I

LECTURE XL.

REIGN OF TERROR.

HAVE endeavoured in the two last lectures to give you some general notice of what was passing in Paris and in the rest of France during the Reign of Terror. You cannot be too well acquainted with it.

I shall therefore attempt, in the lecture of to-day, to offer you a new source of information. I shall refer you to the pages of the Moniteur, the great national gazette of France at the time. I will, in the first place, however, say a few words in the way of preface.

Such scenes as I have already alluded to could not but produce a strong impression on the minds of all the thinking men of Europe.

In the parliamentary debates of your own country you will find a very able and elaborate description of the system of the Jacobins in a speech made by the present Marquis Wellesley, then Lord Mornington, in his place in the House of Commons; it is highly worth your reading. Strong facts are alluded to; and in like manner, all through the later works of Mr. Burke, the system of the Jacobins is always depicted in the most vivid colours by this great writer; and both in these later works, and in this speech of Lord Mornington, and again in the speeches of Mr. Pitt, and in various pamphlets of the day, nothing can be so repulsive as the representations that are given; so that I have sometimes been inclined to suspect that the picture had been overcharged; but I have turned over the pages of the Moniteurs, and often been almost surprised to find the dreadful facts and scenes, to which our orators and writers referred, appearing regularly inserted, without the slightest remark or comment, in these official gazettes, for such at the time they were. The result

of the whole of the impression that I have received induces me to recommend you to do the same.

I know not that the labour is very great of consulting the columns of this daily newspaper through the years 1793 and 1794; when you are acquainted with the history, your eye will easily fasten on those parts of these journals that more especially deserve your attention. The military reports, of which they chiefly consist (after reading a few, to see their vaunting, revolutionary style and manner), you may pass over, and you may easily select from the rest such reports and speeches, addressed to the Convention on other subjects, as will repay your labour. As usual, they strike you more when seen in their proper place; and that such facts and such scenes and such reasonings as appear should be found in the common daily paper, in the dull, grave, official gazette of the country, conveys an impression that cannot be described of the extraordinary state of society at this period in Paris and in France, of the unexampled situation (it must be confessed) of Europe, when such a people, as we see here depicted, were overrunning it with their armies; of the most unexpected and appalling issue at which the progress of the new opinions had, from one circumstance and another, at last arrived.

To impart to you, as well as I can, something of the impression which I have myself received, I will now mention to you what are the general articles of information, and some of the particulars, which I observed, as I turned over the columns of those Moniteurs that were published during the year 1793, and to the fall of Robespierre in the middle of 1794.

My lecture will thus be rendered a lecture of detail, and all detail is an exercise of patience; but it is on occasions like these that men of philosophic minds have such an advantage over others; no detail is fatiguing to them, if it furnish them with any facts; it is here that lies, as they well know, the great province of instruction. Facts are the great object of their inquiry, and if they can be put into possession of these facts, they ask no more. They say with Archimedes of old, dor 48 σтw, give me a foundation on which to rest my reasonings, and leave me to build the proper theory and draw the proper

conclusions. Look, for instance, at the History of Hume; enjoy, if you please, the beautiful narrative and the striking remarks with which it is accompanied, but turn by all means to each appendix, and see the manner in which facts of every kind, often to appearance quite insignificant, are gathered up by this meditating, sagacious observer, and converted to some of the most useful purposes of history. You must try to do the same to-day yourselves. I will read you extracts from the daily journals of France, these are to be your facts; and as I read, you are to consider the conclusions that can be drawn from them. At every moment, while I am reading to you, you are to ask yourselves, if such could be the paragraphs found in a common newspaper, or rather the government newspaper, what must have been the situation of France, and of Europe itself, which is always so connected with France? -Certainly a situation most unparalleled.

After these prefatory remarks, I will proceed to give you some general account of what I observed while turning over the leaves of the Moniteur.

In the first place, I perceived extracts given from our own debates in both houses of parliament, abridged, but affording the French nation a general notion of the nature of the speeches and views of the leading members. Lord Stanhope seems to have been their favourite; Pitt only another name for the principle of evil. The comments on the English nation and its different statesmen are sometimes curious.

