the revolutionary tribunal, and the Committee of Public Safety are really the only power in France. But the danger was not over. A foreign foe was on the frontier moving towards the capital, while the provinces in arms were also marching thither to avenge the convention. The only weapon to be used against the enemy at home was terror, while the republican armies were to resist the foe from without. In the midst of these excitements, Marat one of the famed triumviri fell before the knife of Charlotte Corday, the first act of retributive justice, which was to be followed by others, till the whole tribe of monsters should sink one after another into the bloody grave in which they had pushed so many before them.

But as there cannot be agitation without parties, so they began to be formed in the convention, Jacobins as they were, although it had just rid itself of the great conservative party of the Girondins. Part, seeing in how dangerous hands the supreme power of France was placed, demanded the revival of the constitutional ministry, to be independant of the legislative power, and hence of the committee of public welfare. There were also among these radicals, some more moderate than others, as there always must be. There is a conservative part to all radicalism, an upper crust to the lowest stratum, which may be cut off again and againthere still is left an upper surface which the lower must remove, submit to, or perish. Radicals forget this great fact when they begin to hew away the upper classes. The relation still exists-there always will be those more moderate than others. It was so in the convention. Thus we see two incipient parties spring ing out of the Mountain itself, and endeavoring to stay the wild revolutionary energy that was sweeping every thing away in its fury.

In the meantime the Jacobins and their friends declared through the convention, the revolution to be in a state of siege, from the foes without and within, and hence adopted revolutionary measures. A revolutionary army, and a revolutionary police were established. The police watched the republic, and the army defended it; and while the latter was struggling against monarchy, working through its armies, the former attemped to subvert all aristocracy, by imprisoning all suspected persons. The energy of this revolutionary government

was astonishing, for, while it challenged the royalty of Europe to the conflict, and "threw down the head of a king as the gage of battle," it carried out in all its details the severest police regulations that were ever instituted. Revolutionary committees were formed in every part of France, endowed with the power of judging the persons liable to arrest. Paris had forty-eight, and fifty thousand were in operation throughout the kingdom. The result of these revolutionary measures drenched France in blood. At Lyons, the murderous Collot d' Herbois, under sanction of the government, and carrying out its decree-that an army should travel over the provinces, accompanied by artillery and a guillotine---slew by wholesale. Suspected houses were blown up together, and prisoners were arranged in file, with a ditch on either side, to receive the dead bodies, and then mowed down with grape shot. The Rhone ran blood, and its waters became poisoned with the putrid corpses that loaded the stream. Every species of cruelty that depravity could invent was exhibited in these sanguinary scenes. Amidst the groans of the wounded, and shrieks and tears of friends, Collot d' Herbois, and Fouché, and his partisans, rioted with courtezans, and laughed amid the carnage. In five months six thousand were butchered, and double that number driven into exile. At Bordeaux the same sanguinary scenes were enacted, and all the great cities of France felt the vengeance of the Mountain. In Nantes, women and children were mingled up in the massacres in such proportions, that the ordinary modes of execution were unequal to slay the countless victims that were daily offered. Chained together, two and two, they were thrown into the Loire, while soldiers lined the shore with drawn sabres, to despatch those who escaped drowning. Six hundred children perished in this inhuman manner. In another instance five hundred children were led out to be shot;-unaccustomed to fire sufficiently low to hit these innocent children, the soldiers sent their bullets over their heads. Frantic with fear these comparative infants suddenly broke their bonds and rushed in among the soldiers, clinging to their knees, and crying for mercy. But nothing could allay the fiend that had taken possession of the executioners, and the sword hewed down the suppliants by scores. Thirty thou

sand perished in Nantes alone. The head revolutionary tribunal at Paris, of which all others were but shoots, was in the meantime busy at home. Carts were regularly driven up to the door every morning waiting for its load of human bodies. The accusations made without cause, were followed instantaneously by the trial without justice, and the guillotine ended the farce. Fifty a day would be tried and executed. The rolling of tumbrils going to and from the place of execution, carried constant terror to the prisoners who heard it from their dungeons. Men became reckless of life, and danced and sung on the day of their execution, and went joking to the scaffold. Man had lost his humanity, and a spirit of ferocity unheard of before in the annals of history, animated the bosoms of the murderers who sat as judges. It was more than cold-blooded murder-it was a madness or mania as inexplicable, as it was terrific. At first the people seemed to enjoy the excitement of these scenes of horror, and benches were arranged around the guillotine for their accommodation, on which men and women sat and sang ça via! as head after head rolled on the scaffold. Robespierre and his revolutionary tribunal waded in blood, and still the cry was for more. France had lost nearly a million by the revolution; and the blows which had smitten only the upper classes of society began to descend on the lower classes. Then the reaction commenced. Artisans shut up their shops along the street where the carts passed to the guillotine. A solemn feeling, the first indication of returning reason, began to usurp the place of madness. The monsters who sat as gods in the midst of this overthrow of life, were themselves alarmed at the depth to which they had waded in human gore, and looked in vain for some shore to stand on. They could not go back, and it grew wilder as they advanced. The heavens grew dark over head; and they felt the intimations of an approaching storm, that even in its birth-throes betokened a fiercer strength than their

own.

