A History of England, Period III. Constitutional Monarchy

by J. Franck Bright

Atheists and indulgents being thus both removed, Robespierre and his party were virtually masters of France. Under them the Terror knew no relaxation. "The maxim of our policy," said Robespierre, "ought to be to guide the people by reason and the enemies of the people by terror." Whole batches of victims completely unknown to each other were sent off together to the guillotine under pretext of being accomplices in conspiracy. Between the 20th of June and the 27th of July 1400 people were executed. But Robespierre and his friends looked forward to some conclusion of this state of things, desiring to establish a purely moral, stoical, and deistical Republic. As a first step, the worship of the Supreme Being was decreed, and a great festivity held, where Robespierre, decked with flowers, officiated as priest. Thus, too, he began to shelter the priests and nobles. The idea of the cessation of the Revolution thoroughly frightened some of the worst among the Committee, and Robespierre's assumption of authority disgusted them. They contrived to form a coalition with all the discontented parties, Hébertists, Dantonists, Girondists, Royalists, were all ready to combine against the one man whose stoical purity seemed to insult them, and whose cold implacable cruelty gave them no hope if they should offend him. Robespierre was thus hated by the people, and at enmity both with the people and the Committee, but was still influential at the club of the Jacobins, the Convention, and the revolutionary Tribunal. Knowing that an assault would be directed against him, his wisdom would have been to strike first. To this course St. Just urged him, but he seems to have relied upon his influence in the Convention, and was astonished when he found his friends wholly outnumbered and a hearing refused him. On the 27th of July he was arrested Fall of Robespierre. with Couthon, St. Just, and his brother. He escaped and fled to the Commune. For a moment it appeared as if an insurrection would have reinstated him. But the richer sections of Paris rallied to the destruction of their tyrant, and on the following day Robespierre, with twenty members of the Commune, was dragged to the scaffold.

The party which had overthrown Robespierre were as cruel and far more depraved than he was. They would gladly have continued the Revolution in its most odious form. But the Terror once destroyed, it was impossible to check a reactionary movement. The revolutionary Committee and Tribunal were modified, the Commune destroyed, the club of the Jacobins dissolved, and the Girondins who had escaped execution recalled. Such measures did not please the mob of Paris, still further excited by the constant continuance of famine. On the 12th Germinal (April 1), and again on the 1st Prairial (May 20), they rose in insurrection, invaded the hall of the Convention, clamouring for bread and the constitution of 1793. For Establishment of the Directory. Oct. 1795. six hours a wild tumult raged within the walls. But soldiers had been collected, and with the aid of the troops of the more reactionary Paris sections order was restored. This was the deathblow of the democratic party. A new constitution was drawn up, the executive power was vested in five directors, and two councils, the one of 500, the other of 250, established. The hopes of the royalists had been raised by the late reactionary movement. Finding themselves thwarted by the new constitution, the richer sections and the partisans of reaction marched on the Tuileries. General Menou proved unequal to his place, and the task of defending the Assembly was given to Barras, who chose as his active lieutenant Bonaparte. With a vigour unchecked by fear of shedding the blood of citizens, this young officer brought up thirty cannon from the camp of Sablons, and received the advancing insurrectionists with such showers of grape, that, though not without a short resistance, they were completely defeated. This was the first step towards military despotism. The new constitution came into effect on the 27th of October 1795.

Pitt's first negotiations for peace.

