hearts or guided the course of any statesmen in any age. Some of the great leaders, as Robert Lindet, Vergniaud, perhaps Danton and Camille, retained the same principles throughout their short and stormy lives. Some, as Carnot, Lakanal, Barthelemy, probably Roederer, after holding fast by their integrity during the awful struggle that was so fitted to try men's souls, survived the tempest, and adorned by their talents and edified by their virtues the more tranquil season that succeeded. The criminal portion of the revolutionists were few in number to those whom they duped, or whom they succeeded in overawing by the violence of the multitude. But it was not wholly against their will, or through the mere influence of terror, that the bulk of the Convention and of the country submitted to the outrages of the Decemvirs. An alarm of an opposite nature worked strongly on their minds; the dread of a counterrevolution, and of the vengeance which its leaders, if successful, would surely exercise, had a very powerful operation in reconciling men's minds to the existing Government; and it is certain that the execution of the King and the other crimes early committed by some and connived at by all, had the greatest influence in causing a general fear of retribution and a proportional alarm at what must happen should the old dynasty be restored. These considerations must be taken into our account in examining the conduct of the French, and accounting for their submission to the tyranny, injustice, and cruelty of their revolutionary chiefs, else we shall both mistake the state of the question and do injustice to that great people. It is also due to the leading men of those times that we record how pure was the attachment of many of them to their country, and how little other motives operated on their minds. The course so frequent in such times, leading others from patriotism to faction, from zeal for a principle to impatience of opposition, and from desire of victory over an adversary to the lust of power for personal gratification, gave rise to most of the errors and many of the crimes which we have been contemplating. A melancholy consideration of these and their causes only serves to enhance the value of those men who yielded to no such seductions, and to increase our respect for their pure motives and virtuous lives. But the same contemplation suggests another reflection, teaches another lesson. It shows, with the force of demonstration, the fatal consequences to themselves and their own virtue, of men, however strong their principles and pure their enthusiasm, yielding to such a passion, and overleaping under its influence the plain line of duty which forbids the doing of evil that good may come. It shows the fatal consequences to the community of suffering parties and their chiefs to acquire the ascendant, when pretending, perhaps at first really meaning, to rule the state for the furtherance of a wholesome, rational policy-it being hard to say whether more wickedness may be committed by public men under the influence of enthusiasm, or more detriment sustained by the country under the misguidance of faction. In the second place it must be observed that in all times of revolutionary violence there is an impunity secured to the worst characters by the spirit of party, and especially by the slowness of party chiefs to sacrifice even their worst adherents, and give them over to the merited indignation of the world. See the universal horror and disgust which Marat inspired in all men and of all parties-his odious violence, his virulence of temper more hateful still, his savage ferocity of manner exacerbated by the fury of his sentiments, and the wildness of his propositions; his avowed authorship of a journal which openly preached the indiscriminate massacre of whole classes for their political principles; his constant efforts to excite the mob and drive them towards the most infernal excesses*-all these execrable * In recommending the massacre of all aristocrats, he scrupled not to proclaim through his paper, the "Ami du Peuple," that 270,000 heads must fall by the guillotine; and he published lists of persons whom he consigned to popular vengeance and destruction by their names, description, and places of residence. He was remarkable for the hideous features of a countenance at once horrible and ridiculous, and for the figure of a dwarf, not above five feet high. He was on his first appearance in the mob-meetings of his district the constant butt of the company, and maltreated by all, even to gross personal rudeness. The mob, however, always took his part, because of the violence of his horrid language. Thus long before he preached wholesale massacre in his journal, he had denounced 800 deputies as fit for execution, and demanded that they should be hanged on as many trees. His constant topic was assassination, not only in his journal but in private society. Barbaroux describes him in his " Mémoires" (p. 59) as recommending that all aristocrats should be obliged to wear a badge, in order that they might be recognised and killed. But," he used to add, you have only to wait at the playhouse door and mark those who 66 66 and utterly abominable things had so entirely obliterated the merits which his revolutionary violence and devotion to the extreme party might seem to display, that no one would associate with him or remain on the bench of the assembly on which he took his seat; and when he rose to vindicate himself from the charges on which he was put upon his trial, and began by saying that he was aware he had many enemies in the Convention, his voice was drowned by cries from every quarter of “All! All!”