CHAPTER XIV. THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.
Feudalism, introduced in France a thousand years ago, reconstructed society on the only basis then possible. It was a bridge from barbarism to monarchy. The invasion of the Northmen, though apparently a calamity, was a blessing. They brought fresh, lusty life. Their courage and vigor gave the country a new and needed impulse in progress and civilization.
William, Duke of Normandy, conquered England in 1066, and proved an able and stern ruler.
While many of her nobles were engaged in the Crusades in the East, a social revolution was going on in France, full of significance. This was the rise of free cities. The feudal bishops became so intolerably oppressive that the people succeeded in buying the privilege of electing their own magistrates; then the king, for a goodly sum of money, confirmed it. Appeal was thus secured from the bishop to the king. He encouraged the practice, for it freed him, to a degree, from dependence on his nobles, and gave him greater control over the cities. The process went on during the eleventh, twelfth, and the first part of the thirteenth century.
The result was shown at the battle of Bouvines (A.D. 1214). King John of England, in the hope of recovering Normandy and other provinces which he had ignominiously lost, attacked France. He formed an alliance with the German emperor and with the Court of Flanders.
The army of Philip, the French king, made up of barons, bishops, and knights, clad in steel, and a large body of foot-soldiers sent by sixteen free cities and towns, gained a complete victory. It was one of the most memorable contests of the Middle Ages, for on that hard-fought field three great branches of the Teutonic race—German, Flemish, and English—went down before the furious onset of “hostile blood and speech.” Lords, clergy, and Common People fought side by side against a foreign foe, and henceforth were united by a common bond of pride. It was the hardy yeomanry of Edward, the Black Prince, who won the battle of Crecy (1346), at the beginning of the Hundred Years’ War, against three times as many Frenchmen.
It was in 1598 that Henry IV. issued the Edict of Nantes, which secured to the long and bitterly persecuted Huguenots the rights they demanded. It marked a new era in history. It was the first formal recognition of toleration in religion made by any leading power of Europe, and anticipated a similar act in England by nearly a century.
The king saw what all have since come to see, that freedom of conscience is one of the surest guarantees of national strength.
Henry IV. of France was essentially the people’s king. He was popular with the masses to the same extent that Louis XV. was unpopular. To the Common People in France, Henry IV. represented as much democracy in that age of tyranny as Abraham Lincoln and Grover Cleveland do in a better age and country. Henry was murdered on the streets of Paris by the fanatic Ravaillac, whose dagger inflicted an almost mortal wound upon France herself.
With the aid of Richelieu, the absolute power of the crown was built up; then followed the despotisms of Louis XIV. and Louis XV.; the revocation of the Edict of Nantes; the disastrous failure of the Mississippi Scheme; the struggle between England and France for mastery in the New World, and the complete triumph of the former, and the preparation for the awful revolution of 1789.
France had materially and powerfully assisted the American colonies in their struggle with Great Britain for independence. Many illustrious sons of France, like Lafayette and Rochambeau, had joined and fought side by side with those sons of liberty who were then creating the great republic of America. America was a storehouse of freedom, liberty, and concentrated hate of “caste” and class distinction, from whence Frenchmen like Lafayette carried to France the spirit of freedom. It may fairly be said that the struggle on this continent lighted the torch of liberty which has illuminated the world since, torn Spain’s oppressed colonies in America from her grasp, and made possible the existence of the French Republic, which has now taken its place among the most powerful nations of the earth.
The dormant desire had long been present in the breasts of the poor of the French nation for equality and liberty. The quickening influences and light radiating from the new Republic of the West, among whose children the sons of France had served in the struggle for independence, soon ignited the fires in the heart of the impetuous Frenchman.
Louis XVI. had been more condescending than any of his predecessors; he occupied, possibly, a higher position in the hearts of the people than any king the French had had since Henry IV. But the time had come when, inspired by the example of the Americans, the crime of “caste” in France had become unendurable. Louis XVI. was, of all the Bourbon kings, probably the least objectionable.
His character, while weak and influenced by the stronger will of Marie Antoinette, did not represent the worst phases of the character of Louis XV. or Louis XIV. Gradually, but irresistibly by attrition, the will of the people had been making marks upon the royalty of France. The tyranny, insolence, and arrogance of Louis XIV., in whose presence one dared not speak, had been lessened in Louis XV. to the extent that one could speak in a whisper; but in the presence of Louis XVI. one might speak aloud. With tireless, resistless, sullen determination the billows of the sea of humanity, wherein all is equality and fraternity, had beaten upon this rock of adamant until these divine Bourbon kings had become impressed by its constant, ceaseless energy.
