PERIODS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY
REVOLUTIONARY EUROPE
1789–1815

REVOLUTIONARY
EUROPE

1789–1815

BY

H. MORSE STEPHENS, M.A.

BALLIOL COLLEGE, OXFORD
PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AT CORNELL UNIVERSITY, ITHACA, U.S.A.
AUTHOR OF ‘A HISTORY OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION,’ ETC.

PERIOD VII

London
RIVINGTON, PERCIVAL, & CO.
1896

Third Edition

All Rights Reserved

AUTHOR’S PREFACE

In this volume I have endeavoured to write a history of Europe during an important period of transition. I have reduced military details to the smallest possible limits, and have preferred to mention rather than to describe battles and campaigns, in order to have more space to devote to such questions as the Belgian revolution of 1789, the reorganisation of Prussia in 1806–12, and the Congress of Vienna. I have throughout tried to describe the French Revolution in its influence on Europe, and Napoleon’s career as a great reformer rather than as a great conqueror. The inner meaning of the period and its general results I have sketched in a short introductory chapter, on which the rest of the volume is really a detailed historical commentary.

The maps which accompany the volume are intended to show the changes in the boundaries of States, and not to give the position of places mentioned in the text. Every one who reads such a volume as the present must use an atlas as his constant companion, for no book of this size could possibly contain a sufficient number of maps adequate to the illustration of the events narrated.

In conclusion, I must express my thanks to Mr. W. R. Morfill, Reader in Slavonic to the University of Oxford, for giving me a canon for the spelling of Russian proper names, and to the Editor, Mr. Arthur Hassall, for willing assistance and friendly encouragement.

H. MORSE STEPHENS.

Cambridge, 1893.

CONTENTS

APPENDICES

[MAPS]

INTRODUCTION

The Period from 1789 to 1815 an Era of Transition—The Principles propounded during the period which have modified the political conceptions of the Eighteenth Century: i. The Principle of the Sovereignty of the People; ii. The Principle of Nationality; iii. The Principle of Personal Liberty—The Eighteenth Century, the Era of the Benevolent Despots—The condition of the Labouring Classes in the Eighteenth Century: Serfdom—The Middle Classes—The Upper Classes—Why France led the way to modern ideas in the French Revolution—The influence of the thinkers and writers of the Eighteenth Century in bringing about the change—Contrast between the French and German thinkers—The low state of morality and general indifference to religion—Conclusion.

A Period of Transition.

The period from 1789 to 1815—that is, the era of the French Revolution and of the domination of Napoleon—marks one of the most important transitions in the history of Europe. Great as is the difference between the material condition of the Europe of the nineteenth century, with its railways and its electric telegraphs, and the Europe of the eighteenth century, with its bad roads and uncertain posts, it is not greater than the contrast between the political, social, and economical ideas which prevailed then and which prevail now. Modern principles, that mark a new departure in human progress and in its evidence, Civilisation, took their rise during this epoch of transition, and their development underlies the history of the period, and gives the key to its meaning.

The Sovereignty of the People.

The conception that government exists for the promotion of the security and prosperity of the governed was fully grasped in the eighteenth century. But it was held alike by philosophers and rulers, alike in civilised England and in Russia emerging from barbarism that, whilst government existed for the good of the people, it must not be administered by the people. This fundamental principle is in the nineteenth century entirely denied. It is now believed that the government should be directed by the people through their representatives, and that it is better for a nation to make mistakes in the course of its self-government than to be ruled, be it ever so wisely, by an irresponsible monarch. This notion of the sovereignty of the people was energetically propounded during the great Revolution in France. It is not yet universally accepted in all the states of modern Europe. But it has profoundly affected the political development of the nineteenth century. It lies at the base of one group of modern political ideas; and, though in 1815 it seemed to have been propounded only to be condemned, one of the most striking features of the modern history of Europe since the Congress of Vienna, has been its gradual acceptance and steady growth in civilised countries.

The Principle of Nationality.

The second political belief introduced during the epoch of transition from 1789 to 1815 was the recognition of the idea of nationality in contradistinction to that of the State, which prevailed in the last century. In the eighteenth century the State was typified by the ruling authority. National boundaries and race limits were regarded as of no importance. It was not felt to be an anomaly that the Catholic Netherlands or Belgium should be governed by the House of Austria, or that an Austrian prince should reign in Tuscany and a Spanish prince in Naples. The first partition of Poland was not condemned as an offence against nature, but as an artful scheme devised for the purpose of enlarging the neighbouring states, which had appropriated the districts lying nearest to their own territories. But during the wars of the Revolution and of Napoleon the idea of nationality made itself felt. France, as a nation in arms, proved to be more than a match for the Europe of the old conceptions. And it was not until her own sense of nationality was absorbed in Napoleon’s creation of a new Empire of the West that France was vanquished by coming in contact with the Spanish, the Russian, and the German peoples in the place of her former foes, the sovereigns of Europe. The idea of nationality, like the idea of the sovereignty of the people, seemed to be condemned in 1815 by the Congress of Vienna. The Catholic Netherlands were united with the provinces of Holland; Norway was forcibly separated from Denmark; Italy was once more parcelled out into independent states under foreign princes. But the Congress of Vienna could not eradicate the new idea. It had taken too deep a root. And another striking feature of the European history of the nineteenth century has been the formation of new nations, resting their raison d’être on the feeling of nationality and the identity of race.

The Principle of Personal Liberty.

The third modern notion which has transformed Europe is the recognition of the principle of personal and individual liberty. Feudalism left the impress of its graduation of rights and duties marked deeply on the constitutions of the European States. The sovereignty of the people implies political liberty of action; feudalism denied the propriety and advantages of social and economical freedom. Theoretically, freedom of individual thought and action was acknowledged to be a good thing by all wise philosophers and rulers. Practically, the poorer classes were kept in bondage either as agricultural serfs by their lords or as journeymen workmen by the trade-guilds. Where personal and individual liberty had been attained, political liberty became an object of ambition, and political liberty led to the idea of the sovereignty of the people. The last vestiges of feudalism were swept away during this era of transition. The doctrines of the French Revolution did more than the victories of Napoleon to destroy the political system of the eighteenth century. The Congress of Vienna in 1815 might return to the former notions of government and the State, but it did not attempt to restore the old restrictions on individual liberty. With personal freedom acknowledged, the reactionary tendency of the Congress of Vienna was left of no effect. Liberty of thought and action led to the resurrection of the conceptions of nationality and of the sovereignty of the people, which were but for the moment extinguished by the defeat of France in the person of Napoleon by the armies of united Europe.

The Benevolent Despots.

The period which preceded the French Revolution and the era of war, from the troubles of which modern Europe was to be born, may be characterised as that of the benevolent despots. The State was everything; the nation nothing. The ruler was supreme, but his supremacy rested on the assumption that he ruled his subjects for their good. This conception of the Aufgeklärte Despotismus was developed to its highest degree by Frederick the Great of Prussia. ‘I am but the first servant of the nation,’ he wrote, a phrase which irresistibly recalls the definition of the position of Louis XVI. by the first leaders of the French Revolution. This attitude was defended by great thinkers like Diderot, and is the keynote to the internal policy of the monarchs of the latter half of the eighteenth century towards their people. The Empress Catherine of Russia, Gustavus III. of Sweden, Charles III. of Spain, the Archduke Leopold of Tuscany, and, above all, the Emperor Joseph II. defended their absolutism on the ground that they exercised their power for the good of their subjects. Never was more earnest zeal displayed in promoting the material well-being of all classes, never did monarchs labour so hard to justify their existence, or effect such important civil reforms, as on the eve of the French Revolution, which was to herald the overthrow of the doctrine of absolute monarchy. The intrinsic weakness of the position of the benevolent despots was that they could not ensure the permanence of their reforms, or vivify the rotten fabric of the administrative edifices, which had grown up in the feudal monarchies. Great ministers, such as Tanucci and Aranda, could do much to help their masters to carry out their benevolent ideas, but they could not form or nominate their successors, or create a perfect body of unselfish administrators. When Frederick the Great’s master hand was withdrawn, Prussia speedily exhibited a condition of administrative decay, and since this was the case in Prussia, which had been for more than forty years under the rule of the greatest and wisest of the benevolent despots, the falling-off was likely to be even more marked in other countries. The conception of benevolent despots ruling for their people’s good was eventually superseded, as was certain to be the case, owing to the impossibility of their ensuring its permanence, by the modern idea of the people ruling themselves.

The Condition of the Labouring Classes.

Serfdom.

And, in truth, while doing full justice to the sentiments and the endeavours of the benevolent despots, it cannot honestly be said that their efforts had done much to improve the condition of the labouring classes by the end of the eighteenth century. The great majority of the peasants of Europe were throughout that century absolute serfs. To take once more the example of Prussia, the only attempts to improve the condition of the peasants had been made in the royal domain, and they had only been very tentative. The dwellers on the estates of the Prussian nobility in Silesia and Brandenburg were treated no better than negro slaves in America and the West Indies. They were not allowed to leave their villages, or to marry without their lords’ consent; their children had to serve in the lords’ families for several years at a nominal wage, and they themselves had to labour at least three days, and often six days, a week on their lords’ estate. These corvées or forced labours occupied so much of the peasant’s time that he could only cultivate his own farm by moonlight. This state of absolute serfdom was general in Central and Eastern Europe, in the greater part of Germany, in Poland and in Russia, and where it existed the artisan class was equally depressed, for no man was allowed to learn a trade without his lord’s permission, and an escaped serf had no chance of admission into the trade-guilds of the cities. Towards the west a more advanced civilisation improved the condition of the labourers; the Italian peasant and the German peasant on the Rhine had obtained freedom to marry without his lord’s interference; but, nevertheless, it was a leading prince on the Rhine, the Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel, who sold his subjects to England to serve as mercenaries in the American War of Independence. In France the peasant was far better off. The only serfs left, who existed on the domain of the Abbey of Saint-Claude in the Jura, on whose behalf Voltaire wielded his powerful pen, were in a far happier condition than the German serfs; they could marry whom they pleased; they might emigrate without leave; their persons were free; all they were deprived of was the power of selling their property or devising it by will. The rest of the French peasants and the agricultural classes generally were extremely independent. Feudalism had left them some annoyances but few real grievances, and the inconveniences they suffered were due solely to the inequalities of the copyhold system of tenure and its infringements of their personal liberty. The French peasants and farmers were indignant at an occasional day’s corvée, or forced labour, which really represented the modern rent, and at the succession-duties they had to pay the descendants or representatives of their ancestors’ feudal lords. The German, Polish, and Hungarian peasant, on the contrary, crushed beneath the burden of his personal servitude, did not dream of pretending to own the plot of land, which his lord kindly allowed him to cultivate in his few spare moments.

The Middle Classes.

The mass of the population of Central and Eastern Europe was purely agricultural, and in its poverty expected naught but the bare necessaries of existence. Trade, commerce, and manufactures were therefore practically non-existent. This meant that the cities, and consequently the middle classes, formed but an insignificant factor in the population. In the West of Europe, on the Rhine, and more especially in France, where the agricultural classes were more independent, more wealthy, and more civilised, existence demanded more comforts, and a well-to-do and intelligent commercial and manufacturing urban element quickly developed to supply the demand created. Commerce, trade, and the concentrated employment of labour produced a prosperous and enlightened middle class, accustomed for generations to education and the possession of personal freedom. With wealth always goes civilisation and education, and as there was a larger middle class in France and Western Germany than in Central and Eastern Europe, the peasants in those parts were better educated and more intelligent.

The Upper Classes.

The condition of the upper classes followed the same geographical distribution. The highest aristocracy of all European countries was indeed, as it has always been, on much the same intellectual and social level. Paris was its centre, the capital of society, fashion, and luxury, where Russian, Austrian, Swedish, and English nobles met on an equality. But the bulk of the German and Eastern European aristocracy was in education and refinement inferior to the bulk of the French nobility. Yet they possessed an authority which the French nobility had lost. The Russian, Prussian, and Austrian nobleman and the Hungarian magnate was the owner of thousands of serfs, who cultivated his lands and rendered him implicit obedience. The French nobleman exacted only certain rents, either copyhold quit-rents or feudal services, from the tenants on his ancestral estates. His tenants were in no sense his serfs; they owed him no personal service, and resented the payment of the rent substituted for such service. The patriarchal feeling of loyalty to the lord had long disappeared, and the French peasant did not acknowledge any subjection to his landlord, while the Prussian and Russian serf recognised his bondage to his master.

Why France experienced the Revolution.

These considerations help to show why the Revolution, which was after twenty-six years to inaugurate modern Europe, broke out in France. It was because the French peasant was more independent, more wealthy, and better educated than the German serf, that he resented the political and social privileges of his landlord and the payment of rent, more than the serf objected to his bondage. It was because France possessed an enlightened middle class that the peasants and workmen found leaders. It was because Frenchmen had been in the possession of a great measure of personal freedom that they were ready to strike a blow for political liberty, and eventually promulgated the idea of social equality. The ideas of the sovereignty of the people, of nationality and of personal liberty, did not originate in France. They are as old as civilisation. But they had been clouded in the Middle Ages by feudalism, and, after the Reformation, had been succeeded by different political conceptions, which had crystallised in the eighteenth century into the doctrines of the supremacy of the State, of the arbitrary rule of benevolent or enlightened despots. England and Holland had developed separately from the rest of the Western World. For reasons lying deep in their internal history and their geographical position, they had rid themselves alike of feudalism and absolute monarchy; they had developed a sense of their independent nationality, and had recognised the importance of personal freedom. In England especially, the abolition of the relics of feudalism in the seventeenth century had placed the English farmers and peasants in a different economical position from their fellows on the Continent. There existed in England none of the invidious distinctions between nobleman and roturier in the matter of bearing national burdens, which had survived in France, and, though owing to the curiosities of the franchise the larger proportion of Englishmen had but a very small share in electing the representatives of the people, the government carried on as it was by a small oligarchy of great families possessed an appearance of political liberty, and of a wisely-balanced machine for administrative purposes.

Intellectual movement of the eighteenth century.

Nor must the influence of intellectual ideas, as bearing on problems which the French Revolution was to force on the attention of the more backward and more oppressed nations of Europe, be underrated. The great French writers of the eighteenth century—Voltaire, Montesquieu, Diderot, and Rousseau—had been deeply impregnated with the ideas of Locke and the English political thinkers of his school. In their different lines they insisted that government existed for the good of the governed, and investigated the origins of government and the relations of man in the social state. It was their speculations which altered the character of absolute monarchy and based its retention on its benevolent purposes; they, too, insisted upon the rights of man to preserve his personal freedom, as long as it did not clash with the maintenance and security of civil society. The great French writers of the eighteenth century exercised by their works a smaller influence on the outbreak and actual course of the French Revolution than has been generally supposed. The causes of the movement were chiefly economical and political, not philosophical or social: its rapid development was due to historical circumstances, and mainly to the attitude of the rest of Europe. But the text-books of its leaders were the works of the French thinkers of the eighteenth century, and if their doctrines had little actual influence in bringing about the Revolution, they influenced its development and the extension of its principles throughout Europe. It is curious to contrast the opinions of the great French writers of the middle of the eighteenth century, whose arguments mainly affected the general conceptions of man living in society, that is, of government, with the views advocated by the great German writers of the end of the century, who concentrated their attention upon man in his individual capacity for culture and self-improvement. Schiller, Goethe, Kant, and Herder were, further, more cosmopolitan than German. The problems of man and his intellectual and artistic development proved more attractive to the great German thinkers than the difficulties presented by the economical, social, and political diversities of different classes of society. Goethe, for instance, understood the signification of the French Revolution, and was much interested in its effects on the human race, but he cared very little about its impression on Germany.

Morality and Religion in the eighteenth century.

Finally, the low state of morality in the eighteenth century had sapped the earnestness in the cause of humanity of men of all classes in all countries. Disbelief in the Christian religion was general in both the Protestant and Catholic countries of the Continent. The immorality of most of the prelates in Catholic countries was notorious, and was equalled by their avowed contempt for the doctrines of the religion they professed to teach. The Protestant pastors of Germany were quite as open in their infidelity. In the famous case of Schulz, the pastor of Gielsdorf, who openly denied Christianity, and taught simply that morality was necessary, the High Consistory of Berlin held that he was, nevertheless, still fitted to hold his office as the Lutheran pastor of his village. Christianity in both Catholic and Protestant countries was replaced by the vague sentiments of morality, which are best presented in Rousseau’s Profession de Foi du Vicaire Savoyard. In reaction to this vague and dogmaless morality, there existed many secret societies and coteries of mystics, such as the Rosati and the Illuminati, who replaced religion by ornate and symbolical ceremonies.

Such was the political, economical, intellectual and moral state of Europe in 1789, on the eve of the French Revolution. The whole continent was to pass through twenty-six years of almost unceasing war, at the end of which it was to emerge with new conceptions and new ideals of both political and social life. The new ideas seemed indeed to be checked, if not destroyed, in 1815, but once inspired into men’s minds they could not be forgotten, and their subsequent development forms the history of modern Europe in the nineteenth century.

CHAPTER I
1789

The Treaty of 1756 between France and Austria—The Triple Alliance between England, Prussia, and Holland, 1788—The Minor Powers of Europe—Austria: Joseph ii.—His Internal Policy—His Foreign Policy—Russia: Catherine—Poland—France: Louis xvi.—Spain: Charles iv.—Portugal: Maria i.—Italy—The Two Sicilies: Ferdinand iv.—Naples—Sicily—Rome: Pope Pius vi.—Tuscany: Grand Duke Leopold—Parma: Duke Ferdinand—Modena: Duke Hercules iii.—Lombardy—Sardinia: Victor Amadeus iii.—Lucca—Genoa—Venice—England: George iii.—The Policy of Pitt—Prussia: Frederick William ii.—Policy of Prussia—Holland—Denmark: Christian vii.—Sweden: Gustavus iii.—The Holy Roman Empire—The Diet—The Electors—College of Princes—College of Free Cities—The Imperial Tribunal—The Aulic Council—The Circles—The Princes of Germany—Bavaria—Baden—Würtemburg—Saxony—Saxe-Weimar—The Ecclesiastical Princes—Mayence—Trêves—Cologne—The Petty Princes and Knights of the Empire—Switzerland—Geneva—Conclusion.

The Treaty of 1756.

The states of Europe at the commencement of the year 1789 were ranked diplomatically in two important groups, the one dominated by the connection between France, Austria, Spain, and Russia; the other by the alliance between England, Prussia, and Holland. The great transformation which had been effected by the treaty between France and Austria in 1756 in the relationship between the powers of Europe was the crowning diplomatic event of the eighteenth century. The arrangements then entered into and the alliances tested in the Seven Years’ War still subsisted in 1789. But the spirit which lay at the root of the Austro-French alliance was sensibly modified. The Treaty of 1756 had never been really popular in either country. In France, Marie Antoinette, whose marriage with Louis XVI. had set the seal on the Austrian alliance, was detested as the living symbol of the hated treaty, as l’Autrichienne, the Austrian woman, and the most accredited political thinkers and writers were always dwelling on the traditional policy of France, and on the system of Henri IV., Richelieu, and Louis XIV., which held the House of Hapsburg to be the hereditary and the inevitable enemy of the House of Bourbon and of the French nation. The dislike of the alliance was felt with equal intensity in Austria by the wealthy and the educated classes. The Austrian generals resented the inefficacy of the French intervention during the Seven Years’ War, and the Austrian people attributed its reverses in that war to it with as much acrimony as if France had acted as an enemy instead of as an ally. The same sentiment actuated even the Imperial House. ‘Our natural enemies, travestied as allies, who do more harm than if they were open enemies;’[1] such is the language in which Leopold of Tuscany, brother of Marie Antoinette, characterised the French in a letter written in December 1784 to his brother, the Emperor Joseph II. The Emperor Joseph was himself of the same opinion. He preferred his Russian ally, the Empress Catherine, to his brother-in-law, Louis XVI., King of France, and the tendency of his foreign policy was to strengthen his friendship with Russia, even at the expense of sacrificing his alliance with France. Russia, whose expansion under the great Empress had been enormous since the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War, cared but little for either of the allies, and pursued independently its course of steady development. Catherine had, indeed, during most of the later years of Frederick the Great, remained in alliance with Prussia, and to some extent had been on friendly terms with England. But her natural tendency was to distrust England. In 1780 she had placed herself at the head of the ‘Armed Neutrality,’ which opposed the naval pretensions of England, and in 1788 she had formally proposed a close quadruple alliance between Russia, Austria, France, and Spain.

Prussia, England, and Holland.

If the relations between France, Russia, and Austria were unsettled, the Triple Alliance between Prussia, Holland, and England was hardly on a more stable footing in 1789. Prussia, since the death of Frederick the Great, had become really decrepit, while apparently remaining a first-rate military power. Though still preserving the prestige of its famous King, who died in 1786, and recognising its alliance with England, Prussia in 1789 exhibited a decaying internal administration, and a vacillating foreign policy. England had received a heavy blow by the success of the colonists in North America, and by the Treaty of Versailles, and the powers of the Continent, while envying her wealth, held her military power of but small account. This opinion prevailed even at Berlin, and the new King of Prussia gave many evidences that the alliance of England was rather distasteful to him than otherwise. The third member of the alliance, Holland, was in the weakest condition of all, and it was only by invoking the armed interference of Prussia that England had maintained the authority of the Prince of Orange, as Stadtholder, in 1787. Though this interference had led to the formation of the famous Triple Alliance of 1788, in reality the English and Prussian statesmen profoundly distrusted each other, while the forcing of the yoke of the Stadtholder upon them caused the Dutch democratic party in Holland to abhor the allies and to look for help to France.

The Minor Powers of Europe.

The rest of the European states were bound more or less firmly to the one or the other of the two coalitions. The smaller states of Germany, aggravated or intimidated by the measures of the Emperor Joseph II., had rallied to the side of Prussia. In the north, Denmark, whose reigning house was connected by family ties with the royal families of England and Prussia, was completely under Russian influence, while Sweden, under Gustavus III., was actually at war with Catherine II. Poland, torn by internal dissensions, and threatened with complete destruction by its neighbours, was awaiting its final partition. The southern states of Europe were almost entirely bound to the Franco-Austrian alliance. Spain had been united to France by the offensive and defensive treaty, known as the ‘Pacte de Famille,’ concluded by the French minister, Choiseul, in 1761, and tested in the war of American Independence. Portugal, though connected with England, commercially by the Methuen treaty, and politically by a long course of protection against Spanish pretensions, was striving by a series of royal marriages to become the ally of Spain. In Italy, Naples was ruled by a Spanish prince married to an Austrian princess; Sardinia was closely allied with France, and the remainder of the peninsula was mainly under Austrian influence. Turkey, now travelling towards decay, was looked upon by Russia and Austria as their legitimate prey, and met with encouragement in resistance, but not with active help, from England and France.

After thus roughly sketching the general attitude of the powers of Europe to each other in 1789, it will be well to examine each state separately before entering on the history of the exciting period which followed. Great and sweeping alterations were to be effected; many diplomatic variations were to take place. The most important result of the period of the French Revolution and of Napoleon was its influence upon the minds of men, as shown in the growth of certain political conceptions, which have moulded modern Europe. But great changes were also brought about in dynasties and in the geographical boundaries of states, which can only be understood by a knowledge of the condition of Europe in 1789.

Austria: Joseph II.

Joseph II.: Internal Policy.

