BOOKS.
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.*
Tan apology which Mr. Stephens thinks it necessary to make for the publication of his History of the French Revolution is rendered entirely unnecessary by the very high merit and value of the first volume, which takes us down to the flight to Varennes and the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly. If the two other volumes which are promised maintain the same standard of excellence, we shall have, what has been much wanted in England, a standard and consecutive history of the period which is not likely to be superseded. Carlyle's French Revolution stands entirely by itself, and no one, certainly not Mr. Stephens, is likely to attempt to enter into a hopeless competition with that Titanic effort. But there is nothing which will so much enhance the pleasure of reading Carlyle as to turn, before or after reading him, to this plain and workman- like statement of the plain facts of the story. More than this, Carlyle, true as was his insight and great as was his power of drawing human character in his own inimitable style, wrote in 1837, not fifty years after the meeting of the States-General and the taking of the Bastille. We are now approaching the centenary of those events, and not only has much information come to light which was buried in unpublished, private, and public archives, but altogether new methods of dealing with history have become almost universal. The German school of specialists, of which the founder was Ranke, has invaded France, and hosts of writers have been engaged in the last fifty years in illustrating from documents bearing on special and sometimes minute departments, the great drama which is still so intimately related to modern European politics.
The most striking instance of the new information which has become accessible since Carlyle wrote, is the correspondence between Mirabeau and La Marck, and the correspondence of Marie Antoinette with her mother and brother, which together put a new complexion on Mirabeari's relations with the Court. From this it appears that Carlyle was mistaken in supposing that Mirabean's appreciation of the Queen was at all recipro- cated. That wilful and imperious woman, though she had great natural ability, and though her whole life is now inevitably tinged with the heroism she displayed at its close, was quite destitute of education, and this disabled her from looking upon politics as anything but private interests on an extended scale, and entirely incapacitated her from distinguishing the possible from the impossible. She never had any confidence in Mirabeau, not because of his character, for she had no scruples in making friends of the Poliguacs and the Lamballes, but because he gave her unpalatable advice. This advice she never followed until she was obliged, and then only in half-measures. She could not believe that the day of autocracy was over, and she carried into politics, when she was obliged to attend to them, the same wilful capriciousness which marked her conduct in private life. Mr. Stephens is right when he asks us to pity the little Princess brought to the Court of Louis XV. at the age of fourteen, and left there with no better control than the occasional sermons of the good old Austrian Ambassador ; but he is right, also, to point out the low standard of morality, the recklessness and extravagance, the obstinacy and judicial blindness, in which such an education naturally resulted. Everything Mr. Stephens adds to what we already knew only serves to confirm the judg- ment of a better-known writer that "Marie Antoinette was ignorant, unteachable, blind to events and deaf to good counsels, a bitter grief to her heroic mother, the evil genius of her husband, the despair of her truest advisers, and an exceedingly bad friend to the people of France."
While such is the judgment of the Queen, which Mr. Stephens's book confirms, he has contributed much to enhance our admira- tion of Mirabeau as a statesman. Mirabeau is the greatest example of one of the most pernicious effects of the ancien regime in France. It was a system which deliberately destroyed the usefulness of her sons. Mirabeau plunged into vices and follies quite unworthy of his nature, partly because no useful public career was open to him. He is also a conspicuous example of a man who can remain good and great at heart while he is still pursued by the furies of his present and past vices. Above all, he is a warning to statesmen that no ability, no personal charm, and no sincerity of political purpose can ever make up
• A History of the French Revolution. By H. Morse Stephens. Vol. I. London; Binugtons.
