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plan later recommended by Thiers, and followed with such success in July, 1830.1

The plan could not be worse organised. A great many of the sectionaries quitted their ranks for want of ammunition, which had not been provided. At length, those of the north side of the river advanced to the church of St. Roch, occupied it, and prepared to penetrate by the rue du Dauphin to the Tuileries. Here Bonaparte in person-there was no attack elsewhere to distract him received the assailants with a determined fire of grape, that soon routed them; 2 he pursued them in the rue St. Honoré, which he equally swept with cannon. Those of the fugitives who did not shrink to their homes hurried to the other side of the river, to join the sections of the faubourg St. Germain in their attack, which had not yet been made. When they did appear, menacing the Pont Royal, Bonaparte was here also to receive them, where his cannon, meeting with no impediment along open quays, long streets, and an unencumbered bridge, worked tenfold havoc, and not only succeeded in routing, but in disheartening the sections. Thus fell the cause of the citizens and national guard before the will of the convention, supported by the army and a few of the democrats. The sections were disarmed, the anarchists humbled, the Bourbonists obliged to fly. The convention, resolving itself, with most glaring absurdity, into an electoral assembly, fixed upon two-thirds of its body, which were to constitute the majority of the new legislature, declared its session terminated on the 26th of October, 1795 (4th Brumaire, year IV), and called this act "a dissolution."c

DURUY'S RÉSUMÉ OF THE PRINCIPAL CREATIONS OF THE CONVENTION

The imperious necessities of the strife had not allowed the assemblies to realise all their projected reforms. They had however at least prepared immense quantities of materials for the succeeding generation to utilise. Meanwhile, in the midst of commotions and victories, the convention, to strengthen the unity of France, had prepared a uniform code; established national education; created normal and polytechnical schools, normal and primary central schools (lycées), schools of medicine, chairs of living languages, a bureau of longitudes, a conservatory of music, the Institute, the museum of natural history, and fixed the uniformity of weights and measures (the metrical system). By the reckless issuing of assignats (44,000,000,000) it had demolished public wealth, and by the "maximum law" it had destroyed commerce; but by the sale of the national lands, which comprised a third of the territory, it had opened up to cultivation by the new proprietors immense domains till then unproductive. By the creation of ledgers of the public debt it had prepared for better days a renewed confidence in the

[1"There was a manoeuvre much more prudent for the sections than that of exposing their force in deep columns to the fire of Bonaparte's cannon. This was to form barricades in the streets, to invest the assembly and its troops in the Tuileries, to get possession of the surrounding houses, and to open from every window and aperture a murderous fire on the supporters of the convention, slaying them one by one and reducing them by famine. But the sectionaries only thought of a coup-de-main; and hoped by a single charge to make their way, and to force the gates of the palace."-THIERS.m]

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[2"It is false,' says Napoleon, that we fired first with blank charge; it had been a waste of life to do that.' Most false: the firing was with sharp and sharpest shot: to all men it was plain that here was no sport; the rabbets and plinths of St. Roch Church shew splintered by it to this hour. - Singular: in old Broglie's time, six years ago, this Whiff of Grapeshot was promised; but it could not be given then; could not have profited then. Now, however, the time is come for it, and the man; and behold, you have it; and the thing we specifically call 6 French Revolution' is blown into space by it, and become a thing that was!"-CARLYLE.]

[1795 A.D.] credit of the state. The invention of the telegraph allowed of the rapid transmission of orders from the central government to the frontiers; and the establishment of museums awakened a taste for the arts. The convention desired, moreover, that the infirm and the orphans should be cared for by the state; and the last decree of these terrible legislators was for the abolition of capital punishment after a general peace should be established.s

After the convention had promulgated, in solemn form, the union of Belgium with France, and its subdivision into departments, it resolved to terminate its long and tempestuous career by a signal homage to humanity. It decreed that the punishment of death should be abolished in the French Republic from the period of general peace; it changed the name of the place de la Révolution to that of place de la Concorde; and it pronounced an amnesty for all acts having reference to the Revolution, save for the revolt of the 13th Vendémiaire. This was setting at liberty the men of all parties, except Lemaitre, against whom alone of all the conspirators of Vendémiaire sufficient proofs to warrant condemnation existed. All the prisons were ordered to be thrown open. At length, two hours and a half after midday of the 4th Brumaire, year IV (26th of October, 1795), the president of the convention delivered these words: "The national convention declares that its mission is fulfilled, and its session terminated." Cries enthusiastically repeated of "Long live the Republic!" accompanied and followed these last words.

