LV

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AND THE RESTORATION OF MONARCHY

IN FRANCE

had hardly Thirteen Colonies in America

lost the
before a profound social and political convulsion at the very
BRITAIN heart of Grand Monarchy was to remind Europe still more
vividly of the essentially temporary nature of the political arrange-
ments of the world.
We have said that the French monarchy was the most suc-
cessful of the personal monarchies in Europe. It was the envy
and model of a multitude of competing and minor courts. But
it on a basis of injustice that led to its dramatic collapse.
flourished
It was brilliant and aggressive, but it was wasteful of the life and
substance of its common people. The clergy and nobility were
protected from taxation by a system of exemption that threw the
whole burden of the state upon the middle and lower classes. The
peasants were ground down by taxation; the middle classes were
dominated and humiliated by the nobility.
In 1787 this French monarchy found itself bankrupt and obliged
to call representatives of the different classes of the realm into
consultation upon the perplexities of defective income and excessive
expenditure. In 1789 the States General, a gathering of the nobles,
clergy and commons, roughly equivalent to the earlier form of the
British Parliament, was called together at Versailles. It had not
assembled since 1610. For all that time France had been an abso-
lute monarchy. Now the people found a means of expressing their
long fermenting discontent. Disputes immediately broke out
between the three estates, due to the resolve of the Third Estate, the
Commons, to control the Assembly. The Commons got the better
of these disputes and the States General became a National As-
sembly, clearly resolved to keep the crown in order, as the British
34i
342 A Short History of the World

Parliament kept the British crown in order. The king (Louis XVI)
prepared for a struggle and brought up troops from the provinces.
Whereupon Paris and France revolted.
The collapse of the absolute monarchy was very swift. The
grim-looking prison of the Bastille was stormed by the people of
Paris, and the insurrection spread rapidly throughout France. In
the east and north-west provinces many chateaux belonging to the
nobility were burnt by the peasants, their title-deeds carefully
destroyed, and the owners murdered or driven away. In a month
the ancient and decayed system of the aristocratic order had col-
lapsed. Many of the leading princes and courtiers of the queen's

party fled abroad. A

provisional city government was set up in
Paris and in most of the other large cities, and a new armed force,
the National Guard, a force designed primarily and plainly to
resist the forces of the crown, was brought into existence by these

municipal bodies. The National Assembly found itself called

upon to create a new political and social system for a new age.
It was a task that tried the powers of that gathering to the
utmost. It made a great sweep
of the chief injustices of the absolut-
ist regime; it abolished tax exemptions, serfdom, aristocratic titles

and privileges and sought to establish a constitutional monarchy

in Paris. The king abandoned Versailles and its splendours and
kept a diminished state in the palace of the Tuileries in Paris.
For two years it seemed that the National Assembly might
struggle through to an effective modernized government. Much
work was sound and still endures, if much was experimental
of its
and had to be undone. Much was ineffective. There was a clear-
ing up of the penal code; torture, arbitrary imprisonment and
persecutions for heresy were abolished. The ancient provinces of
France, Normandy, Burgundy and the like gave place to eighty
departments. Promotion to the highest ranks in the army was
laid open to men of every class. An excellent and simple system
of law courts was set up, but its value was much vitiated by having
the judges appointed by popular election for short periods of time.
This made the crowd a sort of final court of appeal, and the judges,
like the members of the Assembly, were forced to play to the gallery.
And the whole vast property of the church was seized and ad-
 The French Revolution 343

ministered by the state; religious establishments not engaged in

education or works of charity were broken up, and the salaries of
the clergy made a charge upon the nation. This in itself was not a
bad thing who were often scandalously
for the lower clergy in France,

