Chapter IV: , VII (35)

Before the belligerents in the North had quieted themselves,
those of the West were again in arms. Spain had fallen under
the influence of two eager and restless ambitions, that of the
queen, Elizabeth of Parma, and an Italian minister, Cardinal
Alberoni; and the schemes into which these two drew the
Bourbon king, Philip V., soon ruptured the close relations
with France which Louis XIV. had ruined his kingdom to bring
about. To check them, a triple alliance was formed (1717)
between France, England and Holland,—enlarged the next year
to a quadruple alliance by the adhesion of Austria. At the
outset of the war, Spain made a conquest of Sardinia, and
almost accomplished the same in Sicily; but the English
crushed her navy and her rising commerce, while the French
crossed the Pyrenees with an army which the Spaniards could
not resist. A vast combination which Alberoni was weaving, and
which took in Charles XII., Peter the Great, the Stuart
pretender, the English Jacobites, and the opponents of the
regency in France, fell to pieces when the Swedish king fell.
Alberoni was driven from Spain and all his plans were given
up. The Spanish king withdrew from Sicily and surrendered
Sardinia. The Emperor and the Duke of Savoy exchanged islands,
as stated before, and the former (holding Naples already)
revived the old Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, while the latter
became King of Sardinia.

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War of the Polish Succession.

These disturbances ended, there were a few years of rest in
Europe, and then another war, of the character peculiar to the
eighteenth century, broke out. It had its cause in the Polish
election of a king to succeed Augustus II. As usual, the
neighboring nations formed a betting ring of onlookers, so to
speak, and "backed" their several candidates heavily. The
deposed and exiled king, Stanislaus Leczinski, who received
his crown from Charles XII. and lost it after Pultowa, was the
French candidate; for he had married his daughter to Louis XV.
Frederick Augustus of Saxony, son of the late King Augustus,
was the Russian and Austrian candidate. The contest resulted
in a double election (1733), and out of that came war. Spain
and Sardinia joined France, and the Emperor had no allies.
Hence the House of Austria suffered greatly in the war, losing
the Two Sicilies, which went to Spain, and were conferred on a
younger son of the king, creating a third Bourbon monarchy.
Part of the duchy of Milan was also yielded by Austria to the
King of Sardinia; and the Duke of Lorraine, husband of the
Emperor's daughter, Maria Theresa, gave up his duchy to
Stanislaus, who renounced therefor his claim on the crown of
Poland. The Duke of Lorraine received as compensation a right
of succession to the grand duchy of Tuscany, where the
Medicean House was about to expire. These were the principal
consequences, humiliating to Austria, of what is known as the
First Family Compact of the French and Spanish Bourbons.

War of Jenkins' Ear.

This alliance between the two courts gave encouragement to
hostile demonstrations in the Spanish colonies against English
traders, who were accused of extensive smuggling, and the
outcome was a petty war (1739), called "the War of Jenkins'
Ear."

War of the Austrian Succession.

Before these hostilities were ended, another "war of
succession," more serious than any before it, was wickedly
brought upon Europe. The Emperor, Charles VI., died in 1740,
leaving no son, but transmitting his hereditary dominions to
his eldest daughter, the celebrated Maria Theresa, married to
the ex-Duke of Lorraine. Years before his death he had sought
to provide against any possible disputing of the succession,
by an instrument known as the Pragmatic Sanction, to which he
obtained, first, the assent of the estates of all the
provinces and kingdoms of the Austrian realm, and, secondly,
the guaranty by solemn treaty of almost every European Power.
He died in the belief that he had established his daughter
securely, and left her to the enjoyment of a peaceful reign.
It was a pitiful illusion. He was scarcely in his grave before
half the guarantors of the Pragmatic Sanction were putting
forward claims to this part and that part of the Austrian
territories. The Elector of Bavaria, the Elector of Saxony (in
his wife's name) and the King of Spain, claimed the whole
succession; the two first mentioned on grounds of collateral
lineage, the latter (a Bourbon cuckoo in the Spanish-Hapsburg
nest) as being the heir of the Hapsburgs of Spain.

While these larger pretensions were still jostling each other
in the diplomatic stage, a minor claimant, who said little but
acted powerfully, sent his demands to the Court of Vienna with
an army following close at their heels. This was Frederick II.
of Prussia, presently known as Frederick the Great, who
resuscitated an obsolete claim on Silesia and took possession
of the province (1740-41) without waiting for debate. If,
anywhere, there had been virtuous hesitations before, his bold
stroke ended them. France could not see her old Austrian rival
dismembered without hastening to grasp a share. She contracted
with the Spanish king and the Elector of Bavaria to enforce
the latter's claims, and to take the Austrian Netherlands in
prospect for compensation, while Spain should find indemnity
in the Austro-Italian states. Frederick of Prussia, having
Silesia in hand, offered to join Maria Theresa in the defense
of her remaining dominions; but his proposals were refused,
and he entered the league against her. Saxony did the same.
England and Sardinia were alone in befriending Austria, and
England was only strong at sea. Maria Theresa found her
heartiest support in Hungary, where she made a personal appeal
to her subjects, and enlarged their constitutional privileges.
In 1742 the Elector of Bavaria was elected Emperor, as Charles
VII. In the same year, Maria Theresa, acting under pressure
from England, gave up the greater part of Silesia to
Frederick, by treaty, as a price paid, not for the help he had
offered at first, but barely for his neutrality. He abandoned
his allies and withdrew from the war. His retirement produced
an immense difference in the conditions of the contest. Saxony
made peace at the same time, and became an active ally on the
Austrian side. So rapidly did the latter then recover their
ground and the French slip back that Frederick, after two
years of neutrality, became alarmed, and found a pretext to
take up arms again. The scale was now tipped to the side on
which he threw himself, but not immediately; and when, in
1745, the Emperor, Charles VII., died suddenly, Maria Theresa
was able to secure the election of her husband, Francis of
Lorraine (or Tuscany), which founded the Hapsburg-Lorraine
dynasty on the imperial throne. This was in September. In the
following December Frederick was in Dresden, and Saxony—the
one effective ally left to the Austrians, since England had
withdrawn from the war in the previous August—was at his
feet. Maria Theresa, having the Spaniards and the French still
to fight in Italy and the Netherlands, could do nothing but make
terms with the terrible Prussian king. The treaty, signed at
Dresden on Christmas Day, 1745, repeated the cession of
Silesia to Frederick, with Glatz, and restored Saxony to the
humbled Elector.

Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle.

France and Spain, deserted the second time by their faithless
Prussian ally, continued the war until 1748, when the
influence of England and Holland brought about a treaty of
peace signed at Aix-la-Chapelle. France gained nothing from
the war, but had suffered a loss of prestige, distinctly.
Austria, besides giving up Silesia to Frederick of Prussia,
was required to surrender a bit of Lombardy to the King of
Sardinia, and to make over Parma, Piacenza and Guastalla to
Don Philip of Spain, for a hereditary principality. Under the
circumstances, the result to Maria Theresa was a notable
triumph, and she shared with her enemy, Frederick, the
fruitage of fame harvested in the war. But antagonism between
these two, and between the interests and ambitions which they
respectively represented—dynastic on one side and national
on the other—was henceforth settled and irreconcilable, and
could leave in Germany no durable peace.

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Colonial conflicts of France and England.

The peace was broken, not for Germany alone, but for Europe
and for almost the world at large, in six years after the
signing of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle. The rupture occurred
first very far from Europe—on the other sides of the globe,
in America and Hindostan, where England and France were eager
rivals in colonial conquest. In America, they had quarreled
since the Treaty of Utrecht over the boundaries of Acadia, or
Nova Scotia, which that treaty transferred to England.
Latterly, they had come to a more serious collision in the
interior of the continent. The English, rooting their
possession of the Atlantic seaboard by strong and stable
settlements, had been tardy explorers and slow in passing the
Alleganies to the region inland. On the other hand, the
French, nimble and enterprising in exploration, and in
military occupation, but superficial and artificial in
colonizing, had pushed their way by a long circuit from
Canada, through the great lakes to the head waters of the
Ohio, and were fortifying a line in the rear of the British
colonies, from the valley of the St. Lawrence to the valley of
the Mississippi, before the English were well aware of their
intent. Then the colonists, Virginians and Pennsylvanians,
took arms, and the career of George Washington was begun as
leader of an expedition in 1754 to drive the French from the
Ohio. It was not successful, and a strong force of regular
troops was sent over next year by the British government,
under Braddock, to repeat the attempt. A frightful
catastrophe, worse than failure, came of this second
undertaking, and open war between France and England, which
had not yet been declared, followed soon. This colonial
conflict of England and France fired the train, so to speak,
which caused a great explosion of suppressed hostilities in
Europe.

The House of Hanover in England.

If the English crown had not been worn by a German king,
having a German principality to defend, the French and English
might have fought out their quarrel on the ocean, and in the
wilderness of America, or on the plains of the Carnatic,
without disturbing their continental neighbors. But England
was now under a new, foreign-bred line of sovereigns,
descended from that daughter of James I., the princess
Elizabeth, who married the unfortunate Elector Palatine and
was queen of Bohemia for a brief winter term. After William of
Orange died, his wife, Queen Mary, having preceded him to the
grave, and no children having been born to them, Anne, the
sister of Mary, had been called to the throne. It was in her
reign that the brilliant victories of Marlborough were won,
and in her reign that the Union of Scotland with England,
under one parliament as well as one sovereign, was brought
about. On Anne's death (1714), her brother, the son of James
II., called "the Pretender," was still excluded from the
throne, because of his religion, and the next heir was sought
and summoned, in the person of the Elector George, of Hanover,
whose remote ancestress was Elizabeth Stuart. George I. had
reigned thirteen years, and his son, George II., had been
twenty-seven years on the throne, when these quarrels with
France arose. Throughout the two reigns, until 1742, the
English nation had been kept mostly at peace, by the potent
influence of a great minister, Sir Robert Walpole, and had
made a splendid advance in material prosperity and strength;
while the system of ministerial government, responsible to
Parliament and independent of the Crown, which has been in
later times the peculiar feature of the British constitution,
was taking shape. In 1742, Walpole fell from power, and the
era of peace for England was ended. But her new dynasty had
been firmly settled, and politically, industrially, and
commercially, the nation was so sound in its condition as to
be well prepared for the series of wars into which it plunged.
In the War of the Austrian Succession England had taken a limited
part, and with small results to herself. She was now about to
enter, under the lead of the high spirited and ambitious Pitt,
afterwards Earl of Chatham, the greatest career of conquest in
her history.

[Image: Europe 1768 A. D.]

The Seven Years War.

