History of the English People, Volume VIII: Modern England, 1760-1815Green, John Richard
History
History of the English People, Volume VIII: Modern England, 1760-1815
Green, John Richard
Great Britain -- History
Such a course could only knit men of all parties together in a common
resentment; and the effect of these revolutionary efforts on the friends
of the Revolution was seen in a declaration which they wrested from Fox,
that at such a moment even the discussion of parliamentary reform was
inexpedient. A far worse result was the new strength they gave to its
foes. Burke was still working hard in writings whose extravagance of
style was forgotten in their intensity of feeling to spread alarm
throughout Europe. He had from the first encouraged the emigrant princes
to take arms, and sent his son to join them at Coblentz. "Be alarmists,"
he wrote to them; "diffuse terror!" But the royalist terror which he
sowed would have been of little moment had it not roused a revolutionary
terror in France itself. At the threat of war against the Emperor the
two German Courts had drawn together, and reluctantly abandoning all
hope of peace with France, gathered eighty thousand men under the Duke
of Brunswick, and advanced slowly in August 1792 on the Meuse. France,
though she had forced on the struggle, was really almost defenceless;
her forces in Belgium broke at the first shock of arms into shameful
rout; and the panic, as it spread from the soldiery to the nation at
large, took violent and horrible forms. At the first news of Brunswick's
advance the mob of Paris broke into the Tuileries on the 10th of August;
and at its demand Lewis, who had taken refuge in the Assembly, was
suspended from his office and imprisoned in the Temple. In the following
September, while General Dumouriez by boldness and adroit negotiations
was arresting the progress of the Allies in the defiles of the Argonne,
bodies of paid murderers butchered the royalist prisoners who crowded
the gaols of Paris, with a view of influencing the elections to a new
Convention which met to proclaim the abolition of royalty. The retreat
of the Prussian army, whose numbers had been reduced by disease till an
advance on Paris became impossible, and a brilliant victory won by
Dumouriez at Jemappes which laid the Netherlands at his feet, turned the
panic of the French into a wild self-confidence. In November the
Convention decreed that France offered the aid of her soldiers to all
nations who would strive for freedom. "All governments are our enemies,"
cried its President; "all peoples are our allies." In the teeth of
treaties signed only two years before, and of the stipulation made by
England when it pledged itself to neutrality, the French Government
resolved to attack Holland, and ordered its generals to enforce by arms
the opening of the Scheldt.
[Sidenote: France declares war with England.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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