Mary Platt Parmele - A Short History of France
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Mary Platt Parmele >> A Short History of France
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But the currents of a cataract nearing the fall are difficult to guide.
Three parties were forming in the National Assembly: the _Girondists_,
the party of genius and eloquence and of moderation; the _Jacobins_,
the party of the extremists and radicals; and a third party, undecided,
waiting to see what was safest and best.
All that was noble and true and fine in the French Revolution was in
the party of the Girondists. Dreamers, idealists, their dream was of a
republic like the one in America, and their ideal an impossible
perfection of condition in which human reason was supreme. The
excesses of the Revolution they did not approve, but were willing to
sacrifice the king and even the royal family, if necessary. They did
not realize the forces with which they were airily playing, nor that
the time was at hand when the Girondists would vainly strive to
restrain the horrible excesses; that, after they had sacrificed the
royal family, the Jacobins would sacrifice them; the slayers would be
slain!
Lafayette, neither a Girondist nor a Jacobin, was a loyal Frenchman and
patriot, with the American ideal in his heart, vainly trying to mediate
between a feeble king and a people who had lost their reason. The time
was near when he would give up the hopeless task and flee to escape
being himself engulfed.
A wretchedly planned attempt at the escape of the royal family
aggravated the situation. They were recognized at Varennes, brought
back with great indignity, and placed under closer surveillance than
before. On the 10th of August, 1792, the mob attacked the Tuileries.
The royal family fled to the National Assembly for protection, while
their Swiss guards vainly defended the palace with their lives.
This was the end of the monarchy. Louis, the brave queen and her
children, and Princess Elizabeth, sister of the king, were removed from
the Assembly to the prison in "The Temple," and the National Convention
formally declared France a republic.
The grim prison to which they were taken, with its central square tower
flanked by four round towers, had stood since the time of Philip
Augustus. It was built for the Knights Templar, and was chateau,
fortress, prison, all in one, and was the home of the grand master and
those others who were burned when Philip IV. ruthlessly destroyed the
order. The central tower, one hundred and fifty feet high, had four
stories. The king and the dauphin were imprisoned in the second story,
and the queen, her young daughter, and the Princess Elizabeth in the
story above.
The power swiftly passed from Girondists to Jacobins, and a
Revolutionary Tribunal was created in charge of the terrible
triumvirate--Robespierre, Marat, and Danton.
An awful travesty upon a court of justice was established in that
historic hall in the Palais de Justice. Its walls, which had looked
down upon generations of Merovingian, Carlovingian, and Capetian kings,
now beheld the condemnation of the most innocent and well-intentioned
of all the kings of France.
The king was arraigned at this court upon the charge of treason,
convicted, and condemned to die on the 21st of January, 1793. He was
allowed to embrace for the last time his adored wife and children. At
the scaffold he tried to speak a last word to his people. The drums
were ordered to drown his voice, and an attendant priest uttered the
words, "_Fils de Saint Louis, montez au ciel_!"--Son of Saint Louis,
ascend to heaven!--and all was over. The kindest-hearted, most
inoffensive gentleman in Europe had expiated the crimes of his
ancestors.
More and more furious swept the torrent, gathering to itself all that
was vile and outcast. Where were the pale-faced, determined patriots
who sat in the National Assembly? Some of them riding with dukes and
marquises to the guillotine. Was this the equality they expected when
they cried, "Down with the Aristocrats"?
Did they think they could guide the whirlwind after raising it? As
well whisper to the cyclone to level only the tall trees, or to the
conflagration to burn only the temples and palaces.
With restraining agencies removed, religion, government, king, all
swept away, that hideous brood born of vice, poverty, hatred, and
despair came out from dark hiding-places; and what had commenced as a
patriotic revolt had become a wild orgy of bloodthirsty demons, led by
three master-demons, Robespierre, Marat, and Danton, vying with each
other in ferocity.
Then we see that simple girl thinking by one supreme act of heroism and
sacrifice, like Joan of Arc, to save her country. Foolish child! Did
she think to slay the monster devouring Paris by cutting off one of his
heads? The death of Marat only added to the fury of the tempest, and
the falling of Charlotte Corday's head was not more noticed than the
falling of a leaf in the forest.