As before said, it was the anxiety of George II. for his
electorate of Hanover which caused an explosion of hostilities
in Europe to occur, as consequence of the remote fighting of
French and English colonists in America. For the strengthening
of Hanover against attacks from France, he sought an alliance
with Frederick of Prussia. This broke the long-standing
anti-French alliance of England with Austria, and Austria
joined fortunes with her ancient Bourbon enemy, in order to be
helped to the revenge which Maria Theresa now promised herself
the pleasure of executing upon the Prussian king. As the
combination finally shaped itself on the French side, it
embraced France, Austria, Russia, Sweden, Poland, Saxony, and
the Palatinate, and its inspiring purpose was to break Prussia
down and partition her territories, rather than to support
France against England. The agreements to this end were made
in secret; but Frederick obtained knowledge of them, and
learned that papers proving the conspiracy against him were in
the archives of the Saxony government, at Dresden. His action was
decided with that promptitude which so often disconcerted his
enemies. He did not wait to be attacked by the tremendous
league formed against him, nor waste time in efforts to
dissolve it, but defiantly struck the first blow. He poured
his army into Saxony (August, 1756), seized Dresden by
surprise, captured the documents he desired, and published
them to the world in vindication of his summary precipitation
of war. Then, blockading the Saxon army in Pirna, he pressed
rapidly into Bohemia, defeated the Austrians at Lowositz, and
returned as rapidly, to receive the surrender of the Saxons
and to enlist most of them in his own ranks. This was the
European opening of the Seven Years War, which raged, first
and last, in all quarters of the globe. In the second year of
the war, Frederick gained an important victory at Prague and
suffered a serious reverse at Kolin, which threw most of
Silesia into the hands of the Austrians. Close following that
defeat came crushing news from Hanover, where the incompetent
Duke of Cumberland, commanding for his father, the English
King George, had allowed the French to force him to an
agreement which disbanded his army, and left Prussia alone in
the terrific fight. Frederick's position seemed desperate; but
his energy retrieved it.
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He fought and defeated the French at Rossbach, near Lützen, on
the 5th of November, and the Austrians, at Leuthen, near
Breslau, exactly one month later. In the campaigns of 1758, he
encountered the Russians at Zorndorf, winning a bloody
triumph, and he sustained a defeat at Hochkirk, in battle with
the Austrians. But England had repudiated Cumberland's
convention and recalled him; English and Hanoverian forces
were again put into the field, under the capable command of
Prince Frederick of Brunswick, who turned the tide in that
quarter against the French, and the results of the year were
generally favorable to Frederick. In 1759, the Hanoverian
army, under Prince Ferdinand, improved the situation on that
side; but the prospects of the King of Prussia were clouded by
heavy disasters. Attempting to push a victory over the
Russians too far, at Kunersdorf, he was terribly beaten. He
lost Dresden, and a great part of Saxony. In the next year he
recovered all but Dresden, which he wantonly and inhumanly
bombarded. The war was now being carried on with great
difficulty by all the combatants. Prussia, France and Austria
were suffering almost equally from exhaustion; the misery
among their people was too great to be ignored; the armies of
each had dwindled. The opponents of Pitt's war policy in
England overcame him, in October, 1761, whereupon he resigned,
and the English subsidy to Frederick was withdrawn. But that
was soon made up to him by the withdrawal of Russia from the
war, at the beginning of 1762, when Peter of Holstein, who
admired Frederick, became Czar. Sweden made peace a little
later. The remainder of the worn and wearied fighters went on
striking at each other until near the end of the year.

Meantime, on the colonial and East Indian side of it, this
prodigious Seven Years War, as a great struggle for
world-empire between England and France, had been adding
conquest to conquest and triumph to triumph for the former. In
1759, Wolfe had taken Quebec and died on the Heights of
Abraham in the moment of victory. Another twelve months saw
the whole of Canada clear of Frenchmen in arms. In the East,
to use the language of Macaulay, "conquests equalling in
rapidity and far surpassing in magnitude those of Cortes and
Pizarro, had been achieved." "In the space of three years the
English had founded a mighty empire. The French had been
defeated in every part of India. Chandernagore had yielded to
Clive, Pondicherry to Coote. Throughout Bengal, Bahar, Orissa,
and the Carnatic, the authority of the East India Company was
more absolute than that of Acbar or Aurungzebe had ever been."

Treaties of Paris and Hubertsburg.

In February, 1763, two treaties of peace were concluded, one
at Paris, on the 10th, between England, France and Spain (the
latter Power having joined France in the war as late as
January, 1762); the other at Hubertsburg, on the 15th, between
Prussia and Austria. France gave up to England all her
possessions in North America, except Louisiana (which passed
to Spain,), and yielded Minorca, but recovered the
Philippines. She surrendered, moreover, considerable interests
in the West Indies and in Africa. The colonial aspirations of
the French were cast down by a blow that was lasting in its
effect. As between Prussia and Austria, the triumphs of the
peace and the glories of the war were won entirely by the
former. Frederick came out of it, "Frederick the Great," the
most famous man of his century, as warrior and as statesman,
both. He had defended his little kingdom for seven years
against three great Powers, and yielded not one acre of its
territory. He had raised Prussia to the place in Germany from
which her subsequent advance became easy and almost
inevitable. But the great fame he earned is spotted with many
falsities and much cynical indifference to the commonest
ethics of civilization. His greatness is of that character
which requires to be looked at from selected standpoints.

Russia.

