There was widespread squalor and misery in Paris during the winter of 1795, and Napoleon showed tact as well as kindness and firmness in preventing tumult. Consider that little picture which is usually passed over so lightly: an angry mob of the unemployed, hungry, desperate, threatening, and on the brink of violence. They suffer, their wives starve, their children die in the garrets. Of course they blame the government. How could such misery exist where there was so much wealth and food, if the government was treating all fairly? Furious women stir about in the crowd lashing the upper classes with bitter tongues, and goading the men on to the point of rioting. Napoleon and his escort arrive. One fat fisherwoman bustles and bawls: “Don’t mind these dandies in uniform with epaulettes on their shoulders! Don’t disperse! They care not if the poor people starve, if they can but eat well and grow fat.”
Think of Napoleon, the leanest of all lean men, “the thinnest and oddest object I ever laid eyes on,” sitting there on his horse representing the unpopular “they”! “Madame, pray look at me: tell us which of us two is the fatter.” The paunchy fisherwoman was stunned; the crowd laughed, and fell to pieces.
CHAPTER IX
The young Republic found itself beset by the old governments of Europe. Because the Revolution proclaimed a new gospel, because it asserted the divine right of the people to govern themselves, because it made war upon caste and privilege, because it asserted the equal right of every citizen to take his share in the benefits as well as the burdens of society, because it threatened the tyranny of both Church and State, it was hated with intense bitterness by the kings, the high-priests, and the aristocracy of Europe.
In 1793 the first great league was formed to crush it, and to restore the Old Order in France. The strong member of this combination against human progress was Great Britain. Rendered secure from attack by her ocean girdle and her invincible fleets, she nevertheless dreaded what were called “French principles.” In these principles she saw everything to dread; for they were most insidious, and few were the men of the masses who, having learned what the new doctrine was, did not embrace it.
The common man, the average man, the full-grown man, the man who had not been stunted by the Orthodox pedagogue or priest, could not listen to the creed of the French republicans without feeling in his heart of hearts that it offered to the world an escape from the system which then enslaved it. Into Great Britain, in Germany, in Italy, in the Netherlands, in Russia itself, the shock with which the Old Order had fallen in France sent its vibrations—tremors which made the kings, princes, and privileged who dwelt in the upper stories of the social fabric quake with terror for the safety of the entire building.
The controlling man in England was William Pitt, able, proud, cold, ambitious. Personally honest, his policy sounded the deepest depravities of statecraft. Under his administration India was looted, ravaged, enslaved; Ireland coerced and dragooned; France outlawed because she dared to kill a king and call into life a republic; Europe bribed to a generation of war; freedom of thought, and speech, and conduct denied, and the cause of feudalism given a new lease of life. The aims and ends of this man’s statesmanship were eternally bad; his methods would have warmed the heart of a Jesuit. He would not stoop to base deeds himself, would not speak the deliberately false word, would not convey the bribe, would not manufacture counterfeit money, would not arm the assassin, would not burn cities nor massacre innocent women and children. No, no!—he belonged to what Lord Wolseley complacently calls “the highest type of English gentleman,” and his lofty soul would not permit him to do things like these himself. He would not corrupt Irish politicians to vote for the Union; but he would supply Castlereagh with the money from which the bribes were paid. He would not himself debauch editor or pamphleteer to slander a political foe, and deceive the British nation; but he supplied funds to those who did. Nor would he have put daggers into the hands of fanatics that they might do murder; but he protected and aided in England those who did. Not a political criminal himself, he used criminals and garnered the harvest of their crimes. Not himself capable of political theft, he countenanced the political thief, approved his success, and as a receiver of stolen goods, knowing them to have been stolen, haughtily added huge gains to his political wealth.
The same lofty-minded minister who had debauched Ireland—an enemy to Irish independence—made war upon free speech and political liberty in England, and exhausted the resources of diplomacy and force to stamp out the revolutionary movement of France. Under his sanction, his emissaries attacked the French Republic by forging and counterfeiting her paper currency; by arming her factions the one against the other; by corrupting her trusted leaders; by nerving the hand of the assassin when the corruptionist could not prevail. That London harbored the Bourbon and his paid assassin was due to the influence of William Pitt. That the Bourbon could land on the French coast the emissaries who came to rouse Vendeans to revolt, or to murder Bonaparte in Paris, was due to the position of William Pitt.
To the same eminent statesman was due the fact that for a whole generation British newspapers were so filled with falsehoods against France and Napoleon that an Englishman could not know the truth without leaving his country to hear it. To the same cause was due the league after league of Europe against France, which, beginning in 1793, reunited and renewed the struggle as often as opportunity offered until France was crushed, and the hands upon the clock of human progress put back a hundred years.