The slaughter of the people had been reduced to an admirable system.
The public prosecutor, Fouquier-Tinville, went every day to the
"Committee of Public Safety" to procure the list of the proscribed, who
were immediately placed in the Conciergerie to await trial. This list
was then submitted to Robespierre, who with his pencil marked the names
of those who would be executed on the morrow.
The mockery of the trial of Charlotte Corday was not delayed. This
girl belonged to a family of the smaller nobility. In her secluded
life in the country, a mind of superior quality had fed upon the new
philosophy of the period. An enthusiasm for liberty, and a horror of
tyranny, had taken possession of her. In passionate sympathy with the
early purposes of the Revolution, Marat seemed to her a monster, the
incarnation of the spirit which would defeat the cause of Liberty. It
was believed that his list of the proscribed was not confined to Paris,
but that the names of thousands of victims all over France were already
designated. In that extraordinary scene at her trial, when questioned,
she impatiently said, "Yes, yes, I killed him. I killed one man to
save a hundred thousand!"
Nothing was lacking to make this, with one exception, the most dramatic
incident of the Revolution. Her eloquent address, to the French
people, found pinned to the waist of her dress after her execution, and
her splendid courage to the end, rounds out the picturesque story of
her useless martyrdom. A Girondist waiting in the Conciergerie, when
he heard of her crime and end, exclaimed: "It will kill us! But she
has taught us how to die!"
The end did not come so swiftly for the queen, who, after being removed
from the Temple, spent seventy-two days and nights in the dark cell in
that abode of horrors, the Conciergerie. Then came the trial, the
inquisitorial trial, lasting all through the night in the gloom of that
dimly lighted hall. And at half-past four in the morning she heard
without a tremor the terrible words, "Marie Antoinette, widow of Louis
Capet, the Tribunal condemns you to die." Not for a moment did this
intrepid woman quail; and a small detail brings before us vividly her
wonderful calmness. As she reached the stairs in her pitiful return to
her cell, she said simply to the lieutenant of the gendarmes, who was
at her side, "Monsieur, I can scarcely see (_Je vois a peine_); will
you lead me?"
In another half hour the drums were beating in every quarter in
preparation for the event; and at ten o'clock she started upon her last
ride. And how bravely she met her awful fate! We forget her follies,
her reckless extravagances, in admiration for her courage as she rides
to her death, with hands tied behind her, sitting in that hideous
tumbril, head erect, pale, proud, defiant, as if upon a throne (October
16, 1793).
The search-light of scrutiny has been turned upon this unfortunate
woman for more than a century, and all that has been discovered is that
she was pleasure-loving, indiscreet, and absolutely ignorant of the
gravity of her responsibility in the position she occupied.
In the days of her power and splendor she lived as the average woman of
her period would have done under the same circumstances--not better,
and not worse. But when the time came to try her soul and test her
mettle, she evinced a strength and dignity and composure surpassing
belief.
If there had been any evidence of the truth of the story of the diamond
necklace--a story which no doubt hastened the revolutionary crisis--it
would certainly have been used at her trial; but it was not. It will
be remembered that this necklace was one of the fatal legacies from the
reign of Louis XV., who had ordered for du Barry this gift which was to
cost a sum large enough for a king's ransom. The king died before it
was completed, and the story became current that Marie Antoinette, the
hated Austrian woman who was ruining France by her extravagance, was
negotiating for the purchase of this necklace while the people were
starving!
A network of villainy is woven about the whole incident, in which the
names of a cardinal and ladies high in rank are involved. The mystery
may never be uncovered, but every effort to connect the queen's name
with this historic scandal has failed.
Probably of all the cruelties inflicted upon this unhappy woman, none
caused her such anguish as the testimony of her son before the
Revolutionary Tribunal, that he had heard his mother say she "hated the
French people." Placed under the care of the brutal Simon after his
father's removal from the Temple, the child had become a physical and
mental wreck. The queen, in her last letter to her sister the Princess
Elizabeth, makes pitiful allusion to the incident, begging her to
remember what he must have suffered before he said this; also reminding
her how children may be taught to utter words they do not comprehend.