underpaid in comparison with the richer dignitaries. But in addi-

tion the choice of priests and bishops was made elective, which
struck at the very root idea of the Roman Church, which centred
everything upon the Pope, and in which all authority is from above
downward. Practically the National Assembly wanted at one
blow to make the church France Protestant, in organization if
in
not in doctrine. Everywhere there were disputes and conflicts
between the state priests created by the National Assembly and the
recalcitrant (non-juring) priests who were loyal to Rome.
In 1791 the experiment of Constitutional monarchy in France
was brought to an abrupt end by the action of the king and queen,
working in concert with their aristocratic and monarchist friends
abroad. Foreign armies gathered on the Eastern frontier and
one night in June the king and queen and their children slipped
away from the Tuileries and fled to join the foreigners and the
aristocratic exiles. They were caught at Varennes and brought
back to Paris, and all France flamed up into a passion of patriotic
republicanism. A Republic was proclaimed, open war with Austria
and Prussia ensued, and the king was tried and executed (January,
1793) on the model already set by England, for treason to his people.
And now followed a strange phase in the history of the French
people. There arose a great flame of enthusiasm for France and
the Republic. There was to be an end to compromise at home
and abroad; at home royalists and every form of disloyalty were
to be stamped out; abroad France was to be the protector and
helper of all revolutionaries. All Europe, all the world, was to
become Republican. The youth of France poured into the Re-
publican armies; a new and wonderful song spread through the
land, a song that still warms the blood like wine, the Marseillaise.
Before that chant and the leaping columns of French bayonets and
their enthusiastically served guns the foreign armies rolled back;
before the end of 1792 the French armies had gone far beyond the
utmost achievements of Louis XIV; everywhere they stood on
344 A Short History of the World

foreign soil. They were in Brussels, they had overrun Savoy, they
had raided to Mayence; they had seized the Scheldt from Holland.
Then the French Government did an unwise thing. It had been
exasperated by the expulsion of its representative from England
upon the execution of Louis, and it declared war against England.
It was an unwise thing to do, because the revolution which had

given France a new enthusiastic infantry and a brilliant artillery

THE TRIAL OF LOUIS XVI

(From a print in the British Museum.)

released from its aristocratic officers and many cramping conditions

had destroyed the discipline of the navy, and the English were
supreme upon the sea. And this provocation united all England
against France, whereas there had been at first a very considerable
liberal movement Great Britain in sympathy with the revolution.
in
Of the made in the next few years against
fight that France
a European coalition we cannot tell in any detail. She drove the
Austrians for ever out of Belgium, and made Holland a republic.
The Dutch fleet, frozen in the Texel, surrendered to a handful of
 The French Revolution 345

cavalry without firing For some time the French thrust

its guns.
towards Ita y was hung up, and it was only in 1796 that a new
general, Napoleon Bonaparte, led the ragged and hungry republican
armies in triumph across Piedmont to Mantua and Verona. Says
C. F. Atkinson, "What astonished the Allies most of all was the
1

number and the velocity of the Republicans. These improvised

armies had in fact nothing to delay them. Tents were unprocurable
for want of money, untransportable for want of the enormous
number of wagons that would have been required, and also un-
necessary, for the discomfort that wou d have caused wholesale
desertion in professional armies was cheerfully borne by the men of
1793-94. Supplies for armies of then unheard-of size could not be
carried in convoys, and the French soon became familiar with
'living on the country.' Thus 1793 saw the birth of the modern
system of war rapidity of movement, full development of national
strength, bivouacs, requisitions and force as against cautious
manoeuvring, small professional armies, tents and full rations, and
chicane. The first represented the decision-compelling spirit, the
second the spirit of risking little to gain a little. ..."
And while these ragged hosts of enthusiasts were chanting the
Marseillaise and fighting for la France, manifestly never quite
clear in their minds whether they were looting or liberating the
countries into which they poured, the republican enthusiasm in Paris
was spending itself in a far less glorious fashion. The revolution
was now under the sway of a fanatical leader, Robespierre. This
man is difficult to judge; he was a man of poor physique, naturally
timid, and a prig. But he had that most necessary gift for power,
faith. He set himself to save the Republic as he conceived it,

and he imagined it could be saved by no other man than he.

