Outlines of Universal History, Designed as a Text-book and for Private Reading

by George Park Fisher

CHAPTER II. FROM THE EXECUTION OF LOUIS XVI. TO THE FALL OF ROBESPIERRE (JAN. 21, 1793-JULY 27, 1794).

THE FIRST COALITION.-The execution of the king was the signal for the union of the European powers against France. The intention of the revolutionary party to propagate their system in other countries afforded one excuse for this interference. The Convention (Nov. 19, 1792) had offered their assistance to peoples wishing to throw off the existing governments. Another reason was the recent annexations, and the proceedings in respect to the free navigation of the Scheldt. The main ground and cement of the coalition was the dread which the governments felt of revolutionary movements among their own subjects, from their sympathy with the new institutions in France.

POLITICS IN ENGLAND.—The reason just mentioned was operative in Great Britain. The revolution of 1688 had given power to a group of Whig families and their retainers. To shake off this Whig control, which had long continued, was a constant aim of George III. In William Pitt, the younger, he found a minister capable, under the favoring circumstances, of achieving this result. He was made prime minister in 1783, when he was only twenty-five years old. The king, in 1788, had been attacked with insanity; and while he was thus afflicted, George, Prince of Wales, who was unpopular on account of his loose morals, ruled as regent. The regent affiliated with the Whigs, but Pitt retained his office. The leader of the liberal party was Charles James Fox, a man of noble talents and generous instincts, but notoriously irregular in his habits. The sympathy in England with the Revolution of 1789 was widely diffused. Edmund Burke, however, the great philosophical statesman, who had defended the cause of freedom in the American War, was alarmed by the events in France, and still more by the theories of human rights propounded by the enthusiastic friends of the Revolution. These ideas were set forth in England, in an offensive form, in the writings of Thomas Paine. Burke published, in 1790, his Reflections on the French Revolution, in which he attacked as visionary the political notions of the French school in regard to human rights, and denounced them for their dangerous tendency. He separated from his party, and publicly broke friendship with Fox. Pitt was personally averse to war with France, but was driven into it by the prevailing sentiment. The anti-revolutionary feeling excited by the news of the death of Louis moved England to an armed interference which involved the most important consequences to all Europe. A Tory minister, Pitt was supported in the long struggle in Europe by a majority of the Whigs. In the next twenty years, Great Britain, by her military strength on the land, and much more on the sea, and in particular by her wealth, freely poured out in subsidies to her allies on the Continent, was a powerful, as well as the most persevering, antagonist of France.

FALL OF THE GIRONDISTS.—The advance of the allied armies increased the violence and strengthened the hands of the Jacobins. Dumouriez lost a battle in Neerwinden (March 18, 1793), and fell back, through Belgium, to the French frontier. He was in sympathy with the Girondists, and complained of the doings of the Jacobins in Paris and in his army. Being called to account, he went over to the Austrians. This desertion weakened the Girondist party, and put new force into the party of Jacobins. At the same time, news came of a royalist revolt in the West, and of conflicts between the Jacobins and their adversaries in the cities of the South. Danton, who understood that "audacity" was the secret of success, procured the appointment by the convention of a Committee of Public Safety (April 6, 1793), which was to exercise the most frightful dictatorship known in history. A "committee of general security" was put in charge of the police of the whole country. The commune of Paris co-operated in the energetic efforts of the Jacobin leaders to collect recruits and to strengthen the military force. The three chiefs were Danton, Marat, and Robespierre. There was a mortal struggle between the advocates of order and the apostles of anarchy. The fate of the moderates and Girondists was sealed by a great insurrection in Paris, and an invasion of the Convention by an armed force. The violent party had at their back eighty thousand National Guards, who hemmed in the Convention. Twenty-nine Girondist leaders were placed under arrest. Their party fell. The boldest and most reckless faction, which had the Paris commune behind it, triumphed.

WAR OF LA VENDÉE.—Outside of Paris, in other parts of France, there were risings against the Jacobin rule. The most formidable of these was in the West, where the relation of the nobles to the peasants had been kindly, and where the common people looked on the violent proceedings at Paris with anger and disgust. Thus began the war of La Vendée, a terrible episode of civil strife, in which the people of that region were subdued, but not until after protracted conflict and immense slaughter.

