the south been
+properly cut. The flooring had indeed been removed at this point for
+some distance, but either the gap was not wide enough or the post was
+insufficiently guarded; the populace and the Federals, badly beaten in
+their main attack upon the long front of the palace, succeeded in
+turning its flank where it joined on to the Louvre; they thus enfiladed
+the suites of rooms and utterly put an end to the resistance of its
+garrison.
+
+Meanwhile the King and Queen, the Dauphin and his little sister, with
+others of the royal household, had taken refuge during the fighting in
+the hall of the Parliament.
+
+After the victory of the populace their fate was debated and decided
+upon; they were imprisoned in the Tower of the Temple, a medi�val
+fortress still standing in the north-east of Paris, and though monarchy
+was not yet formally abolished, the most extreme spirits which the
+Revolution then contained, and the most vigorous, stepped into the place
+of the old Executive, with Danton at their head. With them appeared in
+the seat of Government the spirit of military action, its contempt for
+forms and its rapid decision. The known accomplices of the supporters of
+the Court's resistance and alliance with the invaders were arrested by
+the hundred. The enrolment of volunteers, already enthusiastic
+throughout France, was supported with the new vigour of official aid;
+and the Revolution left at once all its old moorings to enter an extreme
+phase. At the same moment the frontier was crossed and the national soil
+invaded on the 19th of August.
+
+It is possible that the delay of the Prussians until that moment had
+been calculated, for the position in France was complicated and their
+decision to fight had been tardily arrived at. It was the news of the
+fall of the palace that seems to have decided them. The place, like the
+date, of this grave event, deserves to be more famous than it is.
+Brunswick touched what was then French soil, in that little triangle
+where now German and French Lorraine and Luxembourg meet. The village is
+called Redange: thence did the privileged of Europe set out to reach
+Paris and to destroy democracy. The first task occupied them for full
+twenty-two years, upon the latter they are still engaged.
+
+What forces the French could there bring against Brunswick were
+contemptuously brushed aside. Four days later he had, as we have seen,
+taken the frontier stronghold of Longwy; within a week he was in front
+of Verdun.
+
+Verdun had no chance of resistance, no garrison to call a garrison, and
+no opportunity for defence. The news that it must fall reached Paris on
+the morning of a fatal date, the 2nd of September; after its fall there
+would lie nothing between it and the capital; and from that moment the
+whole nature of the Revolution is wholly transformed by the
+psychological effect of war.
+
+
+V
+
+_From the invasion of September 1792 to the establishment of the
+Committee of Public Safety, April 1793._
+
+The fifth phase of the French Revolution may be said to date from these
+first days of September 1792, when the news of the successful invasion
+was maddening Paris, and when the revolutionary Executive, established
+upon the ruins of the old dead monarchy and in its image, was firmly in
+the saddle, up to the establishment of the yet more monarchical
+"Committee of Public Safety," seven months later. And these seven months
+may be characterised as follows:--
+
+They were a period during which it was attempted to carry on the
+revolutionary war against the Governments of Europe upon democratic
+principles. The attempt failed. In the place of discipline and
+comprehension and foresight the rising and intense enthusiasm of the
+moment was depended upon for victory. The pure ideal of the Girondin
+faction, with the model republic which it hoped to establish, proved
+wholly insufficient for the conduct of a war; and to save the nation
+from foreign conquest and the great democratic experiment of the
+Revolution from disaster, it was necessary that the military and
+disciplined side of the French, with all the tyranny that accompanies
+that aspect of their national genius, should undertake the completion of
+the adventure.
+
+This period opens with what are called the Massacres of September. I
+have said upon a former page that "the known accomplices and supporters
+of the Court's alliance with the invaders were arrested by the hundred,"
+upon the fall of the palace and the establishment of a revolutionary
+Executive with Danton at its head.
+
+These prisoners, massed in the jails of the city, were massacred to the
+number of eleven hundred by a small but organised band of assassins
+during the days when the news of the fall of Verdun was expected and
+reached the capital. Such a crime appalled the public conscience of
+Europe and of the French people. It must never be confused with the
+judicial and military acts of the Terror, nor with the reprisals
+undertaken against rebellion, nor with the gross excesses of mob
+violence; for though votes in favour of the immediate execution of those
+who had sided with the enemies of the country were passed in certain
+primary assemblies, the act itself was the mechanical, deliberate and
+voluntary choice of a few determined men. It had, therefore, a character
+of its own, and that character made it stand out for its contemporaries
+as it should stand out for us: it was murder.
+
+The prisoners were unarmed--nay, though treasonable, they had not
+actually taken arms; their destruction was inspired, in most of those
+who ordered it, by mere hatred. Those who ordered it were a small
+committee acting spontaneously, and Marat was their chief.[4]
+
+It was under the impression of these massacres that the Deputies of the
+new or third Assembly of the Revolution, known to history as _The
+Convention_, met in Paris.
+
+This Parliament was to be at first the actual, later the nominal
+governing power in France during the three critical years that followed;
+years which were the military salvation of the Revolution, and which
+therefore permitted the establishment of the democratic experiment in
+modern Europe.
+
+It was on the 20th of September that the Convention met for its first
+sitting, which was held in the palace of the Tuileries. During the hours
+of that day, while it was electing its officials, choosing its Speaker
+and the rest, the French Army upon the frontier, to its own astonishment
+and to that of its enemy, managed to hold in check at the cannonade of
+_Valmy_ the allied invaders.
+
+Upon the morrow the new Assembly met in the riding school (the Man�ge),
+where the two former Assemblies had also sat. It was about to separate
+after that day's sitting when one of the members proposed the abolition
+of Royalty; the Convention voted the reform unanimously and dispersed.
+
+On the third day, the 22nd of September, it was decreed that the public
+documents should henceforward bear the date "First Year of the
+Republic"; but there was no solemnity on the occasion; the idea of "No
+King" was novel and untried; there was as yet no enthusiasm for any save
+the monarchic form of government. It was not until the title "Republic"
+began to connote in men's minds political liberty, and had become also
+the flag, as it were, for the victorious national defence, that the
+Republican name acquired in our Europe, and from France, that strong and
+almost religious force which it has since retained.
+
+The check given to the invaders at Valmy (again to the astonishment of
+both soldiers and statesmen!) determined the campaign. Sickness and the
+difficulty of communications made the further advance of the invaders
+impossible. They negotiated for and obtained an unmolested retreat, and
+a few weeks later they had re-crossed the frontier.
+
+Meanwhile, in Paris the great quarrel had begun between the Municipal
+and the National Government, which, because Paris was more decided, more
+revolutionary, and, above all, more military in temper than the
+Parliament, was destined to terminate in the victory of the capital. The
+Girondins still stood in the Assembly for an ideal republic; a republic
+enjoying to the utmost limit individual liberty in its citizens and the
+autonomy of local government in every city and parish; but opposed to
+this ideal, and far more national, was that of the revolutionary
+extremists, called in the Convention "the Mountain," who had the support
+of the Municipal Government of Paris (known as "the Commune"), and were
+capable of French victories in the field. These stood for the old French
+and soldierly conception of a strong central Government, wherewith to
+carry on the life-and-death struggle into which the Revolution had now
+entered: therefore they conquered.
+
+All that autumn the quarrel between France and Europe remained doubtful,
+for though the armies of the Republic under Dumouriez won the battle of
+Jemappes, swept across the north-eastern frontier and occupied Belgium,
+while to the south another French army swept right up to the Rhine,
+Dumouriez himself knew well enough that a campaign undertaken merely
+upon enthusiasm, and with troops so mixed in character and many of them
+so undisciplined, would end fatally. But until the advent of the new
+year public opinion was not instructed upon these lines, and the
+revolutionary war seemed to have passed suddenly from the defence of the
+national territory to a crusade against the kings and the aristocratic
+Governments of Europe. Enthusiasm, and enthusiasm alone, was the force
+of the moment. Violent decrees such as the Declaration of Fraternity
+(which decreed an alliance with all people struggling to be free) and
+the opening of the Scheldt (a direct violation of treaty rights to which
+England, among other nations, was a partner) were characteristic of the
+moment; chief act of all, the King was put upon his trial at the bar of
+the Parliament.
+
+It was upon the 4th of January, 1793 (the King had already made his will
+upon Christmas Day), that the chief orator of the Girondins moved that
+the sentence should be referred to the people for ratification. The fear
+of civil war more than anything else forbade this just suggestion to
+pass. Upon the 15th of January the question was put to the Parliament,
+"whether the King had been guilty of conspiring against public liberty
+and of attempting the general safety of the State." Many were absent and
+many abstained: none replied in the negative; the condemnation of Louis
+was therefore technically almost a unanimous one.
+
+The voting on these grave issues was what the French call "nominal":
+that is, each member was called upon "by name" to give his vote--and an
+expression of opinion as well if he so chose. A second attempt to appeal
+to the people was rejected by 424 to 283. On the third question, which
+was the decisive one of the penalty, 721 only could be found to vote,
+and of these a bare majority of 53 declared for death as against the
+minority, of whom some voted for the death penalty "conditionally"--that
+is, not at all--or voted against it. A respite was lost by a majority of
+70; and on the 21st of January, 1793, at about ten in the morning, Louis
+XVI was guillotined.
+
+Then followed war with England, with Holland, and with Spain; and almost
+at that moment began the inevitable reflux of the military tide. For the
+French eruption up to the Rhine in the Low Countries and the Palatinate,
+had no permanent military basis upon which to depend. Dumouriez began to
+retreat a month after the King's execution, and on the 18th of March
+suffered a decisive defeat at Neerwinden. It was this retreat, followed
+by that disaster, which decided the fate of the Girondin attempt to
+found a republic ideally, individually, and locally free. Already,
+before the battle of Neerwinden was fought, Danton, no longer a
+minister, but still the most powerful orator in the Convention, proposed
+a special court for trying cases of treason--a court which was later
+called "the Revolutionary Tribunal." The news of Neerwinden prepared the
+way for a stronger measure and some exceptional form of government; a
+special Parliamentary committee already formed for the control of
+ministers was strengthened when, on the 5th of April, after some
+negotiation and doubt, Dumouriez, despairing of the armies of the
+Republic, thought to ally his forces with the invaders and to restore
+order. His soldiers refused to follow him; his treason was apparent;
+upon the morrow the Convention nominated that first "Committee of Public
+Safety" which, with its successor of the same name, was henceforward the
+true despotic and military centre of revolutionary government. It was
+granted secrecy in deliberation, the virtual though not the theoretic
+control of the Ministry, sums of money for secret expenditure, and, in a
+word, all the machinery necessary to a military executive. Rousseau's
+_Dictator_ had appeared, the great mind which had given the _Contrat
+Social_ to be the gospel of the Revolution had also foreseen one of the
+necessary organs of democracy in its hardest trial; his theory had been
+proved necessary and true in fact. Nine members formed this first
+Committee: Bar�re, who may be called the clerk of it, Danton its genius,
+and Cambon its financier, were the leading names.
+
+With the establishment of this truly national and traditional thing,
+whose form alone was novel, but whose power and method were native to
+all the military tradition of Gaul, the Revolution was saved. We have
+now chiefly to follow the way in which the Committee governed and in
+which it directed affairs in the great crisis of the war. This sixth
+phase lasts for nearly sixteen months, from the beginning of April 1793
+to the 28th of July 1794, and it is convenient to divide those sixteen
+months into two divisions.
+
+
+VI
+
+_From April 1793 to July 1794._
+
+The first division of this period, which ends in the height of the
+summer of 1793, is the gradual consolidation of the Committee as a new
+organ of government and the peril of destruction which it runs, in
+common with the nation it governs at the hands of allied Europe.
+
+The second period includes part of August and all the rest of 1793, and
+the first seven months of 1794, during which time the Committee is
+successful in its military effort, the nation is saved, and in a manner
+curiously dramatic and curiously inconsequential, the martial _r�gime_
+of the Terror abruptly ceases.
+
+The first step in the consolidation of the power of the Committee was
+their letting loose of the Commune of Paris and the populace it governed
+against the Girondins.
+
+Looked at merely from the point of view of internal politics (upon
+which most historians have concentrated) the attack of the populace of
+Paris and their Commune against the Parliament seems to be no more than
+the end of the long quarrel between the Girondins with their ideal
+federal republic, and the capital with its instinct for strong
+centralised government. But in the light of the military situation, of
+which the Committee of Public Safety were vividly aware, and which it
+was their business to control, a very different tale may be told.
+
+When the defeats began the Parliament had voted a levy of three hundred
+thousand men. It was a mere vote which came to very little: not enough
+in numbers and still less in moral, for the type of troops recruited
+under a system of money forfeit and purchased substitutes was wholly
+beneath the task of the great war.
+
+This law of conscription had been passed upon the 24th of February. The
+date for its first application was, in many villages, fixed for the 10th
+of March. All that country which borders the estuary of the Loire, to
+the north and to the south, a country whose geographical and political
+peculiarities need not here detain us, but which is still curiously
+individual, began to resist. The decree was unpopular everywhere, of
+course, as military service is everywhere unpopular with a settled
+population. But here it had no ally, for the Revolution and all its
+works were grossly unpopular as well. The error of the Civil
+Constitution of the Clergy was a powerful factor in this revolt. The
+piety and the orthodoxy of this district were and are exceptional. Some
+such resistance in some such quarter was perhaps expected: what was not
+expected was its military success.
+
+Four days before the defeat of Neerwinden itself, and four days after
+the decree of conscription in the villages, a horde of peasantry had
+taken possession of the town of Chollet in the southern part of this
+district, Vend�e. Three days before the Committee of Public Safety was
+formed the insurgents had defeated regular forces at Machecoul, and had
+tortured and put to death their prisoners. The month of April, when the
+Committee of Public Safety was first finding its seat in the saddle, saw
+the complete success of the rebels. The forces sent against them were
+worthless, for all military effort had been concentrated upon the
+frontier. Most of them were not even what we should call militia. A
+small force of regulars was to have moved from Orleans, but, before they
+could attack, Thouars, Parthenay, and Fontenay fell into the power of
+the rebels. These posts afforded an advanced triangle right into the
+regularly administered territory of the Republic: the great town of
+Nantes was outflanked. Even in such a moment the Girondins still clung
+to their ideal: an individually free and locally autonomous republic. It
+is little wonder that the temper of Paris refused to support them, or
+their influence over the Parliament, and we can easily understand how
+the new Committee supported Paris in its revolt.
+
+That revolt took place on the 31st of May. The forces under the command
+of the capital did not march, but a deputation of the sections of Paris
+demanded the arrest of the leading Girondins. The body of the debating
+hall was invaded by the mob. The Committee of Public Safety pretended to
+compromise between Paris and the Parliament, but a document, recently
+analysed, sufficiently proves that their sympathy was with the Parisian
+attack. They proposed, indeed, to put the armed force of Paris at the
+disposition of the Assembly: that is, in their own hands.
+
+That day nothing of moment was done, but the Parliament had proved of no
+strength in the face of the capital. On the frontier the advance of the
+invaders had begun. The great barrier fortress of Valenciennes relied
+for its defence upon the neighbouring camp of Famars. The garrison of
+that camp had been compelled to evacuate it by the advance of the Allied
+Army upon the 23rd of May, and though some days were to be spent before
+the heavy artillery of the Austrians could be emplaced, Valenciennes was
+henceforward at the mercy of its besiegers. There was news that La
+Vend�e was not the only rebellion. Lyons had risen three days before.
+There had been heavy fighting. The Royalists and the Girondins had
+combined and had carried the town hall and established an
+insurrectionary and unelected Municipal Government. Such news, coming
+immediately after the 31st of May, roused the capital to action. This
+time the Parisian forces actually marched against the Parliament. The
+demand for the suspension of the twenty-two named Girondin deputies was
+made under arms. Much has been written, and by the best historians, to
+make of this successful day a mere conquest by the Commune of Paris over
+the Parliament. Though Bar�re and Danton both protested in public, it
+was in reality their politics that conquered with Paris. To the
+twenty-two names that the forces of Paris had listed, seven were added.
+The great Girondins, Brissot, Vergniaud and the rest, were not indeed
+imprisoned, they were considered "under arrest in their houses." But the
+moral authority of the Convention as an administrative machine, not as a
+legislative one, was broken on this day, the 2nd of June, 1793. Paris
+had ostensibly conquered, but the master who was stronger than ever and
+whom Paris had served, was the Committee of Public Safety.
+
+This first Committee of Public Safety endured to the 10th of July. In
+the midst of such a war and of such an internal struggle the Convention
+had voted (upon the initiative of the Committee of Public Safety) the
+famous Constitution of '93, that prime document of democracy which, as
+though to mock its own ideal, has remained no more than a written thing
+from then until now. Therein will be found universal suffrage, therein
+the yearly Parliament, therein the referendum, therein the elected
+Executive--a thing no Parliament would ever give us to-day. The
+Constitution was passed but three weeks after the successful
+insurrection of Paris. A fortnight later still, on the 10th of July, the
+first of the Committees of Public Safety was followed by its successor.
+
+All this while the Vendeans were advancing. Nantes, indeed, had held out
+against the rebels, but as we shall see in a moment, the Republican
+troops had not yet made themselves good. The rebellion of Lyons was
+fortifying itself, and a week later was to execute the Radical Chalier.
+Marseilles was rising. On the 10th of July the Convention summoned to
+its bar Westermann, the friend of Danton, who had just suffered defeat
+at the hands of the western rebels.
+
+It is well to note at this point one of those small individual factors
+which determine the fate of States. Danton, the master of all that first
+movement towards centralisation, the man who had made the 10th of
+August, who had negotiated with the Prussians after Valmy, who had
+determined upon and formed a central government against the Girondin
+anarchy--had broken down. His health was gone. He was a giant in body,
+but for the moment he had tired himself out.
+
+The renewing of his Committee was proposed: he was thrust out from the
+new choice. Bar�re remained to link the old Committee with the new. A
+violent sectarian Calvinist pastor, Jeanbon Saint-Andr�, among the
+bravest and most warped of the Revolutionaries; Couthon, a friend of
+Robespierre; Saint-Just, a still more intimate friend (a young,
+handsome, enormously courageous and decisive man), entered, with others
+to the number of nine, the new Committee. Seventeen days later, on the
+27th of July, Robespierre replaced one of the minor members thus chosen.
+He had precisely a year to live, and it is the moment for fixing before
+the reader's mind the nature of his career.
+
+Robespierre was at this moment the chief figure in the eyes of the
+crowd, and was soon to be the chief revolutionary figure in the eyes of
+Europe: that is the first point. The second is of equal importance, and
+is far less generally recognised. He was not, and was never destined to
+be, the chief force in the revolutionary Government.
+
+As to the first point, Robespierre had attained this position from the
+following combination of circumstances: first, alone of the
+revolutionary personalities, he had been continually before the public
+eye from the beginning; he had been a member of the first Parliament of
+all and had spoken in that Parliament in the first month of its
+sessions. Though then obscure in Versailles, he was already well known
+in his province and native town of Arras.
+
+Secondly, this position of his in the public eye was maintained without
+a break, and his position and reputation had increased by accumulation
+month after month for the whole four years. No one else was left in the
+political arena of whom this could be said. All the old reactionaries
+had gone, all the moderate men had gone; the figures of 1793 were all
+new figures--except Robespierre; and he owed this continued and steady
+increase of fame to:--
+
+Thirdly, his conspicuous and vivid sincerity. He was more wholly
+possessed of the democratic faith of the _Contrat Social_ than any other
+man of his time: he had never swerved from an article of it. There is no
+better engine for enduring fame than the expression of real convictions.
+Moreover--
+
+Fourthly, his speeches exactly echoed the opinions of his audience, and
+echoed them with a lucidity which his audience could not have commanded.
+Whether he possessed true eloquence or no is a matter still debated by
+those who are scholars in French letters. But it is certain that he had
+in his own time all the effects of a great orator, though his manner was
+precise and cold.
+
+Fifthly, he was possessed of a consistent body of doctrine: that is, he
+was not only convinced of the general democratic creed which his
+contemporaries held, and he not only held it unswervingly and
+uncorruptedly, but he could supplement it with a system of morals and
+even something which was the adumbration of religion.
+
+Sixthly, he had, as such characters always can, but not often do, gather
+round themselves, a group of intensely devoted personal admirers and
+supporters, chief of whom was the young and splendidly courageous
+Saint-Just.
+
+It was the combination of all these things, I say, which made
+Robespierre the chief personality in the public eye when he entered the
+Committee of Public Safety on the 27th of July, 1793.
+
+Now let it be noted that, unlike his follower Saint-Just, and
+exceedingly unlike Danton, Robespierre possessed none of those military
+qualities without which it is impossible to be responsible for
+government over a military nation--especially if that nation be in the
+act of war: and such a war! The Committee of Public Safety was the C�sar
+of revolutionary France. Robespierre as a member of that C�sar was
+hopeless. His popularity was an advantage to his colleagues in the
+Committee, but his conception of action upon the frontiers was vague,
+personal, and futile. His ambition for leadership, if it existed, was
+subordinate to his ambition to be the saviour of his people and of their
+democratic experiment, and he had no comprehension of those functions of
+leadership by which it can co-ordinate detail and impose a plan of
+action. Robespierre, therefore, in every crisis of the last year we are
+about to study, yielded to his colleagues, never impressed them and
+never led them, and yet (it was the irony of his fate) was imagined by
+his fellow countrymen and by the warring Governments of Europe to be the
+master of them all.
+
+The first weeks after his appearance in the Committee of Public Safety
+were the critical weeks of the whole revolutionary movement. The
+despotic action of Paris (which I have concluded to be secretly
+supported by the Committee)[5] had provoked insurrection upon all sides
+in the provinces. Normandy had protested, and on the 13th of July a
+Norman girl stabbed Marat to death. Lyons, as we have seen, had been
+some weeks in revolt; Marseilles had rebelled in the first week of June,
+Bordeaux and the whole department of the Gironde had of course risen,
+for their men were at stake. Later Toulon, the great naval depot of
+France, revolted: a reactionary municipal provincial Government was
+formed in that port, the little boy imprisoned in the Temple, heir to
+the kingdom, was proclaimed under the title of Louis XVII, and before
+the end of August the English and Spanish fleets had been admitted into
+the harbour and an excellent foreign garrison was defending the town
+against the national Government.
+
+Meanwhile the Allies upon the Belgian frontier were doing what they
+could, taking fortress after fortress, and while Mayence was falling on
+the Rhine, Valenciennes and Cond� were capitulating on the north-eastern
+border, and a portion of the Allied Army was marching to besiege
+Dunquerque. The insurrection in Vend�e, which had broken out in the
+early part of the year, though checked by the resistance of Nantes, was
+still successful in the field.
+
+It was in the month of August that a successful effort was made. Carnot,
+who soon proved the military genius of the Revolution, entered the
+Committee of Public Safety. On the 23rd of the month a true levy, very
+different from the futile and insufficiently applied attempt of the
+spring, was forced upon the nation by a vote in Parliament. It was a
+levy of men, vehicles, animals and provision, and soon furnished
+something not far short of half a million soldiers. With September the
+tide turned, the first victory in this crisis of the struggle,
+Hoondschoote, relieved Dunquerque in the early days of September. By
+mid-October a second and decisive victory, that of Wattignies, relieved
+Maubeuge. Lyons had been taken, Normandy was pacified long before; by
+the end of the year Toulon was reoccupied, and at the same time the last
+cohesive force of the Vendeans destroyed.
+
+But meanwhile the crisis had had a double effect, moral and material.
+The moral effect had been a sort of national madness in which the most
+extreme measures were proposed and many of them carried through with
+what one may call a creative audacity. The calendar itself was changed,
+the week itself abolished, the months re-named and re-adjusted. Such an
+act sufficiently symbolises the mental attitude of the Revolutionaries.
+They were determined upon a new earth.
+
+There went with this the last and most violent attack upon what was
+believed to be the last remnants of Catholicism in the country, a
+hideous persecution of the priesthood, in which an uncounted number of
+priests died under the rigours of transportation or of violence. The
+reprisals against the rebels varied from severity of the most awful kind
+to cruelty that was clearly insane, and of which the worst examples took
+place at Arras and at Nantes.
+
+In all this turmoil the governing centre of the country, the Committee
+of Public Safety, not only kept its head but used the enormous forces of
+the storm for the purposes of achieving military success, under that
+system known as "the Terror," which was for them no more than martial
+law, and an engine of their despotic control. Of the two thousand and
+more that passed before the revolutionary tribunal and were executed in
+Paris, the large majority were those whom the Committee of Public Safety
+judged to be obstacles to their military policy; and most were men or
+women who had broken some specific part of the martial code which the
+Government had laid down. Some were generals who had failed or were
+suspected of treason; and some, among the most conspicuous, were
+politicians who had attempted to check so absolute a method of
+conducting the war.
+
+Of these the greatest was Danton. Before the end of 1793 he began to
+protest against the system of the Terror; he believed, perhaps, that the
+country was now safe in the military sense and needed such rigours no
+more. But the Committee disagreed, and were evidence available we should
+perceive that Carnot in particular determined that such opposition must
+cease. Danton and his colleagues--including Desmoulins, the journalist
+of the Revolution and the chief publicist who promoted the days of July
+1789--were executed in the first week of April 1794.
+
+Parallel to this action on the part of the Committee was their sudden
+attack upon men of the other extreme: the men whose violence, excessive
+even for that time, threatened to provoke reaction. H�bert was the chief
+of these, the spokesman of the Commune of Paris; and he also perished.
+
+Meanwhile the Committee had permitted other persecutions and other
+deaths, notably that of the Queen. A sane policy would have demanded
+that she should be kept a hostage: she was sacrificed to the desire for
+vengeance, and her head fell on the same day on which the decisive
+battle of Wattignies was won. Later the King's sister, Madame Elisabeth,
+was sacrificed to the same passions, and with her must be counted a
+certain proportion of the victims whose destruction could be no part of
+the Committee's scheme, and proceeded purely from the motives of an
+ancient hatred, though in the case of many of these who were of
+aristocratic birth or of influence through their wealth, it is not easy
+to determine how far the possibility of their intrigue with the
+foreigner may not have led them to the scaffold.
+
+In the last four months of the period we are considering in this book,
+through April, that is, after the execution of Danton, through May and
+June and almost to the end of July, Robespierre appears with a
+particular prominence. Fads or doctrines of his own are admitted upon
+the Statute Book of the Revolution, notably his religious dogmas of a
+personal God and of the immortality of the soul. Nay, a public solemnity
+is arranged in honour of such matters, and he is the high priest
+therein. The intensity of the idolatry he received was never greater;
+the numbers that shared it were, perhaps, diminishing. It is certain
+that he did not appreciate how far the supports of his great popularity
+were failing. It is certain that he saw only the increasing enthusiasm
+of his immediate followers. The Committee still used him as their
+tool--notably for an increase of the Terror in June, but it is possible
+that for the first time in all these months he began to attempt some
+sort of authority within the Committee: we know, for instance, that he
+quarrelled with Carnot, who was easily the strongest man therein.
+
+In the past they had permitted him to indulge a private policy where it
+did not interfere with the general military plan. He was largely
+responsible, not through his own judgment but from his desire to voice
+opinion, for the trial and execution of the Queen. He had temporised
+when Danton was beginning his campaign against the Terror at the end of
+1793, and it is an ineffaceable blot upon his memory and his justly
+earned reputation for integrity and sincerity, that he first permitted
+and then helped towards Danton's execution. We may presume from the few
+indications we have that he protested against it in the secret counsels
+of the Committee, but he had yielded, and what is more, since Saint-Just
+desired to be Danton's accuser he had furnished Saint-Just with notes
+against Danton. Though it was the Committee who were morally responsible
+for the extreme extension of the Terror which proceeded during those
+last few months, Robespierre had the unwisdom to act as their
+instrument, to draft their last decrees, and, believing the Terror to be
+popular, to support it in public. It was this that ruined him. The
+extreme Terrorists, those who were not yet satiated with vengeance, and
+who hated and feared a popular idol, determined to overthrow him.
+
+The mass of those who might be the next victims and who, knowing nothing
+of the secret councils of the Committee, imagined Robespierre to be what
+he posed as being, the master of the Committee, were eager for his
+removal. In his fictitious character as the supposed chief power in the
+State, all the growing nausea against the Terror was directed against
+his person.
+
+Coincidently with such forces, the Committee, whom, relying upon his
+public position, he had begun to interfere with, and probably to check
+in their military action (he certainly had attempted unsuccessfully to
+save certain lives against the decision of his colleagues), determined
+to be rid of him. The crisis came in the fourth week of July: or as the
+revolutionary calendar then went, in the second week of Thermidor. He
+was howled down in the Parliament, an active and clever conspiracy had
+organised all the latent forces of opposition to him; he still so
+trusted in his popularity that the scene bewildered him, and he was
+still so beloved and so ardently followed, that when at that same
+sitting he was outlawed, his brother sacrificed himself to follow him.
+Saint-Just was included in the sentence, and his strict friend Lebas
+voluntarily accepted the same doom.
+
+What followed was at first a confusion of authority; put under arrest,
+the governor of the prison to which Robespierre was dispatched refused
+to receive him. He and his sympathisers met in the H�tel de Ville after
+the fall of darkness, and an attempt was made to provoke an
+insurrection. There are many and confused accounts of what immediately
+followed at midnight, but two things are certain: the populace refused
+to rise for Robespierre, and the Parliament, with the Committee at its
+back, organised an armed force which easily had the better of the
+incipient rebellion at the H�tel de Ville. It is probable that
+Robespierre's signature was needed to the proclamation of insurrection:
+it is certain that he did not complete it, and presumable that he would
+not act against all his own theories of popular sovereignty and the
+general will. As he sat there with the paper before him and his
+signature still unfinished, the armed force of the Parliament burst into
+the room, a lad of the name of Merda aimed a pistol from the door at
+Robespierre, and shot him in the jaw. (The evidence in favour of this
+version is conclusive.) Of his companions, some fled and were captured,
+some killed themselves, most were arrested. The next day, the 10th
+Thermidor, or 28th of July, 1794, at half-past seven in the evening,
+Robespierre, with twenty-one others, was guillotined.
+
+The irony of history would have it that the fall of this man, which was
+chiefly due to his interference with the system of the Terror, broke all
+the moral force upon which the Terror itself had resided; for men had
+imagined that the Terror was his work, and that, he gone, no excuse was
+left for it. A reaction began which makes of this date the true term in
+that ascending series of revolutionary effort which had by then
+discussed every aspect of democracy, succeeded in the military defence
+of that experiment, and laid down, though so far in words only, the
+basis of the modern State.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[3] The reader should be warned that these numbers are hotly disputed.
+The latest authority will allow no more than 4000. After a full
+consultation of the evidence I can reduce the garrison to no less than
+6000.
+
+[4] The legend that Danton was connected with the massacres is based on
+insufficient historical foundation. There are several second or third
+hand stories in support of it, but the chief positive evidence brought
+forward in this connection is the stamped paper of the Minister of
+Justice which, it has been amply proved by Dr. Robinet, was taken by a
+subordinate and without Danton's knowledge or complicity. To the much
+stupider story that the Federals of Marseilles took part in the
+massacres, the modern student need pay no attention; it has been
+destroyed piecemeal and on indefeasible documentary evidence in the
+monograph of Pollio and Marcel.
+
+[5] On p. 403 of my monograph on Danton (Nisbet & Co., 1899) the reader
+will find an unpublished report of the Committee of Public Safety, drawn
+up immediately before the destruction of the Girondins on the 31st of
+May. It forms, in my view, conclusive evidence, read in the light of
+their other actions, of the Committee's determination to side with
+Paris.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+THE MILITARY ASPECT OF THE REVOLUTION
+
+
+The Revolution would never have achieved its object: on the contrary, it
+would have led to no less than a violent reaction against those
+principles which were maturing before it broke out, and which it carried
+to triumph, had not the armies of revolutionary France proved successful
+in the field; but the grasping of this mere historic fact, I mean the
+success of the revolutionary armies, is unfortunately no simple matter.
+
+We all know that as a matter of fact the Revolution was, upon the whole,
+successful in imposing its view upon Europe. We all know that from that
+success as from a germ has proceeded, and is still proceeding, modern
+society. But the nature, the cause and the extent of the military
+success which alone made this possible, is widely ignored and still more
+widely misunderstood. No other signal military effort which achieved its
+object has in history ended in military disaster--yet this was the case
+with the revolutionary wars. After twenty years of advance, during which
+the ideas of the Revolution were sown throughout Western civilisation,
+and had time to take root, the armies of the Revolution stumbled into
+the vast trap or blunder of the Russian campaign; this was succeeded by
+the decisive defeat of the democratic armies at Leipsic, and the superb
+strategy of the campaign of 1814, the brilliant rally of what is called
+the Hundred Days, only served to emphasise the completeness of the
+apparent failure. For that masterly campaign was followed by Napoleon's
+first abdication, that brilliant rally ended in Waterloo and the ruin of
+the French army. When we consider the spread of Grecian culture over
+the East by the parallel military triumph of Alexander, or the conquest
+of Gaul by the Roman armies under C�sar, we are met by political
+phenomena and a political success no more striking than the success of
+the Revolution. The Revolution did as much by the sword as ever did
+Alexander or C�sar, and as surely compelled one of the great
+transformations of Europe. But the fact that the great story can be read
+to a conclusion of defeat disturbs the mind of the student.
+
+Again, that element fatal to all accurate study of military history, the
+imputation of civilian virtues and motives, enters the mind of the
+reader with fatal facility when he studies the revolutionary wars.
+
+He is tempted to ascribe to the enthusiasm of the troops, nay, to the
+political movement itself, a sort of miraculous power. He is apt to use
+with regard to the revolutionary victories the word "inevitable," which,
+if ever it applies to the reasoned, willing and conscious action of men,
+certainly applies least of all to men when they act as soldiers.
+
+There are three points which we must carefully bear in mind when we
+consider the military history of the Revolution.
+
+First, that it succeeded: the Revolution, regarded as the political
+motive of its armies, won.
+
+Secondly, that it succeeded through those military aptitudes and
+conditions which happened to accompany, but by no means necessarily
+accompanied, the strong convictions and the civic enthusiasm of the
+time.
+
+Thirdly, that the element of chance, which every wise and prudent
+reasoner will very largely admit into all military affairs, worked in
+favour of the Revolution in the critical moments of the early wars.
+
+With these points fixed, and with a readiness to return to them when we
+have appreciated the military story, it is well to begin our study by
+telling that story briefly, and upon its most general lines. In so
+doing, it will be necessary to cover here and there points which have
+already been dealt with in this book, but that is inevitable where one
+is writing of the military aspect of any movement, for it is impossible
+to deal with that aspect save as a living part of the whole: so knit
+into national life is the business of war.
+
+
+ONE
+
+When the Revolution first approached action, the prospect of a war
+between France and any other great Power of the time--England, Prussia,
+the Empire, or let us say Russia, or even Spain--was such a prospect as
+might have been entertained at any time during the past two or three
+generations of men.
+
+For pretty well a hundred years men had been accustomed to the
+consideration of dynastic quarrels supported by a certain type of army,
+which in a moment I shall describe.
+
+I have called these quarrels dynastic; that is, they were mainly
+quarrels between the ruling houses of Europe: were mainly motived by
+the desire of each ruling house to acquire greater territory and
+revenue, and were limited by the determination of all the ruling houses
+to maintain certain ideas inviolate, as, for instance, the sacredness of
+monarchy, the independence of individual States, etc. Though they were
+in the main dynastic, yet in proportion as a dynasty might represent a
+united nation, they were national also. The English oligarchy was in
+this respect peculiar and more national than any European Government of
+its time. It is also true to say that the Russian despotism had behind
+it, in most of its military adventures and in all its spirit of
+expansion, the subconscious agreement of the people.
+
+Still, however national, the wars of the time preceding the Revolution
+moved within a fixed framework of ideas, as it were, which no commander
+and no diplomatist dreamed of exceeding. A, the crowned head of a State,
+would have some claims against B, the crowned head of another State,
+with regard to certain territories. C, the crowned head or Government of
+a third State, would remain neutral or ally himself with either of the
+two; if he allied himself, then, as a rule, it was with the weaker
+against the stronger, in order to guarantee himself against too great an
+increase on the part of a rival. Or, again, a rebellion would break out
+against the power of A in some part of his dominions; then would B,
+somewhat reluctantly (as the almost unlimited right of an existing
+executive was still a strong dogma in men's minds), tend to ally
+himself with the rebels in order to diminish the power of A.
+
+Human affairs have always in them very strongly and permanently
+inherent, the character of a sport: the interest (at any rate of males)
+in the conduct of human life is always largely an interest of seeing
+that certain rules are kept, and certain points won, according to those
+rules. We must, therefore, beware of ridiculing the warfare of the
+century preceding the Revolution under the epithet of "a game." But it
+is true of that warfare, and honourably true, that it attempted limited
+things in a limited manner; it did not attempt any fundamental change in
+society; it was not overtly--since the Thirty Years' War at least--a
+struggle of ideas; it was conducted on behalf of known and limited
+interests for known and highly limited objects, and the instruments with
+which it was conducted were instruments artificial and segregated from
+the general life of nations.
+
+These instruments were what have been called the "professional" armies.
+The term is very insufficient, and, in part, misleading. The gentry of
+the various Powers, mixed with whom were certain adventurers not always
+of gentle blood, were the officers that led these forces; and for the
+major part of the gentry in most European countries, the military career
+was the chief field of activity. The men whom they led were not a
+peasantry nor a working class, still less a civic force in which the
+middle class would find itself engaged: they were the poorest and the
+least settled, some would have said the dregs of European life. With the
+exception here and there of a man--usually a very young man whom the
+fabled romance of this hard but glorious trade had attracted--and with
+the exception of certain bodies that followed in a mass and by order the
+relics of a feudal lordship, the armies of the period immediately
+preceding the Revolution were armies of very poor men, who had sold
+themselves into a sort of servitude often exciting and even adventurous,
+but not, when we examine it minutely, a career that a free man would
+choose. The men were caught by economic necessity, by fraud, and in
+other ways, and once caught were held. No better proof of this could be
+found than the barbarous severity of the punishments attached to
+desertion, or to minor forms of indiscipline. So held, they were used
+for the purposes of the game, not only in what would make them
+serviceable instruments of war, but also in what would make them
+pleasing to their masters. Strict alignment, certain frills of parade
+and appearance, all that is required in a theatre or in a pretentious
+household, appear in the military regulations of the time.
+
+I must not in all this be supposed to be belittling that great period
+between 1660 and 1789, during which the art of war was most thoroughly
+thought out, the traditions of most of our great European armies fixed,
+and the permanent military qualities which we still inherit developed.
+The men so caught as private soldiers could not but enjoy the game when
+it was actively played, for men of European stock will always enjoy the
+game of war; they took glory in its recital and in its memories; to be a
+soldier, even under the servile conditions of the time, was a proper
+subject for pride, and it is further to be remarked that the excesses of
+cruelty discoverable in the establishment of their discipline were also
+accompanied by very high and lasting examples of military virtue. The
+behaviour of the English contingents at Fontenoy afford but one of many
+examples of what I mean.
+
+Still, to understand the wars of the Revolution we must clearly
+establish the contrast between the so-called professional armies which
+preceded that movement and the armies which the Revolution invented,
+used, and bequeathed to the modern world.
+
+So also, to revert to what was said above, we must recall the dynastic
+and limited character of the wars in which the eighteenth century had
+been engaged; at the outbreak of the Revolution no other wars were
+contemplated by men.
+
+Had you spoken, for instance, at any moment in 1789, to a statesman,
+whether of old experience or only introduced to political life by the
+new movement, of the position of Great Britain, he would at once have
+discussed that position in the terms of Great Britain's recent defeat at
+the hands of France in the affair of the American colonies. Had you
+discussed with him the position of Prussia he would at once have argued
+it in connection with Prussia's secular opposition to Austria and the
+Empire. Had you asked him how he considered Spain, he would have spoken
+of the situation of Spain as against France in the light of the fact
+that Spain was a Bourbon monarchy allied in blood to the French throne.
+And so forth. No true statesman imagined at the time, nor, indeed, for
+many years, that a war of _ideas_, nor even, strictly speaking, of
+_nations_, was possible. Even when such a war was actually in process of
+waging, the diplomacy which attempted to establish a peace, the
+intrigues whereby alliances were sought, or neutrality negotiated, were
+dependent upon the older conception of things; and the historian is
+afforded, as he regards this gigantic struggle, the ironic satisfaction
+of seeing men fighting upon doctrines the most universal conceivable and
+yet perpetually changing their conduct during the struggle according to
+conceptions wholly particular, local and ephemeral, and soon to be
+entirely swept away by time.
+
+Napoleon himself must needs marry an Austrian archduchess as part of
+this old prejudice, and for years brains as excellent as Danton's or
+Talleyrand's conjecture the possibility of treating now England, now
+Prussia, as neutral to the vast attempt of the French to destroy
+privilege in European society!
+
+One may say that for two years the connection of the revolutionary
+movement with arms had no aspect save that of civil war. True, whenever
+a considerable change is in progress in society the possibility of
+foreign war in connection with it must always arise. Were some European
+State, for instance, to make an experiment in Collectivism to-day, the
+chance of foreign intervention would certainly be discussed by the
+promoters of that experiment. But no serious danger of an armed struggle
+between the French and any of their neighbours in connection with the
+political experiment of the Revolution was imagined by the mass of
+educated men in France itself nor without the boundaries of France
+during those first two years. And, I repeat, the military aspect of
+those years was confined to civil tumult. Nevertheless, that aspect is
+not to be neglected. The way in which the French organised their civil
+war (and there was always something of it present from the summer of
+1789 onwards) profoundly affected the foreign war that was to follow:
+for in their internal struggles great masses of Frenchmen became
+habituated to the physical presence, millions to the discussion, of
+arms.
+
+It is, as we have seen in another part of this book, a repeated and
+conspicuous error to imagine that the first revolutionary outbreaks were
+not met sufficiently sternly by royal troops. On the contrary, the royal
+troops were used to the utmost and were defeated. The populace of the
+large towns, and especially of Paris, proved itself capable of military
+organisation and of military action. When to this capacity had been
+added the institution of the militia called the National Guard, there
+were already the makings of a nation wholly military.
+
+Much in this exceptional and new position must be ascribed to the Gallic
+character. It may be said that from the fall of the Roman Empire to the
+present day that character has been permanently and of its own volition
+steeped in the experience of organised fighting. Civil tumult has been
+native to it, the risk of death in defence of political objects has been
+equally familiar, and the whole trade of arms, its necessary
+organisation, its fatigues and its limiting conditions, have been very
+familiar to the population throughout all these centuries. But beyond
+this the fact that the Revolution prepared men in the school of civil
+tumult was of the first advantage for its later aptitude against foreign
+Powers.
+
+It is always well in history to fix a definite starting-point for any
+political development, and the starting-point of the revolutionary wars
+may easily be fixed at the moment when Louis, his queen and the royal
+children attempted to escape to the frontier and to the Army of the
+Centre under the command of Bouill�. This happened, as we have seen, in
+June 1791.
+
+Many factors combine to make that date the starting-point. In the first
+place, until that moment no actual proof had been apparent in the eyes
+of European monarchs of the captivity of their chief exemplar, the king
+of France.
+
+The wild march upon Versailles, in the days of October 1789, had its
+parallel in a hundred popular tumults with which Europe was familiar
+enough for centuries. But the rapidly succeeding reforms of the year
+1790, and even the great religious blunder of 1791, had received the
+signature and the public assent of the Crown. The Court, though no
+longer at Versailles, was splendid, the power of the King over the
+Executive still far greater than that of any other organ in the State,
+and indefinitely greater than that of any other individual in the State.
+The talk of captivity, of insult and the rest, the outcries of the
+emigrants and the perpetual complaint of the French royal family in its
+private relations, seemed exaggerated, or at any rate nothing to act
+upon, until there came the shock of the King's attempted flight and
+recapture. This clinched things; and it clinched them all the more
+because more than one Court, and especially that of Austria, believed
+for some days that the escape had been successful.
+
+Again, the flight and its failure put the army into a ridiculous
+posture. Action against the Revolution was never likely, so long as the
+discipline and steadiness of the French army were believed in abroad.
+But the chief command had hopelessly failed upon that occasion, and it
+was evident that the French-speaking troops could not easily be trusted
+by the Executive Government or by their own commanders. Furthermore, the
+failure of the flight leads the Queen, with her vivacity of spirit and
+her rapid though ill-formed plans, to turn for the first time to the
+idea of military intervention. Her letters suggesting this (in the form
+of a threat rather than a war, it is true) do not begin until after her
+capture at Varennes.
+
+Finally, coincident with that disaster was the open mention of a
+Republic, the open suggestion that the King should be deposed, and the
+first definite and public challenge to the principles of monarchy which
+the Revolution had thrown down before Europe.
+
+We are, therefore, not surprised to find that this origin of the
+military movement was followed in two months by the Declaration of
+Pillnitz.
+
+With the political nature of that Declaration one must deal elsewhere.
+Its military character must here be observed.
+
+The Declaration of Pillnitz corresponded as nearly as possible to what
+in the present day would be an order preparatory to mobilising a certain
+proportion of the reserve. It cannot with justice be called equivalent
+to an order _calling out_ all the reserves, still less equivalent to an
+order mobilising upon a war footing the forces of a modern nation, for
+such an action is tantamount to a declaration of war (as, for instance,
+was the action of the English Government before the South African
+struggle), and Pillnitz was very far from that. But Pillnitz was
+certainly as drastic a military proceeding as would be the public
+intimation by a group of Powers that the reserves had been warned in
+connection with their quarrel against another Power. It was, for
+instance, quite as drastic as the action of Austria against Servia in
+1908. And it was intended to be followed by such submission as is
+expected to follow upon the threat of superior force.
+
+Such was the whole burden of Marie Antoinette's letters to her brother
+(who had called the meeting at Pillnitz), and such was the sense in
+which the politicians of the Revolution understood it.
+
+All that autumn and winter the matter chiefly watched by foreign
+diplomatists and the clearest of French thinkers was the condition of
+the French forces and of their command. Narbonne's appointment to the
+War Office counted more than any political move, Dumouriez' succession
+to him was the event of the time. Plans of campaign were drawn up (and
+promptly betrayed by Marie Antoinette to the enemy), manifold occasions
+for actual hostilities were discovered, the Revolution challenged the
+Emperor in the matter of the Alsatian princes, the Emperor challenged,
+through Kaunitz, the Revolution in a letter directly interfering with
+the internal affairs of France, and pretending to a right of _ing�rence_
+therein; and on the 20th of April, 1792, war was declared against the
+Empire. Prussia thereupon informed the French Government that she made
+common cause with the Emperor, and the revolutionary struggle had begun.
+
+The war discovered no serious features during its first four months: so
+slow was the gathering and march of the Allies; but the panics into
+which the revolutionary troops fell in the first skirmishes, their lack
+of discipline, and the apparent breakdown of the French military power,
+made the success of the Invasion in Force, when it should come, seem
+certain. The invading army did not cross the frontier until more than a
+week after the fall of the palace. Longwy capitulated at once; a week
+later, in the last days of August, the great frontier fortress of Verdun
+was summoned. It capitulated almost immediately.
+
+
+TWO
+
+On the 2nd of September Verdun was entered by the Prussians, and a
+little outside the gates of the town, near a village bearing the name of
+Regret, the allied camp was fixed. Rather more than a week later, on the
+11th, the Allies marched against the line of the Argonne.
+
+The reader will remember that this moment, with the loss of the frontier
+fortresses Longwy and Verdun, and the evidence of demoralisation which
+that afforded, was also the moment of the September massacres and of the
+horrors in Paris. Dumouriez and the mixed French force which he
+commanded had been ordered by the Ministers of War to hold the line of
+the Argonne against which the Allies were marching. And here it is well
+to explain what was meant in a military sense by this word "line."
+
+The Argonne is a long, nearly straight range of hills running from the
+south northward, a good deal to the west of north.
+
+Their soil is clay, and though the height of the hills is only three
+hundred feet above the plain, their escarpment or steep side is towards
+the east, whence an invasion may be expected. They are densely wooded,
+from five to eight miles broad, the supply of water in them is bad, in
+many parts undrinkable; habitation with its provision for armies and
+roads extremely rare. It is necessary to insist upon all these details
+because the greater part of civilian readers find it difficult to
+understand how formidable an obstacle so comparatively unimportant a
+feature in the landscape may be to an army upon the march. It was quite
+impossible for the guns, the wagons, and therefore the food and the
+ammunition of the invading army, to pass through the forest over the
+drenched clay land of that wet autumn save where proper roads existed.
+These were only to be found wherever a sort of natural pass negotiated
+the range.
+
+Three of these passes alone existed, and to this day there is very
+little choice in the crossing of these hills. The accompanying sketch
+will explain their disposition. Through the southernmost went the great
+high road from the frontier and Verdun to Paris. At the middle one
+(which is called the Gap of Grandpr�) Dumouriez was waiting with his
+incongruous army. The third and northern one was also held, but less
+strongly. The obvious march for an unimpeded invader would have been
+from Verdun along the high road, through the southern pass at "Les
+Islettes," and so to Chal�ns and on to Paris. But Dumouriez, marching
+down rapidly from the north, had set an advanced guard to hold that pass
+and was lying himself with the mass of the army on the pass to the north
+of it at Grandpr�. Against Grandpr� the Prussians marched, and meanwhile
+the Austrians were attacking the further pass to the north. Both were
+forced. Dumouriez fell back southward to St. Menehould. Meanwhile
+Kellermann was coming up from Metz to join him, and all the while the
+main pass at "Les Islettes," through which the great road to Paris went,
+continued to be held by the French.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch Map, showing the turning of the positions on the
+Argonne and the Cannonade at Valmy, September 1792.]
+
+The Prussians and the Austrians joined forces in the plain known as the
+Champagne Pouilleuse, which lies westward of Argonne. It will be seen
+that as they marched south along this plain to meet Dumouriez and to
+defeat him, their position was a peculiar one: they were nearer the
+enemy's capital than the enemy's army was, and yet they had to fight
+with their backs to that capital, and their enemy the French had to
+fight with their faces towards it. Moreover, it must be remarked that
+the communications of the Allied Army were now of a twisted, roundabout
+sort, which made the conveyance of provisions and ammunition slow and
+difficult--but they counted upon an immediate destruction of Dumouriez'
+force and after that a rapid march on the capital.
+
+On September 19 Kellermann came up from the south and joined hands with
+Dumouriez near St. Menehould, and on the morning of the 20th his force
+occupied a roll of land on which there was a windmill and immediately
+behind which was the village of Valmy; from this village the ensuing
+action was to take its name. It must here be insisted upon that both
+armies had been subjected to the very worst weather for more than a
+fortnight, but of the two the Prussian force had suffered from this
+accident much more severely than the French. Dysentery had already
+broken out, and the length and tortuousness of their communications were
+greatly emphasised by the condition of the roads.
+
+On the morning of that day, the 20th of September, a mist impeded all
+decisive movements. There was an encounter, half accidental, between an
+advanced French battery and the enemy's guns, but it was not until
+mid-morning that the weather lifted enough to show each force its
+opponent. Then there took place an action, or rather a cannonade, the
+result of which is more difficult to explain, perhaps, than any other
+considerable action of the revolutionary wars. For some hours the
+Prussian artillery, later reinforced by the Austrian, cannonaded the
+French position, having for its central mark the windmill of Valmy,
+round which the French forces were grouped. At one moment this cannonade
+took effect upon the limbers and ammunition wagons of the French; there
+was an explosion which all eye-witnesses have remembered as the chief
+feature of the firing, and which certainly threw into confusion for some
+moments the ill-assorted troops under Kellermann's command. At what hour
+this took place the witnesses who have left us accounts differ to an
+extraordinary extent. Some will have it at noon, others towards the
+middle of the afternoon--so difficult is it to have any accurate account
+of what happens in the heat of an action. At any rate, if not
+coincidently with this success, at some moment not far removed from it,
+the Prussian charge was ordered, and it is here that the difficulties of
+the historian chiefly appear. That charge was never carried home;
+whether, as some believe, because it was discovered, after it was
+ordered, to be impossible in the face of the accuracy and intensity of
+the French fire, or whether, as is more probably the case, because the
+drenched soil compelled the commanders to abandon the movement after it
+had begun--whatever the cause may have been, the Prussian force, though
+admirably disciplined and led, and though advancing in the most exact
+order, failed to carry out its original purpose. It halted halfway up
+the slope, and the action remained a mere cannonade without immediate
+result apparent upon either side.
+
+Nevertheless that result ultimately turned out to be very great, and if
+we consider its place in history, quite as important as might have been
+the result of a decisive action. In the first place, the one day's delay
+which it involved was just more than the calculations of the Allies,
+with their long impeded line of communications, had allowed for. In the
+next place, a singular increase in determination and moral force was
+infused into the disheartened and ill-matched troops of the French
+commanders by this piece of resistance.
+
+We must remember that the French force upon the whole expected and
+discounted a defeat, the private soldier especially had no confidence in
+the result; and to find that at the first action which had been so long
+threatened and had now at last come, he could stand up to the enemy,
+produced upon him an exaggerated effect which it would never have had
+under other circumstances.
+
+Finally, we must recollect that whatever causes had forbidden the
+Prussian charge forbade on the next day a general advance against the
+French position. And all the time the sickness in the Prussian camp was
+rapidly increasing. Even that short check of twenty-four hours made a
+considerable difference. A further delay of but yet another day, during
+which the Allied Army could not decide whether to attack at once or to
+stand as they were, very greatly increased the list of inefficients from
+illness.
+
+For a whole week of increasing anxiety and increasing inefficiency the
+Allied Army hung thus, impotent, though they were between the French
+forces and the capital. Dumouriez ably entertained this hesitation, with
+all its accumulating dangers for the enemy, by prolonged negotiations,
+until upon the 30th of September the Prussian and Austrian organisation
+could stand the strain no longer, and its commanders determined upon
+retreat. It was the genius of Danton, as we now know, that chiefly
+organised the withdrawal of what might still have been a dangerous
+invading force. It is principally due to him that no unwise Jingoism was
+permitted to claim a trial of strength with the invader, that he was
+allowed to retire with all his guns, his colours and his train. The
+retreat was lengthy and unmolested, though watched by the French forces
+that discreetly shepherded it but were kept tightly in hand from Paris.
+It was more than three weeks later when the Allied Army, upon which
+Europe and the French monarchy had counted for an immediate settlement
+of the Revolution, re-crossed the frontier, and in this doubtful and
+perhaps inexplicable fashion the first campaign of the European Powers
+against the Revolution utterly failed.
+
+
+THREE
+
+Following upon this success, Dumouriez pressed on to what had been, from
+the first moment of his power at the head of the army, his personal
+plan--to wit, the invasion of the Low Countries.
+
+To understand why this invasion failed and why Dumouriez thought it
+might succeed, we must appreciate the military and political situation
+of the Low Countries at the time. They then formed a very wealthy and
+cherished portion of the Austrian dominions; they had latterly suffered
+from deep disaffection culminating in an open revolution, which was due
+to the Emperor of Austria's narrow and intolerant contempt of religion.
+From his first foolish policy of persecution and confiscation he had
+indeed retreated, but the feeling of the people was still strongly
+opposed to the Government at Vienna. It is remarkable, indeed, and in
+part due to the pressure of a strongly Protestant and aristocratic
+state, Holland, to the north of them, that the people of the Austrian
+Netherlands retained at that time a peculiar attachment to the Catholic
+religion. The Revolution was quite as anti-Catholic as the Austrian
+Emperor, but of the persecution of the latter the Belgians (as we now
+call them) knew something; that of the former they had not yet learnt to
+dread. It was, therefore, Dumouriez' calculation that, in invading this
+province of the Austrian power, he would be fighting in friendly
+territory. Again, it was separated from the political centre of the
+empire; it was, therefore, more or less isolated politically, and even
+for military purposes communication with it was not so easy, unless,
+indeed, Austria could count on a complete co-operation with Prussia,
+which Power had been for now so long her ruthless and persistent rival.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch Map of towns occupied by French in 1792 and
+evacuated in March 1793, with sites of battles of Jemappes and of
+Neerwinden, and of Dumouriez' treason.]
+
+Favourable, however, as the circumstances appeared for an invasion, two
+factors telling heavily against the French had to be counted: the first
+was the formation of their army, the second the spirit of rebellion
+against any anti-Catholic Government which had given such trouble to
+Joseph II.
+
+Of these two factors by far the most important was, of course, the
+first. If the French forces had been homogeneous, in good spirit, and
+well trained, they might have held what they won; as a fact, they were
+most unhomogeneous, great portions of them were ill trained, and, worst
+of all, there was no consistent theory of subordinate command. Men who
+imagined that subordinate, that is, regimental, command in an army
+could be erected from below, and that a fighting force could resemble a
+somewhat lax and turbulent democracy, marched alongside of and were
+actually incorporated with old soldiers who had spent their whole
+careers under an unquestioned discipline, and under a subordinate
+command which came to them they knew not whence, and as it were by fate.
