Lectures on the French Revolution Part 17

Prisons were opened and thousands of private citizens were released.

The new sensation displayed itself extravagantly, in the search for pleasures unknown during the stern and sombre reign. Madame Tallien set the fashion as queen of Paris society. Men rejected the modern garment which characterised the hateful years, and put on tights. They buried the chin in folded neckcloths, and wore tall hats in protest against the exposed neck and the red nightcap of the enemy. Powder was resumed; but the pigtail was cut off straight, in commemoration of friends lost by the fall of the axe. Young men, representing the new spirit, wore a kind of uniform, with the badge of mourning on the arm, and a k.n.o.bstick in their hands adapted to the Jacobin skull. They became known afterwards as the _Jeunesse Doree_. The press made much of them, and they served as a body to the leaders of the reaction, hustling opponents, and denoting the infinite change in the conditions of public life.

These were externals. What went on underneath was the gradual recovery of the respectable elements of society, and the pa.s.sage of power from the unworthy hands of the men who destroyed Robespierre. These, the Thermidorians, were faithful to the contract with the Plain, by which they obtained their victory. Some had been friends of Danton, who, at one moment of the previous winter, had approved a policy of moderation in the use of the guillotine. Tallien had domestic as well as public reasons for clemency. But the bulk of the genuine Montagnards were unaltered. They had deserted Robespierre when it became unsafe to defend him; but they had not renounced his system, and held that it was needful as their security against the furious enmity they had incurred when they were the ruling faction.

The majority in the Convention, where all powers were now concentrated, were unable to govern. The irresistible resources of the Reign of Terror were gone, and nothing occupied their place. There was no working Const.i.tution, no settled authority, no party enjoying ascendancy and respect, no public men free from the guilt of blood.

Many months were to pa.s.s before the ruins of the fallen parties gathered together and const.i.tuted an effective government with a real policy and the means of pursuing it. The chiefs of the Commune and of the revolutionary tribunal, near one hundred in number, had followed Robespierre to the scaffold.

The Committees of government had lost their most energetic members, and were disabled by the new plan of rapid renewal. Power fluctuated between varying combinations of deputies, all of them transient and quickly discredited. The main division was between vengeance and amnesty. And the character of the following months was a gradual drift in the direction of vengeance, as the imprisoned or proscribed minority returned to their seats. But the Mountain included the men, who by organising, and equipping, and controlling the armies had made France the first of European Powers, and they could not at once be displaced. Barere proposed that existing inst.i.tutions should be preserved, and that Fouquier should continue his office. On August 19, Louchet, the man who led the a.s.sault against Robespierre, insisted that it was needful to keep up the Terror with all the rigour that had been prescribed by the sagacious and profound Marat. A month later, September 21, the Convention solemnised the apotheosis of Marat, whose remains were deposited in the Pantheon, while those of Mirabeau were cast out. Three weeks later, the master of Robespierre, Rousseau, was brought, with equal ceremony, to be laid by his side.

The worst of the remaining offenders, Barere, Collot d'Herbois, and Billaud-Varennes, were deprived of their seats on the Committee of Public Safety. But in spite of the denunciations of Lecointre and of Legendre, the Convention refused to proceed against them.

All through September and a great part of October the Mountain held its ground, and prevented the reform of the government. Billaud, gaining courage, declared that the lion might slumber, but would rend his enemies on awaking. By the lion, he meant himself and his friends of Thermidor. The governing Committees were reconstructed on the principle of frequent change; the law of Prairial, which gave the right of arbitrary arrest and unconditional gaol delivery, was abrogated; and commissaries were sent out to teach the Provinces the example of Paris.

Beyond these measures, the action of the State stood still. The fall of the men who reigned by terror produced, at first, no great political result. The process of change was set in motion by certain citizens of Nantes. Carrier had sent a batch of 132 of his prisoners to feed the Paris guillotine. Thirty-eight of them died of the hardships they endured. The remainder were still in prison in Thermidor; and they now pet.i.tioned to be put on their trial. The trial took place; and the evidence given was such as made a reaction inevitable. On September 14, the Nantais were acquitted. Then the necessary consequence followed. If the victims of Carrier were innocent, what was Carrier himself? His atrocities had been exposed, and, on November 12, the Convention resolved, by 498 to 2, that he should appear before the tribunal. For Carrier was a deputy, inviolable under common law. The trial was prolonged, for it was the trial not of a man, but of a system, of a whole cla.s.s of men still in the enjoyment of immunity.