—Yet the Jacobin party allowed this wretch to be elected one of the deputies from the capital;* and neither Robespierre nor any of his adherents, nor even Danton, ventured to denounce him, and to give their real and known sentiments respecting him-nay, when the accident of his assassination had freed the earth from so monstrous a pollution, and his bust was simply for that reason placed in the Pantheon, most of the great leaders paid tributes of respect from time to time to his memory, holding up his supposed services as objects of public gratitude, and his death as a martyrdom for revolutionary principles. Yet that death had not obliterated the recollection of one of the enormities of his life, which had made him so justly the object of universal scorn. Robes pierre pronounced his funeral oration; David boasted of preserving by his pencil "the cherished features of the virtuous friend of the people;" and Danton most unaccountacome out, and to observe who have servants, carriages, and silk clothes; and if you kill them all you are pretty sure you have killed so many aristocrats. Or if ten in a hundred should be patriots, it don't signify-you have killed ninety aristocrats." He was about fifty at the time of his death, being born in 1744, and consequently of an age prior to that of the other leaders except Bailly, who was born in 1736. He is said to have taught French in Edinburgh about the year 1774; and he there published a pamphlet in English, under the title of " The Chains of Slavery." He was born at Neufchâtel, and was an obscure medical practitioner in Paris. He published some works of some learning and little other merit on subjects of physical science. * There were among the twenty-four deputies of Paris in the Convention ten of the greatest leaders, exclusive of Marat,-Robespierre and his brother, Danton, Collot d'Herbois, Camille Desmoulins, Legendre, Fabre d'Eglantine, Billaud Varennes, David, and Egalité (ci-devant Duc d'Orléans). Robespierre's brother was a person of no weight, and only known from his relationship. He was, however, a zealous Republican, was employed with the army of Italy when it took Nice; and he sacrificed himself generously on the downfall of his brother, with whom he was arrested at his own desire, and executed with the triumvirate. bly and preposterously called him the Divine Marat, boasting after his assassination of having long before given him that very absurd appellation. Can any one doubt that such conduct in parties and their chiefs, such a pusillanimous truckling to the passions of the rabble, such a base pandering to their worst propensities as this silence respecting great criminals implies, must ever be as impolitic as it is profligate and unprincipled? We have examples of its consequences in all ages, and it has proved most injurious to many a great man's renown. It was probably only as a party leader that Julius Cæsar, without partaking in Catiline's conspiracy, spoke far too gently of it, and gave its accomplices his protection, if not his countenance, on the proceeding against them before the senate. But the result of this party delicacy has been the impression which still rests on the memory of that great man, and leads to a prevailing suspicion of his having secretly joined the most abandoned of conspirators. So, in modern times, whoever is afraid of denouncing known guilt merely for fear of losing the support of some partisan, or offending some party, must make up his mind to passing for the accomplice in crimes which, whether from timidity or upon calculation, he dares not denounce. Against the loss of support let men wisely set the loss of character, which such an unprincipled course is sure to entail upon those who pursue it; and it is not doubtful on which side the balance of the account will be found to rest. SIÉYES. THERE are few names in the French Revolution which have figured so much as that of the Abbé Siéyes; and hardly any which is better known in connexion with this great chapter of modern story. Those who have only marked the space which he filled in debate, or the merits of his celebrated tracts at the convocation of the States General, or the failure of all his plans of constitutions, are apt to underrate the importance of his labours, and to suppose that his high place in the revolutionary Pantheon had been inconsiderately awarded by the public voice. A personal acquaintance with him would certainly have led to the same conclusion. But near observers, belonging to the times in which he figured, entirely dissent from this opinion, and give reasons, apparently satisfactory, for taking the more ordinary view of his services and his importance. I have frequently discussed the subject both with General Carnot and Prince Talleyrand, neither of them at all likely to be deceived by a mere theorist, both of them entertaining very little respect for a metaphysical politician, and from all their own tastes and habits sure to regard with somewhat of disdain a purely speculative statesman. Yet both agreed in affirming the great merit of the Abbé, and they appealed to the extreme importance of the measures which proceeded from him, and for the suggestion of which they both gave him the exclusive credit. Those great measures were three in number, of which certainly it would not be easy to overrate the importance, -namely, the joint verification of the powers at the meeting of the States General, the formation of the National Guards, the establishment of the new system of provincial division and administration. The first of these measures led directly to the great step of the three orders, Prelates, Peers, and Commons, sitting in one chamber, and the consequent absorption of the whole in the latter body. The value of the second needs not to be dwelt upon. But the third was by far the most material of the whole, because it not only settled the Revolution upon an immovable foundation-the admission of the people every where to a share in the local administration of their concerns-but destroyed the remains of the monarchical divisions of the territory, and rendered inevitable that grand step, the most precious of all the fruits of the Revolution, the abolition of the various local and customary codes, and the extension over the whole country of one universal system of jurisprudence; instead of a state of things so intolerable, and so absurd, as the existence of totally different laws in different streets of the same town or hamlet. If it is granted that the whole praise of these reforms belongs undivided to Siéyes, it is proved that his was a |