+The mere mixture of two such different classes of men in one force would
+have been bad enough to deal with, but what was worse, the political
+theories of the day fostered the military error of the new battalions
+though the politicians dared not interfere with the valuable
+organisation of the old.
+
+The invasion of the Low Countries began with a great, though somewhat
+informal and unfruitful success, in the victory of Jemappes. It was the
+first striking and dramatic decisive action which the French, always of
+an eager appetite for such news, had been given since between forty and
+fifty years. The success in America against the English, though
+brilliantly won and solidly founded, had not presented occasions of this
+character, and Fontenoy was the last national victory which Paris could
+remember. Men elderly or old in this autumn of 1792 would have been boys
+or very young men when Fontenoy was fought. The eager generation of the
+Revolution, with its military appetites and aptitudes, as yet had hardly
+expected victory, though victory was ardently desired by them and
+peculiarly suitable to their temper.
+
+It may be imagined, therefore, what an effect the news of Jemappes had
+upon the political world in Paris. The action was fought just below the
+town of Mons, a few miles over the frontier, and consisted in a somewhat
+ill-ordered but successful advance across the River Haine. Whether
+because the Austrians, with an inferior force, attempted to hold too
+long a line, or because the infantry and even the new French volunteer
+battalions, as yet untried by fatigue, proved irresistible in the centre
+of the movement, Jemappes was a victory so complete that the attempts of
+apologists to belittle it only serve to enhance its character.
+
+Like many another great and apparently decisive action, however, it bore
+no lasting fruit. Both the factors of which I have spoken above appeared
+immediately after this success. Belgium was, indeed, over-run by the
+French, but in their over-running of it with something like eighty
+thousand men, they made no attempt to spare the traditions or to
+conciliate the sympathies of the inhabitants. Hardly was Jemappes won
+when Mons, the neighbouring fortified frontier town, was at once endowed
+with the whole machinery of revolutionary government. Church property
+was invaded and occasionally rifled, and the French paper money, the
+assignats of which we have heard, poured in to disturb and in places to
+ruin the excellent commercial system upon which Belgium then as now
+reposed.
+
+Jemappes was fought upon the 6th of November, 1702. Brussels was entered
+upon the 14th, and throughout that winter the Low Countries lay
+entirely in the hands of the French. The Commissioners from the
+Convention, though endowing Belgium with republican institutions,
+treated it as a conquered country, and before the breaking of spring,
+the French Parliament voted its annexation to France. This annexation,
+the determination of the politicians in Paris that the new Belgian
+Government should be republican and anti-Catholic, the maltreatment of
+the Church in the occupied country and the increasing ill discipline and
+lack of cohesion in his army, left Dumouriez in a position which grew
+more and more difficult as the new year, 1793, advanced. It must be
+remembered that this moment exactly corresponded with the execution of
+the King and the consequent declaration of war by or against France in
+the case of one Power after another throughout Europe. Meanwhile, it was
+decided, foolishly enough, to proceed from the difficult occupation of
+Belgium to the still more difficult occupation of Holland, and the siege
+of Maestricht was planned.
+
+The moment was utterly ill-suited for such a plan. Every Executive in
+the civilised world was coalescing openly or secretly, directly or
+indirectly, against the revolutionary Government. The first order to
+retreat came upon the 8th of March, when the siege of Maestricht was
+seen to be impossible, and when the great forces of the Allies were
+gathered again to attempt what was to be the really serious attack upon
+the Revolution: something far more dangerous, something which much more
+nearly achieved success, than the march of the comparatively small force
+which had been checked at Valmy.
+
+For ten days the French retreat continued, when, upon the 18th of March,
+Dumouriez risked battle at Neerwinden. His army was defeated.
+
+The defeat was not disastrous, the retreat was continued in fairly good
+order, but a civilian population understands nothing besides the words
+defeat and victory; it can appreciate a battle, not a campaign. The news
+of the defeat, coming at a moment of crisis in the politics of Paris,
+was decisive; it led to grave doubts of Dumouriez' loyalty to the
+revolutionary Government, it shattered his popularity with those who had
+continued to believe in him, while the general himself could not but
+believe that the material under his command was rapidly deteriorating.
+Before the end of the month the army had abandoned all its conquests,
+and Valenciennes, in French territory, was reached upon the 27th. The
+dash upon Belgium had wholly failed.
+
+At this moment came one of those political acts which so considerably
+disturb any purely military conspectus of the revolutionary wars.
+Dumouriez, at the head of his army, which, though in retreat and
+defeated, was still intact, determined upon what posterity has justly
+called treason, but what to his own mind must have seemed no more than
+statesmanship. He proposed an understanding with the enemy and a
+combined march upon Paris to restore the monarchical government, and
+put an end to what seemed to him, as a soldier, a perfectly hopeless
+situation. He certainly believed it impossible for the French army, in
+the welter of 1793, to defeat the invader. He saw his own life in peril
+merely because he was defeated. He had no toleration for the rising
+enthusiasm or delirium of the political theory which had sent him out,
+and, even before he had reached French territory, his negotiations with
+Coburg, the Austrian commander, had begun. They lasted long. Dumouriez
+agreed to put the frontier fortresses of the French into the hands of
+the enemy as a guarantee and a pledge; and on the 5th of April all was
+ready for the alliance of the two armed forces.
+
+But just as the treason of Dumouriez is, in the military sense, abnormal
+and disturbing to any general conspectus of the campaign, so was the
+action of his army.
+
+The doubtful point of a general command which is political in nature,
+and may be unpopular with the rank and file, lies, of course, in the
+attitude of the commanders of units, and these unanimously refused to
+obey the orders of their chief. It was known that Dumouriez had been
+summoned to the bar of the Convention, which body had sent commissioners
+to apprehend him. He had arrested the commissioners, and had handed them
+over as hostages and prisoners to Coburg. So far from Dumouriez upon the
+critical day handing over his force to the enemy, or constituting it a
+part of an allied army to march upon the capital, he was compelled to
+fly upon the 8th of April; all that disappeared with him, counting many
+who later deserted back again to the French colours, was less than a
+thousand men--and these foreign mercenaries.
+
+The consequence of this strange passage upon the political history of
+the time we have already seen. Its consequence upon the military history
+of it was indirect but profound. The French forces, such as they were,
+were still intact, but no general officer could in future be trusted by
+Paris, and the stimulus which nations in the critical moments of
+invasion and of danger during foreign war seek in patriotism, in the
+offering of a high wage to the men and of honours and fortunes to their
+commanders, was now sought by the French in the singular, novel and
+abnormal experiment of the Terror. Command upon the frontier throughout
+1793 and the first part of 1794, during the critical fourteen months,
+that is, which decided the fate of the Revolution, and which turned the
+tide of arms in favour of the French, was a task accomplished under the
+motive power of capital punishment. A blunder was taken as a proof of
+treason, and there lay over the ordering of every general movement the
+threat of the guillotine.
+
+What we have now to follow is somewhat over a year of a struggle thus
+abnormally organised upon the French side, and finally successful
+through the genius of a great organiser, once a soldier, now a
+politician, Carnot. The French succeeded by the unshakable conviction
+which permitted the political leaders to proceed to all extremity in
+their determination to save the Revolution; by the peculiar physical
+powers of endurance which their army displayed, and finally, of course,
+by certain accidents--for accident will always be a determining factor
+in war.
+
+The spring of 1793, the months of April and May, form the first crisis
+of the revolutionary war. The attack about to be delivered is universal,
+and seems absolutely certain to succeed. With the exception of the rush
+at Jemappes, where less than thirty thousand Austrians were broken
+through by a torrent superior in numbers (though even there obviously
+ill-organised), no success had attended the revolutionary armies. Their
+condition was, even to the eye of the layman, bad, and to the eye of the
+expert hopeless. There was no unity apparent in direction, there were
+vast lesions in the discipline of the ranks like great holes torn in
+some rotten fabric. Even against the forces already mobilised against
+it, it had proved powerless, and it might be taken for granted that by
+an act more nearly resembling police work than a true campaign, the
+Allies would reach Paris and something resembling the old order be soon
+restored. What remains is to follow the process by which this
+expectation was disappointed.
+
+The situation at this moment can best be understood by a glance at the
+sketch map on p. 178. Two great French advances had been made in the
+winter of 1792-93; the one a northern advance, which we have just
+detailed, the over-running of Belgium; the other an eastern advance
+right up to the Rhine and to the town of Mayence. Both had failed. The
+failure in Belgium, culminating in the treason of Dumouriez, has been
+read. On the Rhine (where Mayence had been annexed by the French
+Parliament just as Belgium had been) the active hostility of the
+population and the gathering of the organised forces of the Allies had
+the same effect as had been produced in the Low Countries.
+
+It was on March 21, 1793, that the Prussians crossed the Rhine at
+Bacharach, and within that week the French commander, Custine, began to
+fall back. On the first of April he was back again in French territory,
+leaving the garrison of Mayence, somewhat over twenty thousand men, to
+hold out as best it could; a fortnight later the Prussians had
+surrounded the town and the siege had begun.
+
+On the north-eastern front, stretching from the Ardennes to the sea, a
+similar state of things was developing. There, a barrier of fortresses
+stood between the Allies and Paris, and a series of sieges corresponding
+to the siege of Mayence in the east had to be undertaken. At much the
+same time as the investment of Mayence, on April 9, the first step in
+this military task was taken by the Allies moving in between the
+fortress of Cond� and the fortress of Valenciennes. Thenceforward it was
+the business of the Austrians under Coburg, with the Allies that were to
+reach him, to reduce the frontier fortresses one by one, and when his
+communications were thus secure, to march upon Paris.
+
+It is here necessary for the reader unacquainted with military history
+to appreciate two points upon which not a little of contemporary
+historical writing may mislead him. The first is that both in the Rhine
+valley and on the Belgian frontier the forces of the Allies in their
+numbers and their organisation were conceived to be overwhelming. The
+second is that no competent commander on the spot would have thought of
+leaving behind him the garrison of even one untaken fortress. It is
+important to insist upon these points, because the political passions
+roused by the Revolution are still so strong that men can hardly write
+of it without prejudice and bias, and two errors continually present in
+these descriptions of the military situation in the spring of 1793, are,
+first, that the Allies were weakened by the Polish question, which was
+then active, and secondly, that the delay of their commanders before the
+French fortresses was unnecessary.
+
+Both these propositions are put forward with the object of explaining
+the ultimate defeat of the enemies of the Revolution: both, however
+great the authority behind them, are unhistorical and worthless. The
+French success was a military success due to certain military factors
+both of design and accident, which will appear in what follows. The
+Allies played their part as all the art of war demanded it to be played;
+they were ultimately defeated, not from the commission of any such
+gross and obvious error in policy or strategy as historians with too
+little comprehension of military affairs sometimes pretend, but from the
+military superiority of their opponents.
+
+It is true that the Polish question (that is the necessity the Austrian
+and Prussian Governments were each under of watching that the other was
+not lessened in importance by the approaching annexations of further
+Polish territory with the consequent jealousy and mistrust that arose
+from this between Austria and Prussia) was a very important feature of
+the moment. But it is bad military history to pretend that this affected
+the military situation on the Rhine or in the Netherlands.
+
+Every campaign is conditioned by its political object. The political
+object in this case was to march upon and to occupy Paris. The political
+object of a campaign once determined, the size and the organisation of
+the enemy are calculated and a certain force is brought against it. No
+much larger force is brought than is necessary: to act in such a fashion
+would be in military art what paying two or three times the price of an
+article would be in commerce. The forces of the Allies upon the Rhine
+and in the Netherlands were, in the opinion of every authority of the
+time, amply sufficient for their purpose; and more than sufficient: so
+much more than sufficient that the attitude of that military opinion
+which had to meet the attack--to wit, the professional military opinion
+of the French republican soldiers, was that the situation was
+desperate, nor indeed was it attempted to be met save by a violent and,
+as it were, irrational enthusiasm.
+
+The second point, the so-called "delay" involved in the sieges
+undertaken by the Allies, proves, when it is put forward, an
+insufficient acquaintance with contemporary conditions. Any fortress
+with a considerable garrison left behind untaken would have meant the
+destruction of the Austrian or Prussian communications, and their
+destruction at a moment when the Austrian and Prussian forces were
+actually advancing over a desperately hostile country. Moreover, when
+acting against forces wholly inferior in discipline and organisation, an
+untaken fortress is a refuge which one must take peculiar pains to
+destroy. To throw himself into such a refuge will always stand before
+the commander of those inferior forces as a last resource. It is a
+refuge which he will certainly avail himself of ultimately, if it is
+permitted to him. And when he has so availed himself of it, it means the
+indefinite survival of an armed organisation in the rear of the
+advancing invaders. We must conclude, if we are to understand this
+critical campaign which changed the history of the world, that Coburg
+did perfectly right in laying siege to one fortress after another before
+he began what every one expected to be the necessarily successful
+advance on Paris. The French despair, as one town after another
+surrendered, is an amply sufficient proof of the excellence of his
+judgment.
+
+We approach the military problem of 1793, therefore, with the following
+two fields clear before us:--
+
+1. In the north-east an advance on Paris, the way to which is blocked by
+a quadrilateral of fortresses: Mons, Maubeuge, Cond�, and Valenciennes,
+with the subsidiary stronghold of Lequesnoy in the neighbourhood of the
+last. Mons has been in Austrian hands since Dumouriez' retreat; Cond� is
+just cut off from Valenciennes by Coburg's advance, but has not fallen;
+Valenciennes and the neighbouring Lequesnoy are still intact, and so is
+Maubeuge. All must be reduced before the advance on Paris can begin.
+Behind these fortresses is a French army incapable as yet of attacking
+Coburg's command with any hope of success. Such is the position in the
+last fortnight of April.
+
+2. Meanwhile, on the Rhine the French garrison in Mayence is besieged;
+Custine, the French commander in that quarter, has fallen back on the
+French town of Landau, and is drawing up what are known in history as
+the Lines of Weissembourg. The accompanying sketch map explains their
+importance. Reposing upon the two obstacles of the river on the right
+and the mountains on the left, they fulfilled precisely the same
+functions as a fortress; and those functions we have just described.
+Until these lines were carried, the whole of Alsace may be regarded as a
+fortress defended by the mountains and the river on two sides, and by
+the Lines of Weissembourg on the third.
+
+A reader unacquainted with military history may ask why the obstruction
+was not drawn upon the line of the Prussian advance on Paris. The answer
+is that the presence of a force behind fortifications anywhere in the
+neighbourhood of a line of communication is precisely equivalent to an
+obstacle lying right upon those lines. For no commander can go forward
+along the line of his advance and leave a large undestroyed force close
+to one side of that line, and so situated that it can come out when he
+has passed and cut off his communications; for it is by communications
+that an army lives, especially when it is marching in hostile country.
+
+[Illustration: Strategic situation in early summer of 1793. Mayence
+besieged, Cond� and Valenciennes about to be besieged. Conditions of the
+double advance on Paris.]
+
+Custine, therefore, behind his Lines of Weissembourg, and the besieged
+garrison in Mayence, correspond to the barrier of fortresses on the
+north-east and delayed the advance of the Prussians under Wurmser and
+Brunswick from the Rhine, just as Cond�, Valenciennes, and Maubeuge
+prevented the advance of Coburg on the north-east. Such in general was
+the situation upon the eastern frontier at the end of that month of
+April, 1793.
+
+
+FOUR
+
+Let us first follow the development of the northern position. It will be
+remembered that all Europe was at war against the French. The Austrians
+had for allies Dutch troops which joined them at this moment, and
+certain English and Hanoverian troops under the Duke of York who also
+joined them.
+
+At this moment, when Coburg found himself in increasing strength, a
+tentative French attack upon him was delivered and failed. Dampierre,
+who was in command of all this French "Army of the North," was killed,
+and Custine was sent to replace him. The Army of the North did not, as
+perhaps it should have done, concentrate into one body to meet Coburg's
+threatened advance; it was perpetually attempting diversions which were
+useless because its strength was insufficient. Now it feinted upon the
+right towards Namur, now along the sea coast on the left; and these
+diversions failed in their object. Before the end of the month, Coburg,
+to give himself elbow room, as it were, for the sieges which he was
+preparing, compelled the main French force to retreat to a position well
+behind Valenciennes. It was immediately after this success of Coburg's
+that Custine arrived to take command on the Belgian frontier, his place
+on the Rhine being taken by Houchard.
+
+Custine was a very able commander, but a most unlucky one. His plan was
+the right one: to concentrate all the French forces (abandoning the
+Rhine) and so form an army sufficient to cope with Coburg's. The
+Government would not meet him in this, and he devoted himself
+immediately to the reorganisation of the Army of the North alone. The
+month of June and half of July was taken up in that task.
+
+Meanwhile, the Austrian siege work had begun, and Cond� was the first
+object of its attention. Upon July 10 Cond� fell. Meanwhile Custine had
+been recalled to Paris, and Valenciennes was invested. Custine was
+succeeded by Kilmaine, a general of Irish extraction, who maintained his
+position for but a short time, and was unable while he maintained it to
+do anything. The forces of the Allies continually increased. The number
+at Coburg's disposal free from the business of besieging Valenciennes
+was already larger than the force required for that purpose. And yet
+another fifteen thousand Hessian troops marched in while the issue of
+that siege was in doubt. This great advantage in numbers permitted him
+to get rid of the main French force that was still present in front of
+him, though not seriously annoying him.
+
+This force lay due south-west of Valenciennes, and about a day's march
+distant. He depended for the capture of it upon his English and
+Hanoverian Allies under the Duke of York, but that general's march
+failed. The distance was too much for his troops in the hot summer
+weather, and the French were able to retreat behind the line of the
+Scarpe and save their army intact.
+
+The Duke of York's talents have been patriotically exaggerated in many a
+treatise. He always failed: and this was among the most signal of his
+failures.
+
+Kilmaine had hardly escaped from York, drawn up his army behind the
+Scarpe and put it into a position of safety when he in his turn was
+deprived of the command, and Houchard was taken from the Rhine just as
+Custine had been, and put at the head of the Army of the North. Before
+the main French army had taken up this position of safety, Valenciennes
+had fallen. It fell on the 28th of July, and its fall, inevitable though
+it was and, as one may say, taken for granted by military opinion, was
+much the heaviest blow yet delivered. Nothing of importance remained to
+block the march of the Armies of the Allies, save Maubeuge.
+
+At about the same moment occurred three very important changes in the
+general military situation, which the reader must note if he is to
+understand what follows.
+
+The first was the sudden serious internal menace opposed to the
+Republican Government; the second was the advent of Carnot to power; the
+third was the English diversion upon Dunquerque.
+
+The serious internal menace which the Government of the Republic had to
+face was the widespread rebellion which has been dealt with in the
+earlier part of this book. The action of the Paris Radicals against the
+Girondins had raised whole districts in the provinces. Marseilles, which
+had shown signs of disaffection since April, and had begun to raise a
+local reactionary force, revolted. So did Bordeaux, N�mes, and other
+great southern towns. Lyons had risen at the end of May and had killed
+the Jacobin mayor of the town in the period between the fall of Cond�
+and that of Valenciennes. The troop which Marseilles had raised against
+the Republic was defeated in the field only the day before Valenciennes
+fell, but the great seaport was still unoccupied by the forces of the
+Government. The Norman march upon Paris had also failed between those
+two dates, the fall of Cond� and the fall of Valenciennes. The Norman
+bark had proved worse than the Norman bite; but the force was so
+neighbouring to the capital that it took a very large place in the
+preoccupations of the time. The Vendean revolt, though its triumphant
+advance was checked before Nantes a fortnight before the fall of Cond�,
+was still vigorous, and the terrible reprisals against it were hardly
+begun. Worst of all, or at least, worst perhaps, after the revolt of
+Lyons, was the defection of Toulon. Toulon rose two days before the fall
+of Valenciennes, and was prepared to hand itself over (as at last it did
+hand itself over) to occupation by the English fleet.
+
+The dates thus set in their order may somewhat confuse the reader, and I
+will therefore summarise the general position of the internal danger
+thus: A man in the French camp on the Scheldt, listening to the guns
+before Valenciennes fifteen miles away, and hourly expecting their
+silence as a signal that the city had surrendered, would have heard by
+one post after another how Marseilles still held out against the
+Government; how the counter-attack against the successful Vendeans had
+but doubtfully begun (all July was full of disasters in that quarter);
+how Lyons was furiously successful in her rebellion and had dared to put
+to death the Republican mayor of the town; and that the great arsenal
+and port at Toulon, the Portsmouth of France upon the Mediterranean, had
+sickened of the Government and was about to admit the English fleet. His
+only comfort would have been to hear that the Norman march on Paris had
+failed--but he would still be under the impression of it and of the
+murder of Marat by a Norman woman.
+
+There is the picture of that sudden internal struggle which coincides
+with this moment of the revolutionary war, the moment of the fall of
+Cond� and of Valenciennes, and the exposure of the frontier.
+
+The second point, the advent of Carnot into the Committee of Public
+Safety, which has already been touched upon in the political part of
+this work, has so preponderating a military significance that we must
+consider it here also.
+
+The old Committee of Public Safety, it will be remembered, reached the
+end of its legal term on July 10. It was the Committee which the wisdom
+of Danton had controlled. The members elected to the new Committee did
+not include Carnot, but the military genius of this man was already
+public. He came of that strong middle class which is the pivot upon
+which the history of modern Europe turns; a Burgundian with lineage,
+intensely republican, he had been returned to the Convention and had
+voted for the death of the King; a sapper before the Revolution, and one
+thoroughly well grounded in his arm and in general reading of military
+things, he had been sent by the Convention to the Army of the North on
+commission, he had seen its weakness and had watched its experiments.
+Upon his return he was not immediately selected for the post in which he
+was to transform the revolutionary war. It was not until the 14th of
+August that he was given a temporary place upon the Committee which his
+talents very soon made permanent. He was given the place merely as a
+stopgap to the odious and incompetent fanatic, Saint-Andr�, who was for
+the moment away on mission. But from the day of his admission his
+superiority in military affairs was so incontestable that he was
+virtually a dictator therein, and his first action after the general
+lines of organisation had been laid down by him was to impose upon the
+frontier armies the necessity of concentration. He introduced what
+afterwards Napoleon inherited from him, the tactical venture of "all
+upon one throw."
+
+It must be remembered that Carnot's success did not lie in any
+revolutionary discovery in connection with the art of war, but rather in
+that vast capacity for varied detail which marks the organiser, and in
+an intimate sympathy with the national character. He understood the
+contempt for parade, the severity or brutality of discipline, the
+consciousness of immense powers of endurance which are in the Frenchman
+when he becomes a soldier;--and he made use of this understanding of
+his.
+
+It must be further remembered that this powerful genius had behind him
+in these first days of his activity the equally powerful genius of
+Danton; for it was Danton and he who gave practical shape to that law of
+conscription by which the French Revolution suddenly increased its armed
+forces by nearly half a million of men, restored the Roman tradition,
+and laid the foundation of the armed system on which Europe to-day
+depends. With Carnot virtually commander-in-chief of all the armies, and
+enabled to impose his decisions in particular upon that Army of the
+North which he had studied so recently as a commissioner, the second
+factor of the situation I am describing is comprehended.
+
+The third, as I have said, was the English diversion upon Dunquerque.
+
+The subsequent failure of the Allies has led to bitter criticism of this
+movement. Had the Allies not failed, history would have treated it as
+its contemporaries treated it. The forces of the Allies on the
+north-eastern frontier were so great and their confidence so
+secure--especially after the fall of Valenciennes--that the English
+proposal to withdraw their forces for the moment from Coburg's and to
+secure Dunquerque, was not received with any destructive criticism.
+Eighteen battalions and fourteen squadrons of the Imperial forces were
+actually lent to the Duke of York for this expedition. What is more,
+even after that diversion failed, the plan was fixed to begin again when
+the last of the other fortresses should have fallen: so little was the
+English plan for the capture of the seaport disfavoured by the
+commander-in-chief of the Allies.
+
+That diversion on Dunquerque turned out, however, to be an error of
+capital importance. The attempt to capture the city utterly failed, and
+the victory which accompanied its repulsion had upon the French that
+indefinable but powerful moral effect which largely contributed to their
+future successes.
+
+The accompanying sketch map will explain the position. Valenciennes and
+Cond� have fallen; Lequesnoy, the small fortress subsidiary to
+Valenciennes, has not yet been attacked but comes next in the series,
+when the moment was judged propitious for the detachment of the
+Anglo-Hanoverian force with a certain number of Imperial Allies to march
+to the sea.
+
+It must always be remembered by the reader of history that military
+situations, like the situations upon a chess board, rather happen than
+are designed; and the situation which developed at the end of September
+upon the extreme north and west of the line which the French were
+attempting to hold against the Allies was strategically of this nature.
+When the Duke of York insisted upon a division of the forces of the
+Allies and an attack upon Dunquerque, no living contemporary foresaw
+disaster.
+
+[Illustration: Showing condition of the frontier fortresses blocking the
+road to Paris when the expedition to Dunquerque was decided upon. August
+1793.]
+
+Coburg, indeed, would have preferred the English to remain with him, and
+asked them to do so, but he felt in no sort of danger through their
+temporary absence, nor, as a matter of fact, was he in any danger
+through it.
+
+Again, though the positions which the Duke of York took up when he
+arrived in front of Dunquerque were bad, neither his critics at home,
+nor any of his own subordinates, nor any of the enemy, perceived fully
+how bad they were. It was, as will presently be seen, a sort of drift,
+bad luck combined with bad management, which led to this British
+disaster, and (what was all-important for the conduct of the war) to the
+first success in a general action which the French had to flatter and
+encourage themselves with during all that fatal summer.
+
+The Duke of York separated his force from that of Coburg just before the
+middle of August; besides the British, who were not quite 7,000 strong,
+11,000 Austrians, over 10,000 Hanoverians and 7,000 Hessians were under
+his command. The total force, therefore, was nearly 37,000 strong. No
+one could imagine that, opposed by such troops as the French were able
+to put into line, and marching against such wretched defences as those
+of Dunquerque then were, the Duke's army had not a perfectly easy task
+before it; and the plan, which was to take Dunquerque and upon the
+return to join the Austrian march on Paris, was reasonable and feasible.
+
+It is important that the reader should firmly seize this and not read
+history backward from future events.
+
+Certain faults are to be observed in the first conduct of the march. It
+began on the 15th of August, proceeding from Marchiennes to Menin, and
+at the outset displayed that deplorable lack of marching power which the
+Duke of York's command had shown throughout the campaign.[6] From
+Marchiennes to Tourcoing is a long day's march: it took the Duke of York
+four days; and, take the march altogether, nine days were spent in
+covering less than forty miles. In the course of that march, the British
+troops had an opportunity of learning to despise their adversary: they
+found at Linselles, upon the flank of their advance, a number of
+undisciplined boys who broke the moment the Guards were upon them, and
+whose physical condition excited the ridicule of their assailants. The
+army proceeded after this purposeless and unfruitful skirmish to the
+neighbourhood of the sea coast, and the siege of Dunquerque was
+undertaken under conditions which will be clear to the reader from the
+following sketch map.
+
+[Illustration: Operations round Dunquerque. September 1793.]
+
+The date of the 20th of August must first be fixed in the mind: on that
+date the army which was to take Dunquerque was separated into its two
+component parts. The first, under the Duke of York, was to attack the
+town itself; the second, under the aged Austrian general, Freytag, was
+to watch the movement of any approaching enemy and to cover the force
+which was besieging the town. Two days later, the Duke of York was
+leaving Furnes, which he had made his base for the advance, and Freytag
+had with the greatest ease brushed the French posts--mainly of
+volunteers--from before him, and was beginning to take up the flanking
+positions south and east of Bergues which covered the siege of
+Dunquerque.
+
+Two days later again, on August 24, Freytag had occupied Wormhoudt and
+Esquelbecque, capturing guns by the dozen, doing pretty well what he
+would with the French outposts, and quite surrounding the town of
+Bergues. Wilder was his headquarters. On the same day, the 24th, the
+Duke of York had with the greatest ease driven in the advanced posts of
+the French before Dunquerque, and shut up the enemy within the town,
+while he formed his besieging force outside of it, entrenched in a
+position which he had chosen beforehand, reposing upon the sea at his
+right, his left on the village of Tetteghem. He was then about 3,000
+yards from the fortifications at Dunquerque.
+
+Such was the situation upon the dawn of the 25th, when everything was
+ready for active operations. And here the reader must look upon the map
+for what ultimately proved the ruin of the situation.
+
+Supposing Freytag round Bergues in the position which the map shows; the
+Duke of York in front of Dunquerque as the map also shows him; the two
+forces are in touch across the road and the belt of country which unites
+Bergues and Dunquerque. The covering army and the besieging force which
+it covers are each a wing of one combined body; each communicates with
+the other, each can support the other at the main point of effort, and
+though between the one and the other eastward there stretches a line of
+marshy country--the "meres" which the map indicates--yet a junction
+between the two forces exists westward of these, and the two armies can
+co-operate by the Bergues-Dunquerque road.
+
+A factor which the Duke of York may have neglected was the power of
+flooding all that flat country round, the road which the French in
+Dunquerque, being in possession of the sluices, possessed. They used it
+at once: they drowned the low lands to the south of Dunquerque, upon the
+very day when the last dispositions of the attacking force were
+completed. But more important--and never yet explained--was the
+Austrians' abandonment of Coudequerque. By this error, the main road
+itself, standing above the flood, was lost, and from being one strong
+army the force of the Allies became two weak ones. Communication was no
+longer possible between the Duke of York's and Freytag's territories,
+and it was of this separation that the French, in spite of their
+deplorable organisation and more deplorable personnel, took advantage.
+
+They took advantage of it slowly. Houchard gathered altogether forty
+thousand men near Cassel, but it was ten days before they could be
+concentrated. It must again be insisted upon and repeated that, large as
+the number was--it was four times as great as Freytag's now isolated
+force--Houchard's command was made up of men quite two-thirds of whom
+were hardly soldiers: volunteers both new and recent, ill-trained
+conscripts and so forth. There was no basis of discipline, hardly any
+power to enforce it; the men had behaved disgracefully in all the
+affairs of outposts, they had been brushed away contemptuously by the
+small Austrian force from every position they had held. With all his
+numerical superiority the attempt which Houchard was about to make was
+very hazardous: and Houchard was a hesitating and uncertain commander.
+Furthermore, of the forty thousand men one quarter at least remained out
+of action through the ineptitude and political terror of Dumesny,
+Houchard's lieutenant upon the right.
+
+It was upon the 6th of September that the French advance began along the
+whole line; it was a mere pushing in of inferior numbers by superior
+numbers, the superior numbers perpetually proving themselves inferior to
+the Austrians in military value. Thus, the capture of old Freytag
+himself in a night skirmish was at once avenged by the storming of the
+village near which he had been caught, and he was re-taken. In actual
+fighting and force for force, Houchard's command found nothing to
+encourage it during these first operations.
+
+The Austrians in falling back concentrated and were soon one compact
+body: to attack and dislodge it was the object of the French advance,
+but an object hardly to be attained.
+
+What happened was not only the unexpected success of this advance, but
+the gaining by the French of the first decisive action in the long
+series which was to terminate twenty years later at Leipsic.
+
+The army of Freytag fell back upon the village of Hondschoote and stood
+there in full force upon the morning of Sunday, the 8th of September.
+Houchard attacked it with a force greatly lessened but still double that
+of the defenders. So conspicuous, however, was the superiority of the
+Austrian regulars over the French raw troops and volunteers that during
+this morning of the 8th the result was still doubtful. By the afternoon,
+however, the work was done, and the enemy were in a retreat which might
+easily have been turned into a rout. A glance at the map will show that
+Houchard, had he possessed the initiative common to so many of his
+contemporaries, might at once have driven the numerically inferior and
+heavily defeated force (it had lost one-third of its men) to the right,
+and proceeded himself to cut the communications of the Duke of York and
+to destroy his army, which lay packed upon the waterless sand dunes
+where the village of Malo-les-Bains now stands. Houchard hesitated;
+Freytag escaped; the Duke of York, abandoning his siege-pieces to the
+number of forty and much of his heavy baggage, retreated precipitately
+through the night to Furnes, right across the front of the French army,
+and escaped destruction.
+
+The Battle of Hoondschoote, therefore, as it is called, raised the siege
+of Dunquerque. It was, as I have said, the first successful decisive
+action which the Revolution could count since the moment of its extreme
+danger and the opening of the general European war. But it was nothing
+like what it might have been had Houchard been willing to risk a hardy
+stroke. Houchard was therefore recalled, condemned to death, and
+executed by the Committee of Public Safety, whose pitiless despotism was
+alone capable of saving the nation. He remains the single example of a
+general officer who has suffered death for military incompetence after
+the gaining of a victory, and his execution is an excellent example of
+the way in which the military temper of the Committee, and particularly
+of Carnot, refused to consider any factor in the war save those that
+make for military success.
+
+Carnot and the Committee had no patience with the illusions which a
+civilian crowd possesses upon mere individual actions: what they saw was
+the campaign as a whole, and they knew that Houchard had left the armies
+opposite him intact.
+
+Perhaps his execution was made more certain by the continuance of bad
+news from that more important point of the frontier--the direct line of
+Austrian advance upon Paris. Here, already, Valenciennes had fallen two
+months before, and Cond� also. Lequesnoy, the third point of the barrier
+line, capitulated on the 11th of September, and the news of that
+capitulation reached Paris immediately after the news of Hondschoote. No
+fortress was now left between the Allies and the capital but Maubeuge.
+Coburg marched upon it at once.
+
+Not only had he that immense superiority in the quality of his troops
+which must be still insisted upon, but numerically also he was three to
+one when, on the 28th of September, at dawn, he crossed the Sambre above
+and below Maubeuge, and by noon of that day had contained the French
+army in that neighbourhood within the lines of the fortress.
+
+The situation was critical in the extreme: Maubeuge was ill prepared to
+stand siege; it was hardly provisioned; its garrison was of varied and,
+on the whole, of bad quality. In mere victuals it could stand out for
+but a few days, and, worst of all, it had behind it the continued
+example of necessary and fatal surrenders which had marked the whole
+summer. The orders of the Committee of Public Safety to its commander
+were terse: "Your head shall answer for Maubeuge." After the receipt of
+that message no more came through the lines.
+
+The reader, if he be unaccustomed to military history, does well to note
+that in every action and in every campaign there is some one factor of
+position or of arms or of time which explains the result. Each has a
+pivot or hinge, as it were, upon which the whole turns. It was now upon
+Maubeuge that the revolutionary war thus depended. At risk of
+oversimplifying a complex story, I would lay this down as the prime
+condition for the understanding of the early revolutionary wars: had
+Maubeuge fallen, the road to Paris lay open and the trick was
+done[7]--and here we must consider again the effect in the field of
+Carnot's genius.
+
+In the first place, he had provided numbers not on paper, but in
+reality; the Committee, through a decree of the Assembly, had
+despotically "requisitioned" men, animals, vehicles and supplies. The
+levy was a reality. Mere numbers then raw, but increasing, had begun to
+pour into the north-east. It was they that had told at Hoondschoote, it
+was they that were to tell in front of Maubeuge.
+
+Secondly, as the Committee supplied the necessary initiative, Carnot
+supplied the necessary personality of war. His own will and own brain
+could come to one decision in one moment, and did so. It was he, as we
+shall see, who won the critical action. He chose Jourdan, a man whose
+quaint military career we must reluctantly leave aside in so brief a
+study as this, but at any rate an amateur, and put him in Houchard's
+command over the Army of the Northern Frontier, and that command was
+extended from right away beyond the Ardennes to the sea. He ordered (and
+Jourdan obeyed) the concentration of men from all down that lengthy line
+to the right and the left upon one point, Guise. To leave the rest of
+the frontier weak was a grave risk only to be excused by very rapid
+action and success: both these were to follow. The concentration was
+effected in four days. Troops from the extreme north could not come in
+time. The furthest called upon were beyond Arras, with sixty-five miles
+of route between them and Guise. This division (which shall be typical
+of many), not quite eight thousand strong, left on receiving orders in
+the morning of the 3rd of October and entered Guise in the course of the
+6th. The rate of marching and the synchrony of these movements of
+imperfect troops should especially be noted by any one who would
+understand how the Revolution succeeded.
+
+[Illustration: The rapid eight days' concentration in front of Maubeuge.
+October 1783.]
+
+A second division of over thirteen thousand men followed along the
+parallel road, with a similar time table. From the other end of his
+line, a detachment under Beauregard, just over four thousand men, was
+called up from the extreme right. It will serve as a typical example
+upon the eastern side of this lightning concentration. It had been
+gathered near Carignan, a town full fourteen miles beyond Sedan. It
+picked up reinforcements on the way and marched into Fourmies upon the
+11th, after covering just seventy miles in the three and a half days.
+With its arrival the concentration was complete, and not a moment too
+soon, for the bombardment of Maubeuge was about to begin. From the 11th
+to the 15th of October the army was advanced and drawn up in line, a
+day's march in front of Guise, with its centre at Avesnes and facing the
+covering army of Coburg, which lay entrenched upon a long wooded crest
+with the valley of the Sambre upon its right and the village of
+Wattignies, on a sort of promontory of high land, upon its left.
+
+The Austrian position was reconnoitred upon the 14th. Upon the 15th the
+general attack was delivered and badly repelled. When darkness fell upon
+that day few in the army could have believed that Maubeuge was
+succourable--and it was a question of hours.
+
+Carnot, however, sufficiently knew the virtues as the vices of his novel
+troops, the troops of the great levy, stiffened with a proportion of
+regulars, to attempt an extraordinary thing. He marched eight thousand
+from his left and centre, over to his right during the night, and in the
+morning of the 16th his right, in front of the Austrian left at
+Wattignies had, by this conversion, become far the strongest point of
+the whole line.
+
+A dense mist had covered the end of this operation as the night had
+covered its inception, and that mist endured until nearly midday. The
+Austrians upon the heights had no hint of the conversion, and Wattignies
+was only held by three regiments. If they expected a renewed attack at
+all, they can only have expected it in the centre, or even upon the left
+where the French had suffered most the day before.
+
+Initiative in war is essentially a calculation of risk, and with high
+initiative the risk is high. What Carnot gambled upon (for Jourdan was
+against the experiment) when he moved those young men through the night,
+was the possibility of getting active work out of them after a day's
+furious action, the forced marches of the preceding week and on top of
+it all a sleepless night of further marching. Most of the men who were
+prepared to charge on the French right as the day broadened and the mist
+lifted on that 16th of October, had been on foot for thirty hours. The
+charge was delivered, and was successful. The unexpected numbers thus
+concentrated under Wattignies carried that extreme position, held the
+height, and arrived, therefore, on the flank of the whole Austrian line,
+which, had not the effort of the aggressors exhausted them, would have
+been rolled up in its whole length. As it was, the Austrians retreated
+unmolested and in good order across the Sambre. The siege of Maubeuge
+was raised; and the next day the victorious French army entered the
+fortress.
+
+Thus was successfully passed the turning-point of the revolutionary
+wars.
+
+Two months later the other gate of the country was recovered. In the
+moment when Maubeuge was relieved, the enemy had pierced the lines of
+Wissembourg. It is possible that an immediate and decisive understanding
+among the Allies might then have swept all Alsace; but such an
+understanding was lacking. The disarrayed "Army of the Rhine" was got
+into some sort of order, notably through the enthusiasm of Hoche and the
+silent control of Pichegru. At the end of November the Prussians stood
+on the defensive at Kaiserslautern. Hoche hammered at them for three
+days without success. What really turned the scale was the floods of men
+and material that the levy and the requisitioning were pouring in. Just
+before Christmas the enemy evacuated Haguenau. Landau they still held;
+but a decisive action fought upon Boxing Day, a true soldiers' battle,
+determined by the bayonet, settled the fate of the Allies on this point.
+The French entered Wissembourg again, and Landau was relieved after a
+siege of four months and a display of tenacity which had done not a
+little to turn the tide of the war.
+
+Meanwhile the news had come in that the last of the serious internal
+rebellions was crushed. Toulon had been re-captured, the English fleet
+driven out; the town, the harbour and the arsenal had fallen into the
+hands of the French largely through the science of a young major of
+artillery (not captain: I have discussed the point elsewhere),
+Bonaparte, and this had taken place a week before the relief of Landau.
+The last confused horde of La Vend�e had been driven from the walls of
+Granville in Normandy, to which it had erred and drifted rather than
+retreated. At Mans on the 13th of December it was cut to pieces, and at
+Savenay on the 23rd, three days before the great victory in Alsace, it
+was destroyed. A long peasant-and-bandit struggle, desperate yet hardly
+to be called guerilla, continued through the next year behind the hedges
+of Lower Brittany and of Vend�e, but the danger to the State and to the
+Revolution was over. The year 1793 ended, therefore, with the complete
+relief of the whole territory of the Republic, save a narrow strip upon
+the Belgian frontier, complete domination of it by its C�sar, the
+Committee of Public Safety; with two-thirds of a million of men under
+arms, and the future of the great experiment apparently secure.
+
+The causes of the wonder have been discussed, and will be discussed
+indefinitely. Primarily, they resided in the re-creation of a strong
+central power; secondly, in the combination of vast numbers and of a
+reckless spirit of sacrifice. The losses on the National side were
+perpetually and heavily superior to those of the Allies--in Alsace they
+had been three to one; and we shall better understand the duel when we
+appreciate that in the short eight years between the opening of the war
+and the triumph of Napoleon at Marengo, there had fallen in killed and
+wounded, on the French side, over seven hundred thousand men.
+
+
+FIVE
+
+The story of 1794 is but the consequence of what we have just read. It
+was the little belt or patch upon the Belgian frontier which was still
+in the hands of the enemy that determined the nature of the campaign.
+
+It was not until spring that the issue was joined. The Emperor of
+Austria reached Brussels on the 2nd day of April, and a fortnight later
+reviewed his army. The French line drawn up in opposition to it suffered
+small but continual reverses until the close of the month.
+
+On the 29th Clerfayt suffered a defeat which led to the fall, or rather
+the escape, of the small garrison of Menin. Clerfayt was beaten again at
+Courtray a fortnight later; but all these early engagements in the
+campaign were of no decisive moment. Tourcoing was to be the first heavy
+blow that should begin to settle matters, Fleurus was to clinch them.
+
+No battle can be less satisfactorily described in a few lines than that
+of Tourcoing, so different did it appear to either combatant, so
+opposite are the plans of what was expected on either side, and of what
+happened, so confused are the various accounts of contemporaries. The
+accusations of treason which nearly always arise after a disaster, and
+especially a disaster overtaking an allied force, are particularly
+monstrous, and may be dismissed: in particular the childish legend which
+pretends that the Austrians desired an English defeat.
+
+What the French say is that excellent forced marching and scientific
+concentration permitted them to attack the enemy before the junction of
+his various forces was effected. What the Allies say is (if they are
+speaking for their centre) that it was shamefully abandoned and
+unsupported by the two wings; if they are speaking for the wings, that
+the centre had no business to advance, when it saw that the two wings
+were not up in time to co-operate.
+
+One story goes that the Archduke Charles was incapacitated by a fit;
+Lord Acton has lent his considerable authority to this amusing version.
+At any rate, what happened was this:--
+
+The Allies lay along the river Scheldt on Friday, the 16th of May:
+Tournay was their centre, with the Duke of York in command of the chief
+force there; five or six miles north, down the river, was one extremity
+of their line at a place called Warcoing: it was a body of Hanoverians.
+The left, under the Archduke Charles, was Austrian and had reached a
+place a day's march south of Tournay called St. Amand. Over against the
+Allies lay a large French force also occupying a wide front of over
+fifteen miles, the centre of which was Tourcoing, then a village. Its
+left was in front of the fortress of Courtrai. Now, behind the French,
+up country northward in the opposite direction from the line of the
+Allies on the Scheldt was another force of the Allies under Clerfayt.
+The plan was that the Allied right should advance on to Mouscron and
+take it. The Allied centre should advance on to Tourcoing and Mouveaux
+and take them, while the left should march across the upper waters of
+the river Marque, forcing the bridges that crossed that marshy stream,
+and come up alongside the centre. In other words, there was to be an
+attack all along the French line from the south, and while it was
+proceeding, Clerfayt, from the north of the French, was to cross the Lys
+and attack also.
+
+On the day of the 17th what happened was this: The left of the Allies,
+marching from St. Amand, came up half a day late; the right of the
+Allies took Mouscron, but were beaten out of it by the French. The
+centre of the Allies fulfilled their programme, reaching Tourcoing and
+its neighbourhood by noon and holding their positions. It is to the
+honour of English arms that this success was accomplished by a force a
+third of which was British and the most notable bayonet work in which
+was done by the Guards. Meanwhile, Clerfayt was late in moving and in
+crossing the river Lys, which lay between him and his objective.
+
+[Illustration: Tourcoing. May 16 to 18, 1794.
+
+The breakdown of the attempt of the Allies to cut off the French near
+Courtrai from Lille was due to their failure to synchronise They should
+have been in line from A to B at noon of the 17th with Clerfayt at C.]
+
+When night fell, therefore, on the first day of the action, a glance at
+the map will show that instead of one solid line advancing against the
+French from A to B, and the northern force in touch with it at C, the
+Allied formation was an absurd projection in the middle, due to the
+success of the mixed and half-British force under the Duke of York: a
+success which had not been maintained on the two wings. A bulge of this
+sort in an attacking line is on the face of it disastrous. The enemy
+have only to be rapid in falling upon either flank of it and the bulge
+can be burst in. The French were rapid, and burst in the bulge was. By
+concentrating their forces against this one central part of the Allies
+they fought three to one.
+
+That same capacity which at Wattignies had permitted them to scorn sleep
+and to be indefatigable in marching, put them on the road before three
+o'clock in the morning of Sunday, the 18th, and with the dawn they fell
+upon the central force of the Allies, attacking it from all three sides.
+
+It is on this account that the battle is called the Battle of Tourcoing,
+for Tourcoing was the most advanced point to which the centre of the
+Allies had reached. The Germans, upon the Duke of York's right at
+Tourcoing, felt the first brunt of the attack. The Duke of York himself,
+with his mixed, half-British force, came in for the blow immediately
+afterwards, and while it was still early morning. The Germans at
+Tourcoing began to fall back. The Duke of York's force, to the left of
+them, was left isolated: its commander ought not to have hung on so
+long. But the defence was maintained with the utmost gallantry for the
+short time during which it was still possible. The retreat began about
+nine in the morning and was kept orderly for the first two miles, but
+after that point it was a rout. The drivers of the British cannon fled,
+and the guns, left without teams, blocked the precipitate flight of the
+cavalry. Their disorder communicated itself at once to the Guards, and
+to the line.
+
+Even in this desperate strait some sort of order was restored, notably
+by the Guards Brigade, which were apparently the first to form, and a
+movement that could still be called a retreat was pursued towards the
+south. The Duke of York himself was chased from spinney to spinney and
+escaped by a stroke of luck, finding a bridge across the last brook held
+by a detachment of Hessians. In this way were the central columns, who
+between them numbered not a third of the total force of the Allies,
+destroyed.
+
+Clerfayt had first advanced--but far too late to save the centre--and
+then retreated. The Archduke Charles, upon the left, was four hours late
+in marching to the help of the Duke of York; the right wing of the
+Allies was not even late: it spent the morning in an orderly artillery
+duel with the French force opposed to it. By five in the afternoon
+defeat was admitted and a general retreat of the Allies ordered.
+
+I have said that many reasons are given to account for the disaster of
+Tourcoing, one of the very few in which a British force has been routed
+upon the Continent; but I confess that if I were asked for an
+explanation of my own, I would say that it was simply due to the gross
+lack of synchrony on the part of the Allies, and that this in its turn
+was taken advantage of by the power both of vigil and of marching which
+the French troops, still inferior in most military characteristics, had
+developed and maintained, and which (a more important matter) their
+commanders knew how to use.
+
+This heavy blow, delivered on the 18th of May, in spite of a successful
+rally a week later, finally convinced the Emperor that the march on
+Paris was impossible. Eleven days later, on the 29th, it was announced
+in the camp of Tournay, upon which the Allied army had fallen back, that
+the Emperor had determined to return to Vienna. The Allied army was
+indeed still left upon that front, but the French continued to pour up
+against it. It was again their numbers that brought about the next and
+the final victory.
+
+Far off, upon the east of that same line, the army which is famous in
+history and in song as that of the Sambre et Meuse was violently
+attempting to cross the Sambre and to turn the line of the Allies.
+Coburg reinforced his right opposite the French left, but numbers had
+begun to bewilder him. The enthusiasm of Saint-Just, the science of
+Carnot, decided victory at this eastern end of the line.
+
+Six times the passage of the Sambre had failed. Reinforcements continued
+to reach the army, and the seventh attempt succeeded.
+
+Charleroi, which is the main fortress blocking the passage of the
+Sambre at this place, could be, and was, invested when once the river
+was crossed by the French. It capitulated in a week. But the evacuation
+of Charleroi was but just accomplished when Coburg, seventy thousand
+strong, appeared in relief of the city.
+
+[Illustration: Showing effect of _Ypres_, _Charleroi_ and _Fleurus_ in
+wholly throwing back the Allies in June 1794.
+
+_Ypres_ captured on June 19 by the French, they march on Oudenarde and
+pass it on June 25 to 27. Meanwhile _Charleroi_ has also surrendered to
+the French, and when, immediately afterwards, the Austrians try to
+relieve it, they are beaten at _Fleurus_ and retire on Brussels.
+
+Thus the English at _Tournai_ and all the Allied Forces at _Cond�_,
+_Valenciennes_, _Landrecies_, and _Mons_ are imperilled and must
+surrender or retire.]
+
+The plateau above the town where the great struggle was decided, is
+known as that of Fleurus, and it was upon the 26th of June that the
+armies were there engaged. Never before had forces so equal permitted
+the French any success. It had hitherto been the ceaseless
+requisitioning of men to supply their insufficient training and command,
+which had accomplished the salvation of the country. At Fleurus, though
+there was still some advantage on the French side, the numbers were
+more nearly equal.
+
+The action was not determined for ten hours, and on the French centre
+and left was nearly lost, when the Reserves' and Marceau's obstinacy in
+front of Fleurus village itself at last decided it.
+
+The consequences of the victory were final. As the French right advanced
+from Fleurus the French left advanced from Ypres, and the centre became
+untenable for the Allies. The four French fortresses which the enemy
+still garrisoned in that Belgian "belt" of which I have spoken, were
+invested and re-captured. By the 10th of July the French were in
+Brussels, the English were beaten back upon Holland, the Austrians
+retreating upon the Rhine, and the continuous success of the
+revolutionary armies was assured.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+While these things were proceeding upon land, however, there had
+appeared a factor in the war which modern desire for comfort and, above
+all, for commercial security has greatly exaggerated, but which the
+student will do well to note in its due proportion. This factor was the
+military weakness of France at sea.
+
+In mere numbers the struggle was entered upon with fleets in the ratio
+of about two to one, while to the fleet of Great Britain, already twice
+as large as its opponent, must be added the fleets of the Allies. But
+numbers did not then, nor will they in the future, really decide the
+issue of maritime war. It was the supremacy of English gunnery which
+turned the scale. This triumphant superiority was proved in the battle
+of the 1st of June, 1794.
+
+The English fleet under Lord Howe attacked the French fleet which was
+waiting to escort a convoy of grain into Brest; the forces came in
+contact upon the 28th of May, and the action was a running one of three
+days.
+
+Two examples must suffice to prove how determining was the superiority
+of the British fire. The _Queen Charlotte_, in the final action, found
+herself caught between the _Montagne_ and the _Jacobin_. We have the
+figures of the losses during the duel of these two flagships. The _Queen
+Charlotte_ lost forty-two men in the short and furious exchange, the
+_Montagne_ alone three hundred. Again, consider the total figures. The
+number of the crews on both sides was nearly equal, but their losses
+were as eleven to five. It cannot be too often repeated that the initial
+advantage which the English fleet gained in the great war, which it
+maintained and increased as that war proceeded, and which it made
+absolute at Trafalgar, was an advantage mainly due to the guns.
+
+The reader must not expect in a sketch which ends with the fall of
+Robespierre any treatise, however short, upon the effect of sea power in
+the revolutionary wars. It has of late years been grossly exaggerated,
+the reaction which will follow this exaggeration may as grossly belittle
+it. It prevented the invasion of England, it permitted the exasperation
+and wearing out of the French forces in the Peninsula. But it could not
+have determined the fate of Napoleon. That was determined by his Russian
+miscalculation and by his subsequent and consequent defeat at Leipsic.
+
+Upon the early success of the Revolution and the resulting establishment
+of European democracy, with which alone these pages deal, sea power was
+of no considerable effect.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[6] Incidentally it should be noted how true it is that this supreme
+military quality is a matter of organisation rather than of the physical
+power of troops; in the Napoleonic wars the marching power of the
+English troops was often proved exceptional, and perhaps the greatest of
+all feats accomplished by a small body was that of the Light Brigade
+marching to the succour of Wellington at Talavera.
+
+[7] I must not, in fairness to the reader, neglect the great mass of
+opinion, from Jomini to Mr. Fortescue's classic work upon the British
+Army, which lays it down that the Allies had but to mask the frontier
+fortresses and to advance their cavalry rapidly along the Paris road.
+Historical hypothesis can never be more than a matter of judgment, but I
+confess that this view has always seemed to me to ignore--as purely
+military historians and especially foreign ones might well ignore--the
+social condition of "'93." Cavalry is the weakest of all arms with which
+to deal with sporadic, unorganised, but determined resistance. To pass
+through the densely populated country of the Paris road may be compared
+to the forcing of an open town, and cavalry can never be relied upon for
+_that_. As for the army moving as a whole without a perfect security in
+its communications, the matter need not even be discussed; and it must
+further be remembered that, the moment such an advance began, an
+immediate concentration from the north would have fallen upon the
+ill-guarded lines of supply. It may be taken that Coburg knew his
+business when he sat down before this, the last of the fortresses.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+THE REVOLUTION AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH
+
+
+The last and the most important of the aspects which the French
+Revolution presents to a foreign, and in particular to an English
+reader, is the antagonism which arose between it and the Church.
+
+As this is the most important so it is the most practical of the
+historical problems which the Revolution sets the student to solve; for
+the opposition of the Church's organisation in France has at once been
+the most profound which the Revolution has had to encounter, the most
+active in its methods, and the only one which has increased in strength
+as time proceeded. It is hardly too much to say that the Revolution
+would, in France at least, have achieved its object and created a
+homogeneous, centralised democracy, had not this great quarrel between
+the Republic and the Church arisen; and one may legitimately contrast
+the ready pliancy of men to political suggestion and the easy story of
+their institutions where men knew nothing of the Church, with the great
+storms that arise and the fundamental quarrels that are challenged
+wherever men are acquainted with the burning truths of Catholicism.
+
+Finally, the struggle between the Catholic Church and the Revolution is
+not only the most important and the most practical, but also by an
+unhappy coincidence the most difficult of comprehension of all the
+matters presented to us by the great change.
+
+We have seen in this book that one department of revolutionary history,
+the second in importance, perhaps, to the religious department, was also
+difficult of comprehension--to wit, the military department. And we have
+seen (or at least I have postulated) that the difficulty of following
+the military fortunes of the Republic was due to the mass of detail, to
+the technical character of the information to be acquired and to the
+natural unfamiliarity of the general reader with the elements of
+military science. In other words, an accurate knowledge of great numbers
+of facts, the proper disposition of these facts in their order of
+military importance, and the correlation of a great number of
+disconnected actions and plans will alone permit us to grasp the
+function of the armies in the development and establishment of the
+modern State through the revolutionary wars.
+
+Now in this second and greater problem, the problem of the function
+played by religion, it is an exactly opposite method which can alone be
+of service.
+
+We must examine the field generally, and still more generally we must
+forget details that here only bewilder, and see in the largest possible
+outline what forces were really at issue, why their conflict occurred,
+upon what points that conflict was vital. Any more particular plan will
+land us, as it has landed so many thousands of controversialists, in
+mere invective on one side or the other, till we come to see nothing but
+a welter of treason on the part of priests, and of massacre upon the
+part of democrats.
+
+Men would, did they try to unravel the skein by analysing the documents
+of the Vatican or of the French archives, come apparently upon nothing
+but a host of petty, base, and often personal calculations; or again,
+did they attempt to take a local sample of the struggle and to follow it
+in one department of thought, they would come upon nothing but a whirl
+of conflict with no sort of clue to the motives that lay behind.
+
+The contrast between the military and the religious problem of the
+French Revolution is like the contrast between the geological
+composition and the topographical contours of a countryside. To
+understand the first we must bore and dig, we must take numerous samples
+of soil and subject them to analysis, we must make ourselves acquainted
+with detail in its utmost recesses. But for the second, the more general
+our standpoint, the wider our gaze, and the more comprehensive our
+judgment, the more accurately do we grasp the knowledge we have set out
+to seek.
