The Marriage of the Queen, and her Sister precipitated against Page The Chief Liberals determine to refrain; but the Seditious Provisional Government decided at the Office of National Lamartine supports the Idea of a Republic, and carries it, the Socialists object to convening a Parliament immediately Pa - 6 6 Napoleon elected President of the Republic, December, 1848 Failing to carry that he meditates a Coup d'état He also demands the Repeal of the Law limiting the Suffrage - 6 HISTORY OF FRANCE. CHAPTER XLII. THE DIRECTORY. 1795-1799. Ir is strange to find, but impossible not to see, a considerable resemblance between the reign of Louis the Fourteenth and that of the Convention. Both were supreme and terrible dictatorships; the one of a personage who concentrated in himself all the pride, prejudice, and powers of a dominant upper class; the other of the very antipodes in the social scale, of not merely the people, but of the most destitute and reckless of the people-the very dregs, in fact. It would be difficult to say which was more intolerant or more cruel, the monarch or the mob; for St. Just had reason to plead that the republic sacrificed no more victims than the monarchy. Louis striped, branded, and slaughtered, chiefly the middle and lower class of the south. These, brutalised by his persecutions and proscriptions, took, after a century's lapse, their revenge, the hordes of Marseilles and Avignon bringing CHAP. XLII. CHAP. to the capital their frantic taste for bloodshed. dominant passion of the monarchy, military cond was that of the Convention also; and the resul same-exulting triumphs followed by menacing rev which demanded of the country to meet them al its last man and its last coin. The financial exhau of both periods was the same; in what fashion ruptcy could be best committed being the probler to their successors by the grand monarch and the assembly. The trade and industry of the country almost as much annihilated at one epoch as at the Nor was the internal administration very diff The royal intendants were the conventional comm ries, equally arbitrary; and if not equally oppressi was because the intendants had merely to press the weight that already existed, whilst the Conve had to reverse it. This placing of the poor in the tion which the rich had held produced the aggra horrors of social revolution, the more horrible beca was in some degree called for; each class when i uppermost abusing its power, and effacing the Chr law of fraternity by that of the wild beasts which r each other but as objects of rivalry or prey. No could be more similar than the principles which act Louis the Fourteenth and the Convention. Bot lieved that they had each the right to dictate the religious, and political opinions of their subjects. To loyalty was treason to the king, to profess it was tr to the republic. The worship of birth enjoined in epoch was a capital crime in the other. An embroi coat betokened authority at the beginning of the cen rags were the garb of sovereignty in 1792. nothing perhaps did the exaggerated systems come closely together than in their ultimate conseque which were in both cases to destroy utterly, and r next to impossible, the principles and political sy which they strove to found. Louis the Fourt B strained the sinews of absolute monarchy till they broke. His successor sate upon the throne, but without force to hold the sceptre. The convention so degraded and disgraced democratic government, that a free general election at its close would have extinguished the republic at once. The Conventionalists, however, managed to prolong their own reign, and by so doing merely gave time to enable a soldier to found a military empire, in the place of the constitutional one, which might much more easily have been established in 1796 than it was twenty years later. If the Convention bears such strong resemblance to the most brilliant reign of the monarchy, the likeness between the governments which each begot as its successor is stronger still. The Regency and the Directory are twins. Under both oppressed mankind began to breathe, to talk and to live more freely, yet it was to make no good use of such freedom. The austerity of Louis and the terror of the Convention had suppressed all vice save that of cruelty and servile fear. Society, the moment it was freed from both, rushed into the extreme of dissoluteness and pleasure. Religion, scoffed at one epoch, was proscribed in the other. The Convention had abolished it, as well as the ties of marriage. Barras, the director, was a man of much the same stamp as Cardinal Dubois. The Luxemburg became a Palais Royal. The fall of assignats, and the attempt to replace or bolster them up, led to jobbery as frantic as that which Law inaugurated. Wealth became the sole aim and worship. And complete epicureanism succeeded to the fanaticism, religious or antireligious, of the preceding epochs. The epicureanism of the Regency differed indeed from that of the Directory. In the former epoch it was young, sanguine in its inoral and political aspirations; it was looked to as a principle that might regenerate mankind, and save it from bigotry if not from despotism. It produced Voltaire, grew and CHAP. XLII. |