Another character, somewhat resembling that of Frederick, was
now drawing attention on the eastern side of Europe. Since the
death of Peter the Great, the interval in Russian history had
been covered by six reigns, with a seventh just opening, and
the four sovereigns who really exercised power were women.
Peter's widow, Catherine I., had succeeded him (1725) for two
years. His son, Alexis, he had put to death; but Alexis left a
son, Peter, to whom Catherine bequeathed the crown. Peter II.
died after a brief reign, in 1730; and the nearest heirs were
two daughters of Peter the Great, Anne and Elizabeth. But they
were set aside in favor of another Anne—Anne of
Courland—daughter of Peter the Great's brother. Anne's reign
of ten years was under the influence of German favorites and
ministers, and nearly half of it was occupied with a Turkish
War, in cooperation with Austria. For Austria the war had most
humiliating results, costing her Belgrade, all of Servia, part
of Bosnia and part of Wallachia. Russia won back Asov, with
fortifications forbidden, and that was all. Anne willed her
crown to an infant nephew, who appears in the Russian annals
as Ivan VI.; but two regencies were overthrown by palace
revolutions within little more than a year, and the second one
carried to the throne that Princess Elizabeth, younger
daughter of Peter the Great, who had been put aside eleven
years before. Elizabeth, a woman openly licentious and
intemperate, reigned for twenty-one years, during the whole
important period of the War of the Austrian Succession, and
almost to the end of the Seven Years War. She was bitterly
hostile to Frederick the Great, whose sharp tongue had
offended her, and she joined Maria Theresa with eagerness in
the great effort of revenge, which failed. In the early part
of her reign, war with Sweden had been more successful and had
added South Finland to the Russian territories. It is claimed
for her domestic government that the general prosperity of the
country was advanced.

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Catherine II.

On the death of Elizabeth, near the end of the year 1761, the
crown passed to her nephew, Peter of Holstein, son of her
eldest sister, Anne, who had married the Duke of Holstein.
This prince had been the recognized heir, living at the
Russian court, during the whole of Elizabeth's reign. He was
an ignorant boor, and he had become a besotted drunkard. Since
1744 he had been married to a young German princess, of the
Anhalt Zerbst family, who took the baptismal name of Catherine
when she entered the Greek Church. Catherine possessed a superior
intellect and a strong character; but the vile court into
which she came as a young girl, bound to a disgusting husband,
had debauched her in morals and lowered her to its own
vileness. She gained so great an ascendancy that the court was
subservient to her, from the time that her incapable husband,
Peter III., succeeded to the throne. He reigned by sufferance
for a year and a half, and then (July, 1762) he was easily
deposed and put to death. In the deposition, Catherine was the
leading actor. Of the subsequent murder, some historians are
disposed to acquit her. She did not scruple, at least, to
accept the benefit of both deeds, which raised her, alone, to
the throne of the Czars.

Partition of Poland.

Peter III., in his short reign, had made one important change
in Russian policy, by withdrawing from the league against
Frederick of Prussia, whom he greatly admired. Catherine found
reasons, quite aside from those of personal admiration, for
cultivating the friendship of the King of Prussia, and a close
understanding with that astute monarch was one of the earliest
objects of her endeavor. She had determined to put an end to
the independence of Poland. As she first entertained the
design, there was probably no thought of the partitioning
afterwards contrived. But her purpose was to keep the Polish
kingdom in disorder and weakness, and to make Russian
influence supreme in it, with views, no doubt, that looked
ultimately to something more. On the death of the Saxon king
of Poland, Augustus III., in 1763, Catherine put forward a
native candidate for the vacant throne, in the person of
Stanislaus Poniatowsky, a Russianized Pole and a former lover
of her own. The King of Prussia supported her candidate, and
Poniatowsky was duly elected, with 10,000 Russian troops in
Warsaw to see that it was properly done. The Poles were
submissive to the invasion of their political independence;
but when Catherine, who sought to create a Russian party in
Poland by protecting the members of the Greek Church and the
Protestants, against the intolerance of the Polish Catholics,
forced a concession of civil equality to the former (1768),
there was a wide-spread Catholic revolt. In the fierce war
which followed, a band of Poles was pursued across the Turkish
border, and a Turkish town was burned by the Russian pursuers.
The Sultan, who professed sympathy with the Poles, then
declared war against Russia. The Russo-Turkish war, in turn,
excited Austria, which feared Russian conquests from the
Turks, and another wide disturbance of the peace of Europe
seemed threatening. In the midst of the excitement there came
a whispered suggestion, to the ear of the courts of Vienna and
St. Petersburg, that they severally satisfy their territorial
cravings and mutually assuage each other's jealousy, at the
expense of the crumbling kingdom of Poland. The whisper may
have come from Frederick II. of Prussia, or it may not. There
are two opinions on the point. From whatever source it came,
it found favorable consideration at Vienna and St. Petersburg,
and between February and August, 1772, the details of the
partition were worked out.

Poland was not yet extinguished. The kingdom was only shorn of
some 160,000 square miles of territory, more than half of
which went to Russia, a third to Austria, and the remainder,
less than 10,000 square miles, to Prussia. This last mentioned
annexation was the old district of West Prussia which the
Polish king, Casimir IV., had wrested from the Teutonic
Knights in 1466, before Brandenburg had aught to do with
Prussian lands or name. After three centuries, Frederick
reclaimed it.

The diminished kingdom of Poland showed more signs of a true
national life, of an earnest national feeling, of a sobered
and rational patriotism, than had appeared in its former
history. The fatal powers monopolized by the nobles, the
deadly "liberum veto," the corrupting elective kingship, were
looked at in their true light, and in May, 1791, a new
constitution was adopted which reformed those evils. But a few
nobles opposed the reformation and appealed to Russia,
supplying a pretext to Catherine on which she filled Poland
with her troops. It was in vain that the patriot Kosciusko led
the best of his countrymen in a brave struggle with the
invader. They were overborne (1793-1794); the unhappy nation
was put in fetters, while Catherine and a new King of Prussia,
Frederick William II., arranged the terms of a second
partition. This gave to Prussia an additional thousand square
miles, including the important towns of Danzig and Thorn,
while Russia took four times as much. A year later, the small
remainder of Polish territory was dismembered and divided
between Russia, Prussia and Austria, and thus Poland
disappeared from the map of Europe as a state.

