HISTORIC .SKKTr II KS. 



which they had no voice, and the force and object of which they 

 knew only through suffering. 



In HOUIO respects the condition of the people an regarded the 

 lords was bettor than it hod been !>!'.. ! tin- Jacquerie, but what 

 they gained in this direction they lout in another, for whenever 

 they succeeded in asserting a quasi independence on the 

 seigneurs, they became amenable to the heavy and far-reaching 

 hand of the king, for whose service their persons were taken, 

 ami fur whoso prodigal expenses their little ewe lambs were 

 Nor waa this all. Had the people been required to 

 make these sacrifices in behalf of a strong government, which 

 spout the money it drew from taxes in promoting the glory and 

 honour of tin- kingdom, they might have borne their lot withont 

 doing more than murmur ; but when they found that direct 

 taxes were levied in addition to indirect taxes, which were laid 

 upon the very necessaries of life, in order to support the king 

 and his courtiers in riotous living when they found that not 

 only wore they oppressed, but also that they paid for the means 

 f oppression, they did something more than murmur, and they 

 bided their time for the expression of their wrath. 



During the long reign of Louis XIV., the Grand Monarque, 

 as his flatterers called him, the people were blinded, though 

 they suffered, by the magnificence to which they contri- 

 buted. The honest endeavours of a few ministers to do right 

 and justice towards the people, to improve the internal con- 

 dition of the country, and to develop its resources, had also 

 been i'ully appreciated ; but with the death or withdrawal of these 

 ministers, their endeavours ceased also ; and what they had done 

 remained but as a token of what might still be, and as a foil to 

 set off the absence of further efforts in the same direction. 

 Frenchmen almost forgave Louis XIV., Louis the Magnificent, 

 the Grand Monarque, though men died of hunger outside his 

 park railings, and though his lavish expenditure upon himself 

 and his glory had drained France of money and utterly 

 ruined her. He had a lustre borrowed from the great men who 

 served him, and had, like our Charles II., a certain way with 

 him which won the popular fancy. But when his grandson, 

 Louis XV., succeeded him, and fresh demands were made 

 on the already exhausted country, not for the glory or even 

 the decent maintenance thereof, but for the expenses of mis- 

 tresses, the wages of sin, and the support of that ignoble 

 host who are ever found in the courts of bad princes, the people 

 turned and listened to the voice of those seductive charmers 

 who told them of a way by which they might be free of their 

 burdens for ever. Mr. White, in his " History of France," says 

 well, " Debasing tyranny like Louis the Fourteenth's, degrading 

 viciousness like Orleans' and Dubois", and the wider and more 

 systematic demoralisation introduced by the king who was now 

 ready to assume the sceptre, could not fail, sooner or later, to 

 produce fruits worthy of the altogether corrupted tree which had 

 been planted in such soil and tended by such hands." 



The storm did not burst on the heads of those who had 

 gathered it ; the offences of the fathers were visited upon the 

 children, in whose day the system of which they were the visible 

 representatives was ripe for destruction. Upon the mild, 

 good-intentioned, weak Louis XVI. and his family did the 

 storm of popular anger break. Would-be friends of the people, 

 who thought, moreover, that they could stop the ball whenever 

 they pleased after it had been set rolling, began the movement, 

 and in a very short time they found, to their infinite dismay, 

 that they could not "ride on the whirlwind and direct the 

 storm." 



Louis XVI., finding the country on the verge of bankruptcy, and 

 that the efforts of three of the most eminent financiers of the time 

 had been tried in succession, but in vain, to redeem the finances, 

 resolved to moke an appeal to the notables of France, the peers, 

 nobles, and magistracy, men who for the most part contributed 

 nothing in the shape of taxes towards the burdens of the State, 

 though they enjoyed immense privileges one, the most mon- 

 strous, being that as nobles they were free from taxation. The 

 notables accordingly assembled in 1788, but separated without 

 lending the king any help ; they would not give up their pen- 

 sions, they would not submit to be taxed, and they were not 

 their brothers' keepers ; what had they to do with the sufferings 

 of the vulgar ? On the 1st of May, 1789, the States-General 

 met for the first time since 1614. In the States-General all 

 classes were represented, the starving shopkeeper, the ruined 

 farmer, the intellectual hut untitled, and therefore despised pro- 



man, the oure* of lowly birth Lut Maple brains. M weO as 

 the pompous prelate and the dissolute <iV^ The Htates-Geoeral 

 were to consider the situation of Franco. Within a week of 

 their meeting dissensions broke out which by their very : 

