all hope of such a result. The deposition of with which, after the victory of the republi Louis was, in our opinion, the necessary con- | cans, he and his family were treated. But this sequence of that coalition. The question was we say, that the French had only one alternanow no longer, whether the king should have tive, to deprive him of the powers of first an absolute veto or a suspensive veto, whether magistrate, or to ground their arms and subthere should be one chamber or two chambers, mit patiently to foreign dictation. The events whether the members of the representative of the tenth of August sprang inevitably from body should be re-eligible or not; but whether the league of Pilnitz. The king's palace was France should belong to the French. The in- stormed; his guards were slaughtered. He dependence of the nation, the integrity of the was suspended from his regal functions; and territory, were at stake; and we must say the Legislative Assembly invited the nation to plainly, that we cordially approve of the con- elect an extraordinary Convention, with full duct of those Frenchmen who, at that conjunc-powers which the conjuncture required. To ture, resolved, like our own Blake, to play the men for their country, under whatever form of government their country might fall.

this Convention the members of the National Assembly were eligible; and Barère was chosen by his own department.

It seems to us clear that the war with the con- The Convention met on the twenty-first of tinental coalition was, on the side of France, at September, 1792. The first proceedings were first a defensive war, and therefore a just war. unanimous. Royalty was abolished by accla It was not a war for small objects, or against mation. No objections were made to this despicable enemies. On the event were staked great change, and no reasons were assigned all the dearest interests of the French people. for it. For certainly we cannot honour with Foremost among the threatening powers ap- the name of reasons such apophthegms, as peared two great and martial monarchies, that kings are in the moral world what moneither of which, situated as France then was, sters are in the physical world; and that the might be regarded as a formidable assailant. history of kings is the martyrology of nations. It is evident that, under such circumstances, But though the discussion was worthy only of the French could not, without extreme impru- a debating-club of school-boys, the resolution dence, entrust the supreme administration of to which the Convention came seems to have their affairs to any person whose attachment been that which sound policy dictated. Ir to the national cause admitted of doubt. Now, saying this we do not mean to express an it is no reproach to the memory of Louis to opinion that a republic is, either in the abstract say, that he was not attached to the national the best form of government, or is, under ordicause. Had he been so, he would have been nary circumstances, the form of government something more than man. He had held abso- best suited to the French people. Our own lute power, not by usurpation, but by the acci- opinion is, that the best governments which dent of birth and by the ancient polity of the have ever existed in the world have been kingdom. That power he had, on the whole, limited monarchies; and that France, in parused with lenity. He had meant well by his ticular, has never enjoyed so much prosperity people. He had been willing to make to them, and freedom as under a limited monarchy. of his own mere motion, concessions such as Nevertheless, we approve of the vote of the scarcely any other sovereign has ever made Convention which abolished kingly governexcept under duress. He had paid the penalty ment. The interference of foreign powers had of faults not his own, of the haughtiness and brought on a crisis which made extraordinary ambition of some of his predecessors, of the measures necessary. Hereditary monarchy dissoluteness and baseness of others. He had may be, and we believe that it is, a very usebeen vanquished, taken captive, led in triumph, ful institution in a country like France. And put in ward. He had escaped; he had been masts are very useful parts of a ship. But, if caught; he had been dragged back like a run- the ship is on her beam-ends, it may be neces away galley-slave to the oar. He was still a sary to cut the masts away. When once she state prisoner. His quiet was broken by daily has righted, she may come safe into port under affronts and lampoons. Accustomed from the jury rigging, and there be completely repaired. cradle to be treated with profound reverence, But, in the mean time, she must be hacked he was now forced to command his feelings, with unsparing hand, lest that which, under while men, who, a few months before, had been ordinary circumstances, is an essential part of hackney writers or country attorneys, sat in her fabric, should, in her extreme distress, sink his presence with covered heads, and addressed her to the bottom. Even so there are politica. him in the easy tone of equality. Conscious emergencies in which it is necessary that of fair intentions, sensible of hard usage, he governments should be mutilated of their fair doubtless detested the Revolution; and, while proportions for a time, lest they be cast away charged with the conduct of the war against for ever; and with such an emergency the the confederates, pined in secret for the sight Convention had to deal. The first object of a of the German eagles and the sound of the good Frenchman should have been to save German drums. We do not blame him for France from the fate of Poland. The first this. But can we blame those who, being re-requisite of a government was entire devotion solved to defend the work of the National to the national cause. That requisite was Assembly against the interference of strangers, were not disposed to have him at their head in the fearful struggle which was approaching? We have nothing to say in defence or extenuation of the insolence, injustice, and cruelty,