Russia as left by Catherine II.

Meantime, in her conflicts with the Turks, Catherine was
extending her vast empire to the Dneister and the Caucasus,
and opening a passage for her fleets from the Black Sea to the
Mediterranean. By treaty in 1774 she placed the Tartars of the
Crimea in independence of the Turks, and so isolated them for
easy conquest. In 1783 the conquest was made complete. By the
same treaty she secured a right of remonstrance on behalf of
the Christian subjects of the Sultan, in the Danubian
principalities and in the Greek Church at Constantinople,
which opened many pretexts for future interference and for war
at Russian convenience. The aggressions of the strong-willed
and powerful Czarina, and their dazzling success, filled her
subjects with pride, and effaced all remembrance of her
foreign origin and her want of right to the seat which she
filled. She was ambitious to improve the empire, as well as to
expand it; for her liberal mind took in the large ideas of that
speculative age and was much moved by them. She attempted many
reforms; but most things that she tried to do for the
bettering of civilization and the lifting of the people were
done imperiously, and spoiled by the autocratic method of the
doing. In her later years, her inclination towards liberal
ideas was checked, and the French Revolution put an end to it.

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State of France in the Eighteenth Century.

In tracing the destruction of Poland and the aggrandizement of
Russia, we have passed the date of that great catastrophe in
France which ended the old modern order of things, and
introduced a new one, not for France only, but for Europe at
large. It was a catastrophe toward which the abused French
people had been slowly slipping for generations, pushed
unrelentingly to it by blind rulers and a besotted
aristocracy. By nature a people ardent and lively in temper,
hopeful and brave in spirit, full of intelligence, they had
been held down in dumb repression: silenced in voice, even for
the uttering of their complaints; the national meeting of
their representative States suppressed for nearly two
centuries; taxes wrung from them on no measure save the will
of a wanton-minded and ignorant king; their beliefs
prescribed, their laws ordained, their courts of justice
commanded, their industries directed, their trade hedged
round, their rights and permissions in all particulars meted
out to them by the same blundering and irresponsible
autocracy. How long would they bear it? and would their
deliverance come by the easing of their yoke, or by the
breaking of it?—were the only questions.

Their state was probably at its worst in the later years of
Louis XIV. That seems to be the conclusion which the deepest
study has now reached, and the picture formerly drawn by
historians, of a society continually sinking into lower
miseries, is mostly put aside. The worst state, seemingly, was
passed, or nearly so, when Louis XIV. died. It began to mend
under his despicable successor, Louis XV. (1715-1774),—
perhaps even during the regency of the profligate Orleans
(1715-1723). Why it mended, no historian has clearly
explained. The cause was not in better government; for the
government grew worse. It did not come from any rise in
character of the privileged classes; for the privileged
classes abused their privileges with increasing selfishness.
But general influences were at work in the world at large,
stimulating activities of all kinds,—industry, trade,
speculation, combination, invention, experiment, science,
philosophy,—and whatever improvement occurred in the material
condition and social state of the common people of France may
find its explanation in these. There was an augmentation of
life in the air of the eighteenth century, and France took
some invigoration from it, despite the many maladies in its
social system and the oppressions of government under which it
bent.

But the difference between the France of Louis XIV. and the
France of Louis XVI. was more in the people than in their
state. If their misery was a little less, their patience was
less, and by not a little. The stimulations of the age, which
may have given more effectiveness to labor and more energy to
trade, had likewise set thinking astir, on the same practical
lines. Men whose minds in former centuries would have labored
on riddles dialectical, metaphysical and theological, were now
bent on the pressing problems of daily life. The mysteries of
economic science began to challenge them. Every aspect of
surrounding society thrust questions upon them, concerning its
origin, its history, its inequalities, its laws and their
principles, its government and the source of authority in it.
The so-called "philosophers" of the age, Rousseau, Voltaire
and the encyclopædists—were not the only questioners of the
social world, nor did the questioning all come from what they
taught. It was the intellectual epidemic of the time, carried
into all countries, penetrating all classes, and nowhere with
more diffusion than in France.

After the successful revolt of the English colonies in
America, and the conspicuous blazoning of the doctrines of
political equality and popular self-government in their
declaration of independence and their republican constitution,
the ferment of social free-thinking in France was naturally
increased. The French had helped the colonists, fought side by
side with them, watched their struggle with intense interest,
and all the issues involved in the American revolution were
discussed among them, with partiality to the republican side.
Franklin, most republican representative of the young
republic, came among them and captivated every class. He
recommended to them the ideas for which he stood, perhaps more
than we suspect.

Louis XVI. and his reign.

And thus, by many influences, the French people of all classes
except the privileged nobility, and even in that class to some
small extent, were made increasingly impatient of their
misgovernment and of the wrongs and miseries going with it.
Louis XVI., who came to the throne in 1774, was the best in
character of the Bourbon kings. He had no noxious vices and no
baleful ambitions. If he had found right conditions prevailing
in his kingdom he would have made the best of them. But he had
no capacity for reforming the evils that he inherited, and no
strength of will to sustain those who had. He accepted an
earnest reforming minister with more than willingness, and
approved the wise measures of economy, of equitable taxation,
and of emancipation for manufactures and trade, which Turgot
proposed. But when protected interests, and the privileged
order which fattened on existing abuses, raised a storm of
opposition, he weakly gave way to it, and dismissed the man
(1776) who might possibly have made the inevitable revolution
a peaceful one. Another minister, the Genevan banker, Necker,
who aimed at less reform, but demanded economy, suffered the
same overthrow (1781). The waste, the profligate expenditure,
the jobbery, the leeching of the treasury by high-born
pensioners and sinecure office-holders, went on, scarcely
checked, until the beginnings of actual bankruptcy had
appeared.

