To the mind of Burke, however, his prophecies were already justifying themselves. He could see nothing in the Revolution but its errors, and he hailed the coalition of Europe against France as a league of light against the powers of darkness. He broke away furiously from his friends and allies of so many great political battles. He could not understand, he could not bear to realize that men who had struggled with him to champion the rights of the American colonists, and to punish the offences of Warren Hastings, should now be either avowed sympathizers with or indifferent spectators of the events that were passing in France. He had loved Charles Fox greatly ever since Fox had shaken off the traditions of Toryism and become the most conspicuous champion of liberal ideas in England. But he could not and would not forgive him for his attitude towards the French Revolution and the French Revolutionists. Burke saw nothing but evil in, thought nothing but evil could come of, what was happening in France, and he feared disasters for his own country if it became impregnated with the poison of the revolutionary doctrine. That Fox should in any way advocate that doctrine made him in Burke's eyes an enemy of England, and not merely of England but of the whole human race. There was no middle way with Burke. Those who were not with him were against him, not merely as a politician, but as a man. To the day of his death, in 1797, he hated the Revolution and denied his friendship to those who expressed anything less than execration for its principles and its makers. Although it is always easy to exaggerate the influence that any single spirit may have upon a movement embracing {300} many nationalities and many different orders of mind, it would be difficult to overestimate the effect of Burke's words and Burke's actions in animating the coalition of monarchical Europe against insurgent France. And upon a responsibility for the intervention of other States in the affairs of France depends also a proportionate degree of responsibility for the results of that intervention. Burke was to see all the horrors he had so eloquently anticipated realized as the direct consequence of the invasion of France by the allied armies. The French people in the very hour in which they believed their cherished revolution to be an accomplished fact saw it menaced by the formidable league which proposed to bring the King's brothers back in triumph from Coblentz, and which threatened, in the extraordinary language to which Brunswick put his name, to blot Paris from the map of Europe if any injury were done to the King, who had already formally accepted the constitution that the Revolution had created. Paris went mad with fear and rage. The September massacres, the attacks upon the Tuileries, the proclaimed republicanism of the Convention, the rise of the men of the Mountain, Marat, Danton, and Robespierre, the execution first of the King and then of the Queen, the dominion of the guillotine and the Reign of Terror, were the direct results of a coalition whose only excuse would have been its complete success. The coalition proved to be an absolute failure. To the cry that the country was in danger ragged legions of desperate men rushed to the frontiers, and, to the astonishment of the world, proved more than a match for the armies that were sent against them.
[Sidenote: 1789-92—Pitt and the French Revolution]
Pitt was not himself eager to see England dragged into the European quarrel with France. But it was not easy for a minister who loved popularity, and who very sincerely believed his presence at the head of affairs to be essential to the welfare of the State, to avoid being involved in the controversy. The result of the unsuccessful coalition had been to increase the crimes that marked the course of the French Revolution, and seemingly to justify the fierce indignation of Burke. The country that had {301} been profoundly impressed by Burke's eloquence was profoundly shocked by the horrors that lost nothing of their magnitude in the reports that crossed the Channel. The country was flooded with fugitives from France, emigrants who presented in themselves moving pictures of the sufferings of those who were opposed to the Revolution, and who were not slow to express their sense of the ruin that had fallen upon their country. King George's native shrewdness and native narrowness of mind had made him from the first an active opponent of the Revolution. He declared that if a stop were not put to French principles there would not be a king left in Europe in a few years. To him, whose business above all things it had been to be king, the prospect was unlovely and alarming. The fear that he felt for his office was shared in varying degree by all those who felt that they would have much to lose if the example set by France came to be followed in England. The Church and the aristocracy, with all wealthy and vested interests, were naturally ranked to resist by all means the spread of the new doctrines. There were a few noblemen who, like Lord Stanhope and Lord Lauderdale, professed themselves to be champions of the French Revolution; there were some statesmen among the Opposition who were either sympathizers with the Revolution or asserters of the doctrine that it was no part of England's duty to interfere with the way in which another nation chose to govern herself. But the strength of public opinion was against these, as it was against the minister who was as eager as any Englishman living to remain on good terms with France.