Everything that could be brought to light gave strength to the Thermidorians against their enemies, and gave them the command of public opinion. On December 16 Carrier was guillotined, he had defended himself with spirit. The strength of his case was that his prosecutors were nearly as guilty as himself, and that they would all, successively, be struck down by the enemies of the Republic. He did his best to drag down the party with him. His a.s.sociates, acquitted by the revolutionary tribunal on the plea that their delinquencies were not political, were then sent before the ordinary courts. On the day on which the convention resolved that the butcher of Nantes must stand his trial, they closed the Jacobin Club, and now the reaction was setting in.

On December 1, after hearing a report by Carnot, the a.s.sembly offered an amnesty to the insurgents on the Loire, and on the 8th those Girondins were recalled who had been placed under arrest. This measure was decisive. With the willing aid of the Plain they were masters of the Convention, for they were seventy-three in number, and, unlike the Plain, they were not hampered and disabled by their own iniquities.

They were not accomplices of the Reign of Terror, for they had spent it in confinement. They had nothing to fear from a vigorous application of deserved penalties, and they had a terrible score to clear off. There were still sixteen deputies who had been proscribed with Buzot and the rest. They were now amnestied, and three months later, March 8, they were admitted to their seats. There they sat face to face with the men who had outlawed them, who had devoted them to death by an act the injustice of which was now proclaimed.

The cry for vengeance was becoming irresistible as the policy of the last year was reversed. In the course of that process La Vendee had its turn. On the 17th of February, at La Jaunaye, the French Republic came to terms with Charette. He was treated as an equal power. He obtained liberty for religion, compensation in money, relief from conscription, and a territorial guard of 2000 men, to be paid by the government, and commanded by himself. The same conditions were accepted soon after by Stofflet, and by the Breton leader, Cormatin.

In that hour of triumph Charette rode into Nantes with the white badge of Royalism displayed; and he was received with honour by the authorities, and acclaimed by the crowd. Immediately after the treaty of La Jaunaye which, granted the free practice of religion in the west, it was extended to the whole of France. The churches were given back some months later; there is one parish, in an eastern department, where it is said that the church was never closed, and the service never interrupted.

In March the Girondins were strong enough to turn upon their foes. The extent of the reaction was tested by the expulsion of Marat from his brief rest in the Pantheon, and the destruction of his busts all over the town, by the young men stimulated by Freron. In March, the great offenders who had been so hard to reach, Collot d'Herbois, Billaud, and Barere, were thrown into prison. Carnot defended them, on the ground that they were hardly worse than himself. The Convention resolved that they should be sent to Cayenne. Barere escaped on the way. Fouquier-Tinville came next, and his trial did as much harm to his party in the spring as that of Carrier in the preceding autumn. He pleaded that he was but an instrument in the hands of the Committee of Public Safety, and that as the three members of it, whom he had obeyed, were only transported, no more could be done to himself. The tribunal was not bound by the punishments decreed by the a.s.sembly, and in May Fouquier was executed.

The Montagnards resolved that they would not perish without a struggle. On April 1 they a.s.sailed the Convention, and were repulsed.

A number of the worst were thrown into prison. A more formidable attack was made on May 20. For hours the Convention was in the power of the mob, and a deputy was killed in attempting to protect the president. Members who belonged to the Mountain carried a series of decrees which gratified the populace. Late at night the a.s.sembly was rescued. The tumultuous votes were declared non-existent, and those who had moved them were sent before a military commission. They had not prompted the sedition, and it was urged that they acted as they did in order to appease it, and to save the lives of their opponents.

Romme, author of the republican Calendar, was the most remarkable of these men; and there is some doubt as to their guilt, and the legality of their sentence. One of them had been visited by his wife, and she left the means of suicide in his hands. As they left the court, each of them stabbed himself, and pa.s.sed the knife in silence to his neighbour. Before the guards were aware of anything, three were dead, and the others were dragged, covered with blood, to the place of execution. It was the 17th of June, and the Girondins were supreme.