The figure of most importance in the beginning of the year 1789 was that of the Emperor Joseph II., and his dominions were those in which an observer would have prophesied a great revolution. Joseph was at that date a man of forty-seven; he had been elected Emperor in the place of his father, Francis of Lorraine, in 1765, and succeeded to the hereditary dominions of the House of Austria on the death of his mother, Maria Theresa, in 1780. He was, perhaps, the best type of the class of benevolent despots. A singularly industrious, enlightened, and able ruler, his ideas were far in advance of those of his age,—so much in advance, indeed, that his efforts to impose them upon his subjects brought upon himself hatred instead of gratitude, and among the people turbulence and insurrection instead of peace and tranquillity. The history of the Emperor Joseph’s reforms, and of the disturbances which resulted from them, belongs to an earlier volume of this series. In 1789 the whole of the hereditary dominions of the House of Hapsburg were in a state of ferment. The Emperor’s scheme of welding them into an Austrian nation, by insisting on the use of the German language, by simplifying the state of the law and the administration, and assimilating the various religious and educational institutions, had roused the fire of local patriotism. In Hungary and in the Tyrol, in Bohemia, and, above all, in the Austrian Netherlands, or Belgium, there was declared rebellion, fanned by local prejudices, religious fanaticism, and the spirit of caste. The first and second of these causes were chiefly responsible in the Austrian Netherlands, the third in Hungary. The Belgians, and more especially the Brabançons, were in arms for their local rights and ancient constitutions, which had been infringed by the Emperor’s decrees. The Belgian clergy, who looked upon Joseph as worse than an infidel for his treatment of the Pope and his suppression of religious houses, were inflamed at the establishment of an Imperial Seminary in Brussels as a rival to the Roman Catholic University of Louvain. But in Hungary it was the magnates of the country who had fought so gallantly for Maria Theresa and saved her throne, who were in an attitude of open disaffection. This was partly due to Joseph’s infringement of their Constitution and his removal of the Iron Crown to Vienna, but still more to his abolition of serfdom. As has been already stated, serfdom in Europe was practically extinct in the western part of the Continent, that is, in France, in Belgium, and on the Rhine, while it increased in intensity steadily towards the east, and was as bad in Prussia Proper, Poland, and Hungary, as in Russia. ‘Most merciful Emperor,’ ran a petition from an Hungarian peasant to Joseph, ‘four days’ forced labour for the seigneur; the fifth day, fishing for him; the sixth day, hunting with him; and the seventh belongs to God. Consider, most merciful Emperor, how can I pay dues and taxes?’[2] The iniquity of serfdom, with its practice of forced labour, was accentuated in Hungary by the constitutional custom which exempted the nobility from all taxation. The Emperor Joseph abolished serfdom in Hungary on 22nd August 1785, and inaugurated a system of removing feudal burdens, and converting forced labour, by means of a gradually diminishing tax. The condition of the hereditary dominions of the House of Hapsburg was thus, in 1789, one of seething discontent where it was not open rebellion; Belgian burghers and Hungarian magnates were alike infuriated by the Emperor’s efforts at reform; and the poor serfs of Hungary and Bohemia and the working men of Belgium, whom he designed to benefit by direct legislation and financial measures, were too weak to render him any help. His hope of creating an Austrian state and an Austrian people out of his scattered dominions was fated to be thwarted; obstacles of distance, race, and language, cannot be overcome by legislation, however wise; and the Emperor’s well-intentioned endeavours nearly lost his House its ancient patrimony.

Joseph II. Foreign Policy.

The foreign policy of the Emperor Joseph II. was dictated by the same leading principle as his internal reforms—the desire to form his various territories into a compact state. His schemes to exchange the Austrian Netherlands for Bavaria in order to unite his possessions in Swabia with the nucleus of the Hapsburg territories were frustrated by the policy of Frederick the Great. His attempt to make his authority as Emperor more than nominal, and to create a real German empire based on a German patriotic feeling, proved an utter failure. Foiled in these two projects, the creation of an Austrian compact state, which he deemed practicable, and the resurrection of a mighty Germany under his headship, which he acknowledged to be but a dream, Joseph II. turned his thoughts towards Russia. The ideal of his early manhood had been his mother’s foe, Frederick the Great of Prussia; the ideal of his later years was the Empress Catherine of Russia. Both were specimens of the enlightened despots of the age; both had extended the realms they ruled; both endeavoured to form their states into compact entities; both had succeeded in administration and in war; and both were cynical disciples of the eighteenth-century philosophers. They were successively his models. It is characteristic of the Emperor Joseph II. that the only picture in his private cabinet in the Hofburg at Vienna was a portrait of Frederick; the only picture in his bedroom one of Catherine. After the death of Frederick the Great, the Emperor Joseph II., despising his successor, expressed more loudly his admiration for Catherine. In 1787 he accompanied her in her famous progress to the Crimea. Fascinated by her personality and dazzled by her projects, the Emperor was persuaded to ally himself with Russia against the Turks, and hoped to partition Turkey with her, as his mother, Frederick, and Catherine had accomplished the first partition of Poland. In 1788 he accordingly declared war against the Sublime Porte. But he found that the Turks, in spite of the corruption of their government, were still no contemptible foes. His own army was demoralised by the misconduct of the aristocratic officers; disease decimated his troops; and the Emperor Joseph returned from the campaign of 1788 with the seeds of mortal illness in his system, but with his determination to pursue the war unabated.

Russia: Catherine.

Poland.

Russia, the chosen ally of Joseph II., was in 1789 ruled by the Empress Catherine II. This great monarch, though by birth a princess of the petty German state of Anhalt-Zerbst, ranks with Peter the Great as a founder of the Russian Empire; more Russian than the Russians, she understood the importance of the development of her adopted country geographically towards the Baltic and the Black Sea, and the capacity of her people to support her in her enterprises. She was at this time sixty years of age, in full possession of her remarkable powers, and having ruled for twenty-seven years, she had fortified her authority by experience. Peter the Great had seen the absolute necessity that the Russian Empire should have access to the sea, and had built Saint Petersburg; Catherine had moved southward and extended her dominions to the Black Sea. She hoped to make the Baltic and the Black Sea Russian lakes, and on that account was the consistent and watchful enemy of Sweden and the Turks. Upon the western frontier of Russia lay Poland. The natural policy of Russia was to maintain and even to strengthen Poland as a buffer between Russia and the military powers of Austria and Prussia. But the extraordinary Constitution of Poland, which provided for the election of a powerless king, and recognised the right of civil war and the power of any nobleman to forbid any measure proposed at the Diet by the exercise of what was called the liberum veto, kept the unfortunate country in a state of anarchy, unable either to defend or to oppose. It might have been possible to reform the Constitution, and make the Poles an organised nation, but the neighbouring monarchs considered it easier to share the country amongst them, and had, under the guidance of Frederick the Great, carried out in 1772 the first partition, which excluded Poland from the sea, brought the borders of the three powers, Austria, Prussia, and Russia, nearer to each other, and caused Russia to become an European instead of essentially an Eastern monarchy. Catherine grasped the fact that in her present position Russia must intervene in European politics, owing to the condition of Poland, and decided to derive what benefit she could from this circumstance. In her internal government Catherine was one of the benevolent despots. The patroness of Diderot, she expressed her admiration for the new doctrines of the Rights of Man, and even summoned a convention to draw up a Russian constitution. But she knew that the new doctrines were not applicable to the Russian people, and would be absurdly inappropriate to the nomad Tartar tribes which wandered over the southern districts of the Russian Empire. She was fully aware that their village organisation protected the peasants from many of the evils which prevailed in seemingly more enlightened countries, and gave them a right and interest in the soil to which they were attached. Russia, in fact, had experienced no Reformation, no Renaissance, no awakening of the ideas of individual and political liberty, and therefore was eminently fitted for the rule of a benevolent despot.

France: Louis XVI.

Next to the Austro-Russian alliance, the Austro-French alliance, sealed by the Treaty of 1756, was of the greatest significance to the peace and welfare of Europe in 1789. As has been said, in neither country was the alliance popular; France and Austria were hereditary enemies; classical policy in both courts favoured a resumption of this enmity; the friendship was rather dynastic than national, the work of Kaunitz and Maria Theresa, the Abbé de Bernis, Madame de Pompadour, and Louis XV. France still appeared a very powerful nation. Its intervention in the American War of Independence had largely contributed to England’s loss of her American colonies, and the Treaty of Versailles in 1783 had involved a confession that England was beaten by her cession of the West India islands of St. Lucia and Tobago. But in spite of her seeming power, France was from political and economic causes really very weak. She had been unable in 1787 to effectually support the republican and French party in Holland, and had been forced to allow England and Prussia to reinstate the Stadtholder, the Prince of Orange. In spite of her alliance with Austria, she had been obliged in pursuance of a peace policy, made necessary by her financial condition, to draw near to England, and had made a commercial treaty with her in 1786. The weakness of France arose from internal circumstances. The State and the Court were financially identical. The Court was extravagant, and the result was a chronic national deficit. Efforts had been made to meet this deficit, but all expedients, even partial bankruptcy, had failed. It was evident that a systematic attempt must be made to rearrange the finances by introducing a regular scheme of taxation to take the place of the feudal arrangements for filling the royal treasury, which with some modifications still survived. But a regular scheme of taxation, which should abolish feudal privileges, and make the government responsible to the nation for its expenditure, could not be established without the consent of the people, and the educated classes, who were both numerous and prosperous, claimed a voice in its establishment. The feeling of political discontent went deeper. The French people had outgrown their system of government; the peasants and farmers resented the existence of the economic, social, and political privileges dating from the Middle Ages, which had survived the duties originally accompanying them; the bourgeois argued that they should have a share in regulating the affairs of the State; the educated classes sympathised with both. The day for benevolent despotism was over in France; Louis XVI. was benevolent in disposition, but too weak to reform the system under which he ruled; and it was the system, not the person of the monarch, which the French people disliked; it was the system as a whole which they had outgrown.

Spain: Charles IV.

Much of the strength of France rested on its intimate alliance with Spain. The two great Bourbon houses had been closely united by the ‘Pacte de Famille’ concluded in 1761, which bound them in an offensive and defensive alliance. Spain had loyally fulfilled her part of the bargain, and had suffered much in the War of American Independence against England. Spain had had the good fortune to be ruled by one of the most enlightened of the benevolent despots, Charles III., whose minister, Aranda, was one of the greatest statesmen of his century. Aranda is best known from his persecution of the Jesuits, who had spread their influence over the minds of the Spanish people so far as to be the dictators of education and opinion. Their expulsion contributed to the power of the Crown, which undertook the direction of every form of national energy. Aranda was a great administrator; he spent vast sums on the improvement of communications and on public works, and he built up a powerful Spanish navy. The two evils which had depressed the fame of Spain, the personal lethargy of the people, due to the stamping out of liberty of thought by the Inquisition, and the poverty, caused by the influx of gold from the Spanish colonies, which prevented any encouragement of national industry, were however too great for any administrator to subdue, without a national uprising and the development of a national love for liberty. Aranda was ably helped by Campomanes, who founded a national system of education to take the place of the Jesuits’ schools and colleges, by Jovellanos, a great jurist and political economist, by Cabarrus, a skilful financier, who founded the bank of St. Charles, and developed a system of national credit, and by Florida Blanca, who superintended the department of foreign affairs, and succeeded Aranda in supreme power in 1774. Charles III. died on 12th December 1788, and his successor, Charles IV., whose weakness of character was manifested throughout the period from 1789 to 1815, commenced his reign by maintaining Florida Blanca at the head of Spanish affairs, with Cabarrus and other experienced ministers.

Portugal: Maria I.

Portugal was the intimate ally of England as Spain was of France. The hereditary connection of Portugal and England dated back for many centuries, and had been strengthened by the Methuen Treaty in 1703, which had made Portugal largely dependent on England. The great Portuguese minister, Pombal, who had commenced the persecution of the Jesuits and had effected internal and administrative reforms, comparable to those of Aranda in Spain, had been disgraced in 1777, but the offices of State were filled by his pupils and managed on the principle, which he had initiated, of advancing the prosperity of the people. Pombal, while holding the strongest views on the importance of maintaining the royal absolutism, believed in the modern doctrines of reform; he had abolished slavery, encouraged education, and in the received ideas of political economy had encouraged by means of protection manufactures and agriculture. The essential weakness of Portugal rested, like that of Spain, on the exhaustion and consequent lethargy of its people; the Jesuits and the Inquisition had stamped out freedom of thought. Financially, also, its condition resembled that of Spain, for the sovereign derived such wealth from Brazil as to be independent of taxes, levied on the people. Politically the aim of the House of Braganza, during the latter part of the eighteenth century, had been to endeavour to free itself from dependence on England by uniting closely through inter-marriages with the reigning family in Spain. Queen Maria I., who had succeeded Joseph, the patron of Pombal, in 1777, was a fanatical lady of weak intellect, and in 1789 the royal power was in the hands of the heir-apparent, Prince John, who was recognised as Regent some years later, and eventually succeeded to the throne in 1816, as John VI.

Italy.

Naples: Ferdinand IV.

Sicily.

Rome: Pope Pius VI.

Tuscany: Grand Duke Leopold.

Parma: Duke Ferdinand.

Modena: Duke Hercules III.

Lombardy.

Sardinia: Victor Amadeus III.

Lucca: Republic.

Genoa: Republic.

Venice.

Italy, in the eighteenth century, was composed of a number of small states. The idea of Italian unity lived only in the minds of the great Italian writers and thinkers; it met with no support from the powers of Europe. Italy was still the home of music and the arts, which were fostered by the numerous small Courts; but politically, owing to its subdivision, it hardly counted as a power, and its diplomacy had little weight in the European State system. It was entirely under the influence of France and Austria, and showed the tendencies of the century in the good government of most of the petty rulers. The most important of the Italian states was the kingdom of the Two Sicilies, which comprised the southern part of the peninsula and the island of Sicily. The kingdom had been granted to Ferdinand IV., when his father, the celebrated Don Carlos, succeeded as Charles III. to the throne of Spain in 1759. It was in Naples that Charles III. had commenced his career as a reforming monarch, and the great Neapolitan minister, Tanucci, continued to administer the affairs of the kingdom in a most enlightened fashion during the early years of the new monarch’s reign. His policy was to check the feudal instincts of the Neapolitan barons, whom he deprived of the lucrative right of administering justice, and thus to strengthen the influence of the Crown; and he also opposed the pretensions of the Pope, and concurred in the suppression of the Jesuits. The power thus acquired for the Crown was wisely used; the financial system was revised, education was encouraged, and an attempt was made to procure a general reform of the laws. The young publicist, Filangieri, whose Science of Legislation contained the most enlightened views on political economy and government, and who ranks next to Montesquieu as a typical political thinker of the eighteenth century, was a Neapolitan, and his speculations largely influenced the current of Italian thought. Sicily, however, remained to a great extent untouched by the influence of the great Neapolitan minister owing to its insular jealousy and the maintenance of its mediæval parliament. Ferdinand IV., in 1768, married Maria Carolina, the ablest daughter of the Empress Maria Theresa, who at once assumed the most entire sway over her ill-educated and indolent husband. She secured the dismissal of Tanucci, whom she disliked on much the same grounds that her sister, Marie Antoinette, disliked the reforming French ministers, Turgot and Necker, in 1776, and after an interval replaced him by Acton, a native of France of Irish descent, who, owing to the temper of his patroness, was not able to continue efficiently the work of Tanucci. The States of the Church, including the Legations of Bologna and Ferrara and the principalities of Benevento and Ponte Corvo, were also governed in accordance with the enlightened ideas of the eighteenth century. The Papacy had much fallen in influence, and had been forced to comply with the demands of Pombal, Choiseul, Aranda, and Tanucci for the suppression of its spiritual mainstay, the order of the Jesuits; but it nevertheless maintained its temporal sovereignty in Italy. Giovanni Angelo Braschi, who had been elected Pope in 1775, and taken the title of Pius VI., was a man of singular ability and courtly manners. But he had to assent to vast reforms in Tuscany, which seriously affected the wealth of the Church in that part of the country, and had been unable, in spite of a personal visit to Vienna, to persuade Joseph II. to alter his policy towards the Papacy. His most notable internal measures in the Papal States were the draining of the Pontine marshes, and his reconstitution of the Clementine Museum at Rome, which he placed under the charge of the eminent antiquary, Ennius Quirinus Visconti. Tuscany flourished under the rule of the Grand Duke Leopold, brother and eventual successor of Joseph II., the ablest administrator of all the benevolent despots. His reforms extended in every direction; with the help of Scipio de Ricci, Bishop of Pistoia, he reduced the number of bishoprics and monasteries; he drained many of the marshes, and so benefited agriculture; he reorganised education and encouraged the Universities of Pisa and Siena. But his greatest reforms were legal and economic. Tuscany having originated from a number of mediæval republics, had been hitherto administered as a collection of semi-independent cities and districts, with their own laws and local finances. Leopold was one of the first monarchs to project a uniform code of laws for his state, which he intrusted to the great jurist, Lampredi, to compile, and he abolished all personal privileges before the law, torture, the right of asylum for malefactors, confiscation of the property of condemned malefactors, and secret denunciations. In economics he was the pupil of the French physiocrats, and the friend of the Marquis de Mirabeau, the ‘Ami des hommes,’ and in consonance with their doctrines he swept away all the internal customs duties and other restrictions on industry and commerce. Lastly, Leopold, seeing that his state was not strong enough to carry on a real war, abolished the Tuscan army, to the great advantage of his finances. Next to Tuscany, the best-governed state in Italy was Parma. Ferdinand, Duke of Parma and Piacenza, was the only son of Don Philip, the second son of Philip V. of Spain and Elizabeth Farnese, by Elizabeth of France, daughter of Louis XV. He was educated by the celebrated French philosopher, Condillac, and early in his reign showed the influence of the best eighteenth century ideas. He had succeeded his father in 1765, and continued his minister, a Frenchman, Du Tillot, Marquis of Felino, in office. Du Tillot, though working in a smaller sphere, was as great a reformer as Pombal and Tanucci. He brought about the suppression of the Inquisition in Parma, improved the internal administration, and encouraged education so greatly that the University of Parma, under the management of the learned scholar, Paciaudi, became one of the most famous in Europe. In 1769 Duke Ferdinand married Maria Amelia, daughter of the Empress Maria Theresa, who two years later secured the dismissal of Du Tillot from office. This dismissal was not, however, followed by a reaction, though it put a close to the progress of reform, and Parma, under the administration, first of a Spaniard, Llanos, and then of a Frenchman, Mauprat, retained its reputation as a well governed state. It was otherwise with Modena, where the last Duke of the House of Este, Hercules III., reigned. This prince had succeeded to the duchies of Modena, Reggio, and Mirandola in 1780, when already a man of fifty-three, and had added to them by marriage the principalities of Massa and Carrara. His only daughter and heiress, Maria Beatrice, was married to the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand, younger brother of the Emperor Joseph, and Governor-General of Lombardy. Duke Hercules was a superstitious and avaricious ruler, whose chief care was to amass money, and, politically, he followed out the wishes of Austria. While the House of Austria, by its scions or by marriages, ruled the greater part of Italy indirectly, it possessed the direct sovereignty of Lombardy, or, more accurately, of the Milanese and Mantua. This province profited by the salutary policy of Joseph II., and was administered, under the governor-generalship of the Archduke Ferdinand, by a great statesman, Count Firmian, who understood and carried out the most important reforms. His patronage of the arts and of education was especially remarkable; he laboured ardently to restore the efficiency of the Universities of Milan and Pavia, and appointed Beccaria, the celebrated philanthropist, Professor of Political Economy at the former, and Volta, the equally celebrated man of science, Professor of Physics at the latter. The only other monarchy of Italy, that of Sardinia, was more closely related to France than to Austria. Its king, Victor Amadeus III., had married a Spanish princess, and two of his daughters were married to the two brothers of Louis XVI. of France—Monsieur, the Comte de Provence, and the Comte d’Artois. His dominions comprised the island of Sardinia, Piedmont, Savoy, and Nice, and it was a great subject of complaint to his Piedmontese subjects that he unduly favoured his French-speaking province of Savoy. He, too, was influenced by the spirit of his century; he encouraged agriculture and commerce; he patronised literature and science; he built the Observatory at Turin, and founded academies of science and fine arts; and he undertook great public works, of which the most important was the improvement of the harbour of Nice. But in one matter he pursued an opposite policy to the Grand Duke Leopold of Tuscany, for he increased and reorganised his army, and constructed fortifications of the most modern description at Tortona and Alessandria. Lastly must be noticed three Italian republics, survivals of the Middle Ages. Of these the smallest was the Republic of Lucca, which was entirely surrounded by the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. Its trade suffered from the encouragement given by the Grand Duke Leopold to Leghorn; but, on the whole, it was well governed and prosperous. It was otherwise with the two great aristocratic republics, in which the long continuance of oligarchical government had stamped out all vestiges of political liberty. The Republic of Genoa, of which Raphael di Ferrari was Doge in 1789, was in utter decay. Its people were poverty-stricken; its trade had gone to Leghorn and Nice; and its laws and customs were unreformed. It was so weak that it had been unable to subdue the rebels in Corsica, who had risen under Paoli for the right of self-government, and it had ended by ceding the island to France in 1768. The Republic of Venice, of which the Doge in 1789 was Paul Renier, had not fallen so low in the eyes of Europe. Its possessions on the mainland, which extended from Verona to the Tyrol and along the east coast of the Adriatic Sea, and included the Ionian Islands, were administered for the benefit of the Venetian oligarchy, and supplied it with wealth. From Dalmatia was raised a considerable army, but the administration was wholly selfish, and did not keep pace in enlightenment with that of Lombardy, Parma, Tuscany, and Naples. On the whole, where monarchy existed in Italy, it tended in the eighteenth century to benevolent despotism; and such rule was far more beneficial to the people than that of the antiquated republics. Politically, the whole country might be reckoned as a factor in the Franco-Austrian alliance.

England: George III.

The Policy of Pitt.

The chief power of the Triple Alliance, which balanced the loosely-defined league of Russia, France, and Austria, was England. The severe blow which had been struck by the revolt of her American colonies had made Great Britain appear weaker than she really was to the powers of the Continent. The Treaty of Versailles, by which she had been obliged to make cessions to France, seemed to have set the seal on her humiliation. But in reality her finances were more affected than her fighting strength, and the English navy, which, from her insular position, must always constitute the principal element of her force, was as excellent as ever. The policy of the younger Pitt, who had come into office in 1783, was one of peace and retrenchment. The country had lasted well through the financial strain of the American War, and the chief aim of the minister was to allow its vast commercial and industrial resources to expand. As a pupil of Adam Smith, Pitt understood the great principles of political economy, and the most significant part of his foreign policy was his conclusion of the Commercial Treaty with France. A fiscal system, far in advance of that in any continental country, enabled the English Government to draw on the wealth of the nation more effectively than any other government, if the money was needed for patriotic purposes. In spite of his love of peace, Pitt was induced by his first Foreign Secretary, the Duke of Leeds, to take an active part in European politics, and was eventually led by the state of affairs in Holland to enter into the Triple Alliance. At home, England was unaffected by the intellectual movement which led to the French Revolution. She had in the previous century got rid of the relics of feudalism, which pressed so heavily on the continental farmer and peasant, and had won the boons of individual and commercial liberty, and of equality before the law; while politically, though her government was an oligarchy, supported by the class of wealthy merchants and traders, an opportunity was afforded through the existence of a free press and of the system of election, however hampered by antiquated franchises, for public opinion to make itself felt.

Prussia: Frederick William II.

Prussia, the other principal member of the Triple Alliance, contrasted in every way with England. Seemingly, owing to the prestige of Frederick the Great’s victories and that able monarch’s careful organisation of his army, Prussia was the first military state in Europe; in reality, her reputation was greater than her actual power. Prussia was weak where England was strong. Prussia had no financial system worthy of the name, no industrial wealth, and no national bank; her only resources for war were a certain quantity of specie stored up in Berlin. The Prussian Government was an absolutism, in which the monarch’s will was supreme; its administration was based on feudalism, of which England had entirely and France had practically got rid, with all its mediæval incidents of serfdom, privilege of the nobility, and social and commercial inequalities. The Prussian army was not national; the soldiers were treated as slaves, and the officers, who were all of noble birth, were tyrants in the maintenance of military discipline.

Policy of Prussia.

Frederick the Great was one of the finest types of the benevolent despot of the eighteenth century, but in him the belief in the importance of his despotic power outweighed his benevolence. While wishing for the prosperity of the people, he deliberately maintained the authority of the nobility, and discouraged any desire for change on the part of the agriculturists or citizens. The former were left at the disposal of their lords, the latter trammelled by antiquated civic constitutions. The weakness of Prussia was not only inherent in its government, but was also due to geographical causes. Its component parts were scattered; its Rhenish duchies and East Friesland were separated from its main territories by many German states; its central districts, the Marks of Brandenburg, were sparsely populated, and cut off from the sea; its largest provinces, Prussia Proper, Pomerania, Silesia, and Prussian Poland were, in spite of German and French Huguenot colonies, mainly Slavonic, and as backward in civilisation as other Slavonic races in the eighteenth century. In Russia, however, the Slavonic population in its barbarism yet retained sufficient local organisation to make its lot fairly endurable; in eastern Prussia, and especially in Prussian Poland, the people had been brought into contact with the mediæval and Latin civilisation, and were consequently treated as absolute serfs without the relief afforded by local institutions. The policy of Prussia, as laid down by Frederick the Great, had both Prussian and German aspirations, and in both was utterly selfish. The example set by the cynical monarch in the Silesian wars had left a deep impress on the minds of Prussian statesmen, and the maxims of justice and international law were subordinated by them to expediency. The Prussian policy of Frederick the Great culminated in the first partition of Poland, which he had suggested, by means of which Prussia united her eastern province of Prussia Proper to Brandenburg, and cut off Poland from the sea, and the aim of his successors was to pursue this path of aggrandisement, and, by further annexations, to connect Silesia directly with Prussia Proper. The German policy of Prussia was to assume the leadership of the Empire by pretending the greatest zeal for the rights of the Princes of the Empire, and posing as their protector, and it was on this ground that Frederick the Great formed the League of the Princes. The hereditary enemy of Prussia was Austria, which, though distinctly injured by the conquest of Silesia, still retained the chief influence over the Empire, and also showed a tendency to check the designs on Poland. It was Frederick the Great of Prussia who had thwarted the Emperor’s scheme of exchanging the Austrian Netherlands for Bavaria, and he intrigued against Austria at the Courts both of Russia and France. It was as a counterblow to the Franco-Austro-Russian alliance that Prussia intervened in Holland, at the request of England, and formed the Triple Alliance with England and Holland in 1788. King Frederick William II. of Prussia, who succeeded his famous uncle in 1786, was a man of feeble intellect and undecided nature, but he had thoroughly imbibed the classic ideas of Prussian policy, and regarded Austria as the inevitable foe of Prussia, to be duped and taken advantage of on every possible occasion. His chief minister, Hertzberg, was a consistent enemy of Austria, but owing to the curious character of the king, the real power of the State rested not with the minister but with the royal favourites, of whom the chief at the end of 1788 were Bischofswerder and Lucchesini.

