This brings us to the date of the French Revolution, which, as was inevitable in the circumstances, had its very audible repercussion at Geneva. The doctrine that ‘all men are equal before the law, and ought to enjoy the same political rights,’ was seed which fell there upon a fruitful soil. As might have been expected, French methods of propagandism were imitated, and Jacobinical clubs were formed—the Sans-culottes, the Montagnards, the Marseillais, the Égalité. The clubmen constituted a party known as the Égaliseurs, or Equalitarians, and demanded a new constitution, based upon the principle of the sovereignty of the people, and the admission of all Uitlanders to the full rights of citizenship. On the night of September 4, 1792, there was a rising. The gates of the town were seized; the members of the Government were arrested; a Provisional Government was proclaimed, with the mission of drafting a new constitution on the approved democratic lines.
So far, so good. But the account of what follows reads like a burlesque of the revolutionary proceedings across the frontier. The workmen left their work, and paraded the streets in red caps, singing revolutionary songs. The extremists banded themselves into a society styled ‘the Tanners,’ pledged to ‘tan,’ or assault and batter, the aristocrats, whom they called Englués, or Stick-in-the-muds, whenever and wherever they met them taking their walks abroad. Nor did such informal acts of violence suffice. The next step was to arrest all the aristocrats who had not fled from the town, lock them up in the Grenier de Chantepoulet, and improvise a revolutionary tribunal to judge them.
MONTENVERS AND AIGUILLES VERTE AND DRU
The proceedings of the tribunal were conducted with true republican sans-gêne. The judges sat on the bench in their shirt-sleeves, with their pipes in their mouths and their pistols in their belts. Happily, however, as if they were half conscious that their proceedings were farcical, they were less murderous in their sentences than their French models. Though 600 aristocrats were condemned, the majority of them escaped with sentences of fines, imprisonment, or exile, and the death sentence was only passed upon seven of them. The seven were shot by torch-light at the Bastions; and then the people began to be horrified by the atrocities which they had perpetrated. There was a reaction, a counter-revolution, and a great ceremony of reconciliation in the cathedral. The leaders of the rival factions shook hands in the presence of the assembled populace, and swore to forgive and forget and work together thenceforward for the good of their common country. They kept their oaths, and all promised well until the French Directorate cast covetous eyes upon Geneva, found a pretext for its annexation, and made it the capital of the new department of Leman. It remained French until the last day of the year 1813, when Napoleon’s misfortunes gave the citizens the opportunity of throwing off the yoke, and they sought and obtained admission to the Swiss Confederation.
CHAPTER XIV
LITERATURE AND SCIENCE
It has been remarked as curious that the Age of Revolution at Geneva was also the Golden Age—if not of Genevan literature, which has never really had any Golden Age, at least of Genevan science, which was of world-wide renown. The explanation probably is that these Genevan revolutions, over which the Genevan historians have spilt such a quantity of ink, were not such very important matters after all. So far as one can make out, the graver of them were hardly more grave than the Peterloo massacre, while the less grave hardly attain to the gravity of the Bloody Sunday Riots. A man of letters who took part in one of them on the losing side might suffer unpleasant consequences. He might have his writings burnt by the common hangman, as Bérenger’s were; he might be driven into exile, as were de Lolme, who went to London, where he wrote his famous work on the British Constitution, and d’Ivernois, who went to Paris and became one of the most pungent critics of republican administration and finance. Such things might happen, and in many cases did. But there were no such violent or such continual disturbances as need take up the whole of a literary man’s time, or prevent him from getting on with his work.
The period, at any rate, is one in which notable names meet us at every turn. There were exiled Genevans, like de Lolme, holding their own in foreign political and intellectual circles; there were emigrant Genevan pastors holding aloft the lamps of culture and piety in many cities of England, France, Russia, Germany, and Denmark; there were Genevans, like François Lefort, holding the highest offices in the service of foreign rulers; and there were numbers of Genevans at Geneva of whom the cultivated grand tourist wrote in the tone of a disciple writing of his master. One cannot glance at the history of the period without lighting upon names of note in almost all departments of endeavour. The period is that of de Saussure, Bourrit, the de Lucs, the two Hubers, great authorities respectively on bees and birds; Le Sage, who was one of Gibbon’s rivals for the heart of Mademoiselle Suzanne Curchod; Senebier, the librarian who wrote the first literary history of Geneva; St. Ours and Arlaud, the painters; Charles Bonnet, the entomologist; Bérenger and Picot, the historians; Tronchin, the physician; Trembley and Jallabert, the mathematicians; Dentan, minister and Alpine explorer; Pictet, the editor of the Bibliothèque Universelle, still the leading Swiss literary review; and Odier, who taught Geneva the virtue of vaccination.