Sixty-two deputies had been decreed in the course of the reaction, and the domination of the Jacobin mob, that is, government by equality instead of liberty, was at an end. The middle cla.s.s had recovered power, and it was very doubtful whether these new masters of France were willing again to risk the experiment of a republic. That experiment had proved a dreadful failure, and it was more easy and obvious to seek relief in the refuge of monarchy than on the quicksands of fluttering majorities.

The royalists were wreaking vengeance on their enemies in the south, by what was afterwards known as the White Terror; and they showed themselves in force at Paris. For a time, every measure helped them that was taken against the Montagnards, and people used publicly to say that 8 and 9 are 17, that is, that the revolution of 1789 would end by the accession of Lewis XVII. Between Girondin and royalist there was the blood of the king, and the regicides knew what they must expect from a restoration. The party remained irreconcilable, and opposed the idea. Their struggle now was not with the Mountain, which had been laid low, but with their old adversaries the reforming adherents of Monarchy. But there were some leading men who, from conviction or, which would be more significant, from policy began to compound with the exiled princes. Tallien and Cambaceres of the Mountain, Isnard and Lanjuinais of the Gironde, Boissy d'Anglas of the Plain, the successful general Pichegru, and the best negotiator in France Barthelemy, were all known, or suspected, to be making terms with the Count of Provence at Verona. It was commonly reported that the Committee was wavering, and that the Const.i.tution would turn towards monarchy. Breton and Vendean were ready to rise once more, Pitt was preparing vast armaments to help them; above all, there was a young pretender who had never made an enemy, whose early sufferings claimed sympathy from royalist and republican, and who shared no responsibility for _emigre_ and invader, whom, for the best of reasons, he had never seen.

Meantime the Republic had improved its position in the world. Its conquests included the Alps and the Rhine, Belgium, and Holland, and surpa.s.sed the successes of the Monarchy even under Lewis XIV. The confederacy of kings was broken up. Tuscany had been the first to treat. Prussia had followed, bringing with it the neutrality of Northern Germany. Then Holland came, and Spain had opened negotiations. But with Spain there was a difficulty. There could be no treaty with a government which detained in prison the head of the House of Bourbon. As soon as he was delivered up, Spain was ready to sign and to ratify. Thus in the spring of 1795, the thoughts of men came to be riveted on the room in the Temple where the king was slowly and surely dying. The gaoler had asked the Committee what their intention was. "Do you mean to banish him?" "No." "To kill him?" "No."

"Then," with an oath! "what is it you want?" "To get rid of him." On May 3, it was reported to the government that the young captive was ill. Next day, that he was very ill. But he was an obstacle to the Spanish treaty which was absolutely necessary, and twice the government made no sign. On the 5th, it was believed that he was in danger, and then a physician was sent to him. The choice was a good one, for the man was capable, and had attended the royal family. His opinion was that nothing could save the prisoner, except country air.

One day he added: "He is lost, but perhaps there are some who will not be sorry." Three days later Lewis XVII. was living, but the doctor was dead, and a legend grew up on his grave. It was said that he was poisoned because he had discovered the dread secret that the boy in the Temple was not the king. Even Louis Blanc believed that the king had been secretly released, and that a dying patient from the hospital had been subst.i.tuted for him. The belief has been kept alive to this day. The most popular living dramatist[3] has a play now running at Paris, in which the king is rescued in a washerwoman's linen basket, which draws crowds. The truth is that he died on June 8, 1795. The Republic had gained its purpose. Peace was signed with Spain; and the friends of monarchy on the Const.i.tutional Committee at once declared that they would not vote for it.

[3] Sardou.