Thus closed the protracted and memorable session of the national convention. The constituent assembly had found the old feudal organisation to destroy and a new organisation to construct: the task of the legislative assembly had been to essay this new organisation, burdened with the king left as a component part of the constitution. After an experiment of several months, it ascertained and proclaimed the incompatibility of the king with the new institutions, and his confederacy with coalesced Europe; it suspended the king and the constitution, and abdicated its functions. The convention, therefore, on its convocation, encountered a dethroned king, an abrogated constitution, war declared against Europe, and, as resources in the emergency, an administration utterly subverted, a paper-money greatly depreciated, and antiquated forms of regiments, hollow and emasculated skeletons. Thus, it was not liberty the convention had to assert in presence of an enfeebled and contemned throne; it was liberty it had to defend against all Europea task of very different import. Undaunted in the crisis, it proclaimed the republic in the teeth of the hostile armies; it immolated the king to render its contest irrevocable; eventually it arrogated all authority, and resolved itself into a dictatorship. Within its own pale, voices arose to invoke humanity when it would hear only of energy; it stifled them.

Speedily this dictatorship, which it had assumed over France in the exigency of general peril, twelve members assumed over it, for the like reason and in aggravated exigency. From the Alps to the ocean, from the Pyrenees to the Rhine, those twelve dictators seized upon all, men and things, and commenced with the nations of Europe the greatest and most terrible struggle recorded in history. In order to remain supreme directors of this mighty undertaking, they smote all parties successively; and, according to the condition of human weakness, they exhibited their qualities in their extremes. Those qualities were fortitude and energy; the excess was cruelty. They shed torrents of blood, until, become useless through victory and odious by the abuse of power, they succumbed. The convention thereupon resumed the dictatorship, and began by degrees to relax the springs of its redoubtable

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administration. Tranquillised regarding its safety by victory, it listened to the voice of humanity, and yielded to its spirit of regeneration. During a year it was actuated by the desire of devising and establishing whatever was good and great in a community; but factions, crushed beneath a merciless authority, revived under a government of clemency and forbearance. Two factions, in which were amalgamated, in infinite shades, the friends and enemies of the Revolution, attacked it in turn. It vanquished the first in Germinal and Prairial, the second in Vendémiaire, and to the last day manifested a heroic courage amidst dangers. Finally, it framed a republican constitution, and, after a strife of three years, with Europe, with factions, and with itself, bleeding and mutilated, it abdicated, and transferred France to the Directory.

It has left behind it terrible reminiscences; but for its exculpation it has one-one single fact to allege, and all reproaches sink before that stupendous fact-it saved France from foreign invasion! The preceding assemblies had left France in peril and hazard, it bequeathed France saved and victorious to the Directory and the empire. If the emigration had succeeded in subduing France in 1793, no trace had remained of the labours of the constituent assembly, or of the benefits resulting from the Revolution; instead of those admirable civil institutions of those magnificent achievements which signalised the constituent, the convention, the Directory, the consulate, and the empire-France would have been a prey to such sanguinary and degrading anarchy as was later deplored beyond the Pyrenees. By repelling the aggression of the kingly conspiracy against the republic, the convention secured to the revolution an uninterrupted action of thirty years on the area of France, and afforded to its works time for consolidation, and for acquiring that force which enables them to defy the impotent wrath of the inveterate foes of humanity. To the men who call themselves with pride "patriots of 1780," the convention will always justly reply, "You had provoked the struggle; it is I who sustained and terminated it." m

This mingled tale of great national convulsions and pitiless executions of a total upheaving of new elements, and a total displacement of the old, with heroism, patriotism, and the loftiest aspirations combined with folly and charlatanism of the wildest kind-is now coming to an end. Napoleon Bonaparte is about to lay his hand on the Revolution, and guide it into the path he desires. The history of France condenses itself for the next twenty years into the life of one man, and the same thing may almost be said of the history of the whole of Europe.-WHITE.