THE JACOBIN REVOLUTION.—Danton and the other revolutionary leaders showed a tremendous energy in their attack on both domestic and foreign enemies. A levy was ordered of the whole male population capable of bearing arms. A maximum price was fixed by law for commodities, and also for wages. The government paid its dues in depreciated assignats at the face value. Its emissaries were in all parts of France, stirring up the people and forming revolutionary committees. Thus a system of revolutionary government was everywhere established. A new constitution, of an extreme democratic type, was offered to the acceptance of the people. This dominion of the Jacobins, it must be observed, was a second revolution. The Revolution of 1792 was as different from that of 1789 as was the proposed constitution of 1793 from that of 1791. The insurrections, except at Lyons and Toulon and in La Vendée, were soon quelled. The Jacobin rule was identified with the cause of patriotism in arms against foreign invasion, and with antipathy to the restoration of Bourbon royalty and misrule. In Paris, the revolutionary tribunal was filling the prisons with the suspected, and sending daily its wagon-loads of victims to the guillotine.

MILITARY SUCCESSES OF FRANCE.-The achievements of the great coalition were not at all in proportion to its apparent strength. It was weakened by mutual jealousies and inefficient commanders. In the South, the Spaniards and Piedmontese did not profit by their successes. In the North and North-east, the summer of 1793 was partly wasted by the English, Austrians, and Prussians, in long sieges and in dissensions among themselves. Meantime the French army was growing stronger, and more and more on fire with patriotic ardor. The Duke of York, an incapable general, was obliged to raise the siege of Dunkirk (Sept. 8, 1793). The forces of the coalition began to retire from ground that they had won. At Paris, Carnot's efficient management of military affairs gave France an advantage over her foes. The Prussians were inactive on the Rhine; and Jourdan, reinforced by a French detachment from that quarter, defeated the Austrians at Wattignies. By the movements of Hoche, the allies were driven out of Alsace. Lyons, after a stubborn defense, was captured and savagely punished, and the brave Vendeans were completely defeated by Kleber at Savenay. Near the end of the year, Toulon, then in revolt, was captured. At the siege, a young artillery officer, Napoleon Bonaparte, first distinguished himself by pointing out the proper spot for the planting of batteries that would drive away the English and Spanish fleets, and by carrying out his project.

BONAPARTE.—Napoleon was born on the island of Corsica, Aug. 15, 1769, two months after Corsica became subject to the French. His family, on both sides, were Italians. Napoleon himself never became so fully master of the French tongue that he did not betray in his speech his foreign extraction. He was educated at the military school of Brienne (1779-1784), and then went to the military school at Paris. His principal studies were mathematics and history. He quickly made manifest his military talents, and seems first to have aspired to gain distinction and power, in this line, in Corsica. His connection was at first with the Jacobins, although he afterwards denied it. He had imbibed the ideas of the Revolution, and saw that in the service of the leaders in the war there was opened to him a military career. He turned against his patriotic countryman, Paoli, when the latter sought to separate Corsica from France, at that time under the Jacobin rule.

