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96

THE

NEW QUARTERLY REVIEW.

Essays on the Early Period of the French Revolution. By the late RIGHT HON. JOHN WILSON CROKER. Murray.

It

UPON the whole, we recommend this book very decidedly to the formers of libraries. is not a great book. It is not complete or satisfactory as a view of the mighty historical event which it discusses; but it is full of the peculiar cleverness of Mr. Croker, and it has the merit of exhausting one phase of the Revolution the phase which we may candidly call the blackguard one. To have a special branch of any thing well done is always satisfactory, and the Revolution was Mr. Croker's favourite theme. His hobby was the Revolutionary Pale Horse. He had an interest in the guillotine, similar to that which a Celtic antiquary has in the Round Towers. So sharp a mind could not be so long occupied on one subject without acquiring some of the rights of an authority about it. Accordingly, whoever wants to know the worst that can be said of the characters, motives, and actions of the revolutionists, will always come to this book to look for it. It was a necessary service a valuable service; and both in mind and in position it would be difficult to say how a man could have been found to do it better than the famous old polemic of politics whose book is before us.

Mr. Croker was the perfection of what is called a clever man, and of the many words by which men describe mental endowments, this was emphatically the word for him. Largeness of soul-greatness of view-richness of imagination, or subtlety of humour-were qualities to which he had no more claim than he had to the British crown. But he was acute, sharp, and indefatigable-obstinately indefatigable in work. Even his narrowness was a power to him, as it is to a wedge; and he purchased his usefulness at the expense of more agreeable and amiable characteristics. A sensitive and tender man could never have gone through the fighting which his career imposed on him; so nature had kindly fortified him with a thicker skin

than is natural to a fine organization. Yet, though all this is strictly true-and though, henceforth, no man will ever acquire the same prominence in the same cause without higher qualities we would not be thought too harsh on the memory of so notable a publicist while the paint on his hatchment is hardly dry. Croker was keen and spirited, and did service to his age and party. A certain reverence for what he thought right and good, something higher than a merely intellectual adhesion to it, is visible in his writings; and, if he was too often an unscrupulous assailant, let us remember the kind of men against whom he had to fight when he began life. War is not easily made chivalrous and graceful when your enemies are men who use the scalping-knife; and this was the favourite weapon of controversy when Wilson Croker was young.

He looked at the French Revolution solely with the eye of a man of the kind we have described. He recognised no aspiration in it— nothing good, or generous, or brave-none of its poetry or mystery, even. He constituted himself "devil's advocate" against it, and claimed its men for the functionary that he thus pro tem. represented. Now, we have already said that it was highly necessary that somebody should perform that duty; and we emphatically add that there is plenty for such a somebody to do. But then, unfortunately, we are by no means at our work's end when we have admitted this much. Europe has acccepted the results of that Revolution, and is every day carrying out some of its ideas. France is living under a dynasty which it raised, and England has formed an alliance with that dynasty. One of two things must be done, therefore: a man must either admit that there was some good purpose of Providence at the bottom of the movement, (some purpose apart from the mad crimes and blockheadisms of it,) and try

to discover and apply the lessons of the event, which may be done in a conservative as well as a revolutionary spirit; or, on the other hand, he must stand appalled at God's permitting such things at all; and in that case, we fear, will find nothing worth doing in European politics whatever. Supposing a man to take the latter course, he is only too likely to sink into an inactive grumbler and cynic; and, besides, he involves himself in the intellectual difficulty of having to support undoubted abuses before the Revolution, the memory of which cannot be grateful to any high-minded man who honours the traditions of Europe.

It will be long-whole generations, perhaps -before the philosophy of the Revolution is popularly understood. Meanwhile, it is curious to see in what infinitely divers ways the subject is now treated by historians. French writers -even Conservative ones, like Guizot and De Tocqueville-accept it, M. Guizot going so far as to say, that it aimed at nothing but what had been aimed at, in the world's history, over and over again. The regular Liberals-Michelet and Louis Blanc-of course, admire it in principle and detail. In England, our standard family work on the subject-Alison's History is one long protest, cumbrous in style, and utterly partisan in spirit. Mr. Carlyle's book is a poem, again, taking the Revolution as a dread, grand historic fact, and painting it in all the hues of tragedy. In consequence of the vulgar error which classes that writer with the Radicals, and in consequence, too, of the difficulty of his style, many readers have yet to understand what his views on the Revolution are. Certainly, his is the most original work on the subject-the only one in which its dramatic features are done justice to; for, in all the play of light and colour of Lamartine, there is something dioramic or panoramic-something that suggests an exhibition and lamps. Carlyle accepts the Revolution, but not like a revolutionist. He seems to value the deed more than the men who did the deed. He jeers at the ghastly pedant Robespierre, and esteems no man but Mirabeau to have had first-rate parts. For Marie Antoinette he has poetic tenderness -melancholy as a choral wail. For the brave royalist, Bouillé, he has hearty admiration. He looks, in truth, on the Revolution as a dark and terrible punishment, sent on Europe for its neglect of the old piety and the old reverence. It