wanting in Louis; and such a want, at such a moment, could not be supplied by any public or private virtues. If the king were set aside. the abolition of kingship necessarily followed. In the state in which the public mind then, was

It would have been idle to think of doing what lent the whole weight of their names to the our ancestors did in 1688, and what the French Girondist connection. The wife of Roland Chamber of Deputies did in 1830. Such an brought to the deliberations of her husband's attempt would have failed amidst universal friends masculine courage and force of thought, derision and execration. It would have dis- tempered by womanly grace and vivacity. Nor gusted all zealous men of all opinions; and was the splendour of a great military reputathere were then few men who were not zeal- tion wanting to this celebrated party. Dumou ous. Parties fatigued by long conflict, and rier, then victorious over the foreign invaders, instructed by the severe discipline of that and at the height of popular favour, must be school in which alone mankind will learn, reckoned among the allies of the Gironde. are disposed to listen to the voice of a mediator. But when they are in their first heady youth, devoid of experience, fresh for exertion, flushed with hope, burning with animosity, they agree only in spurning out of their way the daysman who strives to take his stand between them and to lay his hand upon them both. Such was in 1792 the state of France. On one side was the great name of the heir of Hugh Capet, the thirty-third king of the third race; on the other side was the great name of the Republic. There was no rallying-point save these two. It was necessary to make a choice; and those, in our opinion, judged well who, waiving for the moment all subordinate paestions, preferred independence to subjugation, the natal soil to the emigrant camp.

As to the abolition of royalty, and as to the vigorous prosecution of the war, the whole Convention seemed to be united as one man. But a deep and broad gulf separated the representative body into two great parties.

The errors of the Brissotines were undoubt edly neither few nor small; but when we fairly compare their conduct with the conduct of any other party which acted or suffered during the French Revolution, we are forced to admit their superiority in every quality except that single quality which, in such times, prevails over every other-decision. They were zealous for the great social reform which had been effected by the National Assembly; and they were right. For though that reform was, in some respects, carried too far, it was a blessing well worth even the fearful price which has been paid for it. They were resolved to maintain the independence of their country against foreign invaders; and they were right. For the heaviest of all yokes is the yoke of the stranger. They thought that, if Louis remained at their head they could not carry on with the requisite energy the conflict against the European coalition. They therefore concurred in establishing a republican government; and here, again, they were right. For in that struggle for life and death, it would have been madness to trust a hostile or even a half-hearted leader.

