Those Englishmen whose tastes and sympathies induced them to keep in touch with political opinion in France, and to watch with interest the spread of ideas which they themselves held dear, noted with approval many remarkable {293} signs of activity across the Channel. While the strain upon the false financial system of France had become so great that the attempt to stop the hole in the money chest broke the spirit of finance minister after finance minister, a feeling in favor of some change in the system that made such catastrophes possible seemed to be on the increase in educated and even in aristocratic circles. Many Englishmen of that day knew France, or at least Paris, fairly well. If Pitt had paid the French capital but a single visit, Fox was intimately acquainted with it, and Walpole was almost as familiar with a superficial Paris as he was with a superficial London. Dr. Johnson, not very long before the time of which we write, had visited Paris with his friends the Thrales, and had made the acquaintance of a brewer named Santerre. Arthur Young travelled in France as he travelled in England and in Ireland. On the other hand, Frenchmen who were soon to be conspicuous advocates of change were not unknown on the English side of the Channel. Mirabeau was known in London—not too favorably—and the cousin of the French King, the Duke de Chartres, afterwards Duke of Orleans, had moved in London society and was to move there again. So when educated Englishmen heard that Lafayette had demanded the revival of the States-General, unused and almost forgotten these two centuries, they knew that the friend of Washington was not likely to ask for impossibilities. When the Duke of Orleans set himself openly in opposition to the King, his cousin, they recognized a significance in the act, and when Mirabeau asserted himself as the champion of a growing agitation in favor of an oppressed and unrepresented people they remembered the big, vehement man who had passed so much of his life in prisons and had played the spy upon the Prussian Court. Gradually prepared for some change in the administrative system of France, they were not prepared for the rapid succession of changes that followed upon the formal convocation of the States-General in the spring of 1789.
The States-General was the nearest approach to a representative parliamentary system that was known to France. {294} But the States-General had not been summoned to aid the deliberations of a French monarch in the course of many reigns. France had lived under what was practically a despotism untempered by an expression of organized public opinion for several generations. It was so long since the States-General had been convoked that the very forms and ceremonies incidental to or essential to its convocation had passed out of living memory, and had to be painfully ascertained by much groping after authority and precedent. In the end, however, authority and precedent were ascertained, and the States-General, composed of representatives of the three estates of the realm—the Church, the Nobility, and the People—met with much ceremony at Versailles. They were called together for the ostensible purpose of dealing with the financial difficulties that threatened to make the country bankrupt. But it was soon clear that they, or at least the majority of their members, intended to accomplish much more than that. The news that travelled slowly in those days from the capital of France to the capital of England grew to be interesting and important with an interest and an importance that were not to cease in steady activity for more than a quarter of a century. Event followed event with startling rapidity. The members of the Third Estate severed themselves from the Church and the Nobility, met in the Tennis Court in Versailles, and declared themselves a National Assembly. The people of Paris, profoundly agitated, and fearing that the King intended to suppress the insurgent National Assembly by force, broke out into riots, which culminated in an attack upon the famous and detested prison in the Faubourg St. Antoine, the Bastille. The Bastille had not for many years been a serious instrument of oppression, but its record was an evil record, and it represented in the eyes of the people of Paris all that was most detested and most detestable in the old order. The Bastille was captured; its few prisoners were borne in triumph through the streets, while its commander, De Launay, was decapitated and his head carried about on the point of a pike.
[Sidenote: 1789—The French Revolution]
If the King of France had been a different man from {295} Louis the Sixteenth he might have faced the rising storm with some hope of success. But he could do nothing, would do nothing. His advisers, his intimates, his kinsmen, his captains, despairing at his vacillation and fearing that they would be abandoned to the fury of insurgent Paris, fled for their lives from a country that seemed to them as if possessed by a devil. The country was possessed, possessed by the spirit of revolution. After ages of injustice a chance had come for the oppressed, and the oppressed had seized their chance and misused it, as the long oppressed always misuse sudden power. Rebellious Paris marched upon Versailles, camped outside the King's palace; broke in the night time into the King's palace, slaying and seeking to slay. The Royal Family were rescued, if rescue it can be called, by the interposition of Lafayette. They were carried in triumph to Paris. Still nominally sovereign, they were practically prisoners in their palace of the Tuileries. Europe looked on in astonishment at the unexpected outbreak. In England at first the leaders of liberal opinion applauded what they believed to be the dawn of a new and glorious era of political freedom. Fox hailed in a rapture of exultation the fall of the Bastille. The Duke of Dorset, the English ambassador to France, saluted the accomplishment of the greatest revolution recorded by history. Eager young men, nameless then but yet to be famous, apostrophised the dawn of liberty. "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven," Wordsworth wrote, with a wistful regret, fifteen years after the Bastille had fallen, recalling with a kind of tragic irony the emotions of that hour and contrasting them with his thoughts on the events that had followed through half a generation. All over England strenuous politicians, catching the contagion of excitement from excited France, formulated their sympathy with the Revolution in ardent, eloquent addresses, formed themselves into clubs to propagate the principles that were making France free and illustrious, and sent delegates speeding across the Channel to convey to a confident, constitution-making National Assembly the {296} assurance that the best hearts and the wisest brains in England pulsed and moved in unison with their desires.