is the view of a solitary and peculiar thinker, sitting altogether apart from political strife, and trying to read Fate like one of the ancient astrologers watching the stars. His book deserves more study than it has yet obtained. And this is one of the things which prove the vast importance of the French Revolution-this

infinite variety of view of which it admits. From Carlyle's poem or tragedy, Alison's tumid narrative, and other books in dozens, one still turns fresh to the volume of tough old Croker. It is a quite different world; and yet it is about the same men. It is a quite different style, and yet it deals with the same events. One can read, even with a sensation of novelty, his essay on the king's flight to Varennes after the elaborate and artful narrative of Lamartine, and the wild, dashing sketch of Carlyle.

As for the philosophy of Croker about the Revolution, nothing is more easily describedhe had none. He did not, indeed, go so far as an old French noble, living some years back, who held that it was absurd to treat revolutions seriously-that, when the mob assembled, they should be good-humouredly dispersed with horsewhips. But he treats the Revolution as a kind of riot-a serious riot, to be sure; and, unhappily, a successful one-but still a riot. He does not say how you could have prevented it, nor attempt the problem why it was allowed. to succeed; nor does he even seem to have devoted much care to the question whether, in the long run, it had done any good. His business is minute criticism of certain passages in it, from the point of view of a man who thought the chief actors knaves. That done, his business is done. He tracks his game with a certain smart activity which reminds one of a cocker; and his cheerful exultation at finding the scent, is a good deal like the lively bark of those intelligent little animals.

We repeat, however, and we are not the less in earnest because of that last illustration, that the kind of criticism of individuals which these essays contain is highly serviceable. It is instructive to know that such third-rate scoundrels as several of the revolutionists were, can be permitted by the Almighty to punish error. Providence's executioners, we see, are not more dignified characters than the every-day Jack Ketch. The knowledge of this fact is important-First, as a warning-Second, as showing that, by turning a country upside down, you will not necessarily get such miracles of genius and virtue as some people believe. We have something more to say on this point presently; but, meanwhile, let us give a specimen of the kind of way in which Mr. Croker does his business.

Our first extract shall be his account of the celebrated death-scene of the Girondins, which we take (in spite of the halo thrown round it by some who ought to have known better) to be one of the most striking examples of the "false sublime" which the Revolution afforded:

We must add one trait, which is eulogised by all their admirers-which M. Thiers calls 'sublime--but

which, in our judgment, exhibits nothing but childish bravado and disgusting levity. Twenty-one of them, after an imprisonment of four or five months, were sent (on the 31st October, 1793) to the scaffold, and they spent the night preceding their death-how?in the festivities of a supper, enlivened with patriotic and bacchanal songs; and they solaced their passage next morning to the place of execution-by singing the Marseillaise in chorus. Imagine one-and-twenty senators the conscript fathers of the republic-condemned by a most iniquitous sentence (for such it was as regarded the offences with which they were charged), and leaving their families, their friends, and their country in a bloody anarchy which they had helped to create-imagine, we say, such men going to execution -not penitent for their individual errors, nor for the public mischiefs to which they had contributed-not even grave at the dismal prospects of their country, nor impressed with any sense of that future world on the verge of which they stood, but-singing-singing in the condemned cell-singing in the executioner's cart! When we read, in flowery declamations, of 'the majestic wisdom and the exalted eloquence' of Vergniaud and his colleagues, we are involuntarily reminded of this their last hoarse and hollow song, broken by the rattle of the wretched tumbril which jolted them to execution.

Courage is as much-indeed, it is more-shown by dying quietly, than by dying in the style of the hero of an opera. There is no

worse feature of the Revolution than the mixture of levity with its horrors-a mixture like that of froth and venom in a mad dog. Just compare the death scenes of that struggle with the lofty and pious decorum which marked those of our English civil war !