The States-General.

Then a cry, not much heeded before, for the convocation of the
States-general of the kingdom—the ancient great legislature
of France, extinct since the year 1614—became loud and
general. The king yielded (1788). The States-general was
called to meet on the 1st of May, 1789, and the royal summons
decreed that the deputies chosen to it from the third
estate—the common people—should be equal in number to the
deputies of the nobility and the clergy together. So the dumb
lips of France as a nation were opened, its tongue unloosed,
its common public opinion, and public feeling made articulate,
for the first time in one hundred and seventy-five years. And
the word that it spoke was the mandate of Revolution.

The States-general assembled at Versailles on the 5th of May,
and a conflict between the third estate and the nobles
occurred at once on the question between three assemblies and
one. Should the three orders deliberate and vote together as
one body, or sit and act separately and apart. The commons
demanded the single assembly. The nobles and most of the
clergy refused the union, in which their votes would be
overpowered.

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The National Assembly.

After some weeks of dead-lock on this fundamental issue, the
third estate brought it to a summary decision, by boldly
asserting its own supremacy, as representative of the mass of
the nation, and organizing itself in the character of the
"National Assembly" of France. Under that name and character
it was joined by a considerable part of the humbler clergy,
and by some of the nobles,—additional to a few, like
Mirabeau, who sat from the beginning with the third estate, as
elected representatives of the people. The king made a weak
attempt to annul this assumption of legislative sufficiency on
the part of the third estate, and only hurried the exposure of
his own powerlessness. Persuaded by his worst advisers to
attempt a stronger demonstration of the royal authority, he
filled Paris with troops, and inflamed the excitement, which
had risen already to a passionate heat.

Outbreak of the Revolution.

Necker, who had been recalled to the ministry when the meeting
of the States-general was decided upon, now received his
second dismissal (July 11), and the news of it acted on Paris
like a signal of insurrection. The city next day was in
tumult. On the 14th the Bastile was attacked and taken. The
king's government vanished utterly. His troops fraternized
with the riotous people. Citizens of Paris organized
themselves as a National Guard, on which every hope of order
depended, and Lafayette took command. The frightened nobility
began flight, first from Paris, and then from the provinces,
as mob violence spread over the kingdom from the capital. In
October there were rumors that the king had planned to follow
the "émigrés" and take refuge in Metz. Then occurred the
famous rising of the women; their procession to Versailles;
the crowd of men which followed, accompanied but not
controlled by Lafayette and his National Guards; the
conveyance of the king and royal family to Paris, where they
remained during the subsequent year, practically in captivity,
and at the mercy of the Parisian mob.

Meanwhile, the National Assembly, negligent of the dangers of
the moment, while actual anarchy prevailed, busied itself with
debates on constitutional theory, with enactments for the
abolition of titles and privileges, and with the creating of
an inconvertible paper money, based on confiscated church
lands, to supply the needs of the national treasury. Meantime,
too, the members of the Assembly and their supporters outside
of it were breaking into parties and factions, divided by
their different purposes, principles and aims, and forming
clubs,—centers of agitation and discussion,—clubs of the
Jacobins, the Cordeliers, the Feuillants and the like,—where
fear, distrust and jealousy were soon engendering ferocious
conflicts among the revolutionists themselves. And outside of
France, on the border where the fugitive nobles lurked,
intrigue was always active, striving to enlist foreign help
for King Louis against his subjects.

The First Constitution.

In April, 1791, Mirabeau, whose influence had been a powerful
restraint upon the Revolution, died. In June, the king made an
attempt to escape from his durance in Paris, but was captured
at Varennes and brought back. Angry demands for his deposition
were now made, and a tumultuous republican demonstration
occurred, on the Champ de Mars, which Lafayette and the mayor
of Paris, Bailly, dispersed, with bloodshed. But republicanism
had not yet got its footing. In the constitution, which the
Assembly completed at this time, the throne was left
undisturbed. The king accepted the instrument, and a
constitutional monarchy appeared to have quietly taken the
place of the absolute monarchy of the past.

The Girondists.

It was an appearance not long delusive. The Constituent
National Assembly being dissolved, gave way to a Legislative
Assembly (October, 1791) elected under the new constitution.
In the Legislative Assembly the republicans appeared with a
strength which soon gave them control of it. They were divided
into various groups; but the most eloquent and energetic of
these, coming from Bordeaux and the department of the Gironde,
fixed the name of Girondists upon the party to which they
belonged. The king, as a constitutional sovereign, was forced
presently to choose ministers from the ranks of the
Girondists, and they controlled the government for several
months in the spring of 1792. The earliest use they made of
their control was to hurry the country into war with the
German powers, which were accused of giving encouragement to
the hostile plans of the émigrés on the border. It is now a
well-determined fact that the Emperor Leopold was strongly
opposed to war with France, and used all his influence for the
preservation of peace. It was revolutionary France which
opened the conflict, and it was the Girondists who led and
shaped the policy of war.

Overthrow of the Monarchy.