The wave they had gathered, and sent onward had met its limit and was now balancing for its backward march. Danton, who had sickened of the endless murders, was accused as a moderate, and with Camille Desmouslins cast in prison. The revolutionary tribunal he had put in operation, though awe-struck for a moment by his boldness, and alarmed as it heard his voice of thunder hurling defiance into its midst, soon sent

him and his compeers to the guillotine, that still waited for greater victims.

The dethronement of the Deity and instalment of reason in his place, in the person of a lewd woman, alarmed Robespierre, who trembled to see human passion cut loose from all restraint, and he reënthroned the Supreme Ruler in solemn pomp. His haughty bearing on this day turned him from an object of reverence into one of suspicion. Jealousy also began to show itself between the committee of public welfare and the committee of public safety, and sections of both to distrust Robespierre in his rapid strides to supreme power. People began to say, "Robespierre wills it;"" Robespierre demands it." He was the power. This he had sought but wished it without the responsibility. While resentments and jealousies were thus acquiring strength in the different committees, public sympathy began to react against the atrocities to which there seemed no end. In this state of affairs there was wanting only an occasion sufficient to demand boldness of action in the Convention. It was soon furnished in the attack Robespierre made on his old friends, who dared to complain of his arbitrary measures. In a moment of courage Billaud cast off all reserve, and in the midst of the dark hints thrown out in the Convention against Robespierre, accused him abruptly of endeavoring to control the committees, and seeking to be sole master, and lastly of conspiring the day before with the Jacobins to decimate the Convention. The smothered fire had at length burst forth, and the sudden shout," Down with the tyrant!" shook the hall. Robespierre, livid with rage, attempted to speak, but his voice was drowned in the shouts, "arrest!" "accusation!" "to the vote! to the vote!" A decree against him, St. Just and Couthon, was carried.

In the meantime the Jacobins in the Commons were thunderstruck at the sudden fall of their leader. They had been planning a second insurrection against the convention, and the blow had reached them first. The infamous Henriot galloped, half drunk, through the streets, striving to rouse the people. Having misled the gunners in the Place du Carousel, they had pointed their artillery on the hall of the National Convention. The deputies prepared themselves for death, but in the meantime passed a decree of outlawry against Henriot which being read to the soldiers they refused to fire. The National Guard sided with the Convention, and it was over with Robespierre

and his conspirators. Though snatched from the hands of the Convention by the mob, and carried to the Hotel de Ville, they were at length secured. Having been outlawed, there was no need of trial, and they were led off to the execution.

What a change a single day had made in the fate of Robespierre. As we see him lying on a table in the hall of the committee of public welfare pale and haggard, the same blue coat he had worn in pomp and pride at the festival of the Supreme Being, spattered with the blood from his wound, which he vainly strives to staunch with the sheath of his pistol, we learn a lesson on tyranny and not on republicanism we can never forget. The guillotine, to which he had sent so many, finally reached him; and the terrific yell he uttered, freezing every heart with horror, as the bandage was torn from his maimed jaw, letting it drop on his breast, was the knell of the Reign of Terror. Joy and exultation filled every bosom when it was announced that he and his accomplices were no more. Here, the revolution stopped and began to retrogade.

The five years we have thus gone over, stand alone in the history of man. In 1789, the National Assembly overthrew the feudal system and took the first great revolutionary step. In 1791, a Constitution had been given to France, but dissatisfied with its action, a few months after the mob stormed the Tuileries and dethroned the king. The revolution had now awakened the hostility of Europe, and amid the foes without and dangers within, it raged with tenfold fury. As these dangers accumulated and obstacles increased, the last degree of exasperation was reached, and it went on destroying with a blind rage that threatened to overwhelm everything in its passage. With the appearance of mighty armies without and the spectres of bloody plots within, it saw no safety but in indiscriminate slaughter. At the end of 1793, the republican armies were crowned with victory, and the excuse of desperate measures no longer existed, and in the waking up of humanity the tyranny of Terror went down. We cannot follow here the future steps of the National Convention. The heads of the Jacobin party had been cut off, but the members remained to make one more desperate effort for power. Famine too, stalked abroad, furnishing food to nothing but agitation and despair. But general order prevailed-the Jacobin

club was closed-the revolutionary tribunal destroyed, and the insurrections in different parts of the kingdom quelled. The insurrection called the insurrection of the 1st of Prairial, was like that which drove the mob of women to Versaillesscarcity of bread. It was more terrific and threatening than that which overthrew or destroyed the Girondins, but the government had learned to use the force at its disposal with firmness and courage, and the tumult which threatened to bring back the horrors of the 2d of Sept., was quelled.