[Sidenote: 1790—Burke and the French Revolution]
Such assurances were inaccurate and misleading. There was one man in England the goodness of whose heart, the wisdom of whose brain could scarcely be questioned, whose censure in England, and not in England alone, was more serious than the applause of a whole theatre of others. At a moment when all who represented liberal thought in politics, all who some ten years earlier had sympathized with the American colonists, were showing a like sympathy for the insurgent people of France, Edmund Burke made himself conspicuous by the vehemence and the vigor of his opposition to a movement which commanded the admiration of his most intimate friends and closest political allies. While the Revolution was still almost in its infancy, while Sheridan and Fox vied with each other in the warmth of their applause, Burke set himself to preach a crusade against the Revolution with all the unrestrained ardor of his uncompromising nature. No words of Fox or of Sheridan, no resolution of clubs, no delegated enthusiasm had anything like the same effect in aiding, that Burke's famous pamphlet had in injuring the French Revolution, in the eyes not merely of the mass of the English people, but in the eyes of a very great number of people in the countries of Europe. People whose business it was to be king, to use the famous phrase of a then reigning prince, readily welcomed Burke's "Reflexions on the French Revolution," which was soon disseminated all over the Continent in a French translation. Naturally enough it appealed to the Emperor of Germany, to the Empress Catherine of Russia, to the French princes sheltering in Coblentz and boasting of the revenge they would take on the Revolution when the King should enjoy his own again. Naturally enough it appealed to George the Third as a book which every gentleman ought to read. Kings and princes everywhere, who felt that at any moment their own thrones might begin to rock unsteadily beneath them, inevitably applauded the unexpected assistance of the greatest orator and thinker of his age.
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Such applause alone would not have made Burke's pamphlet the formidable weapon that it proved to be in the hands of reaction, or have brought about the grave results that may be directly attributed to Burke's pen. The words of Burke created, the breath of Burke fanned, a public opinion in England and abroad that was in direct antagonism to everything that was meant by those who formed and who guided or were driven by the Revolution. It would be hard to find a parallel in history for the influence thus exerted by a single man against so great a force. All the conservatism of Burke's nature—the conservatism that led him to regard the English Parliamentary system of his day as well-nigh ideally perfect, and that prompted him to resist so steadily and so successfully Pitt's proposals of Parliamentary reform—concentrated itself against what he believed to be the spirit of anarchy newly arisen in France. The Revolution was but a year old, and was as yet unstained by the worst excesses of the Terror, when Burke launched his bolt, shouted his battle-cry, and animated Europe to arms. It must be admitted that many of the evils which Burke prophesied in his review of the nascent revolution were the stigmas of its prime. From the premises he beheld he drew clear and definite conclusions, which were only too unhappily verified as the tide of revolution flowed. But it must also be remembered that Burke was himself in no small measure the cause of the realization of his own dark and tragic prognostications. Burke's arguments, Burke's eloquence, Burke's splendid ability were among the most potent factors in animating the hopes of the refugee princes, of inspiriting their allies, and of forming that ill-advised and disastrous coalition of the Powers against France which Danton answered with the head of a king. It was the genius of Burke that stemmed the sympathy between England and a nation struggling to be free; it was the genius of Burke that fostered the spirit of animosity to France which began with the march upon Paris, and which ended after the disastrous defeats of the invaders, the deaths of the King and Queen, and all the agonies of the Terror, in {298} creating for England, in common with Europe at large, the most formidable enemy that she had ever known.
In spite of Burke and Burke's melancholy vaticinations the course of the Revolution in France seemed at first to most liberal-minded Englishmen to move along reasonable lines and to confine itself within the bounds of moderation. The excesses and outrages that followed immediately upon the first upheaval, the murders of Foulon and Berthier in Paris, the peasant war upon the castles, were regarded as the unavoidable, deplorable ebullitions of a long dormant force which, under the guidance of capable and honorable men, would be directed henceforward solely to the establishment of a stable and popular system of government. The men who were, or who seemed to be, at the head of affairs in France had names that for the most part commended themselves to such Englishmen as had anything more than a superficial knowledge of the country. The fame of Lafayette, the hero of the American war, seemed to answer for the conduct of the army. In Bailly, the astronomer whom unhappy chance had made Mayor of Paris, constitutionalism recognized a man after its own heart. The majority of the members of the National Assembly seemed to be gloriously occupied in evolving out of the chaos of the old order a new and entirely admirable framework of laws modelled boldly after the English pattern. Most English observers thought, in opposition to Burke, what the majority of the members of the National Assembly themselves thought, that the Revolution was an accomplished fact, a concluded page of history, brought about not indeed bloodlessly, but still, on the whole, with comparatively slight shedding of blood, considering the difficulty and the greatness of the accomplished thing. The practical imprisonment of the King and Queen within the walls of Paris, within the walls of the Tuileries, seemed no great hardship in the eyes of the Englishmen who sympathized with the aims of those of the French revolutionaries with whom they were acquainted. The French King himself seemed to be reconciled to his lot, to have joined himself frankly and {299} freely enough to the party of progress within his dominions, and to be as loyally eager to accept the new constitution which the National Assembly was busy framing as the most ardent patriot among its members. Even the flight of the Royal Family, the attempted flight that began with such laborious pomp at Paris to end in such pitiful disaster at Varennes, the flight that condemned the King and Queen to a restraint far more rigorous than before, did not greatly disturb British equanimity.
[Sidenote: 1791—Burke and the coalition against France]