On one side were those statesmen who are called, from the name of the department which some of them represented, the Girondists, and, from the name of one of their most conspicuous Thus far they went along with the revolu leaders, the Brissotines. In activity and prac- tionary movement. At this point they stopped; tical ability, Brissot and Gensonné were the and, in our judgment, they were right in stopmost conspicuous among them. In parliamen- ping, as they had been right in moving. For tary eloquence, no Frenchman of that time can great ends, and under extraordinary circumbe considered as equal to Vergniaud. In a stances, they had concurred in measures which, foreign country, and after the lapse of half a together with much good, had necessarily pre century, some parts of his speeches are still duced much evil; which had unsettled the read with mournful admiration. No man, we public mind; which had taken away from are inclined to believe, ever rose so rapidly to government the sanction of prescription; which such a height of oratorical excellence. His had loosened the very foundations of property whole public life lasted barely two years. This and law. They thought that it was now their is a circumstance which distinguishes him duty to prop what it had recently been their duty from our own greatest speakers, Fox, Burke, to batter. They loved liberty, but liberty associPitt, Sheridan, Windham, Canning. Which ated with order, with justice, with mercy, and of these celebrated men would now be remem- with civilization. They were republicans; but bered as an orator, if he had died two years they were desirous to adorn their Republic with after he first took his seat in the house of Com- all that had given grace and dignity to the fallen mons 1 Condorcet brought to the Girondist monarchy. They hoped that the humanity, the party a different kind of strength. The public courtesy, the taste, which had done much in regarded him with justice as an eminent mathe- old times to mitigate the slavery of France, matician, and, with less reason, as a great would now lend additional charms to her free. master of ethical and political science; the dom. They saw with horror crimes exceeding philosophers considered him as their chief, as in atrocity those which had disgraced the the rightful heir, by intellectual descent, and by infuriated religious factions of the sixteenth solemn adoption, of their deceased sovereign century, perpetrated in the name of reason D'Alembert. In the same ranks were found and philanthropy. They demanded, with elo. Guadet, Isnard, Barbaroux, Buzot, Louvet, too quent vehemence, that the authors of the lawless well known as the author of a very ingenuous massacre which, just before the meeting of the and very licentious romance, and more honour- Convention, had been committed in the prisons ably distinguished by the generosity with which of Paris, should be brought to condign punishhe pleaded for the unfortunate, and by the in- ment. They treated with just contempt the trepidity with which he defied the wicked and pleas which have been set up for that great powerful. Two persons whose talents were crime. They admitted that the public danger not brilliant, but who enjoyed a high reputation was pressing; but they denied that it justified for probity and public spirit, Pétion and Roland, a violation of those principles of morality on

which all society rests. The independence and honour of France were indeed to be vindicated, but to be vindicated by triumphs and not by murders.

Opposed to the Girondists was a party which, having been long execrated throughout the civilized world, has of late-such is the ebb and flow of opinion-found not only apologists, but even eulogists. We are not disposed to deny that some members of the Mountain were sincere and public-spirited men. But even the best of them, Carnot, for example, and Cambon, were far too unscrupulous as to the means which they employed for the purpose of attaining great ends. In the train of these enthusiasts followed a crowd, composed of all who, from sensual, sordid or malignant motives, wished for a period of boundless license.

Girondists refused to listen. They therefore, by voting for the death of the king, conceded to the Mountain the chief point at issue between the two parties. Had they given a manful vote against the capital sentence, the regicides would have been in a minority. It is probable that there would have been an immediate appeal to force. The Girondists might have been victorious. In the worst event, they would have fallen with unblemished honour. Thus much is certain, that their boldness and honesty could not possibly have produced a worse effect than was actually produced by their timidity and their stratagems.

Barère, as we have said, sided with the Mountain on this occasion. He voted against the appeal to the people, and against the respite. His demeanour and his language also When the Convention met, the majority was were widely different from those of the Gironwith the Girondists, and Barère was with the dists. Their hearts were heavy, and their demajority. On the king's trial, indeed, he quit-portment was that of men oppressed by sorrow. ted the party with which he ordinarily acted, It was Vergniaud's duty to proclaim the result voted with the Mountain, and spoke against of the roll-call. His face was pale, and he the prisoner with a violence such as few mem- trembled with emotion, as in a low and broken bers even of the Mountain showed. voice he announced that Louis was condemned to death. Barère had not, it is true, yet attained to full perfection in the art of mingling jests and conceits with words of death; but he already gave promise of his future excellence in this high department of Jacobin oratory. He concluded his speech with a sentence worthy of his head and heart. "The tree of liberty," he said, "as an ancient author re

