f 5 6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



arouse an undistinguishing cruelty, and, in some of the leading actors, 

 a cold-blooded ferocity. Nevertheless, recognizing all this recogniz- 

 ing also the truth that those who wreaked this vengeance were intrin- 

 sically no better than those on whom it was wreaked we must admit 

 that the bloodshed had its excuse. The panic of a people threatened 

 with reimposition of dreadful shackles was not to be wondered at. 

 That the expected return of a time like that, in which gaunt figures 

 and haggard faces about the towns and the country indicated the so- 

 cial disorganization, should excite men to a blind fury, was not unnat- 

 ural. If they became frantic at the thought that there was coming 

 back a state under which there might again be a slaying of hundreds 

 of thousands of men in battles fought to gratify the spite of a king's 

 concubine, we need not be greatly astonished. And some of the hor- 

 ror expressed at the fate of the ten thousand victims might fitly be 

 reserved for the abominations which caused it. 



From this partially-excusable bloodshed, over which men shudder 

 excessively, let us turn now to the immeasurably greater bloodshed, 

 having no excuse, over which they do not shudder at all. Out of the 

 sanguinary chaos of the Revolution, there presently rose a soldier 

 whose immense ability, joined with his absolute unscrupulousness, 

 made him now general, now consul, now autocrat. He was untruthful 

 in an extreme degree, lying in his dispatches day by day, never writ- 

 ing a page without bad faith, 1 nay, even giving to others lessons in 

 telling falsehoods. 2 He professed friendship while plotting to betray, 

 and quite early in his career made the wolf-and-lamb fable his guide. 

 He got antagonists into his power by promises of clemency, and then 

 executed them. To strike terror, he descended to barbarities like those 

 of the blood-thirsty conquerors of old, of whom his career reminds us : 

 as in Egypt, when, to avenge fifty of his soldiers, he beheaded 2,000 

 fellahs, throwing their headless corpses into the Nile ; or as at Jaffa, 

 when 2,500 of the garrison, who finally surrendered, were at his order 

 deliberately massacred. Even his own officers, not over-scrupulous, 

 as we may suppose, were shocked by his brutality sometimes refus- 

 ing to execute his sanguinary decrees. Indeed, the instincts of the 

 savage were scarcely at all qualified in him by what we call moral 

 sentiments ; as we see in his proposal to burn " two or three of the 

 larger communes " in La Vendee ; as we see in his wish to introduce 

 bull-fights into France, and to revive the combats of the Roman 

 arena ; as we see in the cold-blooded sacrifice of his own soldiers, 

 when he ordered a useless outpost attack merely that his mistress 

 might witness an engagement ! That such a man should have 

 prompted the individual killing of leading antagonists, and set prices 

 on their heads, as in the cases of Mourad-Bey and Count Frotte, and 

 that to remove the Due d'Enghien he should have committed a crime 



1 Translation of Lanfrey, vol. ii., p. 25. 

 s Ibid., vol. ii., p. 442. 



