Chapter II (2)

Nevertheless, it was to the dissensions and to the bad policy of the Allies more than to the energy of its own Government that France owed its safety. The object for which the Allies professed to be carrying on the war, the establishment of a pacific Government in France, was subordinated to schemes of aggrandisement, known as the acquisition of just indemnities. While Prussia, bent chiefly on preventing the Emperor from gaining Bavaria in exchange for Belgium, kept its own army inactive on the Rhine, [29] Austria, with the full approval of Pitt's Cabinet, claimed annexations in Northern France, as well as Alsace, and treated the conquered town of Condé as Austrian territory. [30] Henceforward all the operations of the northern army were directed to the acquisition of frontier territory, not to the pursuit and overthrow of the Republican forces. The war was openly converted from a war of defence into a war of spoliation. It was a change which mocked the disinterested professions with which the Allies had taken up arms; in its military results it was absolutely ruinous. In face of the immense levies which promised the French certain victory in a long war, the only hope for the Allies lay in a rapid march to Paris; they preferred the extreme of division and delay. No sooner had the advance of their united armies driven Custine from his stronghold at Famars, than the English commander led off his forces to besiege Dunkirk, while the Austrians, under Prince Coburg, proceeded to invest Cambray and Le Quesnoy. The line of the invaders thus extended from the Channel to Brunswick's posts at Landau, on the border of Alsace; the main armies were out of reach of one another, and their strength was diminished by the corps detached to keep up their communications. The French held the inner circle; and the advantage which this gave them was well understood by Carnot, who now inspired the measures of the Committee. In steadiness and precision the French recruits were no match for the trained armies of Germany; but the supply of them was inexhaustible, and Carnot knew that when they were thrown in sufficient masses upon the enemy their courage and enthusiasm would make amends for their inexperience. The successes of the Allies, unbroken from February to August, now began to alternate with defeats; the flood of invasion was first slowly and obstinately repelled, then swept away before a victorious advance.

[York driven from Dunkirk Sept. 8.]

It was on the British commander that the first blow was struck. The forces that could be detached from the French Northern army were not sufficient to drive York from before Dunkirk; but on the Moselle there were troops engaged in watching an enemy who was not likely to advance; and the Committee did not hesitate to leave this side of France open to the Prussians in order to deal a decisive stroke in the north. Before the movement was noticed by the enemy, Carnot had transported 30,000 men from Metz to the English Channel; and in the first week of September the German corps covering York was assailed by General Houchard with numbers double its own. The Germans were driven back upon Dunkirk; York only saved his own army from destruction by hastily raising the siege and abandoning his heavy artillery. The victory of the French, however, was ill followed up. Houchard was sent before the Revolutionary Tribunal, and he paid with his life for his mistakes. Custine had already perished, unjustly condemned for the loss of Mainz and Valenciennes.

[Commands given to men of the people.]

[Jourdan's victory at Wattignies, Oct 15.]

It was no unimportant change for France when the successors of Custine and Houchard received their commands from the Committee of Public Safety. The levelling principle of the Reign of Terror left its effect on France through its operation in the army, and through this almost alone. Its executions produced only horror and reaction; its confiscations were soon reversed; but the creation of a thoroughly democratic army, the work of the men who overthrew the Gironde, gave the most powerful and abiding impulse to social equality in France. The first generals of the Revolution had been officers of the old army, men, with a few exceptions, of noble birth, who, like Custine, had enrolled themselves on the popular side when most of their companions quitted the country. These generals were connected with the politicians of the Gironde, and were involved in its fall. The victory of the Mountain brought men of another type into command. Almost all the leaders appointed by the Committee of Public Safety were soldiers who had served in the ranks. In the levies of 1792 and 1793 the officers of the newly-formed battalions were chosen by the recruits themselves. Patriotism, energy of character, acquaintance with warfare, instantly brought men into prominence. Soldiers of the old army, like Massena, who had reached middle life with their knapsacks on their backs; lawyers, like the Breton Moreau; waiters at inns, like Murat, found themselves at the head of their battalions, and knew that Carnot was ever watching for genius and ability to call it to the highest commands. With a million of men under arms, there were many in whom great natural gifts supplied the want of professional training. It was also inevitable that at the outset command should sometimes fall into the hands of mere busy politicians; but the character of the generals steadily rose as the Committee gained the ascendancy over a knot of demagogues who held the War Ministry during the summer of 1793; and by the end of the year there was scarcely one officer in high command who had not proved himself worthy of his post. In the investigation into Houchard's conduct at Dunkirk, Carnot learnt that the victory had in fact been won by Jourdan, one of the generals of division. Jourdan had begun life as a common soldier fifteen years before. Discharged at the end of the American War, he had set up a draper's shop in Limoges, his native town. He joined the army a second time on the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, and the men of his battalion elected him captain. His ability was noticed; he was made successively general of brigade and general of division; and, upon the dismissal of Houchard, Carnot summoned him to the command of the Army of the North. The Austrians were now engaged in the investment of Maubeuge. On the 15th of October Jourdan attacked and defeated their covering army at Wattignies. His victory forced the Austrians to raise the siege, and brought the campaign to an end for the winter.