The adoption of a new Constitution now followed, vesting the executive power in the hands of five Directors, and the legislative in two councils--that of the Five Hundred and that of the Ancients. The council of Five Hundred appointed the Directors, which constituted the famous Directory of France. This Constitution excited the last great insurrection of Paris, called the insurrection of the 13th of Vendemaire, and ended for ever the power of the Jacobins. The générale which had so often carried consternation into the hearts of the Parisians, was once more beat and the tocsin sounded, and the lawless power of the mob again on its march, with forty thousand of the National Guard to sustain it Against this overwhelming force, the Constitution had but five thousand men to defend itself. With half the irresolution of Louis XVI., it would have shared his fate. But fortunately these five thousand were put under the command of that same youth who saw, with inexpressible indignation, Louis XVI. submit to the indignities and insults of the mob in the Tuileries. Young Bonaparte had none of that monarch's womanly weakness or childish fear of shedding human blood. With his trusty band he opened his cannon on the approaching masses of his countrymen, as he had done before on the Austrian columns. His orders to disperse were terrific discharges of grape shot. and the authority with which they were issued, was seen in the falling ranks that reeled to the murderous fire. The lawless bands that had first become powerful through the weakness of the king, saw that the government was now in different hands, and disappeared as suddenly as they had arisen. Peace was restored, the factions for ever broken, and a new era dawned on France. At length, October 26, 1795, the National Convention, after having been in session three years, and passed 8370 decrees, dissolved itself. The Directory immedi

ately established itself at Luxembourg, and the remainder of the history of the revolution is taken up chiefly with the external wars up to 1799, at the establishment of the Consulate under Napoleon Bonaparte. We will not trace the steps by which Bonaparte rapidly ascended to power. Lodi, and Arcola, with their desperate struggles and victories the conquests in Italy and on the Rhine -the battles of the Pyramids and the overthrow of Egypt the brilliant achievements with which he dazzled the French people and prepared them for his domination, are a part of history known to all. Like some mighty spirit rising amid universal chaos, and moulding and commanding the raging elements till they marshal themselves in order around him, so did Bonaparte appear amid the turbulence that had shaken France into fragments, and unsettled a continent from its repose. The strange elements and daring spirits the revolution shook up to the surface, he directed on external foes, and moving himself on before in the path of ambition and military glory, he drew a crowd after him filled with the same courage and lofty chivalry. Binding these to him by affection and reverence, and making himself the soul of the army, supreme power imperceptibly glided into his hands, and the revolution of the 18th of Brumaire, by which he obtained the outward insignia of power, and overthrew the Directory, was but the visible expression of what had been already done.

Ten years had elapsed between the calling of the States General, in which the tiers etat made the first feeble attempts at freedom, and the Consulate. Yet, in that time France had overthrown the feudal constitution which had been impregnable for ages; and from a feudal despotism become a limited monarchy with a constitution—from that had suddenly arisen before the astonished world, and in the midst of the despotism of Europe, a free republic, declaring war against all thrones; and throwing down "the head of a king and six thousand prisoners as the gage of battle" and then passed into the wildest anarchy that ever shook a kingdom; and last of all had risen up into a strong military despotism, startling the world as much by its arms as it had done by its principles. Ten years such history the world never before saw. All these transitions were, perhaps, inevitable, after the first step was taken, and the first legislative revolution accomplished. All that France experienced

sof

may have been necessary to the transition from deep oppression and utter misery to freedom and comfort, except the Reign of Terror. Popular outbreaks, and the transient rule of the headlong populace are to be expected, but not the steady and systematic legislation of a mob, ruling by terror and acting through the government of the land. The power of the Jacobins spreading itself, till it wrapped the entire government in its folds, is not chargeable on republicanism. Yet, it is not without its uses; by teaching all republics, to remotest time, that their danger consists not in the ascendency of an aristocracy once overturned, but in the blind fury of factions. No military despotism ever yet grew out of a republic, except through the influence and corruption of factions that were suffered to increase without resistance, till the aid of the populace could be depended on in a struggle against the authority and power of law.

