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794.

COURSE OF THE REVOLUTION.

75

CHAP. IV.

1794.

Fi.OM THE FALL OF ROBESPIERRE TO THE DISSOLUTION OF THE

CONVENTION.

THE revolution in the hands of Robespierre had reached the lowest point to which it was destined to sink; not that the abyss was fathomed, or that there were no lower depths heneath; for there still remained the anarchists, the party of the mere rabble, unredeemed by property, respectability, or talent. Had power been grasped by these, the plunder and destruction of the middle class by the indigent would have been effected with as little mercy as the plunder and destruction of the higher class had been completed by the middle order. But the course of the revolution was forcibly closed previous to this final act. Robespierre closed it, nor could he have done so by means less energetic than the terror.

Up to the hour of his sway the popular force had ever prevailed over that of the government, over absolute royalty under the constituent assembly, over constitutional royalty under the legislature, over legal and organized republicanism in the convention. There remained for it to overcome ana abolish the last possible form of government, and establish in its place permanent insurrection, and the misrule of the indi gent over all possessed of property. On this ground, Robespierre made his stand against the people, and vanquished them. At that moment the reaction took place, the recoil upward. Like a diver, who, the moment he touches the bottom, springs rapidly back towards the surface, the revolution commenced to reascend, traversing the same currents which it had passed in its descent, rising from Jacobinism to Girondism; and from Girondism to Royalism-at last to absolute power. The descent and ascent filled nearly about the same period, the one from 1789 to 1794; the other from 1794 to the ascendency of Buonaparte in 1799. The people were, indeed, little contented with a course of things that was gradually consigning them to their original obscurity and want of influence. They rose, they fought, they struggled; but, once defeated, they were always defeated. At last the middle classes, the good burgesses, began to perceive that they too were about to be set aside, and that the government was tending fast to absolutism. They rose, too, in arms, fought their quarrel on the day of the sections; when the cannon of

Buonaparte, routing and slaughtering them, consigned to the same ruin the power and pretensions of the middle and the lower ranks.

It is this route that we have still to trace and to describe; but as we enter on the domestic struggle of the period immediately subsequent to Robespierre's fall, we must take a view of the military fortunes of the country. The insurrection cf La Vendée was crushed, though not extinguished, in the winter of 1793-4. Had England supported it with the same force and spirit with which she afterwards aided the Peninsula, she would have saved millions, and spared Europe the fame and empire of Buonaparte. An English army and a Bourbon prince would have rallied the whole of the west of France, and its probable successes would have come at the opportune time, when the republican feeling was on the ebb; when the apathy of suffering had seized on many, and when a strong party was raising its head in favor of constitutional monarchy. But Pitt, whom the Jacobins accused of being the spring and mine of every commotion, was, on the contrary, ignorant of the very names of the leaders of La Vendée. Those brave men had been universally successful, until their repulse from Nantes, the attack on which was undertaken by them for the sake of gaining a post to communicate with England. Still they braved the convention and defeated its choicest troops, until by means of the levée en masse, the republican forces were poured upon the devoted regions in such numbers as to overwhelm resistance. To perpetuate the conquest, habitations, forests, fields were given up to flame and devastation, and the inhabitants to the sword. The Vendéans, beaten at Chollet, fled north of the Loire, to a country yet unravaged, where they could procure subsistence: there they pursued again the mad project of conquering a seaport; they were beaten from the walls of Granville as from Nantes, though still forcing the enemy to flee from them in the open field, until disheartened, worn out with fatigue, separated from their general, La Rochejaquelein, and unable to pass the Loire, they were surrounded and almost annihilated at Savenay. Never was so much heroism expended to so little pur pose. It served only to illumine the dark pages of French revolutionary history.

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The campaign of the year 1794 in Flanders, though little interesting in a military point of view, offers politically a most important lesson. The French historians, royalist and revolutionary, alike accuse Great Britain of entering upon the war with selfish and perfidious motives. To believe them, the English government subsidized Europe, and exhausted

1794.

CAMPAIGN IN FLANDERS.

77

the national resources, for the sake of taking the colonies and crushing the marine of France; as if her few beggarly islands and factories could be an object to the mistress of continents, or as if a single blow from a foreign arm could complete the ruin of all her maritime power and resources achieved by the revolution itself. The fact is, that France and England had frighted each other into enmity, and that all of this enmity which did not proceed originally from fear, sprung from quix otism and wounded pride. Pitt, however, though nowise eager to commence hostilities, still, when they were declared, willed manfully to support the hazard, and fight it stubbornly out. Such were not the principles of his allies. Prussia, purely selfish from the very commencement, cared little for the cause. In the commencement of 1794 she refused to keep on foot her armies, unless England paid them. England was kind enough to do so, although the triumphs of France, as they afterwards proved, were far more threatening to Prussia than to Great Britain. Austria, our other ally, had her own Netherlands to defend, and as yet she was zealous. The English army certainly constrained her motions. The duke of York wished to be near the sea, for which reason the Austrians, in order to co-operate with him, were obliged to form their line of operations far from the point of their resources. Provisions, reinforcements, all should cross both Rhine and Meuse to reach them. Their left only approached the latter river; and by a partial victory on this point, the French could always menace the communications of their enemies, and by a trifling success oblige the whole army to retreat. Then the duke of York would not obey an Austrian general, and the emperor himself was obliged to take the field in person, in order to obviate the impracticabilities of etiquette.