Holland.

Holland was the link which bound England and Prussia together. Its military power was of no account, but the wealth of its inhabitants, derived from their vast commercial expansion in Asia and aptitude for banking, made the Republic of the United Provinces of the greatest importance. The Seven Provinces preserved the most complete autonomy; only the veriest semblance of federation held them together. Practically, the only bond of union was in the power of the Stadtholder, which had been restored in 1747. In the more wealthy provinces, such as Holland, the commercial aristocracy, which filled the ranks of the local governments, resented the position of the Stadtholder, who held the command-in-chief of the army and navy; but in the poorer and agricultural provinces, such as Friesland and Groningen, the landed aristocracy generally supported the Stadtholderate. In 1780 the United Provinces had joined in the Neutral League of the North, invented by Catherine of Russia to break the commercial supremacy of England, and in the war which followed they had suffered severe losses, and had been compelled to cede Negapatam in India to England in 1783 on the conclusion of peace. The Stadtholder, William V., Prince of Orange, in whose family the office had been declared hereditary, was vehemently accused of favouring England during this war, and when peace was declared a movement was set on foot, headed by the authorities of the Province of Holland, to oust him from his position, and to draw up a new constitution for the Dutch Netherlands on the same lines as that of the United States of America. This movement grew to its height in 1786; a French Legion, commanded by the Comte de Maillebois, was raised; the Stadtholder had to fly from the Hague, and the armed intervention of France was requested. But, as has been said, France, in spite of her seeming power, was too weak to intervene, and the Dutch patriots were abandoned to their fate. On the other side, that of the Stadtholder, England, through its able ambassador at the Hague, Sir James Harris, afterwards Lord Malmesbury, induced Prussia to act. England and Prussia had dynastic and political reasons for this conduct. The Stadtholder was, through his mother, a first cousin of George III., and had married a sister of Frederick William II., while politically, the acquisition of Holland to the Franco-Austrian alliance, through the expulsion of the Stadtholder, would bring nearly the whole of Europe into that system, and would practically enclose the Austrian Netherlands or Belgium. In September 1787, therefore, a Prussian army, under the Duke of Brunswick, had occupied Amsterdam, and placed the Stadtholder firmly in power; the Dutch patriots fled to France; the Legion of Maillebois was disbanded; and in 1788 the work was consummated by the signature of the Triple Alliance.

Denmark: Christian VII.

Sweden: Gustavus III.

The two northern kingdoms, Denmark and Sweden, had adhered to the Neutral League against England in 1780, but for generations a bitter animosity had existed between them. Denmark, which in 1789 included Norway, was in an extremely prosperous condition. The philanthropic ideas of the eighteenth century had made great way, and on 20th June 1788 a royal ordinance had destroyed the last vestige of serfdom. Efforts were made to improve the condition of the people by reorganising the state of the finances, law and education, and progress was made in every direction. These reforms were not the work of the King, Christian VII., who had fallen into a state of dotage, but of the Prince Royal, afterwards Frederick VI., and of his minister, Count Andrew Bernstorff, the nephew of the greatest Danish statesman of the eighteenth century. Sweden, which in 1789 included the greater part of Finland as well as Swedish Pomerania and the island of Rügen, was under the sway of one of the most enlightened rulers of the century, Gustavus III. That monarch had in 1772, by a coup d’état, overthrown the power of the Swedish Estates, with their division into the two parties of the Caps and the Hats, subsidised respectively by Russia and France. He had made use of his absolutism to carry out some of the benevolent ideas of the time. He had abolished torture, regulated taxation, encouraged commerce and industry, and diminished, where he did not destroy, the privileges of the nobility. Had he contented himself with these internal reforms he would have won the lasting gratitude of the Swedish people, but he insisted on playing a part in continental politics, which involved the maintenance of a large army and the consequent exhaustion of the people. Though he too had joined the League of the North in 1780, he afterwards assumed a strong anti-Russian attitude, and resolved to take advantage of the Russo-Turkish war in order to regain some of his lost provinces. Accordingly he invaded Russia in the summer of 1788, while his fleet threatened St. Petersburg.

The Empire.

The Diet.

College of Electors.

College of Princes.

College of Free Cities.

Hitherto a sketch has been given of states, which in 1789 possessed a certain unity, and were able to play a part as independent countries of more or less weight in European politics. It was otherwise with the Holy Roman Empire, which still remained in the same condition, and was ruled in the same manner, as had been arranged at the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. True Germany, that is Germany to the west of the Oder, had been under this arrangement split up into a number of independent sovereignties, loosely bound together as the Holy Roman Empire. The number of these petty states caused the Empire to be, from a military point of view, utterly inefficient; the bond was too loose to allow of general internal reforms or of a consistent foreign policy; and the federal arrangements were too cumbrous and unwieldy to allow of Germany ranking as a great power. The Imperial Diet or Reichstag consisted of three colleges, and a majority was required in each of the upper colleges to agree to a resolution, which, when confirmed by the Emperor, became a conclusum of the Empire. The first of these colleges was that of the eight Electors, three ecclesiastical, the Elector-Archbishops of Mayence, Trèves, and Cologne, and five lay, the Electors of Bohemia, Brandenburg, and Hanover, who were also Kings of Hungary, Prussia, and England, the Elector of Saxony, and the Elector Palatine, who in 1789 was also Elector of Bavaria. The president of this college was the Elector-Archbishop of Mayence, as Chancellor of the Empire. The second college was that of the Princes, which consisted of one hundred voices, thirty-six ecclesiastical and sixty-four lay. In this college all the Electors had voices under different designations; Hanover possessed six for different principalities, Prussia six for the duchy of Guelders, the county of Mœurs, etc., Austria three, and so on, while the Kings of Denmark and Sweden also were represented as Dukes of Holstein and of Pomerania. Less important princes differing in power from the Landgraves of Hesse, the Margraves of Baden, and the Duke of Würtemburg to the petty princes of Salm and Anhalt, possessed single voices, and made up the number of temporal voters in the college to sixty. The ecclesiastical princes included thirty-four of the wealthiest bishops and abbots, many of whom ruled over considerable territories, and of whom the most important were the Archbishop of Salzburg, the Bishops of Bamberg, Augsburg, Würtzburg, Spires, Worms, Strasbourg, Basle, Constance, Paderborn, Hildesheim, and Münster, and the Abbots of Elwangen, Kempten, and Stablo. The other six voices were called collegiate, and representatives to hold them were elected by the petty lay and ecclesiastical sovereigns who abounded in Franconia, Swabia, and Westphalia, to the number of four lay and two ecclesiastical representatives. The presidency of this college was held alternately by the Archduke of Austria and the Archbishop of Salzburg. The third or inferior college was that of the free cities, and any opposition on its part could prevent a decision arrived at by the two upper or superior colleges being presented to the Emperor for his assent as a conclusum of the Empire. It consisted of the representatives of fifty-two imperial free cities, divided into two ‘benches,’ of which the Bench of Westphalia included Frankfort-on-the-Main, Cologne, Aix-la-Chapelle, Hamburg, Bremen, and Lübeck, and the Bench of Swabia included Nuremberg, Ratisbon, Ulm, and Augsburg. The presidency of this college belonged to the city of Ratisbon, in which the Diet held its sittings. By this elaborate federative system, all sense of German unity was lost; the electors, princes, and free cities were represented only by delegates; the smaller states felt themselves swamped and were obliged to look to a great power, Austria or France, Prussia or Hanover, to preserve their political independence.

The Imperial Tribunal.

The Emperor.

The Aulic Council.

The Circles.

The other important institution of the Empire, the Imperial Tribunal or Reichskammergericht, which sat at Wetzlar and was intended to settle disputes between the German sovereigns, had also fallen into desuetude. Its venality and procrastination became proverbial, and it possessed no machinery to put its decrees into force. At the head of the Empire was the Emperor, who was elected and crowned with all the elaborate ceremonial of the Middle Ages. The office had been, with one exception, conferred on the head of House of Austria, since the Treaty of Westphalia, but it brought little actual authority on the holder. It was as ruler of the hereditary dominions of the House of Hapsburg that the Emperor exerted some influence, not as an Emperor. Joseph II., indeed, endeavoured to be Emperor in more than name, with the result that Frederick the Great was enabled to form the League of Princes against him. As the chief Catholic state, Austria, however, possessed a great influence in the Imperial Diet, for the ecclesiastical members of the Colleges of Electors and Princes naturally inclined to support her, and it was on their votes that she relied. She even went so far as to establish the Aulic Council at Vienna, which intervened in cases between sovereign princes, and usurped some of the prerogatives of the Imperial Tribunal of Wetzlar. The executive power of the Empire, when it had come to a decision, was entrusted to the circles. These circles each had their own Diet, and it was their duty, for instance, to raise money and troops when the Empire decided to go to war. Of the ten circles of the Empire, originally created, one, that of Burgundy, had been extinguished or nearly so by the conquests of Louis XIV., and those situated in the eastern portion were entirely controlled by the important states of Prussia, Saxony, and Austria. It was only in Western Germany, in the circles of Westphalia, Franconia, and Swabia that the organisation was fairly tried, and the result was signal failure, whenever those circles put their contingents in the field. It could hardly be otherwise, when, owing to minute subdivision and divided authority, a single company of soldiers might be raised from half a dozen different petty sovereigns, each of whom would try to throw the burden of their maintenance on his colleagues. The Holy Roman Empire, in short, like other mediæval institutions, had fallen into decay with the mediæval systems of warfare and religion; some of its component states, such as Austria and Prussia, or in a lesser degree Bavaria, might possess a real power; but, as a whole, it was utterly inefficient to defend itself, and formed a feeble barrier between France and the kingdoms of Eastern Europe.

The Princes of Germany.

Bavaria.

Baden.

Würtemburg.

Saxony.

Saxe-Weimar.

The impotence of the Empire for offensive and defensive purposes did not, however, greatly affect the German people; the educated classes prided themselves on being superior to patriotic impulses, and on being cosmopolitan rather than German; the poorer classes thought more of the internal administration which affected them than of the attitude of the Empire to European politics. The tendency towards benevolent despotism, which distinguished the greater powers, showed itself also in the petty states of Germany in the diminution, if not the abolition, of the ancient Estates and in the restraints placed on the authority of the nobility. The increased power of the sovereign was generally, if not universally, used to foster the prosperity of his subjects, or at least to promote literature and art. A notice of a few of the principal rulers of Germany will justify this view. Charles Theodore, the Elector Palatine, who in 1778 had succeeded to the Electorate of Bavaria, and united once more the territories of the House of Wittelsbach, was a most enlightened sovereign. In the Palatinate he had founded a brilliant University at Mannheim, and one of the most famous picture galleries in Europe at Düsseldorf; in Bavaria he suppressed some of the numerous convents, which stifled progress, in spite of his sincere Catholicism. He took as one of his ministers the celebrated American, Benjamin Thompson, whom he created Count Rumford, and that man of science and learning endeavoured to suppress mendacity, and made efforts to bring material comforts within reach of the very poorest. Nevertheless, in some points, the Elector Charles Theodore showed himself a bigot; he left education entirely in the hands of the Roman Catholic priesthood and ex-Jesuits, and he allowed the Protestants in his dominions to be persecuted. The Margrave Charles Frederick, who in 1771 reunited in his person the two margraviates of Baden-Baden and Baden-Durlach, was a more thoroughly enlightened prince. He was truly a benevolent despot; he was a student of political economy, on which he himself wrote a treatise, and applied its principles to his little state; he established a scheme of primary education; and on 23d July 1783 he abolished serfdom in his dominions, while maintaining the royal corvées and the prohibition for a subject to leave the country without obtaining his permission. The Duke Charles Eugène of Würtemburg formed a contrast to his neighbours. He established, like them, his own absolutism, but he used his power to impose heavy taxes and raise an army out of all proportion to the size of his duchy. He treated his subjects like slaves, and his administration was so cruel that the Aulic Council threatened to take measures against him. Nevertheless, he was a patron of literature and the arts. He built a theatre at Stuttgart and founded the Academy of Fine Arts there, and he defrayed the expense of the education of the poet Schiller, who, however, afterwards satirised him and fled to Weimar. Yet Charles Eugène of Würtemburg appears an enlightened monarch to such princes as Duke Charles of Deux-Ponts (Zweibrücken), whose successor, Maximilian Joseph, was to succeed the Elector Palatine, Charles Theodore, and to become the first King of Bavaria, for that prince sacrificed his people to his passion for the chase, and to William IX., Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel, who sold his subjects by the hundred to the English Government to carry on the war in America. Going further east, Saxony, which had ranked among the great states of Germany, was in a state of decline. The Electors Augustus II. and Augustus III. had been Kings of Poland, and had ruined their hereditary dominions to support their royal dignity and position. Fortunately Frederick Augustus, who was Elector in 1789, had not been elected to the Polish throne, and had been able to do something for the prosperity of his subjects. He formed a commission to draw up a code of laws, he abolished torture, encouraged industry and agriculture, and founded an Academy of Mines. But he did not go so far, for instance, as the Margrave of Baden, and made no attempt to suppress serfdom. The glory of Saxony was not, however, on the eve of the French Revolution its electoral house; its intellectual capital was not the beautiful city of Dresden. That place was taken by Weimar, where Duke Charles Augustus of Saxe-Weimar collected around him the great philosophers and men of letters who made the German name famous at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. To his Court resorted the most illustrious Germans of the time, Goethe and Schiller, Herder, Wieland, and Musæus; and the University of his state at Jena became the most famous in Germany. It is not necessary to particularise the other states; it is enough to say that those in the north were generally very backward, especially the duchies of Mecklenburg, and that Hanover was left to the rule of an aristocratic oligarchy, which allowed no reforms, although its University at Göttingen, founded by George II., took rank with the best.

Mayence.

Trèves.

Cologne.

The Ecclesiastical States followed also the movement of the century. The ecclesiastical rulers were often enlightened men, but they were to a great extent the slaves of their chapters. These chapters were generally filled by younger sons of the smaller princes, who insisted on the newly-elected prelates entering into the closest bonds with them to make no changes in the feudal system in the bishoprics. The prince-bishops and abbots at the close of the eighteenth century were, therefore, generally scions of noble houses, such as, for instance, Francis Joseph, Baron of Roggenbach, Bishop of Basle, Baron Francis Louis of Erthal, Bishop of Bamberg and Würtzburg, the Baron of Rödt, Bishop of Constance, the Count of Hoensbroeck, Bishop of Liége, Count Augustus of Limburg, Bishop of Spires, Count Jerome Colloredo, Archbishop of Salzburg, and the Baron of Plettenberg, Abbot of Münster. One curious point deserves notice, that in some instances, Protestant princes had the right to present to Catholic prince-bishoprics, and in 1789 the Duke of York was Prince-Bishop of Osnabrück, and Prince Peter Frederick of Holstein-Gottorp, Prince-Bishop of Lübeck. Of higher rank and more independent of their chapters were the three archbishop-electors, who were therefore more able to rule their states in consonance with the ideas of the century. The chief of these was Baron Frederick Charles of Erthal, Archbishop-Elector of Mayence, and Prince-Bishop of Worms, the Chancellor of the Empire ex officio. This great prelate busied himself mostly with his pleasures, but his rank caused his countenance to be sought by all parties, and his adhesion to Frederick the Great’s League of Princes was the greatest gain the King of Prussia made in his anti-Austrian policy. In 1789 he had completely abandoned the cares of internal and external politics to his coadjutor Charles, Baron de Dalberg, who was to play a leading part in the history of Germany during the period of the French Revolution and Napoleon. The Archbishop-Elector of Trèves in 1789 was Clement Wenceslas, a Saxon prince, and an excellent ruler, who, in 1783, even issued an edict of tolerance, allowing men of any religion to settle in his state, and exercise any trade or profession there. The last Elector-Archbishop was the Archduke Maximilian, the youngest brother of the Emperor Joseph, Archbishop of Cologne, who shared his brother’s liberal opinions, and patronised his predecessor’s creation, the University of Bonn, which had been founded in opposition to the ultramontane University of Cologne, for the encouragement of the modern developments of science. The tendency of all these governments, lay and clerical, was to promote the prosperity of the people; Joseph II. was but the type of the German princes of his time; all wished to do good for the people, but not by them; their characters differed widely, from the enlightened Margrave of Baden to the hunting Duke of Deux-Ponts; but in their different ways and in different degrees they generally meant well. But, while the more important princes showed the tendency of the century, their poorer contemporaries were unable to do so. They were mostly in debt, owing to their efforts to rival the wealthy princes, and in order to raise money resorted to all the devices of mediæval feudalism. The few villages over which they ruled suffered from this tyranny, and it was always possible to know when a traveller crossed the frontier into one of these ‘duodecimo duchies.’ Beneath the petty princes were the Ritters or Knights of the Empire, who abounded in Franconia and Swabia. These knights had no representation in the Imperial Diet, and were consequently dependent directly on the Emperor. Their poverty made them take service with the wealthy princes; and to quote but two instances, Stein, the great Prussian minister, and Würmser, the celebrated Austrian general, were both Knights of the Empire. The result of this minute subdivision of Germany was to destroy the sense of national patriotism; which was not to rise again until after Germany had passed through the mould of Napoleon’s domination.

Switzerland.

Geneva.

The other European confederation, Switzerland, presented the same symptoms of internal decay as the Holy Roman Empire, but it was preserved from the same political degradation by the consciousness of its nationality and the persistence of its local governments. The eighteenth century was marked in Switzerland by struggles between canton and canton, Catholics and Protestants, nobles and bourgeois. In some cantons, such as Berne, an oligarchical system was maintained in the hands of a few noble families; in others, such as Uri, a purely democratic form of government was preserved, which allowed every peasant a voice in the local administration. Where feudalism had been established, the peasants were in no better condition than in the rest of Europe, but in the mountain cantons such a régime was impossible, and individual and political freedom still existed. It must be remembered that the Switzerland of the eighteenth century was not identical with that of the nineteenth. The Grisons formed no part of the confederation, Neufchâtel belonged to Prussia, and Geneva was an independent republic. The part the latter had played in the intellectual movement of the century was most conspicuous. Rousseau was born in Geneva, and Voltaire retired and spent his last years in its neighbourhood. But Geneva had just before 1789 been the scene of a revolution resembling that in Holland. A struggle broke out between the bourgeois families, which monopolised the magistracy, and the mass of the people, which had ended in the victory of the former. The Genevese democrats were expelled, and many of them, notably Clavière, exercised a considerable influence on the course of the Revolution in France.

The state of Europe in 1789 showed everywhere a sense of awakening to new ideas. The bonds of feudalism were ready to break asunder; the benevolent despots had recognised the rights of individual and commercial freedom; the French Revolution was able to sow in ripe ground the two new principles of the sovereignty of the people and the sentiment of nationality.

CHAPTER II
1789–1790

The Empress Catherine and the Emperor Joseph ii.—The Turkish War—Campaign of 1789 against the Turks—Battles of Foksany and the Rymnik—Capture of Belgrade—Revolution in Sweden—Affairs in Belgium—Policy of Joseph ii. in Belgium—Revolution in Liége—Elections to the States-General in France—Meeting of the States-General: struggle between the Orders—The Tiers État declares itself the National Assembly—Oath of the Tennis Court—The Séance Royale—Mirabeau’s Address to the King—Dismissal of Necker—Riot of 12th July in Paris—Capture of the Bastille—Recall of Necker—Louis xvi. visits Paris—Murder of Foullon—Session of 4th August—Declaration of the Rights of Man—Question of the Veto—March of the women of Paris to Versailles—Louis xvi. goes to reside in Paris—Effect of the Revolution in France on Europe—The Revolution in Belgium—Formation of the Belgian Republic—Death of the Emperor Joseph ii.—Failure of his reign—The attitude of Louis xvi. to the French Revolution—The new French Constitution—Civil Constitution of the Clergy—Measures of the Constituent Assembly—Mirabeau—Danger threatened to the new state of affairs in France by a foreign war—Mirabeau and the French Court—Probable causes of a foreign war—Avignon and the Venaissin—Affair of Nootka Sound—The Pacte de Famille—Rights of Princes of the Empire in Alsace—The Emperor Leopold master of the situation.

Catherine and Joseph II. 1789.

At the commencement of the year 1789 the thoughts of European statesmen were mainly turned to the events which were passing in the east of Europe. The alliance between Catherine of Russia and the Emperor Joseph II. was regarded with anxiety not only by Pitt in England and by King Frederick William II. of Prussia, but by the French ministers and by all the smaller states of Europe. The projects of Russia and Austria for the extension of their boundaries at the expense of Turkey, Poland, and Bavaria, were viewed with alarm, and the ambitious ideas of their rulers with dismay. The attention of educated people, who were not statesmen or politicians, but disciples of the philosophical teachers of the eighteenth century, was entirely concentrated on the progress of the Emperor Joseph’s policy in the Austrian Netherlands or Belgium. Success seemed to have crowned the warlike measures of General d’Alton; the Belgian patriots were in prison or in exile; and the philanthropic and centralising reforms of the Emperor seemed to have ended in Belgium in the establishment of a military despotism. France was known to be in an almost desperate financial condition; and the convocation of the States-General for 1st May 1789, was generally looked upon as a means adopted by Louis XVI. to obtain financial relief. The great results, which were to follow the meeting of the States-General, were little expected by even the most acute political observers, and it was not foreseen that for more than a quarter of a century the interest of Europe was to be fixed upon France, and that a series of events in that country, unparalleled in history, were to bring about an entire modification in the political system of Europe, and to open a new era in the history of mankind.

The War with the Turks.

Joseph’s prediction.

The campaign of 1788 had, upon the whole, terminated favourably for the Austrians and Russians in their war with the Turks. Loudon, who commanded the Austrian forces, had taken Dubitza, and penetrating into Bosnia had reduced Novi on 3d October. Francis Josias, of the House of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, commonly known as the Prince of Coburg, at the head of an Austrian army, had in conjunction with a Russian force under Prince Soltikov taken Choczim on 20th September. But, on the other hand, the Turks had overrun and laid waste the Banat of Temesvar and routed the Austrian army in that quarter, which was under the personal command of the Emperor. The Russians had also made some progress, and on 6th December Potemkin, with terrible loss of life, and owing mainly to the intrepidity of Suvórov and Repnin stormed Oczakoff (Ochakov). These successes, despite his own failure, greatly inspirited Joseph, who, in a letter to Prince Charles of Nassau, made the following curious predictions in January 1789:[3]—‘If the Grand Vizier should come to meet me or the Russians near the Danube, he must offer a battle; and then, after having defeated him, I shall drive him back to take refuge under the cannon of Silistria. In October 1789 I shall call a congress, at which the Osmanlis will be obliged to beg for peace from the Giaours. The treaties of Carlowitz and Passarowitz will serve as the basis for my ambassadors on which to conclude peace; in it, however, I shall claim Choczim and part of Moldavia. Russia will keep the Crimea, Prince Charles of Sweden will be Duke of Courland, and the Grand Duke of Florence King of the Romans. Then there will be universal peace in Europe. Until then, France will have settled affairs with the notables of the nation; and the other gentlemen think too much about themselves and too little about Austria.’

The Campaign of 1789.

