The Years of Endurance (15 page)

England; if it does not open every eye and raise every arm, you will deserve your fate."

Yet though Pitt put away his dreams of reform at home, he stubbornly refused to abandon his policy of peace abroad. If France and her eastern neighbours chose to waste their blood and substance in war, that was their concern, not Britain's. When Burke, accorded an interview, urged intervention, he found as always a certain " deadness." The Prime Minister seemed more concerned in saving Poland from Russia, even in dispatching a commercial embassy to China, than in nipping world revolution in the bud. For his policy of security was as dependent on keeping the country out of Continental adventures as on averting doctrinal revolution.

On April 20th the French Assembly declared war on Austria. The little group which under the Jacobin clubman, Robespierre, opposed hostilities on the ground that they would favour the growth of tyranny was swept aside by Girondin eloquence. " The people," cried Mailhe, " desire war; make haste to give way to its just and generous impatience. You are perhaps about to decree the liberty of the whole world."

The demagogues of the Gironde imagined that revolutionary fervour would make their armies invincible. They were mistaken. With the inconsequence of their kind, while clamouring for war they had tampered with military discipline in order to discredit their predecessors. The red woollen nightcaps of the Nancy military mutineers, released from prison in their convicts' garb and given the honours of the Legislative Assembly, had been acclaimed as Caps of Liberty—the approved headwear henceforward of every patriot. France had now to pay the price for such folly. The troops who swarmed into Belgium were a mere rabble. At the first sight of an Austrian
they
ran away and murdered their own general. The greatest war in French history began, as it ended, with shouts of
Sauve qui peu
t!

The hideous rout that scrambled back over the frontier did not make a favourable impression. Europe breathed a sigh of relief. England laughed. " A strange reverse,' was the caption of Gillray
's
next cartoon:

" The democrats dis
play And prove the Rights
of Man—to run away."

Anti-Gallican feeling stiffened. The King was particularly contemptuous. When Chauvelin protested at a royal proclamation against seditious writings,
the
Foreign Secretary coldly intimated that he should mind his own business.

The Austrians did not follow up their victory. They had more pressing concerns. That May the Russian Empress's savage soldiery marched across the Polish frontier. The Poles took up arms, some under Kosciusko to repel the invader, others according to ancient Polish custom to serve their faction at the expense of their country. Their Prussian allies,
bribed in advance by Russia, th
reatened them from the rear. Not for the last time the waters of barbarism closed over the Polish plain.

Meanwhile in Paris the parties of the Left were bidding against one another for the favour of the mob by the vehemence of their abuse of King and foreigner. The Clubs forced a decree through the Assembly disbanding the sovereign's Constitutional Guard. The Girondins summoned a meeting of 20,000 armed " Federates " from the provincial Cantons to the national feast on July 14th.

In June King Louis, relying on the reviving conservatism and religious sense of the country, vetoed a bill for banishing non-juring priests and dismissed the Girondin Ministry. But the royalist counter-attack, though nearly successful, failed through the divisions of its supporters. In the face of common danger, Jacobin and Girondin united. Their self-chosen leader was a rough provincial lawyer from Champagne: a pock-marked, passionate, impulsive man of 32 named Danton, whose name is stained by great crimes but who loved France more than anything in the world.

On July nth, the Left struck. The Assembly, itself assuming the government, declared the country in danger and called on every able-bodied citizen to defend the frontiers. At the national festival on the Champs de Mars the King was hooted and jostled by the assembled " Federates "—the ragged, sweat-stained, angry men of the provincial slums. " The Tarquins," the cry went up, " must be driven out!"

Five days later the Emperor Francis and the King of Prussia met at Mainz amid a gleaming shoal of German Princes and Electors. They were still in no hurry to march for they felt certain of their prey. France, once so mighty, was
dissolving into anarchy. They h
ad only to drive the rabble before them and divide
the
spoil at leisure. On the 24th, having settled the question of indemnities, Prussia openly threw in her lot
With
Austria and declared war. The Commander-in-Chief of the Prussian Army, the veteran Duke of Brunswick, issued a manifesto to the French people. All who had " rebelled " since 1789 were to submit unconditionally and Paris was to be gutted if a hair of the King's head was touched.