In the first encounters of the war, the undisciplined French
troops were beaten, and Paris was in panic. Measures were
adopted which the king refused to sanction, and he dismissed
his Girondist ministers. Lafayette, who was commanding one
division of the army in the field, approved the king's course,
and wrote an unwise letter to the Assembly, intimating that
the army would not submit to a violation of the constitution.
The republicans were enraged. Everything seemed proof to them
of a treasonable connivance with the enemies of France, to
bring about the subjugation of the country, and a forcible
restoration of the old regime, absolutism, aristocratic
privilege and all. On the 20th of June there was another
rising of the Paris mob, unchecked by those who could, as yet,
have controlled it. The rioters broke into the Tuileries and
humiliated the king and queen with insults, but did no
violence. Lafayette came to Paris and attempted to reorganize
his old National Guard, for the defense of the constitution
and the preservation of order, but failed. The extremists then
resolved to throw down the toppling monarchy at once, by a
sudden blow. In the early morning of August 10, they expelled
the Council-General of the Municipality of Paris from the
Hotel de Ville, and placed the government of the city under
the control of a provisional Commune, with Danton at its head.
{1091}
At the same hour, the mob which these conspirators held in
readiness, and which they directed, attacked the Tuileries and
massacred the Swiss guard, while the king and the royal family
escaped for refuge to the Chamber of the Legislative Assembly,
near at hand. There, in the king's presence, on a formal
demand made by the new self-constituted Municipality or
Commune of Paris, the Assembly declared his suspension from
executive functions, and invited the people to elect without
delay a National Convention for the revising of the
Constitution. Commissioners, hastily sent out to the provinces
and the armies in the field, were received everywhere with
submission to the change of government, except by Lafayette
and his army, in and around Sedan. The Marquis placed them
under arrest and took from his soldiers a new oath of fidelity
to the constitution and the king. But he found himself
unsupported, and, yielding to the sweep of events, he obeyed a
dismissal by the new government from his command, and left
France, to wait in exile for a time when he might serve his
Country with a conscience more assured.

The Paris Commune.

Pending the meeting of the Convention, the Paris Commune,
increased in number to two hundred and eighty-eight, and
dominated by Danton and Robespierre, became the governing
power in France. The Legislative Assembly was subservient to
it; the kingless Ministry, which had Danton in association
with the restored Girondists, was no less so. It was the
fierce vigor of the Commune which caused the king and the
royal family to be imprisoned in the Temple; which instituted
a special tribunal for the summary trial of political
prisoners; which searched Paris for "suspects," on the night
of August 29-30, gathered three thousand men and women into
the prisons and convents of the city, planned and ordered the
"September Massacres" of the following week, and thus thinned
the whole number of these "suspects" by a half.

Fall of the Girondists.

On the 22d of September the National Convention assembled. The
Jacobins who controlled the Commune were found to have carried
Paris overwhelmingly and all France largely with them, in the
election of representatives. A furious, fanatical democracy, a
bloodthirsty anarchism, was in the ascendant. The republican
Girondists were now the conservative party in the Convention.
They struggled to hold their ground, and very soon they were
struggling for their lives. The Jacobin fury was tolerant of
no opposition. What stood in its path, with no deadlier weapon
than an argument or an appeal, must be, not merely overcome,
but destroyed. The Girondists would have saved the king from
the guillotine, but they dared not adopt his defense, and
their own fate was sealed when they gave votes, under fear,
which sent him in January to his death. Five months longer
they contended irresolutely, as a failing faction, with their
terrible adversaries, and then, in June, 1793, they were
proscribed and their arrest decreed. Some escaped and raised
futile insurrections in the provinces. Some stayed and faced
the death which awaited them in the fast approaching "reign of
terror."

"The Mountain" and "the Terror."

The fall of the Girondists left the Jacobin "Mountain"
(so-called from the elevation of the seats on which its
deputies sat in the Convention) unopposed. Their power was not
only absolute in fact, but unquestioned, and they inevitably
ran to riot in the exercise of it. The same madness overcame
them in the mass which overcame Nero, Caligula, Caracalla, as
individuals; for it is no more strange that the unnatural and
awful feeling of unlimited dominion over one's fellows should
turn the brain of a suddenly triumphant faction, than that it
should madden a single shallow-minded man. The men of "the
Mountain" were not only masters of France—except in La Vendée
and the neighboring region south of the Loire, where an obstinate
insurrection had broken out—but the armies which obeyed them
had driven back the invading Germans, had occupied the
Austrian Netherlands and taken possession of Savoy and Nice.
Intoxicated by these successes, the Convention had proclaimed
a crusade against all monarchical government, offering the
help of France to every people which would rise against
existing authorities, and declaring enmity to those who
refused alliance with the Revolution. Holland was attacked and
England forced to war. The spring of 1793 found a great
European coalition formed against revolutionary France, and
justified by the aggressions of the Jacobinical government.

For effective exercise of the power of the Jacobins, the
Convention as a whole proved too large a body, even when it
had been purged of Girondist opposition. Its authority was now
gathered into the hands of the famous Committee of Public
Safety, which became, in fact, the Revolutionary Government,
controlling the national armies, and the whole administration
of domestic and foreign affairs. Its reign was the Reign of
Terror, and the fearful Revolutionary Tribunal, which began
its bloody work with the guillotine in October, 1793, was the
chief instrument of its power. Robespierre, Barère, St. Just,
Couthon, Billaud-Varennes, Collot d' Herbois and Carnot—the
latter devoted to the business of the war—were the
controlling members of the Committee. Danton withdrew from it,
refusing to serve.