Weak, amiable, and pliable as Louis XVI. was, poor Jacques had been so long deprived of one heart-beat of feeling that his bosom could no longer restrain the emotions of liberty and equality. The nobles of France, more than Louis XVI., retained the impress of the reign of Louis XIV., “the Glorious” (?), who had proclaimed that he was a Sun; and while the ruling monarch, as the bulwark of royalty, “caste,” and social inequality, had received the first shock of the wave and been marked thereby; still the nobility, sheltered behind the bulwark of the personality of the king, continued to indulge the wild license of their privileges and “caste” distinction, gamboling like lambs upon the greensward of their delusion, becoming fattened for the knife of that butcher that was sure to follow, the guillotine. A more powerful, touching, and realistic picture was never drawn of the arrogance and presumption of the nobles, privileged classes, “higher caste,” than that made by the people’s author, the man who of all others has nearer touched the hearts of the Common People, who will be loved and revered when others more learned may be forgotten, because he wrote of scenes of sensation, emotion, and relations of the Common People—Charles Dickens—in the “Tale of Two Cities,” and for our purpose it would be impossible to find words more fitting than those used by this master delineator of the feelings, thoughts, heart-throbs, and wrongs of the Common People:
“What has gone wrong?” said Monsieur, calmly looking out. A tall man in a night-cap had caught up a bundle from among the feet of the horses and had laid it on the base of the fountain, and was down in the mud and wet, howling over it like a wild animal.
“Pardon, Monsieur the Marquis!” said a ragged and submissive man, “it is a child.”
“Why does he make that abominable noise—is it his child?”
“Excuse me, Monsieur the Marquis, it is a pity—yes.”
The fountain was a little removed, for the street opened where it was, into a space some ten or twelve yards square. As the tall man suddenly got up from the ground and came running at the carriage, Monsieur the Marquis clapped his hand for an instant on his sword-hilt.
“Killed!” shrieked the man in wild desperation, extending both arms at their lengths above his head and staring at him. “Dead!”
The people closed round and looked at Monsieur the Marquis. There was nothing revealed by the many eyes that looked at him but watchfulness and eagerness; there was no visible menacing of anger. Neither did the people say anything; after the first cry, they had been silent, and remained so. The voice of the submissive man who had spoken was flat and tame in its extreme submission. Monsieur the Marquis ran his eyes over them all as though they had been mere rats come out of their holes. He took out his purse.
“It is extraordinary to me,” said he, “that you people cannot take care of yourselves and your children. One or the other of you is forever in the way. How do I know what injury you have done to my horses. See! give him that.”
He threw out a gold coin for the valet to pick up, and all the heads craned forward that all the eyes might look down as it fell. The tall man called out again, with a most unearthly cry, “Dead!”
He was arrested by the quick arrival of another man, for whom the rest made way. On seeing him, the miserable creature fell upon his shoulder, sobbing and crying and pointing to the fountain, where some women were stooping over the motionless bundle, and moving gently about it. They were silent, however, as the men.
“I know all, I know all,” said the last comer. “Be a brave man, my Gaspard. It is better for the poor little plaything to die so, than to live. It has died in a moment without pain. Could it have lived an hour as happily?”
“You are a philosopher, you there,” said the Marquis, smiling.
“How do they call you?”
“They call me Defarge.”
“Of what trade?”
“Monsieur the Marquis, the vender of wine.”
“Pick up that, philosopher and vender of wine,” said the Marquis, throwing him another gold coin, “and spend it as you will. The horses there; are they all right?”
Without deigning to look at the assemblage a second time, Monsieur the Marquis leaned back in his seat, and was just being driven away with the air of a gentleman who had accidentally broken some common thing, and had paid for it and could afford to pay for it, when his ease was suddenly disturbed by a coin flying into the carriage, and ringing on its floor.
“Hold!” said Monsieur the Marquis. “Hold the horses! who threw that?”
He looked to the spot where Defarge, the vender of wine, had stood a moment before; but the wretched father was groveling on his face on the pavement in that spot, and the figure that stood beside him was the figure of a dark, stout woman, knitting.
