The Years of Endurance

by Arthur Bryant

  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, watched 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 quarter 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 Champs de Mars: " 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 enemies. 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 guns 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 the Jacobins. The "Mountain," as they were called from their seats in the Assembly, stood for .a collective dictatorship, the crushing of all opposition .and a permanent state of siege enforced by mob terror. They had three allies -the foreigner, the stars in their courses, 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 Champagne," 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 the first had regarded the Revolution 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

  Pitt was above all things a practising statesman. He was an innovator, trained in the scientific principles of the new economics,

  1 Looking, as one of his fellow-passengers described him, " the very picture of a journeyman tailor who has been drunk and playing at ninepins for the first three da
ys of the week and is returning to his work on Thursday."— H. M. C. Dropmore, II, 316.

  who cared nothing for theory, everything for measurable results. A self-appointed committee of ignorant journeymen, passing omniscient resolutions on far-reaching issues of which they knew nothing, or a mob wreaking the basest passions of human nature on society to square the theories of excitable orators, were not, according to his scheme of things, likely to advance the course of rational progress, He was the parent of more practical reforms in administration and political economy than almost any other English statesman: free trade; a statistical franchise; the Sinking Fund; the Income Tax and the fiscal principle of graduation; national insurance and family allowances; the abolition of slavery and the end of religious disability, can all in part trace their ancestry to him. But he approached them with his eye, not on the horizon like a man of the study, but always on the treacherous and broken ground at his feet. He was wholly out of sympathy with what he once described as " the vain and false philosophy . . . which refers all things to theory, nothing to practice—which rejects experience, which substitutes visionary hypotheses for the solid test of experience, and bewilders the human mind in a maze of opinions when it should be employed in directing to action."

  He was confronted with the spectacle of frenzied enthusiasts— men foolish or bad or both—who wanted to jeopardise all his careful, hard-wrought progress and the peaceful and stable society of which he was the trustee for the sake of general propositions which to his empirical mind were almost without meaning. At that very moment Chauvelin, the agent of the French Government in England, was appeasing his new masters in Paris by fomenting plots among British malcontents to seize the Tower, arm the mob and proclaim English and Irish republics in dependence on France. Across the Channel the Convention—a body whose extravagant language appeared to Pitt frequently to verge on lunacy—was giving, an enthusiastic reception to the complimentary Addresses sent it by British Corresponding Societies. Its President had declared that Britons, once the masters of the French in the social arts, were now their disciples and, treading in their steps, would shortly strike a blow that would resound to the extremities of Asia.

  Pitt had good ground for fearing the spread of revolutionary doctrines among the poorer classes. In the country men faced a hungry winter over blackened crops: in the towns, where there was a mysterious commercial crisis, the price of bread rose alarmingly. An epidemic of strikes, food riots and wild talk in taverns had broken out, fomented, it was believed, by French agents. At Manchester and Sheffield disaffection was even reported among the troops. Nor was the language of a little section of ambitious aristocrats out of office, who pictured Carlton House as a second Palais Royal and themselves as Tribunes of the People, calculated to allay unrest.

  It was on a Britain so divided that the news burst of the sudden French advance. On the 24th October rough old Custine—" General Moustache "—captured Mainz and, striking terror into the Rhineland, advanced swiftly on Frankfurt. Four days later Dumouriez, sweeping back the Austrians from the long-beleagured fortresses of the north, entered Belgium at the head of more than 70,000 men. On November 6th he won the first great victory of the Republic at Jemappes as a cloud of skirmishers, followed by columns of ragged fanatics chanting the Marseillaise' drove the white-coated Austrians from the low heights near Mons. A week later they were in Brussels.

  The politicians in Paris went mad with joy. Suddenly the whole earth seemed to be coming their way. Nothing could now stop the advance of their armies and of their apocalyptic creed: nothing should be allowed to. On November 16th an excited Convention passed two Decrees, the first empowering their generals to follow the flying foe into neutral territory, the other declaring the navigation of the Scheldt estuary—granted exclusively to Holland by a long series of international agreements—open to all nations by the Law of Nature. This was followed by the appearance of French gunboats in the river on their way to reduce Antwerp.

  Britain was the principal guarantor of the Scheldt treaties. She was also the United Netherlands' ally. Only three days before, the Dutch Ambassador had asked London for an assurance that Britain would honour her pledge in the event of a French invasion. Pitt, whose historic conception of European peace was founded 011 respect for international obligations, could only agree. " However unfortunate it would be to find this country in any shape committed," he wrote, " it seems absolutely impossible to hesitate as to supporting our ally in case of necessity." But he added that he hoped for an opportunity to reconcile Continental differences and so end the war, leaving France to arrange her internal affairs in her own way. For he and his Government still clung to their policy of appeasement. As late as November 6th, the Foreign Secretary wrote that his chief ambition was to know that he had kept England from sharing in the evils that surrounded her. " I am more than convinced that this can only be done by keeping wholly and entirely aloof."