Pitt from the first had looked with a favorable eye upon the changes that were taking place across the Channel. To maintain a friendship with France was a radical part of his policy. Friendship with France was essential in his mind in order to combat the aggrandizement of Russia and Prussia, and friendship with France seemed more possible under an enlightened constitution than under a despotic king. While Burke, who could only make the House of Commons smile and sneer by his denunciations {302} of Jacobin intrigues and his display of Jacobin daggers, was playing on the heart-strings of England and reviving all the old hostility to France, Pitt pursued as long as he was allowed to pursue it a policy of absolute neutrality. But he was not long allowed to pursue that policy, although he reaped some reward for it in a proof that the French Government appreciated his intentions and shared his desire for friendship. An English settlement at Nootka Sound, in Vancouver Island, had been interfered with by Spain. England was ready to assert her rights in arms. Spain appealed to France for her aid by the terms of the Family Compact. The French King and the French Ministers were willing enough to engage in a war with England, in the hope of diverting the course and weakening the power of the Revolution. But the National Assembly, after a long and angry struggle, took away from the King the old right to declare war, save with the consent of the National Assembly, which consent the National Assembly, in that particular crisis, was decided not to give. Pitt was delighted at this proof of the friendly spirit of the French people and the advantage of his principle of neutrality. But he was not able to act upon that principle. The forces brought against him were too many and too potent for him to resist. From the King on the throne to the mob in the streets, who sacked the houses of citizens known to be in sympathy with the Revolution, the English people as a whole were against him. The people who sympathized with the Revolution, who made speeches for it in Westminster and formed Constitutional Clubs which framed addresses of friendship to France, were but a handful in the House of Commons, were but a handful in the whole country. Their existence dazzled and deluded the French Revolutionists into the belief that the heart of England was with them at a time when every feeling of self-interest and of sentiment in England was against them. Pitt clung desperately to peace. He thought, what the Opposition thought then and for long years later, that it was wisest to leave France to settle her internal affairs and her form of government in her own way. When England {303} no longer had an ambassador at the French capital Pitt adhered doggedly, tenaciously, to a peace policy; persisted in preserving the neutrality of Holland; was ready, were it only possible, only permitted to him, to recognize the new Republic. But even if the execution of Louis the Sixteenth had not roused irresistible indignation in England the action of the new Republic made the prolongation of peace an impossibility. When, in the winter of 1792, the Convention made the famous offer of its aid in arms to all peoples eager to be free, it must have been plain to Pitt that, with France in that temper and England tempest-tossed between hatred of the Revolution and fear lest its theories were being insidiously fostered in her own confines, the preservation of peace was a dream. The dream was finally dissipated when France made ready to attack Holland and, rejecting all possible negotiations, declared war in the early days of 1793.
[Sidenote: 1793—France declares war against Holland]
At first the war went ill with France, and if the German Powers had co-operated earnestly and honestly with England it is at least within the limits of possibility that Paris might have been occupied and the Revolution for the time retarded. France seemed to be circled by foes; her enemies abroad were aided by civil war at home. La Vendée was in Royalist revolt; Marseilles and Lyons rose against the tyranny of Paris; Toulon, turning against the Republic, welcomed an English fleet. For a moment the arms of England and the aims of the Allies seemed to have triumphed. But the passionate determination of the French popular leaders and the mass of the French people to save the Revolution seemed to inspire them with a heroism that grew in proportion to the threatened danger. Her armies were swollen with enthusiastic recruits. Her internal revolts were coped with and crushed with savage severity. Loyal La Vendée was beaten. The rebellious towns of Lyons and Marseilles almost ceased to exist under the merciless repression of their conquerors. Many of the allied armies were defeated, while those of the two German Powers for their own selfish ends played the game of revolutionary France by abstaining from any serious effort to {304} advance into the country. Germany and Austria were confident that they could whenever they pleased crush revolutionary France, and they preferred to postpone the process, in order to occupy themselves in a new partition of Poland, which they could scarcely have carried out if the French monarchy had been restored. If there was nothing to justify the conduct of the two German Powers, there was much to warrant their confidence in their own strength when they judged that the time had come for them to exert it. They counted upon the known when they measured their forces with those of revolutionary France; they could not count upon the unknown quantity which was to disturb all their calculations. The unknown quantity asserted itself just at the moment when France, in spite of some successes, seemed to be deeply wounded by the loss of Toulon.
With the great port of Toulon in their hands the adversaries of France might well believe that a serious blow had been struck at her strength, and that the spirit which so long had defied them might yet be broken. But the success which had seemed to menace France so gravely proved to be but the point of departure for a new era of French glory. The occupation of Toulon is forever memorable, because it gave an opportunity to a young lieutenant of artillery in the French service, quite obscure in that service and wholly unknown outside of it. The quick intelligence of this young soldier perceived that the seizure of a certain promontory left unguarded by the invaders would place Toulon and those who had held it at the mercy of the French cannon. The suggestion was acted upon; was entirely successful; the English admiral was obliged to retire with all his fleet, and Toulon was once again a French citadel garrisoned by French soldiers. But the importance of the event, for France and the world lay not in the capture but in the captor. Though Barras, confident in his dominion over the Directory, might sneer at the young adventurer from Corsica and minimize his share in a success that had suddenly made him conspicuous, the name of Bonaparte then for the first time took its {305} place in the history of Europe. The youth whose military genius had enabled him to see and to seize upon the fatal weakness in a well-defended city was destined to prove the greatest soldier France had ever known, the greatest as well as the most implacable enemy England had ever to reckon with, and one of the greatest conquerors that ever followed the star of conquest across the war-convulsed earth.
[Sidenote: 1793—Napoleon Bonaparte]
This is the story of England, not the story of France, and Napoleon was at his best and worst rather an influence upon than an integral part of English history. It must be enough to say here that he is assumed to have been born in Ajaccio, in Corsica, in 1769; that when he was ten years old he tried to become French rather than Italian—a feat which he never successfully accomplished—by entering the military school of Brienne; that he served Louis the Sixteenth with indifference and the Revolution with an ambition that was often baffled, and that he struck the first of his many strokes at England when he won Toulon for France.
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