The fruits of German diplomacy never
Vary
.
Before this masterpiece of tactlessness reached Paris on August
3rd
,
the Marseilles " Federates " had marched into the capital: five hundred ruffians " who knew how to die " and how to kill too, and singing a new song bearing their name. They were greeted by the Clubs with ominous enthusiasm and promptly liquidated
an
officer of the National Guard.

Next day Brunswick's manifesto arrived. That night, while a proud people simmered with rage, the great bell of the Cordeliers began to toll. It was the signal that Danton had seized the Hotel de Ville preparatory to attacking the Palace. All next morning a sulky little captain of artillery, who was trying in that starving time to write a history of his native Corsica,
w
atched
the mob storming the Tuileries. The
^-
Royal Family fled to the Assembly and the Swiss Guards were massacred. Before night fell Louis—no longer a King—was a close prisoner in a little cell while children
in
the streets played football with human heads.

Meanwhile the Prussians were marching. With the harsh halo of the great Frederick's victories about them they crossed the frontier, boasting that in a month they would sup in the Palais Royal. On August 20th they took Longwy and twelve days later Verdun. Between them and Paris was only an army of shabby and ill-disciplined Frenchmen, inferior in numbers, with grubby uniforms and officers branded with the memory of the flight from Belgium.

Yet in those ragged ranks a new spirit was stirring. The courage and daemonic energy of Danton —the very personification of France—ran through their veins like an electric current. In their blue jackets and wooden sabots—the " blue earthenware " of the
emigres
contemptuous phrase—the men encamped under Dumouriez at Sedan and Kellermann at Metz prepared to put the " Marseillaise" into action. Among those they elected for their colonels were seven future Napoleonic Marshals and a q
uarter of the Imperial Generals
of Division. "We lived," wrote one of them long afterwards, " in an atmosphere of light: I feel its heat and power now at
55
,
just as I felt it on the first day."

On the day that Verdun surrendered, Danton, calling for volunteers to man the ragged battalions,
made his great speech on the C
hamps de Mar
s: " De l'audace, et encore de l’audace, et toujours de l’audace
-et la France est sauvee ! " While he was speaking ruffians paid by the Paris Commune were' beginning a massacre in the crowded prisons. In that bestial slaughter 1600 victims perished, mostly aristrocrats of the more liberal kind who had stayed to share the fortunes of their country, among them two former Foreign Ministers of France. 'With their screams ringing in its ears, Paris voted
en masse
for the Jacobins. - Only the provinces dared return the men of the Gironde.

On the failing frontiers the unborn Republic faced her ene
mies. On the 19th France learnt
that the Prussians had forced the last defiles of the Argonnes and were debouching into the great plain on which Paris lies. Next day the Constituent Assembly sat for the last time. Miles away to the eastward the g
uns of Valmy were firing in the
drizzling rain. When evening fell the feeble Prussian attack was spent, and Brunswick, cursing the rain and the mud and the sickness and divisions-in his army, called off his men. Goethe, accompanying the German Army, alone had the vision to see the blinding truth through the mists of that sordid, petty encounter on the Champagne plain. " From this day and this hour dates a new epoch in the history of the world."