Thus, before it was understood how completely the army had got the upper hand in France, how completely from henceforward its interests would be military, the appearance of something more like a permanent and orderly government in the shape of the Directory seemed for the instant to give hopes of peace. Towards that point Pitt's feelings had been gradually tending. Even as early as December 1795 he had spoken of the possibility of an honourable peace should a more settled government ever be arrived at in France, and since then much had happened to induce him to lower his tone. In spite of all his efforts, he had seen his great coalition disappear at the Congress at Basle. He had seen the complete ruin of his Quiberon expedition. More than that, all his best tendencies had been shocked by the consequences of his own government at home. But the opening of his eyes to the fallacy of his belief in the speedy bankruptcy of France and its rapid conquest, with which in all his difficulties he had hitherto buoyed himself up, came too late. His application for peace through the Swiss minister (March 1796), which the King announced at the close of the session, met with a very cold reception. For the Government of France, having just been re-established on a new and more dangerous basis, would listen to no terms which implied the restoration of the Low Countries to Austria; and as it was impossible for Pitt, after his conduct to that country, to suggest any other terms, the negotiations speedily came to nothing.

Indeed, the French Republic had this year reached a pitch of glory unequalled in the palmiest times of the monarchy. Carnot, who was again in power as one of the Directory, had conceived a plan for a campaign of this year upon a gigantic scale. Three armies were to push out from France and strike all of them by the three different roads, of the Maine, the Danube, and the Po, at Vienna. Three young generals were intrusted with the task. Jourdan was given the army of the Sambre and Meuse, Moreau the army of the Rhine and Moselle, Bonaparte succeeded Schérer in the command of the army of Italy. The preceding year the battle of Loano had secured to the French the Riviera as far as Savona, but the troops Napoleon's Italian campaign. 1796. were destitute of every necessary. Napoleon aroused their enthusiasm by promises, and in a fortnight had separated the Austrians and Piedmontese, defeated the former at Montenotte and Dégo, and thrown them back into Lombardy, the latter at Millesimo, and again at Mondovi, as he pursued them towards Turin, and finally wrung from them a treaty which left him at liberty to pursue the Austrians. Another fortnight was hardly over before he had turned the Austrian position on the Ticino by the passage of the Po at Placenza, driven them from the Adda by the victories of Fombio and Lodi, and having chased them behind the Mincio, secured the whole of Lombardy to the French. Bonaparte completed the first act of the campaign by securing the line of the Adige and forming the siege of Mantua. He employed some weeks in conquering Italy as far south as Naples, but from this work he was recalled by the approach of an Austrian army to raise the siege of Mantua. Wurmser came down the Adige on one side of the Lake of Garda, Quasdanowich down the Chiesa on the other. Bonaparte, giving up every other object for the moment, placed himself between the armies, defeated Quasdanowich, at Lonato on the one hand, and Wurmser at Castiglioni on the other, and thus driving them into the Tyrol, resumed the siege of Mantua. Wurmser made one more effort to raise the siege; again he advanced with two armies, hoping to enclose the French. Davidowich descended the Adige, Wurmser the valley of the Brenta. The battle of Roveredo destroyed the former, while Bonaparte, turning rapidly into the valley of the Brenta in pursuit of Wurmser, came up with and defeated him at Bassano. Thus cut off from Germany, the Austrian general had no resource but to take refuge in Mantua (Sept. 12). The Austrians could not leave their army thus shut up in Mantua, and a fresh effort was made to save it. It was again a double attack, but after three days' fight, Alvinzi, coming from the east, was beaten at Arcola, and the attempt failed. Six weeks later he made one more desperate effort, but was defeated again on the plateau of Rivoli. Alvinzi's attack had been rendered the more dangerous, because upon the Maine and Rhine Jourdan and Moreau had been unsuccessful. There the Archduke Charles had in a certain degree followed the same plans as Bonaparte, and directing his whole force against Jourdan, had compelled the retreat of Moreau also. It was to this victorious general that the Austrians looked to continue their defence. But Bonaparte, in the beginning of the following year, repeatedly drove him backwards, defeated him on the Tagliamento, drove him into the mountains, and defeated him at Neumarck, and finally, having secured the pass of the Semmering, and being within eighty miles of Vienna, he obliged the Archduke to demand a suspension of arms, and opened negotiations known as the Preliminaries of Léoben (April 13), which were completed under the title of Campo Formio on the 17th of October 1797.

