It founded national rewards for great discoveries.
It gave lavish help to artists and savants.
It offered a prize for the perfecting of the art of spinning.
It ordered the publication of a translation of Bacon’s works found among the papers of one of the condemned on the 9th of Thermidor.
It decided that scientific voyages should be organised at the expense of the State, and that the Republic be charged with the maintenance of artists sent to Rome.
It decreed the adoption, began the discussion, and voted the most important articles of the civil code.
It inaugurated the telegraph and the decimal system, established the uniformity of weights and measures, the bureau of longitudes, reformed the calendar, instituted the Grand Livre, increased and completed the Museum of Natural History, opened the Museum of the Louvre, created the Conservatoire of the Arts and Crafts, the Conservatoire of Music, the Polytechnic School and the Institute.
The truly great work of education initiated by the Convention can only be appreciated by recalling its previous condition. The old colleges were utterly neglected. In such as survived, little more than Latin (and that inefficiently) and a few scraps of history were taught. The natural sciences were wholly neglected; the children of the noblesse were educated by private tutors, and only in showy accomplishments. Madame Campan relates that the Princess Louise had not even mastered the alphabet at twelve years of age.
The Convention abolished negro slavery in the French colonies, and Wilberforce reminded a hostile House of Commons that infidel and anarchic France had given example to Christian England in the work of emancipation. In 1793 it was reported to the Convention that the aged Goldoni had been in receipt of a pension from the ancien régime and was now dependent on the slender resources of a compassionate nephew: the Convention at once decreed as an act of justice and beneficence that the pension of 4000 livres should be renewed, and all arrears paid up. This is but one of many acts of grace and succour among the records of the Convention. The same day, 7th February, an artist of Toulouse was awarded 3000 livres. It is curious to read in the journals of early ’93 how fully assured the revolutionists were of the sympathy of England, “that proud and generous nation, whose name alone, like that of Rome, evokes ideas of liberty and independence,” their appeals to the English nation, whose example they had followed, not to allow the quarrels of kings to embroil them in a conflict fatal to humanity. At the meetings of the Jacobins, flags of England, America and France were unfurled, with cries of “Vivent les trois peuples libres.”
The closing months of ’95 were sped with those whiffs of grape shot from the Pont Royal and the Rue St. Honoré, that shattered the last attempt, this time by the Royalists, at government by insurrection. The Convention closed its stupendous career, and five Directors of the Republic met in a room furnished with an old table, a sheet of paper and an ink-bottle, and set about organising France for a normal and progressive national life. But Europe had by her fatuous interference with the internal affairs of France sown dragons’ teeth indeed. A nation of armed men had sprung forth, nursing hatred of monarchy and habituated to victory. “Eh, bien, mes enfants,” cried a French general before an engagement when provisions were wanting to afford a meal for his troops, “we will breakfast after the victory.” But militarism invariably ends in autocracy. The author of those whiffs of grape shot was appointed in 1796 Commander-in-Chief of the army of Italy, and a new and sinister complexion was given to the policy of the Republic. “Soldiers,” cries Napoleon, “you are half-starved and almost naked; the Government owes you much but can do nothing for you. Your patience, your courage do you honour, but win for you neither glory nor profit. I am about to lead you into the most fertile plains of the world; you will find there great cities and rich provinces; there you will reap honour, glory and riches. Soldiers of Italy, will you lack courage?” This frank appeal to the baser motives that sway men’s minds, this open avowal of a personal ambition, was the beginning of the end of Jacobinism in France. Soon the wealth of Italy streamed into the bare coffers of the Directory:—20,000,000 of francs from Lombardy, 12,000,000 from Parma and Modena, 35,000,000 from the Papal States, an equally large sum from Tuscany; one hundred finest horses of Lombardy to the five Directors, “to replace the sorry nags that now draw your carriages”; convoys of priceless manuscripts and sculpture and pictures to adorn the galleries of Paris. So persistent were these raids on the collections of art in Italy that Napoleon is known there to this day as il gran ladrone. The chief duty of the new French officials in Italy, said Lucien Bonaparte, is to supervise the packing of pictures and statues for Paris. No less than 5233 of these works of art were confiscated by the Allies in 1815, and returned to their former owners.