[Lyons, Toulon, La Vendée, conquered, Oct.-Dec. 1793.]

Thus successful on the northern frontier, the Republic carried on war against its internal enemies without pause and without mercy. Lyons surrendered in October; its citizens were slaughtered by hundreds in cold blood. Toulon had thrown itself into the hands of the English, and proclaimed King Louis XVII. It was besieged by land; but the operations produced no effect until Napoleon Bonaparte, captain of artillery, planned the capture of a ridge from which the cannon of the besiegers would command the English fleet in the harbour. Hood, the British admiral, now found his position hopeless. He took several thousands of the inhabitants on board his ships, and put out to sea, blowing up the French ships which he left in the harbour. Hood had received the fleet from the Royalists in trust for their King; its destruction gave England command of the Mediterranean and freed Naples from fear of attack; and Hood thought too little of the consequences which his act would bring down upon those of the inhabitants of Toulon whom he left behind. [31]

The horrors that followed the entry of the Republican army into the city did not prevent Pitt from including among the subjects of congratulation in the King's Speech of 1794 "the circumstances attending the evacuation of Toulon." It was perhaps fortunate for the Royalists in other parts of France that they failed to receive the assistance of England. Help was promised to the Vendeans, but it arrived too late. The appearance of Kleber at the head of the army which had defended Mainz had already turned the scale. Brave as they were, the Vendeans could not long resist trained armies. The war of pitched battles ended on the Loire with the year 1793. It was succeeded by a war of merciless and systematic destruction on the one side, and of ambush and surprises on the other.

[Prussia withdrawing from the war on account of Polish affairs.]

At home the foes of the Republic were sinking; its invaders were too much at discord with one another to threaten it any longer with serious danger. Prussia was in fact withdrawing from the war. It has been seen that when King Frederick William and the Emperor concerted the autumn campaign of 1792, the understanding was formed that Prussia, in return for its efforts against France, should be allowed to seize part of western Poland, if the Empress Catherine should give her consent. With this prospect before it, the thoughts of the Prussian Government had been from the first busied more with Poland, where it hoped to enter into possession, than with France, where it had only to fight Austria's battles. Negotiations on the Polish question had been actively carried on between Berlin and St. Petersburg during the first months of the war; and in January, 1793, the Empress Catherine had concluded a Treaty of Partition with King Frederick William, in virtue of which a Prussian army under General Möllendorf immediately entered western Poland. It was thought good policy to keep the terms of this treaty secret from Austria, as it granted a much larger portion of Poland to Prussia than Austria was willing that it should receive. Two months passed before the Austrian Sovereign learnt how he had been treated by his ally. He then denounced the treaty, and assumed so threatening an attitude that the Prussians thought it necessary to fortify the territory that they had seized. [32] The Ministers who had been outwitted by the Court of Berlin were dismissed; Baron Thugut, who from the first had prophesied nothing but evil of the Prussian alliance, was called to power. The history of this statesman, who for the next eight years directed the war-policy of Austria, and filled a part in Europe subordinate only to those of Pitt and Bonaparte, has until a recent date been drawn chiefly from the representations of his enemies. Humbly born, scornful and inaccessible, Thugut was detested by the Viennese aristocracy; the French emigrants hated and maligned him on account of his indifference to their cause; the public opinion of Austria held him responsible for unparalleled military disasters; Prussian generals and ambassadors, whose reports have formed the basis of Prussian histories, pictured him as a Satanic antagonist. It was long believed of Thugut that while ambassador at Constantinople he had sold the Austrian cypher to the French; that in 1794 he prevented his master's armies from winning victories because he had speculated in the French funds; and that in 1799 he occasioned the murder of the French envoys at Rastadt, in order to recover documents incriminating himself. Better sources of information are now opened, and a statesman, jealous, bitter, and over-reaching, but not without great qualities of character, stands in the place of the legendary criminal. It is indeed clear that Thugut's hatred of Prussia amounted almost to mania; it is also clear that his designs of aggression, formed in the school of the Emperor Joseph, were fatally in conflict with the defensive principles which Europe ought to have opposed to the aggressions of France. Evidence exists that during the eight years of Thugut's ministry he entertained, together or successively, projects for the annexation of French Flanders, Bavaria, Alsace, part of Poland, Venice and Dalmatia, Salzburg, the Papal Legations, the Republic of Genoa, Piedmont, and Bosnia; and to this list Tuscany and Savoy ought probably to be added. But the charges brought against Thugut of underhand dealings with France, and of the willing abandonment of German interests in return for compensation to Austria in Italy, rest on insufficient ground. Though, like every other politician at Vienna and Berlin, he viewed German affairs not as a matter of nationality but in subordination to the general interests of his own Court, Thugut appears to have been, of all the Continental statesmen of that time, the steadiest enemy of French aggression, and to have offered the longest resistance to a peace that was purchased by the cession of German soil. [33]