+
+We must, then, approach our business by asking at the outset the most
+general question of all: "_Was there a necessary and fundamental quarrel
+between the doctrines of the Revolution and those of the Catholic
+Church?_"
+
+Those ill acquainted with either party, and therefore ill equipped for
+reply, commonly reply with assurance in the affirmative. The French (and
+still more the non-French) Republican who may happen, by the accident of
+his life, to have missed the Catholic Church, to have had no intimacy
+with any Catholic character, no reading of Catholic philosophy, and
+perhaps even no chance view of so much as an external Catholic ceremony,
+replies unhesitatingly that the Church is the necessary enemy of the
+Revolution. Again, the _�migr�_, the wealthy woman, the recluse, any one
+of the many contemporary types to whom the democratic theory of the
+Revolution came as a complete novelty, and to-day the wealthy families
+in that tradition, reply as unhesitatingly that the Revolution is the
+necessary enemy of the Church. The reply seems quite sufficient to the
+Tory squire in England or Germany, who may happen to be a Catholic by
+birth or by conversion; and it seems equally obvious to (let us say) a
+democratic member of some Protestant Church in one of the new countries.
+
+Historically and logically, theologically also, those who affirm a
+necessary antagonism between the Republic and the Church are in error.
+Those who are best fitted to approach the problem by their knowledge
+both of what the Revolution attempted and of what Catholic philosophy
+is, find it in proportion to their knowledge difficult or impossible to
+answer that fundamental question in the affirmative. They cannot call
+the Revolution a necessary enemy of the Church, nor the Church of
+Democracy.
+
+What is more, minds at once of the most active and of the best
+instructed sort are the very minds which find it difficult to explain
+how any such quarrel can have arisen. French history itself is full of
+the names of those for whom not so much a reconciliation between the
+Revolution and the Church, as a statement that no real quarrel existed
+between them, was the motive of politics; and almost in proportion to a
+man's knowledge of his fellows in Catholic societies, almost in that
+proportion is the prime question I have asked answered by such a man in
+the negative. A man who knows both the Faith and the Republic will tell
+you that there is not and cannot be any necessary or fundamental reason
+why conflict should have arisen between a European Democracy and the
+Catholic Church.
+
+When we examine those who concern themselves with the deepest and most
+abstract side of the quarrel, we find the same thing. It is impossible
+for the theologian, or even for the practical ecclesiastical teacher, to
+put his finger upon a political doctrine essential to the Revolution and
+to say, "This doctrine is opposed to Catholic dogma or to Catholic
+morals." Conversely, it is impossible for the Republican to put his
+finger upon a matter of ecclesiastical discipline or religious dogma and
+to say, "This Catholic point is at issue with my political theory of the
+State."
+
+Thousands of active men upon either side would have been only too
+willing during the last hundred years to discover some such issue, and
+it has proved undiscoverable. In a word, only those Democrats who know
+little of the Catholic Church can say that of its nature it forbids
+democracy; and only those Catholics who have a confused or imperfect
+conception of democracy can say that of its nature it is antagonistic to
+the Catholic Church.
+
+Much that is taught by the purely temporal theory of the one is
+indifferent to the transcendental and supernatural philosophy of the
+other. In some points, where there is contact (as in the conception of
+the dignity of man and of the equality of men) there is agreement. To
+sum up, the Republican cannot by his theory persecute the Church; the
+Church cannot by her theory excommunicate the Republican.
+
+Why, then, it must next be asked, has there in practice arisen so
+furious and so enormous a conflict, a conflict whose activity and whose
+consequence are not narrowing but broadening to-day?
+
+It may be replied to this second question, which is only less general
+than the first, in one of two manners.
+
+One may say that the actions of men are divided not by theories but by
+spiritual atmospheres, as it were. According to this view men act under
+impulses not ideal but actual: impulses which affect great numbers and
+yet in their texture correspond to the complex but united impulses of an
+individual personality. Thus, though there be no conflict demonstrable
+between the theology of the Catholic Church and the political theory of
+the Revolution, yet there may be necessary and fundamental conflict
+between the _Persons_ we call the Revolution and the Church, and between
+the vivifying principles by which either lives. That is one answer that
+can be, and is, given.
+
+Or one may give a totally different answer and say, "There was no
+quarrel between the theology of the Catholic Church and the political
+theory of the Revolution; but the folly of this statesman, the ill
+drafting of that law, the misconception of such and such an institution,
+the coincidence of war breaking out at such and such a moment and
+affecting men in such and such a fashion--all these material accidents
+bred a misunderstanding between the two great forces, led into conflict
+the human officers and the human organisations which directed them; and
+conflict once established feeds upon, and grows from, its own
+substance."
+
+Now, if that first form of reply be given to the question we have posed,
+though it is sufficient for the type of philosophy which uses it, though
+it is certainly explanatory of all human quarrels, and though it in
+particular satisfies a particular modern school of thought, it is
+evident that history, properly so called, cannot deal with it.
+
+You may say that the Revolution was the expression of a spirit far more
+real than any theory, that this spirit is no more susceptible of
+analysis or definition than is the personality of a single human
+character, and that this reality was in conflict with another
+reality--to wit, the Catholic Church. You may even (as some minds by no
+means negligible have done) pass into the field of mysticism in the
+matter, and assert that really personal forces, wills superior and
+external to man, Demons and Angels, drove the Revolution against the
+Catholic Church, and created The Republic to be an anti-Catholic force
+capable of meeting and of defeating that Church, which (by its own
+definition of itself) is not a theory, but the expression of a
+Personality and a Will. To put it in old-fashioned terms, you may say
+that the Revolution was the work of antichrist;--but with that kind of
+reply, I repeat, history cannot deal.
+
+If it be true that, in spite of an absence of contradictory intellectual
+theories, there is a fundamental spiritual contradiction between the
+Revolution and the Catholic Church, then time will test the business; we
+shall see in that case a perpetual extension of the quarrel until the
+Revolution becomes principally a force for the extinction of
+Catholicism, and the Catholic Church appears to the supporter of the
+Revolution not as his principal, but as his only enemy. Such a
+development has not arisen in a hundred years; a process of time far
+more lengthy will alone permit us to judge whether the supposed duello
+is a real matter or a phantasm.
+
+The second type of answer, the answer which pretends to explain the
+antagonism by a definite series of events, does concern the historian.
+
+Proceeding upon the lines of that second answer, he can bring his
+science to bear and use the instruments of his trade; and he can show
+(as I propose to show in what follows) how, although no quarrel can be
+found between the theory of the Revolution and that of the Church, an
+active quarrel did in fact spring up between the Revolution in action
+and the authorities of Catholicism; a quarrel which a hundred years has
+not appeased, but accentuated.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Behind the revolutionary quarrel lay the condition of the Church in the
+French State since the settlement of the quarrel of the Reformation.
+
+With what that quarrel of the Reformation was, the reader is
+sufficiently familiar. For, roughly speaking, a hundred years, from the
+first years of the sixteenth century to the first years of the
+seventeenth (from the youth of Henry VIII to the boyhood of Charles I in
+England), a great attempt was made to change (as one party would have
+said to amend, as the other would have said to denaturalise) the _whole
+body_ of Western Christendom. A _general_ movement of attack upon the
+inherited form of the Church, and a general resistance to that attack,
+was at work throughout European civilisation; and either antagonist
+hoped for a universal success, the one of what he called "The
+Reformation of religion," the other of what he called "The Divine
+Institution and visible unity of the Catholic Church."
+
+At the end of such a period it became apparent that no such general
+result had been, or could be, attained. All that part of the West which
+had rejected the authority of the See of Rome began to appear as a
+separate territorial region permanently divided from the rest; all that
+part of Europe which had retained the Authority of the See of Rome began
+to appear as another region of territory. The line of cleavage between
+the two was beginning to define itself as a geographical line, and
+nearly corresponded to the line which, centuries before, had divided the
+Roman and civilised world from the Barbarians.
+
+The Province of Britain had an exceptional fate. Though Roman in origin
+and of the ancient civilisation in its foundation, it fell upon the
+non-Roman side of the new boundary; while Ireland, which the Roman
+Empire had never organised or instructed, remained, alone of the
+external parts of Europe, in communion with Rome. Italy, Spain, and in
+the main southern or Romanised Germany, refused ultimately to abandon
+their tradition of civilisation and of religion. But in Gaul it was
+otherwise--and the action of Gaul during the Reformation must be seized
+if its modern religious quarrels are to be apprehended. A very
+considerable proportion of the French landed and mercantile classes,
+that is of the wealthy men of the country, were in sympathy with the new
+religious doctrines and the new social organisation which had now taken
+root in England, Scotland, Holland, northern Germany and Scandinavia,
+and which were destined in those countries to lead to the domination of
+wealth. These French squires and traders were called the Huguenots.
+
+The succeeding hundred years, from 1615 to 1715, let us say, were a
+settlement, not without bloodshed, of the unsatisfied quarrel of the
+preceding century. All Englishmen know what happened in England; how the
+last vestiges of Catholicism were crushed out and all the social and
+political consequences of Protestantism established in the State.
+
+There was, even in that same seventeenth century, a separate, but
+futile, attempt to destroy Catholicism in Ireland. In Germany a struggle
+of the utmost violence had only led to a similar regional result. The
+first third of that hundred years concluded in the Peace of Westphalia,
+and left the Protestant and Catholic territorial divisions much what we
+now know them.
+
+In France, however, the peculiar phenomenon remained of a body powerful
+in numbers and (what was far more important) in wealth and social power,
+scattered throughout the territory of the kingdom, organised and, by
+this time, fixedly anti-Catholic, and therefore anti-national.
+
+The nation had recovered its traditional line and had insisted upon the
+victory of a strong executive, and that executive Catholic. France,
+therefore, in this period of settlement, became an absolute monarchy
+whose chief possessed tremendous and immediate powers, and a monarchy
+which incorporated with itself all the great elements of the national
+tradition, _including the Church_.
+
+It is the name of Louis XIV, of course, which symbolises this great
+time; his very long reign precisely corresponds to it. He was born
+coincidently with that universal struggle for a religious settlement in
+Europe, which I have described as characteristic of the time; he died
+precisely at its close; and under him it seemed as though the
+reconstructed power of Gaul and the defence of organised Catholicism
+were to be synonymous.
+
+But there were two elements of disruption in that homogeneous body which
+Louis XIV apparently commanded. The very fact that the Church had thus
+become in France an unshakable national institution, chilled the vital
+source of Catholicism. Not only did the hierarchy stand in a perpetual
+suspicion of the Roman See, and toy with the conception of national
+independence, but they, and all the official organisation of French
+Catholicism, put the security of the national establishment and its
+intimate attachment to the general political structure of the State, far
+beyond the sanctity of Catholic dogma or the practice of Catholic
+morals.
+
+That political structure--the French monarchy--seemed to be of granite
+and eternal. Had it indeed survived, the Church in Gaul would doubtless,
+in spite of its attachment to so mundane a thing as the crown, have
+still survived to enjoy one of those resurrections which have never
+failed it in the past, and would have returned, by some creative
+reaction, to its principle of life. But for the moment the consequence
+of this fixed political establishment was that scepticism, and all those
+other active forces of the mind which play upon religion in any Catholic
+State, had full opportunity. The Church was, so to speak, not concerned
+to defend itself but only its method of existence. It was as though a
+garrison, forgetting the main defences of a place, had concentrated all
+its efforts upon the security of one work which contained its supplies
+of food.
+
+Wit, good verse, sincere enthusiasm, a lucid exposition of whatever in
+the human mind perpetually rebels against transcendental affirmations,
+were allowed every latitude and provoked no effective reply. But overt
+acts of disrespect to ecclesiastical authority were punished with
+rigour.
+
+While in the wealthy, the bureaucratic, and the governing classes, to
+ridicule the Faith was an attitude taken for granted, seriously to
+attack the privileges or position of its ministers was ungentlemanly,
+and was not allowed. It did not shock the hierarchy that one of its
+Apostolic members should be a witty atheist; that another should go
+hunting upon Corpus Christi, nearly upset the Blessed Sacrament in his
+gallop, and forget what day it was when the accident occurred. The
+bishops found nothing remarkable in seeing a large proportion of their
+body to be loose livers, or in some of them openly presenting their
+friends to their mistresses as might be done by any great lay noble
+round them. That a diocese or any other spiritual charge should be
+divorced from its titular chief, seemed to them as natural as does to us
+the absence from his modern regiment of some titular foreign colonel.
+Unquestioned also by the bishops were the poverty, the neglect, and the
+uninstruction of the parish clergy; nay--and this is by far the
+principal feature--the abandonment of religion by all but a very few of
+the French millions, no more affected the ecclesiastical officials of
+the time than does the starvation of our poor affect, let us say, one of
+our professional politicians. It was a thing simply taken for granted.
+
+The reader must seize that moribund condition of the religious life of
+France upon the eve of the Revolution, for it is at once imperfectly
+grasped by the general run of historians, and is also the only fact
+which thoroughly explains what followed. The swoon of the Faith in the
+eighteenth century is the negative foundation upon which the strange
+religious experience of the French was about to rise. France, in the
+generation before the Revolution, was passing through a phase in which
+the Catholic Faith was at a lower ebb than it had ever been since the
+preaching and establishment of it in Gaul.
+
+This truth is veiled by more than one circumstance. Thus many official
+acts, notably marriages and the registration of births, took place under
+a Catholic form, and indeed Catholic forms had a monopoly of them.
+Again, the State wore Catholic clothes, as it were: the public occasions
+of pomp were full of religious ceremony. Few of the middle classes went
+to Mass in the great towns, hardly any of the artisans; but the Churches
+were "official." Great sums of money--including official money--were at
+the disposal of the Church; and the great ecclesiastics were men from
+whom solid favours could be got. Again, the historic truth is masked by
+the language and point of view of the great Catholic reaction which has
+taken place in our own time.
+
+It is safe to say that where one adult of the educated classes concerned
+himself seriously with the Catholic Faith and Practice in France before
+the Revolution, there are five to-day. But in between lies the violent
+episode of the persecution, and the Catholic reaction in our time
+perpetually tends to contrast a supposed pre-revolutionary "Catholic"
+society with the revolutionary fury. "Look," say its champions, "at the
+dreadful way in which the Revolution treated the Church." And as they
+say this the converse truth appears obvious and they seem to imply,
+"Think how different it must have been before the Revolution persecuted
+the Church!" The very violence of the modern reaction towards
+Catholicism has exaggerated the revolutionary persecution, and in doing
+so has made men forget that apart from other evidence of the decline of
+religion, it is obvious that persecution could never have arisen without
+a strong and continuous historical backing. You could not have had a
+Diocletian in the thirteenth century with the spirit of the Crusaders
+just preceding him; you could not have had Henry VIII if the England of
+the fifteenth century just preceding him had been an England devoted to
+the monastic profession. And you could not have had the revolutionary
+fury against the Catholic Church in France if the preceding generation
+had been actively Catholic even in a considerable portion.
+
+As a fact, of course it was not: and in the popular indifference to or
+hatred of the Church the principal factor was the strict brotherhood not
+so much of Church and State as of Church and executive Government.
+
+But there was another factor. We were describing a little way back how
+in France there had arisen, during the movement of the Reformation, a
+wealthy, powerful and numerically large Huguenot body. In mere numbers
+it dwindled, but it maintained throughout the seventeenth century a very
+high position, both of privilege and (what was its characteristic) of
+money-power; and even to-day, though their birth-rate is, of course,
+lower than the average of the nation, the French Huguenots number close
+upon a million, and are far wealthier, upon the average, than their
+fellow citizens. It is their wealth which dominates the trade of
+certain districts, which exercises so great an effect upon the
+universities, the publishing trade, and the press; and in general lends
+them such weight in the affairs of the nation.
+
+Now the Huguenot had in France a special and permanent quarrel with the
+monarchy, and therefore with the Catholic Church, which, precisely
+because it was not of the vivid and intense kind which is associated
+with popular and universal religions, was the more secretly ubiquitous.
+His quarrel was that, having been highly privileged for nearly a
+century, the member of "a State within a State," and for more than a
+generation free to hold assemblies separate from and often antagonistic
+to the national Government, these privileges had been suddenly removed
+from him by the Government of Louis XIV a century before the Revolution.
+The quarrel was more political than religious; it was a sort of "Home
+Rule" quarrel. For though the Huguenots were spread throughout France,
+they had possessed special cities and territories wherein their spirit
+and, to a certain extent, their private self-government, formed
+_enclaves_ of particularism within the State.
+
+They had held this position, as I have said, for close upon a hundred
+years, and it was not until a date contemporary with the violent
+settlement of the religious trouble in England by the expulsion of James
+II that a similar settlement, less violent, achieved (as it was thought)
+a similar religious unity in France. But that unity was not achieved.
+The Huguenots, though no longer permitted to exist as a State within a
+State, remained, for the hundred years between the Revocation of the
+Edict of Nantes and the outbreak of the Revolution, a powerful and
+ever-watchful body. They stood upon the flank of the attack which
+intellectual scepticism was making upon the Catholic Church, they were
+prepared to take advantage of that scepticism's first political victory,
+and since the Revolution they have been the most powerful and, after the
+Freemasons, with whom they are largely identified, the most strongly
+organised, of the anti-clerical forces in the country.
+
+The Jews, whose action since the Revolution has been so remarkable in
+this same business, were not, in the period immediately preceding it, of
+any considerable influence, and their element in the coalition may be
+neglected.
+
+Such, then, was the position when the Revolution was preparing. Within
+memory of all men living, the Church had become more and more official,
+the masses of the great towns had wholly lost touch with it; the
+intelligence of the country was in the main drawn to the Deist or even
+to the purely sceptical propaganda, the powerful Huguenot body was ready
+prepared for an alliance with any foe of Catholicism, and in the eyes of
+the impoverished town populace--notably in Paris, which had long
+abandoned the practice of religion--the human organisation of the
+Church, the hierarchy, the priesthood, and the few but very wealthy
+religious orders which still lingered on in dwindling numbers, were but
+a portion of the privileged world which the populace hated and was
+prepared to destroy.
+
+It is upon such a spirit and in such conditions of the national
+religious life that the Revolution begins to work. In the National
+Assembly you have the great body of the Commons which determines the
+whole, touched only here and there with men in any way acquainted with
+or devoted to Catholic practice, and those men for the most part
+individual and eccentric, that is, uncatholic, almost in proportion to
+the genuineness of their religious feeling. Among the nobility the
+practice of religion was a social habit with some--as a mental attitude
+the Faith was forgotten among all but a very few. Among the clergy a
+very wealthy hierarchy, no one of them prepared to defend the Church
+with philosophical argument, and almost unanimous in regarding itself as
+a part of the old political machine, was dominant; while the
+representatives of the lower clergy, strongly democratic in character,
+were at first more occupied with the establishment of democracy than
+with the impending attack upon the material and temporal organisation of
+the Church.
+
+Now, that material and temporal organisation offered at the very
+beginning of the debates an opportunity for attack which no other
+department of the old _r�gime_ could show.
+
+The immediate peril of the State was financial. The pretext and even to
+some extent the motive for the calling of the States-General was the
+necessity for finding money. The old fiscal machinery had broken down,
+and as always happens when a fiscal machine breaks down, the hardship it
+involved, and the pressure upon individuals which it involved, appeared
+to be universal. _There was no immediate and easily available fund of
+wealth upon which the Executive could lay hands save the wealth of the
+clergy._
+
+The feudal dues of the nobles, if abandoned, must fall rather to the
+peasantry than to the State. Of the existing taxes few could be
+increased without peril, and none with any prospect of a large
+additional revenue. The charge for debt alone was one-half of the total
+receipts of the State, the deficit was, in proportion to the revenue,
+overwhelming. Face to face with that you had an institution not popular,
+one whose public functions were followed by but a small proportion of
+the population, one in which income was most unequally distributed, and
+one whose feudal property yielded in dues an amount equal to more than a
+quarter of the total revenue of the State. Add to this a system of
+tithes which produced nearly as much again, and it will be apparent
+under what a financial temptation the Assembly lay.
+
+It may be argued, of course, that the right of the Church to this
+ecclesiastical property, whether in land or in tithes, was absolute, and
+that the confiscation of the one or of the other form of revenue was
+mere theft. But such was not the legal conception of the moment. The
+wealth of the Church was not even (and this is most remarkable)
+defended as absolute property by the generality of those who enjoyed it.
+The tone of the debates which suppressed the tithes, and later
+confiscated the Church lands, was a tone of discussion upon legal
+points, precedents, public utility, and so forth. There was not heard in
+it, in any effective degree, the assertion of mere moral right; though
+in that time the moral rights of property were among the first of
+political doctrines.
+
+It was not, however, the confiscation of the Church lands and the
+suppression of the tithe which founded the quarrel between the
+Revolution and the clergy. No financial or economic change is ever more
+than a preparation for, or a permissive condition of, a moral change. It
+is never the cause of a moral change. Even the suppression of the
+religious houses in the beginning of 1790 must not be taken as the point
+of departure in the great quarrel. The religious orders in France were
+at that moment too decayed in zeal and in numbers, too wealthy and much
+too removed from the life of the nation, for this to be the case. The
+true historical point of departure from which we must date the beginning
+of this profound debate between the Revolution and Catholicism, is to be
+found in the morning of the 30th of May, 1790, when a parliamentary
+committee (the Ecclesiastical Committee) presented to the House its plan
+for the reform of the Constitution of the Church in Gaul.
+
+The enormity of that act is now apparent to the whole world. The
+proposal, at the bidding of chance representatives not elected _ad hoc_,
+to change the dioceses and the sees of Catholic France, the decision of
+an ephemeral political body to limit to such and such ties (and very
+feeble they were) the bond between the Church of France and the Holy
+See, the suppression of the Cathedral Chapters, the seemingly farcical
+proposal that bishops should be elected, nay, priests also thus chosen,
+the submission of the hierarchy in the matter of residence and travel to
+a civil authority which openly declared itself indifferent in matters of
+religion,--all this bewilders the modern mind. How, we ask, could men so
+learned, so enthusiastic, so laborious and so closely in touch with all
+the realities of their time, make a blunder of that magnitude? Much
+more, how did such a blunder escape the damnation of universal mockery
+and immediate impotence? The answer is to be discovered in what has just
+been laid down with so much insistence: the temporary eclipse of
+religion in France before the Revolution broke out.
+
+The men who framed the Constitution of the Clergy, the men who voted it,
+nay, even the men who argued against it, all had at the back of their
+minds three conceptions which they were attempting to reconcile: of
+those three conceptions one was wholly wrong, one was imperfect because
+superficial, the third alone was true. And these three conceptions were,
+first, that the Catholic Church was a moribund superstition, secondly,
+that it possessed in its organisation and tradition a power to be
+reckoned with, and thirdly, that the State, its organs, and their
+corporate inheritance of action, were so bound up with the Catholic
+Church that it was impossible to effect any general political settlement
+in which that body both external to France and internal, should be
+neglected.
+
+Of these three conceptions, had the first been as true as the last, it
+would have saved the Constitution of the Clergy and the reputation for
+common-sense of those who framed it.
+
+It was certainly true that Catholicism had for so many centuries been
+bound up in the framework of the State that the Parliament must
+therefore do something with the Church in the general settlement of the
+nation: it could not merely leave the Church on one side.
+
+It was also superficially true that the Church was a power to be
+reckoned with politically, quite apart from the traditional union of
+Church and State--but only superficially true. What the revolutionary
+politicians feared was the intrigue of those who commanded the
+organisation of the Catholic Church, men whom they knew for the most
+part to be without religion, and the sincerity of all of whom they
+naturally doubted. A less superficial and a more solid judgment of the
+matter would have discovered that the real danger lay in the animosity
+or intrigue against the Civil Constitution, not of the corrupt
+hierarchy, but of the sincere though ill-instructed and dwindling
+minority which was still loyally attached to the doctrines and
+discipline of the Church. But even this superficial judgment would not
+have been fatal, had not the judgment of the National Assembly been
+actually erroneous upon the first point--the vitality of the Faith.
+
+Had the Catholic Church been, as nearly all educated men then imagined,
+a moribund superstition, had the phase of decline through which it was
+passing been a phase comparable to that through which other religions
+have passed in their last moments, had it been supported by ancient
+families from mere tradition, clung to by remote peasants from mere
+ignorance and isolation, abandoned (as it was) in the towns simply
+because the towns had better opportunities of intellectual enlightenment
+and of acquiring elementary knowledge in history and the sciences; had,
+in a word, the imaginary picture which these men drew in their minds of
+the Catholic Church and its fortunes been an exact one, then the Civil
+Constitution of the Clergy would have been a statesmanlike act. It would
+have permitted the hold of the Catholic Church upon such districts as it
+still retained to vanish slowly and without shock. It proposed to keep
+alive at a reasonable salary the ministers of a ritual which would
+presumably have lost all vitality before the last of its pensioners was
+dead; it would have prepared a bed, as it were, upon which the last of
+Catholicism in Gaul could peacefully pass away. The action of the
+politicians in framing the Constitution would have seemed more generous
+with every passing decade and their wisdom in avoiding offence to the
+few who still remained faithful, would have been increasingly applauded.
+
+On the other hand, and from the point of view of the statesman, the
+Civil Constitution of the Clergy bound strictly to the State and made
+responsible to it those ancient functions, not yet dead, of the
+episcopacy and all its train. It was a wise and a just consideration on
+the part of the Assembly that religions retain their machinery long
+after they are dead, and if that machinery has ever been a State
+machinery it must remain subject to the control of the State: and
+subject not only up to the moment when the living force which once
+animated it is fled, but much longer; up, indeed, to the moment when the
+surviving institutions of the dead religion break down and perish.
+
+So argued the National Assembly and its committee, and, I repeat, the
+argument was just and statesmanlike, prudent and full of foresight, save
+for one miscalculation. The Catholic Church was not dead, and was not
+even dying. It was exhibiting many of the symptoms which in other
+organisms and institutions correspond to the approach of death, but the
+Catholic Church is an organism and an institution quite unlike any
+other. It fructifies and expands immediately under the touch of a lethal
+weapon; it has at its very roots the conception that material prosperity
+is stifling to it, poverty and misfortune nutritious.
+
+The men of the National Assembly would have acted more wisely had they
+closely studied the story of Ireland (then but little known), or had
+they even made themselves acquainted with the methods by which the
+Catholic Church in Britain, after passing in the fifteenth century
+through a phase somewhat similar to that under which it was sinking in
+Gaul in the eighteenth, was stifled under Henry and Elizabeth.
+
+But the desire of the men of 1789 was not to kill the Church but to let
+it die; they thought it dying. Their desire was only to make that death
+decent and of no hurt to the nation, and to control the political action
+of a hierarchy that had been wealthy and was bound up with the old
+society that was crumbling upon every side.
+
+The Civil Constitution of the Clergy failed: it lit the civil war, it
+dug the pit which divided Catholicism from the Revolution at the moment
+of the foreign invasion, it segregated the loyal priest in such a
+fashion that his order could not but appear to the populace as an order
+of traitors, and it led, in the furnace of 1793, to the great
+persecution from the memories of which the relations between the French
+democracy and the Church have not recovered.
+
+It is important to trace the actual steps of the failure; for when we
+appreciate what the dates were, how short the time which was left for
+judgment or for revision, and how immediately disaster followed upon
+error, we can understand what followed and we can understand it in no
+other way.
+
+If we find an enduring quarrel between two families whose cause of
+contention we cannot seize and whose mutual hostility we find
+unreasonable, to learn that it proceeded from a cataclysm too rapid and
+too violent for either to have exercised judgment upon it will enable us
+to excuse or at least to comprehend the endurance of their antagonism.
+Now, it was a cataclysm which fell upon the relations of the Church and
+State immediately after the error which the Parliament had committed; a
+cataclysm quite out of proportion to their intentions, as indeed are
+most sudden disasters quite out of proportion to the forces that bring
+them about.
+
+It was, as we have seen, in the summer of 1790--upon the 12th of
+July--that the Civil Constitution of the Clergy was approved by the
+Assembly. But it was not until the 26th of August that the King
+consented to sign. Nor was there at the moment any attempt to give the
+law effect. The protests of the bishops, for instance, came out quite at
+leisure, in the month of October, and the active principle of the whole
+of the Civil Constitution--to wit, the presentation of the Civic Oath
+which the clergy were required to take, was not even debated until the
+end of the year.
+
+This Civic Oath, which is sometimes used as a bugbear in the matter, was
+no more than an engagement under the sanction of an oath that the bishop
+or priest taking it would maintain the new _r�gime_--though that
+_r�gime_ included the constitution of the clergy; the oath involved no
+direct breach with Catholic doctrine or practice. It was, indeed, a
+folly to impose it, and it was a folly based upon the ignorance of the
+politicians (and of many of the bishops of the day) as to the nature of
+the Catholic Church. But the oath was not, nor was it intended to be, a
+measure of persecution. Many of the parish clergy took it, and most of
+them probably took it in good faith: nor did it discredit the oath with
+the public that it was refused by all save four of the acting bishops,
+for the condition of the hierarchy in pre-revolutionary France was
+notorious. The action of the bishops appeared in the public eye to be
+purely political, and the ready acceptance of the oath by so many,
+though a minority, of the lower clergy argued strongly in its favour.
+
+Nevertheless, no Catholic priest or bishop or layman could take that
+oath without landing himself in disloyalty to his religion; and that for
+the same reason which led St. Thomas of Canterbury to make his curious
+and fruitful stand against the reasonable and inevitable, as much as
+against the unreasonable, governmental provisions of his time. The
+Catholic Church is an institution of necessity autonomous. It cannot
+admit the right of any other power exterior to its own organisation to
+impose upon it a modification of its discipline, nor, above all, a new
+conception of its hieratic organisation.
+
+The reader must carefully distinguish between the acceptation by the
+Church of a detail of economic reform, the consent to suppress a
+corporation at the request of the civil power, or even to forego certain
+traditional political rights, and the admission of the general principle
+of civil control. To that general principle the Assembly, in framing the
+Constitution of the Clergy, was quite evidently committed. To admit such
+a co-ordinate external and civil power, or rather to admit a _superior_
+external power, is in theory to deny the principle of Catholicism, and
+in practice to make of the Catholic Church what the other State
+religions of Christendom have become.
+
+I have said that not until the end of the year 1790 was the debate
+opened upon the proposition to compel the clergy to take the oath.
+
+It is a singular commentary upon the whole affair that compulsion should
+have been the subject for debate at all. It should have followed, one
+would have imagined, normally from the law. But so exceptional had been
+the action of the Assembly and, as they now were beginning to find, so
+perilous, that a special decree was necessary--and the King's signature
+to it--before this normal consequence of a measure which had been law
+for months, could be acted upon.
+
+Here let the reader pause and consider with what that moment--the end of
+1790--coincided.
+
+The assignats, paper-money issued upon the security of the confiscated
+estates of the Church, had already depreciated 10 per cent. Those who
+had first accepted them were paying throughout France a penny in the
+livre, or as we may put it, a penny farthing on the shilling, for what
+must have seemed to most of them the obstinacy of one single
+corporation--and that an unpopular one--against the decrees of the
+National Assembly.
+
+It was now the moment when a definite reaction against the Revolution
+was first taking shape, and when the populace was first beginning
+uneasily to have suspicion of it; it was the moment when the Court was
+beginning to negotiate for flight; it was the moment when (though the
+populace did not know it) Mirabeau was advising the King with all his
+might to seize upon the enforcement of the priests' oath as an
+opportunity for civil war.
+
+The whole air of that winter was charged with doubt and mystery: in the
+minds of all who had enthusiastically followed the march of the
+Revolution, the short days of that rigorous cold of 1790-91 contained
+passages of despair, and a very brief period was to suffice for making
+the clerical oath not only the test of democracy against reaction, but
+the wedge that should split the nation in two.
+
+With the very opening of the new year, on the 4th of January, the
+bishops and priests in the Assembly were summoned to take the oath to
+the King, the Nation, and the Law; but that law included the Civil
+Constitution of the Clergy, and they refused. Within three months
+Mirabeau was dead, the flight of the King determined on, the suspicion
+of Paris at white heat, the oath taken or refused throughout France,
+and the schismatic priests introduced into their parishes--it may be
+imagined with what a clamour and with how many village quarrels! In that
+same fortnight appeared the papal brief, long delayed, and known as the
+Brief "_Caritas_," denouncing the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. Six
+weeks later, at the end of May, the papal representative at the French
+Court was withdrawn, and in that act religious war declared.
+
+Throughout this quarrel, which was now exactly of a year's duration, but
+the acute phase of which had lasted only six months, every act of either
+party to it necessarily tended to make the conflict more violent. Not
+only was there no opportunity for conciliation, but in the very nature
+of things the most moderate counsel had to range itself on one side or
+the other, and every public act which touched in any way upon the sore
+point, though it touched but indirectly, and with no desire on the part
+of the actors to rouse the passions of the moment, immediately appeared
+as a provocation upon one side or the other.
+
+It was inevitable that it should be so, with a population which had
+abandoned the practice of religion, with the attachment of the clerical
+organisation to the organisation of the old _r�gime_, with the strict
+bond of discipline that united the priesthood of the Church in France
+into one whole, and above all with the necessity under which the
+Revolution was, at this stage, of finding a definite and tangible
+enemy.
+
+This last point is of the very first importance. Public opinion was
+exasperated and inflamed, for the King was known to be an opponent of
+the democratic movement; yet he signed the bills and could not be
+overtly attacked. The Queen was known to be a violent opponent of it;
+but she did not actually govern. The Governments of Europe were known to
+be opponents; but no diplomatic note had yet appeared of which public
+opinion could make an object for attack.
+
+The resistance, therefore, offered by the clergy to the Civil
+Constitution, had just that effect which a nucleus will have in the
+crystallisation of some solution. It polarised the energies of the
+Revolution, it provided a definite foil, a definite negative, a definite
+counterpoint, a definite butt. Here was a simple issue. Men wearing a
+special uniform, pursuing known functions, performing a known part in
+society--to wit, the priests--were now for the most part the enemies of
+the new democratic Constitution that was in preparation. They would not
+take the oath of loyalty to it: they were everywhere in secret rebellion
+against it and, where they were dispossessed of their cures, in open
+rebellion. The clergy, therefore, that is the non-juring clergy (and the
+conforming clergy were an experiment that soon became a fiction), were
+after April 1791, in the eyes of all the democrats of the time, the
+plainest and most tangible form of the opposition to democracy.
+
+To the way in which I have presented the problem a great deal more might
+be added. The very fact that the democratic movement had come after a
+period of unfaith, and was non-Catholic in its springs, would have
+tended to produce that quarrel. So would the necessary attachment of the
+Catholic to authority and the easy confusion between the principle of
+authority and claims of a traditional monarchy. Again, the elements of
+vanity, of material greed, and of a false finality which are to be
+discovered in any purely democratic theory of the State, will between
+them always bring this theory into some conflict with religion. The
+centuries during which the throne and the altar had stood as twin
+symbols, especially in France, the very terminology of religious
+metaphor which had been forged during the centuries of monarchical
+institutions in Europe, helped to found the great quarrel. But, I
+repeat, the overt act without which the quarrel could never have become
+the terribly great thing it did, the master blunder which destroyed the
+unity of the revolutionary movement, was the Civil Constitution of the
+Clergy.
+
+So much for the first year of the schism, May 1790 to May 1791. The
+second year is but an intensification of the process apparent in the
+first.
+
+It opens with the King's flight in June 1791: that is, with the first
+open act of enmity taken against the authority of the National
+Parliament since, two years before, the National Parliament had declared
+itself supreme. Already the Court had been generally identified with the
+resistance of the clergy, and a particular example of this had appeared
+in the opinion that the King's attempted journey to St. Cloud in April
+had been prompted by a desire to have communion at the hands of a
+non-juring priest.[8] When, therefore, the King fled, though his flight
+had nothing whatsoever to do with the clerical quarrel, it was
+associated in men's minds with the clerical quarrel through his attempt
+to leave Paris in April and from a long association of the Court with
+the clerical resistance. The outburst of anti-monarchical feeling which
+followed the flight was at the same time an outburst of anti-clerical
+feeling; but the clergy were everywhere and could be attacked
+everywhere. The Declaration of Pillnitz, which the nation very rightly
+interpreted as the beginning of an armed European advance against the
+French democracy, was felt to be a threat not only in favour of the King
+but in favour also of the rebellious ecclesiastics.
+
+And so forth. The uneasy approach of war throughout that autumn and
+winter of 1791-92, the peculiar transformation of the French
+temperament which war or its approach invariably produces--a sort of
+constructive exaltation and creative passion--began to turn a great part
+of its energy or fury against the very persons of the orthodox priests.
+
+The new Parliament, the "Legislative" as it was called, had not been
+sitting two months when it passed, upon November 29, 1791, the decree
+that non-juring priests should be deprived of their stipend. And here
+again we must note the curious lack of adjustment between law and fact
+in all this clerical quarrel! For more than a year public money had been
+paid to men who, under the law, should not during the whole of that year
+have touched any salary! Yet, as in the case of the oath, special action
+was necessary, and moreover the Parliament added to this tardy and
+logical consequence of the law a declaration that those who had not so
+taken the oath within eight days of their decree should be rendered
+"suspect."
+
+The word "suspect" is significant. The Parliament even now could not
+act, at least it could not act without the King; and this word
+"suspect," which carried no material consequences with it, was one that
+might cover a threat of things worse than regular and legal punishment.
+It was like the mark that some power not authorised or legal makes upon
+the door of those whom that power has singled out for massacre in some
+city.
+
+Three weeks later Louis vetoed the decree refusing stipends to
+non-jurors, and the year 1791 ended with the whole matter in suspense
+but with exasperation increasing to madness.
+
+The first three months of 1792 saw no change. The non-juring clergy were
+still tolerated by the Executive in their illegal position, and, what is
+more extraordinary, still received public money and were still for the
+most part in possession of their cures; the conception that the clergy
+were the prime, or at any rate the most obvious, enemies of the new
+_r�gime_ now hardened into a fixed opinion which the attempted
+persecution of religion, as the one party called it, the obstinate and
+anti-national rebellion of factious priests, as the other party called
+it, was rapidly approaching real persecution and real rebellion.
+
+With April 1792 came the war, and all the passions of the war.
+
+The known hostility of the King to the Revolution was now become
+something far worse: his known sympathy with an enemy under arms. To
+force the King into the open was henceforward the main tactic of the
+revolutionary body.
+
+Now for those whose object was forcing Louis XVI to open declarations of
+hostility against the nation, his religion was an obvious instrument. In
+no point could one come to closer grips with the King than on this
+question of the Church, where already, in December 1791, he had
+exercised his veto.
+
+On May 27, 1792, therefore, Guadet and Vergniaud, the Girondins, moved
+that a priest who had refused to take the oath should be subjected to
+transportation upon the mere demand of any twenty taxpayers within that
+assembly of parishes known as a "Canton." It was almost exactly two
+years since the Civil Constitution of the Clergy had first been reported
+to the House by the Ecclesiastical Committee of the Constituent or
+National Assembly.
+
+It must not be forgotten under what external conditions this violent
+act, the first true act of persecution, was demanded. It was already a
+month since, upon the 20th of April, the war had opened upon the Belgian
+frontier by a disgraceful panic and the murder of General Dillon; almost
+contemporaneous with that breakdown was the corresponding panic and
+flight of the French troops in their advance to Mons. All Europe was
+talking of the facile march upon Paris which could now be undertaken;
+and in general this decree against the priests was but part of the
+exasperated policy which was rising to meet the terror of the invasion.
+
+It was followed, of course, by the decree dismissing the Royal Guard,
+and, rather more than a week later, by the demand for the formation of a
+camp of volunteers under the walls of Paris. But with this we are not
+here concerned. The King vetoed the decree against the non-juring
+priests, and in the wild two months that followed the orthodox clergy
+were, in the mind of the populace, and particularly the populace of
+Paris, identified with the cause of the re-establishment of the old
+_r�gime_ and the success of the invading foreign armies.
+
+With the crash of the 10th of August the persecution began: the true
+persecution, which was to the growing bitterness of the previous two
+years what a blow is to the opening words of a quarrel.
+
+The decree of the 27th of May was put into force within eleven days of
+the fall of the Tuileries. True, it was not put into force in that
+crudity which the Parliament had demanded: the non-juring priests were
+given a fortnight to leave the kingdom, and if they failed to avail
+themselves of the delay were to be transported.
+
+From this date to the end of the Terror, twenty-three months later, the
+story of the relations between the Revolution and the Church, though
+wild and terrible, is simple: it is a story of mere persecution
+culminating in extremes of cruelty and in the supposed uprooting of
+Christianity in France.
+
+The orthodox clergy were everywhere regarded by this time as the typical
+enemies of the revolutionary movement; they themselves regarded the
+revolutionary movement, by this time, as being principally an attempt to
+destroy the Catholic Church.
+
+Within seven months of the fall of the monarchy, from the 18th of March,
+1793, the priests, whether non-juring or schismatic, might, on the
+denunciation of any six citizens, be subjected to transportation.
+
+There followed immediately a general attack upon religion. The attempted
+closing of all churches was, of course, a failure, but it was firmly
+believed that such attachment as yet remained to the Catholic Church was
+due only to the ignorance of the provincial districts which displayed
+it, or to the self-seeking of those who fostered it. The attempt at mere
+"de-christianisation," as it was called, failed, but the months of
+terror and cruelty, the vast number of martyrdoms (for they were no
+less) and the incredible sufferings and indignities to which the priests
+who attempted to remain in the country were subjected, burnt itself, as
+it were, into the very fibre of the Catholic organisation in France, and
+remained, in spite of political theory one way or the other, and in
+spite of the national sympathies of the priesthood, the one great active
+memory inherited from that time.
+
+Conversely, the picture of the priest, his habit and character, as the
+fatal and necessary opponent of the revolutionary theory, became so
+fixed in the mind of the Republican that two generations did nothing to
+eliminate it, and that even in our time the older men, in spite of pure
+theory, cannot rid themselves of an imagined connection between the
+Catholic Church and an international conspiracy against democracy. Nor
+does this non-rational but very real feeling lack support from the
+utterances of those who, in opposing the political theory of the French
+Revolution, consistently quote the Catholic Church as its necessary and
+holy antagonist.
+
+The attempt to "de-christianise" France failed, as I have said,
+completely. Public worship was restored, and the Concordat of Napoleon
+was believed to have settled the relations between Church and State in a
+permanent fashion. We have lived to see it dissolved; but this
+generation will not see, nor perhaps the generation succeeding it, the
+issue of the struggle between two bodies of thought which are divided by
+no process of reason, but profoundly divorced by the action of vivid and
+tragic historical memories.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[8] This opinion has entered into so many Protestant and non-Catholic
+histories of the Revolution that it is worth criticising once again in
+this little book. The King was perfectly free to receive communion
+privately from the hands of orthodox priests, did so receive it, and had
+received communion well within the canonical times. There was little
+ecclesiastical reason for the attempted leaving of Paris for St. Cloud
+on Monday the 18th April, 1791, save the _custom_ (not the religious
+duty) of communicating in public on Easter Sunday itself; it was a
+political move.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+  Alexander the Great, 144
+  Argonne, the, 156
+  Arras, 132, 137
+  Artois, Comte d', 105
+  Avignon, 111
+
+  Bacharach, 173
+  Bailly, 71, 95
+  Barentin, 89
+  Barr�re, 80, 125, 130, 131
+  Bastille, the, 95, 105, 109, 115
+  Beauregard, 200
+  Belgium, 123, 167, 169, 173
+  Bergues, 191
+  Bordeaux, 135
+  Bouill�, 107, 152
+  Brissot, 110, 130
+  Brunswick, Duke of, 115, 118, 178
+  Brussels, 168
+
+  C�sar, 144
+  Calonne, 46
+  Cambon, 125
+  Carignan, 200
+  Carlyle, Thomas, 68
+  Carnot, 72-74, 80, 81, 136, 139, 171, 184, 186, 195, 197, 198, 200,
+    201
+  Cassel, 192
+  Chal�ns, 107, 158
+  Champ-de-Mars, Massacre of, 109
+  Champfleury, 77
+  Charleroi, 210, 211
+  Charles I of England, 222
+  Chollet, 128
+  Clerfayt, 206, 207, 209
+  Coblentz, 115
+  Coburg, 170, 173, 176, 177, 179, 186, 188, 196, 210
+  Committee of Public Safety, 78, 79, 80, 81, 119, 125, 126, 128, 129,
+    131, 134, 136, 137, 140, 183, 195, 196, 203
+  Cond�, 106
+  Cond�, fortress of, 135, 173, 177, 178, 180, 182, 183, 186, 195
+  Condorcet, 71
+  _Contrat Social_, 21, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 37, 125, 133
+  Coudequerque, 192
+  Couthon, 131
+  Custine, 177, 178, 179, 180
+
+  Danton, 64, 67-72, 73, 81, 82, 109, 117, 119, 120, 125, 130, 131, 135,
+    137, 138, 139, 150, 162, 184, 185
+  Desmoulins, 138
+  Dillon, General, 250
+  Drouet, 108
+  Dumouriez, 43, 65-67, 113, 123, 124, 125, 155, 157, 158, 159, 162,
+    163, 165, 168, 169, 170, 173
+  Dunquerque, 135, 136, 181, 185, 186, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 195
+
+  England, 14, 124, 145
+  Elizabeth, Queen of England, 239
+  Esquelbecque, 191
+
+  Fersen, Count Axel de, 53
+  Fleurus, 211, 212
+  Fontenay, 128
+  Fontenoy, 149, 166
+  Fouch�, 74
+  Freemasonry, 71, 231
+  Freytag, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194
+  Furnes, 190, 194
+
+  George III of England, 63
+  Gironde, 110
+  _Girondins, The_, 110, 112, 119, 122, 123, 129, 249
+  Grandpr�, 158
+  Guadet, 249
+  Guise, 198, 200
+
+  Haguenau, 202
+  Haine, the River, 167
+  H�bert, 138
+  Henry VIII of England, 222, 229, 239
+  Hesse-Cassel, Landgrave of, 113
+  Hoche, 202
+  Holland, 124, 163
+  Hoondschoote, 74, 136, 195, 196, 197
+  Houchard, 179, 181, 192, 193, 194, 195, 198
+  Howe, Lord, 213
+
+  Ireland, 239
+  Isnard, 110
+
+  James II of England, 230
+  Jefferson, 21
+  Jemappes, 123, 166, 167
+  Joseph II of Austria, 112, 163, 165
+  Jourdan, 198
+
+  Kaiserslautern, 202
+  Kaunitz, 155
+  Kellermann, 159, 160
+  Kilmaine, 180, 181
+
+  La Fayette, 43, 51, 61-65, 95, 100, 109, 114
+  Lamballe, Princess de, 53, 71
+  Landau, 177, 202, 203
+  Lebas, 141
+  Leipsic, 143, 214
+  Lequesnoy, 177, 186, 195
+  Linselles, 189
+  Longwy, 115, 118, 156
+  Lorraine, 118
+  Louis XIV of France, 100, 225, 230
+  Louis XVI of France, vi, 37-45, 71, 84, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92,
+    93, 95, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 107, 108, 109, 111, 114,
+    117, 123, 124, 152, 153, 243, 245, 246, 247, 248, 249, 250
+  Louis XVII of France, 135
+  Louvre, the, 116, 117
+  Luxembourg, 118
+  Lyons, 129, 136, 182, 183
+  Lys, the River, 206, 207
+
+  Machecoul, 128
+  Maestricht, 168
+  Malo-les-Bains, 194
+  Marat, 74-77, 120, 135, 183
+  Marcel, 120
+  Marchionnes, 189
+  Marie Antoinette, Queen of France, vi, 45-53, 63, 64, 90, 99, 100,
+    101, 102, 103, 106, 107, 108, 109, 113, 116, 117, 138, 139, 152,
+    153, 155, 245
+  Marque, the River, 206
+  "Marseillaise," the, 116
+  Marseilles, 116, 131, 135, 182
+  Maubeuge, 136, 177, 178, 181, 196, 197, 202
+  Mayence, 135, 173, 177, 178
+  Merda, 142
+  Metz, 159
+  Michelet, 68
+  Mirabeau, 44, 53-61, 64, 70, 72, 102, 103, 104, 106, 107, 243
+  Mons, 167, 177, 250
+  Montm�dy, 107
+  Mouveau, 206
+
+  Namur, 179
+  Nantes, 128, 131, 136, 137, 182
+  Napoleon I, 66, 67, 72, 143, 150, 205, 214, 253
+  Narbonne, 43, 155
+  Necker, 46, 90, 94, 95
+  Neerwinden, 124, 125, 128, 169
+
+  Orleans, 128
+  Orleans, Duke of, 109
+
+  Parthenay, 128
+  Pichegru, 202
+  Pillnitz, 154, 247
+  Poland, 31
+  Polignac, Madame de, 53
+  Pollio, 120
+
+  Redange, 118
+  Robespierre, 77-83, 111, 112, 132, 133, 134, 140, 141, 142, 213
+  Robinet, Dr., 120
+  Roland, 110
+  Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 20, 21, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35,
+    36, 37, 125
+  Russia, 14
+
+  St. Amand, 206
+  Saint-Andr�, Jeanbon, 80, 131, 185
+  St. Cloud, 108, 247
+  Saint-Just, 80, 131, 133, 140, 141, 210
+  St. Menehould, 159
+  Scheldt, the, 123, 183, 205, 206
+  Sedan, 114
+  Servia, 155
+  Si�yes, 87
+  Spain, 24, 44, 124, 150
+
+  Talavera, 189
+  Talleyrand, 150
+  Terror, the, 79, 80, 81, 82, 120, 137, 139, 140, 142, 251
+  Tetteghem, 191
+  Thouars, 128
+  Toulon, 135, 136, 182, 183, 203
+  Tourcoing, 189, 206, 208, 209
+  Tournay, 210
+  Trafalgar, 213
+  Tuileries, the, 100, 101, 116, 121, 251
+
+  Valenciennes, 129, 135, 169, 173, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183,
+    186, 195
+  Valmy, 121, 122, 131, 158, 159, 160, 169
+  Varennes, 107, 108, 154
+  Vend�e, 128, 135, 203
+  Verdun, 118, 120, 156, 157
+  Vergniaud, 110, 130, 249
+  Versailles, 52, 94, 99, 100, 102, 152, 153
+  Vienna, 163, 210
+
+  Warcoing, 205
+  Waterloo, 143
+  Wattignies, 73, 136, 201, 208
+  Wellington, Duke of, 189
+  Westermann, 131
+  Wilder, 191
+  Wissembourg, 202
+  Wormhoudt, 191
+  Wurmser, 178
+
+  York, Duke of, 179, 181, 186, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 194, 205, 208,
+    209
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_Richard Clay & Sons, Limited, London and Bungay._
+
+
+
+
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The French Revolution, by Hilaire Belloc
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The French Revolution
+
+Author: Hilaire Belloc
+
+Release Date: February 8, 2011 [EBook #35215]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FRENCH REVOLUTION ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Steven Gibbs, Richard J. Shiffer and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+  THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
+
+  BY
+
+  HILAIRE BELLOC, M.A.
+
+
+  AUTHOR OF "DANTON," "ROBESPIERRE," "MARIE ANTOINETTE," "THE OLD ROAD,"
+  "THE PATH TO ROME," "PARIS," "THE HILLS AND THE SEA," "THE HISTORIC
+  THAMES," ETC., ETC.
+
+
+  LONDON
+
+  WILLIAMS AND NORGATE
+
+
+  RICHARD CLAY AND SONS, LIMITED,
+  BRUNSWICK STREET, STAMFORD STREET, S.E.,
+  AND BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+The object of these few pages is not to recount once more the history of
+the Revolution: that can be followed in any one of a hundred text-books.
+Their object is rather to lay, if that be possible, an explanation of it
+before the English reader; so that he may understand both what it was
+and how it proceeded, and also why certain problems hitherto unfamiliar
+to Englishmen have risen out of it.
+
+First, therefore, it is necessary to set down, clearly without modern
+accretion, that political theory which was a sort of religious creed,
+supplying the motive force of the whole business; of the new Civil Code
+as of the massacres; of the panics and capitulations as of the
+victories; of the successful transformation of society as of the
+conspicuous failures in detail which still menace the achievement of the
+Revolution.
+
+This grasped, the way in which the main events followed each other, and
+the reason of their interlocking and proceeding as they did must be put
+forward--not, I repeat, in the shape of a chronicle, but in the shape of
+a thesis. Thus the reader must know not only that the failure of the
+royal family's flight was followed by war, but how and why it was
+followed by war. He must not only appreciate the severity of the
+government of the great Committee, but why that severity was present,
+and of the conditions of war upon which it reposed. But in so explaining
+the development of the movement it is necessary to select for
+appreciation as the chief figures the characters of the time, since upon
+their will and manner depended the fate of the whole. For instance, had
+the Queen been French either in blood or in sympathy, had the King been
+alert, had any one character retained the old religious motives, all
+history would have been changed, and this human company must be seen if
+its action and drama are to be comprehended.
+
+The reader interested in that capital event should further seize (and
+but too rarely has an opportunity for seizing) its military aspect; and
+this difficulty of his proceeds from two causes: the first, that
+historians, even when they recognise the importance of the military side
+of some past movement, are careless of the military aspect, and think
+it sufficient to relate particular victories and general actions. The
+military aspect of any period does not consist in these, but in the
+campaigns of which actions, however decisive, are but incidental parts.
+In other words, the reader must seize the movement and design of armies
+if he is to seize a military period, and these are not commonly given
+him. In the second place, the historian, however much alive to the
+importance of military affairs, too rarely presents them as part of a
+general position. He will make his story a story of war, or again, a
+story of civilian development, and the reader will fail to see how the
+two combine.
+
+Now, the Revolution, more than any other modern period, turns upon, and
+is explained by, its military history. On this account has so
+considerable a space been devoted to the explaining of that feature.
+
+The reader will note, again, that the quarrel between the Revolution and
+the Catholic Church has also been dealt with at length.
+
+To emphasise this aspect of the revolutionary struggle may seem unusual
+and perhaps deserves a word of apology.
+
+The reader is invited to consider the fact that the Revolution took
+place in a country which had, in the first place, definitely determined
+during the religious struggle of the sixteenth and seventeenth
+centuries to remain in communion with Rome; and had, in the second
+place, admitted a very large and important body of converts to the
+doctrines of the Reformation.
+
+The determination of the French people, in the crisis of 1572-1610, to
+remain Catholic under a strong central Government, was a capital point
+in the future history of France. So was the presence of a wealthy, very
+large, and highly cultivated body of dissentients in the midst of the
+nation. The two phenomena hardly co-existed elsewhere in Europe. Between
+them they lent to the political history of France a peculiar character
+which the nineteenth century, even more than the Revolution itself, has
+emphasised; and it is the opinion of the present writer that it is
+impossible to understand the Revolution unless very high relief is given
+to the religious problem.
+
+If a personal point may be noted, the fact that the writer of these
+pages is himself a Catholic and in political sympathy strongly attached
+to the political theory of the Revolution, should not be hidden from the
+reader. Such personal conditions have perhaps enabled him to treat the
+matter more thoroughly than it might have been treated by one who
+rejected either Republicanism upon the one hand, or Catholicism upon the
+other; but he believes that no personal and therefore exaggerated note
+has been allowed to intrude upon his description of what is a definite
+piece of objective history lying in the field of record rather than in
+that of opinion.
+
+Some years ago the paramount importance of the quarrel between the
+Church and the Revolution might still have been questioned by men who
+had no personal experience of the struggle, and of its vast results.
+To-day the increasing consequences and the contemporary violence of that
+quarrel make its presentation an essential part of any study of the
+period.
+
+The scheme thus outlined will show why I have given this sketch the
+divisions in which it lies.
+
+                                             H. BELLOC.
+
+  _King's Land,
+    January 1911._
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+                                                                   PAGE
+
+      PREFACE                                                         v
+
+    I THE POLITICAL THEORY OF THE REVOLUTION                         13
+
+   II ROUSSEAU                                                       29
+
+  III THE CHARACTERS OF THE REVOLUTION:
+      King Louis XVI                                                 37
+      The Queen                                                      45
+      Mirabeau                                                       53
+      La Fayette                                                     61
+      Dumouriez                                                      65
+      Danton                                                         67
+      Carnot                                                         72
+      Marat                                                          74
+      Robespierre                                                    77
+
+   IV THE PHASES OF THE REVOLUTION:
+        i. From May 1789 to 17th of July 1789                        83
+       ii. From the 17th of July 1789 to the 6th of October 1789     98
+      iii. From October 1789 to June 1791                           102
+       iv. From June 1791 to September 1792                         108
+        v. From the Invasion of September 1792 to the Establishment
+           of the Committee of Public Safety, April 1793            118
+       vi. From April 1793 to July 1794                             126
+
+    V THE MILITARY ASPECT OF THE REVOLUTION                         142
+      One                                                           145
+      Two                                                           156
+      Three                                                         163
+      Four                                                          179
+      Five                                                          204
+
+   VI THE REVOLUTION AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH                        214
+
+     INDEX                                                          255
+
+
+
+
+THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+THE POLITICAL THEORY OF THE REVOLUTION
+
+
+The political theory upon which the Revolution proceeded has, especially
+in this country, suffered ridicule as local, as ephemeral, and as
+fallacious. It is universal, it is eternal, and it is true.