The campaign of 1789 was far from fulfilling the expectations of the Emperor Joseph. His own health had suffered too much from the privations of the previous year to enable him to take the field again in person, but he was well served by his generals. The Grand Vizier determined to adopt the offensive, and crossed the Danube at Rustchuk in March at the head of an army of 90,000 men, with the intention of invading Transylvania. But an unexpected event led to the recall of the most experienced Turkish general. The Sultan Abdul Hamid died at Constantinople on 7th April, and his nephew and successor, Selim III., at once disgraced the Grand Vizier, and replaced him in the command of the western army and the office of Grand Vizier by the Pasha of Widdin. This incompetent commander rashly advanced, and was defeated by the Prince of Coburg and Suvoróv at Foksany on 31st July in an attempt to prevent the junction of the Austrians and Russians. The allies then took the offensive and inflicted a crushing defeat on the main Turkish army on the Rymnik, in which 18,000 Austrians and 7000 Russians routed nearly 100,000 Turks, and took all their baggage and artillery. This great victory was vigorously followed up. Loudon was appointed Commander-in-chief of the Austrian army, and he took Belgrade on 9th October, and after occupying the whole of Servia, laid siege to Orsova. For these services Joseph conferred upon him the title of generalissimo, which had only been borne before by Wallenstein, Montecuculi, and Prince Eugène. Among other results of the victory on the Rymnik, the Prince of Coburg took Bucharest and occupied Moldavia, while the Prince of Hohenlohe-Kirchberg forced his way into Wallachia. In the eastern quarter of the Turkish frontier Prince Potemkin was equally successful. He defeated the Turkish High Admiral, Hassan Pasha, in a pitched battle at Tobac, and conquered Bessarabia, capturing Bender, and laying siege to Ismail.

Revolution in Sweden.

Doubtless Catherine and Joseph would have met with even greater successes, and perhaps they might have driven the Turks out of Europe, had not their attention been diverted directly by the affairs of Sweden and Belgium, and indirectly by the startling events which were taking place in France. The Triple Alliance looked with great disfavour on the alliance between Austria and Russia. Pitt, as has been said, prepared a great fleet, which is known in English naval history as the Russian Armament, and Frederick William II. began to negotiate an alliance with Turkey. But they limited their direct interference to inducing Denmark to make peace with Sweden. Gustavus III. of Sweden had, in 1788, forced his way at the head of 30,000 men into Russian Finland, and the sound of his guns had been heard in Saint Petersburg, which, owing to the absence of the bulk of the Russian troops, was almost defenceless. But the Swedish nobility had great influence over the army; they disliked the war with Russia; and took this opportunity to declare themselves. Under the secret leadership of Prince Charles, Duke of Sudermania, they refused to obey the king’s orders, and hoped in the embarrassment which ensued to regain their former power. At this moment Christian VII., King of Denmark and Norway, at the instance of Catherine, invaded Sweden and prepared to besiege Gothenburg. Gustavus saw the opportunity which this invasion offered to rouse the patriotic feelings of the Swedes. He appealed to the people, and leaving the command of the army in Finland to the Duke of Sudermania, raised a fresh army of volunteers to resist the invaders. In spite of his efforts, Sweden was in great danger of falling before the combined attacks of Russia and Denmark. The Triple Alliance now intervened promptly and decisively, and by threatening to attack Denmark by land and sea, they induced Bernstorff, the Danish minister, to evacuate Sweden and to agree to an armistice. Gustavus III. returned to Stockholm with the reputation of having repulsed the invaders, and summoned the Diet to meet on 2d February 1789. Sure of the support of the Commons he proposed a new Constitution, or rather a new fundamental law for the Swedish monarchy, which is summed up in one of the articles: ‘The king can administer the affairs of the State as seems good to him.’ The nobility opposed a fruitless resistance; Gustavus imprisoned their leaders and completed the work of his former revolution of 1772 by this coup d’état. He then renewed the war with Russia, but the military operations of his campaign in 1789 were not marked by any event of importance.

Affairs in Belgium, 1789.

While Catherine of Russia was being distracted from the vigorous prosecution of the war against Turkey by the invasion of the Swedes, her ally, the Emperor Joseph, was chiefly concerned with the state of affairs in the Austrian Netherlands or Belgium. It seemed at first as if he was to be as successful as Gustavus in changing the old constitution of the country. But there was this difference. Whereas Gustavus III. was enacting the part of a national deliverer, and had the Swedish people on his side in his overthrow of the nobility, Joseph II. was opposed not only by the Belgian nobles, but by the clergy and the people also. The country seemed quiet enough under the government of Count Trautmannsdorf and the military rule of the Captain-General d’Alton. The suppression of the risings at Brussels and Louvain, Malines and Antwerp seemed to have established the Austrian sway most firmly, and the leading opponents of the Emperor’s policy were in exile. The Estates of the different provinces were convoked as usual, and all of them, except those of Hainault and Brabant, voted the customary subsidies. The Estates of Hainault were at once dissolved by a military force, and their constitution abolished on 31st January 1789. By this example the Emperor hoped to overawe the wealthy and populous province of Brabant, and when it did not have the expected effect, he directed Trautmannsdorf to summon a special meeting of the Estates of Brabant, and to require them to increase the number of deputies of the Third Estate or Commons, and to grant a permanent subsidy. He also maintained his attitude towards the Church, and tried to compel Cardinal Frankenberg, the Archbishop of Malines, to withdraw his opposition to the new Imperial Seminary at Brussels, or to resign his see. The Archbishop stoutly refused to comply, and the Estates of Brabant proved equally stubborn. Joseph then decided on a sudden blow, and by his orders Count Trautmannsdorf, on 18th June 1789, declared the ‘Joyeuse Entrée,’ or Constitution of Brabant abolished. The day was the anniversary of the battle of Kolin, in which, at the crisis of the Seven Years’ War, the Austrians had defeated Frederick the Great. D’Alton thought he made a happy comparison in saying: ‘The 18th of June is a happy epoch for the House of Austria; for on that day the glorious victory of Kolin saved the monarchy, and the Emperor became master of the Netherlands.’ But the victory was not to be won so easily. The two parties of opposition, the Van der Nootists, or partisans of Van der Noot, the supporter of the ancient constitutional rights, and the Vonckists, or followers of Vonck, the advocate of popular or democratic ideas, united. The Triple Alliance was as glad to hamper Joseph’s activity in the East by encouraging these Belgian patriots, as it had been to leave Gustavus free to harass Catherine, by stopping the interference of Denmark in the north, and the ministers of England, Holland, and Prussia all entered into relations with Van der Noot. That partisan, encouraged by hopes of active assistance, formed a patriotic committee at Breda, on the Dutch frontier, and raised an army of exiles, which was placed under the command of Colonel Van der Mersch. Joseph was not to be intimidated. D’Alton put down popular riots, which broke out in various towns, notably at Tirlemont, Louvain, Namur, and Brussels, with unrelenting severity. A sweeping decree was issued on 19th October against the exiles or émigrés, declaring that ordinary emigration would be punished by banishment and confiscation of property, and that joining an armed force on the frontier for the purpose of invasion would be punished by death, and that informers against émigrés would receive a reward of 10,000 livres and absolute impunity.[4] But all the Emperor’s measures and decrees were of no effect. The meeting of the States-General in France had been followed by the capture of the Bastille and the bringing of the King of France from Versailles to Paris by a Parisian mob; and the effects of the French Revolution on affairs in Belgium was soon to be perceived.

Revolution in Liège.

In the bishopric of Liège, which, from its situation, always reflected and repeated any political troubles that took place in Belgium, the influence of the French Revolution was immediately felt. The inhabitants of the bishopric had long resented the rule of the prince-bishops, and felt the anomaly of being subject to an ecclesiastical sovereign. Many exiles from the democratic party in Belgium assembled in the bishopric, and on the news of the capture of the Bastille, the people of Liége needed little persuasion to renew their former insurrection. The revolution was carried out without the shedding of blood. On 16th and 17th August 1789 the people of the city of Liége rose in rebellion; on the 18th MM. Chestret and Fabry were chosen burgomasters by popular acclamation, the garrison was disarmed, and the citadel occupied by bourgeois national guards. On the same day the Prince-Bishop, Count Cæsar Constantine Francis de Hoensbroeck, was brought into the city, and he signed a proclamation acknowledging the revolution and abrogating the despotic settlement of 1684. The other towns in the bishopric followed the example of the capital, and in each of them free municipalities were elected and national guards raised and armed. The Prince-Bishop, after accepting the loss of his political power, fled to Trèves, and considered himself fortunate to be allowed to escape.

The Elections to the States-General.

It is now time to examine the course of the events in France, which led to such important developments upon its north-east frontier, and which distracted the attention of all the monarchs and ministers of Europe, except Catherine of Russia, from the wars in the North and East. It was owing to the increasing difficulty of raising money for carrying on the administration of the State and paying the interest on the national debt, and the consequent necessity for revising the system of taxation and reorganising the financial resources of France that Louis XVI., on the advice of his minister, Loménie de Brienne, had vaguely promised in November 1787 to summon the States-General for July 1792, and had definitely convoked the ancient assembly of France on 8th August 1788 to meet at Versailles on 1st May 1789. But the arrangements for the elections were not made by Loménie de Brienne, who retired from office in the same month as the States-General was convoked, but by his successor Necker, who was recalled to office as an expert financier, in view of the fact that the summons of the States-General was looked on as a purely financial expedient. The procedure to be adopted in electing deputies gave rise to much anxious deliberation and heated controversy in the public press, and the Notables of 1787 were again assembled to give their advice. The burning question was as to the representation of the Tiers État, Third Estate or Commons. The ancient representative assembly of France was known to consist of the three orders of the Nobility, the Clergy, and the Tiers État, and the disputed question was as to the proportion of the number of deputies of the Tiers État to that of the two other orders. This and the other electoral questions were finally settled by the Résultat du Conseil published on 27th December 1788. It was decreed that the royal bailliages and royal sénéchaussées, feudal circumscriptions which had long fallen into disuse, should be treated as electoral units, and that they should elect, according to the extent of their population, one or more deputations, each consisting of four members, one chosen by the Nobility, one by the Clergy, and two by the Tiers État. The elections were to be made in two and sometimes in three degrees, and at each stage cahiers or statements of grievances and projects for reform were to be drawn up by the electoral assemblies.[5] In provinces, where there were no royal bailliages or sénéchaussées, and consequently no Grand Baillis or Grand Sénéchals to preside, corresponding circumscriptions were adopted or invented. During the early months of 1789 the French people were fully occupied in the election of the deputies to the States-General. Whatever might be the opinion of the French Court or the French Ministry, the people,—and more especially the educated bourgeois of the towns and the country lawyers,—looked upon the future assembly as something more than a financial expedient; they trusted to it to draw up a new political system for the State, which should admit the representative principle and allow the taxpayer a voice not only in the granting, but in the spending of the national revenue. The working classes, whether in the towns or the rural districts, did not take much active interest in the elections, and their representatives in the secondary electoral assemblies were generally educated bourgeois, but they vaguely built high hopes on the meeting of the States-General, and expected it to give them land or higher wages. Considering the novelty of choosing representatives in France, it is extraordinary that the electoral operations were carried out as peacefully and as efficiently as they were. This was mainly due to the success of a little revolutionary movement in Dauphiné, where an unauthorised and irregular assembly had met in July 1788 to protest against the abolition of the provincial Parlements by Loménie de Brienne. That minister had left office when he was not permitted to put down the assembly in Dauphiné by force, and Necker hoped to save the prestige of the monarchy by summoning a new assembly of the province in its place. But the ruse was quickly perceived; the men who had sat in the illegal assembly were elected to its successor, and in the eyes of France the representatives of the Dauphiné had won a signal victory over the Court. The new assembly in Dauphiné became the court of appeal in every electoral difficulty, and its secretary, Mounier, the leader of the Tiers État of France. Owing to his energy and ability local jealousies of town against town, province against province, class jealousies and personal rivalry, were set at rest, and it was more owing to Mounier than to any one else that the deputies to the States-General were legally and quietly elected, and that the acts of the future assembly could not be stigmatised as the work of a factious or unrepresentative minority of the French nation.

Meeting of the States-General.

On 5th May 1789 the first States-General held in France since the year 1614 met at Versailles. Barentin, the Keeper of the Seals, and Necker harangued the collected deputies, and the latter explained the desperate financial situation of the State and the necessity for immediate action to relieve the national treasury. The representatives of the nobility and clergy then retired to separate chambers, leaving their colleagues of the Tiers État in the great hall. No word was spoken about the relation of the three orders to each other. It was assumed that each order was to deliberate separately. The representatives of the Tiers État were placed in a most difficult position. There was no advantage in their being as numerous as the two other orders put together, if the three orders were to be independent of each other, for in that case the majorities of the privileged orders could outweigh the opinion of the majority among themselves. The question of vote par ordre, which would give each order equal authority, or vote par tête, which would allow the numerical preponderance of the Tiers État to take effect, had been long recognised as crucial. It had been assumed from the grant of double representation to the Tiers État that the Government intended to sanction the vote par tête, and the tacit acknowledgment of the separation of the orders and consequent recognition of the vote par ordre on 5th May disconcerted for the moment the popular leaders.

Struggle between the Orders.

The Tiers État declare themselves the National Assembly.

But the deputies of the Tiers État, under the guidance of Le Chapelier, a Breton lawyer from Rennes, and of Rabaut de Saint-Étienne, a Protestant pastor from Nîmes, proceeded to take up a most skilful attitude. They resolved on a policy of masterly inactivity. They refused to form themselves into the assembly of the Order of the Tiers État; they refused to open letters addressed to them under that title; they refused to elect a president or secretaries; and stated that they were a body of citizens, representatives of the French nation, waiting in that hall to be joined by the other deputies. This attitude received the unanimous approval of the people of Paris, and threw upon the Government the onus of declaring that the double representation of the Tiers État was merely a sterile gift. The representatives of the two privileged orders treated the situation very differently. The nobility accepted the separation of the orders to distinct chambers, and resolved to constitute their chamber by 188 votes to 47, while the clergy only decided in the same sense by 133 votes to 114. Even this majority was not really significant. For, owing to a tendency which had developed during the course of the elections, the greater part of the deputies of the clergy were poor country curés, who sympathised with the Tiers État, from which they sprung, and not with the prelates and dignitaries of the Church, who belonged to the nobility. This tendency of the true majority of the clergy was well known to the leaders of the Tiers État and encouraged them in their passive attitude. In vain the King and Necker attempted to terminate the deadlock; the deputies of the Tiers État persisted that they did not form an order, and they were reinforced by the representatives of Paris, where the elections were not concluded until the end of May. At last, on 10th June, on the proposition of the Abbé Sieyès, deputy for Paris, a final invitation was sent to the deputies of the nobility and the clergy to join the deputies of the Tiers État, and it was resolved that whether the request was granted or refused the Tiers État would constitute itself into a regular deliberative body. The invitation was rejected by the nobility, and only a few curés, including the Abbé Grégoire, belonging to the Order of the Clergy, complied with it. The deputies then verified their powers, and elected Bailly, a famous astronomer and deputy for Paris, to be their president. But what sort of assembly were they? They denied that they were representatives of an Order, and they were certainly not the States-General of France. The question was hotly debated, and on 16th June they declared themselves the National Assembly. They then declared all the taxes, hitherto levied, to be illegal, and ordered that they should only be paid provisionally. This defiant conduct disconcerted the King and his ministers, and it was announced that a Séance Royale, or Royal Session, would be held by the King in person to settle all disputed questions.

The Oath of the Tennis Court. 20th June.

The Séance Royale. 23d June.

On 20th June the deputies of the Tiers État, or of the National Assembly, as they now termed themselves, were excluded from their usual meeting-place. They therefore met in the Jeu de Paume or Tennis Court at Versailles, and, amidst a scene of wild excitement, swore that they would not separate until they had drawn up a new Constitution for France. By this act they practically became rebels, and the French Revolution really commenced. On 22d June they met in the Church of Saint Louis at Versailles, where they were joined by 149 deputies of the clergy, who thus recognised the act of rebellion. On 23d June the Séance Royale was held. In the speech from the throne it was announced that the King, ‘of his own goodness and generosity,’ would levy no taxes in future without the assent of the representatives of the people, but it was also declared that the financial privileges of the nobility and clergy were unassailable, and that the States-General was to vote par ordre. This was the most critical moment in the first stage of the Revolution. If the deputies of the Tiers État had given way, the oath of the Tennis Court would have seemed only an idle threat. But they found a leader in the Comte de Mirabeau, deputy for the Tiers État of Aix, a man of extraordinary ability, who in the course of a tempestuous career had travelled much and learned much. He courageously faced the situation, and after making a reply to the Grand Master of the Ceremonies that the deputies of France would only be expelled by force, he induced the National Assembly to declare the persons of its members inviolable. Sieyès summed up the situation by telling the deputies: ‘Gentlemen, you are to-day what you were yesterday.’ Before this daring opposition the King gave way: on 25th June the minority of the Order of the Nobility, consisting of forty-seven deputies, headed by the Marquis de Lafayette, the friend of Washington, joined the National Assembly, and two days later the majority of that Order reluctantly followed their example at the command of the King.

Mirabeau’s Address to the King. 9th July.

Dismissal of Necker. 12th July.

The rapid transformation of the deputies of the Tiers État into a National Assembly, which defied the royal authority and spoke of drawing up a new Constitution for France, exasperated the courtiers, who looked with disgust at all attempts to modify the ancien régime. The King did not share their feelings; he was honestly desirous of doing his duty by his people, and preferred the diminution of his royal prerogative to coming into open conflict with his subjects and to initiating a civil war. He had hitherto trusted to Necker and followed Necker’s advice. But the result had not been encouraging. His minister had repeatedly put him in a false position. He had been made to speak in a haughty tone to the deputies of the Tiers État at the Séance Royale on 23d June, and then to eat his words by directing the deputies of the Nobility to join the self-created National Assembly. This great concession seemed to have been wrung from him; the deputies of the Tiers État appeared to have won a great victory in the face of the royal opposition, when in reality the King had yielded from the goodness of his heart. Since he found that following the advice of Necker had only resulted in a loss of authority, combined with profound unpopularity, without improving the financial prospect, Louis XVI. not unnaturally turned his attention to the enemies of the minister. These enemies were headed by the Queen, Marie Antoinette, who resented Necker’s endeavours to restrain the extravagance of the Court and his admission of the need to make concessions to the will of the people, and by the King’s younger brother, the Comte d’Artois, a staunch supporter of the absolute prerogative of the Crown and of the system of the ancien régime. Yielding unwillingly to the arguments of the enemies of Necker and of the National Assembly, the King determined to use force, and he began to concentrate troops in the neighbourhood of Paris and Versailles. The National Assembly did not know what to do; Mounier and other leaders had formed a committee to draw up the bases of a new constitution; but they had no force on which they could depend to resist the royal troops, and felt that they would probably be arrested and the Assembly dissolved long before the foundation of the Constitution was laid. At this crisis Mirabeau again came to the front. With the most daring audacity he attacked and revealed the policy of the Court on 8th July, and on 9th July carried an address to the King on the part of the Assembly, requesting the immediate removal of the troops collected in the neighbourhood, but protesting the loyalty of the Assembly to the person of the King. But the King was now under the influence of the opponents of the Assembly. His answer to Mirabeau’s address was the dismissal of Necker and his colleagues on 12th July, the banishment of Necker, and the appointment of the Maréchal de Broglie, an experienced general, who detested the idea of change, to be Minister for War and Marshal-General of the troops in the neighbourhood of Paris.

Formation of National Guards.

Hitherto the struggle had been between the Court and the deputies of the Tiers État; the popular element was now to intervene; and the people of Paris was for the first time to make its influence felt. The news of Necker’s dismissal was received in Paris with wrath and dismay. A young lawyer without practice, named Camille Desmoulins, announced the event to the crowd collected in the Palais Royal and incited his hearers to resistance. His words were eagerly applauded. The population of Paris, both bourgeois and proletariat, had watched the course of events at Versailles with unflagging interest, and the formation of a camp of soldiers in the neighbourhood with terror. The working classes, who lived near the margin of starvation, expected that the National Assembly would cause in some way a rise in wages and a decrease in the price of necessaries, and were exasperated at the prospect of the non-fulfilment of their hopes. They had already sacked the house of a manufacturer, named Réveillon, who was reported to have spoken scornful words of their poverty, on 28th April, and were ready for any mischief. From the Palais Royal, excited by the news and the words of Camille Desmoulins, started a tumultuous procession bearing busts of Necker and of the Duke of Orleans, a prince of the royal house, who had been exiled by the King for previous opposition to him, and who was regarded as a supporter of the popular claims. The procession was charged by a German cavalry regiment in the French service, commanded by the Prince de Lambesc, a near relative of the Queen, and the mob dispersed to riot and to pillage. The more patriotic rioters broke into the gunsmiths’ shops to seize weapons, the rest pillaged the butchers’ and bakers’ shops, and burned the barriers where octroi duties were collected. This scene of riot brought about its own remedy. The bourgeois, terrified for the safety of their shops, took up arms, and on the following day formed themselves into companies of national guards for the preservation of the peace. The guidance of this movement was taken by the electors of Paris, who, after completing their work of electing deputies for Paris, continued to meet at the Hôtel-de-Ville.

Capture of the Bastille. 14th July.

The 14th of July found the capital of France organised for resistance. The Gardes Françaises, the force maintained for the security of Paris, were devoted to the cause of the National Assembly, and were resolved to fight with the people, not against them. And it was ascertained that the soldiers in the camp were very lukewarm in their attachment to their officers, and were likely to refuse to attack the citizens. Under these circumstances an idea arose that an armed demonstration of the Parisians at Versailles would strengthen the King, whose sentiments were well known, to resist the Court party and to recall Necker. With this notion, large crowds approached the Hôtel des Invalides and the Bastille, the two principal store-houses of arms in Paris. The crowd, which went to the Hôtel des Invalides, had no difficulty in seizing the arms there, in spite of the opposition of the Governor. But it was otherwise at the Bastille. The mob, which collected in the Governor’s Court in that fortress and shouted for arms, was isolated by the raising of the outer drawbridge and fired upon by the weak garrison in the Bastille itself. The sound of this firing brought a number of armed men from other parts of the city; the outer drawbridge was cut down, and preparations were being made to force a way into the fortress itself, when the garrison surrendered. The result of the firing upon the mob in the Governor’s Court had been to kill eighty-three persons and wound many others. The sight of the corpses and the cries of the wounded excited the anger of the successful conquerors of the fortress. A panic arose, and three officers and four soldiers of the garrison were murdered. Then the more disciplined of the conquerors started to take the rest of the defenders of the Bastille to the Hôtel-de-Ville. On the way the Governor and the Major of the fortress were murdered by the mob, and M. de Flesselles, the Provost of the merchants of Paris, who was accused of encouraging the Governor to resist, was also slain. By these events the people of Paris felt that they had commenced a war against the Crown; entrenchments were thrown up and barricades were erected in the streets; all shops were shut up; the barriers were closed; no one was allowed to leave the city, and preparations were made to stand a siege.

Recall of Necker. 15th July.

The King’s visit to Paris. 17th July.

But if the people of Paris were ready to fight, the King was not. As has been said, he loathed the idea of civil war, and when he heard of the capture of the Bastille and of the martial attitude of Paris, he at once gave up the idea of opposing the revolutionary movement by force. He dismissed his reactionary ministers and recalled Necker, and he declared himself ready to co-operate with the National Assembly in restoring order. The first victories of the Assembly had been won by its statesmanlike inaction in the month of May and its courage on 23d June; the victory over the party of force had been won by Paris on 14th July. The Assembly prepared to take advantage of this fresh success. On 16th July it legalised the establishment of National Guards and elective municipalities all over France, and recognising that the only way to convince the Parisians that the King had accepted the new situation and had abandoned the idea of employing force, was to induce the King to visit Paris in person, it proposed that he should do so at once. Louis XVI. was not devoid of personal courage, and consented. On 17th July, accordingly, he entered Paris accompanied by 100 deputies, and amidst wild acclamation put on the tricolour cockade, which the Parisians had assumed as their badge, and consented to the nomination of Bailly, the President of the National Assembly, to be Mayor of Paris, and of Lafayette to be Commander-in-chief of the Paris National Guard. These concessions, and the victory of the National Assembly and of Paris threw consternation among the court party of reaction: the Comte d’Artois and those of his adherents, who were most hated as conspicuous reactionaries or who had advocated the employment of force, fled from the country.

Murder of Foullon. 21st July.

The immediate results of the capture of the Bastille were no less important in the provinces of France. In every city, even in small country towns, mayors and municipalities were elected and National Guards formed; in many the local citadels were seized by the people; in all the troops fraternised with the people; and in some there was bloodshed. This movement was essentially bourgeois; where blood was shed and pillage took place at the hands of the working classes, the new National Guards soon restored order. The general excitement was so great that it is surprising that there was not more bloodshed and that peace was so quickly and efficiently established. Among these outbreaks the most noteworthy took place in Paris itself, where on 21st July Foullon de Doué, who had been nominated to succeed Necker on 12th July, and his son-in-law Berthier de Sauvigny were murdered almost before the eyes of Bailly, the new Mayor of Paris. But these occasional town riots were speedily quelled by the armed bourgeois. Far more widespread and important was the upheaval in the rural districts of France.