The campaign began. Along the whole line from the sea to the Meuse, there was continued and partial fighting betwixt 200,000 men on either side. The duke of York, victorious to-day, was beaten on the morrow. At Turcoing the French were successful, but not to any decisive extent. The worst consequences proceeded from the emperor's presence with the army. He then saw what the king of Prussia had seen in 1792, namely, the impossibility of crushing the French republic. Francis at the same time took a disgust to his Flemsh subjects, whose apathy and love of the French appeared o him equally unnatural and ungrateful. He accordingly abandoned the seat of war, leaving his general, the prince of Coburg, strongly imbued with his own feelings of despair: monarch and general both meditated retiring, and abandoning to the enemy a province which it required 200,000) men to

defend. Carnot, in the mean time, from his office in the capital, saw where the fate of war lay. He directed Jourdan to march with a strong division of the army of the Moselle,being opposed to the inactive though subsidized Prussians, it might well be spared,-to reinforce the wing opposed to the allied left on the Sambre and Meuse. Jourdan obeyed, crossed the Sambre, and laid siege to Charleroi, posting his army nea Fleurus, so as to protect it. Coburg attacked Jourdan on th 16th of June, and had slightly the advantage, with which h was contented, tarrying ten days longer without attempting to follow it up. On the 26th he attacked again, and fought what is known as the battle of Fleurus, said to be the victory which decided the fate of the Low Countries. Bad as were the dispositions of the Austrian general, still the efforts of his lieutenants promised to be crowned with success, when hearing that Charleroi had surrendered, he issued orders to retreat, and gave Jourdan not only the appearance but the reality of victory. It will be asked, that when Jourdan's force was drafted from the Moselle, why did not the Prussians detach a force also to counterbalance it? But no—they had excuses, they were occupied-they preferred to fight alone.

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After the battle of Fleurus the Austrians retreated towards the Meuse, leaving the English to effect theirs as they best might, and in what direction they pleased. Antwerp, Brussels, and Liege, fell into the hands of the French. The British were indignant; they hesitated, and were disposed to withhold the rest of the subsidy so ill earned by the Prussians. But at the same time envoys hurried from London to Vienna, to keep the emperor firm to the alliance against France, and to subsidize him too for exertions in behalf of himself. Austria, however, like Prussia, looked for peace. The emperor and king had ever built hopes upon Robespierre, whose ascendency they expected, and whose pacific inclinations they were base enough to court. Their thoughts, also, were directed elsewhere, towards Poland, whose second partition was then taking place, and whose stubborn resistance under the patriot Kosciusko, was abandoned or relaxed. Thus England was left to bear the fatal brunt. The duke of York could not obtain the aid necessary to preserve the small number of the British army from utter destruction, without taking an Austrian division into pay. Such is a sample of the boasted honor and fixity of principle to be found in absolute govern ments. By her conduct in this campaign, and throughout the war, which she was the first rashly to volunteer, and the first pusillanimously to abandon, Prussia fatuitously earned, as well as prepared, her future downfall. Austria, though less to

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1795.

ANTI-TERRORIST REACTION.

79

blame politically, was, in her military conduct, as imbecile; abandoning in a fit of puerile despondency and despite, her possessions in the Netherlands, and her allies, the British and the Dutch. The French troops soon scoured all the left bank of the Rhine, and took Maestricht, Pichegru completing his conquest by entering Amsterdam in the month of January, 795.

At sea, however, the English took their revenge. On the first of the same month, in which the affair of Fleurus discomfited their continental plans, their fleet met that under Villaret Joyeuse, and gained what is well known to the English reader as lord Howe's victory on the 1st of June. Thiers, the talented historian of the revolution, concludes his account of the battle by observing, that the British returned into port with their captures "frightened at the victory which they had won."*

Whilst Pichegru and Jourdan, aided by Bernadotte, who distinguished himself greatly in this campaign, were chasing the Austrians, the English, and the Dutch before them, the convention continued its debates and quarrels, no longer sanguinary, indeed, but still violent in the extreme. Robespierre had been overthrown by a coalition formed betwixt the Dantonists and his jealous brethren of the committees. But the enmity of these to Robespierre was merely personal. They were no less terrorists, greater terrorists, in our opinion, than even he. Billaud-Varennes, Collot d'Herbois, and Barrère, had sought to change the men rather than the system. They were as disinclined as ever to moderatism, which they suspected would prove dangerous to the republic, and still more dangerous to themselves. Billaud, especially, who had been instrumental in vanquishing Robespierre, aspired to succeed him, and abated none of his dictatorial tone. Whilst thundering as usual from the tribune, a murmur dared to rise against his atrocity. Methinks I hear a murmur," cried Billaud, interrupting his speech, and scowling round upon the assembly....

The members on the other hand, called moderate in the language of the day, though sufficiently sanguinary, the menaced friends of Danton, such as Tallien, Freron, Le Gendre, assumed the new name of Thermidoriens, as if to cut off all connexion with the past. They were disgusted with slaugh

*It is not a little amusing to read the French accounts of their naval defeats. In the "Victoires, Conquêtes," &c. the popular history of national prowess, whilst reverses on land are told with a certain degree of fairness, and with the magnanimity which valor may well afford, their defeats at sea are recounted in a high tone of vaunt, and are made to seem all bu victories.

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