+
+It may be briefly stated thus: that a political community pretending to
+sovereignty, that is, pretending to a moral right of defending its
+existence against all other communities, derives the civil and temporal
+authority of its laws not from its actual rulers, nor even from its
+magistracy, but from itself.
+
+But the community cannot express authority unless it possesses
+_corporate initiative_; that is, unless the mass of its component units
+are able to combine for the purpose of a common expression, are
+conscious of a common will, and have something in common which makes the
+whole sovereign indeed.
+
+It may be that this power of corporate initiative and of corresponding
+corporate expression is forbidden to men. In that case no such thing as
+a sovereign community can be said to exist. In that case "patriotism,"
+"public opinion," "the genius of a people," are terms without meaning.
+But the human race in all times and in all places has agreed that such
+terms have meaning, and the conception that a community can so live,
+order and be itself, is a human conception as consonant to the nature of
+man as is his sense of right and wrong; it is much more intimately a
+part of that nature than are the common accidents determining human
+life, such as nourishment, generation or repose: nay, more intimate a
+part of it than anything which attaches to the body.
+
+This theory of political morals, though subject to a limitless
+degradation in practice, underlies the argument of every man who
+pretends to regard the conduct of the State as a business affecting the
+conscience of citizens. Upon it relies every protest against tyranny and
+every denunciation of foreign aggression.
+
+He that is most enamoured of some set machinery for the government of
+men, and who regards the sacramental function of an hereditary monarch
+(as in Russia), the organic character of a native oligarchy (as in
+England), the mechanical arrangement of election by majorities, or even
+in a crisis the intense conviction and therefore the intense activity
+and conclusive power of great crowds as salutary to the State, will
+invariably, if any one of these engines fail him in the achievement of
+what he desires for his country, fall back upon the doctrine of an
+ultimately sovereign community. He will complain that though an
+election has defeated his ideal, yet true national tradition and true
+national sentiment were upon his side. If he defends the action of a
+native oligarchy against the leaders of the populace, he does so by an
+explanation (more or less explicit) that the oligarchy is more truly
+national, that is more truly communal, than the engineered expression of
+opinion of which the demagogues (as he will call them) have been the
+mouthpieces. Even in blaming men for criticising or restraining an
+hereditary monarch the adherent of that monarch will blame them upon the
+ground that their action is anti-national, that is anti-communal; and,
+in a word, no man pretending to sanity can challenge in matters temporal
+and civil the ultimate authority of whatever is felt to be (though with
+what difficulty is it not defined!) the general civic sense which builds
+up a State.
+
+Those words "civil" and "temporal" must lead the reader to the next
+consideration; which is, that the last authority of all does not reside
+even in the community.
+
+It must be admitted by all those who have considered their own nature
+and that of their fellow beings that the ultimate authority in any act
+is God. Or if the name of God sound unusual in an English publication
+to-day, then what now takes the place of it for many (an imperfect
+phrase), "the moral sense."
+
+Thus if there be cast together in some abandoned place a community of a
+few families so depraved or so necessitous that, against the teachings
+of their own consciences, and well knowing that what they are doing is
+what we call _wrong_, yet they will unanimously agree to do it, then
+that agreement of theirs, though certainly no temporal or civil
+authority can be quoted against it, is yet unjustifiable. Another
+authority lies behind. Still more evidently would this be true if, of
+say, twelve, seven decided (knowing the thing to be wrong) that the
+wrong thing should be done, five stood out for the right--and yet the
+majority possessed by the seven should be determined a sufficient
+authority for the wrongful command.
+
+But it is to be noted that this axiom only applies where the authority
+of the moral law (God, as the author of this book, with due deference to
+his readers, would prefer to say) is recognised and yet flouted. If
+those twelve families do sincerely believe such and such a general
+action to be right, then not only is their authority when they carry it
+into practice a civil and a temporal authority; it is an authority
+absolute in all respects; and further, if, upon a division of opinion
+among them not perhaps a bare majority, nay, perhaps not a majority at
+all, but at any rate a determinant current of opinion--determinant in
+intensity and in weight, that is, as well as in numbers--declares an
+action to be right, then that determinant weight of opinion gives to its
+resolve a political authority not only civil and temporal but absolute.
+Beyond it and above it there is no appeal.
+
+In other words, men may justly condemn, and justly have in a thousand
+circumstances condemned, the theory that a mere decision on the major
+part of the community was necessarily right in morals. It is, for that
+matter, self-evident that if one community decides in one fashion,
+another, also sovereign, in the opposite fashion, both cannot be right.
+Reasoning men have also protested, and justly, against the conception
+that what a majority in numbers, or even (what is more compelling still)
+a unanimity of decision in a community may order, may not only be wrong
+but may be something which that community has no authority to order
+since, though it possesses a civil and temporal authority, it acts
+against that ultimate authority which is its own consciousness of right.
+Men may and do justly protest against the doctrine that a community is
+incapable of doing deliberate evil; it is as capable of such an action
+as is an individual. But men nowhere do or can deny that the community
+acting as it thinks right is ultimately sovereign: there is no
+alternative to so plain a truth.
+
+Let us take it, then, as indubitable that where civil government is
+concerned, the community is supreme, if only from the argument that no
+organ within the community can prove its right to withstand the
+corporate will when once that corporate will shall find expression.
+
+All arguments which are advanced against this prime axiom of political
+ethics are, when they are analysed, found to repose upon a confusion of
+thought. Thus a man will say, "This doctrine would lead my country to
+abandon her suzerainty over that other nation, but were I to consent to
+this, I should be weakening my country, to which I owe allegiance." The
+doctrine compels him to no such muddlement. The community of which he is
+a member is free to make its dispositions for safety, and is bound to
+preserve its own life. It is for the oppressed to protest and to rebel.
+
+Similarly, men think that this doctrine in some way jars with the actual
+lethargy and actual imbecility of men in their corporate action. It does
+nothing of the kind. This lethargy, that imbecility, and all the other
+things that limit the application of the doctrine, in no way touch its
+right reason, any more than the fact that the speech of all men is
+imperfect contradicts the principle that man has a moral right to
+self-expression. That a dumb man cannot speak at all, but must write,
+is, so far from a contradiction, a proof of the truth that speech is the
+prime expression of man; and in the same way a community utterly without
+the power of expressing its corporate will is no contradiction, but a
+proof, of the general rule that such expression and the imposing of such
+decisions are normal to mankind. The very oddity of the contrast between
+the abnormal and the normal aids us in our decision, and when we see a
+people conquered and not persuaded, yet making no attempt at rebellion,
+or a people free from foreign oppression yet bewildered at the prospect
+of self-government, the oddity of the phenomenon proves our rule.
+
+But though all this be true, there stands against the statement of our
+political axiom not a contradiction added, but a criticism; and all men
+with some knowledge of their fellows and of themselves at once perceive,
+_first_, that the psychology of corporate action differs essentially
+from the psychology of individual action, and _secondly_, that in
+proportion to the number, the discussions, the lack of intimacy, and in
+general the friction of the many, corporate action by a community,
+corporate self-realisation and the imposition of a corporate will,
+varies from the difficult to the impossible.
+
+On this no words need be wasted. All men who reason and who observe are
+agreed that, in proportion to distance, numbers, and complexity, the
+difficulty of self-expression within a community increases. We may get
+in a lively people explosions of popular will violent, acute, and
+certainly real; but rare. We may attempt with a people more lethargic to
+obtain some reflection of popular will through the medium of a permanent
+machinery of deputation which, less than any other, perhaps, permits a
+great community to express itself truly. We may rely upon the national
+sympathies of an aristocracy or of a king. But in any case we know that
+large communities can only indirectly and imperfectly express themselves
+where the permanent government of their whole interest is concerned. Our
+attachment, which may be passionate, to the rights of the Common Will we
+must satisfy either by demanding a loose federation of small,
+self-governing states, or submitting the central government of large
+ones to occasional insurrection and to violent corporate expressions of
+opinion which shall readjust the relations between the governor and the
+governed.
+
+All this is true: but such a criticism of the theory in political morals
+which lay behind the Revolution, the theory that the community is
+sovereign, is no contradiction. It only tells us that pure right cannot
+act untrammelled in human affairs and that it acts in some conditions
+more laboriously than in others: it gives not a jot of authority to any
+alternative thesis.[1]
+
+Such is the general theory of the Revolution to which the command of
+Jean Jacques Rousseau over the French tongue gave imperishable
+expression in that book whose style and logical connection may be
+compared to some exact and strong piece of engineering. He entitled it
+the _Contrat Social_, and it became the formula of the Revolutionary
+Creed. But though no man, perhaps, has put the prime truth of political
+morals so well, that truth was as old as the world; it appears in the
+passionate rhetoric of a hundred leaders and has stood at the head or
+has been woven into the laws of free States without number. In the
+English language the Declaration of Independence is perhaps its noblest
+expression. And though this document was posterior to the great work of
+Rousseau and (through the genius of Jefferson) was in some part
+descended from it, its language, and still more the actions of those who
+drafted and supported it, are sufficient to explain what I mean to
+English readers.
+
+Now with this general theory there stand connected on the one hand
+certain great principles without which it would have no meaning, and
+also on the other hand a number of minor points concerning no more than
+the machinery of politics. The first are vital to democracy. The second,
+in spite of their great popularity at the time of the Revolution and of
+the sanction which the Revolution gave them, nay, of their universality
+since the Revolution, have in reality nothing to do with the
+revolutionary theory itself.
+
+Of these two categories the type of the first is the doctrine of the
+equality of man; the type of the second is the mere machinery called
+"representative."
+
+The doctrine of the equality of the man is a transcendent doctrine: a
+"dogma," as we call such doctrines in the field of transcendental
+religion. It corresponds to no physical reality which we can grasp, it
+is hardly to be adumbrated even by metaphors drawn from physical
+objects. We may attempt to rationalise it by saying that what is common
+to all men is not _more_ important but _infinitely more_ important than
+the accidents by which men differ. We may compare human attributes to
+tri-dimensional, and personal attributes to bi-dimensional measurements;
+we may say that whatever man has of his nature is the standard of man,
+and we may show that in all such things men are potentially equal. None
+of these metaphors explains the matter; still less do any of them
+satisfy the demand of those to whom the dogma may be incomprehensible.
+
+Its truth is to be arrived at (for these) in a negative manner. If men
+are _not_ equal then no scheme of jurisprudence, no act of justice, no
+movement of human indignation, no exaltation of fellowship, has any
+meaning. The doctrine of the equality of man is one which, like many of
+the great transcendental doctrines, may be proved by the results
+consequent upon its absence. It is in man to believe it--and all lively
+societies believe it.
+
+It is certainly not in man to prove the equality of men save, as I have
+said, by negation; but it demands no considerable intellectual faculty
+to perceive that, void of the doctrine of equality, the conception of
+political freedom and of a community's moral right to self-government
+disappear. Now to believe that doctrine positively, and to believe it
+ardently, to go on crusade for that religious point, was indeed
+characteristic of the French. It required the peculiar and inherited
+religious temper of the French which had for so many hundred years
+seized and defined point after point in the character of man, to grow
+enamoured of this definition and to feel it not in the intellect, but as
+it were in their bones. They became soldiers for it, and that enormous
+march of theirs, overrunning Europe, which may not inaptly be compared
+to their adventures in the twelfth century, when they engaged upon the
+Crusades, was inspired by no one part of the doctrine of political
+freedom more strongly than by this doctrine of equality.
+
+The scorn which was in those days universally felt for that pride which
+associates itself with things not inherent to a man (notably and most
+absurdly with capricious differences of wealth) never ran higher; and
+the passionate sense of justice which springs from this profound and
+fundamental social dogma of equality, as it moved France during the
+Revolution to frenzy, so also moved it to creation.
+
+Those who ask how it was that a group of men sustaining all the weight
+of civil conflict within and of universal war without, yet made time
+enough in twenty years to frame the codes which govern modern Europe, to
+lay down the foundations of universal education, of a strictly
+impersonal scheme of administration, and even in detail to remodel the
+material face of society--in a word, to make modern Europe--must be
+content for their reply to learn that the Republican Energy had for its
+flame and excitant this vision: a sense almost physical of the equality
+of man.
+
+The minor points which wove themselves into the political practice of
+democracy during the Revolution, which are not of its principles, and
+which would not, were they abstracted, affect its essence, are of quite
+another and less noble kind. I have taken as the chief of these the
+machinery of deputation or of "representation."
+
+The representative system had been designed for a particular purpose
+under the influence of the Church and especially of the monastic orders
+(who invented it) in the Middle Ages. It had been practised as a useful
+check upon the national monarchy in France, and as a useful form of
+national expression in times of crisis or when national initiative was
+peculiarly demanded.
+
+In Spain it became, as the Middle Ages proceeded, a very vital national
+and local thing, varying from place to place. It is not surprising that
+Spain (seeing that in her territory the first experiments in
+representation were made) should have thus preserved it, popular and
+alive.
+
+In England Representation, vigorous as everywhere else in the true
+Middle Ages, narrowed and decayed at their close, until in the
+seventeenth century it had become a mere scheme for aristocratic
+government.
+
+In France for nearly two hundred years before the Revolution it had
+fallen into disuse, but an active memory of it still remained;
+especially a memory of its value in critical moments when a consultation
+of the whole people was required, and when the corporate initiative of
+the whole people must be set at work in order to save the State.
+
+It is no wonder, therefore, that the French, on the eve of the
+Revolution, clamoured for a revival of representation, or, as the system
+was called in the French tongue, "the States-General." But as a
+permanent machine of government no one in Europe had the least idea how
+the system might serve the ends of democracy. In England democracy was
+not practised nor was representation connected with the conception of
+it. The nation had forgotten democracy as completely as it had forgotten
+the religion and the old ideals of the Middle Ages.
+
+In those parts of Christendom in which this ancient Christian
+institution of a parliament had not narrowed to be the mask of an
+oligarchy or dwindled to be a mere provincial custom, its use had
+disappeared. The ancient function of Representation, when it had been
+most lively and vigorous, that is, in the Middle Ages, was occasionally
+to initiate a national policy in critical moments, but more generally to
+grant taxes. What a democratic parliament might do, no one in 1789 could
+conceive.
+
+There was indeed one great example of democratic representation in
+existence: the example of the United States; but the conditions were
+wholly different from those of Europe. No true central power yet existed
+there; no ancient central institution, no Crown nor any Custom of the
+City. The numbers over which American representative democracy then held
+power were not to be compared to the twenty-five millions who inhabited
+the French realm. And even so, most of what counted in their lives was
+regulated by a system of highly local autonomy: for they were as
+scattered as they were few, and the wisest and strongest and best were
+dependent upon slaves. In Europe, I repeat, the experiment was untried;
+and it is one of the chief faults of the French revolutionaries that,
+having been compelled in the critical moment of the opening of the
+Revolution to the use of election and representation, they envisaged the
+permanent use of a similar machinery as a something sacred to and normal
+in the democratic State.
+
+True, they could not foresee modern parliamentarism. Nothing could be
+more alien to their conception of the State than the deplorable method
+of government which parliamentarism everywhere tends to introduce
+to-day.
+
+True, the French people during the revolutionary wars made short work of
+parliamentary theory, and found it a more national thing to follow a
+soldier (being by that time all soldiers themselves), and to incarnate
+in a dictator the will of the nation.
+
+But though the French revolutionaries could not have foreseen what we
+call "Parliamentarism" to-day, and though the society from which they
+sprang made short work of the oligarchic pretensions of a parliament
+when the realities of the national struggle had to be considered, yet
+they did as a fact pay an almost absurd reverence to the machinery of
+representation and election.
+
+They went so far as to introduce it into their attempted reform of the
+Church; they introduced it everywhere into civil government, from the
+smallest units to the highest. They even for a moment played with the
+illusion in that most real of games which men can ever play at--the
+business of arms: they allowed the election of officers. They were led
+to do this by that common fallacy, more excusable in them than in us,
+which confounds the individual will with the corporate. A representative
+(they thought) could in some way be the permanent receptacle of his
+electorate. They imagined that corporate initiative was always
+sufficiently active, in no matter what divisions or subdivisions, to
+react at once upon the delegate, to guide him as may be guided a driven
+animal, or to command him as may be commanded a servant.
+
+It was in vain that Rousseau, the great exponent of the democratic
+theory upon which France attempted to proceed, had warned posterity
+against the possible results of the representative system: they fell
+into the error, and it possesses many of their descendants to this day.
+
+Rousseau's searching mind perceived indeed no more than the general
+truth that men who consent to a representative system are free only
+while the representatives are not sitting. But (as is so often the case
+with intuitions of genius) though he saw not the whole of the evil, he
+had put his finger upon its central spot, and from that main and just
+principle which he laid down--that under a merely representative system
+men cannot be really free--flow all those evils which we now know to
+attach to this method of government. What a rather clumsy epigram has
+called "the audacity of elected persons" is part of this truth. The
+evident spectacle of modern parliamentary nations driven against their
+will into economic conditions which appal them, proceeds again from the
+same truth; the conspicuous and hearty contempt into which parliamentary
+institutions have everywhere fallen again proceeds from it, and there
+proceeds from it that further derivative plague that the representatives
+themselves have now everywhere become more servile than the electorate
+and that in all parliamentary countries a few intriguers are the
+unworthy depositories of power, and by their service of finance permit
+the money-dealers to govern us all to-day. Rousseau, I say, the chief
+prophet of the Revolution, had warned the French of this danger. It is a
+capital example of his talent, for the experiment of democratic
+representation had not yet, in his time, been tried. But much more is
+that power of his by which he not only stamped and issued the gold of
+democracy as it had never till then been minted. No one man makes a
+people or their creed, but Rousseau more than any other man made vocal
+the creed of a people, and it is advisable or necessary for the reader
+of the Revolution to consider at the outset of his reading of what
+nature was Rousseau's abundant influence upon the men who remodelled the
+society of Europe between 1789 and 1794.
+
+Why did he dominate those five years, and how was it that he dominated
+them increasingly?
+
+An explanation of Rousseau's power merits a particular digression, for
+few who express themselves in the English tongue have cared to
+understand it, and in the academies provincial men have been content to
+deal with this great writer as though he were in some way inferior to
+themselves.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] We need not waste any time upon those who talk about such and such a
+form of government being good because "it works." The use of such
+language connotes that the user of it is fatigued by the effort of
+thought. For what is "working," _i.e._ successful action, in any sphere?
+The attainment of certain ends in that sphere. What are those ends in a
+State? If material well-being, then there is an end to talk of
+patriotism, the nation, public opinion and the rest of it which, as we
+all very well know, men always have regarded and always will regard as
+the supreme matters of public interest. If the end is not material
+well-being, but a sense of political freedom and of the power of the
+citizen to react upon the State, then to say that an institution "works"
+though apparently not democratic, is simply to say that under such and
+such conditions that institution achieves the ends of democracy most
+nearly. In other words, to contrast the good "working" of an institution
+superficially undemocratic with democratic theory is meaningless. The
+institution "works" in proportion as it satisfies that political sense
+which perfect democracy would, were it attainable, completely satisfy.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+ROUSSEAU
+
+
+In order to appreciate what Rousseau meant to the revolutionary
+movement, it is necessary to consider the effect of style upon men.
+
+Men are influenced by the word. Spoken or written, the _word_ is the
+organ of persuasion and, therefore, of moral government.
+
+Now, degraded as that term has become in our time, there is no proper
+term to express the exact use of words save the term "style."
+
+What words we use, and in what order we put them, is the whole matter of
+style; and a man desiring to influence his fellow men has therefore not
+one, but two co-related instruments at his disposal. He cannot use one
+without the other. The weakness of the one will ruin the other. These
+two instruments are his idea and his style.
+
+However powerful, native, sympathetic to his hearers' mood or cogently
+provable by reference to new things may be a man's idea, he cannot
+persuade his fellow men to it if he have not words that express it. And
+he will persuade them more and more in proportion as his words are well
+chosen and in the right order, such order being determined by the genius
+of the language whence they are drawn.
+
+Whether the idea of which Rousseau made himself the exponent in his
+famous tract be true or false, need not further concern us in this
+little book. We all know that the difficult attempt to realise political
+freedom has attracted various communities of men at various times and
+repelled others. What English readers rarely hear is that the triumph of
+Rousseau depended not only on the first element in persuasion, which is
+vision, but also upon the second of the two co-related instruments by
+which a man may influence his fellows--to wit, style. It was his choice
+of French words and the order in which he arranged them, that gave him
+his enormous ascendancy over the generation which was young when he was
+old.
+
+I have alluded to his famous tract, the _Contrat Social_, and here a
+second point concerning it may be introduced. This book which gave a
+text for the Revolution, the document to which its political theory
+could refer, was by no means (as foreign observers have sometimes
+imagined) the whole body of writing for which Rousseau was responsible.
+To imagine that is to make the very common error of confusing a man with
+his books.
+
+Rousseau wrote on many things: his character was of an exalted, nervous
+and diseased sort. Its excessive sensibility degenerated with advancing
+years into something not distinguishable from mania. He wrote upon
+education, and the glory of his style carried conviction both where he
+was right and where the short experience of a hundred years has proved
+him to have been wholly wrong. He wrote upon love, and half the lessons
+to be drawn from his writing will be condemned by the sane. He wrote
+upon botany at vast length; he wrote also upon music--with what success
+in either department I am incompetent to determine. He wrote upon human
+inequality: and though the sentences were beautiful and the sentiment
+just, the analysis was very insufficient and the historical conception
+bad. He wrote upon a project for perpetual peace, which was rubbish; and
+he wrote upon the government of Poland an essay which was a perfect
+masterpiece.
+
+But when a great writer writes, each of his great writings has a life of
+its own, and it was not any of these other writings of Rousseau, on
+love or botany, which were the text of the Revolution. The text of the
+Revolution was his _Contrat Social_.
+
+Now it is not too much to say that never in the history of political
+theory has a political theory been put forward so lucidly, so
+convincingly, so tersely or so accurately as in this short and wonderful
+book. The modern publisher in this country would be ashamed to print it:
+not for its views (which would now seem commonplace), nor for its
+excellence, which would ensure it a failure, but for its brevity. It is
+as short as a gospel, and would cover but a hundred pages of one of our
+serious reviews. A modern publisher in this city would not know what
+price to set upon such a work, and the modern reader in this country
+would be puzzled to understand how a great thing could be got within so
+narrow a compass. A debate in Parliament or the libretto of a long
+pantomime is of greater volume.
+
+Nevertheless, if it be closely read the _Contrat Social_ will be
+discovered to say all that can be said of the moral basis of democracy.
+Our ignorance of the historical basis of the State is presumed in the
+very opening lines of it. The logical priority of the family to the
+State is the next statement. The ridiculous and shameful argument that
+strength is the basis of authority--which has never had standing save
+among the uninstructed or the superficial--is contemptuously dismissed
+in a very simple proof which forms the third chapter, and that chapter
+is not a page of a book in length. It is with the fifth chapter that the
+powerful argument begins, and the logical precedence of _human
+association_ to any particular form of government is the foundation
+stone of that analysis. It is this indeed which gives its title to the
+book: the moral authority of men in community arises from _conscious
+association_; or, as an exact phraseology would have it, a "social
+contract." All the business of democracy as based upon the only moral
+authority in a State follows from this first principle, and is developed
+in Rousseau's extraordinary achievement which, much more than any other
+writing not religious, has affected the destiny of mankind.
+
+It is indeed astonishing to one who is well acquainted not only with the
+matter, but with the manner of the _Contrat Social_, to remark what
+criticisms have been passed upon it by those who either have not read
+the work or, having read it, did so with an imperfect knowledge of the
+meaning of French words. The two great counter arguments, the one
+theoretic the other practical, which democracy has to meet, stand
+luminously exposed in these pages, though in so short a treatise the
+author might have been excused from considering them. The theoretical
+argument against democracy is, of course, that man being prone to evil,
+something external to him and indifferent to his passions must be put up
+to govern him; the people will corrupt themselves, but a despot or an
+oligarchy, when it has satisfied its corrupt desires, still has a wide
+margin over which it may rule well because it is indifferent. You
+cannot bribe the despot or the oligarch beyond the limit of his desires,
+but a whole people can follow its own corrupt desires to the full, and
+they will infect all government.
+
+The full practice of democracy, therefore, says Rousseau, is better
+suited to angels than to men.
+
+As to the practical argument that men are not sufficiently conscious of
+the State to practise democracy, save in small communities, that plea
+also is recognised and stated better than any one else has stated it.
+For there is not in this book an apology for democracy as a method of
+government, but a statement of why and how democracy is right.
+
+The silly confusion which regards a representative method as essentially
+democratic has never been more contemptuously dealt with, nor more
+thoroughly, than in the few words in which the _Contrat Social_
+dismisses it for ever; though it was left to our own time to discover,
+in the school of unpleasant experience, how right was Rousseau in this
+particular condemnation.
+
+Exiguous as are the limits within which the great writer has finally
+decided the theory of democracy, he finds space for side issues which
+nowhere else but in this book had been orderly considered, and which,
+when once one has heard them mentioned, one sees to be of the most
+excellent wisdom: that the fundamental laws, or original and particular
+bonds, of a new democracy must come from a source external to itself;
+that to the nature of the people for whom one is legislating, however
+democratic the form of the State, we must conform the particulars of
+law; that a democracy cannot live without "tribunes"; that no utterly
+inflexible law can be permitted in the State--and hence the necessity
+for dictatorship in exceptional times; that no code can foresee future
+details--and so forth.
+
+It would be a legitimate and entertaining task to challenge any man who
+had not read the _Contrat Social_ (and this would include most academic
+writers upon the treatise) to challenge any such one, I say, to put down
+an argument against democratic theory which could not be found within
+those few pages, or to suggest a limitation of it which Rousseau had not
+touched on.
+
+If proof were needed of what particular merits this pamphlet displayed,
+it would be sufficient to point out that in a time when the problem
+represented by religion was least comprehended, when the practice of
+religion was at its lowest, and when the meaning, almost, of religion
+had left men's minds, Rousseau was capable of writing his final chapter.
+
+That the great religious revival of the nineteenth century should have
+proved Rousseau's view of religion in the State to be insufficient is in
+no way remarkable, for when Rousseau wrote, that revival was undreamt
+of; what is remarkable is that he should have allowed as he did for the
+religious sentiment, and above all, that he should have seen how
+impossible it is for a selection of Christian dogma to be accepted as a
+civic religion.
+
+It is further amazing that at such a time a man could be found who
+should appreciate that for the State, to have unity, it must possess a
+religion, and Rousseau's attempt to define that minimum or substratum of
+religion without which unity could not exist in the State unfortunately
+became the commonplace of the politicians, and particularly of the
+English politicians who succeeded him. Who might not think, for
+instance, that he was reading--though better expressed, of course, than
+a politician could put it--some "Liberal" politician at Westminster, if
+he were to come on such phrases as these with regard to what should be
+taught in the schools of the country?
+
+"The doctrines taught by the State should be simple, few in number,
+expressed with precision and without explanation or commentary. The
+existence of a powerful God, beneficent, providential and good; the
+future life; the happiness of the good and the punishment of evil; the
+sanctity of the agreements which bind society together and of laws;
+while as for negative doctrines, one is sufficient, and that one is the
+wickedness of intolerance."
+
+Rousseau's hundred pages are the direct source of the theory of the
+modern State; their lucidity and unmatched economy of diction; their
+rigid analysis, their epigrammatic judgment and wisdom--these are the
+reservoirs from whence modern democracy has flowed; what are now proved
+to be the errors of democracy are errors against which the _Contrat
+Social_ warned men; the moral apology of democracy is the moral apology
+written by Rousseau; and if in this one point of religion he struck a
+more confused and a less determined note than in the rest, it must be
+remembered that in his time no other man understood what part religion
+played in human affairs; for in his days the few who studied religion
+and observed it could not connect it in any way with the political
+nature of man, and of those who counted in the intellect of Europe, by
+far the greater number thought political problems better solved if
+religion (which they had lost) were treated as negligible. They were
+wrong--and Rousseau, in his generalities upon the soul, was
+insufficient; both were beneath the height of a final theory of man, but
+Rousseau came much nearer to comprehension, even in this point of
+religion, than did any of his contemporaries.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+THE CHARACTERS OF THE REVOLUTION
+
+
+KING LOUIS XVI
+
+As might be expected, the character of King Louis XVI has suffered more
+distortion at the hands of historians than has any other of the
+revolutionary figures; and this because he combined with that personal
+character of his a certain office to which were traditionally attached
+certain points of view and methods of action which the historian takes
+for granted when he deals with the character of the man. As any one
+thinking of a judge of some standing upon the English bench cannot but
+believe that he is possessed of some learning or some gravity, etc.; as
+any one hearing of a famous soldier cannot but believe that he has
+certain qualities associated with the business of soldiering, so
+historians tend to confuse the personality and character of Louis XVI
+with that of his office; they either by contrast exaggerate his unkingly
+defects or by sympathy exaggerate his kingly opposition to reform.
+
+The student will do well to avoid this error and its source, and to
+think of Louis as of a man who had been casually introduced, almost
+without preparation, into the office which he held. In other words, the
+student will do well, in his reading of the Revolution, to consider
+Louis XVI simply as a man, and his character as a private character. For
+this last of the long, unbroken line of Capetians possessed a character
+essentially individual. It was of a type which, no matter what accidents
+of fortune might have fallen upon its possessor, would have remained the
+same. Nor was ever a man possessed of high office whom high office had
+less moulded.
+
+Men thus impervious to their environment are commonly so from two
+causes: either from an intense and vivid personal initiative which may
+border upon madness, or from something thick and heavy in their moral
+accoutrement which defends against external action the inner personal
+temperament. The latter was the case with Louis.
+
+He was very slow of thought, and very slow of decision. His physical
+movements were slow. The movement of his eyes was notably slow. He had a
+way of falling asleep under the effort of fatigue at the most
+incongruous moments. The things that amused him were of the largest and
+most superficial kind. Horse-play, now and then a little touched with
+eccentricity, and very plain but unexpected jokes. One may express him
+from one aspect by saying that he was one of those men whom you could
+never by any chance have hoped to convince of anything. The few things
+which he accepted he accepted quite simply, and the process of reasoning
+in the mouth of any who approached him was always too rapid for him to
+follow. But it must not be imagined on this account that the moral
+integument so described was wrapped about a void. On the contrary, it
+enclosed a very definite character. Louis possessed a number of intimate
+convictions upon which he was not to be shaken. He was profoundly
+convinced of the existence and value of a certain corporate tradition in
+the organism which he ruled: the French nation. He was national. In this
+he differed from many a pedant, many a courtier, many an ecclesiastic,
+and many a woman about him, especially his wife.
+
+He was, again, possessed of all the elements of the Catholic faith.
+
+It was, indeed, a singular thing for a man of his position at such a
+time to hold intimately to religion, but Louis held to it. He confessed,
+he communicated, he attended mass, he performed his ordinary
+devotions--not by way of tradition or political duty, or State function,
+to which religious performance was now reduced in the vast majority of
+his wealthy contemporaries, but as an individual for whom these things
+had a personal value. Had he, with precisely the same interior spirit,
+woken in his bed some morning to find himself a country squire, and to
+discover that all his past kingship had been a dream of the night, he
+would have continued the practice of his religion as before.
+
+Now this is a sufficiently remarkable point, for the country squire, the
+noble, the lawyer, the university professor of the generation
+immediately preceding the Revolution had, as a rule, no conception of
+the Catholic Church. With them the faith was dead, save in the case of a
+very few who made it, if one may say so without disrespect, a mania, and
+in their exaggerations were themselves the proofs of the depth of decay
+into which the Church of Gaul had fallen.
+
+Louis XVI was possessed, then, of religion: it appeared in many of his
+acts, in his hesitation to appoint not a few of the many atheist bishops
+of the time, in his real agony of responsibility upon the Civil
+Constitution of the clergy, and in nothing more than the peculiar
+sobriety and solid ritual whereby he prepared for a tragic, sudden, and
+ignominious death.
+
+It is next to be observed that though he was a man not yet in middle
+age, and though he was quite devoid of ardour in any form, he had from
+the first matured a great basis of courage. It is well to admit that
+this quality in him was connected with those slow processes of thought
+and action which hampered him, but it is not to be explained by them. No
+man yet has become brave through mere stupidity.
+
+It was not only the accidents of the Revolution that proved this quality
+in him: his physical habits proved it long before. He was a resolute and
+capable rider of the horse: an aptitude in that exercise is impossible
+to the coward. Again, in those by-products of courage which are
+apparent, even where no physical danger threatens, he was conspicuous;
+he had no hesitation in facing a number of men, and he had aptitude in a
+mechanical trade--a business by no means unconnected with virility.
+
+Now in mentioning his virility, it is of prime importance for the
+student to remember, though the matter can be touched upon but lightly,
+that Louis, in this department of physical life, suffered from a
+mechanical impediment which gravely distorted the first years of his
+marriage, which undoubtedly wounded his self-respect, and which was
+perhaps the only thing that caused him permanent anxiety. He was cured
+by medical aid in the summer of the year 1777, but he was already three
+years a king and seven years a husband before that relief came to him.
+The tragedy affected his whole life, and, I repeat, must never be
+forgotten when one considers either him or Marie Antoinette in their
+intimate character, and in their effect as actors in the great drama.
+
+For the rest, the character of Louis betrayed certain ineptitudes (the
+word ineptitude is far more accurate in this connection than the word
+weakness), which ineptitudes were peculiarly fatal for the military
+office which he held and for the belligerent crisis which he had to
+meet.
+
+Few men are possessed of the eye, the subtle sympathy, the very rapid
+power of decision, and the comprehension of human contrasts and
+differences which build up the apt leader of an armed force great or
+small. Most men are mediocre in the combination of these qualities. But
+Louis was quite exceptionally hopeless where they were concerned. He
+could never have seen the simplest position nor have appreciated the
+military aspects of any character or of any body of men. He could ride,
+but he could not ride at the head of a column. He was not merely bad at
+this trade, he was nul. Drafted as a private into a conscript army, he
+would never have been entrusted with the duties of a corporal. He would
+have been impossible as a sergeant; and, possessed of commissioned rank,
+ridicule would have compelled him to take his discharge.
+
+This lack did not only, or chiefly, betray itself in his inability to
+meet personally the armed crisis of a revolution; it was not only, or
+chiefly, apparent in his complete breakdown during the assault upon the
+palace on the 10th of August: it was also, and much more, the disastrous
+cause of his inability to oversee, or even to choose, military advisers.
+
+Those who propose in the early part of the Revolution to check the mob
+in Paris, are excellent commanders: but Louis does not know it. Those
+who succeed each other at the Ministry of War, or at the head of the
+armies during the active part of the revolution are various in the
+extreme: but they all seem one to him. Between a fop like Narbonne and a
+subtle, trained cavalry man like Dumouriez, Louis made no distinction.
+The military qualities of La Fayette (which were not to be despised)
+meant no more to him than does music, good or bad, to a deaf man. From
+the beginning to the end of the movement, the whole of the military
+problem escaped him.
+
+Another hole in his character, which was of prime importance at such a
+time, was his inability to grasp in a clear vision any general social
+problem. Maps he could well comprehend, and he could well retain
+statistics; but the landscape, as it were, of the Revolution his
+protuberant and lethargic eyes completely missed. He was quite unable to
+see where lay danger and where support, in what large masses such and
+such forces were grouped, and the directions in which they were
+advancing, or upon which they must retreat. In this matter he was, as
+will be seen in a moment, the very opposite of Mirabeau, and it was on
+account of this weakness, or rather this form of nullity, that all
+Mirabeau's vision was wasted upon Louis.
+
+Finally, he had no working comprehension of Europe. He did not even
+exaggerate the powers of the allies in the later phases of the
+Revolution when they were marching upon France. He did not either
+under-estimate or over-estimate the policy and naval force of Great
+Britain, the military resources of his own subjects, the probable
+sympathies of the Netherlands (anti-Austrian but Catholic), the decay of
+Spain, the division and impotence of the Italian Peninsula. Louis saw
+nothing of all these things.
+
+One may conclude the picture (for the purposes of such a short study as
+this) by saying that only one coincidence could have led him through the
+labyrinth of the time with success. That coincidence would have been the
+presence at his side of a friend fully trusted from childhood, loved, as
+religious as himself, and yet possessing precisely those qualities which
+he himself lacked. Had Louis found to hand such a lieutenant, the
+qualities I have mentioned would have been a sort of keel and ballast
+which would have secured the monarchy, for he was not weak, he was not
+impulsive, he was not even foolish: he was only wretchedly alone in his
+incapacities. Certainly such a nature could trust and rely upon no one
+who was not of this intimate kind, and he possessed no such intimate,
+let alone an intimate who could command the qualities I have suggested.
+
+Being what he was, his character is among the half-dozen which
+determined the Revolution to take the course which it did.
+
+
+THE QUEEN
+
+Marie Antoinette presents to history a character which it is of the
+highest interest to regard as a whole. It is the business of her
+biographers to consider that character as a whole; but in her connection
+with the Revolution there is but one aspect of it which is of
+importance, and that is the attitude which such a character was bound to
+take towards the French nation in the midst of which the Queen found
+herself.
+
+It is the solution of the whole problem which the Queen's action sets
+before us to apprehend the gulf that separated her not only from the
+French temperament, but from a comprehension of all French society. Had
+she been a woman lacking in energy or in decision, this alien character
+in her would have been a small matter, and her ignorance of the French
+in every form of their activity, or rather her inability to comprehend
+them, would have been but a private failing productive only of certain
+local and immediate consequences, and not in any way determining the
+great lines of the revolutionary movement.
+
+As it was, her energy was not only abundant but steadfast; it grew more
+secure in its action as it increased with her years, and the initiative
+which gave that energy its course never vacillated, but was always
+direct. She knew her own mind, and she attempted, often with a partial
+success, to realise her convictions. There was no character in touch
+with the Executive during the first years of the Revolution comparable
+to hers for fixity of purpose and definition of view.
+
+It was due to this energy and singleness of aim that her
+misunderstanding of the material with which she had to deal was of such
+fatal importance.
+
+It was she who chose, before the outbreak of the Revolution, the
+succession of those ministers both Liberal and Reactionary, whose unwise
+plans upon either side precipitated violence. It was she who called and
+then revoked, and later recalled to office the wealthy and
+over-estimated Necker; she who substituted for him, and then so
+inopportunely threw over Calonne, the most national of the precursors of
+the Revolution, and ever after her most bitter enemy; it was she who
+advised the more particularly irritating details of resistance after the
+meeting of the first revolutionary Parliament; it was she who presided
+over (and helped to warp) the plans for the flight of the royal family;
+it was she who, after this flight had failed, framed a definite scheme
+for the coercion of the French people by the Governments of Europe; it
+was she who betrayed to foreign chanceries the French plan of campaign
+when war had become inevitable; finally, it was she who inspired the
+declaration of Brunswick which accompanied the invasion of French
+territory, and she was in particular the author of the famous threat
+therein contained to give over Paris to military execution, and to hold
+all the popular authorities responsible with their lives for the
+restoration of the pre-revolutionary state of affairs.
+
+As research proceeds, the capital effect of this woman's continual and
+decided interference will be more and more apparent to historians.
+
+Now Marie Antoinette's conception of mankind in general was the
+conception that you will find prevalent in such societies as that
+domestic and warm centre which had nourished her childhood. The romantic
+affection of a few equals, the personal loyalty of a handful of personal
+servants, the vague histrionic content which permeates the poor at the
+sight of great equipages and rich accoutrements, the cheers of a crowd
+when such symbols accompanying monarchy are displayed in the
+streets--all these were for Marie Antoinette the fundamental political
+feelings of mankind. An absence of them she regarded with bewilderment,
+an active opposition to them she hated as something at once
+incomprehensible and positively evil.
+
+There was in all this illusion, of course, a great element of what the
+English call middle class, and the French bourgeois. To be quite
+ignorant of what servitors will say of their masters behind their backs;
+not to appreciate that heroic devotion is the faculty of a few; never
+to have imagined the discontents of men in general, and the creative
+desire for self-expression which inspires men when they act politically;
+not to know that men as a whole (and particularly the French people) are
+not deceived by the accidents of wealth, nor attach any real inferiority
+to poverty; to despise the common will of numbers or to doubt its
+existence; to see society established in a hierarchy not of office but
+of leisure: all this may seem to the democrat a very unnatural and
+despicable mood. But it was not despicable, still less unnatural; in the
+case of Marie Antoinette: it was the only experience and the only
+conception of society which had ever been given her. She had always
+believed, when she gazed upon a mass of the populace, that the
+difference between the crowd and herself was a moral reality. The
+contrast in external habits between the wealthy, the middle class, and
+the poor--a contrast ultimately produced by differences in the
+opportunity and leisure which wealth affords--she thought to be
+fundamental. Just as children and certain domestic pet animals regard
+such economic accidents in society as something real which
+differentiates men, so did she;--but she happened to nourish this
+illusion in the midst of a people, and within a day's walk of a capital,
+where the misconception had less hold than in any other district of
+Europe.
+
+Of the traits peculiar to the French she knew nothing, or, to put it
+more strongly, she could not believe that they really existed.
+
+The extremes of cruelty into which this people could fall were
+inconceivable to her, as were also the extremes of courage to which they
+can rise under the same excitements as arouse them to an excess of
+hatred. But that character in the French which she most utterly failed
+to foresee or to comprehend, was their power of _corporate
+organisation_.
+
+That a multitude could instruct and order themselves for a common
+purpose, rapidly acquire and nominate the officers who should bring that
+purpose to fruition, and in general pass in one moment from a mere
+multitude to an incipient army--that was a faculty which the French had
+and have to a peculiar degree, and which she (like so many of our own
+contemporaries, and especially those of German blood) could not believe
+to be real. This faculty in the French, when it took action and was
+apparent in the physical struggles of the Revolution, seemed to her, to
+the very end, a sort of nightmare; something which, by all the laws of
+reality, _ought not_ to be happening, but somehow or other _was_
+happening in a manner evilly miraculous. It was her ignorance upon this
+main point of all that caused her to rely so continually upon the use of
+the regular forces, and of those forces in insufficient numbers. She
+could not but believe that a few trained soldiery were necessarily the
+masters of great civilian bodies; their uniforms were a powerful
+argument with her, and mere civilian bodies, however numerous, were
+always, in her conception, a dust of disparate and inchoate humanity.
+She believed there was nothing to attack or resist in popular numbers
+but the opinion, the fear, or the cupidity of the individual. In this
+error of judgment concerning the French people she was not peculiar: it
+is an error repeated over and over again by foreigners, and even by some
+native commentators when they seek to account for some national movement
+of the Gauls. The unlearning of it is the first lesson which those who
+would either administrate or resist the French should learn.
+
+In the matter of religion (which the reader may see in these pages to be
+of such moment in the revolutionary story), the queen was originally far
+more indifferent than her husband, though she observed a certain measure
+of personal practice. It was not until her heavy misfortunes came upon
+her that any degree of personal devotion appeared in her daily life,
+though it must be admitted that, by a sort of premonition of disaster,
+she turned to religion in the months immediately preceding the outbreak
+of the reform.
+
+It remains to describe the personal effect she had upon those who were
+in her immediate presence. Most of the French aristocracy she repelled.
+The same misfortune which made her unable to understand the French
+temperament as a whole divorced her from that particular corner of it
+which took the shape of French aristocratic tradition. She did not
+understand its stiffness, its exactitude, its brilliancy or its
+hardness: and she heartily disliked all four.
+
+On this account she produced on the great families of her court, and
+especially upon the women of them, an effect of vulgarity. Had she
+survived, and had her misfortunes not been of so tragic an intensity,
+the legend she would have left in French society would certainly have
+been one of off-handed carelessness, self-indulgence, and lack of
+dignity which have for the French of that rank the savour that a loud
+voice, a bad accent, an insufficient usage in the rules of daily
+conduct, leave upon what is left of a corresponding rank in England
+to-day.
+
+She was, on the other hand, easily deceived by the flattery of place
+seekers, and the great power which she wielded in politics just before
+the Revolution broke out made her, as it were, a sort of _butt_ of the
+politicians.
+
+They haunted her presence, they depended upon her patronage, and, at the
+same time, they secretly ridiculed her. Her carriage, which was designed
+to impress onlookers and did have that effect upon most foreigners,
+seemed to most of the French observers (of a rank which permitted them
+to approach her familiarly) somewhat theatrical and sometimes actually
+absurd. The earnestness which she displayed in several lines of conduct,
+and notably in her determined animosity to certain characters (as that
+of La Fayette, for instance), was of an open and violent sort which
+seemed to them merely brutal and unintelligent; her luxury, moreover,
+was noticed by the refined world of Versailles to be hardly ever of her
+own choosing, but nearly always practised in imitation of others.
+
+In connection with that trait of luxury, the reader must appreciate at
+the outset that it was grievously exaggerated by her contemporaries, and
+has been still more exaggerated by posterity. She was not a very
+frivolous, still less a dissipated, woman. She was woefully loose in
+tongue, but she was certainly virtuous.
+
+She gambled, but as the times went, and the supposed unlimited fortune
+of the Crown, her gambling was not often excessive; her expenditure upon
+jewellery and dress would be thought most moderate to-day in the case of
+any lady of our wealthier families. On the other hand, her whims were
+continual and as continually changing, especially in the earlier part of
+her life.
+
+Since that surrounding world of the Court which she misunderstood and
+which had no sympathy with her was ready to find some handle against
+her, that handle of dissipation was the easiest for them to seize; but
+the accusation was not a just one.
+
+Had fortune made her the wife of a poor man in a lower class of society,
+Marie Antoinette would have been a capable housewife: her abundant
+energy would have found a proper channel, and she was in no way by
+nature extravagant.
+
+She had a few very passionate and somewhat too sentimental friendships,
+some of which were returned, others of which their objects exploited to
+their own advantage. The two most famous were her friendship for the
+Princess de Lamballe and for Madame de Polignac. These moved her not
+infrequently to unwise acts of patronage which were immediately seized
+by the popular voice and turned against her. They were among the few
+weaknesses apparent in her general temper. They were certainly ill
+balanced and ill judged.
+
+She indulged also in a number of small and unimportant flirtations which
+might almost be called the routine of her rank and world; she had but
+one great affection in her life for the other sex, and it was most
+ardently returned. Its object was a Swedish noble of her own age, the
+very opposite of the French in his temper, romantically chivalrous,
+unpractical in the extreme, gentle, intensely reserved; his name Count
+Axel de Fersen. The affair remained pure, but she loved him with her
+whole heart, and in the last months of her tragedy this emotion must be
+regarded as the chief concern of her soul. They saw each other but very
+rarely, often they were separated for years; it was this, perhaps, which
+lent both glamour and fidelity to the strange romance.
+
+
+MIRABEAU
+
+Mirabeau, the chief of the "practical" men of the Revolution (as the
+English language would render the most salient point in their political
+attitude), needs a very particular examination. His influence upon the
+early part of the Revolution was so considerable, the effect of his
+death was so determinant and final, the speculation as to what _might_
+have happened had he survived is so fruitful, so entertaining, and so
+common, and the positive effect of his attitude upon the development of
+the Revolution after his death was so wide, that to misunderstand
+Mirabeau is in a large measure to misunderstand the whole movement; and
+Mirabeau has unfortunately been ill or superficially understood by many
+among now three generations of historians; for a comprehension of this
+character is not a matter for research nor for accumulated historic
+detail, but rather a task for sympathy.
+
+Mirabeau was essentially an artist, with the powers and the frailties
+which we properly associate with that term: that is, strong emotion
+appealed to him both internally and externally. He loved to enjoy it
+himself, he loved to create it in others. He studied, therefore, and was
+a master of, the material by which such emotion may be created; he
+himself yielded to strong emotion and sought it where it might be found.
+It is foolish alike to belittle and to exaggerate this type of
+temperament. Upon it or upon its admixture with other qualities is based
+the music, the plastic art, and in a large measure the permanent
+literature of the world. This aptitude for the enjoyment and for the
+creation in others of emotion clothes intellectual work in a manner
+which makes it permanent. This is what we mean when we say that _style_
+is necessary to a book; that a great civilisation may partly be judged
+by its architecture; that, as Plato says, music may be moral or immoral,
+and so forth. The artist, though he is not at the root of human affairs,
+is a necessary and proper ally in their development.
+
+When I say that Mirabeau was an artist I mean that wherever his energies
+might have found play he would there have desired to enjoy and to create
+enjoyment through some definite medium. This medium was in part
+literary, but much more largely oral expression. To be a _tribune_, that
+is the voice of great numbers, to persuade, nay, to please by his very
+accents and the very rhythm of his sentences, these things occupied the
+man; but he also brought into his art that without which no great art
+can exist: mere intellect.
+
+He believed in the main principles at least which underlay the
+revolutionary movement, he understood them and he was prepared to
+propagate them; but his power over men was not due to this conviction:
+his power over men was wholly that of the artist, and had he by some
+accident been engaged in maintaining the attack against democracy, he
+would have been nearly as famous as he became under the title of its
+defender. We must then always consider Mirabeau as an orator, though an
+orator endowed with a fine and clear intelligence and with no small
+measure of reasoned faith.
+
+Much else remains to be said of him.
+
+He was a gentleman; that is, he both enjoyed and suffered the
+consequences which attach to hereditary wealth and to the atmosphere
+that surrounds its expenditure. On this account, he being personally
+insufficiently provided with wealth, he was for ever in debt, and
+regarded the sums necessary to his station in life and to his large
+opportunities as things due to him, so to speak, from society. We are
+right when we say that he took bribes, but wrong if we imagine that
+those bribes bound him as they would bind a man meaner in character or
+less lucky in his birth. He stooped as gentlemen will to all manner of
+low intrigues, to obtain "the necessary and the wherewith"; that is,
+money for his _role_. But there was a driving power behind him, bound up
+with his whole character, which made it impossible for any such sums to
+control his diction or to make of such a man a mere advocate. He was
+never that dirtiest of political phenomena, the "party man." He would
+never have been, had he been born a hundred years later and thrust into
+the nastiness of modern parliamentary life, "a parliamentary hand."
+
+Mirabeau had behind him a certain personal history which we must read in
+connection with his temperament.
+
+He had travelled widely, he knew Englishmen and Germans of the wealthier
+classes well. The populace he knew ill even in his own country; abroad
+he knew it not at all. He had suffered from his father's dislike of him,
+from the consequence of his own unbridled passions, also not a little
+from mere accidental misfortune. Capable of prolonged and faithful
+attachment to some woman, the opportunity for that attachment had never
+been afforded him until the last few months before his death. Capable of
+paying loyal and industrious service to some political system, no
+political system had chosen him for its servant. It is a fruitful matter
+of speculation to consider what he might have done for the French
+monarchy had Fate put him early at Court and given him some voice in the
+affairs of the French Executive before the Revolution broke out. As it
+was, the Revolution provided him with his opportunity merely because it
+broke down old barriers and conventions and was destructive of the
+framework of the State in which he lived. He was compelled to enter the
+Revolution as something of a destroyer, for by no other avenue could he
+be given his chance; but by nature he detested destruction. I mean
+(since this phrase is somewhat vague) he detested that spirit which will
+disendow a nation of certain permanent institutions serving definite
+ends, without a clear scheme of how those institutions should be
+replaced by others to serve similar ends. It was on this account that he
+was most genuinely and sincerely a defender of the monarchy: a permanent
+institution serving the definite ends of national unity and the
+repression of tendencies to oligarchy in the State.
+
+Mirabeau had none of the revolutionary Vision. In mind he was
+prematurely aged, for his mind had worked very rapidly over a very
+varied field of experience. The pure doctrine of democracy which was a
+religion to many of his contemporaries, with all the consequences of a
+religion, he had never thought of accepting. But certain consequences of
+the proposed reforms strongly appealed to him. He loved to be rid of
+meaningless and dead barriers, privileges which no longer corresponded
+to real social differences, old traditions in the management of trade
+which no longer corresponded to the economic circumstances of his time,
+and (this is the pivotal point) the fossils of an old religious creed
+which, like nearly all of his rank, he simply took for granted to be
+dead: for Mirabeau was utterly divorced from the Catholic Church.
+
+Much has been said and will be said in these pages concerning the
+religious quarrel which, though men hardly knew it at the time, cut
+right across the revolutionary effort, and was destined to form the
+lasting line of cleavage in French life. There will be repeated again
+and again what has already been written, that a reconciliation between
+the Catholic Church and the reconstruction of democracy was, though men
+did not know it, the chief temporal business of the time, and the reader
+of these pages will be made well acquainted in them with the degradation
+to which religion had fallen among the cultivated of that generation.
+But in the case of Mirabeau this absence of religion must be
+particularly insisted upon. It would no more have occurred to Mirabeau
+that the Catholic Faith had a future than it could occur to (let us say)
+an English politician of thirty years ago that the Irish might become a
+wealthy community or that an English Government might within his own
+lifetime find itself embarrassed for money. I use this parallel for the
+sake of strengthening my contention, but it is indeed a weak parallel.
+No contemporary parallel in our strange and rapidly changing times
+corresponds to the fixed certitude which permeated the whole of the end
+of the eighteenth century that the Catholic Faith was dead. Mirabeau had
+perhaps never engaged in his life in intimate conversation a single man
+who took the Catholic sacraments seriously, or suffered a moment's
+anxiety upon the tenets of the creed.
+
+He knew, indeed, that certain women and a much smaller number of
+insignificant men wrapped themselves up in old practices of an odd,
+superstitious kind; he knew that great, dull areas of ignorant
+peasantry, in proportion to their poverty and isolation, repeated by
+rote the old formulae of the Faith. But of the Faith as a living thing
+he could have no conception.
+
+He saw on the one hand a clerical institution, economic in character,
+providing places and revenues for men of his own rank; he met those men
+and never discovered them to have any religion at all. He saw on the
+other hand a proposed society in which such a fossil, unjust and
+meaningless, must relinquish its grip upon those large revenues. But of
+the Faith as a social force, as a thing able to revive, he could have
+no conception. It would have seemed to him a mere folly to suggest that
+the future might contain the possibility of such a resurrection. The
+dissolution of the religious orders, which was largely his work, the
+civil constitution of the clergy which he presided over, were to him the
+most natural acts in the world. They were the mere sweeping away of a
+quantity of inorganic stuff which cumbered the modern State. He felt of
+them as we might feel of the purchase of waste spaces in our cities, of
+the confiscation of some bad landlords' property in them. The Church
+served no kind of purpose, no one who counted believed in it, it was
+defended only by people who enjoyed large revenues from the survival of
+what had once been, but was now no longer, a living, social function.
+
+In everything of the Revolution which he understood Mirabeau was upon
+the side of caution. He was not oblivious to the conception of popular
+government, he was not even mistrustful of it, but he could not conceive
+of it save as acting through the established strength of the wealthier
+classes. Of military power he judged very largely through Prussian eyes.
+And in long and enthusiastic passages he described the Prussian army as
+invincible. Had he lived to see the military enthusiasm of the
+Republicans he would utterly have distrusted it. He favoured in his
+heart an aristocratic machinery of society--though not an aristocratic
+theory of the State; he was quite determined to preserve as a living
+but diminished national organ the traditional monarchy of France; he was
+curious upon a number of details which were present and close to his
+eyes: methods of voting, constitutional checks, commercial codes and the
+rest of it. The little equilibriums of diplomacy interested him also,
+and the watching of men immediately under his eye in the Parliament.
+
+It was in the Parliament that his whole activity lay, it was there that
+he began to guide the Revolution, it was his absence from the Parliament
+after his death that the Revolution most feels in the summer of 1791.
+
+This very brief sketch does not present Mirabeau to the reader. He can
+only be properly presented in his speeches and in the more rhetorical of
+his documents. It is probable as time proceeds that his reputation in
+this department will grow. His constitutional ideas, based as they were
+upon foreign institutions, and especially upon the English of that time,
+were not applicable to his own people and are now nearly forgotten: he
+was wrong upon English politics as he was wrong upon the German armies,
+but he had art over men and his personality endures and increases with
+time.
+
+
+LA FAYETTE
+
+The character of La Fayette has suffered chiefly from his own aloofness
+towards his contemporaries on the one hand, and from his rigid adherence
+to principle upon the other. Both these causes are clearly connected.
+The same quality in him which made him so tenacious of principle made
+him contemptuous of the run of men about him. Fundamentally, he was
+nearer the extreme Republicans than any other class, from the very fact
+of his possessing a clear political creed and a determination to follow
+it out to its logical consequence. But there was no chance of his
+comprehending the concrete side of the movement or the men engaged upon
+it, for his great wealth, inherited in very early life, had cut him off
+from experience. His moral fault was undoubtedly ambition. It was an
+ambition which worked in the void, as it were, and never measured itself
+with other men's capacities or opportunities. He made no plans for
+advancement, not because he would have despised the use of intrigue in
+reason, but because he was incapable of working it. He was exceedingly
+attached to popularity, when it came he thought it his due; unpopularity
+in its turn seemed to him a proof of the vileness of those who despised
+him. He made himself too much the measure of his world.