Pitt's second negotiations for peace.

On the Rhine and the Maine the two other divisions of the general plan had not met with the same success as had attended the arms of Bonaparte. Great and astonishing as his progress had been, it did not therefore seem as yet to have closed all hope of peace, for which in fact it had only rendered Pitt more anxious; and as the establishment of the Directory seemed to promise that permanence to the Government which Pitt had declared to be the indispensable condition of any hopeful negotiations, it was determined in the autumn of this year (1796) to make a fresh effort, this time direct, to negotiate with the Directory. For this purpose Lord Malmesbury was despatched to Paris. The English believed that they had something they could offer in exchange for any restorations France might make. The Cape of Good Hope had been captured in the preceding year, and in the spring of the present year Moore and Abercrombie had done good service in the West Indies. Many of the islands there had been taken, Guadaloupe almost alone remained in French hands. These conquests they offered to restore. But if the French had been unwilling to treat in the preceding year, their successes in Italy had not rendered them more moderate; they were at this very time arranging, at the instigation of the malcontents in Ireland, represented by Wolfe Tone, a plan for the conquest of Ireland under the command of General Hoche, and probably a still greater plan for the invasion of England itself. In fact, there was still the same irremediable objection—the English still felt bound in honour not to resign the Netherlands to France. "On this point," writes Grenville in his instructions to Malmesbury, "your Lordship must not give the smallest hope that his Majesty will be induced to relax." There was also another point in the French diplomacy which rendered the negotiations difficult. They could not understand the position of a plenipotentiary who had not absolutely full powers to act without reference to his own Court, and taking umbrage at the repeated couriers who went to and fro from Paris, declared their belief that the effort at peace was not honest on the part of England, and that Malmesbury had not full powers at all; and finally, De la Croix, a somewhat stiff man of the red tape school, who had from the first behaved with considerable rudeness, wrote suddenly to Malmesbury bidding him leave Paris within eighteen hours. Thus closed the second effort on the part of Pitt to make peace, chiefly important because it clears him from the charge of inveterate determination to continue the war, because it throws the blame of that continuance completely on the French, and because it shows the effect which the lengthened efforts of England, especially the pressure on the finances, were having upon the naturally peaceful and economical mind of the minister.

Preparations to resist the threatened French invasion.

The preparations for invasion from abroad could not be kept secret, and fresh and constant efforts had been made to meet them. Fresh levies were made both for the navy and for the army; supplementary bodies of militia were raised; plans suggested for the establishment of large bodies of irregular cavalry, and the enrolment as irregular infantry of all those who paid a gun license. More than this, in spite of the pressure on the finances, under which the funds had fallen as low as £53, a new loan of £18,000,000 was raised upon terms which, though we should now think very high, were not then considered remunerative. The loan, which bore a nominal interest of 5 per cent., was issued at £112, 10s.; that is, every £112, 10s. advanced was to represent £100, thus practically reducing the interest to less than 4½ per cent. Pitt found it necessary to make a distinct appeal to the loyalty of the people to raise the loan on these terms; but the temper of the wealthy classes and the amount of riches still existing in England were shown by the extraordinary rapidity with which the subscription list was filled. £1,000,000 was subscribed by the Bank in their corporate capacity, £400,000 by the directors individually; before the close of the first day £5,000,000 was subscribed by different merchants. At ten o'clock on the Monday the doors were opened, and by twenty minutes past eleven the subscription was declared to be full; hundreds were reluctantly obliged to go away. By the post innumerable orders came from the country, scarcely one of which could be accepted, and long after the subscription was closed persons continued coming, and were obliged to depart disappointed.[13] The Duke of Bridgewater sent a draft on sight of £100,000, a similar sum was even given by the Duke of Bedford, one of the staunchest opponents of the war. The Ministry subscribed £10,000 a piece.

French expeditions to Bantry Bay and Bristol.