This reflection naturally leads us to a passage in which Croker compares the two revolutions together. He has brought the resemblances into a very happy form in the following passage :

It must indeed be admitted that there had been, throughout the whole course of the French Revolution, a chain of very remarkable coincidences with corresponding events in English history, which we have before incidentally noticed, but which we think it is worth while to exhibit more clearly in the following synopsis:

Charles J.

Unpopularity of the Queen.
The Long Parliament.
Flight to the Isle of Wight.
Trial and execution.
Government by the Parliament.
Cromwell.

Expels the Parliament.
Military despotism.
Richard Cromwell set aside.
Restoration of Charles II.
Amnesty to all but regicides.
Popish and Ryehouse plots.
Unpopularity of the Duke of York
Outery against the Jesuits.
James II, late King's brother
Suspected birth of the Pretender.
Royal Declarations of indulgence.
Convention Parliament.
Fight and abdication of the King.
Expulsion of him and his family.
They take refuge in FRANCE.

Louis XVI.

Unpopularity of the Queen.
The self-constituted Assembly.
Flight to Varennes.
Trial and execution.
Government by the Convention.
Buonaparte.

Expels the Assemblies.
Military despotism.
Napoleon II. set aside.
Restoration of Louis XVIII.
Amnesty to all but regicides.
Conspiracies of Berton, Bories, &c
Unpopularity of Connt d'Artois.
Outery against the Jesuits.
Charles X., late King's brother.
Suspected birth of D. of Bordeaux
Royal Ordinances.

Meeting of the dissolved Chamber
Flight and abdication of the King
Expulsion of him and his family.
They take refuge in ENGLAND.

And, finally, both Revolutions arrived at the same identical result-the calling to the vacant throne the late King's cousin, being the next male heir after the abdicating branch.

There is no doubt that, of late years, there has been visible among French writers a wish

to invest their Revolution with a historic dignity which many of the actors in it would have repudiated with contempt. M. Guizot takes pleasure in viewing it as a kindred movement with the English one; and M. Louis Blanc is careful to trace its pedigree as far as John Huss. For our own part we are not anxious to deny the existence of certain points of resemblance; such appear between ages the most remote. In Aristotle's "Politics," there are bits of description which fit Reynolds and Cuffey to a hair; and we remember a clever paper in Fraser (attributed to Professor Conington), which showed a remarkable coincidence of political points of view between Aristophanes and Theodore Hook. The readers of Cicero know well how often they are struck by passages descriptive of situations which they have seen existing in their own state during their own day. No wonder, then, if a family likeness be found between the revolutions of two countries divided from each other only by a strip of sea-the revolutions following each other, too, within about a century and a half. Nay, we go so far as to say, that a ramble among the newspapers and fugitive literature of our revolution, is likely to show a man more bits of similarity between it and the French one, than he probably suspects to exist from perusing only grave historians. Yet, when all is allowed for, there remain fundamental distinctions between the two, on which an Englishman may well be proud to insist-distinctions, the thought of which was present in the mind of Coleridge when he said that, in studying the English revolution, the pleasure was, that you could admire both sides! These distinctions are the following:

1st, The religious side of the English revolution. It was a Puritan movement in great part, and the most utterly Puritan party triumphed.

2nd, The historical side.-The first movers in England did not aim at destroying institu tions; they opposed the crown from the old point of view-that is to say, the feudal one.

3rd, The personnel of the revolutionary party. In England, the leaders were mostly gentlemen.

Now, see what we have as the correlative characteristics in the Revolution of France :

1st, Instead of a direct religious inspiration warm from ages of faith, you have the philoso phy and sentimentalism of Rousseau and Co. And this is at the best; for, at the worst, you have atheism, petty literature, base vanity and ambition, and indescribably low motives of action.

2nd, There were no historical traditions such as those afforded by our Magna Charta. There

was a certain varnish of classical republicanism; but that element was beaten and crushed, and downright destructiveness triumphed, tearing society itself to pieces. Our very levellers were Christians, and besides all, our work was shot down, and order in the large sense was never violated. Where are the French Seldens and Cokes?