+
+Undoubtedly a very great part in the moulding of his character proceeded
+from his experience in the United States of America. He was then at the
+most impressionable and formative period of human life, little more than
+a boy, or at least just entering early manhood. He had just married, he
+had just come into the administration of his vast fortune. At such a
+moment he took part in the victorious rebellion of the English colonies,
+and it may be imagined how powerful was the effect of this youthful
+vision upon the whole of the man's future life; because there was no
+proletariat in the colonies, he never saw or comprehended the
+dispossessed classes of Paris--for that matter he never saw or
+comprehended the French peasantry upon his own lands; because a chance
+and volunteer soldiery had, under the peculiar conditions of the
+half-populated Atlantic seaboard in conjunction with the French fleet
+and with the aid of French money and arms, got the better of the small
+and heterogeneous forces of George III, he believed that a military
+nation like the French, in the midst of powerful enemies, could make
+something of an amateur civic force; because a certain type of ease in
+social relations was the ideal of many, perhaps of most, of those with
+whom he had served in America, he confused so simple and mundane an
+ideal with the fierce crusading blast and the sacred passion for
+equality which was stirring his own nation when his opportunity for
+leadership came.
+
+It may be said of La Fayette with justice that he never upon a single
+occasion did the right thing. It may also be said with justice that he
+never did politically any major thing for which his own conscience would
+later reproach him. It is noticeable that the Queen held him in
+particular odium. He had been a wealthy young noble about the Court, the
+friend of all her women friends, and his sympathy with the revolutionary
+movement at its inception therefore seemed to her nothing better than
+treason. There was also undoubtedly something in his manner which
+grievously repelled her; that it was self-sufficient we cannot doubt,
+and that it was often futile and therefore exasperating to women, events
+are sufficient to show. But Marie Antoinette's violent personal
+antagonism towards La Fayette was not common, though several ardent
+spirits (Danton's, for instance) shared it. The mass of those who came
+across La Fayette felt in connection with him a certain irritation or a
+certain contempt or a certain rather small and distant respect; he
+inspired no enthusiasms, and when he timidly attempted a rebellion
+against the new Government after the fall of the monarchy, no one would
+sacrifice himself or follow him.
+
+It may be affirmed of La Fayette that if he had not existed the
+Revolution would have pursued much the same course as it did, with this
+exception: that there would not have been formed a definitely middle
+class armed guard to provoke friction in Paris: the National Guard would
+have been more open to all ranks.
+
+In religion the man was anodyne, Catholic of course by baptism, but
+distinctly Protestant in morals and in general tone, in dogma (until the
+end of his life) freethinking, of course, like all his contemporaries.
+He was personally courageous but foolishly despised the duel. One
+anecdote out of many will help to fix his nature in the mind of the
+reader. Mirabeau, casting about as usual for aid in his indebtedness,
+sent urgently to him as to a fellow noble, a fellow politician and a
+fellow supporter of the Crown, begging a loan of L2000. La Fayette
+accorded him L1000.
+
+
+DUMOURIEZ
+
+Dumouriez presents a character particularly difficult for the modern
+Englishman to comprehend, so remote is it in circumstance and
+fundamentals from those of our time.
+
+Of good birth, but born in a generation when social differences had
+become a jest for intelligent and active men (and he was intelligent and
+active), courageous, with a good knowledge of his trade of soldiering,
+of rapid decision and excellent judgment where troops or _terrain_ were
+concerned, he was all at sea in the comprehension of men, and he bore no
+loyalty to the State.
+
+It is this last feature which will particularly surprise the English
+reader, for it is the singular and permanent advantage of oligarchic
+communities such as the British that they retain under any stress and
+show throughout the whole commonwealth the sense of the State. To betray
+the State, to act against its interests, to be imperfectly conscious of
+its existence, are crimes or weaknesses unknown to the citizens of an
+oligarchy, and a citizen of this country cannot easily conceive of them
+to-day. In democracies and despotisms, on the other hand, to forget
+one's duty to the State, to be almost oblivious of its corporate
+existence, is a common weakness. There is here a compensation, and by
+just so much as despotism and democracy permit rapid, effective and
+all-compelling action on the part of the State, by just so much as they
+permit sudden and sometimes miraculous enthusiasms which save or which
+confirm a State, by that also do they lack the quiet and persistent
+consciousness of the State which oligarchy fosters and determines.
+
+Dumouriez' excellence as a general can only be appreciated by those who
+have looked closely into the constitution of the forces which he was to
+command and the adversaries with whom he had to deal. It is the prime
+quality of a great commander that his mind stands ready for any change
+in circumstances or in the material to his hand, and even when we have
+allowed for the element of luck which is so considerable in military
+affairs, we must not forget that Dumouriez saved without disaster the
+wretched and disorganised bands, inchoate and largely mutinous as to
+their old units, worthless and amateur as to their new, which had to
+meet, in and behind the Argonne, the model army of Prussia.
+
+We must not forget that his plan for the invasion of the Low Countries
+was a just and sensible one, nor with what skill, after the inevitable
+defeat and retreat of the spring of 1793, he saved his command intact.
+
+As a subordinate to an armed executive, to the Government of Napoleon,
+for instance, the man would have been priceless. Nay, had circumstances
+permitted him to retain supreme command of civil as of military power,
+he would have made no bad dictator. His mere technical skill was so
+considerable as to make the large sums paid him by the English
+Government seem a good bargain even at our distance of time, and his
+plans for the defence of England and for the attack on Napoleon are a
+proof of the value at which he was estimated.
+
+But Dumouriez was quite unable to act under the special circumstances in
+which he happened to be placed at the moment of his treason. A mere
+ambition had carried him from intrigue to intrigue among the
+politicians. He despised them as an active and capable soldier was
+compelled to despise them; he was too old to share any of their
+enthusiasms, even had his temperament permitted him to entertain any
+vision, political or religious. He certainly never felt the least moral
+bond attaching him to what was in his eyes the chance anarchy of the
+last six months of French Government under which he served, and if he is
+to be branded with the title of traitor, then we must brand with the
+same title all that multitude of varied men who escaped from the country
+in the Emigration, who left it in disgust, or even who remained in
+France, but despaired of French fortunes, in the turmoil of 1793.
+
+It is perhaps a worthy excuse for Dumouriez' failure to point out that
+he also was one of those whom the Court might have used had it known how
+to use men; but the Court had no such knowledge.
+
+
+DANTON
+
+The character of Danton has more widely impressed the world than that of
+any other revolutionary leader, because it contained elements
+permanently human, independent of the democratic theory of the time, and
+necessary neither to the support of that theory nor to the criticism of
+it.
+
+The character of Danton appeals to that sense in man which is interested
+in action, and which in the field of letters takes the form of drama.
+His vigour, his personal strength of mind and body, the individuality of
+his outline, arrest equally the man who loves the Revolution, and the
+man who hates it, and the man who is quite indifferent to its success or
+failure.
+
+It is on this very account that historians, especially foreign
+historians, have tended to misinterpret the man. Thus Carlyle, who has
+great intuition in the matter, yet makes him out farmer-like--which he
+certainly was not; Michelet, fascinated by his energy, presents him as
+something uncouth, and in general those who would describe Danton stand
+at a distance, as it were, where his loud voice and forcible gesture may
+best be appreciated; but a man to be seen truly must be seen in
+intimacy.
+
+Danton was essentially a compound of two powerful characters in man. He
+was amative or constructive, and at the same time he not only possessed
+but liked to exercise lucidity of thought. The combination is among the
+strongest of all those that go to build up human personalities.
+
+That which was amative and constructive in him, his virility if you
+will, brought him into close touch with reality; he knew and loved his
+own country, for instance, and infinitely preferred its happy survival
+to the full development of any political theory. He also knew and loved
+his fellow countrymen in detail and as persons; he knew what made a
+Frenchman weak and what made him strong. The vein of Huguenotry, though
+he did not know it for what it was, he disliked in his compatriots. On
+the other hand, the salt and freshness of the French was native to him
+and he delighted in it; the freedom of their expression, the noise of
+their rhetoric, and the military subsoil of them, were things to all of
+which he immediately responded. He understood their sort of laughter,
+nor was he shocked, as a man less national would have been, at their
+peculiarly national vices, and in especial their lapses into rage. It is
+this which must account for what all impartial judgment most blames in
+him, which is, his indifference to the cruelties, his absorbed interest
+in foreign and military affairs, at the moment of the Massacres of
+September.
+
+This touch with reality made him understand in some fashion (though only
+from without) the nature of the Germans. The foolish mania of their
+rulers for mere territorial expansion unaccompanied by persuasion or the
+spread of their ideas, he comprehended. The vast superiority of their
+armies over the disorganised forces of the French in 1792 he clearly
+seized: hence on the one hand his grasp of their foreign policy, and on
+the other his able negotiation of the retreat after Valmy. He also
+understood, however, and more profoundly, the rapid self-organisation of
+which his own countrymen were capable, and it was upon this knowledge
+that his determination to risk the continuance of the war reposed. It
+should be remarked that both in his military and in his quasi-military
+action he was himself endowed in a singular degree with that power of
+immediate decision which is characteristic of his nation.
+
+His lucidity of thought permitted him to foresee the consequences of
+many a revolutionary decision, and at the same time inclined him to a
+strong sympathy with the democratic creed, with the doctrine of
+equality, and especially with the remoulding of the national
+institutions--particularly his own profession of the law--upon simple
+lines. He was undoubtedly a sincere and a convinced revolutionary, and
+one whose doctrine more permeated him than did that of many of his
+contemporaries their less solid minds. He was not on that account
+necessarily republican. Had some accident called his genius into play
+earlier in the development of the struggle, he might well, like
+Mirabeau, with whom he presents so curious a parallel, have thought it
+better for the country to save the Monarchy.
+
+It must always be remembered that he was a man of wide culture and one
+who had achieved an early and satisfactory professional success; he was
+earning a sound income at the moment of his youthful marriage; he read
+English largely and could speak it. His dress was not inexpensive, and
+though somewhat disordered (as it often is with men of intense energy
+and constant gesture) it never gave an impression of carelessness or
+disarray. He had many and indifferent intellectual interests, and was
+capable, therefore, of intelligent application in several fields. He
+appreciated the rapid growth of physical science, and at the same time
+the complexity of the old social conditions--too widely different from
+contemporary truths.
+
+To religion he was, of course, like all men of that time, utterly
+indifferent, but unlike many of them he seized the precise proportion of
+its remaining effect upon certain districts and certain sections of the
+countrysides. There has been a tendency latterly to exaggerate the part
+which Freemasonry played in the launching of him; he was indeed a member
+of a masonic lodge, as were, for that matter, all the men, conspicuous
+or obscure, democratic or utterly reactionary, who appeared upon the
+revolutionary stage: probably the king, certainly old aristocrats like
+the father of Madame de Lamballe, and the whole host of the middle
+class, from men like Bailly to men like Condorcet. But it is reading
+history backwards, and imagining the features of our own time to have
+been present a century ago, to make of Masonry the determining element
+in his career.
+
+Danton failed and died from two combined causes: first his health gave
+way, secondly he obtruded his sanity and civilian sense into the heated
+fury and calculated martial law of the second year of the Republic. To
+both that fury and that calculation he was an obstacle; his opposition
+to the Terror lost him the support of the enthusiasts, but it was the
+interference which such a judgment made in the plans of the soldiers,
+and notably of Carnot, that determined his condemnation and death. He
+also, like Mirabeau, will undoubtedly increase as the years proceed,
+and, if only as a representative of the national temper, become more and
+more the typical figure of the Revolution in action.
+
+
+CARNOT
+
+Carnot, the predecessor of Napoleon, and the organising soldier of the
+early revolutionary wars, owed his power to backbone.
+
+He had not only a good solidity of brain, but an astonishing power of
+using it for hours and hours on end. This he owed perhaps to the
+excellent physical stock of which he came, the eldest of a very large
+family born to a notable lawyer in Burgundy.
+
+It was Carnot's pride to hold a commission in the learned arms which
+were to transform at that moment the art of war: for as Bonaparte, his
+successor, was a gunner, so he was a sapper. His practice of exact
+knowledge in application, and the liberal education which his career
+demanded, further strengthened the strong character he had inherited.
+More important still, in his democratic views he was what none of the
+older officers had been, convinced and sincere. He had not come within
+the influence of the very wealthy or of the very powerful. He was
+young, and he knew his own mind not only in matters of political faith
+but in the general domain of philosophy, and in the particular one of
+military science.
+
+It has been said of him that he invented the revolutionary method of
+strategical concentration and tactical massing in the field. There is
+some truth in this; but the method would not have been possible had he
+not also invented, in company with Danton, and supported after Danton
+left power, a universal system of conscription.
+
+Carnot understood, as only trained soldiers can, the value of numbers,
+and _he depended with great sagacity upon the national temper_; thus at
+Wattignies, which was a victory directly due to his genius, though it
+was novel in him to have massed troops suddenly upon the right after a
+check on the extreme left of the field, yet the novelty would have been
+of no effect had he not comprehended that, with his young fellow
+countrymen as troopers, he could depend upon a charge delivered after
+thirty-six hours of vigil.
+
+He used not only the national but also the revolutionary temper in war.
+One of the chief features, for instance, of the revolutionary armies
+when they began to be successful, was the development of lines of
+skirmishers who pushed out hardily before the main bodies and were the
+first in the history of modern warfare to learn the use of cover. This
+development was spontaneous: it was produced within and by each unit,
+not by any general command. But Carnot recognised it at Hoondschoote
+and used it ever after.
+
+The stoical inflexibility of his temper is the noblest among the many
+noble characters of his soul. He never admitted the empire, and he
+suffered exile, seeming thereby in the eyes of the vilest and most
+intelligent of his contemporaries, Fouche, to be a mere fool. He was as
+hard with himself as with others, wholly military in the framework of
+his mind, and the chief controller of the Terror, which he used, as it
+was intended to be used, for the military salvation of the republic.
+
+
+MARAT
+
+Marat is easily judged. The complete sincerity of the enthusiast is not
+difficult to appreciate when his enthusiasm is devoted to a simple human
+ideal which has been, as it were, fundamental and common to the human
+race.
+
+Equality within the State and the government of the State by its general
+will: these primal dogmas, on the reversion to which the whole
+Revolution turned, were Marat's creed.
+
+Those who would ridicule or condemn him because he held such a creed,
+are manifestly incapable of discussing the matter at all. The ridicule
+and condemnation under which Marat justly falls do not attach to the
+patent moral truths he held, but to the manner in which he held them. He
+did not only hold them isolated from other truths--it is the fault of
+the fanatic so to hold any truth--but he held them as though no other
+truths existed. And whenever he found his ideal to be in practice
+working at a friction or stopped dead, his unnourished and acute
+enthusiasms at once sought a scapegoat, discovered a responsible agent,
+and suggested a violent outlet, for the delay.
+
+He was often right when he denounced a political intriguer: he often
+would have sacrificed a victim not unjustly condemned, he often
+discovered an agent partially responsible, and even the violent
+solutions that he suggested were not always impracticable. But it was
+the prime error of his tortured mind that beyond victims, and sudden
+violent clutches at the success of democracy, there was nothing else he
+could conceive. He was incapable of allowing for imperfections, for
+stupidities, for the misapprehension of mind by mind, for the mere
+action of time, and for all that renders human life infinitely complex
+and infinitely adjustable.
+
+Humour, the reflection of such wisdom, he lacked;--"judgment" (as the
+English idiom has it) he lacked still more--if a comparative term may be
+attached to two such absolute vacuities.
+
+It must not be forgotten that so complete an absence of certain
+necessary qualities in the building up of a mind are equivalent to
+madness. Marat was not sane. His insanity was often generous, the creed
+to which it was attached was obvious enough, and in the eyes of most of
+us it is a creed to be accepted. But he worked with it as a madman who
+is mad on collectivism, let us say, or the rights of property, might
+work in our society, thinking of his one thesis, shrieking it and
+foaming at the mouth upon it, losing all control when its acceptance was
+not even opposed but merely delayed. He was valueless for the
+accomplishment of the ends of the Revolution. His doctrine and his
+adherence to it were so conspicuously simple and sincere that it is no
+wonder the populace made him (for a few months) a sort of symbol of
+their demand.
+
+For the rest, his face, like his character, was tortured; he carried
+with him a disease of the skin that irritated perpetually his wholly
+unbalanced temper.
+
+Some say (but one must always beware of so-called "Science" in the
+reading of history) that a mixture of racial types produced in him a
+perpetual physical disturbance: his face was certainly distorted and
+ill-balanced--but physical suggestions of that sort are very
+untrustworthy.
+
+Those who met him in the management of affairs thought him worthless
+enough; a few who knew him intimately loved him dearly; more who came
+across him continually were fatigued and irritated by his empty
+violence. He was, among those young revolutionaries, almost an elderly
+man; he was (this should never be forgotten) a distinguished scholar in
+his own trade, that of medicine; and he effected less in the Revolution
+than any man to whom a reputation of equal prominence happened to
+attach. He must stand responsible for the massacres of September.[2]
+
+
+ROBESPIERRE
+
+No character in the Revolution needs for its comprehension a wider
+reading and a greater knowledge of the national character than
+Robespierre's.
+
+Upon no character does the comprehension of the period more depend, and
+none (for reasons I will give in a moment) has been more misunderstood,
+not only in the popular legend but in the weighed decisions of competent
+historians.
+
+So true is this that even time, which (in company with scholarship)
+usually redresses such errors, has not yet permitted modern authors to
+give a true picture of the man.
+
+The reason of so conspicuous a failure in the domain of history is this:
+that side by side with the real Robespierre there existed in the minds
+of all his contemporaries _save those who actually came across him in
+the junctions of government_, a legendary Robespierre--a Robespierre
+popularly imagined; and that this imaginary Robespierre, while it (or
+he) has proved odious to posterity, seemed, while he lived, a
+fascinating portrait to the man himself, and therefore he accepted it.
+For Robespierre, though just, lacked humility.
+
+The problem is an exceedingly subtle as well as an exceedingly difficult
+one. The historian, as he reads his authorities, has perpetually to
+distinguish between what is strong and what is weak evidence, and to
+recall himself, as he reads, to reality by a recollection of what
+Robespierre himself was. If he does not do so he falls at once into the
+legend; so powerful is that legend in the numbers that supported it, and
+so strongly did Robespierre himself support it by his own attitude. The
+legendary Robespierre may be described in a very few lines.
+
+Conceive a man sincerely convinced of the purest democratic theory, a
+man who cared for nothing else but the realisation of that theory, and
+who had never sacrificed his pursuit of its realisation in the State to
+any personal advantage whatsoever. This man, trusted by the people and
+at last idolised by them, becomes more and more powerful. He enters the
+governing body (the Committee of Public Safety), he is the master both
+within and without that body, and uses his mastery for establishing an
+ideal democracy which shall recognise the existence of God and repose
+upon civic virtue; and to establish this ideal he has recourse to
+terror. He finds that human defections from his ideal are increasingly
+numerous: he punishes them by death. The slaughter grows to be enormous;
+the best of Democrats are involved in it; at last it can be tolerated no
+longer, his immediate subordinates revolt against him in the Committee,
+he is outlawed, fails to raise a popular rebellion in his favour in
+Paris, is executed, and his system of terror falls to the ground.
+
+This picture, though purely legendary in tone, contains not only much
+truth, but truth of precisely that sort which conspires to make credible
+what is false in the whole.
+
+Robespierre was sincerely attached to the conception of an ideal
+democracy; he was incorruptible in the pursuit of it--and to be a
+politician and incorruptible amounts to something like what the Church
+calls heroic virtue in a man. He _did_ enter the Committee of Public
+Safety; he _did_ support the Terror, and when he was overthrown the
+Terror _did_ come to an end. Where, then, does the legend differ from
+the truth?
+
+In these capital points, which change it altogether: that Robespierre
+was not the chief influence in the Committee of Public Safety, _i.e._
+the all powerful executive of the Republic; that he did not desire the
+Terror, that he did not use it, that he even grew disgusted with it, and
+that, in general, he was never the man who governed France.
+
+It need hardly be pointed out how such a truth destroys such a legend.
+The whole nature of the twelve months between the summer of 1793 and the
+summer of 1794 must vary according as we regard them as Robespierrean or
+no: and they were not Robespierrean.
+
+What were they then, and why has the error that Robespierre was then
+master, arisen?
+
+Those months, which may be roughly called the months of the Terror,
+were, as we shall see later in this book, months of martial law; and the
+Terror was simply martial law in action--a method of enforcing the
+military defence of the country and of punishing all those who
+interfered with it or were supposed by the Committee to interfere with
+it.
+
+No one man in the Committee was the author of this system, but the one
+most determined to use it and the one who had most occasion to use it,
+was undoubtedly the military organiser, Carnot. Side by side with him
+one man, such as Barrere, supported it because it kept up the Committee
+of Public Safety which gave him all his political position. Another,
+such as Saint-Just, supported it because he believed that the winning of
+the war (in which he took an active part) would secure democracy
+everywhere and for ever. Another, such as Jean Bon, supported it from
+the old sectarian bitterness of the Huguenot. But of all men in the
+Committee, Robespierre supported the Terror least, and was most
+suspected by his colleagues--and increasingly suspected as time went
+on--of desiring to interfere with the martial system of the Terror and
+to modify it.
+
+Why, then, was Robespierre popularly identified with the Terror, and
+why, when he was executed, did the Terror cease?
+
+Robespierre was identified with the Terror because he was identified
+with the popular clamour of the time, with the extreme democratic
+feeling of the time, and its extreme fear of a reaction. Robespierre
+being the popular idol, had become also the symbol of a popular frenzy
+which was supposed to be ruling the country. But that frenzy was not
+ruling the country. What was ruling the country was the Committee of
+Public Safety, in which Carnot's was the chief brain. Robespierre was
+indeed the idol of the populace; he was in no way the agent of their
+power or of any power.
+
+Why, when he fell, did the Terror cease if he were not its author?
+Because the Terror was acting under a strain; it was with the utmost
+difficulty that this absolute, intolerant and intolerable martial system
+could be continued when once the fear of invasion was removed. For some
+weeks before Robespierre fell the victories had begun to render it
+unnecessary. When the Committee saw to it that Robespierre should be
+outlawed by the Parliament, they knocked away, without knowing it, the
+keystone of their own policy; it was _his_ popular position which made
+_their_ policy possible. When he was destroyed they suddenly found that
+the Terror could no longer be maintained. Men had borne with it because
+of Robespierre, falsely imagining that Robespierre had desired it.
+Robespierre gone, men would not bear with it any more.
+
+Now, finally, if Robespierre himself had always felt opposed to the
+system of the Terror, why did he not take the lead in the popular
+reaction against it?
+
+He had his opportunity given him by Danton in December 1793--seven
+months before his own catastrophe. The Committee determined to put
+Danton out of the way because Danton, in appealing for mercy, was
+weakening the martial power of their government. Robespierre might have
+saved Danton: he preferred to let him be sacrificed. The reason was that
+Robespierre wrongly believed popularity to lie upon the side of the
+Terror and against Danton; he was in no way a leader (save in rhetoric
+and in rhetoric directed towards what men already desired), and his own
+great weakness or vice was the love of popular acclaim.
+
+Later on, in the summer of 1794, when he actually began to move against
+the Terror, he only did so privately. He so misread men that he still
+believed the Terror to be popular, and dared not lose his popular name.
+A man by nature as sincere as crystal, he was tempted to insincerity in
+this major thing, during the last months of his life, and he yielded
+completely to the temptation. For the sake of his memory it was
+deplorable, and deplorable also for history. His weakness has been the
+cause of an historical error as grave as any that can be discovered in
+modern letters, and at the same time has wholly maligned him to
+posterity.
+
+A factor in Robespierre's great public position which is often forgotten
+is the great effect of his speeches. That men should still debate, after
+so vast a change in taste, whether those speeches were eloquent or no,
+is a sufficient proof of their effect. He spoke in an ordered and a
+reasoned manner, which bored the fine spirits of the earlier
+Parliaments, but well suited the violent convictions of the later
+Revolution. His phraseology, his point of view, just jumped with that of
+his audience. He could express what they felt, and express it in terms
+which they knew to be exact, and which they believed to be grand. For
+his manner was never excessive, and those excessive men who heard him in
+an excessive mood, were proud to know that their violence could be
+expressed with so much scholarship and moderated skill.
+
+By birth he was of the smaller gentry, though poor. It is an indication
+of his character that he had thought of taking Orders, and that in early
+youth literary vanity had affected him. He has left no monument; but
+from the intensity of his faith and from his practice of it, his name,
+though it will hardly increase, will certainly endure.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[2] There is but one trustworthy monograph on Marat. It will interest
+the student as a proof of the enthusiasm which Marat can inspire. It is
+by Champfleury.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+THE PHASES OF THE REVOLUTION
+
+
+I
+
+_From May 1789 to 17th of July 1789._
+
+The first point which the reader must hold in the story of the
+Revolution is the quarrel between its first Parliament and the Crown.
+
+Of what nature was that quarrel?
+
+It was not, as it has sometimes been represented, a simple issue between
+privilege and a democratic demand for equality, or between traditional
+organs of government and a democratic demand for self-government by the
+nation. To imagine this is to read history backwards, and to see in the
+untried conditions of 1789 the matured results which only appeared after
+years of struggle.
+
+The prime issue lay between legality and illegality.
+
+The forms of French law and all the inherited method of French
+administration demanded a certain form of authority; a centralised
+government of unlimited power. The King was absolute. From him proceeded
+in the simplest fashion whatever will was paramount in the State. He
+could suspend a debtor's liabilities, imprison a man without trial,
+release him without revision of his case, make war or peace, and in
+minor details such as the discipline and administration of public
+bodies, the power of the Crown was theoretically and legally equally
+supreme. It was not exercised as the enormous power of modern government
+is exercised, it did not perpetually enter into every detail of the life
+of the poor in the way in which the power of a modern English Government
+enters into it; it is in the very nature of such autocratic power that,
+while unlimited in theory, it is compelled to an instinctive and
+perpetual self-limitation lest it break down; and autocracy maybe
+compared in this to aristocracy, or more properly speaking to oligarchy,
+the government of a few: for where a few govern they know that their
+government reposes upon public opinion or public tolerance; they are
+very careful not to exceed certain limits the transgression of which
+would weaken the moral foundation of their power; they welcome allies,
+they recruit themselves perpetually from other classes in the community.
+
+In the same way an autocracy always has the desire to be popular. Its
+strokes affect the great and the powerful, and are hardly ever aimed at
+the mass of the community. The intellectual, the wealthy, the privileged
+by birth, fortune or exceptional personal powers, are suspect to it. As
+for the mass of men an Autocracy attempts to represent and, in a certain
+sense, to obey them.
+
+Now the French autocracy (for it was no less) erred not in the will to
+act thus popularly in the early part of the Revolution, but in the
+_knowledge_ requisite for such action.
+
+The Parliament, shortly after it had met in May 1789, began to show, in
+the Commons part of it, the working of that great theory which had
+leavened all France for a generation. The Commons said, "We are the
+people; at once the symbols of the people, the direct mandatory servants
+of the people, and" (though this was a fiction) "we are of the people in
+our birth and origin. We are therefore the true sovereign; and the
+prince, the head of the Executive, is no more than an organ of
+government, morally less in authority than ourselves, who are the true
+source of government." This attitude, which was at the back of all men's
+minds, and which was concentrated, of course, in the Commons, clashed
+with legality. It could not express itself in the terms of law, it could
+not act save in a fashion which should be, in the strictest sense of the
+word, _revolutionary_.
+
+Now the Crown, on the whole national in sympathy, and comprehending this
+new theory well (I mean by the Crown the general body of advisers round
+the King, and the King himself), was offended at the illegality not of
+the theory or of the pretence (for these were not illegal), but of the
+action of the Commons. And this comparatively small source of friction
+was the irritant upon which we must fix as the cause of what followed.
+The Nobles, by 108 to 47, decided, the day after the opening of the
+Parliament, to sit as a separate House. The Clergy, by a much smaller
+majority, 133 to 114, came to the same decision, but carefully qualified
+it as provisional. The Commons declared that the hall in which they met
+should be regarded as the hall of the National Assembly, and later made
+it their business (to quote the phrase of the motion) "to attempt to
+unite in common all the deputies of the nation in that hall and never to
+abandon the principle of voting individually" (that is, not by separate
+Houses) "or the principle that the States-General formed one undivided
+body." This attitude was qualified and compromised with to some extent
+in the days that followed, but it held the field, and while the Commons
+were insisting upon this attitude as a moral right, the Nobles countered
+by a reaffirmation of the right of each House to a separate judgment
+upon public matters. The Nobles were standing upon legal precedent: the
+Commons had nothing in their favour but political theory; if the orders
+sat all together and voted as individuals, the Commons, who were in
+number equal to the two other Houses combined, would, with their noble
+and clerical sympathisers, have a majority.
+
+Now the King and his advisers, notably Necker, who still had great
+weight, were by no means "Impossiblists" in this struggle. They desired
+an understanding, and through the last days of May and the first days of
+June the attempt at an understanding was made. But the attempt dragged,
+and as it seemed that nothing would come of it, on the 10th of June
+Sieyes moved that the Assembly should "verify its powers" (a French
+phrase for admitting and registering the presence of each member as
+acceptable to the whole body, and to the theory of its Constitution),
+and that this should be done "in the case of each member" (meaning
+members of all the three orders and _not_ of the Commons alone),
+"whether the members of the two privileged Houses were present or
+absent." The roll was called and completed upon the 15th. None of the
+nobles attended the common roll-call, three of the parish clergy (they
+were from the province of Poitou) did so, and thus admitted the right of
+the Commons so to act. A dozen of their colleagues joined them later;
+but that was all.
+
+So far there had been no action which could be precisely called illegal
+or revolutionary. The Commons had affirmed a right based upon a
+political theory which the vast majority of the nation admitted, and the
+legal depositary of power, the King, had not yet reproved. One may draw
+a parallel and compare the action of the Commons so far to some action
+which a trade union, for instance, may take in England; some action the
+legality of which is doubtful but upon which the courts have not yet
+decided.
+
+It was upon the 17th of June, two days after the completion of the
+roll-call by the Commons, that the first revolutionary act took place,
+and the student of the Revolution will do well to put his finger upon
+that date and to regard it not indeed as the moral origin of the
+movement, but as the precise moment from which the Revolution, as a
+Revolution, begins to act. For upon that day the Commons, though in fact
+only joined by a handful of the Clerical House, and by none of the
+nobility, _declared themselves to be the National Assembly_; that is,
+asserted the fiction that Clergy, Nobles and Commons were all present
+and voted together. To this declaration they added a definite act of
+sovereignty which trespassed upon and contradicted the legal authority
+of the Crown. True, the motion was only moved and passed
+"provisionally," but the words used were final, for in this motion the
+self-styled "National Assembly" declared that "provisionally" taxes and
+dues might be raised upon the old authority but that only until the
+National Assembly should disperse; "after which day"--and here we reach
+the sacramental formula, as it were, of the crisis--"the National
+Assembly _wills and decrees_ that all taxes and dues of whatever nature
+which have not been specifically formally and freely granted by the said
+Assembly shall cease in every province of the kingdom no matter how such
+that province may be administered." (This is an allusion to the fact
+that in some provinces there was a representative machinery, in others
+nothing but the direct action of the Crown.) "The Assembly declares that
+when it has _in concert with_ (not in obedience to) the King laid down
+the principle of a national re-settlement, it will busy itself with the
+examination and ordering of the public debt." Etc., etc.
+
+Such was the point of departure after which sovereignty was at issue
+between the Crown and the States-General; the Crown a known institution
+with its traditions stretching back to the Roman Empire, and the
+National Assembly a wholly new organ according to its own claims, basing
+its authority upon a political theory stretching back to the very
+origins of human society.
+
+Two days later, on the 19th of June, the "National Assembly," still only
+self-styled and possessing only the powers which it had ascribed to
+itself beyond all forms of law, set to work, nominated its committees,
+and assumed the sovereignty thus claimed. The Nobles protested (notably
+the Bishops), and the King, on the advice of Barentin, keeper of the
+Seals, determined upon immediate resistance. The excuse was taken that
+the Royal Session, as it was called, in which the King would declare his
+will, needed the preparation of the hall, and when the Commons presented
+themselves at the door of that hall on the next day, the 20th, they
+found it shut against them. They adjourned to a neighbouring tennis
+court, and took a solemn corporate oath that they would not separate
+without giving France a Constitution. They continued to meet, using a
+church for that purpose, but on the 23rd the Royal Session was opened
+and the King declared his will.
+
+The reader must especially note that even in this crisis the Crown did
+not offer a complete resistance. There was an attempt at compromise.
+Necker would have had a more or less complete surrender, the Queen and
+her set would have preferred an act of authority which should have
+annulled all that the Commons had done. What actually happened was a
+permission by the Crown that the three Orders should meet as one body
+for certain common interests, but should preserve the system of voting
+as separate Houses in "all that might regard the ancient and
+constitutional rights of the three Orders, the Constitution to be given
+to future Parliaments, feudal property, and the rights and prerogatives
+of the two senior Houses." As a mere numerical test, such a conclusion
+would have destroyed the power of the Commons, since, as we have seen,
+numbers were the weapon of the Commons, who were equal to the two other
+Houses combined, and if all sat together would, with the Liberal
+members of the clergy and the nobility, be supreme. But apart from this
+numerical test, the act of sovereignty affirmed by the National Assembly
+when it declared itself, and itself only, competent to vote taxes, was
+annulled. Moreover, the royal declaration ended with a command that on
+the next day the three Orders should meet separately.
+
+Now at this critical point the King was disobeyed. The current of the
+time chose the revolutionary bed, and as it began to flow deepened and
+confirmed its course with every passing day and event. Already the
+majority of the clergy had joined the National Assembly when it had
+affirmed its right to sit in spite of the check of the 20th of June.
+There was a half-hour on that decisive day of the Royal Session, the
+23rd of June, when armed force might have been used for the arrest and
+dispersion of the Deputies. They declared themselves inviolable and
+their arrest illegal, but there was, of course, no sanction for this
+decree. As a fact, not a corporal's file was used against them. The next
+day, the 24th, the majority of the clergy again joined the Commons in
+their session (in flat defiance of the King's orders), and on the 25th,
+forty-seven of the nobles followed their example. The King yielded, and
+on the 27th, two days later, ordered the three Houses to meet together.
+
+The National Assembly was now legally constituted, and set out upon its
+career. The Crown, the old centre of authority, had abandoned its
+position, and had confirmed the Revolution, but in doing so it had acted
+as it were in contradiction with itself. It had made technically legal
+an illegality which destroyed its own old legal position, but it had
+done so with ill-will, and it was evident that some counter-stroke would
+be attempted to restore the full powers of the Crown.
+
+At this point the reader must appreciate what forces were face to face
+in the coming struggle. So far, the illegal and revolutionary act of the
+17th of June, the Royal Session which replied to that act upon the 23rd,
+the King's decree which yielded to the Commons upon the 27th, had all of
+them been but words. If it came to action, what physical forces were
+opposed?
+
+On the side of the Crown was the organised armed force which it
+commanded. For it must never be forgotten that the Crown was the
+Executive, and remained the Executive right on to the capture of the
+palace three years later, and the consummation of the Revolution on the
+10th of August, 1792. On the side of the National Assembly was without
+doubt the public opinion of the country (but that is not a force that
+can be used under arms), and, what was much more to the point, the
+municipal organisation of France.
+
+Space forbids a full description of the origins and strength of the
+French municipal system; it is enough to point out that the whole of
+Gallic civilisation, probably from a moment earlier than Caesar's
+invasion, and certainly from the moment when Roman rule was paramount
+in Gaul, was a _municipal_ one. It is so still. The countrysides take
+their names mainly from their chief towns. The towns were the seats of
+the bishops, whose hierarchy had preserved whatever could be preserved
+of the ancient world. In the towns were the colleges, the guilds, the
+discussion and the corporations which built up the life of the nation.
+The chief of these towns was Paris. The old systems of municipal
+government, corrupt and varied as they were, could still give the towns
+a power of corporate expression. And even where that might be lacking it
+was certain that some engine would be found for expressing municipal
+action in a crisis of the sort through which France was now passing. In
+Paris, for instance, it was seen when the time came for physical force
+that the College of Electors, who had chosen the representatives for
+that city, were willing to act at once and spontaneously as a municipal
+body which should express the initiative of the people. It was the
+towns, and especially Paris, prompt at spontaneous organisation, ready
+to arm, and when armed competent to frame a fighting force, which was
+the physical power behind the Assembly.
+
+What of the physical power behind the King? His power was, as we have
+said, the Regular Armed forces of the country: the army. But it is
+characteristic of the moment that only a part of that armed force could
+be trusted. For an army is never a mere weapon: it consists of living
+men; and though it will act against the general opinion of its members
+and will obey orders long after civilians would have broken with the
+ties of technical and legal authority, yet there is for armies also a
+breaking point in those ties, and the Crown, I repeat, could not use as
+a whole the French-speaking and French-born soldiery. Luckily for it, a
+very great proportion of the French army at that moment consisted of
+foreign mercenaries.
+
+Since the position was virtually one of war, we must consider what was
+the strategical object of this force. Its object was Paris, the chief of
+the towns; and round Paris, in the early days of July, the mercenary
+regiments were gathered from all quarters. That military concentration
+once effected, the gates of the city held, especially upon the north and
+upon the west, by encamped regiments and by a particularly large force
+of cavalry (ever the arm chosen for the repression of civilians), the
+Crown was ready to act.
+
+On the 11th of July, Necker, who stood for Liberal opinions, was
+dismissed. A new ministry was formed, and the counter-revolution begun.
+What followed was the immediate rising of Paris.
+
+The news of Necker's dismissal reached the masses of the capital (only
+an hour's ride from Versailles) on the afternoon of the 12th, Sunday.
+Crowds began to gather; an ineffectual cavalry charge in one of the
+outer open spaces of the city only inflamed the popular enthusiasm, for
+the soldiers who charged were German mercenary soldiers under the
+command of a noble. Public forces were at once organised, arms were
+commandeered from the armourers' shops, the Electoral College, which had
+chosen the members of the Assembly for Paris, took command at the Guild
+Hall, but the capital point of the insurrection--what made it
+possible--was the seizure of a great stock of arms and ammunition,
+including cannon, in the depot at the Invalides.
+
+With such resources the crowd attacked, at the other end of the city, a
+fortress and arsenal which had long stood in the popular eye as the
+symbol of absolute monarchy, the Bastille. With the absurdly
+insufficient garrison of the Bastille, its apparent impregnability to
+anything the mob might attempt, the supposed but doubtful treason of its
+governor in firing upon those whom he had admitted to parley, we are not
+here concerned. The Bastille was rushed, after very considerable efforts
+and an appreciable loss in killed and wounded. By the evening of that
+day, Tuesday, the 14th of July, 1789, Paris had become a formidable
+instrument of war. The next news was the complete capitulation of the
+King.
+
+He came on the morrow to the National Assembly, promising to send away
+the troops; he promised to recall Necker, a municipal organisation was
+granted to the city, with Bailly for its first mayor, and--a point of
+capital importance--an armed militia dependent upon that municipality
+was legally formed, with La Fayette at its head. On the 17th Louis
+entered Paris to consummate his capitulation, went to the Guild Hall,
+appeared in the tricoloured cockade, and the popular battle was won.
+
+It behoves us here to consider the military aspect of this definitive
+act from which the sanction of the Revolution, the physical power behind
+it, dates.
+
+Paris numbered somewhat under a million souls: perhaps no more than
+600,000: the number fluctuated with the season. The foreign mercenary
+troops who were mainly employed in the repression of the popular feeling
+therein, were not sufficient to impose anything like a siege. They could
+at the various gates have stopped the provisioning of the city, but then
+at any one of those separate points, any one of their detachments upon a
+long perimeter more than a day's march in circumference would certainly
+have been attacked and almost as certainly overwhelmed by masses of
+partially armed civilians.
+
+Could the streets have been cleared while the ferment was rising? It is
+very doubtful. They were narrow and tortuous in the extreme, the area to
+be dealt with was enormous, the tradition of barricades not forgotten,
+and the spontaneous action of that excellent fighting material which a
+Paris mob contains, had been quite as rapid as anything that could have
+been effected by military orders.
+
+The one great fault was the neglect to cover the Invalides, but even had
+the Invalides not been looted, the stock of arms and powder in the city
+would have been sufficient to have organised a desperate and prolonged
+resistance. The local auxiliary force (of slight military value, it is
+true), the "French Guards," as they were called, were wholly with the
+people. And in general, the Crown must be acquitted of any considerable
+blunder on the military side of this struggle. It certainly did not fail
+from lack of will.
+
+The truth is (if we consider merely the military aspect of this military
+event) that in dealing with large bodies of men who are (a) not
+previously disarmed, (b) under conditions where they cannot be
+dispersed, and (c) capable by a national tradition or character of some
+sort of rapid, spontaneous organisation, the issue will always be
+doubtful, and the uncertain factor (which is the tenacity, decision and
+common will of the civilians, to which soldiers are to be opposed) is
+one that varies within the very widest limits.
+
+In massing the troops originally, the Crown and its advisers estimated
+that uncertain factor at far too low a point. Even contemporary educated
+opinion, which was in sympathy with Paris, put it too low. That factor
+was, as a fact, so high that no armed force of the size and quality
+which the Crown then disposed of, could achieve its object or hold down
+the capital.
+
+As for the absurd conception that any body of men in uniform, however
+small, could always have the better of civilian resistance, however
+large and well organised, it is not worthy of a moment's consideration
+by those who interest themselves in the realities of military history.
+It is worthy only of the academies.
+
+So ends the first phase of the Revolution. It had lasted from the
+opening of the States-General in May to the middle of July 1789.
+
+
+II
+
+_From the 17th of July 1789 to the 6th of Oct. 1789._
+
+We have seen the military conditions under which the attempt at an armed
+counter-revolution failed. There follows a short phase of less than
+three months, whose character can be quickly described.
+
+It was that moment of the Revolution in which ideas had the freest play,
+in which least had been done to test their application, and most scope
+remained for pure enthusiasm. That is why we find in the midst of that
+short phase the spontaneous abandonment of the feudal rights by the
+nobility. And that is why the violent uprisings all over France
+continued. It is the period in which the Declaration of the Rights of
+Man and of the Citizen, a document which may fittingly stand side by
+side with the Declaration of Independence (for together they form the
+noblest monuments of our modern origins), was promulgated. In the same
+period were the elements of the future Constitution rapidly debated and
+laid down, and notably that national policy of a _Single Chamber_ which
+the modern French have imprudently abandoned. In that same period,
+however, appeared, and towards the close of it, another form of
+resistance on the part of the Crown and of those who advised the Crown.
+The King hesitated to accept the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and
+similarly hesitated to promulgate the Decree of the 4th of August in
+which the nobility had abandoned their feudal dues. It would be foolish
+to exaggerate the military aspect of what followed. Louis did call in
+troops, but only in numbers sufficient for personal defence, and we can
+hardly believe that he intended anything more than to police the
+surroundings of his throne. But the brigade (for it was no more, nor was
+it of full strength) which he summoned was sufficient to kindle
+suspicion; and the determinedly false position of the Queen (who all her
+life was haunted by the idea that the regular soldiers, especially if
+they were well dressed and held themselves rigidly, were a sort of
+talisman) provoked an explosion. A feast was given in which the officers
+of the Regiment of Flanders, which had just reached Versailles, were
+entertained by the officers of the Guard. It was made the occasion for a
+good deal of drunkenness and a violent Royalist manifestation, at which
+the Queen was present, which she approved, and which some thought she
+had designed.
+
+The failure of the harvest to relieve the scarcity of bread in Paris,
+the permanent state of alarm in which Paris had remained, and of
+suspicion for the safety of the Parliament which it continually
+entertained since the early part of the summer, needed no more to
+provoke an outbreak. It is an error to imagine that that outbreak was
+engineered or that such a movement could have been factitious. Great
+masses of women (in whom the movement originated), and after them a
+whole flood of the populace, marched upon Versailles.
+
+There was no direct attack upon the palace, though the palace feared
+such an attack at any moment. The troops present were sufficient to
+prevent violence.
+
+La Fayette followed in the night at the head of his new Parisian militia
+force.
+
+Too much reliance was placed upon the military character of this force;
+the palace was invaded in the early morning, an attempt to assassinate
+the Queen on the part of the mob failed, though two of the Guards were
+killed. And after scenes whose violence and apparent anarchy only masked
+the common determination of the populace, the royal family were
+compelled to abandon Versailles and to take up their place in the
+Tuileries; the Parliament followed them to Paris, and neither King nor
+Parliament returned again to the suburban palace.
+
+This recapture of the King by Paris is much more significant than a mere
+impulse of the mob. The King in Paris, the unison of his person with the
+capital city, had been the very sacrament of French life for century
+upon century. It was precisely a hundred years since Paris had been
+abandoned by Louis XIV for Versailles. The significance of that error
+may be understood by the citizens of an aristocratic country if they
+will imagine the abandonment of their countrysides by the squires, or,
+again, the future historian of our modern industrial civilisation may
+understand it when he describes how the wealthy manufacturers abandoned
+the cities in which their wealth was made, to dwell outside and apart
+from the living interests of their people.
+
+With the return of the royal family to Paris, and with the presence of
+the Assembly within the heart of the national life, one prime factor
+appears, which is this: that while the National Assembly proceeds step
+by step to what it imagines to be a complete attainment of democracy
+(though how partial will soon be seen), the resistance of the Crown is
+transformed into a resistance of the mere Court. The attack on the
+Revolution becomes a personal thing. The King is still wholly the chief
+of the Executive; he can give what commands he wills to the armed force;
+he controls receipts and payments; he is for all active purposes the
+Government. But he is no longer considering that prime function of his,
+nor even using it to restore his old power. He acts henceforward as an
+individual, and an individual in danger. The Queen, whose view of the
+Revolution and its dangers had always been a purely personal one, is the
+directing will in the court-group from this moment, October 1789,
+onwards; and the chief preoccupation of that group for eighteen months
+is personal safety. Surrounded by the pomp of the Tuileries and amid all
+the external appearances of a power still greater than that of any other
+monarch in Europe, Louis and his wife and their very few immediate and
+devoted friends and followers thought of the palace as a prison, and
+never considered their position save as one intolerable.
+
+
+III
+
+_From October 1789 to June 1791._
+
+It is this which must explain all that followed in the succeeding phase,
+which lasted from these early days of October 1789 to the last week of
+June 1791. Throughout that period of twenty-one months the King is
+letting the Revolution take its course, with the fixed idea of thwarting
+it at last by flying from it, and perhaps conquering it by foreign aid.
+But even this policy is not consecutively followed. The increasing
+repugnance of the Court and of the King himself to the revolutionary
+development forbids a consecutive and purely hypocritical acceptation of
+the National Assembly's decrees.
+
+Deliberate and calculated intrigue might yet have saved the monarchy and
+the persons of the royal family. Oddly enough, an ally in the struggle,
+an excellent intriguer, a saviour of the monarchical institution and a
+true defender of the royal persons was at hand: it was at hand in the
+person of Mirabeau.
+
+This man had more and more dominated the Assembly; he had been
+conspicuous from its first opening days; he had been its very voice in
+the resistance to the King at Versailles; it was he who had replied to
+the Master of Ceremonies on June 23, that the Commons would not
+disperse; it was he who had moved that the persons of the Commons were
+privileged against arrest. He was of a family noble in station and
+conspicuous before the people by the wealth and eccentricities of its
+head, Mirabeau's father. He himself was not unknown even before the
+Revolution broke out, for his violence, his amours, his intelligence and
+his debts. He was a few years older than the King and Queen: his
+personality repelled them; none the less his desire to serve them was
+sincere; and it was his plan, while retaining the great hold over the
+National Assembly which his rhetoric and his use of men furnished him,
+to give to the Court and in particular to the Queen, whom he very
+greatly and almost reverently admired, such secret advice as might save
+them. This advice, as we shall see in a moment, tended more and more to
+be an advice for civil war. But Mirabeau's death at the close of the
+phase we are now entering (on April 2, 1791), and the increasing fears
+of the King and Queen, between them prevented any statesmanship at all;
+they prevented even the statesmanship of intrigue; and the period
+became, on the side of the Revolution, a rapid and uncontrolled
+development of its democratic theory (limited by the hesitation of the
+middle class), and on the side of the Court an increasing demand for
+mere physical security and flight, coupled with an increasing
+determination to return, and to restore as a popular monarchy the scheme
+of the past.
+
+The eighteen months that intervened between the fixing of the Assembly
+and the royal family in Paris, and the death of Mirabeau, are remarkable
+for the following points, which must all be considered abreast, as it
+were, if we are to understand their combined effects.
+
+1. This was the period in which the constructive work of the National
+Assembly was done, and in which the whole face of the nation was
+changed. The advising bodies of lawyers called "Parliaments" were
+abolished (eleven months after the King had come to Paris), the Modern
+Departments were organised in the place of the old provinces, the old
+national and provincial militia was destroyed; but (as it is very
+important to remember) _the old regular army was left untouched_. A new
+judicature and new rules of procedure were established. A new code
+sketched out in the place of "Common Law" muddle. In a word, it was the
+period during which most of those things which we regard as
+characteristic of the revolutionary work were either brought to their
+theoretic conclusion or given at least their main lines.
+
+2. Among these constructive acts, but so important that it must be
+regarded separately, was the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which
+will be dealt with at length further in this book; it was the principal
+work (and the principal error) of that year and a half.
+
+3. The general spirit of the Revolution, more difficult to define than
+its theory but easy to appreciate as one follows the development of the
+movement, increased regularly and enormously in intensity during the
+period. The power of the King, who was still at the head of the
+Executive, acted more and more as an irritant against public opinion,
+and--
+
+4. That public opinion began to express itself in a centralised and
+national fashion, of which the great federation of the 14th of July
+1790, in Paris, on the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, was the
+nucleus and also the symbol. This federation consisted in delegates from
+the National Guard throughout the country, and it was of this capital
+importance: that it introduced into the revolutionary movement a feature
+of soldiery which made even the regular troops for the most part
+sympathetic with the enthusiasm of the time.
+
+5. These eighteen months were, again, filled with the movement of the
+"Emigration." That movement was, of course, the departure of many of the
+more prominent of the privileged orders and of a crowd of humbler
+nobles, as also of a few ecclesiastics, from France. The King's brothers
+(one fled at the beginning of the emigration, the younger, the Comte
+d'Artois; the other, the elder, at its close, and coincidently with the
+flight of the King) must especially be noted in this connection; they
+formed in company with the more notable of the other emigrants a regular
+political body, which intrigued continually beyond the frontiers, in
+Germany and Italy, against the Revolution. And--
+
+6. It was therefore during these months that the ultimate origins of the
+large European war must be found. The armed body of the emigrants under
+Conde formed an organised corps upon the Rhine, and though there was not
+yet the semblance of an armed movement in Europe besides theirs against
+the French, yet by the _emigres_, as they were called, were sown the
+seeds the harvest of which was to be the war of 1792.
+
+I have said that during these months in which most of the constructive
+work of the Revolution was done, in which the seeds of the great war
+were sown, and in which the absolute position of the Crown as the head
+of the Executive was increasingly irritating to the public opinion of
+the French, and especially of the capital, Mirabeau was the one man who
+might have preserved the continuity of national institutions by the
+preservation of the monarchy. He received money from the Court and in
+return gave it advice. The advice was the advice of genius, but it was
+listened to less and less in proportion as it was more and more
+practical. Mirabeau also favoured the abandonment of Paris by the King,
+but he would have had the King leave Paris openly and with an armed
+force, withdraw to a neighbouring and loyal centre such as Compiegne,
+and thence depend upon the fortunes of civil war.
+
+Meanwhile the Queen was determined upon a very different and much more
+personal plan, into which no conception of statesmanship entered. She
+was determined to save the persons of her children, herself and her
+husband. Plans of flight were made, postponed and re-postponed. It was
+already agreed at the Court that not Mirabeau's plan should be followed,
+but this plan of mere evasion. The army which Bouille commanded upon the
+frontier was to send small detachments along the great road from Paris
+to the east; the first of these were to meet the royal fugitives a
+little beyond Chalons and to escort their carriage eastward; each armed
+detachment in the chain, as the flight proceeded, was to fall in for its
+defence, until, once the town of Varennes was reached, the King and
+Queen should be in touch with the main body of the army.
+
+What was then intended to follow remains obscure. It is fairly certain
+that the King did not intend to pass the frontier but to take refuge at
+Montmedy. The conflict that would have inevitably broken out could
+hardly have been confined to a civil war: foreign armies and the German
+mercenaries in the French service were presumably to be organised, in
+case the flight succeeded, for a march upon Paris and the complete
+restoration of the old state of affairs.
+
+Had Mirabeau lived this rash and unstatesmanlike plan might yet have
+been avoided; it so happened that he died upon April 2, 1791, and soon
+after we enter the third phase of the Revolution, which is that leading
+directly to the great war, and to the fall of the monarchy.
+
+Shortly after Mirabeau's death a tumult, which excessively frightened
+the royal family, prevented the King and Queen from leaving the palace
+and passing Easter at St. Cloud, in the suburbs. Though further
+postponements of their flight followed, the evasion actually took place
+in the night of the 20th to 21st of June. It very nearly succeeded, but
+by a series of small accidents, the last of which, the famous ride of
+Drouet to intercept the fugitives, is among the best-known episodes in
+history, the King and Queen and their children were discovered and
+arrested at Varennes, within a few hundred yards of safety, and were
+brought back to Paris, surrounded by enormous and hostile crowds. With
+the failure of this attempt at flight in the end of June 1791, ends the
+third phase of the Revolution.
+
+
+IV
+
+_From June 1791 to September 1792._
+
+To understand the capital effect both of this flight and of its failure,
+we must once more insist upon the supreme position of the monarchy in
+the traditions and instinct of French polity. The unwisdom of the flight
+it would be difficult to exaggerate: it is impossible to exaggerate the
+moral revolution caused by its failure. It was regarded as virtually an
+abdication. The strong body of provincial, silent, and moderate opinion,
+which still centred on the King and regarded it as his function to lead
+and to govern, was bewildered, and in the main divorced, in the future,
+from the Crown.
+
+It is an excellent proof of what the monarchy had for so long been to
+France, that even in such a crisis barely the name of "a republic" was
+mentioned, and that only in the intellectual circles in Paris. All the
+constitutional and standing forces of society conspired to preserve the
+monarchy at the expense of no matter what fictions. The middle class
+Militia Guard under La Fayette repressed, in what is known as the
+Massacre of the Champ-de-Mars, the beginnings of a popular movement. The
+more Radical leaders (among whom was Danton) fled abroad or hid. The
+Duke of Orleans utterly failed to take advantage of the moment, or to
+get himself proclaimed regent: the monarchical tradition was too strong.
+
+Immediately after the second anniversary of the taking of the Bastille,
+in July, the decrees of Parliament created the fiction that the King was
+not responsible for the flight, that he "had been carried off," and in
+the following September, though until then suspended from executive
+power, the King, on taking the oath to the Constitution, was once more
+at the head of all the forces of the nation.
+
+But all this patching and reparation of the facade of constitutional
+monarchy (a fiction whose tawdriness is more offensive to the French
+temper than its falsehood) had come too late. Already the Queen had
+written to her brother, the Emperor of Austria, suggesting the
+mobilisation of a considerable force, and its encampment on the
+frontier, to overawe the revolutionary movement. Her action coincided
+within a few days with the end of that great Parliament, which had been
+chosen on the most democratic suffrage, and which had transformed the
+whole of society and laid the basis of the revolutionary Constitution.
+With the meeting of the National Assembly's successor on the 1st of
+October, 1791, war was already possible; that possibility was to be
+transformed very soon into probability, and at last into actuality.
+
+In the new Parliament the weight, not of numbers but of leadership, fell
+to a group of enthusiastic and eloquent men who, from the fact that
+certain of their principal members came from the Gironde, were called
+_The Girondins_. They represented the purest and the most enthusiastic
+ideal of democracy, less national, perhaps, than that advocated by men
+more extreme than they, but of a sort which, from that time to this, has
+been able to rouse the enthusiasm of historians.
+
+Vergniaud and Isnard were their great orators, Brissot was their
+intellectual intriguer, and the wife of Roland, one of their members,
+was, as it were, the soul of the whole group. It was the fact that these
+men desired war which made war certain, once the temper of this new
+second Assembly should be felt.
+
+The extremists over against them, to whom I have alluded (known as "the
+Mountain"), were especially Parisian in character. Robespierre, who had
+been first an obscure, and later a sectarian orator of the National
+Assembly, though not sitting in this second Parliament, was perhaps the
+most prominent figure in that group, for he was the public orator of
+Paris; and indeed the Mountain was Paris; Paris, whether inside or
+outside the Parliament; Paris acting as the responsible brain of France.
+Later, it was the Mountain (that had first opposed the war) which was to
+ensure the success of the French arms by a rigidity and despotism in
+action such as the purer and less practical minds of the Girondins
+abhorred.
+
+On the 3rd of December, 1791 (to quote a fundamental date in the rapid
+progress towards the war which was to transform the Revolution), the
+King--writing in a manner which betrays dictation by his wife--begged
+the King of Prussia (as _she_ had begged the Emperor) to mobilise an
+armed force, and with it to back a Congress that should have for its
+object the prevention of the spread of the Revolution. That letter was
+typical of the moment. From both sides tension was rapidly proceeding to
+the breaking point. Nor was the tension merely upon generalities. The
+Revolution had broken a European treaty in the annexation of the Papal
+State of Avignon, and it had broken European conventions when it had
+abolished in Alsace feudal rights that were possessed by the princes of
+the empire. It was as though some State to-day, attempting Collectivism,
+should confiscate, along with other property, securities lying in its
+banks, but held by the nationals of a foreign State.
+
+On the revolutionary side also there was a definite point at issue,
+which was the permission accorded within the empire for the emigrants to
+meet in arms and to threaten the French frontier.
+
+But these precise and legal points were not the true causes of the war.
+The true causes of the war were the desire of the unreformed European
+Governments (notably those of Prussia and Austria) that the Revolution
+should, in their own interests, be checked, and the conviction that
+their armed forces were easily capable of effecting the destruction of
+the new French _regime_.
+
+The Court of Vienna refused to accept a just indemnity that was offered
+the princes of the empire in Alsace for the loss of their old feudal
+rights; Leopold, the emperor, who was one of the same generation as the
+French King and Queen, died upon the 1st of March, 1792, and was
+succeeded by a son only twenty-four years of age and easily persuaded to
+war.
+
+On the French side, with the exception of the Mountain and notably of
+Robespierre, there was a curious coalition of opinion demanding war.
+
+The Court and the reactionaries were sufficiently certain of the victory
+of the Allies to find their salvation in war.
+
+The revolutionary party, that is, the mass of public opinion and the
+"patriots," as they called themselves, the Girondins, also, and
+especially, desired war as a sort of crusade for the Revolution; they
+suffered grievous illusions, as enthusiasts always must, and believed
+the French armed forces capable of sustaining the shock. The plans had
+already been drawn up for the campaign (and promptly betrayed to the
+enemy by the Queen); Dumouriez, an excellent soldier, had from the
+middle of March 1792 been the chief person in the ministry, and the
+director of foreign affairs, and a month later, on the 20th of April,
+war was declared against Austria, or, to be accurate, against "the King
+of Hungary and Bohemia."
+
+Such was still the official title of Marie Antoinette's nephew, who,
+though now succeeded to the empire, had not yet been crowned emperor. It
+was hoped to confine the war to this monarch, and, indeed, the German
+princes of the empire did not join him (the Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel
+was an exception). But the one German power that counted most, the
+kingdom of Prussia, which Dumouriez had especially hoped to keep
+neutral, joined forces with Austria. The royal letters had done their
+work.
+
+At this critical moment the French armed forces and the French
+strongholds were at their worst. The discipline of the army was
+deplorable. The regular soldiers of the old _regime_ had lost from six
+to nine thousand officers by emigration, and mixed no better than water
+and oil with the revolutionary volunteers who had been drafted (to the
+number of over two hundred battalions) into the ranks of the army;
+moreover, these volunteer battalions were for the most part ill
+provided, far below their establishment, some only existed on paper;
+none were trained as soldiers should be trained. In a more orderly time,
+when the decrees of the Government corresponded with reality, four
+hundred thousand men would have held the frontier; such a number was in
+the estimates. As it was, from the Swiss mountains to the English
+Channel, the French could count on no more than _one-fifth_ of that
+number. Eighty thousand alone were under arms. The full Prussian army
+was, alone, apart from its allies, close upon treble the size of this
+disorganised and insufficient force.
+
+Panics at once ludicrous and tragic opened the campaign upon the French
+side. The King took advantage of them to dismiss his Girondin Ministry
+and to form a reactionary Government. The Parliament replied by measures
+useless to the conduct of war, and designed only to exasperate the
+Crown, which was betraying the nation. It ordered the dismissal of the
+royal Guard, the formation of a camp of revolutionary Federals outside
+Paris, the transportation of the orthodox priests; in pursuit of the
+Court's determination to resist the Assembly and to await the victorious
+allies, Louis vetoed the last two decrees. La Fayette, who was now in
+command of the army of the centre, with his headquarters at Sedan, right
+upon the route of the invasion, declared for the King.
+
+Had the armies of Austria and Prussia moved with rapidity at this
+moment, the Revolution was at an end. As it was, their mobilisation was
+slow, and their march, though accurate, leisurely. It gave time for the
+populace of Paris to demonstrate against the palace and the royal family
+on the 20th of June. It was not until the first days of August that the
+main force of the combined monarchs, under the generalship-in-chief of
+the Duke of Brunswick (who had the reputation of being the best general
+of his time), set out for the march on Paris. It was not until the 23rd
+of August that the invaders took the first French frontier town, Longwy.
+
+Meanwhile two very important things had lent to the French, in spite of
+the wretched insufficiency of their armed force, an intensity of feeling
+which did something to supply that insufficiency. In the first place,
+the third anniversary of the Fall of the Bastille, the 14th of July, had
+called to Paris deputations from all the provinces, many of them armed;
+this gave the national feeling unity. In the second place, Brunswick had
+issued from Coblentz, which was his base, upon the 25th of that same
+month of July, a manifesto which was known in Paris three days later,
+and which (though certain modern historians have questioned this)
+undoubtedly set revolutionary opinion ablaze.
+
+This manifesto demanded, in the name of the Allied Army, a complete
+restoration of the old _regime_, professed to treat the French and their
+new authorities as rebels subject to military execution, and contained a
+clause of peculiar gravity, which excited an immediate and exasperated
+response from Paris. The authorship of this clause lay with Marie
+Antoinette, and it threatened, if there were any attack upon the palace,
+to give the capital over to military execution and total subversion.
+
+Two days later the Federals from Marseilles, a middle-class body of
+excellent citizens, though merely amateurs at soldiering and small in
+numbers, marched into the city. Their marching song has become famous
+under the title of the "Marseillaise." They had accomplished the
+astonishing feat of traversing France, drawing cannon with them, at the
+rate of eighteen miles a day, in the height of a torrid summer, for
+close upon a month on end. There is no parallel to such an effort in the
+history of war, nor did contemporary opinion exaggerate when it saw in
+the battalion of Marseilles the centre of the coming fight.
+
+The shock between the palace and the populace was joined in the morning
+of the 10th of August. The palace was held by about six thousand men,[3]
+of whom some twelve hundred were regulars of the Swiss Guard. The palace
+(the Tuileries) was, or should have been, impregnable. The popular
+attack, we may be certain, would have been beaten back had the
+connection between the Tuileries and the Louvre on the south been
+properly cut. The flooring had indeed been removed at this point for
+some distance, but either the gap was not wide enough or the post was
+insufficiently guarded; the populace and the Federals, badly beaten in
+their main attack upon the long front of the palace, succeeded in
+turning its flank where it joined on to the Louvre; they thus enfiladed
+the suites of rooms and utterly put an end to the resistance of its
+garrison.
+
+Meanwhile the King and Queen, the Dauphin and his little sister, with
+others of the royal household, had taken refuge during the fighting in
+the hall of the Parliament.
+
+After the victory of the populace their fate was debated and decided
+upon; they were imprisoned in the Tower of the Temple, a mediaeval
+fortress still standing in the north-east of Paris, and though monarchy
+was not yet formally abolished, the most extreme spirits which the
+Revolution then contained, and the most vigorous, stepped into the place
+of the old Executive, with Danton at their head. With them appeared in
+the seat of Government the spirit of military action, its contempt for
+forms and its rapid decision. The known accomplices of the supporters of
+the Court's resistance and alliance with the invaders were arrested by
+the hundred. The enrolment of volunteers, already enthusiastic
+throughout France, was supported with the new vigour of official aid;
+and the Revolution left at once all its old moorings to enter an extreme
+phase. At the same moment the frontier was crossed and the national soil
+invaded on the 19th of August.
+
+It is possible that the delay of the Prussians until that moment had
+been calculated, for the position in France was complicated and their
+decision to fight had been tardily arrived at. It was the news of the
+fall of the palace that seems to have decided them. The place, like the
+date, of this grave event, deserves to be more famous than it is.
+Brunswick touched what was then French soil, in that little triangle
+where now German and French Lorraine and Luxembourg meet. The village is
+called Redange: thence did the privileged of Europe set out to reach
+Paris and to destroy democracy. The first task occupied them for full
+twenty-two years, upon the latter they are still engaged.
+
+What forces the French could there bring against Brunswick were
+contemptuously brushed aside. Four days later he had, as we have seen,
+taken the frontier stronghold of Longwy; within a week he was in front
+of Verdun.
+
+Verdun had no chance of resistance, no garrison to call a garrison, and
+no opportunity for defence. The news that it must fall reached Paris on
+the morning of a fatal date, the 2nd of September; after its fall there
+would lie nothing between it and the capital; and from that moment the
+whole nature of the Revolution is wholly transformed by the
+psychological effect of war.
+
+
+V
+
+_From the invasion of September 1792 to the establishment of the
+Committee of Public Safety, April 1793._
+
+The fifth phase of the French Revolution may be said to date from these
+first days of September 1792, when the news of the successful invasion
+was maddening Paris, and when the revolutionary Executive, established
+upon the ruins of the old dead monarchy and in its image, was firmly in
+the saddle, up to the establishment of the yet more monarchical
+"Committee of Public Safety," seven months later. And these seven months
+may be characterised as follows:--
+
+They were a period during which it was attempted to carry on the
+revolutionary war against the Governments of Europe upon democratic
+principles. The attempt failed. In the place of discipline and
+comprehension and foresight the rising and intense enthusiasm of the
+moment was depended upon for victory. The pure ideal of the Girondin
+faction, with the model republic which it hoped to establish, proved
+wholly insufficient for the conduct of a war; and to save the nation
+from foreign conquest and the great democratic experiment of the
+Revolution from disaster, it was necessary that the military and
+disciplined side of the French, with all the tyranny that accompanies
+that aspect of their national genius, should undertake the completion of
+the adventure.
+
+This period opens with what are called the Massacres of September. I
+have said upon a former page that "the known accomplices and supporters
+of the Court's alliance with the invaders were arrested by the hundred,"
+upon the fall of the palace and the establishment of a revolutionary
+Executive with Danton at its head.
+
+These prisoners, massed in the jails of the city, were massacred to the
+number of eleven hundred by a small but organised band of assassins
+during the days when the news of the fall of Verdun was expected and
+reached the capital. Such a crime appalled the public conscience of
+Europe and of the French people. It must never be confused with the
+judicial and military acts of the Terror, nor with the reprisals
+undertaken against rebellion, nor with the gross excesses of mob
+violence; for though votes in favour of the immediate execution of those
+who had sided with the enemies of the country were passed in certain
+primary assemblies, the act itself was the mechanical, deliberate and
+voluntary choice of a few determined men. It had, therefore, a character
+of its own, and that character made it stand out for its contemporaries
+as it should stand out for us: it was murder.
+
+The prisoners were unarmed--nay, though treasonable, they had not
+actually taken arms; their destruction was inspired, in most of those
+who ordered it, by mere hatred. Those who ordered it were a small
+committee acting spontaneously, and Marat was their chief.[4]
+
+It was under the impression of these massacres that the Deputies of the
+new or third Assembly of the Revolution, known to history as _The
+Convention_, met in Paris.
+
+This Parliament was to be at first the actual, later the nominal
+governing power in France during the three critical years that followed;
+years which were the military salvation of the Revolution, and which
+therefore permitted the establishment of the democratic experiment in
+modern Europe.
+
+It was on the 20th of September that the Convention met for its first
+sitting, which was held in the palace of the Tuileries. During the hours
+of that day, while it was electing its officials, choosing its Speaker
+and the rest, the French Army upon the frontier, to its own astonishment
+and to that of its enemy, managed to hold in check at the cannonade of
+_Valmy_ the allied invaders.
+
+Upon the morrow the new Assembly met in the riding school (the Manege),
+where the two former Assemblies had also sat. It was about to separate
+after that day's sitting when one of the members proposed the abolition
+of Royalty; the Convention voted the reform unanimously and dispersed.
+
+On the third day, the 22nd of September, it was decreed that the public
+documents should henceforward bear the date "First Year of the
+Republic"; but there was no solemnity on the occasion; the idea of "No
+King" was novel and untried; there was as yet no enthusiasm for any save
+the monarchic form of government. It was not until the title "Republic"
+began to connote in men's minds political liberty, and had become also
+the flag, as it were, for the victorious national defence, that the
+Republican name acquired in our Europe, and from France, that strong and
+almost religious force which it has since retained.
+
+The check given to the invaders at Valmy (again to the astonishment of
+both soldiers and statesmen!) determined the campaign. Sickness and the
+difficulty of communications made the further advance of the invaders
+impossible. They negotiated for and obtained an unmolested retreat, and
+a few weeks later they had re-crossed the frontier.
+
+Meanwhile, in Paris the great quarrel had begun between the Municipal
+and the National Government, which, because Paris was more decided, more
+revolutionary, and, above all, more military in temper than the
+Parliament, was destined to terminate in the victory of the capital. The
+Girondins still stood in the Assembly for an ideal republic; a republic
+enjoying to the utmost limit individual liberty in its citizens and the
+autonomy of local government in every city and parish; but opposed to
+this ideal, and far more national, was that of the revolutionary
+extremists, called in the Convention "the Mountain," who had the support
+of the Municipal Government of Paris (known as "the Commune"), and were
+capable of French victories in the field. These stood for the old French
+and soldierly conception of a strong central Government, wherewith to
+carry on the life-and-death struggle into which the Revolution had now
+entered: therefore they conquered.
+
+All that autumn the quarrel between France and Europe remained doubtful,
+for though the armies of the Republic under Dumouriez won the battle of
+Jemappes, swept across the north-eastern frontier and occupied Belgium,
+while to the south another French army swept right up to the Rhine,
+Dumouriez himself knew well enough that a campaign undertaken merely
+upon enthusiasm, and with troops so mixed in character and many of them
+so undisciplined, would end fatally. But until the advent of the new
+year public opinion was not instructed upon these lines, and the
+revolutionary war seemed to have passed suddenly from the defence of the
+national territory to a crusade against the kings and the aristocratic
+Governments of Europe. Enthusiasm, and enthusiasm alone, was the force
+of the moment. Violent decrees such as the Declaration of Fraternity
+(which decreed an alliance with all people struggling to be free) and
+the opening of the Scheldt (a direct violation of treaty rights to which
+England, among other nations, was a partner) were characteristic of the
+moment; chief act of all, the King was put upon his trial at the bar of
+the Parliament.
+
+It was upon the 4th of January, 1793 (the King had already made his will
+upon Christmas Day), that the chief orator of the Girondins moved that
+the sentence should be referred to the people for ratification. The fear
+of civil war more than anything else forbade this just suggestion to
+pass. Upon the 15th of January the question was put to the Parliament,
+"whether the King had been guilty of conspiring against public liberty
+and of attempting the general safety of the State." Many were absent and
+many abstained: none replied in the negative; the condemnation of Louis
+was therefore technically almost a unanimous one.
+
+The voting on these grave issues was what the French call "nominal":
+that is, each member was called upon "by name" to give his vote--and an
+expression of opinion as well if he so chose. A second attempt to appeal
+to the people was rejected by 424 to 283. On the third question, which
+was the decisive one of the penalty, 721 only could be found to vote,
+and of these a bare majority of 53 declared for death as against the
+minority, of whom some voted for the death penalty "conditionally"--that
+is, not at all--or voted against it. A respite was lost by a majority of
+70; and on the 21st of January, 1793, at about ten in the morning, Louis
+XVI was guillotined.
+
+Then followed war with England, with Holland, and with Spain; and almost
+at that moment began the inevitable reflux of the military tide. For the
+French eruption up to the Rhine in the Low Countries and the Palatinate,
+had no permanent military basis upon which to depend. Dumouriez began to
+retreat a month after the King's execution, and on the 18th of March
+suffered a decisive defeat at Neerwinden. It was this retreat, followed
+by that disaster, which decided the fate of the Girondin attempt to
+found a republic ideally, individually, and locally free. Already,
+before the battle of Neerwinden was fought, Danton, no longer a
+minister, but still the most powerful orator in the Convention, proposed
+a special court for trying cases of treason--a court which was later
+called "the Revolutionary Tribunal." The news of Neerwinden prepared the
+way for a stronger measure and some exceptional form of government; a
+special Parliamentary committee already formed for the control of
+ministers was strengthened when, on the 5th of April, after some
+negotiation and doubt, Dumouriez, despairing of the armies of the
+Republic, thought to ally his forces with the invaders and to restore
+order. His soldiers refused to follow him; his treason was apparent;
+upon the morrow the Convention nominated that first "Committee of Public
+Safety" which, with its successor of the same name, was henceforward the
+true despotic and military centre of revolutionary government. It was
+granted secrecy in deliberation, the virtual though not the theoretic
+control of the Ministry, sums of money for secret expenditure, and, in a
+word, all the machinery necessary to a military executive. Rousseau's
+_Dictator_ had appeared, the great mind which had given the _Contrat
+Social_ to be the gospel of the Revolution had also foreseen one of the
+necessary organs of democracy in its hardest trial; his theory had been
+proved necessary and true in fact. Nine members formed this first
+Committee: Barere, who may be called the clerk of it, Danton its genius,
+and Cambon its financier, were the leading names.
+
+With the establishment of this truly national and traditional thing,
+whose form alone was novel, but whose power and method were native to
+all the military tradition of Gaul, the Revolution was saved. We have
+now chiefly to follow the way in which the Committee governed and in
+which it directed affairs in the great crisis of the war. This sixth
+phase lasts for nearly sixteen months, from the beginning of April 1793
+to the 28th of July 1794, and it is convenient to divide those sixteen
+months into two divisions.
+
+
+VI
+
+_From April 1793 to July 1794._
+
+The first division of this period, which ends in the height of the
+summer of 1793, is the gradual consolidation of the Committee as a new
+organ of government and the peril of destruction which it runs, in
+common with the nation it governs at the hands of allied Europe.
+
+The second period includes part of August and all the rest of 1793, and
+the first seven months of 1794, during which time the Committee is
+successful in its military effort, the nation is saved, and in a manner
+curiously dramatic and curiously inconsequential, the martial _regime_
+of the Terror abruptly ceases.
+
+The first step in the consolidation of the power of the Committee was
+their letting loose of the Commune of Paris and the populace it governed
+against the Girondins.
+
+Looked at merely from the point of view of internal politics (upon
+which most historians have concentrated) the attack of the populace of
+Paris and their Commune against the Parliament seems to be no more than
+the end of the long quarrel between the Girondins with their ideal
+federal republic, and the capital with its instinct for strong
+centralised government. But in the light of the military situation, of
+which the Committee of Public Safety were vividly aware, and which it
+was their business to control, a very different tale may be told.
+
+When the defeats began the Parliament had voted a levy of three hundred
+thousand men. It was a mere vote which came to very little: not enough
+in numbers and still less in moral, for the type of troops recruited
+under a system of money forfeit and purchased substitutes was wholly
+beneath the task of the great war.
+
+This law of conscription had been passed upon the 24th of February. The
+date for its first application was, in many villages, fixed for the 10th
+of March. All that country which borders the estuary of the Loire, to
+the north and to the south, a country whose geographical and political
+peculiarities need not here detain us, but which is still curiously
+individual, began to resist. The decree was unpopular everywhere, of
+course, as military service is everywhere unpopular with a settled
+population. But here it had no ally, for the Revolution and all its
+works were grossly unpopular as well. The error of the Civil
+Constitution of the Clergy was a powerful factor in this revolt. The
+piety and the orthodoxy of this district were and are exceptional. Some
+such resistance in some such quarter was perhaps expected: what was not
+expected was its military success.
+
+Four days before the defeat of Neerwinden itself, and four days after
+the decree of conscription in the villages, a horde of peasantry had
+taken possession of the town of Chollet in the southern part of this
+district, Vendee. Three days before the Committee of Public Safety was
+formed the insurgents had defeated regular forces at Machecoul, and had
+tortured and put to death their prisoners. The month of April, when the
+Committee of Public Safety was first finding its seat in the saddle, saw
+the complete success of the rebels. The forces sent against them were
+worthless, for all military effort had been concentrated upon the
+frontier. Most of them were not even what we should call militia. A
+small force of regulars was to have moved from Orleans, but, before they
+could attack, Thouars, Parthenay, and Fontenay fell into the power of
+the rebels. These posts afforded an advanced triangle right into the
+regularly administered territory of the Republic: the great town of
+Nantes was outflanked. Even in such a moment the Girondins still clung
+to their ideal: an individually free and locally autonomous republic. It
+is little wonder that the temper of Paris refused to support them, or
+their influence over the Parliament, and we can easily understand how
+the new Committee supported Paris in its revolt.
+
+That revolt took place on the 31st of May. The forces under the command
+of the capital did not march, but a deputation of the sections of Paris
+demanded the arrest of the leading Girondins. The body of the debating
+hall was invaded by the mob. The Committee of Public Safety pretended to
+compromise between Paris and the Parliament, but a document, recently
+analysed, sufficiently proves that their sympathy was with the Parisian
+attack. They proposed, indeed, to put the armed force of Paris at the
+disposition of the Assembly: that is, in their own hands.
+
+That day nothing of moment was done, but the Parliament had proved of no
+strength in the face of the capital. On the frontier the advance of the
+invaders had begun. The great barrier fortress of Valenciennes relied
+for its defence upon the neighbouring camp of Famars. The garrison of
+that camp had been compelled to evacuate it by the advance of the Allied
+Army upon the 23rd of May, and though some days were to be spent before
+the heavy artillery of the Austrians could be emplaced, Valenciennes was
+henceforward at the mercy of its besiegers. There was news that La
+Vendee was not the only rebellion. Lyons had risen three days before.
+There had been heavy fighting. The Royalists and the Girondins had
+combined and had carried the town hall and established an
+insurrectionary and unelected Municipal Government. Such news, coming
+immediately after the 31st of May, roused the capital to action. This
+time the Parisian forces actually marched against the Parliament. The
+demand for the suspension of the twenty-two named Girondin deputies was
+made under arms. Much has been written, and by the best historians, to
+make of this successful day a mere conquest by the Commune of Paris over
+the Parliament. Though Barere and Danton both protested in public, it
+was in reality their politics that conquered with Paris. To the
+twenty-two names that the forces of Paris had listed, seven were added.
+The great Girondins, Brissot, Vergniaud and the rest, were not indeed
+imprisoned, they were considered "under arrest in their houses." But the
+moral authority of the Convention as an administrative machine, not as a
+legislative one, was broken on this day, the 2nd of June, 1793. Paris
+had ostensibly conquered, but the master who was stronger than ever and
+whom Paris had served, was the Committee of Public Safety.
+
+This first Committee of Public Safety endured to the 10th of July. In
+the midst of such a war and of such an internal struggle the Convention
+had voted (upon the initiative of the Committee of Public Safety) the
+famous Constitution of '93, that prime document of democracy which, as
+though to mock its own ideal, has remained no more than a written thing
+from then until now. Therein will be found universal suffrage, therein
+the yearly Parliament, therein the referendum, therein the elected
+Executive--a thing no Parliament would ever give us to-day. The
+Constitution was passed but three weeks after the successful
+insurrection of Paris. A fortnight later still, on the 10th of July, the
+first of the Committees of Public Safety was followed by its successor.
+
+All this while the Vendeans were advancing. Nantes, indeed, had held out
+against the rebels, but as we shall see in a moment, the Republican
+troops had not yet made themselves good. The rebellion of Lyons was
+fortifying itself, and a week later was to execute the Radical Chalier.
+Marseilles was rising. On the 10th of July the Convention summoned to
+its bar Westermann, the friend of Danton, who had just suffered defeat
+at the hands of the western rebels.
+
+It is well to note at this point one of those small individual factors
+which determine the fate of States. Danton, the master of all that first
+movement towards centralisation, the man who had made the 10th of
+August, who had negotiated with the Prussians after Valmy, who had
+determined upon and formed a central government against the Girondin
+anarchy--had broken down. His health was gone. He was a giant in body,
+but for the moment he had tired himself out.
+
+The renewing of his Committee was proposed: he was thrust out from the
+new choice. Barere remained to link the old Committee with the new. A
+violent sectarian Calvinist pastor, Jeanbon Saint-Andre, among the
+bravest and most warped of the Revolutionaries; Couthon, a friend of
+Robespierre; Saint-Just, a still more intimate friend (a young,
+handsome, enormously courageous and decisive man), entered, with others
+to the number of nine, the new Committee. Seventeen days later, on the
+27th of July, Robespierre replaced one of the minor members thus chosen.
+He had precisely a year to live, and it is the moment for fixing before
+the reader's mind the nature of his career.
+
+Robespierre was at this moment the chief figure in the eyes of the
+crowd, and was soon to be the chief revolutionary figure in the eyes of
+Europe: that is the first point. The second is of equal importance, and
+is far less generally recognised. He was not, and was never destined to
+be, the chief force in the revolutionary Government.
+
+As to the first point, Robespierre had attained this position from the
+following combination of circumstances: first, alone of the
+revolutionary personalities, he had been continually before the public
+eye from the beginning; he had been a member of the first Parliament of
+all and had spoken in that Parliament in the first month of its
+sessions. Though then obscure in Versailles, he was already well known
+in his province and native town of Arras.
+
+Secondly, this position of his in the public eye was maintained without
+a break, and his position and reputation had increased by accumulation
+month after month for the whole four years. No one else was left in the
+political arena of whom this could be said. All the old reactionaries
+had gone, all the moderate men had gone; the figures of 1793 were all
+new figures--except Robespierre; and he owed this continued and steady
+increase of fame to:--
+
+Thirdly, his conspicuous and vivid sincerity. He was more wholly
+possessed of the democratic faith of the _Contrat Social_ than any other
+man of his time: he had never swerved from an article of it. There is no
+better engine for enduring fame than the expression of real convictions.
+Moreover--
+
+Fourthly, his speeches exactly echoed the opinions of his audience, and
+echoed them with a lucidity which his audience could not have commanded.
+Whether he possessed true eloquence or no is a matter still debated by
+those who are scholars in French letters. But it is certain that he had
+in his own time all the effects of a great orator, though his manner was
+precise and cold.
+
+Fifthly, he was possessed of a consistent body of doctrine: that is, he
+was not only convinced of the general democratic creed which his
+contemporaries held, and he not only held it unswervingly and
+uncorruptedly, but he could supplement it with a system of morals and
+even something which was the adumbration of religion.
+
+Sixthly, he had, as such characters always can, but not often do, gather
+round themselves, a group of intensely devoted personal admirers and
+supporters, chief of whom was the young and splendidly courageous
+Saint-Just.
+
+It was the combination of all these things, I say, which made
+Robespierre the chief personality in the public eye when he entered the
+Committee of Public Safety on the 27th of July, 1793.
+
+Now let it be noted that, unlike his follower Saint-Just, and
+exceedingly unlike Danton, Robespierre possessed none of those military
+qualities without which it is impossible to be responsible for
+government over a military nation--especially if that nation be in the
+act of war: and such a war! The Committee of Public Safety was the Caesar
+of revolutionary France. Robespierre as a member of that Caesar was
+hopeless. His popularity was an advantage to his colleagues in the
+Committee, but his conception of action upon the frontiers was vague,
+personal, and futile. His ambition for leadership, if it existed, was
+subordinate to his ambition to be the saviour of his people and of their
+democratic experiment, and he had no comprehension of those functions of
+leadership by which it can co-ordinate detail and impose a plan of
+action. Robespierre, therefore, in every crisis of the last year we are
+about to study, yielded to his colleagues, never impressed them and
+never led them, and yet (it was the irony of his fate) was imagined by
+his fellow countrymen and by the warring Governments of Europe to be the
+master of them all.
+
+The first weeks after his appearance in the Committee of Public Safety
+were the critical weeks of the whole revolutionary movement. The
+despotic action of Paris (which I have concluded to be secretly
+supported by the Committee)[5] had provoked insurrection upon all sides
+in the provinces. Normandy had protested, and on the 13th of July a
+Norman girl stabbed Marat to death. Lyons, as we have seen, had been
+some weeks in revolt; Marseilles had rebelled in the first week of June,
+Bordeaux and the whole department of the Gironde had of course risen,
+for their men were at stake. Later Toulon, the great naval depot of
+France, revolted: a reactionary municipal provincial Government was
+formed in that port, the little boy imprisoned in the Temple, heir to
+the kingdom, was proclaimed under the title of Louis XVII, and before
+the end of August the English and Spanish fleets had been admitted into
+the harbour and an excellent foreign garrison was defending the town
+against the national Government.
+
+Meanwhile the Allies upon the Belgian frontier were doing what they
+could, taking fortress after fortress, and while Mayence was falling on
+the Rhine, Valenciennes and Conde were capitulating on the north-eastern
+border, and a portion of the Allied Army was marching to besiege
+Dunquerque. The insurrection in Vendee, which had broken out in the
+early part of the year, though checked by the resistance of Nantes, was
+still successful in the field.
+
+It was in the month of August that a successful effort was made. Carnot,
+who soon proved the military genius of the Revolution, entered the
+Committee of Public Safety. On the 23rd of the month a true levy, very
+different from the futile and insufficiently applied attempt of the
+spring, was forced upon the nation by a vote in Parliament. It was a
+levy of men, vehicles, animals and provision, and soon furnished
+something not far short of half a million soldiers. With September the
+tide turned, the first victory in this crisis of the struggle,
+Hoondschoote, relieved Dunquerque in the early days of September. By
+mid-October a second and decisive victory, that of Wattignies, relieved
+Maubeuge. Lyons had been taken, Normandy was pacified long before; by
+the end of the year Toulon was reoccupied, and at the same time the last
+cohesive force of the Vendeans destroyed.
+
+But meanwhile the crisis had had a double effect, moral and material.
+The moral effect had been a sort of national madness in which the most
+extreme measures were proposed and many of them carried through with
+what one may call a creative audacity. The calendar itself was changed,
+the week itself abolished, the months re-named and re-adjusted. Such an
+act sufficiently symbolises the mental attitude of the Revolutionaries.
+They were determined upon a new earth.
+
+There went with this the last and most violent attack upon what was
+believed to be the last remnants of Catholicism in the country, a
+hideous persecution of the priesthood, in which an uncounted number of
+priests died under the rigours of transportation or of violence. The
+reprisals against the rebels varied from severity of the most awful kind
+to cruelty that was clearly insane, and of which the worst examples took
+place at Arras and at Nantes.
+
+In all this turmoil the governing centre of the country, the Committee
+of Public Safety, not only kept its head but used the enormous forces of
+the storm for the purposes of achieving military success, under that
+system known as "the Terror," which was for them no more than martial
+law, and an engine of their despotic control. Of the two thousand and
+more that passed before the revolutionary tribunal and were executed in
+Paris, the large majority were those whom the Committee of Public Safety
+judged to be obstacles to their military policy; and most were men or
+women who had broken some specific part of the martial code which the
+Government had laid down. Some were generals who had failed or were
+suspected of treason; and some, among the most conspicuous, were
+politicians who had attempted to check so absolute a method of
+conducting the war.
+
+Of these the greatest was Danton. Before the end of 1793 he began to
+protest against the system of the Terror; he believed, perhaps, that the
+country was now safe in the military sense and needed such rigours no
+more. But the Committee disagreed, and were evidence available we should
+perceive that Carnot in particular determined that such opposition must
+cease. Danton and his colleagues--including Desmoulins, the journalist
+of the Revolution and the chief publicist who promoted the days of July
+1789--were executed in the first week of April 1794.
+
+Parallel to this action on the part of the Committee was their sudden
+attack upon men of the other extreme: the men whose violence, excessive
+even for that time, threatened to provoke reaction. Hebert was the chief
+of these, the spokesman of the Commune of Paris; and he also perished.
+
+Meanwhile the Committee had permitted other persecutions and other
+deaths, notably that of the Queen. A sane policy would have demanded
+that she should be kept a hostage: she was sacrificed to the desire for
+vengeance, and her head fell on the same day on which the decisive
+battle of Wattignies was won. Later the King's sister, Madame Elisabeth,
+was sacrificed to the same passions, and with her must be counted a
+certain proportion of the victims whose destruction could be no part of
+the Committee's scheme, and proceeded purely from the motives of an
+ancient hatred, though in the case of many of these who were of
+aristocratic birth or of influence through their wealth, it is not easy
+to determine how far the possibility of their intrigue with the
+foreigner may not have led them to the scaffold.
+
+In the last four months of the period we are considering in this book,
+through April, that is, after the execution of Danton, through May and
+June and almost to the end of July, Robespierre appears with a
+particular prominence. Fads or doctrines of his own are admitted upon
+the Statute Book of the Revolution, notably his religious dogmas of a
+personal God and of the immortality of the soul. Nay, a public solemnity
+is arranged in honour of such matters, and he is the high priest
+therein. The intensity of the idolatry he received was never greater;
+the numbers that shared it were, perhaps, diminishing. It is certain
+that he did not appreciate how far the supports of his great popularity
+were failing. It is certain that he saw only the increasing enthusiasm
+of his immediate followers. The Committee still used him as their
+tool--notably for an increase of the Terror in June, but it is possible
+that for the first time in all these months he began to attempt some
+sort of authority within the Committee: we know, for instance, that he
+quarrelled with Carnot, who was easily the strongest man therein.
+
+In the past they had permitted him to indulge a private policy where it
+did not interfere with the general military plan. He was largely
+responsible, not through his own judgment but from his desire to voice
+opinion, for the trial and execution of the Queen. He had temporised
+when Danton was beginning his campaign against the Terror at the end of
+1793, and it is an ineffaceable blot upon his memory and his justly
+earned reputation for integrity and sincerity, that he first permitted
+and then helped towards Danton's execution. We may presume from the few
+indications we have that he protested against it in the secret counsels
+of the Committee, but he had yielded, and what is more, since Saint-Just
+desired to be Danton's accuser he had furnished Saint-Just with notes
+against Danton. Though it was the Committee who were morally responsible
+for the extreme extension of the Terror which proceeded during those
+last few months, Robespierre had the unwisdom to act as their
+instrument, to draft their last decrees, and, believing the Terror to be
+popular, to support it in public. It was this that ruined him. The
+extreme Terrorists, those who were not yet satiated with vengeance, and
+who hated and feared a popular idol, determined to overthrow him.
+
+The mass of those who might be the next victims and who, knowing nothing
+of the secret councils of the Committee, imagined Robespierre to be what
+he posed as being, the master of the Committee, were eager for his
+removal. In his fictitious character as the supposed chief power in the
+State, all the growing nausea against the Terror was directed against
+his person.
+
+Coincidently with such forces, the Committee, whom, relying upon his
+public position, he had begun to interfere with, and probably to check
+in their military action (he certainly had attempted unsuccessfully to
+save certain lives against the decision of his colleagues), determined
+to be rid of him. The crisis came in the fourth week of July: or as the
+revolutionary calendar then went, in the second week of Thermidor. He
+was howled down in the Parliament, an active and clever conspiracy had
+organised all the latent forces of opposition to him; he still so
+trusted in his popularity that the scene bewildered him, and he was
+still so beloved and so ardently followed, that when at that same
+sitting he was outlawed, his brother sacrificed himself to follow him.
+Saint-Just was included in the sentence, and his strict friend Lebas
+voluntarily accepted the same doom.
+
+What followed was at first a confusion of authority; put under arrest,
+the governor of the prison to which Robespierre was dispatched refused
+to receive him. He and his sympathisers met in the Hotel de Ville after
+the fall of darkness, and an attempt was made to provoke an
+insurrection. There are many and confused accounts of what immediately
+followed at midnight, but two things are certain: the populace refused
+to rise for Robespierre, and the Parliament, with the Committee at its
+back, organised an armed force which easily had the better of the
+incipient rebellion at the Hotel de Ville. It is probable that
+Robespierre's signature was needed to the proclamation of insurrection:
+it is certain that he did not complete it, and presumable that he would
+not act against all his own theories of popular sovereignty and the
+general will. As he sat there with the paper before him and his
+signature still unfinished, the armed force of the Parliament burst into
+the room, a lad of the name of Merda aimed a pistol from the door at
+Robespierre, and shot him in the jaw. (The evidence in favour of this
+version is conclusive.) Of his companions, some fled and were captured,
+some killed themselves, most were arrested. The next day, the 10th
+Thermidor, or 28th of July, 1794, at half-past seven in the evening,
+Robespierre, with twenty-one others, was guillotined.
+
+The irony of history would have it that the fall of this man, which was
+chiefly due to his interference with the system of the Terror, broke all
+the moral force upon which the Terror itself had resided; for men had
+imagined that the Terror was his work, and that, he gone, no excuse was
+left for it. A reaction began which makes of this date the true term in
+that ascending series of revolutionary effort which had by then
+discussed every aspect of democracy, succeeded in the military defence
+of that experiment, and laid down, though so far in words only, the
+basis of the modern State.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[3] The reader should be warned that these numbers are hotly disputed.
+The latest authority will allow no more than 4000. After a full
+consultation of the evidence I can reduce the garrison to no less than
+6000.
+
+[4] The legend that Danton was connected with the massacres is based on
+insufficient historical foundation. There are several second or third
+hand stories in support of it, but the chief positive evidence brought
+forward in this connection is the stamped paper of the Minister of
+Justice which, it has been amply proved by Dr. Robinet, was taken by a
+subordinate and without Danton's knowledge or complicity. To the much
+stupider story that the Federals of Marseilles took part in the
+massacres, the modern student need pay no attention; it has been
+destroyed piecemeal and on indefeasible documentary evidence in the
+monograph of Pollio and Marcel.
+
+[5] On p. 403 of my monograph on Danton (Nisbet & Co., 1899) the reader
+will find an unpublished report of the Committee of Public Safety, drawn
+up immediately before the destruction of the Girondins on the 31st of
+May. It forms, in my view, conclusive evidence, read in the light of
+their other actions, of the Committee's determination to side with
+Paris.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+THE MILITARY ASPECT OF THE REVOLUTION
+
+
+The Revolution would never have achieved its object: on the contrary, it
+would have led to no less than a violent reaction against those
+principles which were maturing before it broke out, and which it carried
+to triumph, had not the armies of revolutionary France proved successful
+in the field; but the grasping of this mere historic fact, I mean the
+success of the revolutionary armies, is unfortunately no simple matter.
+
+We all know that as a matter of fact the Revolution was, upon the whole,
+successful in imposing its view upon Europe. We all know that from that
+success as from a germ has proceeded, and is still proceeding, modern
+society. But the nature, the cause and the extent of the military
+success which alone made this possible, is widely ignored and still more
+widely misunderstood. No other signal military effort which achieved its
+object has in history ended in military disaster--yet this was the case
+with the revolutionary wars. After twenty years of advance, during which
+the ideas of the Revolution were sown throughout Western civilisation,
+and had time to take root, the armies of the Revolution stumbled into
+the vast trap or blunder of the Russian campaign; this was succeeded by
+the decisive defeat of the democratic armies at Leipsic, and the superb
+strategy of the campaign of 1814, the brilliant rally of what is called
+the Hundred Days, only served to emphasise the completeness of the
+apparent failure. For that masterly campaign was followed by Napoleon's
+first abdication, that brilliant rally ended in Waterloo and the ruin of
+the French army. When we consider the spread of Grecian culture over
+the East by the parallel military triumph of Alexander, or the conquest
+of Gaul by the Roman armies under Caesar, we are met by political
+phenomena and a political success no more striking than the success of
+the Revolution. The Revolution did as much by the sword as ever did
+Alexander or Caesar, and as surely compelled one of the great
+transformations of Europe. But the fact that the great story can be read
+to a conclusion of defeat disturbs the mind of the student.
+
+Again, that element fatal to all accurate study of military history, the
+imputation of civilian virtues and motives, enters the mind of the
+reader with fatal facility when he studies the revolutionary wars.
+
+He is tempted to ascribe to the enthusiasm of the troops, nay, to the
+political movement itself, a sort of miraculous power. He is apt to use
+with regard to the revolutionary victories the word "inevitable," which,
+if ever it applies to the reasoned, willing and conscious action of men,
+certainly applies least of all to men when they act as soldiers.
+
+There are three points which we must carefully bear in mind when we
+consider the military history of the Revolution.
+
+First, that it succeeded: the Revolution, regarded as the political
+motive of its armies, won.
+
+Secondly, that it succeeded through those military aptitudes and
+conditions which happened to accompany, but by no means necessarily
+accompanied, the strong convictions and the civic enthusiasm of the
+time.
+
+Thirdly, that the element of chance, which every wise and prudent
+reasoner will very largely admit into all military affairs, worked in
+favour of the Revolution in the critical moments of the early wars.
+
+With these points fixed, and with a readiness to return to them when we
+have appreciated the military story, it is well to begin our study by
+telling that story briefly, and upon its most general lines. In so
+doing, it will be necessary to cover here and there points which have
+already been dealt with in this book, but that is inevitable where one
+is writing of the military aspect of any movement, for it is impossible
+to deal with that aspect save as a living part of the whole: so knit
+into national life is the business of war.
+
+
+ONE
+
+When the Revolution first approached action, the prospect of a war
+between France and any other great Power of the time--England, Prussia,
+the Empire, or let us say Russia, or even Spain--was such a prospect as
+might have been entertained at any time during the past two or three
+generations of men.
+
+For pretty well a hundred years men had been accustomed to the
+consideration of dynastic quarrels supported by a certain type of army,
+which in a moment I shall describe.
+
+I have called these quarrels dynastic; that is, they were mainly
+quarrels between the ruling houses of Europe: were mainly motived by
+the desire of each ruling house to acquire greater territory and
+revenue, and were limited by the determination of all the ruling houses
+to maintain certain ideas inviolate, as, for instance, the sacredness of
+monarchy, the independence of individual States, etc. Though they were
+in the main dynastic, yet in proportion as a dynasty might represent a
+united nation, they were national also. The English oligarchy was in
+this respect peculiar and more national than any European Government of
+its time. It is also true to say that the Russian despotism had behind
+it, in most of its military adventures and in all its spirit of
+expansion, the subconscious agreement of the people.
+
+Still, however national, the wars of the time preceding the Revolution
+moved within a fixed framework of ideas, as it were, which no commander
+and no diplomatist dreamed of exceeding. A, the crowned head of a State,
+would have some claims against B, the crowned head of another State,
+with regard to certain territories. C, the crowned head or Government of
+a third State, would remain neutral or ally himself with either of the
+two; if he allied himself, then, as a rule, it was with the weaker
+against the stronger, in order to guarantee himself against too great an
+increase on the part of a rival. Or, again, a rebellion would break out
+against the power of A in some part of his dominions; then would B,
+somewhat reluctantly (as the almost unlimited right of an existing
+executive was still a strong dogma in men's minds), tend to ally
+himself with the rebels in order to diminish the power of A.
+
+Human affairs have always in them very strongly and permanently
+inherent, the character of a sport: the interest (at any rate of males)
+in the conduct of human life is always largely an interest of seeing
+that certain rules are kept, and certain points won, according to those
+rules. We must, therefore, beware of ridiculing the warfare of the
+century preceding the Revolution under the epithet of "a game." But it
+is true of that warfare, and honourably true, that it attempted limited
+things in a limited manner; it did not attempt any fundamental change in
+society; it was not overtly--since the Thirty Years' War at least--a
+struggle of ideas; it was conducted on behalf of known and limited
+interests for known and highly limited objects, and the instruments with
+which it was conducted were instruments artificial and segregated from
+the general life of nations.
+
+These instruments were what have been called the "professional" armies.
+The term is very insufficient, and, in part, misleading. The gentry of
+the various Powers, mixed with whom were certain adventurers not always
+of gentle blood, were the officers that led these forces; and for the
+major part of the gentry in most European countries, the military career
+was the chief field of activity. The men whom they led were not a
+peasantry nor a working class, still less a civic force in which the
+middle class would find itself engaged: they were the poorest and the
+least settled, some would have said the dregs of European life. With the
+exception here and there of a man--usually a very young man whom the
+fabled romance of this hard but glorious trade had attracted--and with
+the exception of certain bodies that followed in a mass and by order the
+relics of a feudal lordship, the armies of the period immediately
+preceding the Revolution were armies of very poor men, who had sold
+themselves into a sort of servitude often exciting and even adventurous,
+but not, when we examine it minutely, a career that a free man would
+choose. The men were caught by economic necessity, by fraud, and in
+other ways, and once caught were held. No better proof of this could be
+found than the barbarous severity of the punishments attached to
+desertion, or to minor forms of indiscipline. So held, they were used
+for the purposes of the game, not only in what would make them
+serviceable instruments of war, but also in what would make them
+pleasing to their masters. Strict alignment, certain frills of parade
+and appearance, all that is required in a theatre or in a pretentious
+household, appear in the military regulations of the time.
+
+I must not in all this be supposed to be belittling that great period
+between 1660 and 1789, during which the art of war was most thoroughly
+thought out, the traditions of most of our great European armies fixed,
+and the permanent military qualities which we still inherit developed.
+The men so caught as private soldiers could not but enjoy the game when
+it was actively played, for men of European stock will always enjoy the
+game of war; they took glory in its recital and in its memories; to be a
+soldier, even under the servile conditions of the time, was a proper
+subject for pride, and it is further to be remarked that the excesses of
+cruelty discoverable in the establishment of their discipline were also
+accompanied by very high and lasting examples of military virtue. The
+behaviour of the English contingents at Fontenoy afford but one of many
+examples of what I mean.
+
+Still, to understand the wars of the Revolution we must clearly
+establish the contrast between the so-called professional armies which
+preceded that movement and the armies which the Revolution invented,
+used, and bequeathed to the modern world.
+
+So also, to revert to what was said above, we must recall the dynastic
+and limited character of the wars in which the eighteenth century had
+been engaged; at the outbreak of the Revolution no other wars were
+contemplated by men.
+
+Had you spoken, for instance, at any moment in 1789, to a statesman,
+whether of old experience or only introduced to political life by the
+new movement, of the position of Great Britain, he would at once have
+discussed that position in the terms of Great Britain's recent defeat at
+the hands of France in the affair of the American colonies. Had you
+discussed with him the position of Prussia he would at once have argued
+it in connection with Prussia's secular opposition to Austria and the
+Empire. Had you asked him how he considered Spain, he would have spoken
+of the situation of Spain as against France in the light of the fact
+that Spain was a Bourbon monarchy allied in blood to the French throne.
+And so forth. No true statesman imagined at the time, nor, indeed, for
+many years, that a war of _ideas_, nor even, strictly speaking, of
+_nations_, was possible. Even when such a war was actually in process of
+waging, the diplomacy which attempted to establish a peace, the
+intrigues whereby alliances were sought, or neutrality negotiated, were
+dependent upon the older conception of things; and the historian is
+afforded, as he regards this gigantic struggle, the ironic satisfaction
+of seeing men fighting upon doctrines the most universal conceivable and
+yet perpetually changing their conduct during the struggle according to
+conceptions wholly particular, local and ephemeral, and soon to be
+entirely swept away by time.
+
+Napoleon himself must needs marry an Austrian archduchess as part of
+this old prejudice, and for years brains as excellent as Danton's or
+Talleyrand's conjecture the possibility of treating now England, now
+Prussia, as neutral to the vast attempt of the French to destroy
+privilege in European society!
+
+One may say that for two years the connection of the revolutionary
+movement with arms had no aspect save that of civil war. True, whenever
+a considerable change is in progress in society the possibility of
+foreign war in connection with it must always arise. Were some European
+State, for instance, to make an experiment in Collectivism to-day, the
+chance of foreign intervention would certainly be discussed by the
+promoters of that experiment. But no serious danger of an armed struggle
+between the French and any of their neighbours in connection with the
+political experiment of the Revolution was imagined by the mass of
+educated men in France itself nor without the boundaries of France
+during those first two years. And, I repeat, the military aspect of
+those years was confined to civil tumult. Nevertheless, that aspect is
+not to be neglected. The way in which the French organised their civil
+war (and there was always something of it present from the summer of
+1789 onwards) profoundly affected the foreign war that was to follow:
+for in their internal struggles great masses of Frenchmen became
+habituated to the physical presence, millions to the discussion, of
+arms.
+
+It is, as we have seen in another part of this book, a repeated and
+conspicuous error to imagine that the first revolutionary outbreaks were
+not met sufficiently sternly by royal troops. On the contrary, the royal
+troops were used to the utmost and were defeated. The populace of the
+large towns, and especially of Paris, proved itself capable of military
+organisation and of military action. When to this capacity had been
+added the institution of the militia called the National Guard, there
+were already the makings of a nation wholly military.
+
+Much in this exceptional and new position must be ascribed to the Gallic
+character. It may be said that from the fall of the Roman Empire to the
+present day that character has been permanently and of its own volition
+steeped in the experience of organised fighting. Civil tumult has been
+native to it, the risk of death in defence of political objects has been
+equally familiar, and the whole trade of arms, its necessary
+organisation, its fatigues and its limiting conditions, have been very
+familiar to the population throughout all these centuries. But beyond
+this the fact that the Revolution prepared men in the school of civil
+tumult was of the first advantage for its later aptitude against foreign
+Powers.
+
+It is always well in history to fix a definite starting-point for any
+political development, and the starting-point of the revolutionary wars
+may easily be fixed at the moment when Louis, his queen and the royal
+children attempted to escape to the frontier and to the Army of the
+Centre under the command of Bouille. This happened, as we have seen, in
+June 1791.
+
+Many factors combine to make that date the starting-point. In the first
+place, until that moment no actual proof had been apparent in the eyes
+of European monarchs of the captivity of their chief exemplar, the king
+of France.
+
+The wild march upon Versailles, in the days of October 1789, had its
+parallel in a hundred popular tumults with which Europe was familiar
+enough for centuries. But the rapidly succeeding reforms of the year
+1790, and even the great religious blunder of 1791, had received the
+signature and the public assent of the Crown. The Court, though no
+longer at Versailles, was splendid, the power of the King over the
+Executive still far greater than that of any other organ in the State,
+and indefinitely greater than that of any other individual in the State.
+The talk of captivity, of insult and the rest, the outcries of the
+emigrants and the perpetual complaint of the French royal family in its
+private relations, seemed exaggerated, or at any rate nothing to act
+upon, until there came the shock of the King's attempted flight and
+recapture. This clinched things; and it clinched them all the more
+because more than one Court, and especially that of Austria, believed
+for some days that the escape had been successful.
+
+Again, the flight and its failure put the army into a ridiculous
+posture. Action against the Revolution was never likely, so long as the
+discipline and steadiness of the French army were believed in abroad.
+But the chief command had hopelessly failed upon that occasion, and it
+was evident that the French-speaking troops could not easily be trusted
+by the Executive Government or by their own commanders. Furthermore, the
+failure of the flight leads the Queen, with her vivacity of spirit and
+her rapid though ill-formed plans, to turn for the first time to the
+idea of military intervention. Her letters suggesting this (in the form
+of a threat rather than a war, it is true) do not begin until after her
+capture at Varennes.
+
+Finally, coincident with that disaster was the open mention of a
+Republic, the open suggestion that the King should be deposed, and the
+first definite and public challenge to the principles of monarchy which
+the Revolution had thrown down before Europe.
+
+We are, therefore, not surprised to find that this origin of the
+military movement was followed in two months by the Declaration of
+Pillnitz.
+
+With the political nature of that Declaration one must deal elsewhere.
+Its military character must here be observed.
+
+The Declaration of Pillnitz corresponded as nearly as possible to what
+in the present day would be an order preparatory to mobilising a certain
+proportion of the reserve. It cannot with justice be called equivalent
+to an order _calling out_ all the reserves, still less equivalent to an
+order mobilising upon a war footing the forces of a modern nation, for
+such an action is tantamount to a declaration of war (as, for instance,
+was the action of the English Government before the South African
+struggle), and Pillnitz was very far from that. But Pillnitz was
+certainly as drastic a military proceeding as would be the public
+intimation by a group of Powers that the reserves had been warned in
+connection with their quarrel against another Power. It was, for
+instance, quite as drastic as the action of Austria against Servia in
+1908. And it was intended to be followed by such submission as is
+expected to follow upon the threat of superior force.
+
+Such was the whole burden of Marie Antoinette's letters to her brother
+(who had called the meeting at Pillnitz), and such was the sense in
+which the politicians of the Revolution understood it.
+
+All that autumn and winter the matter chiefly watched by foreign
+diplomatists and the clearest of French thinkers was the condition of
+the French forces and of their command. Narbonne's appointment to the
+War Office counted more than any political move, Dumouriez' succession
+to him was the event of the time. Plans of campaign were drawn up (and
+promptly betrayed by Marie Antoinette to the enemy), manifold occasions
+for actual hostilities were discovered, the Revolution challenged the
+Emperor in the matter of the Alsatian princes, the Emperor challenged,
+through Kaunitz, the Revolution in a letter directly interfering with
+the internal affairs of France, and pretending to a right of _ingerence_
+therein; and on the 20th of April, 1792, war was declared against the
+Empire. Prussia thereupon informed the French Government that she made
+common cause with the Emperor, and the revolutionary struggle had begun.
+
+The war discovered no serious features during its first four months: so
+slow was the gathering and march of the Allies; but the panics into
+which the revolutionary troops fell in the first skirmishes, their lack
+of discipline, and the apparent breakdown of the French military power,
+made the success of the Invasion in Force, when it should come, seem
+certain. The invading army did not cross the frontier until more than a
+week after the fall of the palace. Longwy capitulated at once; a week
+later, in the last days of August, the great frontier fortress of Verdun
+was summoned. It capitulated almost immediately.
+
+
+TWO
+
+On the 2nd of September Verdun was entered by the Prussians, and a
+little outside the gates of the town, near a village bearing the name of
+Regret, the allied camp was fixed. Rather more than a week later, on the
+11th, the Allies marched against the line of the Argonne.
+
+The reader will remember that this moment, with the loss of the frontier
+fortresses Longwy and Verdun, and the evidence of demoralisation which
+that afforded, was also the moment of the September massacres and of the
+horrors in Paris. Dumouriez and the mixed French force which he
+commanded had been ordered by the Ministers of War to hold the line of
+the Argonne against which the Allies were marching. And here it is well
+to explain what was meant in a military sense by this word "line."
+
+The Argonne is a long, nearly straight range of hills running from the
+south northward, a good deal to the west of north.
+
+Their soil is clay, and though the height of the hills is only three
+hundred feet above the plain, their escarpment or steep side is towards
+the east, whence an invasion may be expected. They are densely wooded,
+from five to eight miles broad, the supply of water in them is bad, in
+many parts undrinkable; habitation with its provision for armies and
+roads extremely rare. It is necessary to insist upon all these details
+because the greater part of civilian readers find it difficult to
+understand how formidable an obstacle so comparatively unimportant a
+feature in the landscape may be to an army upon the march. It was quite
+impossible for the guns, the wagons, and therefore the food and the
+ammunition of the invading army, to pass through the forest over the
+drenched clay land of that wet autumn save where proper roads existed.
+These were only to be found wherever a sort of natural pass negotiated
+the range.
+
+Three of these passes alone existed, and to this day there is very
+little choice in the crossing of these hills. The accompanying sketch
+will explain their disposition. Through the southernmost went the great
+high road from the frontier and Verdun to Paris. At the middle one
+(which is called the Gap of Grandpre) Dumouriez was waiting with his
+incongruous army. The third and northern one was also held, but less
+strongly. The obvious march for an unimpeded invader would have been
+from Verdun along the high road, through the southern pass at "Les
+Islettes," and so to Chalons and on to Paris. But Dumouriez, marching
+down rapidly from the north, had set an advanced guard to hold that pass
+and was lying himself with the mass of the army on the pass to the north
+of it at Grandpre. Against Grandpre the Prussians marched, and meanwhile
+the Austrians were attacking the further pass to the north. Both were
+forced. Dumouriez fell back southward to St. Menehould. Meanwhile
+Kellermann was coming up from Metz to join him, and all the while the
+main pass at "Les Islettes," through which the great road to Paris went,
+continued to be held by the French.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch Map, showing the turning of the positions on the
+Argonne and the Cannonade at Valmy, September 1792.]
+
+The Prussians and the Austrians joined forces in the plain known as the
+Champagne Pouilleuse, which lies westward of Argonne. It will be seen
+that as they marched south along this plain to meet Dumouriez and to
+defeat him, their position was a peculiar one: they were nearer the
+enemy's capital than the enemy's army was, and yet they had to fight
+with their backs to that capital, and their enemy the French had to
+fight with their faces towards it. Moreover, it must be remarked that
+the communications of the Allied Army were now of a twisted, roundabout
+sort, which made the conveyance of provisions and ammunition slow and
+difficult--but they counted upon an immediate destruction of Dumouriez'
+force and after that a rapid march on the capital.
+
+On September 19 Kellermann came up from the south and joined hands with
+Dumouriez near St. Menehould, and on the morning of the 20th his force
+occupied a roll of land on which there was a windmill and immediately
+behind which was the village of Valmy; from this village the ensuing
+action was to take its name. It must here be insisted upon that both
+armies had been subjected to the very worst weather for more than a
+fortnight, but of the two the Prussian force had suffered from this
+accident much more severely than the French. Dysentery had already
+broken out, and the length and tortuousness of their communications were
+greatly emphasised by the condition of the roads.
+
+On the morning of that day, the 20th of September, a mist impeded all
+decisive movements. There was an encounter, half accidental, between an
+advanced French battery and the enemy's guns, but it was not until
+mid-morning that the weather lifted enough to show each force its
+opponent. Then there took place an action, or rather a cannonade, the
+result of which is more difficult to explain, perhaps, than any other
+considerable action of the revolutionary wars. For some hours the
+Prussian artillery, later reinforced by the Austrian, cannonaded the
+French position, having for its central mark the windmill of Valmy,
+round which the French forces were grouped. At one moment this cannonade
+took effect upon the limbers and ammunition wagons of the French; there
+was an explosion which all eye-witnesses have remembered as the chief
+feature of the firing, and which certainly threw into confusion for some
+moments the ill-assorted troops under Kellermann's command. At what hour
+this took place the witnesses who have left us accounts differ to an
+extraordinary extent. Some will have it at noon, others towards the
+middle of the afternoon--so difficult is it to have any accurate account
+of what happens in the heat of an action. At any rate, if not
+coincidently with this success, at some moment not far removed from it,
+the Prussian charge was ordered, and it is here that the difficulties of
+the historian chiefly appear. That charge was never carried home;
+whether, as some believe, because it was discovered, after it was
+ordered, to be impossible in the face of the accuracy and intensity of
+the French fire, or whether, as is more probably the case, because the
+drenched soil compelled the commanders to abandon the movement after it
+had begun--whatever the cause may have been, the Prussian force, though
+admirably disciplined and led, and though advancing in the most exact
+order, failed to carry out its original purpose. It halted halfway up
+the slope, and the action remained a mere cannonade without immediate
+result apparent upon either side.
+
+Nevertheless that result ultimately turned out to be very great, and if
+we consider its place in history, quite as important as might have been
+the result of a decisive action. In the first place, the one day's delay
+which it involved was just more than the calculations of the Allies,
+with their long impeded line of communications, had allowed for. In the
+next place, a singular increase in determination and moral force was
+infused into the disheartened and ill-matched troops of the French
+commanders by this piece of resistance.
+
+We must remember that the French force upon the whole expected and
+discounted a defeat, the private soldier especially had no confidence in
+the result; and to find that at the first action which had been so long
+threatened and had now at last come, he could stand up to the enemy,
+produced upon him an exaggerated effect which it would never have had
+under other circumstances.
+
+Finally, we must recollect that whatever causes had forbidden the
+Prussian charge forbade on the next day a general advance against the
+French position. And all the time the sickness in the Prussian camp was
+rapidly increasing. Even that short check of twenty-four hours made a
+considerable difference. A further delay of but yet another day, during
+which the Allied Army could not decide whether to attack at once or to
+stand as they were, very greatly increased the list of inefficients from
+illness.
+
+For a whole week of increasing anxiety and increasing inefficiency the
+Allied Army hung thus, impotent, though they were between the French
+forces and the capital. Dumouriez ably entertained this hesitation, with
+all its accumulating dangers for the enemy, by prolonged negotiations,
+until upon the 30th of September the Prussian and Austrian organisation
+could stand the strain no longer, and its commanders determined upon
+retreat. It was the genius of Danton, as we now know, that chiefly
+organised the withdrawal of what might still have been a dangerous
+invading force. It is principally due to him that no unwise Jingoism was
+permitted to claim a trial of strength with the invader, that he was
+allowed to retire with all his guns, his colours and his train. The
+retreat was lengthy and unmolested, though watched by the French forces
+that discreetly shepherded it but were kept tightly in hand from Paris.
+It was more than three weeks later when the Allied Army, upon which
+Europe and the French monarchy had counted for an immediate settlement
+of the Revolution, re-crossed the frontier, and in this doubtful and
+perhaps inexplicable fashion the first campaign of the European Powers
+against the Revolution utterly failed.
+
+
+THREE
+
+Following upon this success, Dumouriez pressed on to what had been, from
+the first moment of his power at the head of the army, his personal
+plan--to wit, the invasion of the Low Countries.
+
+To understand why this invasion failed and why Dumouriez thought it
+might succeed, we must appreciate the military and political situation
+of the Low Countries at the time. They then formed a very wealthy and
+cherished portion of the Austrian dominions; they had latterly suffered
+from deep disaffection culminating in an open revolution, which was due
+to the Emperor of Austria's narrow and intolerant contempt of religion.
+From his first foolish policy of persecution and confiscation he had
+indeed retreated, but the feeling of the people was still strongly
+opposed to the Government at Vienna. It is remarkable, indeed, and in
+part due to the pressure of a strongly Protestant and aristocratic
+state, Holland, to the north of them, that the people of the Austrian
+Netherlands retained at that time a peculiar attachment to the Catholic
+religion. The Revolution was quite as anti-Catholic as the Austrian
+Emperor, but of the persecution of the latter the Belgians (as we now
+call them) knew something; that of the former they had not yet learnt to
+dread. It was, therefore, Dumouriez' calculation that, in invading this
+province of the Austrian power, he would be fighting in friendly
+territory. Again, it was separated from the political centre of the
+empire; it was, therefore, more or less isolated politically, and even
+for military purposes communication with it was not so easy, unless,
+indeed, Austria could count on a complete co-operation with Prussia,
+which Power had been for now so long her ruthless and persistent rival.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch Map of towns occupied by French in 1792 and
+evacuated in March 1793, with sites of battles of Jemappes and of
+Neerwinden, and of Dumouriez' treason.]
+
+Favourable, however, as the circumstances appeared for an invasion, two
+factors telling heavily against the French had to be counted: the first
+was the formation of their army, the second the spirit of rebellion
+against any anti-Catholic Government which had given such trouble to
+Joseph II.
+
+Of these two factors by far the most important was, of course, the
+first. If the French forces had been homogeneous, in good spirit, and
+well trained, they might have held what they won; as a fact, they were
+most unhomogeneous, great portions of them were ill trained, and, worst
+of all, there was no consistent theory of subordinate command. Men who
+imagined that subordinate, that is, regimental, command in an army
+could be erected from below, and that a fighting force could resemble a
+somewhat lax and turbulent democracy, marched alongside of and were
+actually incorporated with old soldiers who had spent their whole
+careers under an unquestioned discipline, and under a subordinate
+command which came to them they knew not whence, and as it were by fate.
+The mere mixture of two such different classes of men in one force would
+have been bad enough to deal with, but what was worse, the political
+theories of the day fostered the military error of the new battalions
+though the politicians dared not interfere with the valuable
+organisation of the old.
+
+The invasion of the Low Countries began with a great, though somewhat
+informal and unfruitful success, in the victory of Jemappes. It was the
+first striking and dramatic decisive action which the French, always of
+an eager appetite for such news, had been given since between forty and
+fifty years. The success in America against the English, though
+brilliantly won and solidly founded, had not presented occasions of this
+character, and Fontenoy was the last national victory which Paris could
+remember. Men elderly or old in this autumn of 1792 would have been boys
+or very young men when Fontenoy was fought. The eager generation of the
+Revolution, with its military appetites and aptitudes, as yet had hardly
+expected victory, though victory was ardently desired by them and
+peculiarly suitable to their temper.
+
+It may be imagined, therefore, what an effect the news of Jemappes had
+upon the political world in Paris. The action was fought just below the
+town of Mons, a few miles over the frontier, and consisted in a somewhat
+ill-ordered but successful advance across the River Haine. Whether
+because the Austrians, with an inferior force, attempted to hold too
+long a line, or because the infantry and even the new French volunteer
+battalions, as yet untried by fatigue, proved irresistible in the centre
+of the movement, Jemappes was a victory so complete that the attempts of
+apologists to belittle it only serve to enhance its character.
+
+Like many another great and apparently decisive action, however, it bore
+no lasting fruit. Both the factors of which I have spoken above appeared
+immediately after this success. Belgium was, indeed, over-run by the
+French, but in their over-running of it with something like eighty
+thousand men, they made no attempt to spare the traditions or to
+conciliate the sympathies of the inhabitants. Hardly was Jemappes won
+when Mons, the neighbouring fortified frontier town, was at once endowed
+with the whole machinery of revolutionary government. Church property
+was invaded and occasionally rifled, and the French paper money, the
+assignats of which we have heard, poured in to disturb and in places to
+ruin the excellent commercial system upon which Belgium then as now
+reposed.
+
+Jemappes was fought upon the 6th of November, 1702. Brussels was entered
+upon the 14th, and throughout that winter the Low Countries lay
+entirely in the hands of the French. The Commissioners from the
+Convention, though endowing Belgium with republican institutions,
+treated it as a conquered country, and before the breaking of spring,
+the French Parliament voted its annexation to France. This annexation,
+the determination of the politicians in Paris that the new Belgian
+Government should be republican and anti-Catholic, the maltreatment of
+the Church in the occupied country and the increasing ill discipline and
+lack of cohesion in his army, left Dumouriez in a position which grew
+more and more difficult as the new year, 1793, advanced. It must be
+remembered that this moment exactly corresponded with the execution of
+the King and the consequent declaration of war by or against France in
+the case of one Power after another throughout Europe. Meanwhile, it was
+decided, foolishly enough, to proceed from the difficult occupation of
+Belgium to the still more difficult occupation of Holland, and the siege
+of Maestricht was planned.
+
+The moment was utterly ill-suited for such a plan. Every Executive in
+the civilised world was coalescing openly or secretly, directly or
+indirectly, against the revolutionary Government. The first order to
+retreat came upon the 8th of March, when the siege of Maestricht was
+seen to be impossible, and when the great forces of the Allies were
+gathered again to attempt what was to be the really serious attack upon
+the Revolution: something far more dangerous, something which much more
+nearly achieved success, than the march of the comparatively small force
+which had been checked at Valmy.
+
+For ten days the French retreat continued, when, upon the 18th of March,
+Dumouriez risked battle at Neerwinden. His army was defeated.
+
+The defeat was not disastrous, the retreat was continued in fairly good
+order, but a civilian population understands nothing besides the words
+defeat and victory; it can appreciate a battle, not a campaign. The news
+of the defeat, coming at a moment of crisis in the politics of Paris,
+was decisive; it led to grave doubts of Dumouriez' loyalty to the
+revolutionary Government, it shattered his popularity with those who had
+continued to believe in him, while the general himself could not but
+believe that the material under his command was rapidly deteriorating.
+Before the end of the month the army had abandoned all its conquests,
+and Valenciennes, in French territory, was reached upon the 27th. The
+dash upon Belgium had wholly failed.
+
+At this moment came one of those political acts which so considerably
+disturb any purely military conspectus of the revolutionary wars.
+Dumouriez, at the head of his army, which, though in retreat and
+defeated, was still intact, determined upon what posterity has justly
+called treason, but what to his own mind must have seemed no more than
+statesmanship. He proposed an understanding with the enemy and a
+combined march upon Paris to restore the monarchical government, and
+put an end to what seemed to him, as a soldier, a perfectly hopeless
+situation. He certainly believed it impossible for the French army, in
+the welter of 1793, to defeat the invader. He saw his own life in peril
+merely because he was defeated. He had no toleration for the rising
+enthusiasm or delirium of the political theory which had sent him out,
+and, even before he had reached French territory, his negotiations with
+Coburg, the Austrian commander, had begun. They lasted long. Dumouriez
+agreed to put the frontier fortresses of the French into the hands of
+the enemy as a guarantee and a pledge; and on the 5th of April all was
+ready for the alliance of the two armed forces.
+
+But just as the treason of Dumouriez is, in the military sense, abnormal
+and disturbing to any general conspectus of the campaign, so was the
+action of his army.
+
+The doubtful point of a general command which is political in nature,
+and may be unpopular with the rank and file, lies, of course, in the
+attitude of the commanders of units, and these unanimously refused to
+obey the orders of their chief. It was known that Dumouriez had been
+summoned to the bar of the Convention, which body had sent commissioners
+to apprehend him. He had arrested the commissioners, and had handed them
+over as hostages and prisoners to Coburg. So far from Dumouriez upon the
+critical day handing over his force to the enemy, or constituting it a
+part of an allied army to march upon the capital, he was compelled to
+fly upon the 8th of April; all that disappeared with him, counting many
+who later deserted back again to the French colours, was less than a
+thousand men--and these foreign mercenaries.
+
+The consequence of this strange passage upon the political history of
+the time we have already seen. Its consequence upon the military history
+of it was indirect but profound. The French forces, such as they were,
+were still intact, but no general officer could in future be trusted by
+Paris, and the stimulus which nations in the critical moments of
+invasion and of danger during foreign war seek in patriotism, in the
+offering of a high wage to the men and of honours and fortunes to their
+commanders, was now sought by the French in the singular, novel and
+abnormal experiment of the Terror. Command upon the frontier throughout
+1793 and the first part of 1794, during the critical fourteen months,
+that is, which decided the fate of the Revolution, and which turned the
+tide of arms in favour of the French, was a task accomplished under the
+motive power of capital punishment. A blunder was taken as a proof of
+treason, and there lay over the ordering of every general movement the
+threat of the guillotine.
+
+What we have now to follow is somewhat over a year of a struggle thus
+abnormally organised upon the French side, and finally successful
+through the genius of a great organiser, once a soldier, now a
+politician, Carnot. The French succeeded by the unshakable conviction
+which permitted the political leaders to proceed to all extremity in
+their determination to save the Revolution; by the peculiar physical
+powers of endurance which their army displayed, and finally, of course,
+by certain accidents--for accident will always be a determining factor
+in war.
+
+The spring of 1793, the months of April and May, form the first crisis
+of the revolutionary war. The attack about to be delivered is universal,
+and seems absolutely certain to succeed. With the exception of the rush
+at Jemappes, where less than thirty thousand Austrians were broken
+through by a torrent superior in numbers (though even there obviously
+ill-organised), no success had attended the revolutionary armies. Their
+condition was, even to the eye of the layman, bad, and to the eye of the
+expert hopeless. There was no unity apparent in direction, there were
+vast lesions in the discipline of the ranks like great holes torn in
+some rotten fabric. Even against the forces already mobilised against
+it, it had proved powerless, and it might be taken for granted that by
+an act more nearly resembling police work than a true campaign, the
+Allies would reach Paris and something resembling the old order be soon
+restored. What remains is to follow the process by which this
+expectation was disappointed.
+
+The situation at this moment can best be understood by a glance at the
+sketch map on p. 178. Two great French advances had been made in the
+winter of 1792-93; the one a northern advance, which we have just
+detailed, the over-running of Belgium; the other an eastern advance
+right up to the Rhine and to the town of Mayence. Both had failed. The
+failure in Belgium, culminating in the treason of Dumouriez, has been
+read. On the Rhine (where Mayence had been annexed by the French
+Parliament just as Belgium had been) the active hostility of the
+population and the gathering of the organised forces of the Allies had
+the same effect as had been produced in the Low Countries.
+
+It was on March 21, 1793, that the Prussians crossed the Rhine at
+Bacharach, and within that week the French commander, Custine, began to
+fall back. On the first of April he was back again in French territory,
+leaving the garrison of Mayence, somewhat over twenty thousand men, to
+hold out as best it could; a fortnight later the Prussians had
+surrounded the town and the siege had begun.
+
+On the north-eastern front, stretching from the Ardennes to the sea, a
+similar state of things was developing. There, a barrier of fortresses
+stood between the Allies and Paris, and a series of sieges corresponding
+to the siege of Mayence in the east had to be undertaken. At much the
+same time as the investment of Mayence, on April 9, the first step in
+this military task was taken by the Allies moving in between the
+fortress of Conde and the fortress of Valenciennes. Thenceforward it was
+the business of the Austrians under Coburg, with the Allies that were to
+reach him, to reduce the frontier fortresses one by one, and when his
+communications were thus secure, to march upon Paris.
+
+It is here necessary for the reader unacquainted with military history
+to appreciate two points upon which not a little of contemporary
+historical writing may mislead him. The first is that both in the Rhine
+valley and on the Belgian frontier the forces of the Allies in their
+numbers and their organisation were conceived to be overwhelming. The
+second is that no competent commander on the spot would have thought of
+leaving behind him the garrison of even one untaken fortress. It is
+important to insist upon these points, because the political passions
+roused by the Revolution are still so strong that men can hardly write
+of it without prejudice and bias, and two errors continually present in
+these descriptions of the military situation in the spring of 1793, are,
+first, that the Allies were weakened by the Polish question, which was
+then active, and secondly, that the delay of their commanders before the
+French fortresses was unnecessary.
+
+Both these propositions are put forward with the object of explaining
+the ultimate defeat of the enemies of the Revolution: both, however
+great the authority behind them, are unhistorical and worthless. The
+French success was a military success due to certain military factors
+both of design and accident, which will appear in what follows. The
+Allies played their part as all the art of war demanded it to be played;
+they were ultimately defeated, not from the commission of any such
+gross and obvious error in policy or strategy as historians with too
+little comprehension of military affairs sometimes pretend, but from the
+military superiority of their opponents.
+
+It is true that the Polish question (that is the necessity the Austrian
+and Prussian Governments were each under of watching that the other was
+not lessened in importance by the approaching annexations of further
+Polish territory with the consequent jealousy and mistrust that arose
+from this between Austria and Prussia) was a very important feature of
+the moment. But it is bad military history to pretend that this affected
+the military situation on the Rhine or in the Netherlands.
+
+Every campaign is conditioned by its political object. The political
+object in this case was to march upon and to occupy Paris. The political
+object of a campaign once determined, the size and the organisation of
+the enemy are calculated and a certain force is brought against it. No
+much larger force is brought than is necessary: to act in such a fashion
+would be in military art what paying two or three times the price of an
+article would be in commerce. The forces of the Allies upon the Rhine
+and in the Netherlands were, in the opinion of every authority of the
+time, amply sufficient for their purpose; and more than sufficient: so
+much more than sufficient that the attitude of that military opinion
+which had to meet the attack--to wit, the professional military opinion
+of the French republican soldiers, was that the situation was
+desperate, nor indeed was it attempted to be met save by a violent and,
+as it were, irrational enthusiasm.
+
+The second point, the so-called "delay" involved in the sieges
+undertaken by the Allies, proves, when it is put forward, an
+insufficient acquaintance with contemporary conditions. Any fortress
+with a considerable garrison left behind untaken would have meant the
+destruction of the Austrian or Prussian communications, and their
+destruction at a moment when the Austrian and Prussian forces were
+actually advancing over a desperately hostile country. Moreover, when
+acting against forces wholly inferior in discipline and organisation, an
+untaken fortress is a refuge which one must take peculiar pains to
+destroy. To throw himself into such a refuge will always stand before
+the commander of those inferior forces as a last resource. It is a
+refuge which he will certainly avail himself of ultimately, if it is
+permitted to him. And when he has so availed himself of it, it means the
+indefinite survival of an armed organisation in the rear of the
+advancing invaders. We must conclude, if we are to understand this
+critical campaign which changed the history of the world, that Coburg
+did perfectly right in laying siege to one fortress after another before
+he began what every one expected to be the necessarily successful
+advance on Paris. The French despair, as one town after another
+surrendered, is an amply sufficient proof of the excellence of his
+judgment.
+
+We approach the military problem of 1793, therefore, with the following
+two fields clear before us:--
+
+1. In the north-east an advance on Paris, the way to which is blocked by
+a quadrilateral of fortresses: Mons, Maubeuge, Conde, and Valenciennes,
+with the subsidiary stronghold of Lequesnoy in the neighbourhood of the
+last. Mons has been in Austrian hands since Dumouriez' retreat; Conde is
+just cut off from Valenciennes by Coburg's advance, but has not fallen;
+Valenciennes and the neighbouring Lequesnoy are still intact, and so is
+Maubeuge. All must be reduced before the advance on Paris can begin.
+Behind these fortresses is a French army incapable as yet of attacking
+Coburg's command with any hope of success. Such is the position in the
+last fortnight of April.
+
+2. Meanwhile, on the Rhine the French garrison in Mayence is besieged;
+Custine, the French commander in that quarter, has fallen back on the
+French town of Landau, and is drawing up what are known in history as
+the Lines of Weissembourg. The accompanying sketch map explains their
+importance. Reposing upon the two obstacles of the river on the right
+and the mountains on the left, they fulfilled precisely the same
+functions as a fortress; and those functions we have just described.
+Until these lines were carried, the whole of Alsace may be regarded as a
+fortress defended by the mountains and the river on two sides, and by
+the Lines of Weissembourg on the third.
+
+A reader unacquainted with military history may ask why the obstruction
+was not drawn upon the line of the Prussian advance on Paris. The answer
+is that the presence of a force behind fortifications anywhere in the
+neighbourhood of a line of communication is precisely equivalent to an
+obstacle lying right upon those lines. For no commander can go forward
+along the line of his advance and leave a large undestroyed force close
+to one side of that line, and so situated that it can come out when he
+has passed and cut off his communications; for it is by communications
+that an army lives, especially when it is marching in hostile country.
+
+[Illustration: Strategic situation in early summer of 1793. Mayence
+besieged, Conde and Valenciennes about to be besieged. Conditions of the
+double advance on Paris.]
+
+Custine, therefore, behind his Lines of Weissembourg, and the besieged
+garrison in Mayence, correspond to the barrier of fortresses on the
+north-east and delayed the advance of the Prussians under Wurmser and
+Brunswick from the Rhine, just as Conde, Valenciennes, and Maubeuge
+prevented the advance of Coburg on the north-east. Such in general was
+the situation upon the eastern frontier at the end of that month of
+April, 1793.
+
+
+FOUR
+
+Let us first follow the development of the northern position. It will be
+remembered that all Europe was at war against the French. The Austrians
+had for allies Dutch troops which joined them at this moment, and
+certain English and Hanoverian troops under the Duke of York who also
+joined them.
+
+At this moment, when Coburg found himself in increasing strength, a
+tentative French attack upon him was delivered and failed. Dampierre,
+who was in command of all this French "Army of the North," was killed,
+and Custine was sent to replace him. The Army of the North did not, as
+perhaps it should have done, concentrate into one body to meet Coburg's
+threatened advance; it was perpetually attempting diversions which were
+useless because its strength was insufficient. Now it feinted upon the
+right towards Namur, now along the sea coast on the left; and these
+diversions failed in their object. Before the end of the month, Coburg,
+to give himself elbow room, as it were, for the sieges which he was
+preparing, compelled the main French force to retreat to a position well
+behind Valenciennes. It was immediately after this success of Coburg's
+that Custine arrived to take command on the Belgian frontier, his place
+on the Rhine being taken by Houchard.
+
+Custine was a very able commander, but a most unlucky one. His plan was
+the right one: to concentrate all the French forces (abandoning the
+Rhine) and so form an army sufficient to cope with Coburg's. The
+Government would not meet him in this, and he devoted himself
+immediately to the reorganisation of the Army of the North alone. The
+month of June and half of July was taken up in that task.
+
+Meanwhile, the Austrian siege work had begun, and Conde was the first
+object of its attention. Upon July 10 Conde fell. Meanwhile Custine had
+been recalled to Paris, and Valenciennes was invested. Custine was
+succeeded by Kilmaine, a general of Irish extraction, who maintained his
+position for but a short time, and was unable while he maintained it to
+do anything. The forces of the Allies continually increased. The number
+at Coburg's disposal free from the business of besieging Valenciennes
+was already larger than the force required for that purpose. And yet
+another fifteen thousand Hessian troops marched in while the issue of
+that siege was in doubt. This great advantage in numbers permitted him
+to get rid of the main French force that was still present in front of
+him, though not seriously annoying him.
+
+This force lay due south-west of Valenciennes, and about a day's march
+distant. He depended for the capture of it upon his English and
+Hanoverian Allies under the Duke of York, but that general's march
+failed. The distance was too much for his troops in the hot summer
+weather, and the French were able to retreat behind the line of the
+Scarpe and save their army intact.
+
+The Duke of York's talents have been patriotically exaggerated in many a
+treatise. He always failed: and this was among the most signal of his
+failures.
+
+Kilmaine had hardly escaped from York, drawn up his army behind the
+Scarpe and put it into a position of safety when he in his turn was
+deprived of the command, and Houchard was taken from the Rhine just as
+Custine had been, and put at the head of the Army of the North. Before
+the main French army had taken up this position of safety, Valenciennes
+had fallen. It fell on the 28th of July, and its fall, inevitable though
+it was and, as one may say, taken for granted by military opinion, was
+much the heaviest blow yet delivered. Nothing of importance remained to
+block the march of the Armies of the Allies, save Maubeuge.
+
+At about the same moment occurred three very important changes in the
+general military situation, which the reader must note if he is to
+understand what follows.
+
+The first was the sudden serious internal menace opposed to the
+Republican Government; the second was the advent of Carnot to power; the
+third was the English diversion upon Dunquerque.
+
+The serious internal menace which the Government of the Republic had to
+face was the widespread rebellion which has been dealt with in the
+earlier part of this book. The action of the Paris Radicals against the
+Girondins had raised whole districts in the provinces. Marseilles, which
+had shown signs of disaffection since April, and had begun to raise a
+local reactionary force, revolted. So did Bordeaux, Nimes, and other
+great southern towns. Lyons had risen at the end of May and had killed
+the Jacobin mayor of the town in the period between the fall of Conde
+and that of Valenciennes. The troop which Marseilles had raised against
+the Republic was defeated in the field only the day before Valenciennes
+fell, but the great seaport was still unoccupied by the forces of the
+Government. The Norman march upon Paris had also failed between those
+two dates, the fall of Conde and the fall of Valenciennes. The Norman
+bark had proved worse than the Norman bite; but the force was so
+neighbouring to the capital that it took a very large place in the
+preoccupations of the time. The Vendean revolt, though its triumphant
+advance was checked before Nantes a fortnight before the fall of Conde,
+was still vigorous, and the terrible reprisals against it were hardly
+begun. Worst of all, or at least, worst perhaps, after the revolt of
+Lyons, was the defection of Toulon. Toulon rose two days before the fall
+of Valenciennes, and was prepared to hand itself over (as at last it did
+hand itself over) to occupation by the English fleet.
+
+The dates thus set in their order may somewhat confuse the reader, and I
+will therefore summarise the general position of the internal danger
+thus: A man in the French camp on the Scheldt, listening to the guns
+before Valenciennes fifteen miles away, and hourly expecting their
+silence as a signal that the city had surrendered, would have heard by
+one post after another how Marseilles still held out against the
+Government; how the counter-attack against the successful Vendeans had
+but doubtfully begun (all July was full of disasters in that quarter);
+how Lyons was furiously successful in her rebellion and had dared to put
+to death the Republican mayor of the town; and that the great arsenal
+and port at Toulon, the Portsmouth of France upon the Mediterranean, had
+sickened of the Government and was about to admit the English fleet. His
+only comfort would have been to hear that the Norman march on Paris had
+failed--but he would still be under the impression of it and of the
+murder of Marat by a Norman woman.
+
+There is the picture of that sudden internal struggle which coincides
+with this moment of the revolutionary war, the moment of the fall of
+Conde and of Valenciennes, and the exposure of the frontier.
+
+The second point, the advent of Carnot into the Committee of Public
+Safety, which has already been touched upon in the political part of
+this work, has so preponderating a military significance that we must
+consider it here also.
+
+The old Committee of Public Safety, it will be remembered, reached the
+end of its legal term on July 10. It was the Committee which the wisdom
+of Danton had controlled. The members elected to the new Committee did
+not include Carnot, but the military genius of this man was already
+public. He came of that strong middle class which is the pivot upon
+which the history of modern Europe turns; a Burgundian with lineage,
+intensely republican, he had been returned to the Convention and had
+voted for the death of the King; a sapper before the Revolution, and one
+thoroughly well grounded in his arm and in general reading of military
+things, he had been sent by the Convention to the Army of the North on
+commission, he had seen its weakness and had watched its experiments.
+Upon his return he was not immediately selected for the post in which he
+was to transform the revolutionary war. It was not until the 14th of
+August that he was given a temporary place upon the Committee which his
+talents very soon made permanent. He was given the place merely as a
+stopgap to the odious and incompetent fanatic, Saint-Andre, who was for
+the moment away on mission. But from the day of his admission his
+superiority in military affairs was so incontestable that he was
+virtually a dictator therein, and his first action after the general
+lines of organisation had been laid down by him was to impose upon the
+frontier armies the necessity of concentration. He introduced what
+afterwards Napoleon inherited from him, the tactical venture of "all
+upon one throw."
+
+It must be remembered that Carnot's success did not lie in any
+revolutionary discovery in connection with the art of war, but rather in
+that vast capacity for varied detail which marks the organiser, and in
+an intimate sympathy with the national character. He understood the
+contempt for parade, the severity or brutality of discipline, the
+consciousness of immense powers of endurance which are in the Frenchman
+when he becomes a soldier;--and he made use of this understanding of
+his.
+
+It must be further remembered that this powerful genius had behind him
+in these first days of his activity the equally powerful genius of
+Danton; for it was Danton and he who gave practical shape to that law of
+conscription by which the French Revolution suddenly increased its armed
+forces by nearly half a million of men, restored the Roman tradition,
+and laid the foundation of the armed system on which Europe to-day
+depends. With Carnot virtually commander-in-chief of all the armies, and
+enabled to impose his decisions in particular upon that Army of the
+North which he had studied so recently as a commissioner, the second
+factor of the situation I am describing is comprehended.
+
+The third, as I have said, was the English diversion upon Dunquerque.
+
+The subsequent failure of the Allies has led to bitter criticism of this
+movement. Had the Allies not failed, history would have treated it as
+its contemporaries treated it. The forces of the Allies on the
+north-eastern frontier were so great and their confidence so
+secure--especially after the fall of Valenciennes--that the English
+proposal to withdraw their forces for the moment from Coburg's and to
+secure Dunquerque, was not received with any destructive criticism.
+Eighteen battalions and fourteen squadrons of the Imperial forces were
+actually lent to the Duke of York for this expedition. What is more,
+even after that diversion failed, the plan was fixed to begin again when
+the last of the other fortresses should have fallen: so little was the
+English plan for the capture of the seaport disfavoured by the
+commander-in-chief of the Allies.
+
+That diversion on Dunquerque turned out, however, to be an error of
+capital importance. The attempt to capture the city utterly failed, and
+the victory which accompanied its repulsion had upon the French that
+indefinable but powerful moral effect which largely contributed to their
+future successes.
+
+The accompanying sketch map will explain the position. Valenciennes and
+Conde have fallen; Lequesnoy, the small fortress subsidiary to
+Valenciennes, has not yet been attacked but comes next in the series,
+when the moment was judged propitious for the detachment of the
+Anglo-Hanoverian force with a certain number of Imperial Allies to march
+to the sea.
+
+It must always be remembered by the reader of history that military
+situations, like the situations upon a chess board, rather happen than
+are designed; and the situation which developed at the end of September
+upon the extreme north and west of the line which the French were
+attempting to hold against the Allies was strategically of this nature.
+When the Duke of York insisted upon a division of the forces of the
+Allies and an attack upon Dunquerque, no living contemporary foresaw
+disaster.
+
+[Illustration: Showing condition of the frontier fortresses blocking the
+road to Paris when the expedition to Dunquerque was decided upon. August
+1793.]
+
+Coburg, indeed, would have preferred the English to remain with him, and
+asked them to do so, but he felt in no sort of danger through their
+temporary absence, nor, as a matter of fact, was he in any danger
+through it.
+
+Again, though the positions which the Duke of York took up when he
+arrived in front of Dunquerque were bad, neither his critics at home,
+nor any of his own subordinates, nor any of the enemy, perceived fully
+how bad they were. It was, as will presently be seen, a sort of drift,
+bad luck combined with bad management, which led to this British
+disaster, and (what was all-important for the conduct of the war) to the
+first success in a general action which the French had to flatter and
+encourage themselves with during all that fatal summer.
+
+The Duke of York separated his force from that of Coburg just before the
+middle of August; besides the British, who were not quite 7,000 strong,
+11,000 Austrians, over 10,000 Hanoverians and 7,000 Hessians were under
+his command. The total force, therefore, was nearly 37,000 strong. No
+one could imagine that, opposed by such troops as the French were able
+to put into line, and marching against such wretched defences as those
+of Dunquerque then were, the Duke's army had not a perfectly easy task
+before it; and the plan, which was to take Dunquerque and upon the
+return to join the Austrian march on Paris, was reasonable and feasible.
+
+It is important that the reader should firmly seize this and not read
+history backward from future events.
+
+Certain faults are to be observed in the first conduct of the march. It
+began on the 15th of August, proceeding from Marchiennes to Menin, and
+at the outset displayed that deplorable lack of marching power which the
+Duke of York's command had shown throughout the campaign.[6] From
+Marchiennes to Tourcoing is a long day's march: it took the Duke of York
+four days; and, take the march altogether, nine days were spent in
+covering less than forty miles. In the course of that march, the British
+troops had an opportunity of learning to despise their adversary: they
+found at Linselles, upon the flank of their advance, a number of
+undisciplined boys who broke the moment the Guards were upon them, and
+whose physical condition excited the ridicule of their assailants. The
+army proceeded after this purposeless and unfruitful skirmish to the
+neighbourhood of the sea coast, and the siege of Dunquerque was
+undertaken under conditions which will be clear to the reader from the
+following sketch map.
+
+[Illustration: Operations round Dunquerque. September 1793.]
+
+The date of the 20th of August must first be fixed in the mind: on that
+date the army which was to take Dunquerque was separated into its two
+component parts. The first, under the Duke of York, was to attack the
+town itself; the second, under the aged Austrian general, Freytag, was
+to watch the movement of any approaching enemy and to cover the force
+which was besieging the town. Two days later, the Duke of York was
+leaving Furnes, which he had made his base for the advance, and Freytag
+had with the greatest ease brushed the French posts--mainly of
+volunteers--from before him, and was beginning to take up the flanking
+positions south and east of Bergues which covered the siege of
+Dunquerque.
+
+Two days later again, on August 24, Freytag had occupied Wormhoudt and
+Esquelbecque, capturing guns by the dozen, doing pretty well what he
+would with the French outposts, and quite surrounding the town of
+Bergues. Wilder was his headquarters. On the same day, the 24th, the
+Duke of York had with the greatest ease driven in the advanced posts of
+the French before Dunquerque, and shut up the enemy within the town,
+while he formed his besieging force outside of it, entrenched in a
+position which he had chosen beforehand, reposing upon the sea at his
+right, his left on the village of Tetteghem. He was then about 3,000
+yards from the fortifications at Dunquerque.
+
+Such was the situation upon the dawn of the 25th, when everything was
+ready for active operations. And here the reader must look upon the map
+for what ultimately proved the ruin of the situation.
+
+Supposing Freytag round Bergues in the position which the map shows; the
+Duke of York in front of Dunquerque as the map also shows him; the two
+forces are in touch across the road and the belt of country which unites
+Bergues and Dunquerque. The covering army and the besieging force which
+it covers are each a wing of one combined body; each communicates with
+the other, each can support the other at the main point of effort, and
+though between the one and the other eastward there stretches a line of
+marshy country--the "meres" which the map indicates--yet a junction
+between the two forces exists westward of these, and the two armies can
+co-operate by the Bergues-Dunquerque road.
+
+A factor which the Duke of York may have neglected was the power of
+flooding all that flat country round, the road which the French in
+Dunquerque, being in possession of the sluices, possessed. They used it
+at once: they drowned the low lands to the south of Dunquerque, upon the
+very day when the last dispositions of the attacking force were
+completed. But more important--and never yet explained--was the
+Austrians' abandonment of Coudequerque. By this error, the main road
+itself, standing above the flood, was lost, and from being one strong
+army the force of the Allies became two weak ones. Communication was no
+longer possible between the Duke of York's and Freytag's territories,
+and it was of this separation that the French, in spite of their
+deplorable organisation and more deplorable personnel, took advantage.
+
+They took advantage of it slowly. Houchard gathered altogether forty
+thousand men near Cassel, but it was ten days before they could be
+concentrated. It must again be insisted upon and repeated that, large as
+the number was--it was four times as great as Freytag's now isolated
+force--Houchard's command was made up of men quite two-thirds of whom
+were hardly soldiers: volunteers both new and recent, ill-trained
+conscripts and so forth. There was no basis of discipline, hardly any
+power to enforce it; the men had behaved disgracefully in all the
+affairs of outposts, they had been brushed away contemptuously by the
+small Austrian force from every position they had held. With all his
+numerical superiority the attempt which Houchard was about to make was
+very hazardous: and Houchard was a hesitating and uncertain commander.
+Furthermore, of the forty thousand men one quarter at least remained out
+of action through the ineptitude and political terror of Dumesny,
+Houchard's lieutenant upon the right.
+
+It was upon the 6th of September that the French advance began along the
+whole line; it was a mere pushing in of inferior numbers by superior
+numbers, the superior numbers perpetually proving themselves inferior to
+the Austrians in military value. Thus, the capture of old Freytag
+himself in a night skirmish was at once avenged by the storming of the
+village near which he had been caught, and he was re-taken. In actual
+fighting and force for force, Houchard's command found nothing to
+encourage it during these first operations.
+
+The Austrians in falling back concentrated and were soon one compact
+body: to attack and dislodge it was the object of the French advance,
+but an object hardly to be attained.
+
+What happened was not only the unexpected success of this advance, but
+the gaining by the French of the first decisive action in the long
+series which was to terminate twenty years later at Leipsic.
+
+The army of Freytag fell back upon the village of Hondschoote and stood
+there in full force upon the morning of Sunday, the 8th of September.
+Houchard attacked it with a force greatly lessened but still double that
+of the defenders. So conspicuous, however, was the superiority of the
+Austrian regulars over the French raw troops and volunteers that during
+this morning of the 8th the result was still doubtful. By the afternoon,
+however, the work was done, and the enemy were in a retreat which might
+easily have been turned into a rout. A glance at the map will show that
+Houchard, had he possessed the initiative common to so many of his
+contemporaries, might at once have driven the numerically inferior and
+heavily defeated force (it had lost one-third of its men) to the right,
+and proceeded himself to cut the communications of the Duke of York and
+to destroy his army, which lay packed upon the waterless sand dunes
+where the village of Malo-les-Bains now stands. Houchard hesitated;
+Freytag escaped; the Duke of York, abandoning his siege-pieces to the
+number of forty and much of his heavy baggage, retreated precipitately
+through the night to Furnes, right across the front of the French army,
+and escaped destruction.
+
+The Battle of Hoondschoote, therefore, as it is called, raised the siege
+of Dunquerque. It was, as I have said, the first successful decisive
+action which the Revolution could count since the moment of its extreme
+danger and the opening of the general European war. But it was nothing
+like what it might have been had Houchard been willing to risk a hardy
+stroke. Houchard was therefore recalled, condemned to death, and
+executed by the Committee of Public Safety, whose pitiless despotism was
+alone capable of saving the nation. He remains the single example of a
+general officer who has suffered death for military incompetence after
+the gaining of a victory, and his execution is an excellent example of
+the way in which the military temper of the Committee, and particularly
+of Carnot, refused to consider any factor in the war save those that
+make for military success.
+
+Carnot and the Committee had no patience with the illusions which a
+civilian crowd possesses upon mere individual actions: what they saw was
+the campaign as a whole, and they knew that Houchard had left the armies
+opposite him intact.
+
+Perhaps his execution was made more certain by the continuance of bad
+news from that more important point of the frontier--the direct line of
+Austrian advance upon Paris. Here, already, Valenciennes had fallen two
+months before, and Conde also. Lequesnoy, the third point of the barrier
+line, capitulated on the 11th of September, and the news of that
+capitulation reached Paris immediately after the news of Hondschoote. No
+fortress was now left between the Allies and the capital but Maubeuge.
+Coburg marched upon it at once.
+
+Not only had he that immense superiority in the quality of his troops
+which must be still insisted upon, but numerically also he was three to
+one when, on the 28th of September, at dawn, he crossed the Sambre above
+and below Maubeuge, and by noon of that day had contained the French
+army in that neighbourhood within the lines of the fortress.
+
+The situation was critical in the extreme: Maubeuge was ill prepared to
+stand siege; it was hardly provisioned; its garrison was of varied and,
+on the whole, of bad quality. In mere victuals it could stand out for
+but a few days, and, worst of all, it had behind it the continued
+example of necessary and fatal surrenders which had marked the whole
+summer. The orders of the Committee of Public Safety to its commander
+were terse: "Your head shall answer for Maubeuge." After the receipt of
+that message no more came through the lines.
+
+The reader, if he be unaccustomed to military history, does well to note
+that in every action and in every campaign there is some one factor of
+position or of arms or of time which explains the result. Each has a
+pivot or hinge, as it were, upon which the whole turns. It was now upon
+Maubeuge that the revolutionary war thus depended. At risk of
+oversimplifying a complex story, I would lay this down as the prime
+condition for the understanding of the early revolutionary wars: had
+Maubeuge fallen, the road to Paris lay open and the trick was
+done[7]--and here we must consider again the effect in the field of
+Carnot's genius.
+
+In the first place, he had provided numbers not on paper, but in
+reality; the Committee, through a decree of the Assembly, had
+despotically "requisitioned" men, animals, vehicles and supplies. The
+levy was a reality. Mere numbers then raw, but increasing, had begun to
+pour into the north-east. It was they that had told at Hoondschoote, it
+was they that were to tell in front of Maubeuge.
+
+Secondly, as the Committee supplied the necessary initiative, Carnot
+supplied the necessary personality of war. His own will and own brain
+could come to one decision in one moment, and did so. It was he, as we
+shall see, who won the critical action. He chose Jourdan, a man whose
+quaint military career we must reluctantly leave aside in so brief a
+study as this, but at any rate an amateur, and put him in Houchard's
+command over the Army of the Northern Frontier, and that command was
+extended from right away beyond the Ardennes to the sea. He ordered (and
+Jourdan obeyed) the concentration of men from all down that lengthy line
+to the right and the left upon one point, Guise. To leave the rest of
+the frontier weak was a grave risk only to be excused by very rapid
+action and success: both these were to follow. The concentration was
+effected in four days. Troops from the extreme north could not come in
+time. The furthest called upon were beyond Arras, with sixty-five miles
+of route between them and Guise. This division (which shall be typical
+of many), not quite eight thousand strong, left on receiving orders in
+the morning of the 3rd of October and entered Guise in the course of the
+6th. The rate of marching and the synchrony of these movements of
+imperfect troops should especially be noted by any one who would
+understand how the Revolution succeeded.
+
+[Illustration: The rapid eight days' concentration in front of Maubeuge.
+October 1783.]
+
+A second division of over thirteen thousand men followed along the
+parallel road, with a similar time table. From the other end of his
+line, a detachment under Beauregard, just over four thousand men, was
+called up from the extreme right. It will serve as a typical example
+upon the eastern side of this lightning concentration. It had been
+gathered near Carignan, a town full fourteen miles beyond Sedan. It
+picked up reinforcements on the way and marched into Fourmies upon the
+11th, after covering just seventy miles in the three and a half days.
+With its arrival the concentration was complete, and not a moment too
+soon, for the bombardment of Maubeuge was about to begin. From the 11th
+to the 15th of October the army was advanced and drawn up in line, a
+day's march in front of Guise, with its centre at Avesnes and facing the
+covering army of Coburg, which lay entrenched upon a long wooded crest
+with the valley of the Sambre upon its right and the village of
+Wattignies, on a sort of promontory of high land, upon its left.
+
+The Austrian position was reconnoitred upon the 14th. Upon the 15th the
+general attack was delivered and badly repelled. When darkness fell upon
+that day few in the army could have believed that Maubeuge was
+succourable--and it was a question of hours.
+
+Carnot, however, sufficiently knew the virtues as the vices of his novel
+troops, the troops of the great levy, stiffened with a proportion of
+regulars, to attempt an extraordinary thing. He marched eight thousand
+from his left and centre, over to his right during the night, and in the
+morning of the 16th his right, in front of the Austrian left at
+Wattignies had, by this conversion, become far the strongest point of
+the whole line.
+
+A dense mist had covered the end of this operation as the night had
+covered its inception, and that mist endured until nearly midday. The
+Austrians upon the heights had no hint of the conversion, and Wattignies
+was only held by three regiments. If they expected a renewed attack at
+all, they can only have expected it in the centre, or even upon the left
+where the French had suffered most the day before.
+
+Initiative in war is essentially a calculation of risk, and with high
+initiative the risk is high. What Carnot gambled upon (for Jourdan was
+against the experiment) when he moved those young men through the night,
+was the possibility of getting active work out of them after a day's
+furious action, the forced marches of the preceding week and on top of
+it all a sleepless night of further marching. Most of the men who were
+prepared to charge on the French right as the day broadened and the mist
+lifted on that 16th of October, had been on foot for thirty hours. The
+charge was delivered, and was successful. The unexpected numbers thus
+concentrated under Wattignies carried that extreme position, held the
+height, and arrived, therefore, on the flank of the whole Austrian line,
+which, had not the effort of the aggressors exhausted them, would have
+been rolled up in its whole length. As it was, the Austrians retreated
+unmolested and in good order across the Sambre. The siege of Maubeuge
+was raised; and the next day the victorious French army entered the
+fortress.
+
+Thus was successfully passed the turning-point of the revolutionary
+wars.
+
+Two months later the other gate of the country was recovered. In the
+moment when Maubeuge was relieved, the enemy had pierced the lines of
+Wissembourg. It is possible that an immediate and decisive understanding
+among the Allies might then have swept all Alsace; but such an
+understanding was lacking. The disarrayed "Army of the Rhine" was got
+into some sort of order, notably through the enthusiasm of Hoche and the
+silent control of Pichegru. At the end of November the Prussians stood
+on the defensive at Kaiserslautern. Hoche hammered at them for three
+days without success. What really turned the scale was the floods of men
+and material that the levy and the requisitioning were pouring in. Just
+before Christmas the enemy evacuated Haguenau. Landau they still held;
+but a decisive action fought upon Boxing Day, a true soldiers' battle,
+determined by the bayonet, settled the fate of the Allies on this point.
+The French entered Wissembourg again, and Landau was relieved after a
+siege of four months and a display of tenacity which had done not a
+little to turn the tide of the war.
+
+Meanwhile the news had come in that the last of the serious internal
+rebellions was crushed. Toulon had been re-captured, the English fleet
+driven out; the town, the harbour and the arsenal had fallen into the
+hands of the French largely through the science of a young major of
+artillery (not captain: I have discussed the point elsewhere),
+Bonaparte, and this had taken place a week before the relief of Landau.
+The last confused horde of La Vendee had been driven from the walls of
+Granville in Normandy, to which it had erred and drifted rather than
+retreated. At Mans on the 13th of December it was cut to pieces, and at
+Savenay on the 23rd, three days before the great victory in Alsace, it
+was destroyed. A long peasant-and-bandit struggle, desperate yet hardly
+to be called guerilla, continued through the next year behind the hedges
+of Lower Brittany and of Vendee, but the danger to the State and to the
+Revolution was over. The year 1793 ended, therefore, with the complete
+relief of the whole territory of the Republic, save a narrow strip upon
+the Belgian frontier, complete domination of it by its Caesar, the
+Committee of Public Safety; with two-thirds of a million of men under
+arms, and the future of the great experiment apparently secure.
+
+The causes of the wonder have been discussed, and will be discussed
+indefinitely. Primarily, they resided in the re-creation of a strong
+central power; secondly, in the combination of vast numbers and of a
+reckless spirit of sacrifice. The losses on the National side were
+perpetually and heavily superior to those of the Allies--in Alsace they
+had been three to one; and we shall better understand the duel when we
+appreciate that in the short eight years between the opening of the war
+and the triumph of Napoleon at Marengo, there had fallen in killed and
+wounded, on the French side, over seven hundred thousand men.
+
+
+FIVE
+
+The story of 1794 is but the consequence of what we have just read. It
+was the little belt or patch upon the Belgian frontier which was still
+in the hands of the enemy that determined the nature of the campaign.
+
+It was not until spring that the issue was joined. The Emperor of
+Austria reached Brussels on the 2nd day of April, and a fortnight later
+reviewed his army. The French line drawn up in opposition to it suffered
+small but continual reverses until the close of the month.
+
+On the 29th Clerfayt suffered a defeat which led to the fall, or rather
+the escape, of the small garrison of Menin. Clerfayt was beaten again at
+Courtray a fortnight later; but all these early engagements in the
+campaign were of no decisive moment. Tourcoing was to be the first heavy
+blow that should begin to settle matters, Fleurus was to clinch them.
+
+No battle can be less satisfactorily described in a few lines than that
+of Tourcoing, so different did it appear to either combatant, so
+opposite are the plans of what was expected on either side, and of what
+happened, so confused are the various accounts of contemporaries. The
+accusations of treason which nearly always arise after a disaster, and
+especially a disaster overtaking an allied force, are particularly
+monstrous, and may be dismissed: in particular the childish legend which
+pretends that the Austrians desired an English defeat.
+
+What the French say is that excellent forced marching and scientific
+concentration permitted them to attack the enemy before the junction of
+his various forces was effected. What the Allies say is (if they are
+speaking for their centre) that it was shamefully abandoned and
+unsupported by the two wings; if they are speaking for the wings, that
+the centre had no business to advance, when it saw that the two wings
+were not up in time to co-operate.
+
+One story goes that the Archduke Charles was incapacitated by a fit;
+Lord Acton has lent his considerable authority to this amusing version.
+At any rate, what happened was this:--
+
+The Allies lay along the river Scheldt on Friday, the 16th of May:
+Tournay was their centre, with the Duke of York in command of the chief
+force there; five or six miles north, down the river, was one extremity
+of their line at a place called Warcoing: it was a body of Hanoverians.
+The left, under the Archduke Charles, was Austrian and had reached a
+place a day's march south of Tournay called St. Amand. Over against the
+Allies lay a large French force also occupying a wide front of over
+fifteen miles, the centre of which was Tourcoing, then a village. Its
+left was in front of the fortress of Courtrai. Now, behind the French,
+up country northward in the opposite direction from the line of the
+Allies on the Scheldt was another force of the Allies under Clerfayt.
+The plan was that the Allied right should advance on to Mouscron and
+take it. The Allied centre should advance on to Tourcoing and Mouveaux
+and take them, while the left should march across the upper waters of
+the river Marque, forcing the bridges that crossed that marshy stream,
+and come up alongside the centre. In other words, there was to be an
+attack all along the French line from the south, and while it was
+proceeding, Clerfayt, from the north of the French, was to cross the Lys
+and attack also.
+
+On the day of the 17th what happened was this: The left of the Allies,
+marching from St. Amand, came up half a day late; the right of the
+Allies took Mouscron, but were beaten out of it by the French. The
+centre of the Allies fulfilled their programme, reaching Tourcoing and
+its neighbourhood by noon and holding their positions. It is to the
+honour of English arms that this success was accomplished by a force a
+third of which was British and the most notable bayonet work in which
+was done by the Guards. Meanwhile, Clerfayt was late in moving and in
+crossing the river Lys, which lay between him and his objective.
+
+[Illustration: Tourcoing. May 16 to 18, 1794.
+
+The breakdown of the attempt of the Allies to cut off the French near
+Courtrai from Lille was due to their failure to synchronise They should
+have been in line from A to B at noon of the 17th with Clerfayt at C.]
+
+When night fell, therefore, on the first day of the action, a glance at
+the map will show that instead of one solid line advancing against the
+French from A to B, and the northern force in touch with it at C, the
+Allied formation was an absurd projection in the middle, due to the
+success of the mixed and half-British force under the Duke of York: a
+success which had not been maintained on the two wings. A bulge of this
+sort in an attacking line is on the face of it disastrous. The enemy
+have only to be rapid in falling upon either flank of it and the bulge
+can be burst in. The French were rapid, and burst in the bulge was. By
+concentrating their forces against this one central part of the Allies
+they fought three to one.
+
+That same capacity which at Wattignies had permitted them to scorn sleep
+and to be indefatigable in marching, put them on the road before three
+o'clock in the morning of Sunday, the 18th, and with the dawn they fell
+upon the central force of the Allies, attacking it from all three sides.
+
+It is on this account that the battle is called the Battle of Tourcoing,
+for Tourcoing was the most advanced point to which the centre of the
+Allies had reached. The Germans, upon the Duke of York's right at
+Tourcoing, felt the first brunt of the attack. The Duke of York himself,
+with his mixed, half-British force, came in for the blow immediately
+afterwards, and while it was still early morning. The Germans at
+Tourcoing began to fall back. The Duke of York's force, to the left of
+them, was left isolated: its commander ought not to have hung on so
+long. But the defence was maintained with the utmost gallantry for the
+short time during which it was still possible. The retreat began about
+nine in the morning and was kept orderly for the first two miles, but
+after that point it was a rout. The drivers of the British cannon fled,
+and the guns, left without teams, blocked the precipitate flight of the
+cavalry. Their disorder communicated itself at once to the Guards, and
+to the line.
+
+Even in this desperate strait some sort of order was restored, notably
+by the Guards Brigade, which were apparently the first to form, and a
+movement that could still be called a retreat was pursued towards the
+south. The Duke of York himself was chased from spinney to spinney and
+escaped by a stroke of luck, finding a bridge across the last brook held
+by a detachment of Hessians. In this way were the central columns, who
+between them numbered not a third of the total force of the Allies,
+destroyed.
+
+Clerfayt had first advanced--but far too late to save the centre--and
+then retreated. The Archduke Charles, upon the left, was four hours late
+in marching to the help of the Duke of York; the right wing of the
+Allies was not even late: it spent the morning in an orderly artillery
+duel with the French force opposed to it. By five in the afternoon
+defeat was admitted and a general retreat of the Allies ordered.
+
+I have said that many reasons are given to account for the disaster of
+Tourcoing, one of the very few in which a British force has been routed
+upon the Continent; but I confess that if I were asked for an
+explanation of my own, I would say that it was simply due to the gross
+lack of synchrony on the part of the Allies, and that this in its turn
+was taken advantage of by the power both of vigil and of marching which
+the French troops, still inferior in most military characteristics, had
+developed and maintained, and which (a more important matter) their
+commanders knew how to use.
+
+This heavy blow, delivered on the 18th of May, in spite of a successful
+rally a week later, finally convinced the Emperor that the march on
+Paris was impossible. Eleven days later, on the 29th, it was announced
+in the camp of Tournay, upon which the Allied army had fallen back, that
+the Emperor had determined to return to Vienna. The Allied army was
+indeed still left upon that front, but the French continued to pour up
+against it. It was again their numbers that brought about the next and
+the final victory.
+
+Far off, upon the east of that same line, the army which is famous in
+history and in song as that of the Sambre et Meuse was violently
+attempting to cross the Sambre and to turn the line of the Allies.
+Coburg reinforced his right opposite the French left, but numbers had
+begun to bewilder him. The enthusiasm of Saint-Just, the science of
+Carnot, decided victory at this eastern end of the line.
+
+Six times the passage of the Sambre had failed. Reinforcements continued
+to reach the army, and the seventh attempt succeeded.
+
+Charleroi, which is the main fortress blocking the passage of the
+Sambre at this place, could be, and was, invested when once the river
+was crossed by the French. It capitulated in a week. But the evacuation
+of Charleroi was but just accomplished when Coburg, seventy thousand
+strong, appeared in relief of the city.
+
+[Illustration: Showing effect of _Ypres_, _Charleroi_ and _Fleurus_ in
+wholly throwing back the Allies in June 1794.
+
+_Ypres_ captured on June 19 by the French, they march on Oudenarde and
+pass it on June 25 to 27. Meanwhile _Charleroi_ has also surrendered to
+the French, and when, immediately afterwards, the Austrians try to
+relieve it, they are beaten at _Fleurus_ and retire on Brussels.
+
+Thus the English at _Tournai_ and all the Allied Forces at _Conde_,
+_Valenciennes_, _Landrecies_, and _Mons_ are imperilled and must
+surrender or retire.]
+
+The plateau above the town where the great struggle was decided, is
+known as that of Fleurus, and it was upon the 26th of June that the
+armies were there engaged. Never before had forces so equal permitted
+the French any success. It had hitherto been the ceaseless
+requisitioning of men to supply their insufficient training and command,
+which had accomplished the salvation of the country. At Fleurus, though
+there was still some advantage on the French side, the numbers were
+more nearly equal.
+
+The action was not determined for ten hours, and on the French centre
+and left was nearly lost, when the Reserves' and Marceau's obstinacy in
+front of Fleurus village itself at last decided it.
+
+The consequences of the victory were final. As the French right advanced
+from Fleurus the French left advanced from Ypres, and the centre became
+untenable for the Allies. The four French fortresses which the enemy
+still garrisoned in that Belgian "belt" of which I have spoken, were
+invested and re-captured. By the 10th of July the French were in
+Brussels, the English were beaten back upon Holland, the Austrians
+retreating upon the Rhine, and the continuous success of the
+revolutionary armies was assured.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+While these things were proceeding upon land, however, there had
+appeared a factor in the war which modern desire for comfort and, above
+all, for commercial security has greatly exaggerated, but which the
+student will do well to note in its due proportion. This factor was the
+military weakness of France at sea.