  It was one thing to wish to keep aloof: another to do so. In the van of the French armies moved a swarm of French agents preparing a " liberating " road for them. A number of these gentlemen were hard at work in Holland, where they had long been sowing trouble in a fertile soil. In the middle of November the British Ambassador at the Hague reported that there was scarcely a village without a seditious club and a travelling Jacobin. It was obvious that the French meant to follow up ideological infiltration with an invasion. It was equally plain that the Dutch plutocracy was incapable of stopping either.

  The rulers of Holland, a rich and timorous merchant oligarchy, did everything within their power to avoid inflaming their powerful neighbour. As long as it was possible they refrained from formally asking Britain to fulfil her treaty obligations. But after the fall of Antwerp on November 28th and a peremptory ultimatum demanding the passage of French troops through the frontier fortress of Maestricht, they begged that a British squadron should be assembled in the Downs. An intercepted letter from Dumouriez to the French envoy at the Hague made that general's aggressive intentions unmistakable.

  Pitt was thus faced with the fact that the war he had struggled so hard to avoid was inevitable unless the Convention relinquished its designs on Holland. The retention of the Dutch coastline and the great anchorages of the Scheldt in friendly hands was a vital British interest: the Dutch alliance the keystone of his foreign policy. He could not abandon them at the dictates of frenzied demagogues and of an imaginary " Law of Nature " enforced by French guns. No such canon of law—let alone the exclusive right of French politicians to interpret it—was recognised by his country.

  On November 29th Grenville had a conversation with Chauvelin. It was a chilling interview,1 for the Foreign Office with characteristic

  1 It opened with the Foreign Secretary motioning Chauvelin to the smallest chair in the room and the latter promptly occupying the largest.

  pedantry refused to admit the French Ambassador's official status, the royal government which had sent him to London no longer existing. At Grenville's request Chauvelin affirmed, not very convincingly, his government's desire to respect Dutch neutrality. Three days later on the suggestion of a well-meaning Member of Parliament Pitt gave an informal interview to Maret, a French diplomat then on a private visit to England.1 The conversation was friendly, but the Prime Minister warned the would-be appeaser that any act of aggression against Holland would lead to immediate war. When Maret's account of the interview was published in Paris, this warning was deliberately suppressed.

  For though a few of the wiser Revolutionary leaders still wanted Anglo-French friendship, others had made up their minds that a war with Britain was necessary. In their view France's interest was not peace but conquest as a Revolutionary instrument. Without it the dictatorship would lose its raison d'etre. Even the Jacobin Robespierre, who had first opposed a European war out of fear of a counter-revolutionary dictatorship, now advocated its extension. To preserve their monopoly of power, the Party chiefs had to continue down the bloody slope or be overwhelmed by the forces
they had aroused. The ease with which victory had so far crowned their audacity encouraged them to go on: to unloose the Terror of the armed mob beyond the frontiers and again conquer. Aggression, too, was needed to replenish their coffers and recoup the moneylenders and stock-jobbers. War against Holland, with its international banks and gold reserves, offered a wonderful opportunity.

  Success depended on the ruling class of every nation proving as weak and irresolute as those of France's immediate neighbours. But an unpleasant shock was now administered to the Revolutionary statesmen by England,, which their agents and the Gallophil enthusiasts of-the Corresponding Societies had painted as ripe for revolution. For foreign criticism of British institutions instead of dividing the nation united it: foreign victories instead of intimidating aroused it. That eternally recurrent spectacle took every one, even Englishmen, by surprise.

  For from every county there suddenly poured in resolutions by spontaneous " Loyal Associations " of yeomen, gentry and shopkeepers, promising the Government their support to maintain the

  1 Afterwards, as Due de Bassano, Napoleon's Foreign Minister.

  rights and liberties of Englishmen. When Pitt on December ist, at last openly declaring that nothing but readiness for war could preserve peace, issued a Proclamation calling out two-thirds of the Militia and summoned Parliament to meet in a fortnight, he was universally applauded.

  The half-baked enthusiasts, who a few weeks earlier had been acclaiming French victories and penning fraternal greetings to the Convention, now found themselves in a hopeless minority, scorned by their neighbours and threatened by the magistrates. The hour had struck, as often before in her history, when Britain with a single voice resolved to: