It was this slow, vacillating, indecisive course of the former revolution which generated all the causes that conspired to defeat it. The Bastile was stormed in 1789. It was not until the latter part of 1792 that the unfortunate monarch was deposed. During these three years, though strokes of great boldness were struck, one after another, yet none of them were of a decisive character: none of them indicated a fixed point at which the revolution was to stop: while they were all of a character to alarm, to exasperate and to raise up powerful enemies to the revolution both at home and abroad.
Thus, in 1789 privileges and distinctions of orders were abolished, and the hitherto sacred revenues of the church suffered a deep encroachment.
In 1790 titles of nobility, with all their insignia of emblasoned arms and feudal power, were annihilated, and the estates attached to them were seized for the public use. These measures drove from France a numerous and powerful body of emigrants, inflamed with resentment and despair, who preached up, at every court in Europe, the cause of kings, which they represented, with reason, to be menaced with general destruction; and they left in France an equally numerous and powerful body of malcontents, whose cabals kept every part of the kingdom in a state of constant ferment and insurrection. The people, released at once from the restraints of the clergy and of their feudal lords, and suddenly become their own masters, without the discretion necessary for their guidance, became licentious and turbulent, and the whole kingdom presented a scene of riot and disorder which there were no laws to repress. And now was hatched that political hydra, the Jacobin faction, which no Frenchman will ever be able to remember without an involuntary shudder.
In 1791 the affrighted king made an unsuccessful attempt to escape with his family. They were arrested near the confines of the kingdom and brought back to Paris under the most humiliating circumstances; but still he was acknowledged to be the king of France, and a constituent part of the existing government. A new constitution was then framed, to which he was required to take an oath of obedience, and he took it per force. The leading patriots, who had nothing more in view than the enjoyment of rational liberty under a regular government, attempted to stop the revolution at the point of a limited monarchy. Mirabeau, that prodigy of genius and vice, was believed to have been of this number. The virtuous Lafayette certainly was, and so was a host of others of the brightest names in France. But
the ball had rolled beyond their reach, and had acquired a momentum which they could no longer control. A set of unprincipled men, engendered by the slow progress of the revolution, had, by their flatteries and appeals to the worst passions of the populace, worked themselves up to the head of affairs and drove on the revolution before the storm, without any fixed object on their own part.
These infamous men infused suspicions into the minds of the people against their best friends, and even Lafayette had to defend himself against their accusations.
In 1792 the king was tried, condemned and deposed, and a republic was established; but it was a republic of bedlamites. The revolution now assumed a most dreadful form. France, delivered up, at once, to the fury of a foreign and a civil war, and at the same time rent asunder by the most frightful anarchy, exhibited a picture which the heart quails to contemplate even at this distance of time. All was chaos and confusion, and Lafayette perceiving that the great object for which he had contended was lost, retired from the kingdom, and was doomed to mourn, for years, in an Austrian dungeon, the disappointment of his patriot hopes.
In 1793 the amiable and unfortunate king was torn from his family, and bade adieu, on the scaffold, to all the troubles of life; and thenceforth the guillotine streamed with the blood of the best patriots of France. No confidence existed any where. Every one was distrusted. Generals, whose victories had shed the highest glory upon their country, were called from the head of their armies to perish in disgrace. Denunciation and massacre were the order of the day. Suspicion became full proof, and every accusation was fatal. To consummate the horror of the scene, the christian religion was formally abolished, and a sort of heathen worship was substituted in its place. The republic was dissolved,
the government was declared to be revolutionary, and a dictatorship was established, compared with which those of Marius and Sylla formed a golden age. Terror, death, and rapine walked abroad in triumph, and the diabolical spirits which had set the mischief afoot, hovered over the bloody spectacle and mocked at the misery which they had created.
In 1794 the ruffians, Danton and Robespierre, fell in succession, and expiated their crimes (if indeed such crimes be expiable at all) on that guillotine which they had so often deluged with the blood of innocence, even of female innocence and beauty. But the reign of terror still held on its course. The government was continually shifting its form. In truth, there was virtually no government at all. It was one continued scene of anarchy and confusion. Those terrible factions, the Jacobin, the Gironde, the Mountain, in their struggles for power, and their alternate ascendancy, continued to exhibit France as one great slaughter-house of human victims, without regard to guilt or innocence, sex or age. The whole nation seemed to have been metamorphosed into a nation of demons, wild and frightful, and drunk with human blood, with which they seemed incapable of being satiated.