+
+In mere numbers the struggle was entered upon with fleets in the ratio
+of about two to one, while to the fleet of Great Britain, already twice
+as large as its opponent, must be added the fleets of the Allies. But
+numbers did not then, nor will they in the future, really decide the
+issue of maritime war. It was the supremacy of English gunnery which
+turned the scale. This triumphant superiority was proved in the battle
+of the 1st of June, 1794.
+
+The English fleet under Lord Howe attacked the French fleet which was
+waiting to escort a convoy of grain into Brest; the forces came in
+contact upon the 28th of May, and the action was a running one of three
+days.
+
+Two examples must suffice to prove how determining was the superiority
+of the British fire. The _Queen Charlotte_, in the final action, found
+herself caught between the _Montagne_ and the _Jacobin_. We have the
+figures of the losses during the duel of these two flagships. The _Queen
+Charlotte_ lost forty-two men in the short and furious exchange, the
+_Montagne_ alone three hundred. Again, consider the total figures. The
+number of the crews on both sides was nearly equal, but their losses
+were as eleven to five. It cannot be too often repeated that the initial
+advantage which the English fleet gained in the great war, which it
+maintained and increased as that war proceeded, and which it made
+absolute at Trafalgar, was an advantage mainly due to the guns.
+
+The reader must not expect in a sketch which ends with the fall of
+Robespierre any treatise, however short, upon the effect of sea power in
+the revolutionary wars. It has of late years been grossly exaggerated,
+the reaction which will follow this exaggeration may as grossly belittle
+it. It prevented the invasion of England, it permitted the exasperation
+and wearing out of the French forces in the Peninsula. But it could not
+have determined the fate of Napoleon. That was determined by his Russian
+miscalculation and by his subsequent and consequent defeat at Leipsic.
+
+Upon the early success of the Revolution and the resulting establishment
+of European democracy, with which alone these pages deal, sea power was
+of no considerable effect.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[6] Incidentally it should be noted how true it is that this supreme
+military quality is a matter of organisation rather than of the physical
+power of troops; in the Napoleonic wars the marching power of the
+English troops was often proved exceptional, and perhaps the greatest of
+all feats accomplished by a small body was that of the Light Brigade
+marching to the succour of Wellington at Talavera.
+
+[7] I must not, in fairness to the reader, neglect the great mass of
+opinion, from Jomini to Mr. Fortescue's classic work upon the British
+Army, which lays it down that the Allies had but to mask the frontier
+fortresses and to advance their cavalry rapidly along the Paris road.
+Historical hypothesis can never be more than a matter of judgment, but I
+confess that this view has always seemed to me to ignore--as purely
+military historians and especially foreign ones might well ignore--the
+social condition of "'93." Cavalry is the weakest of all arms with which
+to deal with sporadic, unorganised, but determined resistance. To pass
+through the densely populated country of the Paris road may be compared
+to the forcing of an open town, and cavalry can never be relied upon for
+_that_. As for the army moving as a whole without a perfect security in
+its communications, the matter need not even be discussed; and it must
+further be remembered that, the moment such an advance began, an
+immediate concentration from the north would have fallen upon the
+ill-guarded lines of supply. It may be taken that Coburg knew his
+business when he sat down before this, the last of the fortresses.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+THE REVOLUTION AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH
+
+
+The last and the most important of the aspects which the French
+Revolution presents to a foreign, and in particular to an English
+reader, is the antagonism which arose between it and the Church.
+
+As this is the most important so it is the most practical of the
+historical problems which the Revolution sets the student to solve; for
+the opposition of the Church's organisation in France has at once been
+the most profound which the Revolution has had to encounter, the most
+active in its methods, and the only one which has increased in strength
+as time proceeded. It is hardly too much to say that the Revolution
+would, in France at least, have achieved its object and created a
+homogeneous, centralised democracy, had not this great quarrel between
+the Republic and the Church arisen; and one may legitimately contrast
+the ready pliancy of men to political suggestion and the easy story of
+their institutions where men knew nothing of the Church, with the great
+storms that arise and the fundamental quarrels that are challenged
+wherever men are acquainted with the burning truths of Catholicism.
+
+Finally, the struggle between the Catholic Church and the Revolution is
+not only the most important and the most practical, but also by an
+unhappy coincidence the most difficult of comprehension of all the
+matters presented to us by the great change.
+
+We have seen in this book that one department of revolutionary history,
+the second in importance, perhaps, to the religious department, was also
+difficult of comprehension--to wit, the military department. And we have
+seen (or at least I have postulated) that the difficulty of following
+the military fortunes of the Republic was due to the mass of detail, to
+the technical character of the information to be acquired and to the
+natural unfamiliarity of the general reader with the elements of
+military science. In other words, an accurate knowledge of great numbers
+of facts, the proper disposition of these facts in their order of
+military importance, and the correlation of a great number of
+disconnected actions and plans will alone permit us to grasp the
+function of the armies in the development and establishment of the
+modern State through the revolutionary wars.
+
+Now in this second and greater problem, the problem of the function
+played by religion, it is an exactly opposite method which can alone be
+of service.
+
+We must examine the field generally, and still more generally we must
+forget details that here only bewilder, and see in the largest possible
+outline what forces were really at issue, why their conflict occurred,
+upon what points that conflict was vital. Any more particular plan will
+land us, as it has landed so many thousands of controversialists, in
+mere invective on one side or the other, till we come to see nothing but
+a welter of treason on the part of priests, and of massacre upon the
+part of democrats.
+
+Men would, did they try to unravel the skein by analysing the documents
+of the Vatican or of the French archives, come apparently upon nothing
+but a host of petty, base, and often personal calculations; or again,
+did they attempt to take a local sample of the struggle and to follow it
+in one department of thought, they would come upon nothing but a whirl
+of conflict with no sort of clue to the motives that lay behind.
+
+The contrast between the military and the religious problem of the
+French Revolution is like the contrast between the geological
+composition and the topographical contours of a countryside. To
+understand the first we must bore and dig, we must take numerous samples
+of soil and subject them to analysis, we must make ourselves acquainted
+with detail in its utmost recesses. But for the second, the more general
+our standpoint, the wider our gaze, and the more comprehensive our
+judgment, the more accurately do we grasp the knowledge we have set out
+to seek.
+
+We must, then, approach our business by asking at the outset the most
+general question of all: "_Was there a necessary and fundamental quarrel
+between the doctrines of the Revolution and those of the Catholic
+Church?_"
+
+Those ill acquainted with either party, and therefore ill equipped for
+reply, commonly reply with assurance in the affirmative. The French (and
+still more the non-French) Republican who may happen, by the accident of
+his life, to have missed the Catholic Church, to have had no intimacy
+with any Catholic character, no reading of Catholic philosophy, and
+perhaps even no chance view of so much as an external Catholic ceremony,
+replies unhesitatingly that the Church is the necessary enemy of the
+Revolution. Again, the _emigre_, the wealthy woman, the recluse, any one
+of the many contemporary types to whom the democratic theory of the
+Revolution came as a complete novelty, and to-day the wealthy families
+in that tradition, reply as unhesitatingly that the Revolution is the
+necessary enemy of the Church. The reply seems quite sufficient to the
+Tory squire in England or Germany, who may happen to be a Catholic by
+birth or by conversion; and it seems equally obvious to (let us say) a
+democratic member of some Protestant Church in one of the new countries.
+
+Historically and logically, theologically also, those who affirm a
+necessary antagonism between the Republic and the Church are in error.
+Those who are best fitted to approach the problem by their knowledge
+both of what the Revolution attempted and of what Catholic philosophy
+is, find it in proportion to their knowledge difficult or impossible to
+answer that fundamental question in the affirmative. They cannot call
+the Revolution a necessary enemy of the Church, nor the Church of
+Democracy.
+
+What is more, minds at once of the most active and of the best
+instructed sort are the very minds which find it difficult to explain
+how any such quarrel can have arisen. French history itself is full of
+the names of those for whom not so much a reconciliation between the
+Revolution and the Church, as a statement that no real quarrel existed
+between them, was the motive of politics; and almost in proportion to a
+man's knowledge of his fellows in Catholic societies, almost in that
+proportion is the prime question I have asked answered by such a man in
+the negative. A man who knows both the Faith and the Republic will tell
+you that there is not and cannot be any necessary or fundamental reason
+why conflict should have arisen between a European Democracy and the
+Catholic Church.
+
+When we examine those who concern themselves with the deepest and most
+abstract side of the quarrel, we find the same thing. It is impossible
+for the theologian, or even for the practical ecclesiastical teacher, to
+put his finger upon a political doctrine essential to the Revolution and
+to say, "This doctrine is opposed to Catholic dogma or to Catholic
+morals." Conversely, it is impossible for the Republican to put his
+finger upon a matter of ecclesiastical discipline or religious dogma and
+to say, "This Catholic point is at issue with my political theory of the
+State."
+
+Thousands of active men upon either side would have been only too
+willing during the last hundred years to discover some such issue, and
+it has proved undiscoverable. In a word, only those Democrats who know
+little of the Catholic Church can say that of its nature it forbids
+democracy; and only those Catholics who have a confused or imperfect
+conception of democracy can say that of its nature it is antagonistic to
+the Catholic Church.
+
+Much that is taught by the purely temporal theory of the one is
+indifferent to the transcendental and supernatural philosophy of the
+other. In some points, where there is contact (as in the conception of
+the dignity of man and of the equality of men) there is agreement. To
+sum up, the Republican cannot by his theory persecute the Church; the
+Church cannot by her theory excommunicate the Republican.
+
+Why, then, it must next be asked, has there in practice arisen so
+furious and so enormous a conflict, a conflict whose activity and whose
+consequence are not narrowing but broadening to-day?
+
+It may be replied to this second question, which is only less general
+than the first, in one of two manners.
+
+One may say that the actions of men are divided not by theories but by
+spiritual atmospheres, as it were. According to this view men act under
+impulses not ideal but actual: impulses which affect great numbers and
+yet in their texture correspond to the complex but united impulses of an
+individual personality. Thus, though there be no conflict demonstrable
+between the theology of the Catholic Church and the political theory of
+the Revolution, yet there may be necessary and fundamental conflict
+between the _Persons_ we call the Revolution and the Church, and between
+the vivifying principles by which either lives. That is one answer that
+can be, and is, given.
+
+Or one may give a totally different answer and say, "There was no
+quarrel between the theology of the Catholic Church and the political
+theory of the Revolution; but the folly of this statesman, the ill
+drafting of that law, the misconception of such and such an institution,
+the coincidence of war breaking out at such and such a moment and
+affecting men in such and such a fashion--all these material accidents
+bred a misunderstanding between the two great forces, led into conflict
+the human officers and the human organisations which directed them; and
+conflict once established feeds upon, and grows from, its own
+substance."
+
+Now, if that first form of reply be given to the question we have posed,
+though it is sufficient for the type of philosophy which uses it, though
+it is certainly explanatory of all human quarrels, and though it in
+particular satisfies a particular modern school of thought, it is
+evident that history, properly so called, cannot deal with it.
+
+You may say that the Revolution was the expression of a spirit far more
+real than any theory, that this spirit is no more susceptible of
+analysis or definition than is the personality of a single human
+character, and that this reality was in conflict with another
+reality--to wit, the Catholic Church. You may even (as some minds by no
+means negligible have done) pass into the field of mysticism in the
+matter, and assert that really personal forces, wills superior and
+external to man, Demons and Angels, drove the Revolution against the
+Catholic Church, and created The Republic to be an anti-Catholic force
+capable of meeting and of defeating that Church, which (by its own
+definition of itself) is not a theory, but the expression of a
+Personality and a Will. To put it in old-fashioned terms, you may say
+that the Revolution was the work of antichrist;--but with that kind of
+reply, I repeat, history cannot deal.
+
+If it be true that, in spite of an absence of contradictory intellectual
+theories, there is a fundamental spiritual contradiction between the
+Revolution and the Catholic Church, then time will test the business; we
+shall see in that case a perpetual extension of the quarrel until the
+Revolution becomes principally a force for the extinction of
+Catholicism, and the Catholic Church appears to the supporter of the
+Revolution not as his principal, but as his only enemy. Such a
+development has not arisen in a hundred years; a process of time far
+more lengthy will alone permit us to judge whether the supposed duello
+is a real matter or a phantasm.
+
+The second type of answer, the answer which pretends to explain the
+antagonism by a definite series of events, does concern the historian.
+
+Proceeding upon the lines of that second answer, he can bring his
+science to bear and use the instruments of his trade; and he can show
+(as I propose to show in what follows) how, although no quarrel can be
+found between the theory of the Revolution and that of the Church, an
+active quarrel did in fact spring up between the Revolution in action
+and the authorities of Catholicism; a quarrel which a hundred years has
+not appeased, but accentuated.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Behind the revolutionary quarrel lay the condition of the Church in the
+French State since the settlement of the quarrel of the Reformation.
+
+With what that quarrel of the Reformation was, the reader is
+sufficiently familiar. For, roughly speaking, a hundred years, from the
+first years of the sixteenth century to the first years of the
+seventeenth (from the youth of Henry VIII to the boyhood of Charles I in
+England), a great attempt was made to change (as one party would have
+said to amend, as the other would have said to denaturalise) the _whole
+body_ of Western Christendom. A _general_ movement of attack upon the
+inherited form of the Church, and a general resistance to that attack,
+was at work throughout European civilisation; and either antagonist
+hoped for a universal success, the one of what he called "The
+Reformation of religion," the other of what he called "The Divine
+Institution and visible unity of the Catholic Church."
+
+At the end of such a period it became apparent that no such general
+result had been, or could be, attained. All that part of the West which
+had rejected the authority of the See of Rome began to appear as a
+separate territorial region permanently divided from the rest; all that
+part of Europe which had retained the Authority of the See of Rome began
+to appear as another region of territory. The line of cleavage between
+the two was beginning to define itself as a geographical line, and
+nearly corresponded to the line which, centuries before, had divided the
+Roman and civilised world from the Barbarians.
+
+The Province of Britain had an exceptional fate. Though Roman in origin
+and of the ancient civilisation in its foundation, it fell upon the
+non-Roman side of the new boundary; while Ireland, which the Roman
+Empire had never organised or instructed, remained, alone of the
+external parts of Europe, in communion with Rome. Italy, Spain, and in
+the main southern or Romanised Germany, refused ultimately to abandon
+their tradition of civilisation and of religion. But in Gaul it was
+otherwise--and the action of Gaul during the Reformation must be seized
+if its modern religious quarrels are to be apprehended. A very
+considerable proportion of the French landed and mercantile classes,
+that is of the wealthy men of the country, were in sympathy with the new
+religious doctrines and the new social organisation which had now taken
+root in England, Scotland, Holland, northern Germany and Scandinavia,
+and which were destined in those countries to lead to the domination of
+wealth. These French squires and traders were called the Huguenots.
+
+The succeeding hundred years, from 1615 to 1715, let us say, were a
+settlement, not without bloodshed, of the unsatisfied quarrel of the
+preceding century. All Englishmen know what happened in England; how the
+last vestiges of Catholicism were crushed out and all the social and
+political consequences of Protestantism established in the State.
+
+There was, even in that same seventeenth century, a separate, but
+futile, attempt to destroy Catholicism in Ireland. In Germany a struggle
+of the utmost violence had only led to a similar regional result. The
+first third of that hundred years concluded in the Peace of Westphalia,
+and left the Protestant and Catholic territorial divisions much what we
+now know them.
+
+In France, however, the peculiar phenomenon remained of a body powerful
+in numbers and (what was far more important) in wealth and social power,
+scattered throughout the territory of the kingdom, organised and, by
+this time, fixedly anti-Catholic, and therefore anti-national.
+
+The nation had recovered its traditional line and had insisted upon the
+victory of a strong executive, and that executive Catholic. France,
+therefore, in this period of settlement, became an absolute monarchy
+whose chief possessed tremendous and immediate powers, and a monarchy
+which incorporated with itself all the great elements of the national
+tradition, _including the Church_.
+
+It is the name of Louis XIV, of course, which symbolises this great
+time; his very long reign precisely corresponds to it. He was born
+coincidently with that universal struggle for a religious settlement in
+Europe, which I have described as characteristic of the time; he died
+precisely at its close; and under him it seemed as though the
+reconstructed power of Gaul and the defence of organised Catholicism
+were to be synonymous.
+
+But there were two elements of disruption in that homogeneous body which
+Louis XIV apparently commanded. The very fact that the Church had thus
+become in France an unshakable national institution, chilled the vital
+source of Catholicism. Not only did the hierarchy stand in a perpetual
+suspicion of the Roman See, and toy with the conception of national
+independence, but they, and all the official organisation of French
+Catholicism, put the security of the national establishment and its
+intimate attachment to the general political structure of the State, far
+beyond the sanctity of Catholic dogma or the practice of Catholic
+morals.
+
+That political structure--the French monarchy--seemed to be of granite
+and eternal. Had it indeed survived, the Church in Gaul would doubtless,
+in spite of its attachment to so mundane a thing as the crown, have
+still survived to enjoy one of those resurrections which have never
+failed it in the past, and would have returned, by some creative
+reaction, to its principle of life. But for the moment the consequence
+of this fixed political establishment was that scepticism, and all those
+other active forces of the mind which play upon religion in any Catholic
+State, had full opportunity. The Church was, so to speak, not concerned
+to defend itself but only its method of existence. It was as though a
+garrison, forgetting the main defences of a place, had concentrated all
+its efforts upon the security of one work which contained its supplies
+of food.
+
+Wit, good verse, sincere enthusiasm, a lucid exposition of whatever in
+the human mind perpetually rebels against transcendental affirmations,
+were allowed every latitude and provoked no effective reply. But overt
+acts of disrespect to ecclesiastical authority were punished with
+rigour.
+
+While in the wealthy, the bureaucratic, and the governing classes, to
+ridicule the Faith was an attitude taken for granted, seriously to
+attack the privileges or position of its ministers was ungentlemanly,
+and was not allowed. It did not shock the hierarchy that one of its
+Apostolic members should be a witty atheist; that another should go
+hunting upon Corpus Christi, nearly upset the Blessed Sacrament in his
+gallop, and forget what day it was when the accident occurred. The
+bishops found nothing remarkable in seeing a large proportion of their
+body to be loose livers, or in some of them openly presenting their
+friends to their mistresses as might be done by any great lay noble
+round them. That a diocese or any other spiritual charge should be
+divorced from its titular chief, seemed to them as natural as does to us
+the absence from his modern regiment of some titular foreign colonel.
+Unquestioned also by the bishops were the poverty, the neglect, and the
+uninstruction of the parish clergy; nay--and this is by far the
+principal feature--the abandonment of religion by all but a very few of
+the French millions, no more affected the ecclesiastical officials of
+the time than does the starvation of our poor affect, let us say, one of
+our professional politicians. It was a thing simply taken for granted.
+
+The reader must seize that moribund condition of the religious life of
+France upon the eve of the Revolution, for it is at once imperfectly
+grasped by the general run of historians, and is also the only fact
+which thoroughly explains what followed. The swoon of the Faith in the
+eighteenth century is the negative foundation upon which the strange
+religious experience of the French was about to rise. France, in the
+generation before the Revolution, was passing through a phase in which
+the Catholic Faith was at a lower ebb than it had ever been since the
+preaching and establishment of it in Gaul.
+
+This truth is veiled by more than one circumstance. Thus many official
+acts, notably marriages and the registration of births, took place under
+a Catholic form, and indeed Catholic forms had a monopoly of them.
+Again, the State wore Catholic clothes, as it were: the public occasions
+of pomp were full of religious ceremony. Few of the middle classes went
+to Mass in the great towns, hardly any of the artisans; but the Churches
+were "official." Great sums of money--including official money--were at
+the disposal of the Church; and the great ecclesiastics were men from
+whom solid favours could be got. Again, the historic truth is masked by
+the language and point of view of the great Catholic reaction which has
+taken place in our own time.
+
+It is safe to say that where one adult of the educated classes concerned
+himself seriously with the Catholic Faith and Practice in France before
+the Revolution, there are five to-day. But in between lies the violent
+episode of the persecution, and the Catholic reaction in our time
+perpetually tends to contrast a supposed pre-revolutionary "Catholic"
+society with the revolutionary fury. "Look," say its champions, "at the
+dreadful way in which the Revolution treated the Church." And as they
+say this the converse truth appears obvious and they seem to imply,
+"Think how different it must have been before the Revolution persecuted
+the Church!" The very violence of the modern reaction towards
+Catholicism has exaggerated the revolutionary persecution, and in doing
+so has made men forget that apart from other evidence of the decline of
+religion, it is obvious that persecution could never have arisen without
+a strong and continuous historical backing. You could not have had a
+Diocletian in the thirteenth century with the spirit of the Crusaders
+just preceding him; you could not have had Henry VIII if the England of
+the fifteenth century just preceding him had been an England devoted to
+the monastic profession. And you could not have had the revolutionary
+fury against the Catholic Church in France if the preceding generation
+had been actively Catholic even in a considerable portion.
+
+As a fact, of course it was not: and in the popular indifference to or
+hatred of the Church the principal factor was the strict brotherhood not
+so much of Church and State as of Church and executive Government.
+
+But there was another factor. We were describing a little way back how
+in France there had arisen, during the movement of the Reformation, a
+wealthy, powerful and numerically large Huguenot body. In mere numbers
+it dwindled, but it maintained throughout the seventeenth century a very
+high position, both of privilege and (what was its characteristic) of
+money-power; and even to-day, though their birth-rate is, of course,
+lower than the average of the nation, the French Huguenots number close
+upon a million, and are far wealthier, upon the average, than their
+fellow citizens. It is their wealth which dominates the trade of
+certain districts, which exercises so great an effect upon the
+universities, the publishing trade, and the press; and in general lends
+them such weight in the affairs of the nation.
+
+Now the Huguenot had in France a special and permanent quarrel with the
+monarchy, and therefore with the Catholic Church, which, precisely
+because it was not of the vivid and intense kind which is associated
+with popular and universal religions, was the more secretly ubiquitous.
+His quarrel was that, having been highly privileged for nearly a
+century, the member of "a State within a State," and for more than a
+generation free to hold assemblies separate from and often antagonistic
+to the national Government, these privileges had been suddenly removed
+from him by the Government of Louis XIV a century before the Revolution.
+The quarrel was more political than religious; it was a sort of "Home
+Rule" quarrel. For though the Huguenots were spread throughout France,
+they had possessed special cities and territories wherein their spirit
+and, to a certain extent, their private self-government, formed
+_enclaves_ of particularism within the State.
+
+They had held this position, as I have said, for close upon a hundred
+years, and it was not until a date contemporary with the violent
+settlement of the religious trouble in England by the expulsion of James
+II that a similar settlement, less violent, achieved (as it was thought)
+a similar religious unity in France. But that unity was not achieved.
+The Huguenots, though no longer permitted to exist as a State within a
+State, remained, for the hundred years between the Revocation of the
+Edict of Nantes and the outbreak of the Revolution, a powerful and
+ever-watchful body. They stood upon the flank of the attack which
+intellectual scepticism was making upon the Catholic Church, they were
+prepared to take advantage of that scepticism's first political victory,
+and since the Revolution they have been the most powerful and, after the
+Freemasons, with whom they are largely identified, the most strongly
+organised, of the anti-clerical forces in the country.
+
+The Jews, whose action since the Revolution has been so remarkable in
+this same business, were not, in the period immediately preceding it, of
+any considerable influence, and their element in the coalition may be
+neglected.
+
+Such, then, was the position when the Revolution was preparing. Within
+memory of all men living, the Church had become more and more official,
+the masses of the great towns had wholly lost touch with it; the
+intelligence of the country was in the main drawn to the Deist or even
+to the purely sceptical propaganda, the powerful Huguenot body was ready
+prepared for an alliance with any foe of Catholicism, and in the eyes of
+the impoverished town populace--notably in Paris, which had long
+abandoned the practice of religion--the human organisation of the
+Church, the hierarchy, the priesthood, and the few but very wealthy
+religious orders which still lingered on in dwindling numbers, were but
+a portion of the privileged world which the populace hated and was
+prepared to destroy.
+
+It is upon such a spirit and in such conditions of the national
+religious life that the Revolution begins to work. In the National
+Assembly you have the great body of the Commons which determines the
+whole, touched only here and there with men in any way acquainted with
+or devoted to Catholic practice, and those men for the most part
+individual and eccentric, that is, uncatholic, almost in proportion to
+the genuineness of their religious feeling. Among the nobility the
+practice of religion was a social habit with some--as a mental attitude
+the Faith was forgotten among all but a very few. Among the clergy a
+very wealthy hierarchy, no one of them prepared to defend the Church
+with philosophical argument, and almost unanimous in regarding itself as
+a part of the old political machine, was dominant; while the
+representatives of the lower clergy, strongly democratic in character,
+were at first more occupied with the establishment of democracy than
+with the impending attack upon the material and temporal organisation of
+the Church.
+
+Now, that material and temporal organisation offered at the very
+beginning of the debates an opportunity for attack which no other
+department of the old _regime_ could show.
+
+The immediate peril of the State was financial. The pretext and even to
+some extent the motive for the calling of the States-General was the
+necessity for finding money. The old fiscal machinery had broken down,
+and as always happens when a fiscal machine breaks down, the hardship it
+involved, and the pressure upon individuals which it involved, appeared
+to be universal. _There was no immediate and easily available fund of
+wealth upon which the Executive could lay hands save the wealth of the
+clergy._
+
+The feudal dues of the nobles, if abandoned, must fall rather to the
+peasantry than to the State. Of the existing taxes few could be
+increased without peril, and none with any prospect of a large
+additional revenue. The charge for debt alone was one-half of the total
+receipts of the State, the deficit was, in proportion to the revenue,
+overwhelming. Face to face with that you had an institution not popular,
+one whose public functions were followed by but a small proportion of
+the population, one in which income was most unequally distributed, and
+one whose feudal property yielded in dues an amount equal to more than a
+quarter of the total revenue of the State. Add to this a system of
+tithes which produced nearly as much again, and it will be apparent
+under what a financial temptation the Assembly lay.
+
+It may be argued, of course, that the right of the Church to this
+ecclesiastical property, whether in land or in tithes, was absolute, and
+that the confiscation of the one or of the other form of revenue was
+mere theft. But such was not the legal conception of the moment. The
+wealth of the Church was not even (and this is most remarkable)
+defended as absolute property by the generality of those who enjoyed it.
+The tone of the debates which suppressed the tithes, and later
+confiscated the Church lands, was a tone of discussion upon legal
+points, precedents, public utility, and so forth. There was not heard in
+it, in any effective degree, the assertion of mere moral right; though
+in that time the moral rights of property were among the first of
+political doctrines.
+
+It was not, however, the confiscation of the Church lands and the
+suppression of the tithe which founded the quarrel between the
+Revolution and the clergy. No financial or economic change is ever more
+than a preparation for, or a permissive condition of, a moral change. It
+is never the cause of a moral change. Even the suppression of the
+religious houses in the beginning of 1790 must not be taken as the point
+of departure in the great quarrel. The religious orders in France were
+at that moment too decayed in zeal and in numbers, too wealthy and much
+too removed from the life of the nation, for this to be the case. The
+true historical point of departure from which we must date the beginning
+of this profound debate between the Revolution and Catholicism, is to be
+found in the morning of the 30th of May, 1790, when a parliamentary
+committee (the Ecclesiastical Committee) presented to the House its plan
+for the reform of the Constitution of the Church in Gaul.
+
+The enormity of that act is now apparent to the whole world. The
+proposal, at the bidding of chance representatives not elected _ad hoc_,
+to change the dioceses and the sees of Catholic France, the decision of
+an ephemeral political body to limit to such and such ties (and very
+feeble they were) the bond between the Church of France and the Holy
+See, the suppression of the Cathedral Chapters, the seemingly farcical
+proposal that bishops should be elected, nay, priests also thus chosen,
+the submission of the hierarchy in the matter of residence and travel to
+a civil authority which openly declared itself indifferent in matters of
+religion,--all this bewilders the modern mind. How, we ask, could men so
+learned, so enthusiastic, so laborious and so closely in touch with all
+the realities of their time, make a blunder of that magnitude? Much
+more, how did such a blunder escape the damnation of universal mockery
+and immediate impotence? The answer is to be discovered in what has just
+been laid down with so much insistence: the temporary eclipse of
+religion in France before the Revolution broke out.
+
+The men who framed the Constitution of the Clergy, the men who voted it,
+nay, even the men who argued against it, all had at the back of their
+minds three conceptions which they were attempting to reconcile: of
+those three conceptions one was wholly wrong, one was imperfect because
+superficial, the third alone was true. And these three conceptions were,
+first, that the Catholic Church was a moribund superstition, secondly,
+that it possessed in its organisation and tradition a power to be
+reckoned with, and thirdly, that the State, its organs, and their
+corporate inheritance of action, were so bound up with the Catholic
+Church that it was impossible to effect any general political settlement
+in which that body both external to France and internal, should be
+neglected.
+
+Of these three conceptions, had the first been as true as the last, it
+would have saved the Constitution of the Clergy and the reputation for
+common-sense of those who framed it.
+
+It was certainly true that Catholicism had for so many centuries been
+bound up in the framework of the State that the Parliament must
+therefore do something with the Church in the general settlement of the
+nation: it could not merely leave the Church on one side.
+
+It was also superficially true that the Church was a power to be
+reckoned with politically, quite apart from the traditional union of
+Church and State--but only superficially true. What the revolutionary
+politicians feared was the intrigue of those who commanded the
+organisation of the Catholic Church, men whom they knew for the most
+part to be without religion, and the sincerity of all of whom they
+naturally doubted. A less superficial and a more solid judgment of the
+matter would have discovered that the real danger lay in the animosity
+or intrigue against the Civil Constitution, not of the corrupt
+hierarchy, but of the sincere though ill-instructed and dwindling
+minority which was still loyally attached to the doctrines and
+discipline of the Church. But even this superficial judgment would not
+have been fatal, had not the judgment of the National Assembly been
+actually erroneous upon the first point--the vitality of the Faith.
+
+Had the Catholic Church been, as nearly all educated men then imagined,
+a moribund superstition, had the phase of decline through which it was
+passing been a phase comparable to that through which other religions
+have passed in their last moments, had it been supported by ancient
+families from mere tradition, clung to by remote peasants from mere
+ignorance and isolation, abandoned (as it was) in the towns simply
+because the towns had better opportunities of intellectual enlightenment
+and of acquiring elementary knowledge in history and the sciences; had,
+in a word, the imaginary picture which these men drew in their minds of
+the Catholic Church and its fortunes been an exact one, then the Civil
+Constitution of the Clergy would have been a statesmanlike act. It would
+have permitted the hold of the Catholic Church upon such districts as it
+still retained to vanish slowly and without shock. It proposed to keep
+alive at a reasonable salary the ministers of a ritual which would
+presumably have lost all vitality before the last of its pensioners was
+dead; it would have prepared a bed, as it were, upon which the last of
+Catholicism in Gaul could peacefully pass away. The action of the
+politicians in framing the Constitution would have seemed more generous
+with every passing decade and their wisdom in avoiding offence to the
+few who still remained faithful, would have been increasingly applauded.
+
+On the other hand, and from the point of view of the statesman, the
+Civil Constitution of the Clergy bound strictly to the State and made
+responsible to it those ancient functions, not yet dead, of the
+episcopacy and all its train. It was a wise and a just consideration on
+the part of the Assembly that religions retain their machinery long
+after they are dead, and if that machinery has ever been a State
+machinery it must remain subject to the control of the State: and
+subject not only up to the moment when the living force which once
+animated it is fled, but much longer; up, indeed, to the moment when the
+surviving institutions of the dead religion break down and perish.
+
+So argued the National Assembly and its committee, and, I repeat, the
+argument was just and statesmanlike, prudent and full of foresight, save
+for one miscalculation. The Catholic Church was not dead, and was not
+even dying. It was exhibiting many of the symptoms which in other
+organisms and institutions correspond to the approach of death, but the
+Catholic Church is an organism and an institution quite unlike any
+other. It fructifies and expands immediately under the touch of a lethal
+weapon; it has at its very roots the conception that material prosperity
+is stifling to it, poverty and misfortune nutritious.
+
+The men of the National Assembly would have acted more wisely had they
+closely studied the story of Ireland (then but little known), or had
+they even made themselves acquainted with the methods by which the
+Catholic Church in Britain, after passing in the fifteenth century
+through a phase somewhat similar to that under which it was sinking in
+Gaul in the eighteenth, was stifled under Henry and Elizabeth.
+
+But the desire of the men of 1789 was not to kill the Church but to let
+it die; they thought it dying. Their desire was only to make that death
+decent and of no hurt to the nation, and to control the political action
+of a hierarchy that had been wealthy and was bound up with the old
+society that was crumbling upon every side.
+
+The Civil Constitution of the Clergy failed: it lit the civil war, it
+dug the pit which divided Catholicism from the Revolution at the moment
+of the foreign invasion, it segregated the loyal priest in such a
+fashion that his order could not but appear to the populace as an order
+of traitors, and it led, in the furnace of 1793, to the great
+persecution from the memories of which the relations between the French
+democracy and the Church have not recovered.
+
+It is important to trace the actual steps of the failure; for when we
+appreciate what the dates were, how short the time which was left for
+judgment or for revision, and how immediately disaster followed upon
+error, we can understand what followed and we can understand it in no
+other way.
+
+If we find an enduring quarrel between two families whose cause of
+contention we cannot seize and whose mutual hostility we find
+unreasonable, to learn that it proceeded from a cataclysm too rapid and
+too violent for either to have exercised judgment upon it will enable us
+to excuse or at least to comprehend the endurance of their antagonism.
+Now, it was a cataclysm which fell upon the relations of the Church and
+State immediately after the error which the Parliament had committed; a
+cataclysm quite out of proportion to their intentions, as indeed are
+most sudden disasters quite out of proportion to the forces that bring
+them about.
+
+It was, as we have seen, in the summer of 1790--upon the 12th of
+July--that the Civil Constitution of the Clergy was approved by the
+Assembly. But it was not until the 26th of August that the King
+consented to sign. Nor was there at the moment any attempt to give the
+law effect. The protests of the bishops, for instance, came out quite at
+leisure, in the month of October, and the active principle of the whole
+of the Civil Constitution--to wit, the presentation of the Civic Oath
+which the clergy were required to take, was not even debated until the
+end of the year.
+
+This Civic Oath, which is sometimes used as a bugbear in the matter, was
+no more than an engagement under the sanction of an oath that the bishop
+or priest taking it would maintain the new _regime_--though that
+_regime_ included the constitution of the clergy; the oath involved no
+direct breach with Catholic doctrine or practice. It was, indeed, a
+folly to impose it, and it was a folly based upon the ignorance of the
+politicians (and of many of the bishops of the day) as to the nature of
+the Catholic Church. But the oath was not, nor was it intended to be, a
+measure of persecution. Many of the parish clergy took it, and most of
+them probably took it in good faith: nor did it discredit the oath with
+the public that it was refused by all save four of the acting bishops,
+for the condition of the hierarchy in pre-revolutionary France was
+notorious. The action of the bishops appeared in the public eye to be
+purely political, and the ready acceptance of the oath by so many,
+though a minority, of the lower clergy argued strongly in its favour.
+
+Nevertheless, no Catholic priest or bishop or layman could take that
+oath without landing himself in disloyalty to his religion; and that for
+the same reason which led St. Thomas of Canterbury to make his curious
+and fruitful stand against the reasonable and inevitable, as much as
+against the unreasonable, governmental provisions of his time. The
+Catholic Church is an institution of necessity autonomous. It cannot
+admit the right of any other power exterior to its own organisation to
+impose upon it a modification of its discipline, nor, above all, a new
+conception of its hieratic organisation.
+
+The reader must carefully distinguish between the acceptation by the
+Church of a detail of economic reform, the consent to suppress a
+corporation at the request of the civil power, or even to forego certain
+traditional political rights, and the admission of the general principle
+of civil control. To that general principle the Assembly, in framing the
+Constitution of the Clergy, was quite evidently committed. To admit such
+a co-ordinate external and civil power, or rather to admit a _superior_
+external power, is in theory to deny the principle of Catholicism, and
+in practice to make of the Catholic Church what the other State
+religions of Christendom have become.
+
+I have said that not until the end of the year 1790 was the debate
+opened upon the proposition to compel the clergy to take the oath.
+
+It is a singular commentary upon the whole affair that compulsion should
+have been the subject for debate at all. It should have followed, one
+would have imagined, normally from the law. But so exceptional had been
+the action of the Assembly and, as they now were beginning to find, so
+perilous, that a special decree was necessary--and the King's signature
+to it--before this normal consequence of a measure which had been law
+for months, could be acted upon.
+
+Here let the reader pause and consider with what that moment--the end of
+1790--coincided.
+
+The assignats, paper-money issued upon the security of the confiscated
+estates of the Church, had already depreciated 10 per cent. Those who
+had first accepted them were paying throughout France a penny in the
+livre, or as we may put it, a penny farthing on the shilling, for what
+must have seemed to most of them the obstinacy of one single
+corporation--and that an unpopular one--against the decrees of the
+National Assembly.
+
+It was now the moment when a definite reaction against the Revolution
+was first taking shape, and when the populace was first beginning
+uneasily to have suspicion of it; it was the moment when the Court was
+beginning to negotiate for flight; it was the moment when (though the
+populace did not know it) Mirabeau was advising the King with all his
+might to seize upon the enforcement of the priests' oath as an
+opportunity for civil war.
+
+The whole air of that winter was charged with doubt and mystery: in the
+minds of all who had enthusiastically followed the march of the
+Revolution, the short days of that rigorous cold of 1790-91 contained
+passages of despair, and a very brief period was to suffice for making
+the clerical oath not only the test of democracy against reaction, but
+the wedge that should split the nation in two.
+
+With the very opening of the new year, on the 4th of January, the
+bishops and priests in the Assembly were summoned to take the oath to
+the King, the Nation, and the Law; but that law included the Civil
+Constitution of the Clergy, and they refused. Within three months
+Mirabeau was dead, the flight of the King determined on, the suspicion
+of Paris at white heat, the oath taken or refused throughout France,
+and the schismatic priests introduced into their parishes--it may be
+imagined with what a clamour and with how many village quarrels! In that
+same fortnight appeared the papal brief, long delayed, and known as the
+Brief "_Caritas_," denouncing the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. Six
+weeks later, at the end of May, the papal representative at the French
+Court was withdrawn, and in that act religious war declared.
+
+Throughout this quarrel, which was now exactly of a year's duration, but
+the acute phase of which had lasted only six months, every act of either
+party to it necessarily tended to make the conflict more violent. Not
+only was there no opportunity for conciliation, but in the very nature
+of things the most moderate counsel had to range itself on one side or
+the other, and every public act which touched in any way upon the sore
+point, though it touched but indirectly, and with no desire on the part
+of the actors to rouse the passions of the moment, immediately appeared
+as a provocation upon one side or the other.
+
+It was inevitable that it should be so, with a population which had
+abandoned the practice of religion, with the attachment of the clerical
+organisation to the organisation of the old _regime_, with the strict
+bond of discipline that united the priesthood of the Church in France
+into one whole, and above all with the necessity under which the
+Revolution was, at this stage, of finding a definite and tangible
+enemy.
+
+This last point is of the very first importance. Public opinion was
+exasperated and inflamed, for the King was known to be an opponent of
+the democratic movement; yet he signed the bills and could not be
+overtly attacked. The Queen was known to be a violent opponent of it;
+but she did not actually govern. The Governments of Europe were known to
+be opponents; but no diplomatic note had yet appeared of which public
+opinion could make an object for attack.
+
+The resistance, therefore, offered by the clergy to the Civil
+Constitution, had just that effect which a nucleus will have in the
+crystallisation of some solution. It polarised the energies of the
+Revolution, it provided a definite foil, a definite negative, a definite
+counterpoint, a definite butt. Here was a simple issue. Men wearing a
+special uniform, pursuing known functions, performing a known part in
+society--to wit, the priests--were now for the most part the enemies of
+the new democratic Constitution that was in preparation. They would not
+take the oath of loyalty to it: they were everywhere in secret rebellion
+against it and, where they were dispossessed of their cures, in open
+rebellion. The clergy, therefore, that is the non-juring clergy (and the
+conforming clergy were an experiment that soon became a fiction), were
+after April 1791, in the eyes of all the democrats of the time, the
+plainest and most tangible form of the opposition to democracy.
+
+To the way in which I have presented the problem a great deal more might
+be added. The very fact that the democratic movement had come after a
+period of unfaith, and was non-Catholic in its springs, would have
+tended to produce that quarrel. So would the necessary attachment of the
+Catholic to authority and the easy confusion between the principle of
+authority and claims of a traditional monarchy. Again, the elements of
+vanity, of material greed, and of a false finality which are to be
+discovered in any purely democratic theory of the State, will between
+them always bring this theory into some conflict with religion. The
+centuries during which the throne and the altar had stood as twin
+symbols, especially in France, the very terminology of religious
+metaphor which had been forged during the centuries of monarchical
+institutions in Europe, helped to found the great quarrel. But, I
+repeat, the overt act without which the quarrel could never have become
+the terribly great thing it did, the master blunder which destroyed the
+unity of the revolutionary movement, was the Civil Constitution of the
+Clergy.
+
+So much for the first year of the schism, May 1790 to May 1791. The
+second year is but an intensification of the process apparent in the
+first.
+
+It opens with the King's flight in June 1791: that is, with the first
+open act of enmity taken against the authority of the National
+Parliament since, two years before, the National Parliament had declared
+itself supreme. Already the Court had been generally identified with the
+resistance of the clergy, and a particular example of this had appeared
+in the opinion that the King's attempted journey to St. Cloud in April
+had been prompted by a desire to have communion at the hands of a
+non-juring priest.[8] When, therefore, the King fled, though his flight
+had nothing whatsoever to do with the clerical quarrel, it was
+associated in men's minds with the clerical quarrel through his attempt
+to leave Paris in April and from a long association of the Court with
+the clerical resistance. The outburst of anti-monarchical feeling which
+followed the flight was at the same time an outburst of anti-clerical
+feeling; but the clergy were everywhere and could be attacked
+everywhere. The Declaration of Pillnitz, which the nation very rightly
+interpreted as the beginning of an armed European advance against the
+French democracy, was felt to be a threat not only in favour of the King
+but in favour also of the rebellious ecclesiastics.
+
+And so forth. The uneasy approach of war throughout that autumn and
+winter of 1791-92, the peculiar transformation of the French
+temperament which war or its approach invariably produces--a sort of
+constructive exaltation and creative passion--began to turn a great part
+of its energy or fury against the very persons of the orthodox priests.
+
+The new Parliament, the "Legislative" as it was called, had not been
+sitting two months when it passed, upon November 29, 1791, the decree
+that non-juring priests should be deprived of their stipend. And here
+again we must note the curious lack of adjustment between law and fact
+in all this clerical quarrel! For more than a year public money had been
+paid to men who, under the law, should not during the whole of that year
+have touched any salary! Yet, as in the case of the oath, special action
+was necessary, and moreover the Parliament added to this tardy and
+logical consequence of the law a declaration that those who had not so
+taken the oath within eight days of their decree should be rendered
+"suspect."
+
+The word "suspect" is significant. The Parliament even now could not
+act, at least it could not act without the King; and this word
+"suspect," which carried no material consequences with it, was one that
+might cover a threat of things worse than regular and legal punishment.
+It was like the mark that some power not authorised or legal makes upon
+the door of those whom that power has singled out for massacre in some
+city.
+
+Three weeks later Louis vetoed the decree refusing stipends to
+non-jurors, and the year 1791 ended with the whole matter in suspense
+but with exasperation increasing to madness.
+
+The first three months of 1792 saw no change. The non-juring clergy were
+still tolerated by the Executive in their illegal position, and, what is
+more extraordinary, still received public money and were still for the
+most part in possession of their cures; the conception that the clergy
+were the prime, or at any rate the most obvious, enemies of the new
+_regime_ now hardened into a fixed opinion which the attempted
+persecution of religion, as the one party called it, the obstinate and
+anti-national rebellion of factious priests, as the other party called
+it, was rapidly approaching real persecution and real rebellion.
+
+With April 1792 came the war, and all the passions of the war.
+
+The known hostility of the King to the Revolution was now become
+something far worse: his known sympathy with an enemy under arms. To
+force the King into the open was henceforward the main tactic of the
+revolutionary body.
+
+Now for those whose object was forcing Louis XVI to open declarations of
+hostility against the nation, his religion was an obvious instrument. In
+no point could one come to closer grips with the King than on this
+question of the Church, where already, in December 1791, he had
+exercised his veto.
+
+On May 27, 1792, therefore, Guadet and Vergniaud, the Girondins, moved
+that a priest who had refused to take the oath should be subjected to
+transportation upon the mere demand of any twenty taxpayers within that
+assembly of parishes known as a "Canton." It was almost exactly two
+years since the Civil Constitution of the Clergy had first been reported
+to the House by the Ecclesiastical Committee of the Constituent or
+National Assembly.
+
+It must not be forgotten under what external conditions this violent
+act, the first true act of persecution, was demanded. It was already a
+month since, upon the 20th of April, the war had opened upon the Belgian
+frontier by a disgraceful panic and the murder of General Dillon; almost
+contemporaneous with that breakdown was the corresponding panic and
+flight of the French troops in their advance to Mons. All Europe was
+talking of the facile march upon Paris which could now be undertaken;
+and in general this decree against the priests was but part of the
+exasperated policy which was rising to meet the terror of the invasion.
+
+It was followed, of course, by the decree dismissing the Royal Guard,
+and, rather more than a week later, by the demand for the formation of a
+camp of volunteers under the walls of Paris. But with this we are not
+here concerned. The King vetoed the decree against the non-juring
+priests, and in the wild two months that followed the orthodox clergy
+were, in the mind of the populace, and particularly the populace of
+Paris, identified with the cause of the re-establishment of the old
+_regime_ and the success of the invading foreign armies.
+
+With the crash of the 10th of August the persecution began: the true
+persecution, which was to the growing bitterness of the previous two
+years what a blow is to the opening words of a quarrel.
+
+The decree of the 27th of May was put into force within eleven days of
+the fall of the Tuileries. True, it was not put into force in that
+crudity which the Parliament had demanded: the non-juring priests were
+given a fortnight to leave the kingdom, and if they failed to avail
+themselves of the delay were to be transported.
+
+From this date to the end of the Terror, twenty-three months later, the
+story of the relations between the Revolution and the Church, though
+wild and terrible, is simple: it is a story of mere persecution
+culminating in extremes of cruelty and in the supposed uprooting of
+Christianity in France.
+
+The orthodox clergy were everywhere regarded by this time as the typical
+enemies of the revolutionary movement; they themselves regarded the
+revolutionary movement, by this time, as being principally an attempt to
+destroy the Catholic Church.
+
+Within seven months of the fall of the monarchy, from the 18th of March,
+1793, the priests, whether non-juring or schismatic, might, on the
+denunciation of any six citizens, be subjected to transportation.
+
+There followed immediately a general attack upon religion. The attempted
+closing of all churches was, of course, a failure, but it was firmly
+believed that such attachment as yet remained to the Catholic Church was
+due only to the ignorance of the provincial districts which displayed
+it, or to the self-seeking of those who fostered it. The attempt at mere
+"de-christianisation," as it was called, failed, but the months of
+terror and cruelty, the vast number of martyrdoms (for they were no
+less) and the incredible sufferings and indignities to which the priests
+who attempted to remain in the country were subjected, burnt itself, as
+it were, into the very fibre of the Catholic organisation in France, and
+remained, in spite of political theory one way or the other, and in
+spite of the national sympathies of the priesthood, the one great active
+memory inherited from that time.
+
+Conversely, the picture of the priest, his habit and character, as the
+fatal and necessary opponent of the revolutionary theory, became so
+fixed in the mind of the Republican that two generations did nothing to
+eliminate it, and that even in our time the older men, in spite of pure
+theory, cannot rid themselves of an imagined connection between the
+Catholic Church and an international conspiracy against democracy. Nor
+does this non-rational but very real feeling lack support from the
+utterances of those who, in opposing the political theory of the French
+Revolution, consistently quote the Catholic Church as its necessary and
+holy antagonist.
+
+The attempt to "de-christianise" France failed, as I have said,
+completely. Public worship was restored, and the Concordat of Napoleon
+was believed to have settled the relations between Church and State in a
+permanent fashion. We have lived to see it dissolved; but this
+generation will not see, nor perhaps the generation succeeding it, the
+issue of the struggle between two bodies of thought which are divided by
+no process of reason, but profoundly divorced by the action of vivid and
+tragic historical memories.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[8] This opinion has entered into so many Protestant and non-Catholic
+histories of the Revolution that it is worth criticising once again in
+this little book. The King was perfectly free to receive communion
+privately from the hands of orthodox priests, did so receive it, and had
+received communion well within the canonical times. There was little
+ecclesiastical reason for the attempted leaving of Paris for St. Cloud
+on Monday the 18th April, 1791, save the _custom_ (not the religious
+duty) of communicating in public on Easter Sunday itself; it was a
+political move.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+  Alexander the Great, 144
+  Argonne, the, 156
+  Arras, 132, 137
+  Artois, Comte d', 105
+  Avignon, 111
+
+  Bacharach, 173
+  Bailly, 71, 95
+  Barentin, 89
+  Barrere, 80, 125, 130, 131
+  Bastille, the, 95, 105, 109, 115
+  Beauregard, 200
+  Belgium, 123, 167, 169, 173
+  Bergues, 191
+  Bordeaux, 135
+  Bouille, 107, 152
+  Brissot, 110, 130
+  Brunswick, Duke of, 115, 118, 178
+  Brussels, 168
+
+  Caesar, 144
+  Calonne, 46
+  Cambon, 125
+  Carignan, 200
+  Carlyle, Thomas, 68
+  Carnot, 72-74, 80, 81, 136, 139, 171, 184, 186, 195, 197, 198, 200,
+    201
+  Cassel, 192
+  Chalons, 107, 158
+  Champ-de-Mars, Massacre of, 109
+  Champfleury, 77
+  Charleroi, 210, 211
+  Charles I of England, 222
+  Chollet, 128
+  Clerfayt, 206, 207, 209
+  Coblentz, 115
+  Coburg, 170, 173, 176, 177, 179, 186, 188, 196, 210
+  Committee of Public Safety, 78, 79, 80, 81, 119, 125, 126, 128, 129,
+    131, 134, 136, 137, 140, 183, 195, 196, 203
+  Conde, 106
+  Conde, fortress of, 135, 173, 177, 178, 180, 182, 183, 186, 195
+  Condorcet, 71
+  _Contrat Social_, 21, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 37, 125, 133
+  Coudequerque, 192
+  Couthon, 131
+  Custine, 177, 178, 179, 180
+
+  Danton, 64, 67-72, 73, 81, 82, 109, 117, 119, 120, 125, 130, 131, 135,
+    137, 138, 139, 150, 162, 184, 185
+  Desmoulins, 138
+  Dillon, General, 250
+  Drouet, 108
+  Dumouriez, 43, 65-67, 113, 123, 124, 125, 155, 157, 158, 159, 162,
+    163, 165, 168, 169, 170, 173
+  Dunquerque, 135, 136, 181, 185, 186, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 195
+
+  England, 14, 124, 145
+  Elizabeth, Queen of England, 239
+  Esquelbecque, 191
+
+  Fersen, Count Axel de, 53
+  Fleurus, 211, 212
+  Fontenay, 128
+  Fontenoy, 149, 166
+  Fouche, 74
+  Freemasonry, 71, 231
+  Freytag, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194
+  Furnes, 190, 194
+
+  George III of England, 63
+  Gironde, 110
+  _Girondins, The_, 110, 112, 119, 122, 123, 129, 249
+  Grandpre, 158
+  Guadet, 249
+  Guise, 198, 200
+
+  Haguenau, 202
+  Haine, the River, 167
+  Hebert, 138
+  Henry VIII of England, 222, 229, 239
+  Hesse-Cassel, Landgrave of, 113
+  Hoche, 202
+  Holland, 124, 163
+  Hoondschoote, 74, 136, 195, 196, 197
+  Houchard, 179, 181, 192, 193, 194, 195, 198
+  Howe, Lord, 213
+
+  Ireland, 239
+  Isnard, 110
+
+  James II of England, 230
+  Jefferson, 21
+  Jemappes, 123, 166, 167
+  Joseph II of Austria, 112, 163, 165
+  Jourdan, 198
+
+  Kaiserslautern, 202
+  Kaunitz, 155
+  Kellermann, 159, 160
+  Kilmaine, 180, 181
+
+  La Fayette, 43, 51, 61-65, 95, 100, 109, 114
+  Lamballe, Princess de, 53, 71
+  Landau, 177, 202, 203
+  Lebas, 141
+  Leipsic, 143, 214
+  Lequesnoy, 177, 186, 195
+  Linselles, 189
+  Longwy, 115, 118, 156
+  Lorraine, 118
+  Louis XIV of France, 100, 225, 230
+  Louis XVI of France, vi, 37-45, 71, 84, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92,
+    93, 95, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 107, 108, 109, 111, 114,
+    117, 123, 124, 152, 153, 243, 245, 246, 247, 248, 249, 250
+  Louis XVII of France, 135
+  Louvre, the, 116, 117
+  Luxembourg, 118
+  Lyons, 129, 136, 182, 183
+  Lys, the River, 206, 207
+
+  Machecoul, 128
+  Maestricht, 168
+  Malo-les-Bains, 194
+  Marat, 74-77, 120, 135, 183
+  Marcel, 120
+  Marchionnes, 189
+  Marie Antoinette, Queen of France, vi, 45-53, 63, 64, 90, 99, 100,
+    101, 102, 103, 106, 107, 108, 109, 113, 116, 117, 138, 139, 152,
+    153, 155, 245
+  Marque, the River, 206
+  "Marseillaise," the, 116
+  Marseilles, 116, 131, 135, 182
+  Maubeuge, 136, 177, 178, 181, 196, 197, 202
+  Mayence, 135, 173, 177, 178
+  Merda, 142
+  Metz, 159
+  Michelet, 68
+  Mirabeau, 44, 53-61, 64, 70, 72, 102, 103, 104, 106, 107, 243
+  Mons, 167, 177, 250
+  Montmedy, 107
+  Mouveau, 206
+
+  Namur, 179
+  Nantes, 128, 131, 136, 137, 182
+  Napoleon I, 66, 67, 72, 143, 150, 205, 214, 253
+  Narbonne, 43, 155
+  Necker, 46, 90, 94, 95
+  Neerwinden, 124, 125, 128, 169
+
+  Orleans, 128
+  Orleans, Duke of, 109
+
+  Parthenay, 128
+  Pichegru, 202
+  Pillnitz, 154, 247
+  Poland, 31
+  Polignac, Madame de, 53
+  Pollio, 120
+
+  Redange, 118
+  Robespierre, 77-83, 111, 112, 132, 133, 134, 140, 141, 142, 213
+  Robinet, Dr., 120
+  Roland, 110
+  Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 20, 21, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35,
+    36, 37, 125
+  Russia, 14
+
+  St. Amand, 206
+  Saint-Andre, Jeanbon, 80, 131, 185
+  St. Cloud, 108, 247
+  Saint-Just, 80, 131, 133, 140, 141, 210
+  St. Menehould, 159
+  Scheldt, the, 123, 183, 205, 206
+  Sedan, 114
+  Servia, 155
+  Sieyes, 87
+  Spain, 24, 44, 124, 150
+
+  Talavera, 189
+  Talleyrand, 150
+  Terror, the, 79, 80, 81, 82, 120, 137, 139, 140, 142, 251
+  Tetteghem, 191
+  Thouars, 128
+  Toulon, 135, 136, 182, 183, 203
+  Tourcoing, 189, 206, 208, 209
+  Tournay, 210
+  Trafalgar, 213
+  Tuileries, the, 100, 101, 116, 121, 251
+
+  Valenciennes, 129, 135, 169, 173, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183,
+    186, 195
+  Valmy, 121, 122, 131, 158, 159, 160, 169
+  Varennes, 107, 108, 154
+  Vendee, 128, 135, 203
+  Verdun, 118, 120, 156, 157
+  Vergniaud, 110, 130, 249
+  Versailles, 52, 94, 99, 100, 102, 152, 153
+  Vienna, 163, 210
+
+  Warcoing, 205
+  Waterloo, 143
+  Wattignies, 73, 136, 201, 208
+  Wellington, Duke of, 189
+  Westermann, 131
+  Wilder, 191
+  Wissembourg, 202
+  Wormhoudt, 191
+  Wurmser, 178
+
+  York, Duke of, 179, 181, 186, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 194, 205, 208,
+    209
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_Richard Clay & Sons, Limited, London and Bungay._
+
+
+
+
+
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