At the very moment when the Const.i.tution was presented to the a.s.sembly by Boissy d'Anglas, a fleet of transports under convoy appeared off the western coast. Pitt had allowed La Vendee to go down in defeat and slaughter, but at last he made up his mind to help, and it was done on a magnificent scale. Two expeditions were fitted out, and furnished with material of war. Each of them carried three or four thousand _emigres_ armed and clad by England. One was commanded by d'Hervilly, whom we have already seen, for it was he who took the order to cease firing on August 10; the other by young Sombreuil, whose father was saved in September in the tragic way you have heard. At the head of them all was the Count de Puisaye, the most politic and influential of the _emigres_, a man who had been in touch with the Girondins in Normandy, who had obtained the ear of ministers at Whitehall, and who had been washed in so many waters that the genuine, exclusive, narrow-minded managers of Vendean legitimacy neither understood nor believed him. They brought a vast treasure in the shape of forged _a.s.signats_; and in confused memory of the services rendered by the t.i.tular of Agra, they brought a real bishop who had sanctioned the forgery.

The first division sailed from Cowes on June 10. On the 23rd Lord Bridport engaged the French fleet and drove it into port. Four days later the _emigres_ landed at Carnac, among the early monuments of the Celtic race. It was a low promontory, defended at the neck by a fort named after the Duke de Penthievre, and it could be swept, in places, by the guns of the fleet. Thousands of Chouans joined; but La Vendee was suspicious and stood aloof. They had expected the fleet to come to them, but it had gone to Brittany, and there was jealousy between the two provinces, between the partisans of Lewis XVIII. and those of his brother the Count d'Artois, between the priests and the politicians.

The clergy restrained Charette and Stofflet from uniting with Puisaye and his questionable allies, whom they accused of seeking the crown of France for the Duke of York; and they promised that, if they waited a little, the Count d'Artois would appear among them. They effectively ruined their prospects of success; but Pitt himself had contributed his share. Puisaye declined to bring English soldiers into his country, and his scruples were admitted. But, in order to swell his forces, the frugal minister armed between 1000 and 2000 French prisoners, who were republicans, but who declared themselves ready to join, and were as glad to escape from captivity as the government was to get rid of them. The royalist officers protested against this alloy, but their objections did not prevail, and when they came to their own country these men deserted. They pointed out a place where the republicans could pa.s.s under the fort at low water, and enter it on the undefended side. At night, in the midst of a furious tempest, the pa.s.sage was attempted. Hoche's troops waded through the stormy waters of Quiberon bay, and the tricolor was soon displayed upon the walls.

The royalists were driven to the extremity of the peninsula. Some, but not many, escaped in English boats, and it was thought that our fleet did not do all that it might have done to retrieve a disaster so injurious to the fame and the influence of England. Sombreuil defended himself until a republican officer called on him to capitulate. He consented, for there was no hope; but no terms were made, and it was in truth an unconditional surrender. Tallien, who was in the camp, hurried to Paris to intercede for the prisoners. Before going to the Convention, he went to his home. There his wife told him that she had just seen Lanjuinais, that Sieyes had brought back from Holland, where he had negotiated peace, proofs of Tallien's treasonable correspondence with the Bourbons, and that his life was in danger. He went at once to the Convention, and called for the summary punishment of the captured _emigres_.

Hoche was a magnanimous enemy, both by character and policy, and he had a deep respect for Sombreuil. He secretly offered to let him escape. The prisoner refused to be saved without his comrades; and they were shot down together near Auray, on a spot which is still known as the field of sacrifice. They were six or seven hundred. The firing party awakened the echoes of Vendee, for Charette instantly put his prisoners to death; and the Chouans afterwards contrived to cut down every man of the four battalions charged with the execution.

The battle of Quiberon took place on July 21, and when all that ensued was over on August 25, another expedition sailed from Portsmouth with the Count d'Artois on board. He landed on an island off La Vendee, and Charette, with fifteen thousand men, marched down to the coast to receive him, among the haggard veterans of the royal cause. There, on October 10, a message came from the Prince informing the hero that he was about to sail away, and to wait in safety for better times. Five days earlier the question had been fought out and decided at Paris, and a man had been revealed who was to raise deeper and more momentous issues than the obsolete controversy between monarchy and republic.

That controversy had been pursued in the const.i.tutional debates under the fatal influence of the events on the coast of Brittany. The royalists had displayed their colours, sailing under the British flag, and the British alliance had not availed them. And they had displayed a strange political imbecility, contrasting with their spirit and intelligence in war.