His lesson, no doubt, had been learned by cruel tortures; and, rendered
half imbecile, it was recited when the time came. None but his keeper
was ever permitted to see the boy. His condition, final illness, and
death are shrouded in mystery. In June, 1794, eight months after his
mother's execution, it was announced that he was dead. It would be
difficult to prove this event before a court of justice. There were no
witnesses whose testimony would have any weight. No one was permitted
to see the child who was put into that obscure grave; and many
circumstances give rise to a suspicion that the boy, who might have
been a source of political embarrassment in the rehabilitation of
France, was disposed of in another way--dropped into an obscurity which
would serve as well as death.
There was a surfeit of killing, and a waning Revolution. We are far
from saying that such a thing happened. But ambitious royalists might
have thought their money well expended in removing the son of the
murdered king from the scene. The claim of the American dauphin,
Eleazer Williams, may have been fanciful, or even false; but what safer
and more effectual plan could be devised than to drop the half-imbecile
heir to a throne into the heart of a tribe of Indians in an American
wilderness?
When Louis XVIII. occupied his brother's throne, in 1814, and erected
over the dishonored graves of his family that beautiful Chapelle
Expiatoire, he also gave orders for masses to be said for the repose of
the souls of his murdered kindred, whom he designated by name: Louis
XVI., king; Marie Antoinette, queen, and the Princess Elizabeth, his
sister. If it is true, as has been said, that the name of the dauphin
was not included in this list, it is a most suggestive omission.
Technically, this boy was king from the moment of his father's death
until his own, and on the lists of sovereigns is called Louis XVII.
Then why was there no mention of him as one of that martyred group?
Twenty-two of the Girondists who had helped to dethrone the king on
that 10th of August, and later consented to his death, were now facing
the same doom to which they had sent him only six months before, and by
a strange fatality were under the same roof with the queen. Only a few
feet, and two thin partitions, separated them; and in her cell she must
have heard their impassioned voices during that dramatic banquet, the
last night of their lives. And the next day this group of
extraordinary men--men singularly gifted and fascinating--were all
lying in one tomb, at the side of Louis XVI.
Philip Egalite, the Duke of Orleans, was to meet his Nemesis also.
Brought a prisoner to that grim resting-place, he occupied the
adjoining cell to that which had been the queen's, and, it is said, had
assigned to him the wretched cot she no longer needed. His desperate
game had failed. No elevation would come to him out of the chaos of
crime, and the reward for scheming and voting for the death of his
cousin, the king, would be a scaffold, not a throne. His name had been
upon the list of the proscribed for some time; but the end was
precipitated by an act of his young son, Louis Philippe, then Duke de
Chartres, and aide-de-camp to Dumouriez, who was defending the frontier
from an invasion of Austrian troops. After the execution of the queen,
Dumouriez refused longer to defend France from an invasion the purpose
of which was to make such horrors impossible. He laid down his
command, and, with his aide, Louis Philippe, joined the colony of
exiles in Belgium, while the Austrian troops were in full march upon
Paris from Verdun.
This was treason--whether justifiable or not this is not the place to
discuss.
Philip Egalite knew that he no longer had the confidence of the
leaders, and that they also knew that he was an aristocrat in disguise.
So when this defection of Dumouriez came, and was shared by his own
son, he tried to get out of the country. He was arrested at
Marseilles, brought to the Conciergerie, that half-way house to the
scaffold, and was soon following in the footsteps of his king and
queen, through the Rue St. Honore, passing his own Palais Royal on his
way to the Place de la Revolution.
The Revolution, beginning with a patriotic assembly, in a measure sane,
had made a rapid descent, first falling apart into Girondist and
Jacobin, moderate and extremist, the Girondist with a shudder
consenting to the execution of the king. Then, the power passing to a
so-called "Committee of Public Safety" and a Triumvirate, in order to
sweep away the obstructive Girondist; and then an untrammelled Terror,
in the hands of three, and, finally, one. Such had been its mad
course. But with the death of the king and queen, the madness had
reached its height, and a revulsion of feeling set in. There was a
surfeit of blood, and an awakening sense of horror, which turned upon
the instigators. Danton fell, and finally, when amid cries of "Death
to the tyrant!" Robespierre was dragged wounded and shivering to the
fate he had brought upon so many thousands, the drama which had opened
at the Bastille was fittingly closed.
