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

by George Park Fisher

THE CONDITION OF GERMANY.—Germany consisted of a multitude of states, of which Austria (which had large territories not German) and Prussia were the chief, and were in constant rivalry. The Holy Roman Empire kept up its name and forms. Besides smaller sovereignties, as Saxony and Bavaria, there were two hundred and fifty petty principalities, fifty imperial cities, and several hundred knights, each with an insignificant domain subject to him. The empire was one body only in theory. National feeling had died out. The Diet had little to do, and no efficiency. Austria, which held the imperial office, and included in its extensive dominions Milan and Southern Netherlands, had sunk into a "gloomy and soulless despotism." The reforms of Joseph II. produced a ferment; but after the death of Leopold II. (1790-1792), under Francis II., a sickly and selfish ruler, a reactionary policy, inspired by the dread of change, had full sway. Thugut, the minister of Francis, cared only for the acquisition of territory: the people were so many millions "to be taxed, to be drilled, to be kept down by the police." In Prussia, Frederick William II. (1786-1797) and his people had no feeling so strong as that of hostility to Austria, whose influence was predominant in the minor states. Prussia cared more for getting additional Polish territory than for helping the French emigrants. The Prussian people were separated by rigorous lines into three classes,—nobles, burghers, and peasants. The nobles were poor. The lawful occupations of each class were prescribed by law. "The mass of the peasantry, at least in the country east of the Elbe, were serfs attached to the soil." The offices in the army were confined to nobles, on whose absolute obedience the king could count. Blows were inflicted on the common soldier as if he were a slave. In some of the other Protestant states, the character of the government had improved. In the south and west, the serfs had been set free. In the ecclesiastical states, including the electorates of Mentz, Trèves, and Cologne, the prince-bishops and canons were nobles, who led a gay and luxurious life. Nowhere were poverty and wretchedness so general as in the lands of the knights. The political life of Germany, notwithstanding its abundant resources, mainly from the decay of public spirit and the want of political unity, had become stagnant and corrupt. Germany was almost incapable of vigorous, united action.

CONFLICT OF LOUIS AND THE ASSEMBLY.—There was no real union between Louis XVI. and the Assembly. Troops of the National Guard, to the number of twenty thousand, from the provinces were to encamp near Paris. This measure, as well as a decree for the banishment of the non-juring clergy, the king refused to sanction. The Girondist ministers laid down their office. A mob burst into the Tuileries: they put on the king's head a Jacobin cap, but he remained calm and steadfast in his refusal to assent to the decrees. La Fayette came to Paris from the Northern army, to restore order; but the queen treated him with habitual distrust, and he fell under suspicion with the radicals. He went back to the army without effecting any thing.

IMPRISONMENT OF THE KING.—Prussia had joined its rival, Austria. Ferdinand of Brunswick, an officer trained under Frederick the Great, commanded the Prussian forces. He issued (July 25) a threatening proclamation to the French people. There were three French armies in the field, under Rochambeau, La Fayette, and Luckner; but the fire of the Revolution had not yet entered into the veins of the soldiers. Military reverses heightened the revolutionary excitement in Paris. The municipal government was broken up by Danton and his associates, with the mob of poor and desperate partisans at their back; and its place was taken by commissioners from the sections. An armed throng again attacked the Tuileries. The king took refuge in the hall of the Assembly. The Swiss guards fought bravely against the assailants, when they received an order from him to cease firing. The result was that they were slaughtered without mercy. The uniform composure of the king in the most trying situations, and his conscientious feelings, were a poor substitute for intellectual force. The Assembly voted to suspend the exercise of his authority, to put him and his family under surveillance, to hand over the young prince to the custody of a person charged with his education, and to call a national convention to draw up a constitution. The royal family were given into the hands of the Paris commune, and lodged as prisoners, in apartments scantily furnished, in the castle called the Temple.

MASSACRES OF SEPTEMBER.—The blundering of the royalists, their intrigues, and the pressure of the coalition of foreign enemies, had thrown the power into the hands of the Jacobins. The city council, and Danton, the minister of justice, were really supreme, although the Girondists had a share in the new ministry. La Fayette was accused and proscribed, and fled from the country. He was captured by the Austrians, and kept in prison at Olmutz until 1797. The news of the advance of the allies led to the "massacres of September," when the prisons in Paris, which had been filled with priests and laymen arrested on charges of complicity with the enemies of liberty, were entered by ruffians acting under influence of Marat and the commune's "committee of surveillance," and, after "a burlesque trial" before an armed jury, were murdered. In Versailles, Lyons, Orleans, and other towns, there were like massacres. The victims of these massacres numbered about two thousand.

TRIAL AND EXECUTION OF THE KING.—The National Convention was made up entirely of republicans. The monarchy was abolished, and France was declared a republic. The Girondists had at first the preponderance in numbers; but the Jacobins, led by Robespierre, Danton, Marat, Couthon, Fouché, the Duke of Orleans (who called himself Philip Égalité), St. Just, Billaud-Varenne, Barère, were supported by the clubs and the city council, and by the savage populace of the sections,—the sans culottes. The guillotine—a machine for beheading, which Guillotin, a physician, did not invent, but recommended for use—was the instrument on which the fanatical revolutionists placed most of their reliance for the extirpation of "aristocracy." The energy of the Jacobins, aided by the general dread of a restoration of the royalists to power, and by the fury of the Paris populace, proved too strong for the more moderate party to withstand. The king, designated as Louis Capet, was arraigned before the assembly, tried, and condemned to death. There were seven hundred and twenty-one votes: his death was decreed by a small majority (Jan. 17, 1793). Through all the terrible scenes of the trial, the parting with his wife and children, and the execution (Jan. 21), Louis manifested a serene and Christian temper.

VICTORIES OF FRANCE.—Meantime, in France the war was felt, and justly, to be a war of self-defense. The enemies were a privileged class in alliance with foreign invaders. Volunteers flocked to the field. The troops under Dumouriez and others had been successful. At Valmy (Sept. 20, 1792) the allies, under Brunswick, were defeated. The victory of Dumouriez at Jemmappes was followed by the conquest of the Austrian Netherlands (Nov., 1792). Savoy and Nice were annexed to France. The Scheldt was declared free and open to commerce, and Antwerp was made an open port.

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.