The const.i.tutional committee had been elected on April 23 under different auspices, when the Convention was making terms with Charette and Cormatin, as well as with the foreign Powers. Sieyes, of necessity, was the first man chosen; but he was on the governing committee, and he declined. So did Merlin and Cambaceres, for the same reason, and the three ablest men in the a.s.sembly did not serve.

Eleven moderate but not very eminent men were elected, and the draft was made chiefly by Daunou, and advocated by Thibaudeau. Daunou was an ancient oratorian, a studious and thoughtful if not a strong man, who became keeper of the archives, and lived down to 1840 with a somewhat usurped reputation for learning. Thibaudeau now began to exhibit great intelligence, and his writings are among our best authorities for these later years of the Republic and for the earlier years of the Empire. The general character of their scheme is that it is influenced more by experience than by theory, and strives to attach power to property. They reported on June 23; the debate began on July 4; and on the 20th Sieyes intervened. His advice turned mainly on the idea of a const.i.tutional jury, an elective body of about one hundred, to watch over the Const.i.tution, and to be guardians of the law against the makers of the law. It was to receive the plaints of minorities and of individuals against the legislature, and to preserve the spirit of the organic inst.i.tutions against the omnipotence of the national representatives. This memorable attempt to develop in Europe something a.n.a.logous to that property of the Supreme Court which was not yet matured in America, was rejected on August 5, almost unanimously.

The Const.i.tution was adopted by the Convention on August 17. It included a declaration of duties, founded on confusion, but defended on the ground that a declaration of rights alone destroys the stability of the State. And in matters touching religion it innovated on what had been done hitherto, for it separated Church and State, leaving all religions to their own resources. The division of powers was carried farther, for the legislative was divided into two, and the executive into five. Universal suffrage was restricted; the poorest were excluded; and after nine years there was to be an educational test. The law did not last so long. The electoral body, one in two hundred of the whole const.i.tuency, was to be limited to owners of property. The directors were to be chosen by the legislature.

Practically, there was much more regard for liberty, and less for equality, than in the former const.i.tutions. The change in public opinion was shown by the vote on two Houses which only one deputy opposed.

At the last moment, that there might be no danger from royalism in the departments, it was resolved that two-thirds of the legislature must be taken from the Convention. They thus prolonged their own power, and secured the permanence of the ideas which inspired their action. At the same time they showed their want of confidence in the republican feeling of the country, and both exasperated the royalists and gave them courage to act for themselves. On September 23 the country accepted the scheme, by a languid vote, but with a large majority.

The new Const.i.tution afforded securities for order and for liberty such as France had never enjoyed. The Revolution had begun with a Liberalism which was a pa.s.sion more than a philosophy, and the first a.s.sembly endeavoured to realise it by diminishing authority, weakening the executive, and decentralising power. In the hour of peril under the Girondins the policy failed, and the Jacobins governed on the principle that power, coming from the people, ought to be concentrated in the fewest possible hands and made absolutely irresistible. Equality became the subst.i.tute of liberty, and the danger arose that the most welcome form of equality would be the equal distribution of property. The Jacobin statesmen, the thinkers of the party, undertook to abolish poverty without falling into Socialism.

They had the Church property, which served as the basis of the public credit. They had the royal domain, the confiscated estates of emigrants and malignants, the common lands, the forest lands. And in time of war there was the pillage of opulent neighbours. By these operations the income of the peasantry was doubled, and it was deemed possible to relieve the ma.s.ses from taxation, until, by the immense transfer of property, there should be no poor in the Republic. These schemes were at an end, and the Const.i.tution of the year III. closes the revolutionary period.

The royalists and conservatives of the capital would have acquiesced in the defeat of their hopes but for the additional article which threatened to perpetuate power in the hands of existing deputies, which had been carried by a far smaller vote than that which was given in favour of the organic law itself. The alarm and the indignation were extreme, and the royalists, on counting their forces, saw that they had a good chance against the declining a.s.sembly. Nearly thirty thousand men were collected, and the command was given to an experienced officer. It had been proposed by some to confer it on the Count Colbert de Maulevrier, the former employer of Stofflet. This was refused on the ground that they were not absolutists or _emigres_, but Liberals, and partisans of const.i.tutional monarchy, and of no other.