The great battle for human liberty had been fought and won. Religious
freedom and political freedom were identical in principle. The right
of the human conscience, proclaimed by Luther in 1517, had in 1793 only
expanded into the large conception of all the inherent rights of the
_individual_.
It had taken centuries for English persistence to accomplish what
France, with such appalling violence, had done in as many years. It
had been a furious outburst of pent-up force; but the work had been
thorough. Not a germ of tyranny remained. The incrustations of a
thousand years were not alone broken, but pulverized; the privileged
classes were swept away, and their vast estates, two-thirds of the
territory of France, ready to be distributed among the rightful owners
of the soil, those who by toil and industry could win them. France was
as new as if she had no history. There was ample opportunity for her
people now. What would they do with it?
What would they build upon the ruins of their ancient despotism? What
would be the starting-point for such a task--every connecting link with
an historic past broken, and the armies of an indignant Europe pressing
in upon every side? Could they ever wipe out the stain which had made
them odious in the sight of Christendom? Would they ever be forgiven
for disgracing the name of Liberty?
It was the power and genius of a single man which was going to make the
world forget her disgrace, and cover France with a mantle more glorious
than she had ever worn.
CHAPTER XVI.
The Revolution over, France, sitting among the wreckage of the past,
found herself disgraced, discredited, and at war with all of Europe.
Austria, naturally the leader in an effort to stop the atrocities which
threatened a daughter of her own royal house, had been joined finally
by England, Holland, Spain, and even Portugal and Tuscany, these all
being impelled, not by the personal feeling which actuated Austria, but
by alarm for their own safety. This revolutionary movement was a moral
and political plague spot which must be stamped out, or there would be
anarchy in every kingdom in Europe.
It was the difficulty in recruiting troops to fight this coalition
which had embarrassed and finally broken the power of the revolutionary
government. If the states of Europe had really acted in concert, the
life of the new republic would have been brief. But Austria was
jealous of Prussia, and Prussia afraid of the friendship which was
forming between Austria and England, and Catharine, the empress of
Russia, keeping all uncertain about her designs upon Poland--with the
result that the war upon France was conducted in a desultory and
ineffectual manner.
In the organization of the new French republic, the executive power was
vested in a Directory, composed of five members, chosen by two houses
of legislature.
A disagreement over some details of the new constitution led to a
heated quarrel, and this to an insurrection in Paris, October 5, 1795,
which Napoleon Bonaparte, a young officer who had acquired distinction
at Toulon, was summoned to quell. The vigor and the success with which
the young leader used his cannon in the streets of Paris struck
precisely the right note at the right moment. Law and order were
established. A delighted Directory yielded at once to the suggestion
of a campaign against Austria which should be conducted in Italy, in
combination with an advance upon Vienna from the Rhine.
With the instinct of genius, Napoleon Bonaparte saw the path to power.
The air was vibrating with the word _Liberty_. If he would capture
France--which was what he intended to do--he must move along the line
of political freedom. The note to be struck was the liberation of the
oppressed. Where would he find chains more galling, more unnatural,
than in Italy, held by the iron hand of Austria? And was not Austria
the leader of the coalition against France?
Without money or supplies, and with an unclothed army, he obeyed the
inspiration, audaciously planning to make the invaded country pay the
expenses of the war waged against it. Pointing to the Italian cities,
he said to his soldiers: "There is your reward. It is rich and ample,
but you must conquer it!" Like Caesar, he knew how, in words brief and
concise, to address his followers, and to inspire enthusiasm as few
have ever done before or since. He also knew how to confound the enemy
with new and unexpected methods which made unavailing all which
military science and experience had taught them.
With the suddenness of a tornado he swept down upon the plains of
Lombardy. The battles of _Lodi_, _Arcola_, _Rivoli_, were won, and in
ten months Napoleon was master of Italy. By the treaty of Campo
Formio, October 17, 1797, northern Italy was divided into four
republics, with their capitals respectively at Milan, Genoa, Bologna,
and Rome. And in return for her acquiescence in this redistribution of
her Italian territory, Austria received Venice. After fourteen
centuries of independence, Venetia, the queen of the Adriatic, was in
chains!
[Illustration: Napoleon at the Battle of Rivoli, January 14, 1797.
From the painting by Philippoteaux.]