Bloody as was the French revolution, no one can now appreciate the circumstances in which the men of that period were placed. Those alone who have felt the oppression and inhumanity of an unprincipled aristocracy, can know how strong is the feeling of retributive justice, and how terrible the fear of the reascendency of such power, rendered still more fearful by burning hatred. Added to all this, the crowned heads of Europe were moving down on this new, agitated republic, threatening to crush it, in its first incoherent struggles for life. Fear and rage combined, strung the energies of France to their utmost tension, and we look with wonder on the boldness and strength with which she struggled in her distress. Robespierre, Danton, Marat, Couthon, Barrére, St. Just and Collot d' Herbois were monsters; yet, perhaps, with the exception of Marat and Couthon, not so much so by nature as by circumstances. After they obtained the power, it was a matter of life and death with them, and having shut their hearts against all compassion, every thing in their own defence seemed alike pardonable. Let them pass as spectres of that mighty revolution. Their reign was short; lasting only about nine months, while the first States General struggled manfully against tyranny for three years.

The Revolution was not so much perhaps to give liberty to France, as to break the spell of tyranny in Europe. If this be true, Buonaparte's career was as much needed as the revolution itself. The iron frame work of the feudal system had

fastened itself so thoroughly, and rusted so long in its place, above the heads of the lower classes, that no slow cessation or steadily wasting effort could affect its firmness. A convulsion that should heave and rend it asunder was needed. It came in the French revolution, but this affected only France. Some power was needed to roll this earthquake under the thrones of Europe, and Bonaparte was the man. Taking the untamed energies this sudden upheaving had cast forth on the bosom of society, he prepared to dispute with Europe the exclusive claim of nobility to power and privilege. A plebeian himself, he made marshals of plebeians. Ney and Murat and Soult and Davoust and Macdonald and Kleber, and a host of others, were base-born men, and he pitted them against princes and dukes and nobles of every degree, and the plebeians proved themselves the better men. Nay, he did more he shocked and disgusted, and forever disgraced royalty itself, in their estimation, by making kings of plebeians, and finally taking the daughter of one of the haughtiest monarchs of Europe to his plebeian bed. He forced the haughty aristocracy to mingle in blood and companionship with those of his own making, and carried out, to its utmost limit, the just act of the tiers etat, when they wished simply to have the orders verify in common with them. He thus broke up this iron system over the continentdrove everything into fragments, and sent thrones, emptied of their kings and all the insignia of royalty, drifting like a floating wreck on the ocean he had set heaving. The strongest pillars of royalty were shattered to their bases-the objects of oldest, deepest reverence treated as baubles, and the spell-word, by which pride and tyranny had conjured so long, made powerless as the tricks of a playactor. He confounded and confused every thing, and set the crowned heads of Europe in such a tumult and wonderment, that they have not yet recovered their senses. He started every rivet in the chain of despotism, so that it can never be fastened again--and, more than all, waked up the human soul to think for itself, so that the dark ages which preceded his appearance can never more return. The work of reformation may be slow, but it is sure. Man is forever exalted, and he cannot be depressed anew. Reverence and fear are rapidly diminishing, while the dawning light is spreading higher and brighter on the hori

zon. With Bonaparte's motives we now have nothing to do, but with the effect of his actions alone. His whole imperial reign, though despotism to France, was republicanism to the world. It was the revolution rolled out of France, and working amid the thrones of Europe. In this respect Bonaparte had an important mission to fulfil, and he accomplished it. The elements he so strangely disturbed, slowly settled back towards their original places, but never did, and never can reach them. The solid surface of feudalism has been broken, and can never reunite. Other experiments are to be worked out, and other destinies reached, different from those which have heretofore made up the history of man.

There is another aspect in which the revolution may be regarded. It was like a personal struggle between freedom and tyranny, which must have taken place before man could be benefited, and when it did occur, must, from the very fierceness of the conflict, have been simply a wild and desperate effort for victory--victory alone. The strife was too deadly and awful to admit of any other thought than bare victory, and hence the means employed, and the distress occasioned, were minor considerations. The struggle was necessarily terrible from the very magnitude of the consequences involved in the issue, and the convulsions inevitable from such a struggle. The benefits are yet to be received. We believe the French revolution has settled the question, whether all reform is to be checked by the bayonet. We see, already, its effect on the despotisms of Europe. England might have been the victim of this strife between liberty and tyranny, if France had not. But now she yields rights, one after another, in obedience to the stern voice of the people. Kings speak in an humble tone of their power, and in a more respectful manner of their subjects. Man, simple, untitled Man, is no longer a cipher in government. He is consulted silently, if not openly. The king fears him, as he stands in the might and majesty of truth, more than hostile armies. The French revolution, and Bonaparte afterwards, rent everything to pieces by the vehemence of their action, but left room for truth to perform its silent and greater work. France went back to military despotism, and is now a monarchybut the world is no longer what it was. Whatever the final goal may be, it has, at least, taken one step forward.