[Victories of Hoche and Pichegru at Wörth and Weissenburg, Dec. 23, 26.]

Nevertheless, from the moment when Thugut was called to power the alliance between Austria and Prussia was doomed. Others might perhaps have averted a rupture; Thugut made no attempt to do so. The siege of Mainz was the last serious operation of war which the Prussian army performed. The mission of an Austrian envoy, Lehrbach, to the Prussian camp in August, 1793, and his negotiations on the Polish and the Bavarian questions, only widened the breach between the two Courts. It was known that the Austrians were encouraging the Polish Diet to refuse the cession of the provinces occupied by Prussia; and the advisers of King Frederick William in consequence recommended him to quit the Rhine, and to place himself at the head of an army in Poland. At the headquarters of the Allies, between Mainz and the Alsatian frontier, all was dissension and intrigue. The impetuosity of the Austrian general, Wurmser, who advanced upon Alsace without consulting the King, was construed as a studied insult. On the 29th of September, after informing the allied Courts that Prussia would henceforth take only a subordinate part in the war, King Frederick William quitted the army, leaving orders with the Duke of Brunswick to fight no great battle. It was in vain that Wurmser stormed the lines of Weissenburg (Oct. 13), and victoriously pushed forward into Alsace. The hopes of a Royalist insurrection in Strasburg proved illusory. The German sympathies shown by a portion of the upper and middle classes of Alsace only brought down upon them a bloody vengeance at the hands of St. Just, commissioner of the Convention. The peasantry, partly from hatred of the feudal burdens of the old _régime_, partly from fear of St. Just and the guillotine, thronged to the French camp. In place of the beaten generals came Hoche and Pichegru: Hoche, lately a common soldier in the Guards, earning by a humble industry little sums for the purchase of books, now, at the age of twenty-six, a commander more than a match for the wrangling veterans of Germany; Pichegru, six years older, also a man sprung from the people, once a teacher in the military school of Brienne, afterwards a private of artillery in the American War. A series of harassing encounters took place during December. At length, with St. Just cheering on the Alsatian peasants in the hottest of the fire, these generals victoriously carried the Austrian positions at Wörth and at Weissenburg (Dec. 23, 26). The Austrian commander declared his army to be utterly ruined; and Brunswick, who had abstained from rendering his ally any real assistance, found himself a second time back upon the Rhine. [34]

[Pitt's bargain with Prussia, April, 1794.]

[Revolt of Kosciusko. April, 1794.]

[Möllendorf refuses to help in Flanders.]