The peasants believed that the time had come, when they were to own their land free from copyhold rights or the relics of feudal servitudes. Even the better-educated farmers for their own interests favoured this idea. The result was a regular jacquerie in many parts of France. The châteaux of the lords were burnt, or in some instances only the charters stored in them, and the lords’ dovecotes and rabbit-warrens were generally destroyed. In certain provinces the National Guards of the neighbouring towns put down these rural outbreaks, occasionally with great severity, but as a rule they ran their course unchecked.

The Session of 4th August.

On 4th August a deputy named Salomon read a report on these occurrences to the National Assembly, or as it is generally called from the Constitution it framed, the Constituent Assembly. His report was followed by a curious scene, which marked the transition from feudal to modern France. The scene was opened by the sacrifice by some of the young liberal noblemen of their feudal rights. Privileges of all sorts, privileges of class, of town and of province were solemnly abandoned. Feudal customs and all relics of feudalism were condemned and declared to be abolished. Even tithes were swept away, in spite of a protest from Sieyès, and the ‘orgie,’ as Mirabeau termed it, closed with a decree that a monument should be erected to Louis XVI., ‘the restorer of French liberty.’

The Declaration of the Rights of Man.

The Suspensive Veto.

But it was not possible to restore peace and prosperity to France by the abolition of the relics of feudalism. Destruction of former anomalies and of a crumbling system of government would inevitably lead to anarchy, unless accompanied by the construction of a new scheme of central and local administration. It was here that the Constituent Assembly failed. The deputies were quick to destroy but slow to construct. For two months they wasted time instead of hastening to draw up a new constitution for France. They first wrangled over the wording of a Declaration of the Rights of Man, which they resolved to compile in imitation of the founders of the American Republic. They then debated lengthily whether the future representative assembly of France should consist of one or two chambers, and whether the King should have power to veto its acts. The first question was decided in favour of a single chamber, more because the English Constitution sanctioned two chambers, and the deputies feared to be thought imitators, than for any logical reason. And the debate on the second question terminated in the grant to the King of a suspensive veto for six months, in spite of the eloquence of Mirabeau, who saw that a monarchical constitution, which gave the King no more power than the President of the United States of America, would prove unworkable, because it would divorce responsibility from real authority, leaving the former to the King and the latter to the Legislature.

The march of the Women to Versailles. 5th October.

The King brought to Paris. 6th October.

During the two months occupied by these debates the situation had again become critical. Necker’s only idea to relieve the financial situation was to propose loans, which the Assembly granted, but which he could not succeed in raising. The King was again being acted upon by the Court party, which advocated the use of force and the dissolution of the Assembly, and this party was encouraged by the Queen and by the King’s sister, Madame Elizabeth. He was also urged to leave the neighbourhood of Paris and to establish himself in some provincial town, where the populace could be more easily restrained by the regular troops. He would not heartily agree to either of these courses, but weakly consented once more to concentrate troops round his person. Everything advised at Versailles was soon known in Paris. The journalists, who had since the capture of the Bastille sprung up in the capital to advocate the views of the popular party, and of whom the ablest were Loustalot, editor of the Révolutions de Paris, and Marat, editor of the Ami du Peuple, kept warning the people of Paris against treason on the part of the King, and prophesying dire consequences if he were allowed to leave the neighbourhood or to concentrate troops. Their words did not fall on unheeding ears. The working classes feared a siege of Paris again as they had done in July, and looked on the King’s presence in Paris as the only means to keep down the price of necessaries. The thinking bourgeois, whether liberal deputies in the Assembly or national guards in Paris, feared a sudden forced dissolution of the Assembly, and not only the loss of the advantages they had gained but punishment for the part they had played. Both these elements were perceptible in the movement which followed. The description given in the popular journals of a banquet at Versailles, honoured by the presence of the royal family, at which the national cockade had been trampled underfoot, on 1st October, roused the people of Paris to a frenzy of wrath and fear. On 5th October a crowd of women collected in Paris, declaring that they were starving, and were led to Versailles by Maillard, one of the conquerors of the Bastille, followed by a mob. The representatives of the women interviewed the King, and the mob prepared to spend the night outside the palace walls. Late at night they were followed by a powerful detachment of the National Guard of Paris, under the command of Lafayette, who protested that he came to save the King. Nevertheless, owing to bad management, some of the mob broke into the palace before daybreak on the morning of 6th October and murdered two of the royal bodyguards. Lafayette came to the rescue and demanded that the King and royal family should come to Paris and take up their residence at the Tuileries. The King, horrified by the events of the morning, and obliged to obey Lafayette, consented, and the royal family, accompanied by the mob, and escorted by the National Guard, at once proceeded to the capital. This second victory of the Parisians was not less important than the first: on 14th July the people of Paris had terrified the King into abandoning the idea of dissolving the National Assembly by force; on 6th October they brought him amongst them, so that if he again conceived the idea, he would be unable to execute it.

Effect in Europe.

The capture of the Bastille caused the most profound astonishment in Europe. Where the people possessed some amount of political liberty, as in the United States of America and in England, it appealed to the imagination, and the French were regarded as the conquerors of their freedom. In the neighbourhood of France, in the Rhenish principalities, in Belgium, and above all in Liège, it caused a general sense of discontent and even riots. The despotic monarchs of Europe and their principal ministers did not pay so much attention to the capture of the Bastille as did the inhabitants of free countries; they did not for one moment believe that the National Assembly would be allowed to alter the old constitution of France, and looked upon the whole of the popular movement with a favourable eye as likely to weaken France and prevent her from interfering in the affairs of the Continent. They took care, however, to suppress all similar risings in their own states. The King of Sardinia and the Elector of Mayence were especially severe; the Emperor’s General d’Alton was more than severe in Belgium; and the King of Prussia sent General Schlieffen with a strong force to restore the authority of the Bishop of Liège. This attitude of the continental monarchs was encouraged by the first French émigrés, who loudly declared that the success of the Assembly was due to the culpable weakness of Louis XVI.

The Belgian Revolution. Oct. 1789-Jan. 1790.

The tidings of the events of 5th and 6th October showed both the French émigrés and the continental monarchs that they were wrong in their estimate of the Revolution. That the French royal family should be triumphantly brought to Paris and be practically imprisoned in the Tuileries under the eyes of the Parisian populace was a startling proof of the power of the people. It proportionately encouraged the supporters of all the popular movements on the French borders. Of these, the most important was that which had already made so much progress two years before in Belgium. The first result of the removal of the King of France to Paris was the Belgian Revolution of 1789, which filled almost as large a place in the eyes of contemporaries as the French Revolution itself. Encouraged by the Triple Alliance, and more especially by Frederick William II. of Prussia, the Belgian exiles of both wings, the supporters of Van der Noot, the advocate of the ancient Constitution, and of Vonck, the radical, had formed a patriotic army at Breda. The news of the events of 5th and 6th October determined them to act. On 23d October the army under Van der Mersch crossed the border, and on 24th October Van der Noot issued a manifesto declaring the Emperor Joseph deprived of his sovereignty over the Duchy of Brabant for having violated its fundamental charter.

Formation of the Belgian Republic, 10th Jan. 1790.

The march of the patriotic army was both rapid and successful. Bruges and Ostend opened their gates to the exiles; the fort of St. Pierre at Ghent was stormed; and the Estates of Flanders at once assembled, published a declaration of independence, and called on the other provinces to join in the movement. In Brabant the excitement was at its height. Trautmannsdorf in vain promised to restore the ‘Joyeuse Entrée,’ to abolish the Imperial Seminary at Brussels, and to declare a general amnesty. The patriots would not trust him, and Van der Mersch advanced into the Duchy and occupied Tirlemont. The people of Brussels then rose in insurrection. From 7th to 12th December was a period of long-continued riot and street fighting. Many of the Austrian soldiers deserted to the popular side, and those who remained true to their colours were shot at from windows and refused to charge. The advance of Van der Mersch set the seal upon d’Alton’s discomfiture. He made a capitulation on 12th December, and marched out of Brussels, leaving his guns, military stores, and military chest containing 3,000,000 florins behind. He retreated to Luxembourg, the only province which remained faithful to the House of Austria, and his example was followed by the imperial garrisons of Malines, Antwerp, and Louvain, which were abandoned to the patriots. D’Alton himself died at Trèves, it is said by taking poison, on being summoned to Vienna to be tried by a court-martial, and was succeeded in command of the Austrian troops in Luxembourg by General Bender. On 18th December the patriot committee entered Brussels, headed by Van der Noot, who was hailed by the people as the Belgian Franklin. On 7th January 1790 representatives from all the provinces of the former Austrian Netherlands met at Brussels under the presidency of Cardinal Frankenberg, Archbishop of Malines, and on 10th January they passed a federal constitution for the ‘United Belgian States,’ resembling that of Holland, under which each province was to preserve its internal independence, and only foreign affairs and national defence were left to the central government. Van der Noot was chosen Minister of State, and he at once asked for the official recognition of the new Belgian Constitution by the Triple Alliance, whose ministers at the Hague, Lord Auckland, Count Keller, and Van der Spiegel had, he asserted, promised to guarantee the independence of the new United States of Belgium. Frederick William II. of Prussia endeavoured to carry out this promise. He authorised one of his officers, General Schönfeld, to organise the Belgian army, and ordered General Schlieffen at Liége to enter into communication with the new government. But England and Holland, though approving the insurrection of Belgium as affording a powerful counterpoise to the Emperor’s policy in the East, were in no hurry to guarantee the new Republic, and Van der Noot then determined, under the influence of the radicals or Vonckists, to solicit the help of France, and announced the new Belgian Constitution in a significant manner both to Louis XVI. and to the President of the National Assembly.

Death of the Emperor Joseph. 20th Feb. 1790.

The news of the declaration of the independence of the Belgian provinces, and of the revolution which had led to it, proved to be the death-blow of the Emperor Joseph. To the Prince de Ligne, a native of Belgium, he said, just before his death, ‘Your country has killed me; the taking of Ghent is my agony; the evacuation of Brussels is my death. What a disgrace this is for me! I die; I must be made of wood, if I did not. Go to the Netherlands; make them return to their allegiance. If you do not succeed in the attempt, remain there. Do not sacrifice your fortune for me; you have children.’ The dying Emperor in his despair made concessions in every direction. He humbled his pride to entreat the Pope to use his influence with the Belgian clergy. He gave in to the Hungarian magnates, who demanded the repeal of his great reforms with threats of insurrection; and on 28th January 1790 he issued his ‘Revocatio Ordinationum quæ sensu communi legibus adversari videbantur,’ by which he revoked all his reforms in Hungary, except the edict of toleration and the decrees against serfdom; and on 18th February he ordered the Crown of St. Stephen to be sent back to Pesth. He assented to the suspension of his reforming edicts in Bohemia, and even in the Tyrol, where an insurrection was on the point of breaking out. Then, feeling his life a failure, he prepared for death. He confessed and received the ordinances of the Church; the last words he was heard to say were: ‘I believe I have done my duty as a man and a prince,’ and on the morning of 20th February he died. The words he wished to be written on his grave were: ‘Here rests a prince, whose intentions were pure; but who had the misfortune to see all his plans miscarry;’ but the people of Vienna, with a deeper sense of the merits of the great ruler who had lived in their midst, placed on his statue the inscription, ‘Josepho secundo, arduis nato, magnis perfuncto, majoribus præcepto, qui saluti publicæ vixit non diu, sed totus.’ The failure of the career of Joseph, the noblest sovereign of the eighteenth century,—one of the noblest sovereigns of any century,—was a proof of the fallacy of the eighteenth century conception of benevolent despotism. He had tried to accomplish in his dominions the very measures of reform which the Constituent Assembly had undertaken in France. The abolition of the relics of feudalism, the creation of a spirit of nationality, based upon the existence of uniform laws, the nationalisation of the Church and of education, the removal of all caste privileges, whether in the payment of taxes or in eligibility for public employment, and the maintenance of good internal administration, the primary aims and the great achievements of the Revolution in France, were also the objects of Joseph’s reforms. But everything was to be done for the people, nothing by the people, and it is doubtful whether, if Joseph had been in the place of Louis XVI., the French people would have relished the advantages he might have conferred. The spirit of locality was perhaps not so strong in France as in the hereditary dominions of the House of Austria. Dauphiné and Burgundy did not differ from Brittany and Normandy as much as Bohemia and Hungary, Belgium and the Milanese differed from each other. Yet the abolition of local distinctions might have been resented in France, as it was in the dominions of Joseph, if it had been accomplished by the monarch, instead of being the work of elected representatives. It is indeed remarkable that, allowing for the want of exactness in the parallel, owing to the difference of local conditions, the very reforms, which rallied all France to the side of the Revolution, should have led to the disastrous termination of the Emperor Joseph’s reign, and it is difficult to avoid coming to the conclusion that the whole subject illustrates the grand distinction between the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, the distinction between alterations in the political, social, or economical conditions of a state made by a monarch for his people, and by a people for itself.

Louis XVI., indeed, showed himself a very different type of monarch from Joseph. He wished for the good of his people as ardently as his brother-in-law, but he had during the early years of his reign been satisfied with wishing for reforms, instead of energetically initiating them. When the success of the Revolution was assured by the policy of the deputies of the Tiers État, by the capture of the Bastille and by his own establishment at Paris, he never thought of setting himself at the head of the party of reform. He did not openly ally himself with the Tiers État, to vanquish the opposition of the nobles, as Gustavus III. of Sweden had done; he did not dream of outbidding the National Assembly for popularity by lavish promises, as other monarchs before and since have done; and he did not even try to share the credit of the representatives of the people by exhibiting an ardent zeal for reform. The horror he felt for civil war was not recognised; his partial yielding to the Court party of reaction in July and October, though at so late a date and so half-heartedly as to nullify any chance of its success, was imputed to him as a crime; and the difficulty presented by the fact that his dearest relatives, his Queen, Marie Antoinette, and his sister, Madame Elizabeth, were against all reform, was never fully appreciated. In consequence, the King’s real wishes to please his people and avoid bloodshed were looked on as simulated by the members of the National Assembly, and not only Louis himself, but the very principle of the French monarchy, were regarded as hostile to representative institutions. Louis XVI. was as weak as Joseph II. was energetic, but he was equally well-intentioned; and it was a distinct misfortune, both for himself and for France, that the value of the passive inertness, which he generally opposed to the reactionary schemes of his family and of the partisans of the ancien régime, was not adequately recognised.

The New French Constitution. 1789–1791.

This attitude towards the King had an important effect upon the constitution which the Constituent Assembly was engaged in framing during the year 1790. Only the main points in the growth of this Constitution, which occupied the greater part of the time of the Assembly from 1789 to 1791, can here be touched upon. But one striking feature must first be observed, that it was drawn up and applied piecemeal, not as an organic whole, like the later French constitutions of the revolutionary period. The first important principle was decreed upon 12th November 1789, when it was resolved that all the old local divisions of France, which perpetuated the memory of the gradual growth of the French provinces into France, should be abolished, and that the country should be divided into eighty departments of nearly equal size. It was naturally some months before the new division was effected, and still longer before the further division of each department into districts, and each district into cantons was finished. No wiser step for converting France from a congeries of provinces into a nation could have been devised. On the basis of the new divisions a new local government was established. Each department and district was to be administered by elected authorities, elaborately chosen by a system of double election. Next to the local government, the judicial system was reorganised. The Parlements were all abolished, and local courts, consisting of elected judges of departmental and district tribunals, and elected justices of the peace, were substituted. A uniform system of law was projected, and juries were sanctioned in criminal but not in civil cases. In these sweeping reforms one natural blemish is perceptible: from having no elected officials the other extreme was adopted of having all officials elected.

The Civil Constitution of the Clergy.

The mania for election affected the reform of the ecclesiastical arrangements of France, and directly brought about the schism, which so largely contributed to the misfortunes of France during the revolutionary period. On 2d November 1789 it had been resolved, in the face of the financial distress, that the property of the Church in France should be confiscated or resumed, as it was represented by opposite parties, while acknowledging the duty of providing and paying curés and bishops. This implied the formation of a State Church, a measure which needed the most delicate handling. On 13th February 1790 all monasteries and religious houses were suppressed; but as there had already been a partial suppression a few years previously, this would not by itself have caused a schism. It was otherwise with regard to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. It was resolved to reduce the number of bishoprics to one for each department, and that all the beneficed clergy, from curés to bishops, should be elected. This violation of a fundamental principle of the Catholic Church could not be allowed to pass unchallenged, and when the Constituent Assembly found that opposition was raised, it drove matters to a crisis by ordering that every beneficed ecclesiastic should take an oath to observe the new Civil Constitution of the Clergy. This oath was generally refused by the bishops and dignitaries, and largely by the parochial clergy, and it was resolved by the Assembly, on 27th November 1790, that all who refused the oath within one week should be held to be dismissed from their offices. The King sanctioned this decree on 26th December 1790, and the great schism in France began. It was doubtful at first whether apostolical succession could be preserved in the new Church of France. Only four beneficed bishops, including Loménie de Brienne, Cardinal Archbishop of Sens, and Talleyrand, Bishop of Autun, out of one hundred and thirty-five, and three coadjutor bishops, or bishops in partibus, including Gobel, Bishop of Lydda, consented to take the oath, but by them the first of the elected bishops of departmental sees were consecrated.

The measures of the Constituent Assembly in abolishing the old provincial divisions and law courts, and substituting new and more modern arrangements for administration, were in the nature of great reforms, though marred by the mania for election; the attempt to establish a Gallican Church, though obviously opposed to the discipline of the Catholic Church, and seriously discounted by the same mania, was patriotic, if not very wise; but the arrangements for the central administration were utterly absurd. In their dislike of the system of the ancien régime, and their fear of a strong executive, the Constituent Assembly thought it could not do enough to hamper the authority of the throne and of the central administration. The King, under the new Constitution, was left powerless. He was to be the first functionary of the State, nothing more. His veto on the measures of the Legislature was to have effect for only six months; his guards were suppressed, and his position made untenable for a strong monarch, and unbearable for a weak one. The ministers were invested with supreme executive authority, but more regulations were made to ensure their responsibility and limit their actual power, than to define their functions. They were to be answerable to the Legislature, in which they were not allowed to sit; and their measures were to be criticised by an irresponsible representative assembly. Under such regulations the King and his ministers, that is, the executive, were put in a position of inferiority, which no vigorous man could be expected to accept, to the inevitable derangement of the whole administrative machine. In addition to the Constitution, the Constituent Assembly carried several measures of the greatest importance to a free state. All citizens, of whatever religion or class, were declared eligible for employment by the State; and on 13th April 1790 a noble decree, declaring the most absolute and entire toleration of every form of religion, was carried. The Constitution of 1791 was, on the whole, a praiseworthy effort of untried legislators to give their country a representative constitution. It was marred only by the fatal jealousy of giving due authority to the executive, and the mania for election. But it was in no way democratic. For the election to all offices was to be by at least two degrees, and no man was to have a vote unless he was an ‘active citizen.’ To be an active citizen, a man had to contribute to the direct taxation of the country an amount equivalent in value to three days’ wages in his locality. Further, to be eligible for office, a candidate had to pay taxes of the value of a ‘silver mark,’ which inevitably restricted all offices to the bourgeois, or very prosperous working men.

Other acts of the Constituent Assembly.

Though the main occupation of the Constituent Assembly was the building up of the Constitution of 1791, it interfered only too much in matters of current administration. It was soon obvious that its power exceeded that of the King, and it has been observed that Van der Noot announced the new Belgian Constitution alike to the King and the President of the Assembly, as to authorities of equal importance. The mischief produced by this constant interference was perceptible in every department of government. Mirabeau, who was a profound master of statecraft, saw through the fallacies of endeavouring to separate the legislative and executive powers in the State, and, what was implied in the preponderance of a legislature in which the ministers had no seat, to divorce authority from responsibility. He understood and approved of the English system, and as soon as the Constituent Assembly had removed to Paris in October 1789, after the establishment of the King at the Tuileries, and he had got the ear of the Court through his friend, La Marck, Mirabeau proposed the formation of a constitutional ministry, after the English fashion, from among the leading members of the Assembly. His scheme got noised abroad: the Assembly in its fear of the executive, which was afterwards consecrated in the Constitution of 1791, and stimulated by Lafayette, who dreaded the influence of a strong ministry, passed a motion on 7th November, that no member of the Assembly could take office as a minister while he remained a deputy, or for three years after his resignation.

The spirit, which lay at the root of this decree, showed itself in other ways. The fear of the influence of the Crown extended itself to the army and navy, as the natural instruments of the Crown for re-establishing its former authority. The army, already disorganised by the emigration of many of its officers, was practically destroyed in its efficiency as a fighting machine by the relaxation of discipline among the soldiers, caused not only by the actual decrees of the Assembly, but by the impunity allowed to desertion and mutiny. The Marquis de Bouillé, the general commanding at Metz, did indeed put down a military mutiny at Nancy on 31st August 1790, but his action, though applauded by the Assembly, which could not openly encourage mutiny, was isolated and not imitated. In the navy matters were even more desperate, for a larger proportion of officers deserted, resigned, or emigrated than in the army, and loss of discipline is even more disastrous in a naval than in a military force. The weakness of the army was intended to be compensated by the enrolment of national guards. But these citizen soldiers could not be treated with the strictness of regular troops. They were chiefly of the bourgeois class, and had the prejudices of that class, caring more for the protection of their property than for military efficiency. In Paris they were of the most importance, owing to their numbers, and their commander-in-chief, Lafayette, probably the most powerful man in France in 1790. The framing of the Constitution, and the disorganisation of the central authority and its instruments were the chief results of the labours of the Constituent Assembly in 1790; but among its minor acts should be noted the abolition of titles of nobility, liveries and other relics of social pre-eminence on 13th July 1790, as an evidence of its desire to extirpate even the outward signs of the ancien régime.

Mirabeau.

Only one man seems to have understood the dangers to which France was drifting owing to the policy of the Constituent Assembly, and that man was Mirabeau. He had done more than any man to assure the victory of the Tiers État in June 1789; he was the greatest orator and greatest statesman the revolutionary crisis had produced. Mirabeau, however, hated anarchy as much as he did despotism. He saw the absolute necessity of establishing a strong executive, if the crisis of 1789, the dissolution of the old authorities, the unpunished riots in towns, and the jacquerie in the rural districts were not to lead to anarchy. Foiled in his prudent scheme of selecting a strong ministry from the Constituent Assembly[6] by the vote of 7th November 1789, Mirabeau saw that it was impossible to overcome the distrust of the Assembly for the executive. He therefore turned to the Court, and in May 1790 he became the secret adviser of the King through the mediation of his friend La Marck. In a series of memoirs or notes for the Court of surpassing political wisdom, Mirabeau analysed the situation of affairs and proposed remedies. The two main dangers were the state of the finances and the fear of foreign intervention. Mirabeau’s horror of national bankruptcy was as great as his personal extravagance in expenditure. In September 1789 he advocated Necker’s scheme of a general contribution, though it was accompanied by stipulations which were certain to make it almost entirely unproductive, and he personally disapproved of it; in December 1789 he grudgingly acquiesced in the first issue of ‘assignats’ or promises to pay, based on the value of the property of the Church, resumed or confiscated by the Assembly, and to be extinguished as this property was sold. In August 1790 he went yet further. Comprehending that men are mainly influenced by their pecuniary interests, he advocated a wide extension of the system of assignats, down to small sums, on the grounds that they would then be able to reach the hands of the poorer classes and give them an interest in their maintaining their value, and would also frustrate the machinations of speculators, who began to make money by depreciating the exchange of specie against the new paper currency. But he also wisely proposed and successfully carried severe regulations for the extinction of assignats as the national property was realised, regulations which, unfortunately, were not strictly observed. His decree was followed in September 1790 by the retirement of Necker from office, and it is a significant proof of the change in popular opinion that the final retirement of the minister, whose dismissal in July 1789 had brought about the capture of the Bastille, was received without excitement.