Again in the Moniteurs you will also find, very often, the proceedings of the Jacobin club; always more furious, generally more important, than those of the Convention itself. It is in these sittings, that may best be seen the real nature of the Jacobin party. You have the speeches and views of the members, sometimes singularly atrocious, sometimes singularly absurd, not unfrequently, both; the same may be said of many of the addresses that continually came from different sections and municipalities of Paris, from different societies and departments in the kingdom; all highly characteristic of this extraordinary period.

The general fury and political fanaticism, the extravagances to which the new opinions were at last carried, are here seen: and here is also shown, what we are to expect, when all the

and when every up,

common notions of mankind are broken man can find an audience for every opinion or doctrine or project, that may have occurred to his own particular mind or fancy. This is now, as these dreadful men were not permitted by the Almighty ultimately to overturn the world (though for a time they shook it to its centre), this is now, the great edification of the scene.

You see too announced in the Moniteurs, many of the books that were published at the time, the spectacles that were exhibited, all characteristic of the period, and numerous notices of the politics of other countries. Accounts too are given of the trials of public offenders, of suspected or unsuccessful generals, Custine for instance, of the queen, the Girondists. The whole is always a picture of the exoteric history of the Revolution; the interior springs and movements of the machine are not visible. This may in general be said of the Moniteurs all through the Revolution. But during this particular period of the reign of the Jacobins, even in the face of this exterior history, traits are visible of the most extraordinary nature, and such as are now perhaps fitted to furnish you with the most durable and accurate impression of the whole, provided you make what you observe, as I have already intimated to you, the subject of your reflections, and continually ask yourselves if such was the grave, cold, dull, formal official gazette of the period, what must all the time have been the real scene?

And now to give a few instances and illustrate a little what I am saying. During the earlier part of the year 1793, the pages of the Moniteur are occupied with the trial of the king, the concerns of the Girondists, and the war with England. In the mean time you may observe a curious article under the title of "Etat civil." This article may be often seen in the Moniteurs, and it is a sort of official account of the divorces, marriages, births, and deaths, that took place in the city of Paris. In the Moniteur of the 3rd of April, 1793, for instance, you will find the divorces and marriages of the preceding months summed up: divorces, 562; marriages, 1875. Conceive what must be the state of society, when the divorces were to the marriages, in about the proportion of three to ten. And in this sort of manner they proceeded; not the slightest

comment made on these divorces and marriages, any more than on the births and deaths; all appearing to be equally thought matters of course. In page 278 of the Moniteur for Frimaire, 1794, they are summed up for the month of November, 1793:—divorces, 136; marriages 832; for the month of Pluviose, divorces, 178; marriages, 810; making a proportion of three hundred and fourteen, to one thousand six hundred and forty-two, or about one to five and a fifth nearly; which, though better than before, gives still a most melancholy picture of the consequences of turning marriage into a contract merely civil, to be dissolved at the pleasure of the parties.

But the articles connected with the insurrection and subjugation of Lyons, as the year rolls on, arrest our attention, and as they are specimens of the Reign of Terror, of the nature of the Jacobins, and of their mode of defending the Revolution, or rather of defending their own party, and of contending with all those enemies, which their violence had raised up against them, I will give you a few extracts from the speeches and reports of the principal actors in the scene. But in the first place, as a sort of ludicrous preparation for what you will have to read in the regular histories of the cruelties exercised at Lyons and La Vendée, and in Paris itself, Bourdeaux, and other places, you will observe a curious article in one of the Moniteurs in November, 1793. You will see a regular deputation come from one of the sections of Paris, and the orator gravely proposes to familiarize the people with virtue; that therefore, in Paris, the Hotel de Dieu shall be called "Temple of Republican Humanity," the adjacent streets, "Generosity Street," "Sensibility Street," &c. &c.; the next order of streets "Temperance Street," Sobriety Street," &c. &c. "And thus," says the orator," thus will the people have every moment the name of some virtue or other in their mouths, and they will soon have morality in their hearts."

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Again before I proceed, I must beg you always to observe that, in every instance of extract or reference to passages in these Moniteurs, I find myself obliged, from want of time, so to abridge and mutilate them, that I do no proper justice to what I conceive is sometimes the atrociousness, sometimes the absurdity, of the original article. I am so limited in this