3rd, The question of the revolutionary personnel is a very important one, and has never been done justice to. It is certainly true that the majority of peers and landholders were on the side of the crown during our civil war. But, for all that, the revolt was headed by gentlemen. The chief of the house of Percy was not under the king's banner. Devereux, Fiennes, Montagu, Fairfax, Greville (Lord Brooke,)— these are the names of leading parliamentarians, and are all names of prime quality. Cromwell, Hampden, Waller, Haselrig, Ireton, Bradshaw, were all gentlemen in the regular ancient sense of that word. Social distinctions existed on their side, as they did on the other. Never, for an instant, did the rabble get the upper hand. In fact, the rabble (as Sir Walter Scott somewhere observes) used to take whichever side happened to be strongest in their neighbourhood. They had nothing to do with the affair, unless it was to turn a penny by selling provisions to the armies. So little is the social nature of the civil wars understood in England,

that dunces who write Radicalism in obscure papers sign themselves "Hampden," as if their political position was any thing like that of a great country gentleman whose ancestors had represented Bucks under the Plantagenets, and whose regiment took his livery as their uniform. What he could have in common with an angry ten-pounder of our day, the reader may guess. Were such a man alive now, he would probably be a Whig member for Bucks, married to a Cavendish, and denounced by his sham namesake, weekly, as a "bloated oligarch !"

It may be thought that we have dwelt too long on this feature of the English revolution; but the truth is, that it had far more to do with the difference between the movements than is supposed. There is a certain dignity about the English one which contrasts strikingly with the frenzied blackguardism of the Parisian mob. Take the respective treatment of the sovereigns for instance. When the grim Bradshaw addressed Charles as "Charles Stuart," that was, at least, the king's name; but to call Louis the Sixteenth and his family "Capet," was a bit of vulgar burlesque. It was carrying what is called caddism into politics-it was degrading history. Too much in the French Revolution reminds one that its

heroes were, many of them, low fellows-playing on the stage of history tricks that would have been thought base and vulgar in a tap-room. Hence, one is not surprised to find Mr. Carlyle observing, that this Revolution was one of the greatest works in history, performed by the smallest men.

Of these men, one has, in a peculiar degree, been considered by posterity as the representative of every thing that was horrible in the Revolution-all its dirt and all its blood. Of course we allude to Robespierre-to whom a special essay is devoted in this volume. Croker's Robespierre is one of the best of these essays; and not the less so, because the veteran Tory fairly does justice to the strange man-does not consider him a mere butcher for the sake of butchery; but seems to favour the modern and (we believe) true theory, that he was a fanatic. This makes the man a more pardonable, though scarcely a less wonderful, monster -the green, bilious, cold-hearted, one-idea'd dictator of the terror! We transcribe a passage or two here-curious, at least, because any thing decently civil to that dead Jacobin must have been wrung from Croker by sheer pressure of truth :—

A different and more considerable class of writers have been carried, by various motives, into an opposite, yet almost equally false estimate of his character. They represent him as a 'plat coquin'-a 'niais,' a low fellow of no abilities, raised to eminence by mere accident, bloodthirsty without object or measure, and instigated to enormous wickedness by a blind and gratuitous malevolence against the human race. This is, à priori, incredible, and is indeed contradicted by the facts of the case. Robespierre must have been a man of considerable abilities, well educated, a tolerable writer, an effective speaker, and, at least, a clever party tactician. That he was a respectable scholar may be inferred from an anecdote recorded by Vilatte, a juror of the Revolutionary Tribunal, who chose to call himself Sempronius Gracchus. Happening to be in Barrère's room one day, Robespierre came in, and seeing a new face, asked Who is that young man?' 'Oh,' said Barrère, 'tis Sempronius Gracchus, one of Sempronius Gracchus, one of ours!' exclaimed Robespierre. No, no; I see you have forgotten your Cicero's Offices; that aristocrat only praises Sempronius Gracchus as a contrast to his sons, and to make them appear to be seditious agitators.' In a season of general brutality, profligacy, and corruption, his manners and conduct were decent, and his personal integrity unimpeached. He had neither the eloquence of Vergniaud nor the vigour of Danton, but he had a combination of qualities which enabled him to subdue them, as well as all other rivals, and to raise himself to the supreme authority on the ruins both of the kingdom and the republic.

ours.

6

These things happened in our own time-thousands are still living who saw them, yet it seems almost incredible that batches (fournées-such was the familiar phrase)-of sixty victims should be condemned in one morning by the same tribunal, and executed the same afternoon on the same scaffold. These batches comprised all ranks, ages, sexes: the most different

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