A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD BY H. G. WELLS
55.THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AND THE RESTORATION OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE
Britain had hardly lost the Thirteen Colonies in America before a profound social and political convulsion at the very heart of Grand Monarchy was to remind Europe still more vividly of the essentially temporary nature of the political arrangements of the world.
We have said that the French monarchy was the most successful of the personal monarchies in Europe. It was the envy and model of a multitude of competing and minor courts. But it flourished on a basis of injustice that led to its dramatic collapse. 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 absolute 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 Assembly, clearly resolved to keep the crown
in order, as the British 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 collapsed. 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 absolutist 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 of its work was
sound and still endures, if much was experimental and had to be undone.
Much was ineffective. There was a clearing 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
administered 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 for the lower clergy in France, who were often scandalously
underpaid in comparison with the richer dignitaries. But in addition
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
in France Protestant, in organization if 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 an 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 Republican 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
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 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 in Great Britain in
sympathy with the revolution.
Of the fight that France made in the next few years against 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 cavalry without firing
its guns. For some time the French thrust towards Italy 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, [1] “What astonished the
Allies most of all was the 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
unnecessary, for the discomfort that would 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 manœuvring, 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 Vendée,
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 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 slaughtering
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, this infernal new machine
chopped off heads and more heads and more. The reign of Robespierre
lived, it seemed, on blood; and needed more and more, as an opium-taker
needs more and more opium.
Finally in the summer of 1794 Robespierre himself was overthrown 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 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 scheming 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 promotion 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 old Holy Roman Empire, intending to replace it by 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 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 conclusive 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 conglomerate army 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 Waterloo. 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.