The conduct of the leading Girondists on that occasion was little to their honour. Of cruelty, indeed, we fully acquit them; but it is impossible to acquit them of criminal irresolution and disingenuousness. They were far, indeed, far from thirsting for the blood of Louis; on the contrary, they were most desirous to protect him. But they were afraid that, if they went straight forward to their object, the sin-marks, flourishes when it is watered with the cerity of their attachment to republican insti- blood af all classes of tyrants." M. Hippolyte tutions would be suspected. They wished to Carnot has quoted this passage, in order, as save the king's life, and yet to obtain all the we suppose, to do honour to his hero. We credit of having been regicides. Accordingly, wish that a note had been added to inform us they traced out for themselves a crooked from what ancient author Barère quoted. In course, by which they hoped to attain both the course of our own small reading among their objects. They first voted the king guilty. the Greek and Latin writers, we have not hapThey then voted for referring the question re-pened to fall in with trees of liberty and waspecting his fate to the whole body of the people. [tering-pots full of blood; nor can we, such is Defeated in this attempt to rescue him, they our ignorance of classical antiquity, even reluctantly, and with ill-suppressed shame and imagine an Attic or Roman orator employing concern, voted for the capital sentence. Then imagery of that sort. In plain words, when they made a last attempt in his favour, and Barère talked about an ancient author, he was voted for respiting the execution. These zig-lying, as he generally was when he asserted zag politics produced the effect which any man conversant with public affairs might have foreseen. The Girondists, instead of attaining both their ends, failed of both. The Mountain justly charged them with having attempted to save the king by underhand means. Their own consciences told them, with equal justice, that their hands had been dipped in the blood of the most inoffensive and most unfortunate of men. The direct path was here, as usual, the path not only of honour but of safety. The principle on which the Girondists stood as a party was, that the season for revolutionary violence was over, and that the reign of law and order ought now to commence. But the proceeding against the king was clearly revolutionary in its nature. It was not in conformity with the laws. The only plea for it was, that all ordinary rules of jurisprudence and morality were suspended by the extreme public danger. This was the very plea which the Mountain urged in defence of the massacre of September, and to which, when so urged, the VOL V.-80

any fact, great or small. Why he lied on this occasion we cannot guess, unless, indeed, it was to keep his hand in.

It is not improbable that, but for one circumstance, Barère would, like most of those with whom he ordinarily acted, have voted for the appeal to the people and for the respite. But, just before the commencement of the trial, papers had been discovered which proved that, while a member of the National Assembly, he had been in communication with the court respecting his reports on the woods and forests. He was acquitted of all criminality by the Convention; but the fiercer republicans considered him as a tool of the fallen monarch; and this reproach was long repeated in the journal of Marat, and in the speeches at the Jacobin club. It was natural that a man like Barère should, under such circumstances, try to distinguish himself among the crowd of regicides by peculiar ferocity. It was because he had been a royalist that he was one of the foremost in shedding blood.

The king was no more. The leading Girondists had, by their conduct towards him, lowered their character in the eyes both of friends and foes. They still, however, maintained the contest against the Mountain, called for vengeance on the assassins of September, and protested against the anarchical and sanguinary doctrines of Marat. For a time they seemed likely to prevail. As publicists and orators they had no rivals in the Convention. They had with them, beyond all doubt, the great majority both of the deputies and of the French nation. These advantages, it should seem, ought to have decided the event of the struggle. But the opposite party had compensating advantages of a different kind. The chiefs of the Mountain, though not eminently distinguished by eloquence or knowledge, had great audacity, activity, and determination. The Convention and France were against them; but the mob of Paris, the clubs of Paris, and the municipal government of Paris, were on their side.