“You dogs!” said the Marquis, but smoothly, and with an unchanged front, except as to the spots on his nose; “I would ride over any of you very willingly, and exterminate you from the earth. If I knew which rascal threw at the carriage, and if that brigand were sufficiently near it, he should be crushed under the wheels.”
So cowed was their condition, and so long and hard their experience of what such a man could do to them, within the law and beyond it, that not a voice or a hand, or even an eye was raised. Among the men not one. But the woman who was knitting looked up steadily, and looked the Marquis in the face. It was not for his dignity to notice it; his contemptuous eyes passed over her and over all the other rats; and he leaned back in his seat again, and gave the word, “Go on!”
In vain would we seek for words describing better the horrible condition of the Common People, and the tremendous extent of the assumption of a superiority upon the part of the nobles, than in the foregoing picture so ably portrayed by Charles Dickens. Such a condition of the social life in France could produce but one result. The harvest was ripe for the sickle. The people had witnessed an illustration of the might of the Common People of America when opposed to the representatives of “caste” in the British army. That the storm should have burst that so long had been hovering over the heads of the French nobles is not a matter of surprise, in view of the fact that Dickens is historically correct in his picture of the oppressed condition of the poor in France. The only wonder to us Anglo-Saxons is that brave men, as the Frenchmen are, should have borne so long the cruel, heartless oppression of the rich nobility.
Duruy says: “The French Revolution was the establishment of a new order of society, founded on justice, not privileges. Such changes never take place without causing terrible suffering. It is the law of humanity that all new life shall be born in pain.”
When Louis XVI. ascended the throne, in 1774, revolution was in the air. The outward splendor of Versailles, as Carlyle intimates, was the rainbow above Niagara: beneath was destruction.
There was a general feeling that a crisis was at hand. The spirit of free inquiry aroused by the leading writers and thinkers was ominous. Government, religion, social institutions, were all burned in the crucible, and a new order of things was inevitable. The country was hopelessly deep in the mire of debt; the tax agents were brutal, and the peasants ground to the lowest depths of misery and suffering.
The power of the nobles over the peasants living on their estates was absolute. Large tracts of land were declared game-preserves, where wild boars and deer roamed at pleasure. To preserve the game with its flavor unimpaired, the starving peasants were not allowed to weed their little plots of ground. The nobility and clergy, who owned two-thirds of the land, were nearly exempt from taxation.
The peasant must grind his corn at the lord’s mill; bake his bread in the lord’s oven, and press his grapes at the lord’s wine-press, paying whatever the lord chose to charge. If the wife of the seigneur fell ill, the peasants must beat the neighboring marshes all night to prevent the frogs from croaking, and so disturbing the lady’s rest.
French agriculture had not advanced beyond the tenth century, and the plow in use was the same as that used before the Christian era. The picture of rural wretchedness is completed by the purchase and sale of 150,000 serfs with the land on which they were born.
Louis desired to redress the wrongs of his country, but did not know how. Ministers came and went in a continuous procession, Turgot, Necker, Colonne, Brienne, and Necker again, tried to solve the problem, and gave up in despair.
As a last resort, the States-General, which had not met for one hundred and seventy-five years, assembled May 5, 1789, and that day marked the opening of the Revolution.
The National Assembly, proving to be the most powerful body of the States-General, invited the nobles and clergy to join it, and declared itself the National Assembly. Louis closed the hall. The members repaired to a tennis-court near by, and swore not to separate until they had given France a constitution. The weak king soon yielded, and, at his request, the coronets and mitres met with the commons. The court decided to overawe the refractory Assembly, and collected 30,000 soldiers about Versailles.
Four members of that assembly were Lafayette, Count Mirabeau, Robespierre, and Guillotine, inventor of the fearful instrument of punishment bearing his name.
The Paris populace were infuriated by the menace from the soldiers. They stormed the old Bastile and razed its dungeons to the ground. The insurrection spread like a prairie-fire. Chateaux were burned, and tax-payers tortured to death. Soon a maddened mob surged toward Versailles, screeching “Bread! bread!” The palace was sacked and the royal family brought to Paris.
Political clubs sprang up like mushrooms, chief among which were the Jacobins and the Cordelies, whose leaders, Robespierre, Marat, and Danton, advocated sedition and organized the revolution.
The Assembly, in its burst of patriotism, extinguished feudal privileges, abolished serfdom, and equalized taxes. The estates of the clergy were confiscated, and upon this security notes were issued to meet the expenses of the government.
