I. THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION . . . . 1 II. VERSAILLES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 III. ECONOMIC CRISIS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 IV. CONVOCATION OF THE STATES GENERAL . . . . . . . 35 V. FRANCE COMES TO VERSAILLES . . . . . . . . . . . 52 VI. FROM VERSAILLES TO PARIS . . . . . . . . . . . . 70 VII. THE ASSEMBLY DEMOLISHES PRIVILEGE . . . . . . . 89 VIII. THE FLIGHT TO VARENNES . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 IX. WAR BREAKS OUT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123 X. THE MASSACRE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139 XI. ENDING THE MONARCHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157 XII. THE FALL OF THE GIRONDE . . . . . . . . . . . . 170 XIII. THE REIGN OF TERROR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185 XIV. THERMIDOR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 202 XV. THE LAST DAYS OF THE CONVENTION . . . . . . . . 222 XVI. THE DIRECTOIRE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 239 XVII. ART AND LITERATURE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 262 INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279 {1} THE FRENCH REVOLUTION CHAPTER I THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION The magnitude of an event is too apt to lie with its reporter, and the reporter often fails in his sense of historical proportion. The nearer he is to the event the more authority he has as a witness, but the less authority as a judge. It is time alone can establish the relation and harmony of things. This is notably the case with the greatest event of modern European history, the French Revolution, and the first task of the historian writing a century later, is to attempt to catch its perspective. To do this the simplest course will be to see how the Revolution has been interpreted from the moment of its close to the present day. It was Madame de Stael, under the influence of Constant, who first made Europe listen to reason after the Bourbon restoration of 1815. {2} Her _Considerations sur la Revolution francaise_, published in 1818, one year after her death, was a bold though temperate plea for the cause of political liberty. At a moment of reaction when the Holy Alliance proclaimed the fraternity not of men but of monarchs, and the direct delegation by Divine Providence of its essential virtues to Alexander, Frederick William and Francis,--at a moment when the men of the Convention were proscribed as regicides, when the word Jacobin sent a thrill of horror down every respectable spinal chord, the daughter of Necker raised her voice to say that if, during the stormy years just passed, the people of France had done nothing but stumble from crime to folly and from folly to crime, the fault did not, after all, lie with them, but with the old regime. If Frenchmen had failed to show the virtues of freemen, it was because they had for so many centuries been treated as slaves. This was in 1818, three years after Waterloo.