The virtual retirement of Prussia from the Coalition was no secret to the French Government: amongst the Allies it was viewed in various lights. The Empress Catherine, who had counted on seeing her troublesome Prussian friend engaged with her detested French enemy, taunted the King of Prussia with the loss of his personal honour. Austria, conscious of the antagonism between Prussian and Austrian interests and of the hollow character of the Coalition, would concede nothing to keep Prussia in arms. Pitt alone was willing to make a sacrifice, in order to prevent the rupture of the alliance. The King of Prussia was ready to continue the struggle with France if his expenses were paid, but not otherwise. Accordingly, after Austria had refused to contribute the small sum which Pitt asked, a bargain was struck between Lord Malmesbury and the Prussian Minister Haugwitz, by which Great Britain undertook to furnish a subsidy, provided that 60,000 Prussian troops, under General Möllendorf, were placed at the disposal of the Maritime Powers. [35] It was Pitt's intention that the troops which he subsidised should be massed with Austrian and English forces for the defence of Belgium: the Prussian Ministry, availing themselves of an ambiguous expression in the treaty, insisted on keeping them inactive upon the Upper Rhine. Möllendorf wished to guard Mainz: other men of influence longed to abandon the alliance with Austria, and to employ the whole of Prussia's force in Poland. At the moment when Haugwitz was contracting to place Möllendorf's army at Pitt's disposal, Poland had risen in revolt under Kosciusko, and the Russian garrison which occupied Warsaw had been overpowered and cut to pieces. Catherine called upon the King of Prussia for assistance; but it was not so much a desire to rescue the Empress from a momentary danger that excited the Prussian Cabinet as the belief that her vengeance would now make an absolute end of what remained of the Polish kingdom. The prey was doomed; the wisdom of Prussia was to be the first to seize and drag it to the ground. So large a prospect offered itself to the Power that should crush Poland during the brief paralysis of the Russian arms, that, on the first news of the outbreak, the King's advisers urged him instantly to make peace with France and to throw his whole strength into the Polish struggle. Frederick William could not reconcile himself to making peace with the Jacobins; but he ordered an army to march upon Warsaw, and shortly afterwards placed himself at its head (May, 1794). When the King, who was the only politician in Prussia who took an interest in the French war, thus publicly acknowledged the higher importance of the Polish campaign, his generals upon the Rhine made it their only object to do nothing which it was possible to leave undone without actually forfeiting the British subsidy. Instead of fighting, Möllendorf spent his time in urging other people to make peace. It was in vain that Malmesbury argued that the very object of Pitt's bargain was to keep the French out of the Netherlands: Möllendorf had made up his mind that the army should not be committed to the orders of Pitt and the Austrians. He continued in the Palatinate, alleging that any movement of the Prussian army towards the north would give the French admittance to southern Germany. Pitt's hope of defending the Netherlands now rested on the energy and on the sincerity of the Austrian Cabinet, and on this alone.

[Battles on the Sambre, May-June, 1794.]

After breaking up from winter quarters in the spring of 1794, the Austrian and English allied forces had successfully laid siege to Landrecies, and defeated the enemy in its neighbourhood. [36] Their advance, however, was checked by a movement of the French Army of the North, now commanded by Pichegru, towards the Flemish coast. York and the English troops were exposed to the attack, and suffered a defeat at Turcoing. The decision of the campaign lay, however, not in the west of Flanders, but at the other end of the Allies' position, at Charleroi on the Sambre, where a French victory would either force the Austrians to fall back eastwards, leaving York to his fate, or sever their communications with Germany. This became evident to the French Government; and in May the Commissioners of the Convention forced the generals on the Sambre to fight a series of battles, in which the French repeatedly succeeded in crossing the Sambre, and were repeatedly driven back again. The fate of the Netherlands depended, however, on something beside victory or defeat on the Sambre. The Emperor had come with Baron Thugut to Belgium in the hope of imparting greater unity and energy to the allied forces, but his presence proved useless. Among the Austrian generals and diplomatists there were several who desired to withdraw from the contest in the Netherlands, and to follow the example of Prussia in Poland. The action of the army was paralysed by intrigues. "Every one," wrote Thugut, "does exactly as he pleases: there is absolute anarchy and disorder." [37] At the beginning of June the Emperor quitted the army; the combats on the Sambre were taken up by Jourdan and 50,000 fresh troops brought from the army of the Moselle; and on the 26th of June the French defeated Coburg at Fleurus, as he advanced to the relief of Charleroi, unconscious that Charleroi had surrendered on the day before. Even now the defence of Belgium was not hopeless; but after one council of war had declared in favour of fighting, a second determined on a retreat. It was in vain that the representatives of England appealed to the good faith and military honour of Austria. Namur and Louvain were abandoned; the French pressed onwards; and before the end of July the Austrian army had fallen back behind the Meuse. York, forsaken by the allies, retired northwards before the superior forces of Pichegru, who entered Antwerp and made himself master of the whole of the Netherlands up to the Dutch frontier. [38]

[England disappointed by the Allies.]