The other great danger which France incurred, by the disorganising policy of the Constituent Assembly, was the possibility of the armed intervention of foreign powers. Mirabeau thought that if national bankruptcy and the interference of foreigners could be avoided, the anarchy, which was making itself felt, might soon be quelled. He did not fear civil war; indeed, he argued that it might be a positive advantage, and that as long as the King did not retract his concession of a representative constitution, a large portion of his subjects would support him in winning back the legitimate authority of the executive. But foreign war was to him an evil to be feared as much as national bankruptcy. He knew the spirit of his countrymen well, and that they would in case of national disaster submit to any despotism rather than submit to the dictation or the interference of a foreign power in their internal affairs. Success in a foreign war owing to the state of the army was not to be expected, but if it did come, it would with almost equal certainty lead to the despotism of the conquering government, whether it were the reigning monarch, his successor, or a victorious general. To avoid a foreign war it was necessary as far as possible to leave the conduct of foreign affairs in the hands of the King. This was Mirabeau’s intention in the great debate on the right of declaring peace and war in May 1790, and he succeeded in getting the Assembly to sanction the initiation of peace or war as part of the duties of the King. But at this period Louis XVI. was too weak or too unwilling to understand the paramount necessity of maintaining peace. Mirabeau, therefore, got himself elected to a special Diplomatic Committee of the Constituent Assembly, and as its reporter endeavoured throughout the year 1790 to keep France clear of international complications.

Mirabeau and the Court.

Unfortunately neither Louis XVI. nor his ministers, and still less Marie Antoinette, grasped the truth of Mirabeau’s memoirs for the Court. On the contrary, the one idea of the Queen was to get her brother, the Emperor Leopold, to interfere, and, if necessary, by force of arms to restore the power of the French monarch. The King, too, was startled at Mirabeau’s ideas; he felt no horror at the notion of a foreign war, but would suffer anything rather than engage in a civil war. The wise advice of the great statesman went unheeded; both King and Queen regarded their connection with him as the clever muzzling of a dangerous revolutionary leader. They could not comprehend his desire to establish a strong executive for the sake of France, and looked on it as a bit of personal ambition. The King was not sufficiently far-seeing, nor the Queen sufficiently patriotic to understand his views. If the Constituent Assembly distrusted the Court, the King and Queen no less strongly distrusted Mirabeau.

As reporter of the Diplomatic Committee, Mirabeau had three different problems to solve, in which the policy of the Assembly came in contact with foreign powers, the affairs of Avignon, the maintenance of the Pacte de Famille with Spain, and the interference caused by the legislation of the Assembly with the Princes of the Empire who owned fiefs of the Empire in Alsace.

Avignon and the Venaissin.

The city of Avignon and the county of the Venaissin, though inhabited by Frenchmen and surrounded by French territory, were under the sovereignty of the Pope. As early as the ‘orgie’ of 4th August 1789 the Constituent Assembly had pronounced on the expediency of uniting both the city and the county with France. A French party was formed in Avignon; and a free municipal constitution after the model of those just established in France was framed and assented to by the Cardinal Vice-Legate in April 1790. The Pope, however, annulled his deputy’s assent, with the result that fierce street fighting took place in the city, which was only stopped by the intervention of the National Guard of the neighbouring French city of Orange. The result of these events was that the city of Avignon, or at least the French party there, declared Avignon united to France on 12th June 1790. The inhabitants of the Venaissin, on the other hand, declared their attachment for the Pope, and their wish to remain subject to him. When these circumstances became known in Paris a strong party showed itself in the Assembly in favour of accepting the union of Avignon with or without the Pope’s assent. Mirabeau skilfully averted the danger of a flagrant breach of international law by securing the appointment of an Avignon Committee, and when it became necessary to send regular troops to maintain order in the city, he secured their despatch thither without the assumption of any rights of sovereignty.

The Affair of Nootka Sound. May 1790.

Far more serious was the question which arose in May 1790, and which gave rise to the debate in the Constituent Assembly on the right of declaring peace and war, for it brought into prominence a doubt whether the Assembly should recognise the treaties made by the French monarchy. Of these treaties, the most popular in France, and the first to be brought into evidence, was the Pacte de Famille, which had been concluded in 1761 by Choiseul between France and Spain. Charles IV. had succeeded his able and accomplished father, Charles III., on 12th December 1788. The new monarch was completely under the influence of his wife, Marie Louise, a princess of Parma, who in her turn was governed by a young guardsman, her lover, Godoy. Charles IV. made a friend of Godoy, a fact which of itself shows the essential weakness of his character. He, as well as his Queen, was, outwardly at least, deeply religious, and it was pretty certain that before long a reaction would take place at the Spanish Court against the liberal régime, which, in the previous reign, under the administration of Aranda and Florida Blanca, Campomanes and Jovellanos, had done so much for Spain. But for the first three years of his reign, Charles IV. maintained his father’s experienced ministers, with the assent of the Queen, who did not dare at once to introduce her lover into the ministry, or invest him openly with power. Florida Blanca, the Spanish minister, with Spanish pride, refused to recognise the actual weakness of Spain, and was particularly active in maintaining her supremacy in America. When, therefore, Vancouver Island was demonstrated to be an island and not a peninsula, he claimed its possession for Spain, and also alleged pre-colonisation. But he went further. Spanish officers had seized an English ship in Nootka Sound, now St. George’s Sound, in Vancouver Island, had destroyed an English settlement there, and had even insulted an English naval captain. When Pitt demanded reparation, Florida Blanca replied haughtily, and claimed the possession of the island on the grounds stated. Pitt at once sent one of the ablest English diplomatists, Alleyne Fitzherbert, afterwards Lord St. Helens, to threaten to declare war, and prepared a great fleet, known in English naval history as the Spanish Armament.

Both Pitt and Florida Blanca knew that a war between England and Spain would only be seriously undertaken if France decided to intervene. Florida Blanca claimed the assistance of France under the terms of the Pacte de Famille, and Pitt, who understood that power had passed from Louis XVI. to the Constituent Assembly, sent two secret emissaries to Paris to see if the Assembly was inclined to maintain the policy of the ancien régime. One of these emissaries was Hugh Elliot, brother of Sir Gilbert Elliot, afterwards Lord Minto, an old schoolfellow of Mirabeau, who was expected to influence the orator, and the other, William Augustus Miles, who was to ally himself with the leading democratic deputies. The question came before the Constituent Assembly on a letter from the Comte de Montmorin, Minister for Foreign Affairs. The enthusiasm in the Assembly for the maintenance of the Spanish Alliance was extreme, defiance was hurled at England, Spain’s faithful adherence to the Pacte de Famille in the Seven Years’ War and the War of American Independence was remembered, and a fleet for active service was ordered to be got ready at Brest, and sixteen new ships of war built. But the first burst of enthusiasm soon cooled. Some deputies feared war would strengthen the monarchy, others did not like to be bound by the treaties, especially the dynastic treaties of the ancien régime, and others again, headed by Robespierre and Pétion, inveighed against the idea of any offensive war. The whole question was referred to the Diplomatic Committee. Mirabeau, who knew perfectly well that Spain would not fight without the aid of France, read an able report, recommending that the Pacte de Famille should be changed to a simple defensive treaty, which was adopted. The Court of Spain, seeing that no help was to be got from France under these circumstances, resigned its pretensions to Vancouver Island, and consented to pay the compensation demanded by England. This diplomatic victory of England exasperated the Spaniards; Charles IV. was surprised and disgusted at the concessions made by Louis XVI., and declared them a breach of the Pacte de Famille; and by her conduct France lost the friendship of her closest ally of the eighteenth century.

The Rights of the Princes of the Empire in Alsace.

The third question in which the new state of things in France touched the diplomatic system of old Europe and threatened to cause international complications, which might lead to a foreign war, was concerned with the fiefs of the Empire in Alsace. By the Treaty of Westphalia that province had been ceded to France in full and entire sovereignty, but reserving the rights of the Empire. The complications caused by this ambiguous arrangement had raised perpetual difficulties throughout the reigns of Louis XIV. and Louis XV., and many separate treaties had been concluded with individual princes, by which they recognised the sovereignty of France in Alsace, in return for the acknowledgment of all their ancient rights. A further problem was added by the fact that the more important princely landowners in Alsace were also ruling and independent sovereigns across the French border. They were thus supreme, save for the loose over-lordship of the Emperor in Germany, and subject to the French monarchy for their domains in Alsace. Among the principal of these rulers were the three ecclesiastical electors, the Archbishops of Mayence, Trèves, and Cologne, the Bishops of Strasbourg, Spires, Worms, and Basle, the Abbot of Murbach, the Dukes of Würtemburg and of Deux-Ponts or Zweibrücken, the Elector Palatine, the Margrave of Baden, the Landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt, and the Princes of Nassau, Leiningen, Salm-Salm, and Hohenlohe-Bartenstein. These princes were naturally profoundly affected by the abolition of feudalism decreed by the Constituent Assembly, which further complicated their position. They felt as German princes, and appealed against the measures of the Assembly as contrary to international law, and violating the Treaty of Westphalia and the many separate treaties. The protests of certain of these princes were laid before the Assembly on 11th February 1790, and referred by it to the Feudal Committee on 28th April. The reporter of the Committee on this matter was Merlin of Douai, one of the greatest French jurists and statesmen of the whole revolutionary period. On 28th October he read his report, in which he insisted on the new principle of the sovereignty of the people. He asserted that the unity of Alsace with France rested not on ancient treaties, but on the unanimous resolution of the Alsatian people to be Frenchmen. But at the same time he argued that in practice old rights ought to be maintained. Mirabeau, with his usual sagacity, saw that international complications might, on this ground, be adjourned, if not altogether avoided; and it was on his motion that the Constituent Assembly resolved to uphold the sovereignty of France in Alsace, and the application of all its decrees to that province, but at the same time requested the King to arrange the amount of indemnity to be paid to the Princes of the Empire as compensation for the rights of which they were thus deprived. These princes, however, with but very few exceptions, refused absolutely to accept any monetary compensation, and appealed to the Diet of the Empire. It was on this question, therefore, that foreign intervention most seriously threatened France at the end of 1790, in spite of the diplomatic knowledge and skill of two of her leading statesmen, Mirabeau and Merlin of Douai.

While Mirabeau was doing his best to keep France from the disturbance, and even disasters, which a foreign war would cause in the midst of her new development, the Queen cast all her hopes for the restoration of the power of the French monarchy on the armed help of foreign states. Louis XVI. in a half-hearted fashion was opposed to foreign interference, but his younger brother, the Comte d’Artois, and the French émigrés, who had established themselves on the borders of France, declared that the King was not in his right senses, and that he was forced to yield to the measures of the Constituent Assembly against his will. They felt no patriotic misgivings, and loudly invoked the assistance of all monarchs in the cause of monarchy and the feudal system. The ruler on whom the Queen chiefly relied, and to whom she appealed most fervently, the monarch to whom the émigrés looked with most confidence, was Leopold, the brother and successor of Joseph II. He held the key of the position; he was the sovereign especially feared by the leaders of the Constituent Assembly, and as Emperor and as brother of Marie Antoinette he was expected by the royalists to intervene in the affairs of France.

CHAPTER III
1790–1792

The Emperor Leopold—His Internal Policy—The Policy of Prussia—Leopold’s Foreign Policy—Conference of Reichenbach—Leopold and the Turks—Treaty of Sistova—Leopold crowned Emperor—Leopold and Hungary—State of Parties in Belgium—Their Internal Dissensions—Congress at the Hague—Leopold reconquers Belgium—War between Russia and Sweden—Treaty of Verela—War between Russia and the Turks—Capture of Ismail—Treaty of Jassy—Position of Leopold—The State of France—Mirabeau’s advice—Death of Mirabeau—The Flight to Varennes—Its Results: in France—The Massacre of 17th July 1791—Revision of the Constitution—Its Results: in Europe—Manifesto of Padua—Declaration of Pilnitz—Completion of the French Constitution of 1791—The Polish Constitution of 1791—The Legislative Assembly in France—The Girondins—Approach of War between France and Austria—Causes of the War—Attitude of Europe—Death of the Emperor Leopold—Murder of Gustavus ii. of Sweden—Policy of Dumouriez—War declared by France against Austria—Invasion of the Tuileries, 20th June 1792—Francis ii. crowned Emperor—Invasion of France by Prussia and Austria—Insurrection of 10th August 1792—Suspension of Louis xvi.—Desertion of Lafayette—The Massacres of September in the prisons—Battle of Valmy—Meeting of the National Convention—The Girondins and the Mountain—Conquest of Savoy, Nice, and Mayence—Battle of Jemmappes—Conquest of Belgium—Execution of Louis xvi.—War declared against Spain, Holland, England and the Empire—Catherine invades Poland—Overthrow of the Polish Constitution—Second Partition of Poland—Contrast between the resistance of France and Poland.

The Emperor Leopold.

The successor of Joseph II., the Emperor Leopold, was, except perhaps Catherine of Russia, the ablest monarch of his time. He had had a long experience in the art of government, for he had succeeded to the sovereignty of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany in 1765, on the death of his father, the Emperor Francis of Lorraine. While his brother Joseph was kept until 1780 by Maria Theresa in leading-strings as far as the actual administration of the Hapsburg dominions was concerned, and was only able to exert his authority as Emperor, Leopold had from his boyhood been an absolute and irresponsible sovereign, and had imbibed from his education an Italian knowledge of statecraft. During his long reign in Tuscany he showed the finest qualities of a benevolent despot in his measures for increasing the material comforts of his people, combined with tact and diplomatic subtlety. His reforms were as sweeping as those of Joseph, but were so managed as not to set his dominions in a flame. With the help of Scipio de Ricci, Bishop of Pistoia, he freed the people of Tuscany from the heavy burden of an excessive number of ecclesiastics; he reorganised the internal administration, and especially the judicial system; and he showed such intelligence in grasping and partially applying the new principles of political economy as to be called ‘the physiocratic prince.’ He had been Grand Duke of Tuscany for twenty-five years, and when he succeeded his elder brother Joseph as King of Hungary and Bohemia in February 1790, he had earned the reputation of a singularly wise and prudent statesman, and of one who, if it could be done, might be expected to restore the power of the House of Austria. He abandoned the Grand Duchy of Tuscany to his second son Ferdinand, and at once applied himself to the difficult task bequeathed to him by Joseph II.

Policy of Leopold.

Leopold found the power of Austria seriously affected by dangers from within and dangers from without. He at once undid much of Joseph’s work. He recognised the difference between consolidating and unifying a nation, which was essentially one, and a congeries of nations speaking different languages, belonging to different races, and geographically widely separated. In Tuscany he had accomplished a great work in abolishing the local franchises of the cities and building up a Tuscan state, but he understood that such a work was impossible in the divided hereditary dominions of the House of Hapsburg, and that the Emperor Joseph had been attempting a hopeless task. Leopold’s first step was, therefore, to restore the former state of things in such parts of his dominions as were not in open insurrection. In Austria proper, in Bohemia, in the Milanese, and in the Tyrol, the concessions of Leopold were received with demonstrations of popular gratitude. He abolished the new system of taxation and the unpopular seminaries; he recognised the separate administrations of provinces which were essentially diverse; he gave up futile attempts at unification. But, at the same time, he maintained the edict of religious toleration, the most noble of Joseph’s reforms, and introduced many slight but appreciable improvements in the local institutions which he restored. Having thus assured the fidelity of an important body of his subjects, he prepared to deal with the declared rebels in Belgium and the unconcealed opposition in Hungary. It was here that Leopold suffered most from the foreign policy of Maria Theresa and Joseph, for it was indisputable that the prevalent discontent and insurrection in Belgium and Hungary was fostered by the Triple Alliance, and especially by Prussia. He had a serious war with the Turks on his hands; his ally, Catherine of Russia, was too much occupied with her wars with the Swedes and Turks and with the affairs of Poland, to come to his help; France, excited by her internal dissensions, and with the Assembly indisposed to the maintenance of the Treaty of 1756, might almost be reckoned an enemy; the Empire had been roused to distrust by the policy of Joseph, and the Triple Alliance was openly hostile. Under these circumstances Prussia appeared at once the chief power on the Continent and the principal enemy of Austria, and it was with Prussia that Leopold first resolved to deal.

The Policy of Prussia.

The events of the year 1789 had greatly improved the position of Prussia on the Continent. The pretensions of Joseph to Bavaria had made Frederick William II., as it had made Frederick the Great, the real leader of the Princes of the Empire, and the Triple Alliance had done more to improve and strengthen his position in Europe. The classic policy of Prussia was consistent opposition to Austria, and Hertzberg, the Prussian minister, in pursuance of this policy, had made use of all Joseph’s mistakes to lower the power of the House of Hapsburg. He felt it necessary, indeed, to disavow a treaty with the Turks, which the too zealous Prussian envoy had signed in January 1790, but he was eager to make use of the difficulties of Russia and Austria caused by the Turkish war to forward Prussia’s designs on Poland. His main aim was to obtain the cession of the important Polish cities of Thorn and Dantzic, which would give Prussia complete control of the great river Vistula. The ablest Prussian diplomatist, Lucchesini, was sent to Warsaw, and on 29th March 1790 he signed a treaty of friendship and union with the Poles, by which Poland was to cede Thorn and Dantzic to Prussia in return for the retrocession of part of Austrian Galicia, which had fallen to Austria at the first partition, while Prussia promised to guarantee the territory and constitution of Poland, and to send an army of 18,000 men to the help of the Poles if they were attacked.

This treaty, shameless even in its epoch for its desertion of allies, breach of former engagements and absence of good faith, was highly approved by Frederick William II. and Hertzberg. They would not have dared to conclude it but for the seeming weakness of Russia and Austria, the partners in the former partition. Russia was hampered by the Swedish and Turkish wars, and the discontent of the ceded provinces of Poland. Austria was in a still more desperate condition. With the Turkish war still unconcluded, with open insurrection in Belgium, and disaffection in Hungary, unpopular in the Empire, and deprived of the alliance of France by the unconcealed dislike of the Assembly to the Treaty of 1756, it seemed as if the House of Hapsburg must now give way entirely to the House of Hohenzollern. Of the active encouragement given to the Turks, the Belgians, the Hungarians, and the Princes of the Empire against Austria by Prussia, mention has been made. Not less skilful was the conduct of the Prussian ambassador at Paris, Goltz, who intrigued with the more extreme leaders in the Assembly, and especially Pétion,[7] against Austria, and in particular did all in his power to increase the growing unpopularity of Marie Antoinette and to insist that she was a traitor to France.

The Policy of Leopold.

Had a less able statesman than Leopold been the successor of Joseph, the schemes of Prussia might have been crowned with success. But he had not ruled in the native city of Machiavelli for a quarter of a century for nothing; and he set to work to checkmate the designs of Hertzberg and Frederick William II. His wise measures of conciliation speedily rallied the heart of the hereditary dominions to him; and he determined to use diplomacy to establish his position in Europe before he dealt with Belgium and Hungary. He quickly perceived that Prussia’s real strength lay in the support of the Triple Alliance; her financial situation was such that she dared not undertake a serious war without the active countenance of England and Holland. He knew that it was worse than hopeless to rely upon France, and therefore at once applied to England. He protested that he did not share his brother’s attachment for Russia, or his schemes for the division of the Ottoman provinces; and he further hinted that he would abandon all attempt to reconquer Belgium and surrender it to France unless he received some assistance. Pitt felt the weight of these considerations; he did not care much about what happened to Poland, but he cared a great deal that the French should not occupy Belgium. When, therefore, the King of Prussia mobilised a powerful army in Silesia, and demanded through Hertzberg that Austria should on the one hand make an armistice with the Turks, and on the other restore Galicia to Poland, Leopold, trusting that he had broken the harmony of the Triple Alliance, made no elaborate warlike preparations, but demanded a conference.

The Conference of Reichenbach. June 1790.

The King of Hungary and Bohemia thoroughly understood the character of the Prussian king and the intrigues of his courtiers and ministers; he knew that Hertzberg was the real enemy of Austria, and that Frederick William was unstable and easily persuaded. He felt that his own strength lay in diplomacy, not war. On 26th June the two Austrian envoys, Reuss and Spielmann, arrived at the headquarters of the Prussian army in Silesia at Reichenbach, and demanded a conference. Rather to the disgust of the Prussians, their allies of the Triple Alliance insisted on being present, and a regular congress was held, at which Hertzberg and Lucchesini represented Prussia, Reuss and Spielmann, Austria, Ewart, England, Reden, Holland, and Jablonowski, the Poles. Even the Hungarian malcontents and the Belgian rebels, relying on the promises of Frederick William, ventured to send envoys. The conclusions of the congress justified Leopold’s diplomatic skill. When Hertzberg laid the Prussian demands in full before the assembled envoys, to his surprise Jablonowski declared that the Poles would never cede Thorn and Dantzic, while the representatives of England and Holland not only advocated the maintenance of the status quo, but refused the co-operation of their governments in Prussia’s schemes for aggrandisement. The policy of Hertzberg and Kaunitz, of perpetuating the rivalry of Prussia and Austria, had failed. Leopold was far too acute to leave these matters to ministers. He placed himself in direct communication with the King of Prussia and his personal favourites, Lucchesini and Bischofswerder; he argued that the interests of the two great German states both with regard to Poland and France were identical, and on 27th July 1790 the Convention of Reichenbach was signed, by which Austria promised at once to make an armistice with the Turks, and eventually to conclude peace with them under the mediation of the Triple Alliance, while, on the other hand, the powers of the Triple Alliance guaranteed the restoration of the Austrian authority in Belgium. It was more privately arranged that Prussia should withdraw from encouraging discontent in Hungary and Belgium, and support Leopold’s candidature for the Imperial throne. This great diplomatic victory did more than merely check the active enmity of Prussia; it established the ascendency of Leopold over the weak mind of Frederick William; and it eventually, in May 1791, brought about, not indeed his actual dismissal from office, but the removal of Hertzberg, the sworn foe of Austria, from the charge of the foreign policy of Prussia.

Leopold and the Turks.

The Treaty of Sistova. 4th Aug. 1791.

The first actual consequence of the Convention of Reichenbach was the conclusion of an armistice between Austria and the Turks. The war had never been looked on with favour by Leopold, who regarded Joseph’s infatuation for the grandiose schemes of Catherine of Russia as absurd, and the dismemberment of Turkey as impracticable, and at the present time undesirable. He had not attempted to press matters against the Turks, and had withdrawn many of his best troops under Loudon from the seat of war to Bohemia to strengthen his position at Reichenbach. The Prince of Coburg, who succeeded Loudon, aided by an earthquake, took Orsova, and laid siege to Giurgevo, but he was defeated in his camp after a severe battle on 8th July 1790. This defeat was only partially compensated by a victory won by Clerfayt, and by the capture of Zettin by General de Vins on 20th July. Under these circumstances Leopold was not sorry to conclude an armistice for nine months at Giurgevo on 19th September. Shortly afterwards a congress of plenipotentiaries from Austria, Turkey, and the mediating powers met, as had been arranged at Reichenbach, at Sistova. The negotiations lasted for many months; Leopold insisted on the cession by Turkey of Old Orsova and a district in Croatia, which would make the Danube and the Unna the boundary between Austria and Turkey; Prussia at first strongly protested against any cession to Austria; the congress even for a time broke up; and it was not until Leopold adroitly got Lucchesini, the Prussian envoy, on his side, that the important Treaty of Sistova upon the terms desired by Leopold was concluded on 4th August 1791.

Leopold crowned Emperor. 9th Oct. 1790.

By this treaty the hereditary dominions of the House of Hapsburg were relieved from the danger of foreign war; the next result which Leopold drew from the Convention of Reichenbach was the re-establishment of the Austrian ascendency in Germany. Assured of the support of Prussia, Leopold travelled to the Rhine. On 30th September 1790 he was unanimously elected King of the Romans; on 4th October he solemnly entered Frankfort, and on 9th October he was crowned Emperor. But it was not enough for him to be crowned Emperor; he had to destroy the bad effect of his brother Joseph’s attitude towards the Empire; he had to become the real as well as the nominal head and leader of the German princes, and to win back the advantages which Prussia had secured by forming the League of Princes. The opportunity was afforded to him by the disinclination of the German princes, who owned territories in Alsace, Lorraine, and Franche Comté, to accept the compensation offered to them by the French Constituent Assembly. Their protests took the shape of a clause in the ‘capitulation’ laid before him and accepted by him on his election as Emperor by which he promised to intervene on behalf of the Empire for the preservation of the rights, sanctioned by the Treaty of Westphalia, of the princes, whose interests were affected. Leopold thus seized this opportunity to pose as the head of the German Empire, and on 14th December 1790 he wrote a very strong letter to Louis XVI., in which he said: ‘The territories in question have not been transferred to the kingdom of France; they are subject to the supremacy of the Emperor and the Empire: no member of the Empire has the right to transfer that supremacy to a foreign nation. It follows, therefore, that the decrees of the Assembly are null and void so far as concerns the Empire and its members, and that everything ought to be replaced on the ancient footing.’[8]

Leopold and Hungary.

Leopold crowned King of Hungary. 15th Nov. 1790.