THE REIGN OF TERROR.—The Reign of Terror had now established itself in France. The Committee of Public Safety wielded absolute power. Every man, woman, and child was called upon to take part in the defense of the country. The property of all the "emigrants" and prisoners of state was seized. Whoever was suspected of being hostile to the established tyranny was thrown into prison. Even to be lukewarm in adhesion to it, was a serious offense. Summary trials were followed by swift executions. The tenderness of youth and the venerableness of age were no protection. Day after day, the stream of human blood continued to flow. A new calendar was ordained: Sept. 22, 1792, was the beginning of the year one. There was a new division of months; in the room of the week, each tenth day was made a holiday. The commune of Paris, followed by other cities, began a crusade against Christianity. Fashions of dress, modes of speech, and manners were revolutionized. Every vestige of "aristocracy" was to be swept off the earth. There was a wild license given to divorce and to profligacy. Paris was like a camp where young soldiers were drilled, weapons were forged, and lint and bandages made ready for the wounded. There were seen, even in the hall of the Convention, throngs of coarse and fierce men, and of coarser and fiercer women, with their songs and wild outcries and gestures. The commune of Paris instituted a sacrilegious festival in the ancient cathedral of Notre Dame, where an actress was enthroned as "Goddess of Liberty." There were priests and bishops who abjured the Christian faith, and there were others who adhered to it at the peril of their lives. The prisons, which were packed with all classes, were theaters of strange and thrilling scenes. In many cases, death, made familiar, ceased to terrify. Crowds escorted the batch of victims carried on carts each day to the place of execution, and insulted them with their brutal shouts. The arrested Girondist deputies were executed. Some of the leaders of that party, including Roland, perished by suicide. Among the eminent persons sent to the guillotine were the eloquent Vergniaud, Brissot, Bailly, Malesherbes (the brave advocate who had defended Louis XVI.), and Madame Roland; also the infamous Duke of Orleans, who had intrigued to get himself raised to the throne. Marie Antoinette, her hair turned white in the tragic scenes through which she had passed, miserably clad, was dragged before the merciless tribunal. There she was insulted with foul accusations which nobody believed. After the mockery of a trial, she was carried like a common criminal, in a cart, with her arms bound, to the place of execution (Oct. 16). Her dignity and serenity, her pallid countenance, and the simple, pathetic words uttered by her at her arraignment, touched for the moment the hardened hearts of the imbruted spectators. Her sad fate has blinded many to the calamitous errors committed by her in the days of her power.

THE JACOBIN CHIEFS.—The Reign of Terror was not confined to Paris. The unexampled atrocities there were repeated in the other large towns with like circumstances of barbarity. A species of fanaticism ruled and raged in the land. The mania, if one may so call it, reached its height in such chiefs of the revolutionary party as Marat, Billaud, and Robespierre. In Marat especially, the mastery gained by one idea almost amounted to mental disorder. He demanded first five hundred heads, then (in Sept., 1793) forty thousand; then, six weeks later, two hundred and seventy thousand. It did seem to be a "homicidal mania." Marat was assassinated by a young maiden, Charlotte Corday, who devoted herself to the task of ridding the world of such a monster.

DEATH OF DANTON.—The Jacobin leaders found their ideal of virtue in the Spartan spirit. Infatuated by Rousseau's theory of the omnipotence of the state, in which the individual is merged and lost under the despotism of the majority, they looked on the massacre of countless persons, guilty of no crime, as a good deed. At length men began to grow weary of this frightful tyranny. The leaders became divided among themselves. Danton, though often the advocate of violent measures, was a statesman, and, to his credit be it said, halted at a point where the others advanced. He made an objection to the confounding of the innocent with the guilty. Hébert and the leaders of the commune, with their atheism, as dangerous political rivals, were offensive to Robespierre, who was a deist. He held a sort of middle position, had most power with the Jacobins, and was enabled to crush and destroy his associates. He was a dull man, of a quiet mien, often seen with a nosegay in his hand, and bloodthirsty according to a precise theory. His ascendency gave him the power, after scenes of tempestuous debate, to inflict first on Hébert, on Clootz, and his other confederates, and then on Danton and the Dantonist chiefs, the same death by the guillotine to which they had doomed so many. Robespierre abolished the worship of Reason, and caused the Convention to pass a resolution acknowledging the existence of a supreme Being, in whose honor fêtes were held. Christianity was denounced as a base superstition.

CRUELTIES IN THE PROVINCES.—When Robespierre was supreme, the Reign of Terror became still more terrible. In trials, the hearing of evidence and of argument were dispensed with. The prisons were crowded with "suspects." Alleged conspiracies in prisons were made a pretext for wholesale slaughter under the guillotine. Suicide and madness were of common occurrence. Even before Robespierre's predominance there had been in the provinces scenes of horror like those which occurred in the capital. The revolted cities, as Lyons and Toulon, were punished with savage ferocity. At Lyons, men, women, and children in masses were shot down with artillery. Those who were not killed with the shot were cut in pieces by the soldiery. At Nantes prisoners were bound together in pairs, and huddled together in barges, which were scuttled and set afloat down the Loire. For these atrocities the deputy Carrier was responsible.

FRENCH VICTORIES.—Yet, at this time, the arms of the republic, except on the sea, where the French fleet was badly beaten by the English, were mostly successful. The Duke of York was vanquished on the Belgian frontier, and the defeat of the allies at Fleurus (June 26, 1794) obliged them to evacuate Belgium.