by a consideration of the profound changes in the system of land-ownership which were brought about by the Revolution.
Throughout the Middle Ages the peasants in France, as elsewhere on the Continent, were a harried, miserable, and persecuted class. Their intolerable suffering sometimes found expression in futile jacqueries, which were invariably repressed with the utmost brutality. Their condition grew worse, if possible, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as a result of the growth of absentee landlordism and the heavy increases of taxation necessitated by the wars of Louis XIV. In 1789 the great majority of the French peasants had almost literally nothing to lose. Consequently they became the natural allies of the Parisian extremists. They instinctively felt that only the most drastic changes in the government could permanently improve their wretched condition.
From 1789 to 1794 the workers of Paris formed the spearhead of the Jacobin movement. The grimy mobs of the Faubourg Saint Antoine stormed the Bastille, forced the royal family to come from Versailles to Paris, urged on the execution of the King, and brought the Revolution to its last stage of radicalism by expelling the Girondists from the Convention. But Paris alone could not have made and maintained the Revolution without the more or less active co-operation of the provinces. Outside of La Vendée this cooperation was generally given. The efforts of the Girondists to rouse the departments against the capital met with total failure. The peasants responded to the levie en masse in sufficient numbers to beat off the invading forces of the coalition.
Had it lacked the hearty support of the peasants, the Revolution must have foundered miserably, from incompetent leadership if from no other cause. Now that the initial horror inspired by the Reign of Terror and the threat of world-wide revolution has subsided there is a general disposition to exaggerate the ability of the men who headed the French government in 1793 and 1794. Even Professor Davis, who is very far from sharing the radical views of the Jacobins, pays a high tribute to them in declaring that "they saved France." It would be more accurate to say that France was saved in spite of them. Outside of Carnot, the Revolution did not produce a single first-rate organizing genius. The restoration of the Bourbons was averted by the fierce courage and patriotism of the French people, by the lukewarmness and dissensions of the allied