Such was the result of Great Britain's well-meant effort to assist the two great military Powers to defend Europe against the Revolution. To the aim of the English Minister, the defence of existing rights against democratic aggression, most of the public men alike of Austria and Prussia were now absolutely indifferent. They were willing to let the French seize and revolutionise any territory they pleased, provided that they themselves obtained their equivalent in Poland. England was in fact in the position of a man who sets out to attack a highway robber, and offers each of his arms to a pickpocket. The motives and conduct of these politicians were justly enough described by the English statesmen and generals who were brought into closest contact with them. In the councils of Prussia, Malmesbury declared that he could find no quality but "great and shabby art and cunning; ill-will, jealousy, and every sort of dirty passion." From the head quarters of Möllendorf he wrote to a member of Pitt's Cabinet: "Here I have to do with knavery and dotage.... If we listened only to our feelings, it would be difficult to keep any measure with Prussia. We must consider it an alliance with the Algerians, whom it is no disgrace to pay, or any impeachment of good sense to be cheated by." To the Austrian commander the Duke of York addressed himself with royal plainness: "Your Serene Highness, the British nation, whose public opinion is not to be despised, will consider that it has been bought and sold." [39]

[French reach the Rhine, Oct., 1794.]

[Pichegru conquers Holland, Dec., 1794.]

The sorry concert lasted for a few months longer. Coburg, the Austrian commander, was dismissed at the peremptory demand of Great Britain; his successor, Clerfayt, after losing a battle on the Ourthe, offered no further resistance to the advance of the Republican army, and the campaign ended in the capture of Cologne by the French, and the disappearance of the Austrians behind the Rhine. The Prussian subsidies granted by England resulted in some useless engagements between Möllendorf's corps in the Palatinate and a French army double its size, followed by the retreat of the Prussians into Mainz. It only remained for Great Britain to attempt to keep the French out of Holland. The defence of the Dutch, after everything south of the river Waal had been lost, Pitt determined to entrust to abler hands than those of the Duke of York; but the presence of one high-born blunderer more or less made little difference in a series of operations conceived in indifference and perversity. Clerfayt would not, or could not, obey the Emperor's orders and succour his ally. City after city in Holland welcomed the French. The very elements seemed to declare for the Republic. Pichegru's army marched in safety over the frozen rivers; and, when the conquest of the land was completed, his cavalry crowned the campaign by the capture of the Dutch fleet in the midst of the ice-bound waters of the Texel. The British regiments, cut off from home, made their way eastward through the snow towards the Hanoverian frontier, in a state of prostrate misery which is compared by an eye-witness of both events to that of the French on their retreat in 1813 after the battle of Leipzig. [40]

[Treaties of Basle with Prussia, April 5, and Spain, July 22, 1795.]

The first act of the struggle between France and the Monarchies of Europe was concluded. The result of three years of war was that Belgium, Nice, and Savoy had been added to the territory of the Republic, and that French armies were in possession of Holland, and the whole of Germany west of the Rhine. In Spain and in Piedmont the mountain-passes and some extent of country had been won. Even on the seas, in spite of the destruction of the fleet at Toulon, and of a heavy defeat by Lord Howe off Ushant on the 1st of June, 1794, the strength of France was still formidable; and the losses which she inflicted on the commercial marine of her enemies exceeded those which she herself sustained. England, which had captured most of the French West Indian Islands, was the only Power that had wrested anything from the Republic. The dream of suppressing the Revolution by force of arms had vanished away; and the States which had entered upon the contest in levity, in fanaticism, or at the bidding of more powerful allies, found it necessary to make peace upon such terms as they could obtain. Holland, in which a strong Republican party had always maintained connection with France, abolished the rule of its Stadtholder, and placed its resources at the disposal of its conquerors. Sardinia entered upon abortive negotiations. Spain, in return for peace, ceded to the Republic the Spanish half of St. Domingo (July 22, 1795). Prussia concluded a Treaty at Basle (April 5), which marked and perpetuated the division of Germany by providing that, although the Empire as a body was still at war with France, the benefit of Prussia's neutrality should extend to all German States north of a certain line. A secret article stipulated that, upon the conclusion of a general peace, if the Empire should cede to France the principalities west of the Rhine, Prussia should cede its own territory lying in that district, and receive compensation elsewhere. [41]

[Austria and England continue the war, 1795.]

