E-text prepared by Richard Hulse, Graeme Mackreth, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by Internet Archive (https://archive.org) Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustrations. See 59162-h.htm or 59162-h.zip: (https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/59162/pg59162-images.html) or (https://www.gutenberg.org/files/59162/59162-h.zip) Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive. See https://archive.org/details/frenchrevolution00abborich [Illustration: MARIE ANTOINETTE.] THE FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1789 As Viewed in the Light of Republican Institutions. by JOHN S. C. ABBOTT. With One Hundred Engravings. New York: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, Franklin Square. 1859. Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year one thousand eight hundred and fifty-nine, by Harper & Brothers, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the Southern District of New York. PREFACE. For some years the author of this work has been collecting materials for writing the history of the French Revolution. With this object in view he has visited Paris, wishing also to become familiar with the localities rendered immortal by the varied acts of this drama--the most memorable tragedy, perhaps, which has as yet been enacted upon the theatre of time. In addition to the aids which he has thus derived from a brief sojourn in Paris, he has also found the library of Bowdoin College peculiarly rich in all those works of religious and political philosophizings which preceded and ushered in these events, and in the narratives of those contemporary historians who recorded the scenes as they occurred, or which they themselves witnessed. Governor Bowdoin, whose library was the nucleus of the present college library, seems to have taken a special interest in collecting all the writings of the French philosophers and all the works of contemporary authors bearing upon the French Revolution, including--the most important of all--full files of the Moniteur.