On the morrow of the battle, still ignorant of its fate, the Convention met in haste to make a new France. It decreed that there should
be no more. Kings and that the
Republic was one and indivisible. The provincial elections. had given the Girondins a majority, but the masters of the Convention were now t
he Jacobins. The "Mountain," as
they were called from their
seats in the Assembly, stood for .a collective dictatorship, the crushing of all op
position .and a permanent
state of siege enforced by mo
b terror. They had three allies -the foreigner, the
stars in their cour
ses, and Catherine of Russia. All
that September, while the volunteers shambled over the. cobblestones'
in
a thousand little towns and the rain fell on
the
encamped armies on " the plains of "lousy Champag
ne," the Prussians hesitated.
On the last day of the month, clogged with mud and emaciated by dysentery brought on by excessive eating of grapes—"
la couree prussienne
"—they began to retreat to their own frontiers. For the Russian Empress had again drawn the attention of Berlin from the birth of the French Republic to the death agonies of Poland.

As the Allies fell back the French advanced. On the 28th Custine entered the Rhineland, moving swiftly on Speyer and Worms while princes, bishops and nobles fled before his dreadful battle
-
cry of " War to the tyrant's palace! Peace to the poor man's cottage! " At the same time another French army, bubbling over with the frenzied enthusiasm of the hour, poured into Savoy, forcing back the Piedmontese over the mountains. Dumouriez's natural frontiers of France—a mirage in the spring—suddenly seemed to be becoming a reality.

These events were witnessed by Englishmen with growing bewilderment. Those, who from th
e first had regarded the Revolu
tion as a disaster, saw in the September massacres not only the fulfilment of their predictions but a call to arms. Burke was beside himself with prophetic rage and terror. He bombarded the Foreign Secretary with letters, demanding immediate intervention. "It is not the enmity but the friendship of France that is truly terrible. Her intercourse, her example and the spread of her doctrines are the most dreadful of her arms." Every day more and more of his countrymen were coming to agree with him. " How," wrote the generous and liberal-minded Romilly, " could we ever be so deceived in the character of the French nation as to think them capable of liberty? " As thousands of poor refugees poured into England with ghastly tales on their lips, a kindly people who were hereditary foes to oppression and cruelty could not conceal their anger. Eastbourne and Rye were full of penniless seigneurs and priests and forlorn women, and waggon-loads of misery rumbled ceaselessly over the London bridges. Such horrors recalled the massacre of St. Bartholomew and Louis XIV's persecution of the Huguenots.

By a familiar paradox this French influx intensified popular hatred of the French race. Spy mania swept the southern counties. With tales spreading of revolutionary " banditti," armed with daggers and disguised as refugees, pressure on the Government to do something grew hourly.

The Prime Minister preserved a wonderful calm. '' No hour of Pitt's life," wrote John Richard Green, " was so great as that in which he stood lonely and passionless before the growth of national passion and refused to bow to the gathering cry for war." Neither in his official utterances nor in his correspondence did he comment on the events of August and September. After the massacre at the Tuileries the British Ambassador, Lord Gower, was recalled from Paris on the ground that the life of an aristocrat was no longer safe there and that the Government to which he had been accredited had ceased to exist. But on September 20th Pitt refused a request of the Austrian and Neapolitan ambassadors that Britain should exclude from its territories the representatives of those guilty of attack on the French Royal Family. It was not the business of Britain, he maintained, to take sides in the internal concerns of other countries.

For Pitt's steadfast vision was still fixed on England and not on Europe. He was conscious that the harvest had failed after the wettest summer in recent memory, that there was food shortage and rioting in the manufacturing towns and that under such circumstances peace was essential if the growing industrial population was not to go hungry. And for all the rising indignation of the propertied classes, his Home Office reports warned him that the country was not yet united in its attitude to the Revolution. However much the facts belied them, the promises of the French politicians seemed to many to offer hopes of a freer and happier life. The Irish republicans and the radical clubmen in England and Scotland rejoiced over the events of that autumn as milestones on the road to human emancipation. Their eyes were so dazzled by the sunrise of freedom that they could not see the cruel, blood-stained foreground. The Irish volunteers adopted a crownless harp surmounted by a cap of liberty as their emblem: Tom Paine was elected member for Calais in the French Convention and crossed over to his constituency amid the hisses of the good people of Dover.
¹