After being crowned Emperor at Frankfort, Leopold returned to Vienna and proceeded to establish his power firmly in Hungary. The discontent aroused in the most backward part of his dominions by the Emperor Joseph’s measures had not been appeased by that monarch’s wholesale retractation, nor even by the return of the Crown of St. Stephen. The Hungarian nobles regarded Joseph’s retractation as a sign of weakness, and, encouraged by the intrigues of Prussia and the difficulties in which Leopold was involved by the war with the Turks, resolved to obtain more sweeping concessions. The example of France exerted an influence even in Hungary, and the following sentences from a memorial,[9] presented to Leopold by the people of Pesth, might have been written by a Parisian popular society: ‘From the rights of nations and of man, and from that social compact whence States arose, it is incontestable that sovereignty originates from the people. This axiom our parent Nature has impressed on the hearts of all; it is one of those which a just prince (and such we trust Your Majesty will ever be) cannot dispute; it is one of those inalienable, imprescriptible rights which the people cannot forfeit by neglect or disuse. Our constitution places the sovereignty jointly in the king and people, in such a manner that the remedies necessary to be applied according to the ends of social life for the security of persons and property, are in the power of the people. We are sure, therefore, that at the meeting of the ensuing Diet, Your Majesty will not confine yourself to the objects mentioned in your rescript; but will also restore our freedom to us, in like manner as to the Belgians, who have conquered theirs with the sword. It would be an example big with danger to teach the world that a people can only protect or regain their liberties by the sword, and not by obedience.’ The Hungarian Diet, which Leopold had summoned for the ceremony of his coronation, and to which the people of Pesth alluded in this remarkable address, was largely attended. The Hungarian nobility regarded its convocation as a further sign of weakness, for none had been held since the accession of Maria Theresa, and prepared an inaugural act or compact, which would have reduced the kings of Hungary to a similar position to that occupied by the kings of Poland. Full of confidence in themselves they even went so far as to send envoys, as has been mentioned, to the Congress of Reichenbach. Leopold, however, had no intention of yielding to these demands; his only desire was to gain time until he had secured his position by diplomacy. Meanwhile he tried to stir up opposition in Hungary itself, by encouraging the other nationalities in the kingdom, such as the inhabitants of Croatia and the Banat. But when the Congress of Reichenbach was over, the armistice of Giurgevo concluded, and his coronation as Emperor performed, Leopold proceeded to deal with the Hungarians. He first ordered the army of 60,000 men, which he had concentrated in Bohemia to support his attitude against the Prussians, to Pesth, and then directed the Diet to remove to Presburg for his coronation as King of Hungary. He then declared that nothing would induce him to accept the proposed new constitution, or to consent to an infringement of the Edict of Toleration, and that he would only consent to the terms of the inaugural acts of his grandfather, Charles VI., and his mother, Maria Theresa. The Hungarian nobles, overcome by his firmness and the presence of his troops, yielded; the Emperor appointed his fourth son, the Archduke Leopold, to be Palatine of Hungary in the place of the late Prince Esterhazy; and it was from him that he received the Crown of St. Stephen on 15th November, on the terms he had stipulated.

Parties in Belgium.

Having gained this victory by his firmness, Leopold proceeded to win popularity by a timely concession, and proposed a law, obliging every future king to be crowned within six months of his accession. This concession was received with the wildest enthusiasm, as it obviated the possibility of conduct resembling that of Joseph II.; the Diet granted the Emperor a gift of 225,000 florins instead of the usual 100,000 florins; and the disaffected attitude of the nobility was changed for one of hearty admiration and gratitude. The bourgeois of Pesth and their declarations were disavowed; the echo of the French Revolution, which had been heard there, was quickly stifled; and the Hungarian nobility, well contented with Leopold, declined to encourage the popular aspirations. The difficulties which the Emperor Leopold encountered in Hungary were trifling to those which faced him in Belgium. But in this quarter time had worked for the House of Hapsburg, and when the Congress of Plenipotentiaries, arranged at the Congress of Reichenbach, met at the Hague in October 1790, the situation had entirely changed. The victory of the Belgian rebels in 1789 had been followed by internal dissensions, which appeared directly the new Constitution was proclaimed. The first difference was between the Van der Nootists, or Statists, as they termed themselves, and the Vonckists. The latter, inspired by the success of the French Revolution, advocated a thoroughly democratic constitution, and the organisation of a new elective system of local administration, to the great disgust of the Statists, who desired simply the restoration of the old order of things, but with the central government controlled by elected assembly instead of being in the hands of the House of Hapsburg. Curiously enough popular feeling ran in a direction very different from that followed in France. Influenced by the priests, the Belgian people, and more especially the mob of Brussels, were convinced that the Vonckists were atheists; the democrats were attacked in the streets, maltreated and imprisoned; the bourgeois National Guards refused to protect them; they were proscribed by Van der Noot and the party in power; and after many riots and disturbances Vonck fled to France in April 1790. These events greatly weakened the Belgian Republic, for the democratic party, which had been energetic in the revolution, numbered in its ranks many of the ablest and most enlightened men in the country. But even more serious was the result abroad, for the National Assembly of France and Lafayette were surprised and disgusted at the persecution of the democrats, and the sympathy of the French people was entirely alienated from the Belgian leaders. Still more striking in its effect was the conduct of the Van der Nootists towards the gallant officer, Van der Mersch, who had commanded the patriot troops in the invasion of October 1789. Not satisfied with superseding him by the Prussian general, Schönfeld, the Van der Nootists had him arrested on a charge of disorganising the Belgian army and imprisoned at Antwerp, to the great wrath of the people of Flanders, of which province Van der Mersch was a native. The conquering party was further divided. The nobility and clergy, headed by the Duc d’Aremberg, were jealous of the ascendency assumed by Van der Noot, and of the continued omnipotence of the Assembly at Brussels. Under these circumstances it was a significant fact that the Austrian troops in Luxembourg under the command of Marshal Bender were able with the help of the people themselves to occupy the province of Limburg.

Congress at the Hague. Oct. 1790.

Leopold reconquers Belgium.

The Austrians at Liége.

In October 1790 the Congress, which had been resolved on at Reichenbach, met at the Hague. The Austrian plenipotentiary was the Comte de Mercy-Argenteau, the most accomplished Austrian diplomatist and ambassador at Paris, and the representatives of England, Prussia, and Holland were Lord Auckland, Count Keller, and the Grand Pensionary Van der Spiegel. Leopold now reaped the advantages of his skilful diplomacy at Reichenbach. England and Holland understood that the new Emperor was a very different man from his predecessor, and Prussia dared not act without them. As he had promised, Leopold solemnly announced his intention to restore all the charters, laws, and arrangements, which had existed in Belgium in the time of his mother, Maria Theresa, under the guarantee of the three powers, and further promised a general amnesty if his authority was recognised by 21st November. The Belgian States-General made no reply to Leopold, and the Emperor proceeded to concentrate 45,000 men under Bender in Luxembourg. Then the Belgian leaders applied to the Congress at the Hague for a prolongation of the armistice and the restoration of the state of government existing in the time of Charles VI. and not in that of Maria Theresa. These demands were supported by the representatives of the Triple Alliance, but rejected by the Austrian ambassador. On 21st November the Belgian States-General elected the Archduke Charles, the third son of the Emperor, to be hereditary Grand Duke, but the time had gone by for compromises, and on the following day Bender entered Belgium. The experiences of a year of revolution made the Belgian people not unwilling to return under the sway of Austria; the cities surrendered without a blow, and on 2d December 1790 Brussels capitulated. Van der Noot fled with his chief friends, and Belgium was won back by Leopold as easily as it had been lost by Joseph. On 8th December the Comte de Mercy-Argenteau assented to the restoration of the liberties recognised in the inaugural act of Charles VI., but Leopold disavowed his ambassador and insisted on the authority possessed by Maria Theresa at the close of her reign. Under these circumstances the mediating powers refused their guarantee, a refusal which rather gratified the Emperor than otherwise, as it freed him from the fear of foreign interference. Not only in Belgium itself, but in the neighbouring bishopric of Liége also, Leopold established Austrian ascendency. The princes of the Circle of the Empire, which adjoined, were dissatisfied with the conduct of Prussia and General Schlieffen, and appealed to the Emperor. He was only too glad to assert his authority; Schlieffen evacuated the territory; and on 13th January 1791 it was occupied by an Austrian force, which re-established the Prince-bishop in all his former authority.

Russia and Sweden.

Treaty of Verela. Aug. 14th 1790.

The entire reversal of Joseph’s policy by Leopold, the arrangements made at Reichenbach, and the friendly attitude of the new Emperor towards the powers forming the Triple Alliance, deprived Russia of her only ally at a time when the Empress had on her hands two exhausting wars with Sweden and Turkey. The former was the most serious. Gustavus III., freed from the dangers of a Danish invasion, and by his coup d’état from the formidable plots of his nobility, rejoined his army in Finland and prepared to carry on the war vigorously by land and sea. His army was too small to effect much in spite of his near approach to St. Petersburg, and his chief confidence was in his fleet. This fleet was soon blockaded in the Gulf of Vyborg by the Russian admiral, the Prince of Nassau-Siegen, one of the most famous soldiers of fortune of the century; an attempt it made to break out on 24th June 1790 was repulsed, and the Russians even hoped to force it to capitulate. But, to their surprise, the Swedes broke the blockade on the 3d July, though with a loss of 5000 men, and on 9th July won a great naval victory in Svenska Sound, in which the Russians lost 30 ships, 600 guns and 6000 men. But this victory led to no corresponding diplomatic result. Catherine, defeated though she was, made overtures in no humiliated spirit to the King of Sweden, and proposed to him that, instead of quarrelling with his neighbours, he should turn his attention to the state of affairs in France. The chivalrous and romantic king was not unwilling to listen to her suggestions; he had, during a visit to Paris, been much impressed by Marie Antoinette, and was full of pity at the situation of the royal family of France and of disgust at the progress of the Revolution. He felt, too, that the war with Russia was not popular among his people, and on 14th August 1790 he signed a treaty of peace at Verela, by which the status quo ante bellum between Russia and Sweden was restored without any compensation in money or territory being obtained by the victorious Swedes.

Capture of Ismail. 20th Dec. 1790.

Treaty of Jassy. 9th Jan. 1792.

While resisting the Swedes, Catherine made her chief effort against the Turks. In this quarter the defection of Leopold and the Armistice of Giurgevo seriously compromised her position. The war had resolved itself into the siege of the strong city of Ismail, where the Turks defended themselves with the utmost tenacity. The Russian attacks were foiled again and again, and Potemkin resigned the conduct of the siege in despair. His place was taken by Suvórov, whose brilliant victory on the Rymnik in 1789 had marked him as the greatest Russian general of his time. His valour and constancy equalled those qualities in the Turks; and Ismail was stormed on 20th December 1790, after a scene of carnage which cost the lives of 10,000 Russians and 30,000 Turks. In the following year the Russians pressed onwards towards Constantinople, and on 9th July 1791 the Russian General Repnin, under whom served Suvórov and Kutuzov, defeated the Grand Vizier at Matchin. But the Empress Catherine was not inclined to follow up these military advantages. The policy of Leopold had isolated her; the Treaty of Sistova had deprived her of an auxiliary army against the Turks; the state of affairs in Poland demanded her most serious attention; and she had to observe the action of Europe on the French Revolution and of the French Revolution on Europe, in the hope of deriving some advantage for Russia from the complications. She, therefore, signed a treaty of peace with the Turks at Jassy on 9th January 1792, by which Russia retained only Oczakoff and the coast-line between the mouths of the Bug and the Dniester. By making this peace, Catherine only deferred the prosecution of the schemes of Russia against the Ottoman Empire, and certain clauses with regard to the Danubian Principalities, affording a pretext for future wars, were skilfully included in the Treaty of Jassy.

Position of Leopold.

The success of the policy of the Emperor Leopold entirely altered the situation of the European states and their attitude towards each other. He was in 1791 not only master in his own dominions, but the recognised representative of the Empire, in fact as well as in name. He had broken down the combination against Austria and the solidarity of the Triple Alliance. England was far more favourably inclined to him than she had ever been to Joseph II.; Frederick William II. of Prussia was his ally not his enemy. He was, therefore, able in 1791 to turn his thoughts to the situation of France, and to see what advantages could be drawn from the position of affairs there for the benefit of Austria. The political effacement of France in foreign affairs was due to the assumption of all real authority by the Constituent Assembly, while leaving the responsibility to the King’s ministers, and Leopold did not doubt that the result of an entire victory of the popular party would be a recurrence to the classical policy of opposition to Austria and the rupture of the Treaty of 1756. It was to his interest to prevent this, and he had therefore political, as well as personal, ends to secure in endeavouring to restore the authority of the King of France. The capture of the Bastille and the transference of the royal family to Paris were great events in the history of France, but they only affected Leopold as weakening the authority of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette, the faithful allies of Austria. The behaviour of the Constituent Assembly gave him pretexts for interfering in France, in spite of the diplomatic ability of Mirabeau, and he was earnestly besought by the French émigrés, or opponents of the new state of things in France, who had gone into voluntary exile with the King’s younger brother, the Comte d’Artois, at their head, to intervene on behalf of the French monarchy.

The state of France, 1791.

The conduct of the Constituent Assembly in disorganising every branch of the executive in France had its natural effect by the commencement of 1791. The army, in spite of the effort of General Bouillé to restore discipline by making an example of some Swiss mutineers at Nancy in 1790, was rendered inefficient by the disaffection of the soldiers and the exaggerated royalism of most of the officers; the navy was in a still worse condition; the Civil Constitution of the Clergy had caused a schism, which disturbed the minds of men in all parts of France, and created an army of opponents to the work of the Assembly, who had peculiar influence over the rural communities; the issue of assignats on the security of the confiscated domains of the Church had inflated the currency, and, while giving an appearance of fictitious prosperity, had really given a feeling of insecurity to all trade and commerce; the old internal administrations of the provinces had been replaced by the new administrations of the departments, which were filled by inexperienced men, utterly unable to cope with the difficulties of a time of unrest and revolution. The practical disorganisation of the executive was meanwhile being consecrated by the measures of the Constituent Assembly, which, in the Constitution it was drawing up, in its fear of the power of the monarchy, so hampered the authority of the executive as to destroy the necessary foundations of good government.

Death of Mirabeau.

In its ardour for the Rights of Man and the principle of election, the Constituent Assembly forgot the need for enforcing the authority of the law, and the necessity for providing a strong arm to carry it into effect. Mirabeau had clearly perceived that France was drifting into a state of anarchy. In his secret notes for the Court he insisted on the importance of restoring its proper power to the executive, and he advised the King to leave Paris and call the partisans of order to his side. Civil war, he contended, was preferable to anarchy, cloaked by fine words; it would openly divide France into the adherents of order and of disorder, and result in the maintenance of the popular rights sanctioned by the royal power. The King was to acknowledge the right of the people to legislate, and tax themselves through their representatives, but was to point out the importance of maintaining a strong government to secure the happiness of the governed. Against foreign war, however, Mirabeau strongly protested; foreign interference would rouse the spirit of national patriotism, and if the King was suspected of favouring the foreigners, it would result in the overthrow of the monarchy, and in a long struggle before the country could agree on a new form of government. However, on 2d April 1791, Mirabeau died, and France was deprived of its most sagacious, if not its only, statesman. In truth, Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette had no wish to take Mirabeau’s advice; the King regarded civil war as a horrible calamity, and to be shunned in every way and at any sacrifice; the Queen longed for the interference of her brother, the Emperor, and begged him to intervene to restore the royal authority. The King’s religious convictions were wounded by the Civil Constitution of the Clergy; the Queen was roused to wrath by the feeling that she was a prisoner, by daily insults in the press, and by the degradation of the power of the monarchy. On 18th April 1791 the royal prisoners were prevented by the Parisians from going to Saint-Cloud for Easter, and on 18th May the Emperor Leopold issued a circular to all crowned heads calling attention to the position of the King of France in his capital. On 20th May he had an interview with the Comte de Durfort, a secret emissary from the Tuileries, at Mantua, and charged him to tell the King and Queen of France that ‘he was going to concern himself with their affairs, not in words, but in acts.’

The Flight to Varennes. 21st June 1791.

The action of the Parisian mob on 18th April caused Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette to resolve to escape secretly from Paris, since they were obviously prisoners and could not leave openly. They determined, contrary to the advice so often given by Mirabeau, and contrary also to the wishes of the Emperor and of his able representative at the Hague, the Comte de Mercy-Argenteau, who knew France better than any living diplomatist, to fly towards the frontier. Leopold, under the pretext of supporting his authority in Belgium and Luxembourg, and that of his allies, the Elector-Archbishop of Trèves and the Bishop of Liége, massed his troops upon the frontier in readiness to succour or assist, and Bouillé, who commanded at Metz, made preparations to have the part of his forces on which he could rely ready to receive the fugitive monarch. On 20th June 1791 the royal family left Paris by night, after the King had drawn up a declaration protesting against the whole of the measures of the Constituent Assembly, and disavowing them. The flight, from a combination of circumstances, ended in the royal family being stopped at Varennes, and being brought back to Paris in custody. It had the most momentous results upon the history of the French Revolution, which are sometimes disregarded in the recollection of the romantic circumstances attending it.

Results of the Flight to Varennes.

The Massacre of 17th July in Paris.

The primary result of the flight to Varennes was the sudden comprehension by France that Louis XVI. was an unwilling collaborator in the work of reconstituting the French government on a new basis. Hitherto the people, and even the leaders of the Constituent Assembly, had believed in his acquiescence, if not in his hearty assistance. But the declaration, left behind on the occasion of his flight, proved the contrary. The statesmen of the Constituent Assembly, including the makers of the new Constitution, such as Le Chapelier and Thouret, and the triumvirate of Duport, Barnave, and Lameth, who, after Mirabeau’s death, were the undisputed leaders of the majority, saw they had gone too far, and that in their desire to weaken the royal authority, they had seriously weakened the executive, and had made the King’s position intolerable. They therefore threw the blame of the flight to Varennes on the subordinates in the scheme, ignored the King’s declaration, and acted on the supposition that he was misled by bad advisers. This attitude not being wholly approved by the Jacobin Club, which, through its affiliated clubs in the provinces, exercised the most powerful sway in the formation of public opinion, the believers in the royal authority seceded and formed the Constitutional Club, or Club of 1789, which temporarily weakened the power of the Jacobins in Paris. But this secession was entirely sanctioned by the bourgeois classes both in Paris and throughout France, who had the strongest interest in the maintenance of order, and who sent in numerous declarations of their adhesion to the cause of monarchy. Moreover, their chief representatives in arms, the National Guard of Paris, under the command of Lafayette, had soon an opportunity of giving practical proof of this loyal disposition. The Cordeliers Club, which was chiefly influenced by Danton, a lawyer of Paris, who had Mirabeau’s gift of seeing things as they really were, felt it impossible to hush things up. They understood the King’s declaration to mean a declaration of war against the new Constitution; his flight to Varennes they rightly interpreted to show that he was trusting to the intervention of foreign powers to re-establish him in his former position; and they resolved to draw up a petition for his dethronement. This petition was largely the work of Danton and of Brissot, a pamphleteer and journalist, who had been imprisoned in the Bastille, and had imbibed republican notions in America, and a large crowd assembled to sign it on the Champ de Mars. Lafayette determined to disperse this crowd, and the National Guard, under his command, fired on the people, killing several persons. This vigorous measure, which was intended to show the power of the party of order, was followed by vigorous steps against the party for dethronement.

Revision of the Constitution.

The leaders of the Cordeliers were proscribed. Danton and Marat fled to England, and the party of order seemed triumphant. A revision of the Constitution was undertaken, and various reactionary clauses, specially directed against the press, the popular clubs or societies, and the rights of assembly and of petition, were inserted. But this new attitude of the Constituent Assembly had but a slight effect upon France, for the king’s flight had caused the people in general to believe that he was the enemy of their new-born liberties, and a traitor in league with foreign powers to overthrow them.

Effects of the Flight to Varennes.

Manifesto of Padua. 6th July 1791.

The flight to Varennes proved to the people of France, as well as to the monarchs and statesmen of Europe, that Louis XVI. was a prisoner in Paris, and an enemy to the new settlement of the government, as laid down by the Constitution in course of preparation. The Emperor Leopold, as brother of Marie Antoinette, as Holy Roman Emperor and supporter of dynastic legitimacy, as the leading monarch of Europe, decided to intervene. On 6th July 1791 he issued the Manifesto of Padua, in which he invited the sovereigns of Europe to join him in declaring the cause of the King of France to be their own, in exacting that he should be freed from all popular restraint, and in refusing to recognise any constitutional laws as legitimately established in France, except such as might be sanctioned by the King acting in perfect freedom. The English Government paid little or no attention to these requests of Leopold, but the Empress Catherine, and the Kings of Prussia, Spain, and Sweden, for different reasons and in different degrees, heartily accepted Leopold’s views, and armed intervention to carry them into effect was suggested. But Leopold had no desire for war. His policy since his accession had been distinctly in favour of peace. He was a diplomatist, not a soldier, and he desired to frighten France by threats, rather than to fight France for the liberty of Louis XVI. and his family.

Declaration of Pilnitz, 27th Aug. 1791.

Completion of the Constitution.

The sequel to the Manifesto of Padua was a conference at Pilnitz between the Emperor Leopold and King Frederick William II. of Prussia, accompanied by their ministers, in August 1791. At this conference the King’s brothers, Monsieur, the Comte de Provence, afterwards Louis XVIII., who had escaped from France at the time of the flight to Varennes, and the Comte d’Artois, afterwards Charles X., who had fled in July 1789, at the epoch of the capture of the Bastille, were present. They had their own aims to serve. They were disgusted at the weak conduct, as they termed it, of Louis XVI. in yielding so far as he had done to the popular wishes; they desired to undo the whole effect of the Revolution and to restore the Bourbon monarchy in its ancient authority by the arms of the monarchs of Europe. But Leopold did not care about the French princes or the Bourbon monarchy. He cared rather for the safety of his sister, Marie Antoinette, and the maintenance through her of the Franco-Austrian alliance. In the Declaration of Pilnitz, which was signed by the Emperor and the King of Prussia on 27th August 1791, the two sovereigns declared that the situation of the King of France was an object of interest common to all European monarchs, and that they hoped other monarchs would use with them the most efficacious means to put the King of France in a position to lay in perfect liberty the bases of a monarchical government, suited alike to the rights of sovereigns and the happiness of the French nation. Provided that other powers would co-operate with them they were willing to act promptly, and had therefore placed their armies on foot. These threats exasperated but did not terrify the French people. Leopold had no intention of entering upon hostilities, and found a loophole by which to escape from declaring war in the acceptance by Louis XVI. of the completed Constitution on 21st September 1791. He then solemnly withdrew his pretensions to interfere in the internal affairs of France.

The Polish Constitution. 3d May 1791.

While the first Constitution of France, sanctioning the representative principle and the rights of the people, was being slowly built up in the midst of troubles and intrigues in Paris, a not less remarkable constitution was promulgated in Poland, manifesting the same ideas. The partition of Poland in 1773 had proved to all patriotic Poles that their independence as a nation was in the utmost peril. A serious effort was therefore made to organise the country, and to place the government on a settled and logical basis. The army was made national instead of feudal; an attempt was made to establish a national system of finance, and a scheme of national education was propounded and partly carried into effect. But these measures were but steps in the work of making Poland a nation, instead of a loose confederation of nobles; the final decision was taken in 1788, when the Polish Diet elected a Committee to draw up a new Constitution, raised the national army to 60,000 men, and decreed regular taxes in order to replenish the national treasury. This consciousness of nationality enabled Stanislas Poniatowski, King of Poland, to negotiate as an independent and powerful sovereign with Prussia in 1789, and to send his envoys to Reichenbach in 1790 to act with the envoys of the other powers. The leading member of the Polish Constitutional Committee was Kollontai, a most remarkable man, and a Catholic priest, who had done good service as Rector of the University of Cracow, which he reorganised, and who had been made Vice-Grand-Chancellor of the kingdom. He was the principal author of the Polish Constitution, which was accepted by the Diet of Warsaw on 3d May 1791. This Constitution was noteworthy in what it abolished and what it created. It abolished the elective monarchy, the source of so many evils and intrigues, and declared the throne of Poland hereditary in the House of Saxony in succession to Stanislas Poniatowski, and it also abolished the liberum veto, which had enabled one member of the Diet to thwart the wishes of the majority. It created a regular government, conferring the legislative power on the King, the Senate, and an elected Chamber, and the executive power on the King, aided by six ministers responsible to the Legislature. The cities were permitted to elect their judges and deputies to the Diet; but the plague-spot of serfdom was too delicate to touch, and the Diet only declared its willingness to sanction all arrangements made between a lord and his serfs for the benefit of the latter. In some respects this Constitution compares favourably with that of France drawn up at the same time; if it does not proclaim so firmly the liberty of man, it at any rate is free from the lamentable fear of the power of the executive, which vitiated the work of the French reformers. France feared its executive after a long course of despotic monarchy; Poland felt the need of a strong executive after a long history of anarchy. Both countries, trying to be free, were affected in different ways, and with very different results, by the intervention of foreign powers.