Humiliating such a peace certainly was; yet it would probably have been the happiest issue for Europe had every Power been forced to accept its conditions. The territory gained by France was not much more than the very principle of the Balance of Power would have entitled it to demand, at a moment when Russia, victorious over the Polish rebellion, was proceeding to make the final partition of Poland among the three Eastern Monarchies; and, with all its faults, the France of 1795 would have offered to Europe the example of a great free State, such as the growth of the military spirit made impossible after the first of Napoleon's campaigns. But the dark future was withdrawn from the view of those British statesmen who most keenly felt the evils of the present; and England, resolutely set against the course of French aggression, still found in Austria an ally willing to continue the struggle. The financial help of Great Britain, the Russian offer of a large share in the spoils of Poland, stimulated the flagging energy of the Emperor's government. Orders were sent to Clerfayt to advance from the Rhine at whatever risk, in order to withdraw the troops of the Republic from the west of France, where England was about to land a body of Royalists. Clerfayt, however, disobeyed his instructions, and remained inactive till the autumn. He then defeated a French army pushing beyond the Rhine, and drove back the besiegers of Mainz; but the British expedition had already failed, and the time was passed when Clerfayt's successes might have produced a decisive result. [42]

[Landing at Quiberon, June 27, 1795.]

[France in 1795.]

A new Government was now entering upon power in France. The Reign of Terror had ended in July, 1794, with the life of Robespierre. The men by whom Robespierre was overthrown were Terrorists more cruel and less earnest than himself, who attacked him only in order to save their own lives, and without the least intention of restoring a constitutional Government to France. An overwhelming national reaction forced them, however, to represent themselves as the party of clemency. The reaction was indeed a simple outburst of human feeling rather than a change in political opinion. Among the victims of the Terror the great majority had been men of the lower or middle class, who, except in La Vendée and Brittany, were as little friendly to the old _régime_ as their executioners. Every class in France, with the exception of the starving city mobs, longed for security, and the quiet routine of life. After the disorders of the Republic a monarchical government naturally seemed to many the best guarantee of peace; but the monarchy so contemplated was the liberal monarchy of 1791, not the ancient Court, with its accessories of a landed Church and privileged noblesse. Religion was still a power in France; but the peasant, with all his superstition and all his desire for order, was perfectly free from any delusions about the good old times. He liked to see his children baptised; but he had no desire to see the priest's tithe-collector back in his barn: he shuddered at the summary marketing of Conventional Commissioners; but he had no wish to resume his labours on the fields of his late seigneur. To be a Monarchist in 1795, among the shopkeepers of Paris or the farmers of Normandy, meant no more than to wish for a political system capable of subsisting for twelve months together, and resting on some other basis than forced loans and compulsory sales of property. But among the men of the Convention, who had abolished monarchy and passed sentence of death upon the King, the restoration of the Crown seemed the bitterest condemnation of all that the Convention had done for France, and a sentence of outlawry against themselves. If the will of the nation was for the moment in favour of a restored monarchy, the Convention determined that its will must be overpowered by force or thwarted by constitutional forms. Threatened alternately by the Jacobin mob of Paris and by the Royalist middle class, the Government played off one enemy against the other, until an ill-timed effort of the emigrant noblesse gave to the Convention the prestige of a decisive victory over Royalists and foreigners combined. On the 27th of June, 1795, an English fleet landed the flower of the old nobility of France at the Bay of Quiberon in southern Brittany. It was only to give one last fatal proof of their incapacity that these unhappy men appeared once more on French soil. Within three weeks after their landing, in a region where for years together the peasantry, led by their landlords, baffled the best generals of the Republic, this invading army of the nobles, supported by the fleet, the arms, and the money of England, was brought to utter ruin by the discord of its own leaders. Before the nobles had settled who was to command and who was to obey, General Hoche surprised their fort, beat them back to the edge of the peninsula where they had landed, and captured all who were not killed fighting or rescued by English boats (July 20). The Commissioner Tallien, in order to purge himself from the just suspicion of Royalist intrigues, caused six hundred prisoners to be shot in cold blood. [43]

[Project of Constitution, 1795.]

At the moment when the emigrant army reached France, the Convention was engaged in discussing the political system which was to succeed its own rule. A week earlier, the Committee appointed to draw up a new constitution for France had presented its report. The main object of the new constitution in its original form was to secure France against a recurrence of those evils which it had suffered since 1792. The calamities of the last three years were ascribed to the sovereignty of a single Assembly. A vote of the Convention had established the Revolutionary Tribunal, proscribed the Girondins, and placed France at the mercy of eighty individuals selected by the Convention from itself. The legislators of 1795 desired a guarantee that no party, however determined, should thus destroy its enemies by a single law, and unite supreme legislative and executive power in its own hands. With the object of dividing authority, the executive was, in the new draft-constitution, made independent of the legislature, and the legislature itself was broken up into two chambers. A Directory of five members, chosen by the Assemblies, but not responsible except under actual impeachment, was to conduct the administration, without the right of proposing laws; a Chamber of five hundred was to submit laws to the approval of a Council of two hundred and fifty Ancients, or men of middle life; but neither of these bodies was to exercise any influence upon the actual government. One director and a third part of each of the legislative bodies were to retire every year. [44]

[Constitution of 1795. Insurrection of Vendémiaire, Oct. 4.]

