The Long Nineteenth Century: A History of Europe from 1789 to 1918. Charles Downer Hazen

each year. The example of America was again recommended but was not followed because the Convention feared that a single executive, a president, might remind the French too sharply of monarchy or might become a new Robespierre.

      The Constitution of 1795 was eminently the result of experience, not of abstract theorizing. It established a bourgeois republic, as the Constitution of 1791 had established a bourgeois monarchy. The Republic was in the hands, therefore, of a privileged class, property being the privilege.

      But the Convention either did not wish or did not dare to trust the voters to elect whom they might desire to the new Councils. Was there not danger that they might elect monarchists and so hand over the new republican constitution to its enemies? Would the members of the Convention, who enjoyed power, who did not wish to step down and out, and yet who knew that they were unpopular because of the record of the Convention, stand any chance of election to the new legislature? Yet the habit of power was agreeable to them. Would the Republic be safe? Was it not their first duty to provide that it should not fall into hostile hands?

      Under the influence of such considerations the Convention passed two decrees, supplementary to the constitution, providing of the two-thirds of each Council should be chosen from the present members of the Convention.

      The constitution was overwhelmingly approved by the voters to whom it was submitted for ratification. But the two decrees aroused decided opposition. They were represented as a barefaced device where-by men who knew themselves unpopular could keep themselves in power for a while longer. Although the decrees were finally ratified, it was by much smaller majorities than had ratified the constitution. The vote of Paris was overwhelmingly against them.

      Nor did Paris remain contented with casting a hostile vote. It proposed to prevent this consummation. An insurrection was organized against the Convention, this time by the bourgeois and to the wealthier people, in reality a royalist project. The Convention intrusted its defense to Barras as commander-in-chief. Barras, who was more a politician than a general, called to his aid a little Corsican officer twenty-five years old who, two years before, had helped recover Toulon for the Republic. This little Buona-Parte, for this is the form in which the famous name appears in the official report of the day, was an artillery officer, a believer in the efficacy of that weapon. Hearing that there were forty cannon in a camp outside the city in danger of being seized by the insurgents, Bonaparte sent a young dare-devil cavalryman, Joachim Murat, to get them. Murat and his men dashed at full speed through the city, drove back the insurgents, seized the cannon and dragged them, always at full speed, to the Tuileries, which they reached by six o'clock in the morning. As one writer has said, "Neither the little general nor the superb cavalier dreamed that, in giving Barras cannon to be used against royalists, each was winning a crown for himself."

      The cannon were placed about the Tuileries, where sat the Convention, rendering it impregnable. Every member of the Convention was given a rifle and cartridges. On the 13th of Vendemiaire (October 5) on came the insurgents in two columns, down the streets on both sides of the Seine. Suddenly at four-thirty in the afternoon a violent cannonading was heard. It was Bonaparte making his debut. The Convention was saved and an astounding career was begun. This is what Carlyle, in his vivid way, calls "the whiff of grapeshot which ends what we specifically call the French Revolution," an imaginative and inaccurate statement. Though it did not end the Revolution, it did, however, end one phase of it and inaugurated another.

      Three weeks later, on October 26, 1795, the Convention declared itself dissolved. It had had an extraordinary history, only a few aspects of which have been described in this brief account. In the three years of its existence it had displayed prodigious activity along many lines. Meeting in the midst of appalling national difficulties born of internal dissension and foreign war, attacked by sixty departments of France and by an astonishing array of foreign powers, England, Prussia, Austria, Piedmont, Holland, Spain, it had triumphed all along the line. Civil war had been stamped out and in the summer of 1795 three hostile states, Prussia, Holland, and Spain, made peace with France and withdrew from the war. France was actually in possession of the Austrian Netherlands and of the German provinces on the west bank of the Rhine. She had practically attained the so-called natural boundaries. War still continued with Austria and England. That problem was passed on to the Directory.

      During these three years the Convention had proclaimed the Republic in the classic land of monarchy, had voted two constitutions, had sanctioned two forms of worship and had finally separated church and state, a thing of extreme difficulty in any European country. It had put a king to death, had organized and endured a reign of tyranny, which long discredited the very idea of a republic among multitudes of the French, and which immeasurably weakened the Republic by cutting off so many men who, had they lived, would have been its natural and experienced defenders for a full generation longer, since most of them were young. The Republic used up its material recklessly, so that when the man arrived who wished to end it and establish his personal rule, this sallow Italian Buona-Parte, his task was comparatively easy, the opposition being leaderless or poorly led. On the other hand, the Republic had had its thrilling victories, its heroes, and its martyrs, whose careers and teachings were to be factors in the history of France for fully a century to come.

      The Convention had also worked mightily and achieved much in the avenues of peaceful development. It had given France a system of weights and measures, more perfect than the of the world had ever seen, the metric system, since widely adopted by other countries. It had laid the foundations and done the preliminary work for a codification of the laws, an achievement which Napoleon was to carry to completion and of which he was to monopolize the renown. It devoted fruitful attention to the problem of national education, believing with Danton, that "next to bread, education is the first need of the people," and that there ought to be a national system, free, compulsory, and entirely secular. The time has come, said the eloquent tribune, to establish the great principle which appears to be ignored, "that children belong to the Republic before they belong to their parents." A great system of primary and secondary education was elaborated but it was not put into actual operation, owing to the lack of funds. On the other hand, much was done for certain special schools. Among the invaluable creations of the Convention were certain institutions whose fame has institutions steadily increased, whose influence has been profound, the Normal School, the Polytechnic School, the Law and Medical Schools of Paris, the Conservatory of Arts and Crafts, the National Archives, the Museum of the Louvre, the National Library, and the Institute. While some of these had their roots in earlier institutions, all such were so reorganized and amplified and enriched as to make them practically new. To keep the balance of our judgment clear we should recall these imperishable services to civilization rendered by the same assembly which is more notorious because of its connection with the iniquitous Reign of Terror. The Republic had its glorious trophies, its honorable records, from which later times were to derive inspiration and instruction.