The Legislative Assembly.

The acceptance of the completed French Constitution was the signal for the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly. It was at once succeeded by the Legislative Assembly, elected under the provisions of the new Constitution. The new Assembly consisted, owing to a self-denying ordinance passed in May 1791, on the proposition of Robespierre, forbidding the election of deputies sitting in the Constituent Assembly to its successor, of none but untried men, who had no experience of politics. They were mostly young men who had learned to talk in their local popular societies, and who at once joined the mother of such societies, the Jacobin Club at Paris. They were forbidden by a clause in the Constitution of 1791 to interfere with constitutional questions, which could only be touched by a Convention summoned for the purpose, and so could only interfere in current politics and matters of administration. In such interference they were justified by the position of powerlessness into which the executive authority, the King and his ministers, were reduced by the Constitution. The two burning questions which first came before them were, the treatment of the clergy who had not taken the oath to observe the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, and of the émigrés. Both questions gave plenty of opportunity for the display of fervid revolutionary and patriotic eloquence, for the priests, who had not taken the oath, were undisguisedly stirring up opposition to the Revolution in the provinces, and the émigrés were forming an army on the French frontier. And the Legislative Assembly was in a greater degree than either its predecessor, the Constituent, or its successor, the Convention, liable to be swayed by oratory. The deputies liked to listen to glowing words and patriotic sentiments, and were largely influenced by the speeches of three great orators, Vergniaud, Gensonné, and Guadet, who all came from Bordeaux, the capital of the department of the Gironde, and to whose supporters posterity has given the name of Girondins. But these orators were in their turn influenced by a Norman deputy, Brissot. This veteran pamphleteer was a sincere republican; he also, having long been a journalist, believed himself a master of foreign politics. He desired to bring about a war between France and Austria. He believed that such a war would either cause the King to throw in his lot heartily with the Revolution, or, what was more likely, would make him declare himself openly against it, and would thus enable the advanced democratic party to call him a traitor, and by rousing all France against him, pave the way for his overthrow and the establishment of a republic. The first step was taken to make Louis XVI. appear the opponent of the Revolution by passing a decree against the priests, who had not taken the oath, which his conscience would not permit him to sign; the second by passing a decree against the émigrés, who were led by his own brothers, and an instruction that he should ask the Emperor and the German princes on the Rhine to prevent the émigrés from forming an army, and to expel them if they did so.

Approach of War between France and the Emperor.

The question of the expediency of war with Austria was soon taken up in France, and not only the Legislative Assembly but the popular clubs busied themselves in discussing it. The Declaration of Pilnitz exasperated the whole nation, which resented dictation or interference in the internal affairs of France, and the warlike and menacing attitude of the army of émigrés, which had been formed by the Prince de Condé on the French frontier at Worms, increased the universal wrath. Louis XVI., whose ministers had been but feeble figure-heads during the Constituent Assembly, at this juncture appointed the Comte de Narbonne, a young man of distinguished ability, to be Minister for War. Narbonne grasped the situation. He saw the people wished for war, and he therefore declared that the King was as patriotic as his subjects, and was also ready for war if satisfaction were not given to France. Three large armies were formed and placed upon the frontiers under the command of Generals Rochambeau, Lückner, and Lafayette, of whom the two former were created Marshals of France. By this policy Narbonne took the wind out of the sails of Brissot and the Girondins; he hoped that if the Austrian war was successful the King would be sufficiently strengthened in popularity to regain his authority as head of the executive; while, if it failed, the nation in its extremity would turn to its legitimate sovereign and invest him with dictatorial power. The leaders of the democratic party in Paris, which had been scattered by Lafayette in July 1791, saw this equally clearly with Narbonne, and therefore opposed the war with all their might. The Jacobin Club had become their headquarters; most of the deputies who came up from the provinces joined the mother society in Paris, and it soon became more powerful than ever in creating public opinion. The effect of the secession and consequent formation of the Club of 1789 only made the Jacobins more frankly democratic, while the presence of many of its members in the Legislative Assembly strengthened the influence of the Jacobin Club. It was in the Jacobin Club during the debates on the war that the difference between what were to be the Girondin and the Mountain parties in the Convention first appeared. Brissot and the Girondin orators argued in favour of war; while Marat, Danton, and still more Robespierre, whose career in the Constituent Assembly had made him exceedingly popular, opposed it. The last-mentioned orator was indeed the chief opponent of the war; he saw through Narbonne’s schemes, and hinted that the projected war was merely a court intrigue to promote the power of the King. The political strife became personal, and Robespierre, Marat, and Danton became the sworn foes of Brissot and the Girondins.

Causes of war between France and the Emperor.

The main causes of the war were the questions of the rights of the Princes of the Empire in Alsace and of the émigrés. The defence of the former rights as rights of the Empire had been pressed upon Leopold at the time of his election as Emperor, and on 26th April 1791 the Prince of Thurn and Taxis, as Imperial Commissary, summoned the Diet to meet. It assembled, and after a long discussion a conclusum was arrived at, that the Empire maintained the Treaties of Westphalia and of the eighteenth century now violated by France, and requested the Emperor to take severe measures against the revolutionary propaganda. The Emperor Leopold, as sovereign of Austria, had withdrawn from the position he had taken up at Pilnitz, but as Emperor he was obliged to submit this conclusum of the Diet to the King of France, which he did in a strongly-worded despatch drawn up by the Chancellor Kaunitz, which was laid before the Legislative Assembly on 3d December 1791. It was as Emperor also that Leopold defended the conduct of the border princes of the Empire, notably the Elector-Archbishops of Trèves, Cologne, and Mayence, and the Bishops of Spires and Worms, in sheltering French émigrés. On 29th November 1791 the Assembly had desired the King to write to the Emperor and to these border princes protesting against the enlistment of troops by the émigrés, and the Emperor’s answer defending the conduct of the princes concerned was read to the Assembly on 14th December. The replies of Leopold were referred to the Diplomatic Committee, and on its report, the Assembly resolved on 25th January 1792 that the Emperor should be requested to explain his attitude towards France and to promise to undertake nothing against her independence in forming her own constitution and settling her own mode of government before 1st March 1792, and that an evasive or unsatisfactory reply should be considered as annulling the Treaty of 1756 and as an act of hostility. The answer to this demand, which was drafted by Kaunitz, was read to the Assembly on 1st March; it censured the course which was being taken by France, stigmatised the Revolution and accused the Jacobins of fomenting anarchy, and its first results were the dismissal of Narbonne, the impeachment of De Lessart, the Foreign Minister, and the formation of a Girondin ministry.

Death of Leopold, 1st March 1792.

In the position he had taken up the Emperor Leopold was generally supported. The Princes of the Empire, as was represented in their conclusum passed at the Diet, not only resented the interference of France with historic rights in Alsace and her dictation as to whom they should shelter, but were beginning to fear the contagion of the revolutionary conceptions of the rights of man and political liberty. Throughout the Rhine provinces the peasants had risen in partial rebellion against their lords; in all the great cities of western Germany the more enlightened bourgeois protested against their exclusion from political influence. This contagion, however, did not spread far in these early days. The Empress Catherine, the King of Prussia, and the King of Sweden, who chiefly urged Leopold to make a brave stand against the Legislative Assembly, were urged by other motives. Catherine wished to see Austria and Prussia embroiled with France so as to have her hands free to deal with the Poles, who seemed likely with their new Constitution to ward off destruction. Frederick William II. was disgusted by the disrespect shown to the principle of monarchy by the Parisians’ treatment of Louis XVI. Gustavus III. had imbibed a knightly admiration for Marie Antoinette, and felt a personal desire to relieve her from her position of humiliation. Each monarch showed his inclination characteristically. Catherine received some French émigrés, who found their way to her distant court, with kindness, and dismissed the French ambassador; Gustavus hurried to Spa to consult with the French émigrés, and proposed an immediate expedition to carry off the French court; Frederick William signed an offensive and defensive alliance with the Emperor on 2d February 1792, which saved him the trouble of personal decision, and left to the Emperor the harassing business of arranging the details of the war and of so carrying out the necessary diplomatic negotiations which preceded an open rupture, that the interference of the powers should seem justified. In the midst of his preparations the Emperor Leopold died suddenly on 1st March 1792, the very day on which his last manifesto was read to the Legislative Assembly. His death was an irreparable blow for Austria, for Germany, for France, and for Europe. In his short reign he had shown himself to be a monarch of extraordinary ability, possessing alike singular tact and great force of character. He was succeeded in the hereditary dominions of the House of Hapsburg by his eldest son Francis II., an inexperienced youth, quite unfitted to continue Leopold’s policy in the troublous times approaching.

Murder of Gustavus III. 29th March 1792.

Europe had hardly recovered from the shock of the Emperor’s sudden death, when it was startled by the news of the murder of Gustavus III. of Sweden, who was shot on his way from a masked ball at Stockholm by an officer named Ankarström, on 16th March 1792. He lingered till 29th March, when he died, and was succeeded on the throne of Sweden by his infant son, Gustavus IV. Duke Charles of Sudermania was appointed Regent. He at once reversed the policy of the late king; he felt none of the sympathy so warmly expressed by Gustavus III. for Marie Antoinette, and he distrusted the close alliance which had been entered into with Russia after the Treaty of Verela. His first measure was to place Sweden in a position of absolute neutrality, from which she never swerved during his tenure of power.

Policy of Dumouriez.

War declared by France against Austria. 20th April 1792.

Of the ministers who came into office in France in March 1792 through the influence of the Girondins in the Legislative Assembly, the most notable were Roland and Dumouriez. The former was a sincere republican, who was induced by his wife to take up an offensive attitude to the King, the latter an experienced soldier and diplomatist, who was well fitted for the ministry of foreign affairs. Dumouriez at once accepted war with Austria as inevitable, and directed all his efforts to isolate her. He was a sworn enemy of the Austrian alliance, entered into by the Treaty of 1756, and cemented by the marriage of Marie Antoinette, and his first step was to endeavour to detach Prussia. He was sanguine enough to believe in the possibility of doing this, but he did not understand the character of Frederick William II. It was difficult to induce that monarch to make up his mind, but when he did make it up he was obstinate. The French party at his Court, headed by his uncle Prince Henry, and in his ministry, represented by Haugwitz, was very strong; but, on the other hand, he had been convinced by Leopold that the cause of Louis XVI. was the cause of monarchy, and the German party at Berlin hinted that if he allowed Austria to pose as the defender of the rights of the Empire by herself, the policy of Frederick the Great to make Prussia the leader of Germany would be undone. Frederick William II., therefore, listened coldly to the overtures of Dumouriez, and made preparations to support his ally in the field. On 20th April 1792 the Legislative Assembly assented almost unanimously to the King’s proposition, as read by Dumouriez, to declare war against the King of Hungary and Bohemia, as Francis II. was at this time styled, and the great war, which was to rage with but slight intermissions for twenty-three years, began.

Invasion of the Tuileries. 20th June 1792.

The commencement of the first campaign of 1792 proved how thoroughly the French army had been disorganised and demoralised by the policy of the Constituent Assembly and the general course of the Revolution. An attempt was made to invade the Austrian Netherlands or Belgium on four lines; but one column was seized with panic and rushed back to Lille, murdering its general, Theobald Dillon. The other commanders found their soldiers filled with a spirit of distrust for their officers and hardly amenable to discipline, and it soon became obvious that France would have to stand on the defensive. This news profoundly moved the people of France and especially of Paris. The word treachery was freely used in connection with the Court, and it was asserted that the plan of campaign had been revealed to the Austrians by the Queen. This was true; Marie Antoinette had always looked to Austrian help to rescue her from her position, and Louis XVI. had now entirely come round to her view. At this juncture he dismissed his Girondin ministers on their insisting upon his signing a decree, which had been passed by the Assembly ordering the deportation of priests who had not taken the oath, and even accepted the resignation of the ablest of them, Dumouriez, who had offered to form a new ministry. The populace of Paris was intensely excited by the failure of the attack on Belgium, the concentration of the Prussian army on the frontier, and the dismissal of the popular ministers, and a body of petitioners, after filing through the hall of the Assembly, burst into the Tuileries and for some hours filled the palace, insulting the King and Queen and forcing the former to put on a red cap of liberty. The invasion of the Tuileries marked the final breach between the King and the people. Louis XVI. longed more ardently than ever for the arrival of the allied monarchs; and the Jacobin leaders, who perceived the impossibility that France should be successful in war with an unwilling king at her head, began to plot for his overthrow. His last chance was lost, when he rejected the proffered assistance of Lafayette, who returned from his army without leave and offered to bring the National Guard of Paris to his help.

Francis II. Emperor. 14th July 1792.

The news of the invasion of the Tuileries by the mob on the 20th June further decided the allied monarchs to take immediate action. Francis II., who was crowned Emperor at Frankfort on 14th July 1792, was eager to come to his aunt’s help. The position of the allies was now reversed. Instead of Austria in the person of the experienced Emperor Leopold guiding Prussia, it was now Frederick William II. of Prussia who directed the policy of the young Emperor Francis. It was arranged that the Prussians should invade Champagne, supported by a corps of Austrians and émigrés on their left, and joined midway by a corps of Austrians from their right, while an Austrian army under Duke Albert of Saxe-Teschen was to march from the Netherlands and invest Lille. The central Prussian army was placed under the command of the Duke of Brunswick, who issued a proclamation, drafted by an émigré, M. de Limon, and filled with violent language by Count Fersen, threatening to hold Paris liable for the safety of the King, and vowing vengeance on the French people as rebels.

Insurrection of 10th Aug. 1792.

Suspension of Louis XVI. 10th Aug. 1792.

Brunswick’s proclamation was the very thing to complete the exasperation of the French people. National patriotism rose to its height; the country had been declared in danger, and thousands of volunteers were arming and preparing to go to the front; the threats of the Prussians only increased the national spirit of resistance; and the universal feeling was one of defiance. But there was obviously no chance of success while the executive remained in its present hands. The King’s power of interfering with the preparations for resistance had to be stopped. This was clearly understood by the democratic leaders, who, ever since 20th June 1792, had been organising an armed rising. They waited till some volunteers from Marseilles entered the capital, singing the song that bears their name, and then they struck. The royal plans for the defence of the Tuileries were thwarted; a number of the most energetic democrats ousted the Council-General of the Commune of Paris, and formed an Insurrectionary Commune; and the men of the poorer districts of Paris, the Faubourgs Saint-Antoine and Saint-Marceau, headed by the Marseillais, advanced to attack the royal palace. Before the assault commenced, Louis XVI., accompanied by his family and his ministers, took refuge in the hall of the Legislative Assembly. The attack was gallantly resisted by the Swiss Guards, who garrisoned the palace, but the people were eventually successful and the Tuileries was taken. The Legislative Assembly at once declared the King suspended from his office, and ordered him to be confined with his family in the Temple. It then elected a new ministry, consisting of three of the former Girondin ministers, Roland, Clavière, and Servan for the Interior, Finance, and War, and three new men, Danton, Monge, and Lebrun for Justice, the Marine, and Foreign Affairs. This ministry, with the help of an extraordinary Commission of Twenty-one, elected by the Legislative, and of the Commune of Paris, displayed the greatest energy. By means of domiciliary visits, those suspected of opposition to the insurrection of 10th August were seized and imprisoned; a camp was formed for the defence of Paris; men were everywhere raised and equipped and sent to the front; and commissioners were sent throughout France, and especially to the armies, to tell the tale of the insurrection and to secure the adhesion of the people. Danton was the heart and soul of the defence movement and of the ministry, and inspired confidence and patriotism into those who hesitated; the Commission of Twenty-one, whose mouthpiece was the great orator Vergniaud, aided him to the best of their power; the Legislative directed the convocation of the primary assemblies, without distinction of active and passive citizens, for the election of a National Convention; and the Commune of Paris took measures to prevent any attempt at a counter-revolution.

Desertion of Lafayette.

The Massacres of September 1792.

But no amount of energy and patriotism could in a moment make trained armies and enable France to repulse the most famous troops in Europe. Fortunately for France, in this crisis, her untrained soldiers behaved admirably. Lafayette, on the news of the insurrection of 10th August, arrested the commissioners sent to him by the Legislative Assembly, and endeavoured to induce his army to march to the aid of the King. But his men refused; the former commander of the National Guard of Paris deserted, and Dumouriez took command of his army. Lille made a gallant resistance to the Austrians, who had formed the siege, but the Prussians met with no such obstinate opposition. Longwy surrendered to them on 27th August, and Verdun on 2nd September, and they continued their march directly on Paris. Dumouriez fell back with his main army to defend the uplands,—they can hardly be called the mountains,—of the Argonne. He summoned to him the corps d’armée on the Belgian frontier under Arther Dillon, and a detachment from the Army of the Rhine under Kellermann, while he was also reinforced by some thousands of undisciplined, and therefore useless, volunteers, and by a fine division of old soldiers collected from the garrisons in the interior. In Paris the news of the Prussian advance caused a panic; it seemed impossible that Dumouriez’ hastily concentrated army could oppose an effective resistance; and even Danton and Vergniaud could hardly keep up the enthusiasm they had at first aroused. At this juncture the Parisian volunteers were half afraid to go to the front for fear that the numerous prisoners, arrested during the domiciliary visits, would break out and revenge themselves on the families of the volunteers. This feeling induced the horrible series of murders, known as the Massacres of September, in the prisons. The massacres began fortuitously, and there were not more than 200 murderers at work; but the crowd, including national guards, stood by and saw them committed without raising a hand to help the victims. All Paris was responsible for the murders; they could have been easily stopped; but no one wanted to check them: the feeling which allowed them was the popular feeling; neither Danton, nor Roland, nor the Commune of Paris, nor the Legislative Assembly cared to interfere; the massacres were the answer to the Prussian advance and the capture of Longwy, as the insurrection of 10th August was the reply to Brunswick’s manifesto.

Battle of Valmy. 20th Sept. 1792.

On 20th September 1792 the main Prussian army, which had reached the Argonne, attacked the position occupied by Kellermann at Valmy, and was repulsed. The victory was not a great one; the battle was not very hotly contested; the losses on both sides were insignificant; but its results both military and political were immense. The King of Prussia, who complained that the Austrians had not fulfilled their engagements, and that the whole burden was thrown on him, was easily persuaded by the Duke of Brunswick to order a retreat. The Duke of Brunswick was induced to give that advice from military considerations, in that his army was wasted by disease and harassed by the inclement weather, and from policy, because, like many Prussian officers, he considered it unnatural for Prussians and Austrians to fight side by side. The retiring army was not hotly pressed; Dumouriez still hoped to induce Prussia to quit the coalition against France, and pursued with more courtesy than vigour until the army of Brunswick was beyond the limits of French territory.

Meeting of the Convention. 20th Sep. 1792.

Parties in the Convention.

On the day of the battle, or as it is with more correctness termed the cannonade, of Valmy, the National Convention met in Paris and assumed the direction of affairs. It contained all the most distinguished men who had sat in the two former assemblies on the Left, or democratic side, and its first act was to declare France a Republic. After this had been unanimously carried, dissensions at once arose, and a fundamental difference between two groups of deputies appeared, which threatened to end in the proscription of the one or the other. On the one side were the distinguished orators of the Gironde, who have given their name to the whole party, reinforced by the presence of several old members of the Constituent Assembly and of a few young and inexperienced men. This group was roughly divided into Buzotins and Brissotins, or followers of Buzot, a leading ex-Constituant, and of Brissot, the author of the war; but some of the greatest of them, like Vergniaud, refused to ally themselves with either leader. The chief meeting-place of the Buzotins, who included most of the younger men, was Madame Roland’s salon. On the other side, taking their name from the high benches on which they sat, were the deputies of the Mountain, including almost the whole of the representatives of Paris, and all the energetic republicans, who had brought about the insurrection of 10th August. This group comprised Robespierre, Danton and Marat, Collot-d’Herbois and Billaud-Varenne, all deputies for Paris, and none of whom, except Robespierre, had ever sat in either of the former assemblies, with some leaders of the extreme party in the Legislative, Merlin of Thionville, Chabot and Basire. It was not long before open quarrels arose between the two groups. The Girondins accused the leaders of the Mountain of having in the Insurrectionary Commune fomented the massacres of September in the prisons, and abused them as sanguinary and ambitious anarchists. This accusation was formally indeed brought against Robespierre by Louvet, a Rolandist Girondin, in an elaborate attack delivered on 29th October; while at the same time the Mountain accused the Girondins of being federalists and desiring to destroy the essential unity of the Republic, an accusation which was used with deadly effect at a later date. Both groups,—they cannot be called parties, for they had no party ties and recognised no party obligations,—appealed to the great majority of the Convention, the deputies of the Centre, who sat in the Plain or Marsh. The representative of this vast majority was Barère, an ex-Constituant, who trimmed judiciously between the two opposing groups.

Conquest of Savoy and Nice.

Capture of Mayence. 21st October 1792.

Battle of Jemmappes. 6th Nov. 1792.

The Convention, which had been elected in days of deepest dejection, if not despair, when the Prussians were moving on Paris and the Austrians were besieging Lille, was soon raised by a succession of conquests to a state of patriotic exaltation, bordering on delirium. In the month of September, just after the battle of Valmy, General Montesquiou occupied Savoy, and General Anselme the county and city of Nice, territories belonging to the King of Sardinia, without striking a blow. This was followed by a more important series of successes. Though not as a body engaged in war with France, many princes of the Empire had sent contingents to the aid of the Prussians and Austrians. In reply, still without declaring war on the Empire, the French attacked the Rhenish princes. On 1st October General Custine, commanding a corps of the Army of the Rhine, took Spires, on October 4 Worms, and on October 21 Mayence, one of the bulwarks of the Empire and the capital of the Elector-Archbishop. From Mayence Custine detached divisions in other directions, and held the wealthy city of Frankfort-on-the-Main to ransom. Not less startlingly rapid were the conquests of Dumouriez on the north-east frontier. After the retreat of the Prussians he turned north against the Austrians; he raised the siege of Lille, which had been heroically defended, and on 6th November he defeated the Austrians in a pitched battle at Jemmappes, near Mons. This victory laid Belgium open to him. He occupied the whole country, entered Brussels as a conqueror, and established his headquarters at Liége. The conquest of Belgium intoxicated the Convention; they believed their armies to be invincible; they regarded themselves as having a mission to carry the doctrines of the French Revolution as embodied in the Rights of Man and the Sovereignty of the People into all countries; they declared themselves on 19th November ready to wage war for all peoples upon all kings; and in disregard of all international obligations, they declared the Scheldt, which by treaty had been closed to commerce for years, a free river, because it had its source in a free country.

The intoxication which followed this series of unparalleled successes blinded the Convention to the need of improving and disciplining their troops. The French republicans did not comprehend that the chief cause of the facile conquests of their armies was that they met with the sympathy of the conquered. Belgium, the Rhine provinces, Savoy, and Nice were all filled with revolutionary enthusiasm, and welcomed the French as liberators; they requested to be united to France, when primary assemblies were summoned by the French commissioners, and on 9th November Savoy and Nice, and on 13th December the Austrian Netherlands or Belgium, were declared a part of France. In spite of these military successes, the republican army could not be organised in a day; the seeds of anarchy sown by the Constituent had gone too deep to enable discipline to be restored except by sharp measures; the administration of the army, that is, the commissariat, the war office, etc., was in a state of chaos; the soldiers, both officers and men, of all the armies, kept their eyes too closely fixed on the course of politics in Paris to do their duty efficiently at the front.

Execution of Louis XVI. 21st Jan. 1793.

The burning question which divided the Convention at the end of 1792 was the treatment to be meted out to Louis XVI. Robespierre urged that, as a political measure, he should be put to death; but the Girondins, filled with an idea of imitating the English republicans of the seventeenth century, decided on a royal trial. When the trial, which was but a defence of Louis XVI. by his counsel, was over, the Girondins, in their desire to avoid responsibility, or perhaps from a genuine belief that it might save the King’s life, proposed that the sentence on him should be submitted to the primary assemblies of the people. The deputies of the Mountain feared no responsibility, and taunted the Girondins with being concealed royalists. The motion for an appeal to the people was rejected; the King was sentenced to death by a small majority; and on 21st January 1793 Louis XVI. was guillotined at Paris.

War with Spain, Holland, England, and the Empire.