Part 356

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.

{1092}

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.

The masterful Corsican, who handled these great matters with the airs of a sovereign, may have known himself already to be the coming master of France. For the inevitable submission again of the many to one was growing plain to discerning eyes. The frightful school-teaching of the Revolution had not impressed practical lessons in politics on the mind of the untrained democracy, so much as suspicions, distrusts, and alarms. All the sobriety of temper, the confidence of feeling, the constraining habit of public order, without which the self-government of a people is impracticable, were yet to be acquired. French democracy was not more prepared for republican institutions in 1797 than it had been in 1789. {1093} There was no more temperance in its factions, no more balance between parties, no more of a steadying potency in public opinion. But it had been brought to a state of feeling that would prefer the sinking of all factions under some vigorous autocracy, rather than another appeal of their quarrels to the guillotine. And events were moving fast to a point at which that choice would require to be made. The summer of 1797 found the members of the Directory in hopeless conflict with one another and with the legislative councils. On the 4th of September a "coup d' état," to which Bonaparte contributed some help, purged both the Directory and the Councils of men obnoxious to the violent faction, and exiled them to Guiana. Perhaps the moment was favorable then for a soldier, with the great prestige that Bonaparte had won, to mount to the seat of power; but he did not so judge.

The Expedition to Egypt.

He planned, instead, an expedition to Egypt, directed against the British power in the East,—an expedition that failed in every object it could have, except the absence in which it kept him from increasing political disorders at home. He was able to maintain some appearance of success, by his subjugation of Egypt and His invasion of Syria; but of harm done to England, or of gain to France in the Mediterranean, there was none; since Nelson, at the battle of the Nile, destroyed the French fleet, and Turkey was added to the Anglo-Austrian coalition. The blunder of the expedition, as proved by its whole results, was not seen by the French people so plainly, however, as they saw the growing hopelessness of their own political state, and the alarming reverses which their armies in Italy and on the Rhine had sustained since Bonaparte went away.

French Aggressions.—The new Coalition.

Continued aggressions on the part of the French had provoked a new European coalition, formed in 1798. In Switzerland they had overthrown the ancient constitution of the confederacy, organizing a new Helvetic Republic on the Gallic model, but taking Geneva to themselves. In Italy they had set up a third republic, the Roman, removing the Pope forcibly from his sovereignty and from Rome. Every state within reach had then taken fresh alarm, and even Russia, undisturbed in the distance, was now enlisted against the troublesome democracy of France.

The unwise King of Naples, entering rashly into the war before his allies could support him, and hastening to restore the Pope, had been driven (December, 1798) from his kingdom, which underwent transformation into a fourth Italian republic, the Parthenopeian. But this only stimulated the efforts of the Coalition, and in the course of the following year the French were expelled from all Italy, saving Genoa alone, and the ephemeral republics they had set up were extinguished. On the Rhine they had lost ground; but they had held their own in Switzerland, after a fierce struggle with the Russian forces of Suwarrow.

Napoleon in power.