The army of the Convention was scarcely six thousand, and a large body of Jacobin roughs were among them. The command was bestowed on Menou, a member of the minority of n.o.bles of 1789. But Menou was disgusted with his materials, and felt more sympathy with the enemy. He endeavoured to negotiate, and was deposed, and succeeded by Barras, the victor in the bloodless battle of Thermidor.

Bonaparte, out of employment, was lounging in Paris, and as he came out of the theatre he found himself among the men who were holding the parley. He hurried to headquarters, where the effect of his defining words upon the scared authorities was such that he was at once appointed second in command. Therefore, when morning dawned, on October 5, the Louvre and the Tuileries had become a fortress, and the gardens were a fortified camp. A young officer who became the most brilliant figure on the battlefield of Europe--Murat--brought up cannon from the country. The bridge, and the quay, and every street that opened on the palace, were so commanded by batteries that they could be swept by grape-shot. Officers had been sent out for provisions, for barrels of gunpowder, for all that belongs to hospital and ambulance. Lest retreat should be cut off, a strong detachment held the road to St. Cloud; and arms were liberally supplied to the Convention and the friendly quarter of St. Antoine. The insurgents, led by dexterous intriguers, but without a great soldier at their head, could not approach the river; and those who came down from the opulent centre of the city missed their opportunity. After a sharp conflict in the Rue St. Honore, they fled, pursued by nothing more murderous than blank cartridge; and Paris felt, for the first time, the grasp of the master. The man who defeated them, and by defeating them kept the throne vacant, was Bonaparte, through whose genius the Revolution was to subjugate the Continent.

APPENDIX

THE LITERATURE OF THE REVOLUTION

Before embarking on the stormy sea before us, we ought to be provided with chart and compa.s.s. Therefore I begin by speaking about the histories of the Revolution, so that you may at once have some idea what to choose and what to reject, that you may know where we stand, how we have come to penetrate so far and no farther, what branches there are that already bear ripe fruit and where it is still ripening on the tree of knowledge. I desire to rescue you from the writers of each particular school and each particular age, and from perpetual dependence on the ready-made and conventional narratives that satisfy the outer world.

With the growing experience of mankind, the larger curiosity and the increased resource, each generation adds to our insight. Lesser events can be understood by those who behold them, great events require time in proportion to their greatness.

Lamartine once said that the Revolution has mysteries but no enigmas.

It is humiliating to be obliged to confess that those words are no nearer truth now than when they were written. People have not yet ceased to dispute about the real origin and nature of the event. It was the deficit; it was the famine; it was the Austrian Committee; it was the Diamond Necklace, and the humiliating memories of the Seven Years' War; it was the pride of n.o.bles or the intolerance of priests; it was philosophy; it was freemasonry; it was Mr. Pitt; it was the incurable levity and violence of the national character; it was the issue of that struggle between cla.s.ses that const.i.tutes the unity of the history of France.

Amongst these interpretations we shall have to pick our way; but there are many questions of detail on which I shall be forced to tell you that I have no deciding evidence.