The project thus outlined met with general approval, and gained even that of the Royalists, who believed that a popular election would place them in a majority in the two new Assemblies. Such an event was, however, in the eyes of the Convention, the one fatal possibility that must be averted at every cost. In the midst of the debates upon the draft-constitution there arrived the news of Hoche's victory at Quiberon. The Convention gained courage to add a clause providing that two-thirds of the new deputies should be appointed from among its own members, thus rendering a Royalist majority in the Chambers impossible. With this condition attached to it, the Constitution was laid before the country. The provinces accepted it; the Royalist middle class of Paris rose in insurrection, and marched against the Convention in the Tuileries. Their revolt was foreseen; the defence of the Convention was entrusted to General Bonaparte, who met the attack of the Parisians in a style unknown in the warfare of the capital. Bonaparte's command of trained artillery secured him victory; but the struggle of the 4th of October (13 Vendémiaire) was the severest that took place in Paris during the Revolution, and the loss of life in fighting greater than on the day that overthrew the Monarchy.

[The Directory, Oct., 1795.]

The new Government of France now entered into power. Members of the Convention formed two-thirds of the new legislative bodies; the one-third which the country was permitted to elect consisted chiefly of men of moderate or Royalist opinions. The five persons who were chosen Directors were all Conventionalists who had voted for the death of the King; Carnot, however, who had won the victories without sharing in the cruelties of the Reign of Terror, was the only member of the late Committee of Public Safety who was placed in power. In spite of the striking homage paid to the great act of regicide in the election of the five Directors, the establishment of the Directory was accepted by Europe as the close of revolutionary disorder. The return of constitutional rule in France was marked by a declaration on the part of the King of England of his willingness to treat for peace. A gentler spirit seemed to have arisen in the Republic. Although the laws against the emigrants and non-juring priests were still unrepealed, the exiles began to return unmolested to their homes. Life resumed something of its old aspect in the capital. The rich and the gay consoled themselves with costlier luxury for all the austerities of the Reign of Terror. The labouring classes, now harmless and disarmed, were sharply taught that they must be content with such improvement in their lot as the progress of society might bring.

[What was new to Europe in the Revolution.]

[Absolute governments of 18th century engaged in reforms.]

At the close of this first period of the Revolutionary War we may pause to make an estimate of the new influences which the French Revolution had brought into Europe, and of the effects which had thus far resulted from them. The opinion current among the French people themselves, that the Revolution gave birth to the modern life not of France only but of the Western Continent generally, is true of one great set of facts; it is untrue of another. There were conceptions in France in 1789 which made France a real contrast to most of the Continental monarchies; there were others which it shared in common with them. The ideas of social, legal, and ecclesiastical reform which were realised in 1789 were not peculiar to France; what was peculiar to France was the idea that these reforms were to be effected by the nation itself. In other countries reforms had been initiated by Governments, and forced upon an unwilling people. Innovation sprang from the Crown; its agents were the servants of the State. A distinct class of improvements, many of them identical with the changes made by the Revolution in France, attracted the attention in a greater or less degree of almost all the Western Courts of the eighteenth century. The creation of a simple and regular administrative system; the reform of the clergy; the emancipation of the Church from the jurisdiction of the Pope, and of all orders in the State from the jurisdiction of the Church; the amelioration of the lot of the peasant; the introduction of codes of law abolishing both the cruelties and the confusion of ancient practice,--all these were purposes more or less familiar to the absolute sovereigns of the eighteenth century, whom the French so summarily described as benighted tyrants. It was in Austria, Prussia, and Tuscany that the civilising energy of the Crown had been seen in its strongest form, but even the Governments of Naples and Spain had caught the spirit of change. The religious tolerance which Joseph gave to Austria, the rejection of Papal authority and the abolition of the punishment of death which Leopold effected in Tuscany, were bolder efforts of the same political rationalism which in Spain minimised the powers of the Inquisition and in Naples attempted to found a system of public education. In all this, however, there was no trace of the action of the people, or of any sense that a nation ought to raise itself above a state of tutelage. Men of ideas called upon Governments to impose better institutions upon the people, not upon the people to wrest them from the Governments.

[In France, the nation itself acted.]