Ir might have been hoped that the overthrow and punishment of the leading terrorists would produce a return to legality, to order, and to a respect of the representative system. Extreme parties were wearied, decimated, and worn out. The republic was victorious, and had no more to fear from foreign enemies. Now was the moment to establish liberty on a firm basis. The convention, dissolved, would have been replaced by a majority of new men, unstained by the crimes of the Revolution, with the page of experience opened before them, warning them alike of the excesses of royal and of popular tyrants.

But no: the convention, chosen by the nation, dared not trust the nation. Its majority could not hope for re-election; and the past crimes of its members thus forced it to cling to power in self-defence. The republicans made a bugbear of royalism, in order to serve as a pretext for their arbitrary measures; just as royalism makes the same use of republicanism when it has the upper hand. Offering then the pretext of this groundless fear, the old members of the convention perpetuated their power, which thus became a veritable tyranny and dictatorship. It was still more a tyranny, because supported by no party or class whatsoever. The royalists, the moderate, the extreme republicans -all disowned them. The higher classes and the middle classes

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they had been obliged to slaughter on the eve of usurpation; and they were very soon assailed by a conspiracy of democrats. Thus deserted by all parties, the majority of the new legislature represented but one interest-that of themselves, the regicides; and had but one aim-their own impunity and continuance in power. It was impossible that their authority, thus baseless, could endure they leaned for support on the military, which became their janissaries. And the military were obedient, until there arose a general of reputation and ambition, capable of taking the lead, and of representing the military interest. As soon as such a personage appeared, the dictatorial tyranny fell before him, and their usurpation gave way to his. The party of the regicides was superseded by that of the soldiers.

On the 27th of October, 1795, the 500 self-elected conventionalists united themselves, according to their decree, to the 250 newly elected members. These last were for the most part moderate men, distinguished by their information and probity, and strangers to revolutionary excess. Their old colleagues instantly stigmatised them as royalists, ere they opened their mouths. Amongst the married members above forty years of age, a ballot took place; 250 were thus chosen to form the upper chamber, or council of Ancients. The next important step was the choice of the five members of the executive Directory. In this, too, the conventionalists had provided for the maintenance of their system and influence: being the majority, they had entered into a private compact to nominate none save those who had voted the death of Louis XVI, the shibboleth of their party. Accordingly, the choice fell upon Barras, Rewbell, Larévellère-Lépeaux, Letourneur, and Sieyes. The last, either from dislike to his colleagues, or in pique that his plan of government had not been adopted, refused the office; and Carnot was chosen in his stead. The newly elected deputies proposed Cambacérès, who had voted for the imprisonment, not the death, of Louis; but the majority did not consider him sufficiently staunch.

It required an inordinate measure of either courage or ambition to accept the office of government at such a moment. The legislature, and of course its executive, could reckon on the support of no party. The discomfited citizens were indignant; the patriots not reconciled. The five directors, in repairing to the palace of the Luxembourg, which had been assigned them, "found there not a single article of furniture. The porters lent them a rickety table, a sheet of paper, and an ink-bottle, to enable them to despatch the first message announcing their accession. There was not a sou in the treasury. Each night were printed the assignats requisite for the service of the morrow; and they were issued whilst yeu moist from the presses of the republic. The greatest uncertainty prevailed as to the provisioning of the capital; and for some days the people had received but a few ounces of bread and some rice each."c

FINANCIAL CONDITION OF FRANCE

The financial situation was frightful. Twenty-nine billions of assignats had been issued of which ten had been retired, and nineteen remained in circulation, although on account of the great number of counterfeits it was impossible to know the exact figure. The assignats lost in value from a hundred to a hundred and fifty to one. As a result no more purveyors could be found, officials tendered their resignations, and soldiers deserted, through having no means of living. The postmasters threatened to stop their service. To feed the armies of Paris, the lack of money was supplied by fabricating