 were difficult to be allayed, but which hatred, long 

 during so many yean, made inextinguishable as 

 noble and the human -'-ntrt Louis, to gain time, and in hope 

 of stilling the disorders, prorogued the assembly for a month ; 

 but when the Commons, wishing to enter their haU, were refused 

 by soldiers with fixed bayonet*, they adjourned to the Tennis 

 Court of the Palace of Versailles, and took an oath not to 

 dissolve till they should have attained the object for which they 

 met, and they called themselves the National Assembly. A number 

 of priests and nobles from the other section of the Ttstits fissure! 

 joined them, and the king was obliged to yield. The Assembly 

 met again, and all caste privileges were abolished, taxes wen 

 ordered to be levied on all classes alike, and the closed pro- 

 fessions, the army and the civil service, were thrown open; 

 restrictions were remove i from the press, the public debt wae 

 secured, personal and religions liberty were promised. Bat the 

 States-General would not dissolve, and when the king threatened 

 and then withdrew his threats, they assumed fiprm* power, 

 and the National Assembly was king in his stead. 



On the 14th of July, 1789, the populace of Paris, excited by 

 what had taken place, and anxious to make nee of their newly- 

 gotten power, rushed in arms to the Bastille, the fortress in which 

 so many dark deeds had been committed, and, after a brief resist- 

 ance, overcame the guards, demolished the fortress, and, l*^*f 

 the governor and his officers to the Place de Grove, eat off their 

 heads, which they paraded about on pikes. In the country the 

 example of Paris was imitated ; the people rose on the ttrtstss, 

 and murdered, outraged, and destroyed ; they burnt castles and 

 title-deeds, all the relics of the old system they could cone 

 across ; ousted the king's authorities in the towns, and set op 

 their own instead. In October, Louis, who had been forced 

 with his own hands to " undeck the pompous body of a king," 

 and to submit himself on many occasions to the authority of the 

 National Assembly, was driven to Paris from Versailles by a 

 mob of hungry, unkempt folk, who had been induced to come 

 down in consequence of some indiscretion on the part of the 

 royal guards. In Paris the royal power was at an end; the 

 nobles saw it and fled, they and their families, and all they ooold 

 transport, into foreign countries. Thousands of people left the 

 country, and the gold they took with them was so great in 

 quantity that a circulating medium ceased almost entirely. In 



1791 the Marquis de Mirabeau, who at one time was the i 

 denouncer of the old order, but who had roared round on 

 beholding the excesses committed and to be committed by the 

 popular side, died, and with him went the hut chance fot 

 royalty. In all the clubs of Paris, in the churches, in every 

 other house, was heard the voice of violence, proclaiming itstiiel 

 hatred to kings, and inflaming the popular frenzy against that 

 poor king who was really a prisoner in hit palace at the 

 Tuileries. 



The king having been put on one side, foreign princes feared 

 for themselves, and, in the name of royalty generally, took up 

 arms against the Revolution. Thousands of French emigrants 

 swarmed in the enemies' ranks, and there is reason to think that 

 Louis himself authorised negotiations which had for their object 

 his release from restraint by means of foreign troops. Once he 

 attempted to escape, but through imperfection in the arrange- 

 ments he was detected at Varennes, and brought back to Paris ; 

 and the people, who discovered his part in bringing the foreigner 

 into France, attacked his palace, slaughtered hie guards and all 

 his servants, and would probably have slain him, had he not 

 taken refuge, with his family, in the Hall of the National 

 Assembly. From the National Assembly the royal family were 

 removed to the prison of the Temple, which the king and qaeen 

 never left again till the days of their trial and execution. 



On the 10th of August, 1792, when the Tuileries wvreattacked 



by an infuriated mob, monarchy was virtually abolished in Prance, 



Ntional Assembl considerin itself unequal to the 



and the National Assembly, considering itself 

 emergency presented by the new circumstances, called a more 

 democratic assembly than itself, the National Convention, to 

 take the responsibility. The guides and apostles of this assembly 

 were those who were the fountain-head of all the violence which 

 had taken plaoe Robespierre, Marat, and Danton. Under them 

 was formed the Revolutionary Tribunal, a court erected for the 