In France alone a view of public affairs had grown up which impelled the nation to create its reforms for itself. If the substance of many of the French revolutionary changes coincided with the objects of Austrian or of Tuscan reform, there was nothing similar in their method. In other countries reform sprang from the command of an enlightened ruler; in France it started with the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and aimed at the creation of local authority to be exercised by the citizens themselves. The source of this difference lay partly in the influence of England and America upon French opinion, but much more in the existence within France of a numerous and energetic middle class, enriched by commerce, and keenly interested in all the speculation and literary activity of the age. This was a class that both understood the wrongs which the other classes inflicted or suffered, and felt itself capable of redressing them. For the flogged and over-driven peasant in Naples or Hungary no ally existed but the Crown. In most of those poor and backward States which made up monarchical Europe, the fraction of the inhabitants which neither enjoyed privilege nor stood in bondage to it was too small to think of forcing itself into power. The nobles sought to preserve their feudal rights: the Crown sought to reduce them; the nation, elsewhere than in France, did not intervene and lay hands upon power for itself, because the nation was nothing but the four mutually exclusive classes of the landlords who commanded, the peasants who served, the priests who idled, and the soldiers who fought. France differed from all the other monarchies of the Continent in possessing a public which blended all classes and was dominated by none; a public comprehending thousands of men who were familiar with the great interests of society, and who, whether noble or not noble, possessed the wealth and the intelligence that made them rightly desire a share in power.

[Movements against governments outside France.]

Liberty, the right of the nation to govern itself, seemed at the outset to be the great principle of the Revolution. The French people themselves believed the question at issue to be mainly between authority and popular right; the rest of Europe saw the Revolution under the same aspect. Hence, in those countries where the example of France produced political movements, the effect was in the first instance to excite agitation against the Government, whatever might be the form of the latter. In England the agitation was one of the middle class against the aristocratic parliamentary system; in Hungary, it was an agitation of the nobles against the Crown; on the Rhine it was an agitation of the commercial classes against ecclesiastical rule. But in every case in which the reforming movement was not supported by the presence of French armies, the terrors which succeeded the first sanguine hopes of the Revolution struck the leaders of these movements with revulsion and despair, and converted even the better Governments into engines of reaction. In France itself it was seen that the desire for liberty among an enlightened class could not suddenly transform the habits of a nation accustomed to accept everything from authority. Privilege was destroyed, equality was advanced; but instead of self-government the Revolution brought France the most absolute rule it had ever known. It was not that the Revolution had swept by, leaving things where they were before: it had in fact accomplished most of those great changes which lay the foundation of a sound social life: but the faculty of self-government, the first condition of any lasting political liberty, remained to be slowly won.

[Reaction.]

Outside France reaction set in without the benefit of previous change. At London, Vienna, Naples, and Madrid, Governments gave up all other objects in order to devote themselves to the suppression of Jacobinism. Pitt, whose noble aims had been the extinction of the slave-trade, the reform of Parliament, and the advance of national intercourse by free trade, surrendered himself to men whose thoughts centred upon informers, Gagging Acts, and constructive treasons, and who opposed all legislation upon the slave-trade because slaves had been freed by the Jacobins of the Convention. State trials and imprisonments became the order of the day; but the reaction in England at least stopped short of the scaffold. At Vienna and Naples fear was more cruel. The men who either were, or affected to be, in such fear of revolution that they discovered a Jacobinical allegory in Mozart's last opera, [45] did not spare life when the threads of anything like a real conspiracy were placed in their hands. At Vienna terror was employed to crush the constitutional opposition of Hungary to the Austrian Court. In Naples a long reign of cruelty and oppression began with the creation of a secret tribunal to investigate charges of conspiracy made by informers. In Mainz, the Archbishop occupied the last years of his government, after his restoration in 1793, with a series of brutal punishments and tyrannical precautions.

These were but instances of the effect which the first epoch of the Revolution produced upon the old European States. After a momentary stimulus to freedom it threw the nations themselves into reaction and apathy; it totally changed the spirit of the better governments, attaching to all liberal ideas the stigma of Revolution, and identifying the work of authority with resistance to every kind of reform. There were States in which this change, the first effect of the Revolution, was also its only one; States whose history, as in the case of England, is for a whole generation the history of political progress unnaturally checked and thrown out of its course. There were others, and these the more numerous, where the first stimulus and the first reaction were soon forgotten in new and penetrating changes produced by the successive victories of France. The nature of these changes, even more than the warfare which introduced them, gives its interest to the period on which we are about to enter.