Austria and Prussia took up arms in behalf of Louis, and invaded France (1791). This step doomed the monarch and the monarchy. The approach of the “foreigners” kindled to unrestrainable fury the wrath of the masses. The “Marseillaise” was heard for the first time on the streets of Paris; the palace of the Tuileries was sacked; the faithful Swiss guards were slain, and Louis sent to prison. The Jacobins were triumphant. They arrested all who spoke against their revolutionary projects; assassins were hired to go through the crowded prisons and murder the inmates. For four days during September the terrible carnival of blood raged.
The Prussian army was checked at Valmy, and soon recrossed the frontier. Then the Austrians were defeated at Jemmapes, and Belgium was proclaimed a republic. The leaders of the French revolution were electrified, and the next Assembly established a republic in France. The king was arraigned and guillotined. As the bleeding head tumbled into the basket the furious crowds shouted “Vive la Republique!” Europe was horrified, and a league, with England as its moving spirit, was formed to avenge the death of Louis. The royalists held Marseilles, Bordeaux, Lyons and Toulon.
The Convention appointed a Committee of Safety, which knew neither mercy nor pity. Revolutionary tribunals were set up, and the work of slaughter began and raged with a ferocity beyond the power of imagination to conceive. To charge a person with being in sympathy with the aristocrats was his death warrant. Men saved themselves by denouncing their neighbors before their neighbors could denounce them. Intimate friends suspected each other, and members of the same family became mortal enemies.
Marie Antoinette, her head silvered by the awful woe and desolation and horror, perished on the same scaffold where her husband had died. At Lyons, the guillotine was too slow, and the victims were mowed down with grape-shot; at Nantes, boat-loads were rowed out and sunk in the Loire. The people were made frantic by their thirst for blood.
Marat rubbed his hands and chuckled with glee at the carnival of murder. He showed his admiring friends his reception room, papered with death warrants.
But his turn speedily came. Charlotte Corday, a young girl from Normandy, gained access to him, and, while he was jotting down the names of fresh victims, stabbed him to death, and then walked proudly to the guillotine.
Danton expressed a suspicion that the massacre had continued long enough, for which he was promptly guillotined, and then for nearly four months the appalling Robespierre reigned supreme. His aim was to destroy all the other leaders; the axe worked faster and faster, but not fast enough to suit the clamoring tigers; the accused were forbidden defence, and were tried en masse.
Finally, when common safety demanded it, friends and foes united for the overthrow of the colossal monster. He was arrested and beheaded July 28, 1794. The reign of terror ended with his life. It had lasted little more than a year. But what a year of woe, massacre, murder, and blood! From the first outbreak of the revolution to its close, it has been estimated that 1,000,000 lives were sacrificed.
From this appalling furnace of fire and death emerged the true life of France. The revolutionary clubs were abolished; the prison doors flung wide; the churches opened, and the emigrant priests and nobles invited to return.
But, though the Convention had organized the government of the Directory in name, it had yet to fight for its existence. The Royalists hoped they might restore the monarchy. The National Guard was persuaded to join the monarchical party. In October, 1795, the combined forces, 40,000 strong, marched on the Tuileries to expel the Convention or prevent the establishment of the Directory.
The Convention called on General Barras to defend them. Barras asked a Corsican artillery officer of twenty-six, who had distinguished himself at Toulon, to act as his lieutenant. He speedily converted the palace into an intrenched camp. He had 7000 troops, but he planted his batteries with such admirable skill, and used his grape-shot with such effect that the advancing hosts were defeated and scattered, and the Convention, with its defender, Napoleon Bonaparte, was master of the situation.
Thankfulness should fill the hearts of all the citizens of the American Republic that the history of our own country will not present a duplicate picture of the scenes portrayed in this chapter. It certainly is not the fault of the good management of the sham aristocrats that these scenes of such monstrous horror, exhibiting the birth of liberty in France and the erasure of the word “caste” with its most objectionable features from French life, were not reproduced in America. Fortunately for the would-be aristocrats, the volcano, upon which they slept, had a crater known as the BALLOT-BOX, where the pent-up steam of the indignation of the people found a vent-hole. November 8, 1892, the safety-valve was opened by the people, and the believers in “caste” should be thankful that there existed some means of relief; had such not been the case, the pent-up energies and the indignation of the people would have caused another explosion, which would have rivalled in force, if not in the howling scenes of blood, the French Revolution.