him and love him with an enthusiasm which even friendship rarely shows,
overwhelmingly decide our judgment in his favour, and make his career
one of the most absorbing pages in the absorbing history of the time.
Mirabeau did not live to see his hopes accomplished. On the 2nd April,
1791, worn out by work and illness, the great statesman died, and with
him died any hope that still existed of reconciling the Revolution with
the Crown.
CHAPTER VI.
THE RISE OF THE JACOBIN PARTY.
The French Revolution can be divided into many periods, and several
parties directed it in turn. But, broadly speaking, besides its minor
phases, it contained two movements, successive and distinct. The
first movement began in 1789, and lost its force in 1791. The second
movement came to the front in 1791, when the earlier one was dying
out; helped by external circumstances, it quickly swept everything
before it; and it carried on the Revolution, by new methods and for
different objects, until 1794. The first movement was chiefly political
in form, and although social questions entered deeply into it and gave
it its irresistible force, still to the end its social aspects were
subordinate. Its leaders were politicians. Its object was the creation
of a new political order. Its attention was fixed upon political
change. The second movement had its political aspects too, and
political issues mingled largely with it. But it sprang primarily from
social causes. Its leaders succeeded because they claimed to be social
reformers. Its favourite objects were the transference of property, the
extinction of poverty and riches, the creation of a new social state.
The one movement of course was inextricably bound up with the other,
and no exact dates marked their beginnings or their ends. But the rise
of the new principles, and their triumph over the old, was the chief
characteristic of the later Revolution, and was the reason why, after
1791, the Revolution went forward and developed afresh.
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