Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/643

ROBESPIERRE S RULE.] FRANCE G07 the eleven armies on foot was on his side. The campaigns of 1794 proved glorious for them; the battle of Fleurus (2Gth June) won for them the second conquest of Belgium; in the Pyrenees] the French stormed the Spanish camp at Ceret, and threatened Catalonia ; in Italy, where young Bonaparte commanded the artillery, they swept the Pied- montese out of their camp at Saorgio, and got the command of all the strong points along the Alps. It was only on the sea that the French armies failed ; Corsica was taken, and Howe defeated the squadron in charge of a corn-fleet from San Domingo. In the midst of his foreign cares Robespierre also busied himself with the exposition of his ideas. Those whom he had destroyed, Hebertists and Dantonists, had been anarchic and atheist ; he, pale reflex of Rousseau, would bring back the reign of virtue and the love of God. He desired to be at once high priest and dictator of a regenerated France. To this end he passed a decree recognizing the Supreme Being and declaring that the soul is immortal. His ad mirers at once hailed him as a great prophet ; the emotion throughout the country was great. On the 8th of June 1794 he took the lead in the great fute of the Supreme Being, which amused and offended many of his old friends. Finding himself far from being admired by them, he deter mined that the Terror, which he had in some ways miti- gateil, should go on again ; the Convention, however, re sisted, and he withdrew completely from public life, giving his enemies the opportunity of strengthening themselves against him. At the same time he left the reins of power in the hands of his terrible colleagues, who at once applied with the utmost ferocity the law by which suspected persons could be put to death with but the shadow of a trial. This was the time of what is called the Great Terror, June and July 1794. The reaction soon came ; in spite of his friends and the power of the Jacobins, he had arrayed against him the majority of the Committees, and almost all the old Montagnards; his pride and vanity, the fete and his conduct of it, their fears of a dictator, their fear for their own heads, all undermined his position. Before long the struggle began. Robespierre was no Marat ; he would not strike a crushing blow, and "making solitude, call it peace." He trusted too much to the strength of his ideas, the influence of his party ; and on the 27th of July 1794 (the 9th Thermidor) it came to an explosion in the Con vention. Permanence was voted, the arrest of Robespierre and his chief supporters was agreed to ; a proclamation to the people was issued ; five members of the Convention were carried off to prison. Instantly, the commune of Paris declared itself in insurrection, the tocsin was rung, and the five deputies were at once rescued from the jailor s hands, and carried in triumph to the Hotel de Ville. Two hundred cannoniers marched on the Tuileries, where the Convention was sitting, and all seemed over there. But the artillery men were not firm ; when the deputies talked to them, they hesitated, and that hesitation was fatal to Robespierre ; for those sections of Paris which hated him had also put them selves in motion to defend the Convention ; indecision fell on the Jacobins, their forces melted away, and the resistance came to an end. Robespierre tried to shoot himself, and shattered his lower jaw; he and his friends were again arrested, and perished the next day on the scaffold. And thus ended the early history of the French Revolution. From the proclamation of the Republic to the days of the Legislative Assembly, from the overthrow of their power to the death of the king, thence to the fall of the Girondists, then to the death of Hebert and Danton, now to the failure of Robespierre s bloodstained Utopia, thus had the Re volution moved onwards, violent, yet often generous, proudly patriotic, yet destructive of all the stability of the country. There remained but the army. The army was heartily republican, and had suffered enough and triumphed 1794. enough to have a high idea of its own organization and its The fu- worth. When a man comes to lead it, the army will set ture of itself to organize France into an instrument of tremendous tliearmy> power ; a despotism, solid and strong, aggressive abroad, vigorous at home, using all the terms and calls of the Re volution, will take the place of thejll-fated men who have hitherto tried to guide the destinies of the country. It will call itself an empire ; it will be a despot ruling with the liberal ideas and phrases. Meanwhile, as Mr Carlyle says, " here was the end not The ie- of Robespierre only, but of the Revolution-system itself," actionon for his death was the signal of a great revulsion of feeling. Robes France, so gay and light of heart, had lived an unnatural life under the preachings of this virtuous dictator ; she was weary of the gloom and burden of a system which crushed out gaiety, made wealth a crime, and pleasure impossible ; and public opinion hailed with joy the tidings that the regime of virtue and the guillotine was over. The Terror was past ; the committees which had destroyed Robespierre perished with his death; the " Thermidor ians," the Mountain, who had caused this revolution, became a reactionary party, sitting on the right, and remodelling, if not over throwing, the existing government. The prisons were emptied, the terrible cruelties of Nantes stopped ; amnesty was offered to the rebels; the sections of Paris were reduced in importance, the administration of the capital reorganized. All the parties in hiding came forth ; the Girondists returned ; society began once more to dance and glitter ; it was like the temper of England after the return of Charles II. In Close January 1795 the Convention closed the Jacobins Club ; of tlie _ the agents who had carried out the inhuman orders of the ^ c bins past were put to death. The armies, which by no means sympathized with the The war movement of affairs at home, still pursued in the autumn abroad, and winter of 1794 a brilliant career under Pichegru in the north, Jourdain on the Sambre and Meuse, and other generals for the Moselle and the Rhine. The whole course of the Rhine from Basel to the sea was in their hands ; and the winter campaign, in which Pichegru conquered Holland, raised the fame of the commander and of his troops to the highest point. Pichegru had done what Louis XIV. had failed to do; 1795 wiped out the discredit of 1672; Hol land and Belgium were to become republics on the French model ; the Amsterdam populace welcomed the French as brethren. The capture of the Dutch fleet at the Texel by hussars, who stormed it on horseback, riding across the ice, seemed to the French people to realize a tale of fairyland. At home, too, the suppression of the Chouans, those Breton peasants who, taking advantage of the troubles, plied the trade of brigands and highway robbers, added to the general content. The Vendeans struggled still ; their country was a scene of desolation, and the central authority had to re call their barbarous agents, and to try to reduce the district to peace by way of conciliation. So ended the year 1794, which saw the reaction set in Things at Paris, and saw, too, the Revolution triumphant on every look frontier, and the area of its influence extended widely. b o " ghtc>r The coalition against France showed signs of breaking ; the p rancCi Dutch made peace, ceding northern Flanders with other districts to France ; the king of Prussia also abandoned the coalition, ceding to France the left bank of the Rhine ; the Bourbon king of Spain next abandoned " the cause of all kings "; the little states of Germany followed ; Portugal made advances in the same direction, as did Naples, the papacy, and other Italian powers. England and Austria alone stood firm against the new ideas, and Pitt, though he could not hope to direct, or have to pay, half Europe, still felt strong enough to carry on the war. Paris, where famine Taged unchecked, was still uneasy