Not satisfied with this, Napoleon intended that Paris should wear the
jewels which had adorned the fair Italian cities. The people whose
chains he had come to break were at once required to surrender money,
jewels, plate, horses, equipments, besides their choicest art
collections and rarest manuscripts. In a private letter to a member of
the Directory he wrote: "I shall send you twenty pictures by some of
the first masters, including Correggio and Michael Angelo." A later
letter said: "Join all these to what will be sent from Rome, and we
shall have all that is beautiful in Italy, except a small number of
objects in Turin and Naples." Pius VI., without a protest, surrendered
his millions of francs, and ancient bronzes, costly pictures, and
priceless manuscripts.
Austria had lost fourteen battles, and all her Italian possessions were
grouped together into a Cisalpine republic! Another Helvetic republic
was set up in Switzerland, and still another republic created in
Holland under a French protectorate.
In other words, this man had accomplished in Italy precisely what he
was going to accomplish later in Germany. He had broken down the
lingering traces of mediaevalism, and prepared the soil for a new order
of things.
The peace of Campo Formio was the most glorious ever made for France.
The river Rhine was at last recognized as her frontier, thus placing
Belgium within the lines of the republic. Napoleon had captured not
alone Italy, but France herself? What might she not accomplish with
such a leader? The delighted Directory discussed the invasion of
England. Napoleon, knowing this would be premature, dramatically
conceived the idea of crippling England by threatening her Asiatic
possessions, and led an army into Egypt (1798). Although Nelson
destroyed his fleet, he still maintained the arrogance of a conqueror.
No king, no military leader, had brought as much glory to France. Du
Guesclin, Turenne, Conde, all were eclipsed. And so were Marlborough
and Prince Eugene. What would not France do at the bidding of this
magician, who by a single sweep of his wand had raised her from the
dust of humiliation and made her the leading power on the Continent!
The young officer, now so distinguished, had married in the early part
of his career the widow of M. de Beauharnais, one of the victims of the
Reign of Terror. During his absence in Egypt, the Directorate, and the
Legislature, and the people had all become embroiled in dissensions.
Things were falling again into chaos, with no hand to hold them
together. Discontent was rife, and men were asking why the one man,
the little dark man who knew how to do and to compel things, and to
maintain discipline, why he was sent to the Nile and the Pyramids!
Josephine, from Paris, kept Napoleon informed of these conditions. So,
leaving his army in charge of Kleber, he unexpectedly returned. He
knew what he was going to do; and he also knew he could depend upon the
army to sustain him. By political moves as adroit and unexpected as
his tactics on the field, the Directorate was swept out of existence,
and Napoleon was first consul of France.
It was a long step backward. The pendulum was returning once more
toward a strong executive, and to centralization. From this moment,
until he was a prisoner in the hands of the English, Napoleon Bonaparte
was sole master of France.
The early simplicity of the republic was disappearing. The receptions
of the first consul at the Tuileries began to recall the days at
Versailles. Josephine, fascinating, and perfect in the art of dress,
knew well how to maintain the splendor of her new court; as also did
Bonaparte's sisters, with their beauty and their brilliant talents.
But outside of France, and across the channel, the consul was only a
usurper, and Louis XVIII. was king--an uncrowned but legitimate
sovereign!
Perhaps it is not too much to say that nothing in Napoleon's career has
left such enduring traces, and so permanently influenced civilization,
as two acts performed at this period: the creation of that monumental
work of genius the codification of the laws of France and the sale of
Louisiana to the United States. Spain had ceded this large territory
to France in 1763, and Bonaparte realizing that he was not in a
position to hold it now, if attacked, sold it to the United States
(1803), in order to keep it out of the hands of England.
The goal to which things were tending was realized by some. A
conspiracy against the life of the consul was discovered. Napoleon
suspected it to have originated with the Bourbons; and the death of the
young Duke d'Enghien, a son of the Prince of Conde, without pity or
justice, was intended to strike with terror all who were plotting for
his downfall. The swiftness with which it was done, the darkness under
the walls of Vincennes, the lantern on the breast of the victim, and
the file of soldiers at midnight, all conspired to warn conspirators of
the fate awaiting them. It was the critical moment at hand which
turned Bonaparte's heart to steel.
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