In September, the policy of terrorism was avowedly adopted,
and, in the language of the Paris Commune, "the Reign of
Terror" became "the order of the day." The arraignment of
"suspects" before the Revolutionary Tribunal began. On the
14th of October Marie Antoinette was put on trial; on the 16th
she met her death. On the 31st the twenty-one imprisoned
Girondist deputies were sent to the guillotine; followed on
the 10th of November by the remarkable woman, Madame Roland,
who was looked upon as the real leader of their party. From
that time until the mid-summer following, the blood-madness
raged; not in Paris alone, but throughout France, at Lyons,
Marseilles, Toulon, Bordeaux, Nantes, and wherever a show of
insurrection and resistance had challenged the ferocity of the
Commissioners of the Revolutionary Government, who had been
sent into the provinces with unlimited death-dealing powers.

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But when Jacobinism had destroyed all exterior opposition, it
began very soon to break into factions within itself. There
was a pitch in its excesses at which even Danton and
Robespierre became conservatives, as against Hébert and the
atheists of his faction. A brief struggle ensued, and the
Hébertists, in March, 1794, passed under the knife of the
guillotine. A month later Danton's enemies had rallied and he,
with his followers, went down before their attack, and the
sharp knife in the Place de la Revolution silenced his bold
tongue. Robespierre remained dominant for a few weeks longer
in the still reigning Committee of Public Safety; but his
domination was already undermined by many fears, distrusts and
jealousies among his colleagues and throughout his party. His
downfall came suddenly on the 27th of July. On the morning of
that day he was the dictator of the Convention and of its
ruling committee; at night he was a headless corpse, and Paris
was shouting with joy.

On the death of Robespierre the Reign of Terror came quickly
to an end. The reaction was sudden and swift. The Committee of
Public Safety was changed; of the old members only Carnot,
indispensable organizer of war, remained. The Revolutionary
Tribunal was remodeled. The Jacobin Club was broken up. The
surviving Girondist deputies came back to the Convention.
Prosecution of the Terrorists for their crimes began. A new
struggle opened, between the lower elements in Parisian and
French society, the sansculotte elements, which had controlled
the Revolution thus far, and the middle class, the
bourgeoisie, long cowed and suppressed, but now rallying to
recover its share of power. Bourgeoisie triumphed in the
contest. The Sansculottes made their last effort in a rising
on the 1st Prairial (May 20, 1795) and were put down. A new
constitution was framed which organized the government of the
Republic under a legislature in two chambers,—a Council of
Five Hundred and a Council of Ancients,—with an executive
Directory of Five. But only one third of the legislature first
assembled was to be freely elected by the people. The
remaining two thirds were to be taken from the membership of
the existing Convention. Paris rejected this last mentioned
feature of the constitution, while France at large ratified
it. The National Guard of Paris rose in insurrection on the
13th Vendémiare (October 5), and it was on this occasion that
the young Corsican officer, Napoleon Bonaparte, got his foot
on the first round of the ladder by which he climbed
afterwards to so great a height. Put in command of the regular
troops in Paris, which numbered only 5,000, against 30,000 of the
National Guards, he crushed the latter in an action of an
hour. That hour was the opening hour of his career.

The government of the Directory was instituted on the 27th of
October following. Of its five members, Carnot and Barras were
the only men of note, then or afterwards.

The war with the Coalition.

While France was cowering under "the Terror," its armies,
under Jourdan, Hoche, and Pichegru, had withstood the great
European combination with astonishing success. The allies were
weakened by ill feeling between Prussia and Austria over the
second partition of Poland, and generally by a want of concert
and capable leadership in their action. On the other side, the
democratic military system of the Republic, under Carnot's
keen eyes, was continually bringing forward fresh soldierly
talent to the front. The fall of the Jacobins made no change
in that vital department of the administration, and the
successes of the French were continued. In the summer of 1794
they carried the war into Germany, and expelled the allies
from the Austrian Netherlands. Thence they invaded Holland,
and before the end of January, 1795, they were masters of the
country; the Stadtholder had fled to England, and a Batavian
Republic had been organized. Spain had suffered losses in
battle with them along the Pyrenees, and the King of Sardinia
had yielded to them the passes of the Maritime Alps. In April
the King of Prussia made peace with France. Before the close
of the year 1795 the revolt in La Vendée was at an end; Spain
had made peace; Pichegru had attempted a great betrayal of the
armies on the Rhine, and had failed.

Napoleon in Italy.

This in brief was the situation at the opening of the year
1796, when the "little Corsican officer," who won the
confidence of the new government of the Directory by saving
its constitution on the 13th Vendemiare, planned the campaign
of the year, and received the command of the army sent to
Italy. He attacked the Sardinians in April, and a single month
sufficed to break the courage of their king and force him to a
treaty of peace. On the 10th of May he defeated the Austrians
at Lodi; on the 15th he was in Milan. Lombardy was abandoned
to him; all central Italy was at his mercy, and he began to
act the sovereign conqueror in the peninsula, with a contempt
for the government at Paris which he hardly concealed. Two
ephemeral republics were created under his direction, the
Cisalpine, in Lombardy, and the Cispadane, embracing Modena,
Ferrara and Bologna. The Papacy was shorn of part of its
territories.

Every attempt made by the Austrians to shake the hold which
Bonaparte had fastened on the peninsula only fixed it more
firmly. In the spring he began movements beyond the Alps, in
concert with Hoche on the Rhine, which threatened Vienna
itself and frightened Austria into proposals of peace.
Preliminaries, signed in April, foreshadowed the hard terms of
the treaty concluded at Campo Formio in the following October.
Austria gave up her Netherland provinces to France, and part
of her Italian territories to the Cisalpine Republic; but
received, in partial compensation, the city of Venice and a
portion of the dominions of the Venetian state; for, between
the armistice and the treaty, Bonaparte had attacked and
overthrown the venerable republic, and now divided it with his
humbled enemy.

France under the Directory.