After the contemporary memoirs, the first historian who wrote with authority was Droz. He was at work for thirty years, having begun in 1811, when Paris was still full of floating information, and he knew much that otherwise did not come out until long after his death. He had consulted Lally Tollendal, and he was allowed to use the memoirs of Malouet, which were in ma.n.u.script, and which are unsurpa.s.sed for wisdom and good faith in the literature of the National a.s.sembly. Droz was a man of sense and experience, with a true if not a powerful mind; and his book, in point of soundness and accuracy, was all that a book could be in the days when it was written. It is a history of Lewis XVI. during the time when it was possible to bring the Revolution under control; and the author shows, with an absolute sureness of judgment, that the turning-point was the rejection of the first project of Const.i.tution, in September 1789. For him, the Revolution is contained in the first four months. He meant to write a political treatise on the natural history of revolutions, and the art of so managing just demands that unjust and dangerous demands shall acquire no force. It became a history of rejected opportunities, and an indictment of the wisdom of the minister and of the goodness of the king, by a const.i.tutional royalist of the English school. His service to history is that he shows how disorder and crime grew out of unreadiness, want of energy, want of clear thought and definite design. Droz admits that there is a flaw in the philosophy of his t.i.tle-page. The position lost in the summer of 1789 was never recovered. But during the year 1790 Mirabeau was at work on schemes to restore the monarchy, and it is not plain that they could never have succeeded. Therefore Droz added a volume on the parliamentary career of Mirabeau, and called it an appendix, so as to remain true to his original theory of the fatal limit. We know the great orator better than he could be known in 1842, and the value of Droz's excellent work is confined to the second volume. It will stand undiminished even if we reject the idea which inspired it, and prefer to think that the cause might have been won, even when it came to actual fighting, on the 10th of August. Droz's book belongs to the small number of writings before us which are superior to their fame, and it was followed by one that enjoyed to the utmost the opposite fate.

For our next event is an explosion. Lamartine, the poet, was one of those legitimists who believed that 1830 had killed monarchy, who considered the Orleans dynasty a sham, and set themselves at once to look ahead of it towards the inevitable Republic. Talleyrand warned him to hold himself ready for something more substantial than the exchange of a nephew for an uncle on a baseless throne. With the intuition of genius he saw sooner than most men, more accurately than any man, the signs of what was to come. In six years, he said, we shall be masters. He was mistaken only by a few weeks. He laid his plans that, when the time came, he should be the accepted leader. To chasten and idealise the Revolution, and to prepare a Republic that should not be a terror to mankind, but should submit easily to the fascination of a melodious and sympathetic eloquence, he wrote the _History of the Girondins_. The success was the most instantaneous and splendid ever obtained by a historical work. People could read nothing else; and Alexandre Dumas paid him the shrewd compliment of saying that he had lifted history to the level of romance. Lamartine gained his purpose. He contributed to inst.i.tute a Republic that was pacific and humane, responsive to the charm of phrase, and obedient to the master hand that wrote the glories of the Gironde. He always believed that, without his book, the Reign of Terror would have been renewed.

From early in the century to the other day there was a succession of authors in France who knew how to write as scarcely any but Mr. Ruskin or Mr. Swinburne have ever written in England. They doubled the opulence and the significance of language, and made prose more sonorous and more penetrating than anything but the highest poetry.

There were not more than half a dozen, beginning with Chateaubriand, and, I fear, ending with Saint Victor. Lamartine became the historian in this Corinthian school of style, and his purple patches outdo everything in effectiveness. But it would appear that in French rhetoric there are pitfalls which tamer pens avoid. Rousseau compared the Roman Senate to two hundred kings, because his sensitive ear did not allow him to say three hundred--_trois cents rois_. Chateaubriand, describing in a private letter his journey to the Alps, speaks of the moon along the mountain tops, and adds: "It is all right; I have looked up the Almanac, and find that there was a moon." Paul Louis Courier says that Plutarch would have made Pompey conquer at Pharsalus if it would have read better, and he thinks that he was quite right.

Courier's exacting taste would have found contentment in Lamartine. He knows very well that Marie Antoinette was fifteen when she married the Dauphin in 1770; yet he affirms that she was the child the Empress held up in her arms when the Magyar magnates swore to die for their queen, Maria Theresa. The scene occurred in 1741, fourteen years before she was born. Histories of literature give the catalogue of his amazing blunders.

In his declining years he reverted to this book, and wrote an apology, in which he answered his accusers, and confessed to some pa.s.sages which he exhorted them to tear out. There was good ground for recantation. Writing to dazzle the democracy by means of a bright halo, with himself in the midst of it, he was sometimes weak in exposing crimes that had a popular motive. His republicanism was of the sort that allows no safeguard for minorities, no rights to men but those which their country gives them. He had been the speaker who, when the Chamber wavered, rejected the Regency which was the legal government, and compelled the d.u.c.h.ess of Orleans to fly. When a report reached him that she had been seized, and he was asked to order her release, he refused, saying, "If the people ask for her, she must be given up to them."