and would gladly have seen the Convention removed for a time to some provincial town, or placed under the protection of a trusty guard, which might have overawed the Parisian mob; but there is not the slightest reason to suspect them of any design against the unity of the state. Barère, however, really was a federalist, and, we are inclined to believe, the only federalist in the Convention. As far as a man so unstable and servile can be said to have felt any preference for any form of government, he felt a preference for federal government. He was born under the Pyrenees; he was a Gascon of the Gascons, one of a people strong. ly distinguished by intellectual and moral cha racter, by manners, by modes of speech, by accent, and by physiognomy, from the French of the Seine and of the Loire; and he had many of the peculiarities of the race to which he belonged. When he first left his own province he had attained his thirty-fourth year, and had acquired a high local reputation for eloquence and literature. He had then visited Paris for the first time. He had found himself in a new world. His feelings were those of a banished man. It is clear also that he had been by no means without his share of the small disap

enced by men of letters who, elated by provincial applause, venture to display their powers before the fastidious critics of a capital. On the other hand, whenever he revisited the mountains among which he had been born, he found himself an object of general admiration. His dislike of Paris, and his partiality to his native district, were therefore as strong and durable as any sentiments of a mind like his could be. He long continued to maintain that the ascendency of one great city was the bane of France; that the superiority of taste and intelligence which it was the fashion to ascribe to the inhabitants of that city were wholly imaginary; and that the nation would never enjoy a really good government till the Alsatian people, the Breton people, the people of Bearn, the people of Provence, should have each an inde pendent existence, and laws suited to its own tastes and habits. These communities he proposed to unite by a tie similar to that which binds together the grave Puritans of Connec ticut, and the dissolute slave-drivers of New Orleans. To Paris he was unwilling to grant even the rank which Washington holds in the United States. He thought it desirable that the congress of the French federation should have no fixed place of meeting, but should sit sometimes at Rouen, sometimes at Bordeaux, sometimes at his own Toulouse.

The policy of the Jacobins, in this situation, was to subject France to an aristocracy in finitely worse than that aristocracy which had emigrated with the Count of Artoisto an aristocracy not of birth, not of wealth, not of education, but of mere locality.-pointments and humiliations so often experiThey would not hear of privileged orders; but they wished to have a privileged city. That twenty-five millions of Frenchmen should be ruled by a hundred thousand gentlemen and clergymen was insufferable; but that twenty-five millions of Frenchmen should be ruled by a hundred thousand Parisians, was as it should be. The qualification of a member of the new oligarchy was simply that he should live near the hall where the Convention met, and should be able to squeeze himself daily into the gallery during a debate, and now and then to attend with a pike for the purpose of blockading the doors. It was quite agreeable to the maxims of the Mountain, that a score of draymen from Santerre's brewery, or of devils from Hébert's printing-house, should be permitted to drown the voices of men commissioned to speak the sense of such cities as Marseilles, Bordeaux, and Lyons; and that a rabble of half-naked porters from the Faubourg St. Antoine, should have power to annul decrees for which the representatives of fifty or sixty departments had voted. It was necessary to find some pretext for so odious and absurd a tyranny. Such a pretext was found. To the old phrases of liberty and equality were added the sonorous watchwords, unity and indivisibility. A new crime was invented, and called by the name of federalism. The object of the Girondists, it was asserted, was to break up the great nation into little independent commonwealths, bound together only by a league like that which connects the Swiss cantons or the United States of America. The great obstacle in the way of this pernicious design was the influence of Paris. To strengthen the influence of Paris ought, therefore, to be the chief object of every patriot.

The accusation brought against the leaders of the Girondist party was a mere calumny. They were undoubtedly desirous to prevent the capital from domineering over the Republic,

Animated by such feelings, he was, till the close of May, 1793, a Girondist, if not an ultraGirondist. He exclaimed against those impure and blood-thirsty men who wished to make the public danger a pretext for cruelty and rapine, "Peril," he said, "could be no excuse for crime. It is when the wind blows hard, and the waves run high, that the anchor is most needed; it is when a revolution is raging, that the great laws of morality are most necessary to the safety of a state." Of Marat he spoke with abhorrence and contempt; of the munic pal authorities of Paris with just severity. He