THE HISTORY OF FRANCE. BY EYRE EVANS CROWE. IN FIVE VOLUMES. VOL. V. LONDON: LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 1868. PREFACE. THE present volume completes a History of France, written after a careful study of every available original source, with the sole desire of ascertaining the truth, and without any bias of party policy or contemporaneous fashion. As the author announced in the first volume, his aim was to write French history from a point of view which should be English in its spirit, principles, and judgment, yet without jealousy or enmity towards a nation running the same race with ourselves, although in a different path. It is surely possible to be just and even friendly towards our neighbours, without adopting their opinions wholesale, and taking their rule as the measure not only of their merits but of our own. This nevertheless is what Englishmen have long been in the habit of doing. Of the histories of England which preceded that of Hume, the most popular and the most highly esteemed was written by a Frenchman. But although Hume's work displaced that of Rapin, Hume's views of England were taken altogether from the banks of the Seine, and his opinions were but the echoes of opinions current in French circles and saloons. What, again, is the new English school of thought which expresses sympathy with the acts of the French Revo lution, and an unbounded approbation of its results? We may admit that it was justly provoked by the shallow judgment which anathematised every liberal movement under the name of Revolution, until the public became first sated and at last disgusted. Still, what is the sympathy for Jacobinism but the echo of the opinions of those clever Frenchmen, who have contrived not only to excuse but to sanctify the Revolution by representing its cause as holy, its career as inevitable, its crimes as attributable to circumstances, not to persons, and its results as sufficiently glorious to cover any amount of meanness or of atrocity? It may be natural for Frenchmen to take this view, but it is obsequious folly on the part of Englishmen to adopt it. There is good and there is bad in the French Revolution. It may be more poetical to condemn it or laud it in the mass; but discrimination, though doubtless prosaic, is demanded by truth, morality, and sound judgment. No more miserable and pernicious doctrine has ever been preached, than that which represents revolution as the result of an irresistible impulse, which it is treason to doubt and madness to resist. The era of revolutions is far from being closed; that of class struggles has indeed only recommenced. To enter upon such a period with the belief that the victory is reserved for those classes which stand lowest in the scale of education and resources, and that the excesses in which they indulge are to be patiently and submissively endured, is puerile and pusillanimous. Far more truly might it be said, that the physical force of multitudes, although it may for a time overbear intelligence and moderation, can always be resisted. If |