So
that to keep in power was to save the Republic. The living spirit
of the Republic, it seemed, had sprung from a slaughter of royalists
and the execution of the king. There were insurrections; one
in the west, in the district of La Vendee, where the people rose

against the conscription and against the dispossession of the orthodox

clergy, and were led by noblemen and priests; one in the south,
where Lyons and Marseilles had risen and the royalists of Toulon
1
In his article, "French Revolutionary Wars," in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
346 A Short History of the World

had admitted an English and Spanish garrison. To which there

seemed no more effectual reply than to go on killing royalists.
The Revolutionary Tribunal went to work, and a steady slaugh-
tering began. The invention of the guillotine was opportune to
this mood. The queen was guillotined, most of Robespierre's
antagonists were guillotined, atheists who argued that there was
no Supreme Being were guillotined; day by day, week by week,

THE EXECUTION OF MARIE ANTOINETTE, QUEEN OF FRANCE, OCTOBER 16, 1793

(From a print in the British Museum)

this infernal new machine chopped heads and more heads and
off

more. The on blood; and

reign of Robespierre lived, it seemed,
needed more and more, as an opium-taker needs more and more
opium.
Finally in the summer of 1794 Robespierre himself was over-
thrown and guillotined. He was succeeded by a Directory of five
men which carried on the war of defence abroad and held France
together at home for five years. Their reign formed a curious
interlude in this history of violent changes. They took things
 The French Revolution 347

as they found them. The propagandist zeal of the revolution

carried the French armies into Holland, Belgium, Switzerland,
south Germany and north Italy. Everywhere kings were expelled
and republics set up. But such propagandist zeal as animated
the Directorate did not prevent the looting of the treasures of
the liberated peoples to relieve the financial embarrassment of the
French Government. Their wars became less and less the holy
wars of freedom, and more and more like the aggressive wars of
the ancient regime. The last feature of Grand Monarchy that
France was disposed to discard was her tradition of foreign policy.
One discovers it still as vigorous under the Directorate as if there
had been no revolution.
Unhappily for France and the world a man arose who embodied
in its intensest form this national egotism of the French. He gave
that country ten years of glory and the humiliation of a final defeat.
This was that same Napoleon Bonaparte who had led the armies
of the Directory to victory in Italy.

Throughout the five years of the Directorate he had been schem-

ing and working for self -advancement. Gradually he clambered to
supreme power. He was a man of severely limited understanding
but of ruthless directness and great energy. He had begun life
as an extremist of the school of Robespierre; he owed his first promo-
tion to that side; but he had no real grasp of the new forces that
were working in Europe. His utmost political imagination carried
him to a belated and tawdry attempt to restore the Western Empire.
He tried to destroy the remains of the oldHoly Roman Empire,
intending to replace by
it a new one centring upon Paris. The
Emperor in Vienna ceased to be the Holy Roman Emperor and
became simply Emperor of Austria. Napoleon divorced his French
wife in order to marry an Austrian princess.
He became practically monarch of France as First Consul in
1799, and he made himself Emperor of France in 1804 in direct
imitation of Charlemagne. He was crowned by the Pope in Paris,
taking the crown from the Pope and putting it upon his own head
himself as Charlemagne had directed. His son was crowned King
of Rome.
For some years Napoleon's reign was a career of victory. He
34 8 A Short History of the World

conquered most of Italy and Spain, defeated Prussia and Austria,

and dominated all Europe west of Russia. But he never won the
command of the sea from the British and his fleets sustained a con-
clusive defeat inflicted by the British Admiral Nelson at Trafalgar
(1805). Spain rose against him in 1808 and a British army under
Wellington thrust the French armies slowly northward out of the
peninsula. In 1811 Napoleon came into conflict with the Tsar
Alexander I, and in 1812 he invaded Russia with a great conglom-
eratearmy of 600,000 men, that was defeated and largely destroyed
by the Russians and the Russian winter. Germany rose against
him, Sweden turned against him. The French armies were beaten
back and at Fontainebleau Napoleon abdicated (1814). He was
exiled to Elba, returned to France for one last effort in 1815 and
was defeated by the allied British,Belgians and Prussians at Water-
loo. He died a British prisoner at St. Helena in 1821.
The forces released by the French revolution were wasted and
finished. A great Congress of the victorious allies met at Vienna
to restore as far as possible the state of affairs that the great storm
had rent to pieces. For nearly forty years a sort of peace, a peace
of exhausted effort, was maintained in Europe.