to a political leader for want of personal character. " Ah ! how the immorality of my youth," he bitterly exclaimed, "hinders the public good." Nevertheless, in spite of his vices, which were by no means confined to his youth, in spite of the popular sus- picions that he was bought by the Court, Mirabeau is the hero, and the worthy hero, of the first period of the French Revolution. His character is underrated by Frenchmen, for the very reason that made him great,—the thoroughly practical character of his statesmanship. Such men are rare in France, partly from the genius of her people, partly because she has only given repre- sentative institutions a short and intermittent trial. And it is curious that the only two Frenchmen who have within the century possessed that character, Gambetta and Mirabeau, were both snatched away in the very middle of their career. The greatest mistake that can be imputed to Mirabeau as a states- man arose out of the pedantic and impracticable temper of the members of the Assembly with which he had to deal. It was true that he was in the service of the Court ; but he was pays, pas vendu. He undertook to be the secret Prime Minister of the King, because the jealousy of the Assembly towards the Executive, enhanced by personal jealousy towards Mirabeau, had induced it to decree that no member of the Assembly could be a Minister. Such a decree could only secure a permanent mis- understanding between the Executive and the Legislature. Mirabeau ridiculed it because it rendered impossible the idea for which he was contending,—the idea of a democratic and Constitutional Monarchy, strong in Executive, but resting on the confidence of the people. "I am for the restoration of order," he wrote at the end of 1790, " but not for the restoration of the old order." This the majority of the Assembly could not under- stand, and it was, unfortunately, equally unintelligible to the Court. Marie Antoinette did not trust her best adviser, because the order she wished to be restored was the old order. Even when she tried to carry out his plans she failed, because his plans were devised with an object different from hers. A good illustration of this is the miserable flight to Varennes, which is only not ridiculous because it is full of tragedy and pathos. Mirabean's policy was for the King to make a public appeal to France against the Parisian mob, after careful pre- parations, and with solemn pledges that all which had been done by the Assembly would be adhered to by the King. The flight to Varennes was an appeal not to France, but to the foreigners and the emigres. It was not carefully prepared. It was a sur- prise to every one. It was a secret flight, and not a public appeal. Above all, the letter to the Assembly which the King left behind him retracted every concession, good and bad, which he had made, the concessions which had been made to the public opinion of France, as well as concessions which had been made to the turbulence of Paris. Mirabeau believed that civil war was necessary, and that it could not but end in the success of the party of order. The King had absurd scruples about civil war ; while, urged on by the Queen, he had no objection to bring in a motley army of foreigners and dissolute run- away courtiers to coerce his people. To fly to the frontier was to put the crowning-stone on to the unpopularity of the Court, to play into the hands of the Jacobin Club, to alienate and cow the party of order, and to render it inevitable that when order was restored, it should be restored on the ruins of the Monarchy.
Another branch of the subject on which Mr. Stephens is able by his careful collation of recent authorities to throw new light, is the provincial history of the Revolution. He has an excellent and instructive chapter on the " Elections to the States- General," in which the different local circumstances of each province, and the main points which each contributed to the general result, are carefully and succinctly stated. The import- ance of the action taken by the local Assembly of Dauphine has never been brought out before. Dauphine, by its example to the rest of France, superseded the orders of the Court, en- couraged the liberal noblesse, taught the cures to elect cures and not dignitaries, and the burghers not to separate themselves from the rest of the Tiers Etat. In a country where the repre- sentatives of the nation had not met for 173 years, everything about their constitution and the method of electing them was a matter of archaeology rather than of politics. A precedent was everything, and that precedent the Assembly of Dauphine supplied. The only other sources of information as to the States-General were the pamphlets which were showered from the printing-press not only in Paris, but all over France, and Mr. Stephens points out how often the local pamphleteer became the representative of the locality in the States-General. Of the more noted names, Reliant de St. Etienne, Larevelli6re-Lepaux, Lanjuinais, Boissy d'Anglas, P6tion, and Robespierre were all local pamphleteers. This history of the elections owes much to the collection of these pamphlets in the British Museum, of which the Croker collection forms a part. Carlyle never saw this collection ; Mr. Froude says because of the stupidity of the officials ; Mr. Stephens says because Carlyle demanded a private room to work in. But besides Mr. Stephens's account of the elections, the view of the Provinces in 1789 (chapter vi.), and of the Provinces and Colonies in 1790-91 (chapter xvi.), are both full of interest and new matter. Provincial history has been making great strides in France in the last fifty years ; and this account of the Provinces during the Revolution has been quite inaccessible to the English reader up to the present time. The account of the burning of the cliteaux, which was done not from patriotic motives, nor from hostility to the landlords, but, as in the rebellion of Wat Tyler in England, to destroy the evidences of the servitude of the peasants and the lord's title to unpopular rent, is very good ; as is also that of the " great fear" when the rumours of "brigands," who never existed, convulsed the whole of provincial France. Mr. Stephens also carefully explains the tenure of land in France, and sums up very well the facts, which show that the subdivision of the land into very small holdings was not the result of the Revolution. It was the result of the old division into small copyhold holdings, as we should call them, which, when the feudal dues were abolished in the Revolution, became the absolute possessions of the tenants. In the chapter on the Army and Navy we think we detect traces of hasty writing and a less carefully polished style. But the main facts are carefully brought out, and the way in which the Constituent Assembly ruined the French Army and destroyed the Navy by attempting to substitute the rights of man for military discipline, is very amusingly told. We wish we had more space to bring out the various points of Mr. Stephens's book. There is a humour and variety about his style which make his book fascinating. There is no attempt at fine-writing, but the writing never falls below the subject, and with such a subject that is saying a good deal. Altogether, we look forward to Mr. Stephens's next volume, and commend our readers not to be content with a knowledge of this one at second-hand.
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