Charles Alan Fyffe

“ Such was the conflict of the Four Days of June, a conflict memorable as one in which the combatants fought not for a political principle or form of Government, but for the preservation or the overthrow of society based on the institution of private property. The National Guard, with some exceptions, fought side by side with the regiments of the line, braved the same perils, and sustained an equal loss. The workmen threw themselves the more passionately into the struggle, inasmuch as defeat threatened them with deprivation of the very means of life. ”

“ Unless the French Emperor was resolved to acquiesce in the gradual development of this federal unity until, as regarded the foreigner, the North and the South of Germany should be a single body, he could have no confident hope of lasting peace. To have thus anticipated and accepted the future, to have removed once and for all the sleepless fears of Prussia by the frank recognition of its right to give all Germany effective Union, would have been an act too great and too wise in reality, too weak and self-renouncing in appearance, for any chief of a rival nation. ”

“ Metternich though excluded from office by younger men, beamed upon Vienna with the serenity of a prophet who had lived to see most of his enemies shot and of a martyr who had returned to one of the most enviable Salons in Europe. No dynasty lost its throne, no class of the population had been struck down with proscription as were the clergy and the nobles of France fifty years before. Yet the traveller familiar with Germany before the revolution found that much of the old had now vanished, much of a new world come into being. ”

“ A government so powerful as to bend the entire resources of the State to military ends will, whether it is one of democracy run mad, or of a crowned soldier of fortune, or of an ancient monarchy throwing new vigour into its traditional system and policy, crush in the moment of impact communities of equal or greater resources in which a variety of rival influences limit and control the central power and subordinate military to other interests. It was so in the triumphs of the Reign of Terror over the First Coalition; it was so in the triumphs of King William over Austria and France. ”

“ But the history of France, no less than the history of Greece, shows that it is not the excess, but the sense, of wrong that produces revolution. A people may be so crushed by oppression as to suffer all conceivable misery with patience. It is when the pulse has again begun to beat strong, when the eye is fixed no longer on the ground, and the knowledge of good and evil again burns in the heart, that the right and the duty of resistance is felt.
[Capodistrias and Hypsilanti.] ”

“ The generation which witnessed the fall of Napoleon is not the only one which has seen Providence in the fulfilment of its own desire, and in the storm-cloud of nature and history has traced with too sanguine gaze the sacred lineaments of human equity and love. ”

“ The Assembly had at one blow converted into enemies the entire mass of the population that lived by the wages of bodily labour. It had committed an act of political suicide, and had given to a man so little troubled with scruples of honour as Louis Napoleon the fatal opportunity of appealing to France as the champion of national sovereignty and the vindicator of universal suffrage against an Assembly which had mutilated it in the interests of class. ”

“ Great Britain had failed to weaken or to alarm Napoleon; the King of Prussia made no movement on behalf of the losing cause; and the Austrian Government unwillingly found itself compelled to accept conditions of peace. It was not so much a deficiency in its forces as the universal distrust of its generals that made it impossible for Austria to continue the war. The soldiers had fought as bravely as the French, but in vain. "If we had a million soldiers," it was said, "we must make peace; for we have no one to command them." ”

“ Side by side with the thought that the Bourbons had been brought back by foreign arms, the remembrance sank deep into the heart of the French people that this family had put to death "the bravest of the brave." It would have been no common good fortune for Louis XVIII. to have pardoned or visited with light punishment a great soldier whose political feebleness had led him to an act of treason, condoned by the nation at large. Exile would not have made the transgressor a martyr. But the common sense of mankind condemns Ney's execution: the public opinion of France has never forgiven it. ”

“ Russia, since the Crimean War, had seemed to be entering upon an epoch of boundless change. The calamities with which the reign of Nicholas had closed had excited in that narrow circle of Russian society where thought had any existence a vehement revulsion against the sterile and unchanging system of repression, the grinding servitude of the last thirty years. From the Emperor downwards all educated men believed not only that the system of government, but that the whole order of Russian social life, must be recast. The ferment of ideas which marks an age of revolution was in full course ”

“ Each conflict with the enemy, each vain and exhausting march, told that the superiority had passed from the French to their foes, and that Napoleon's retreat was now only a matter of time. "These creatures have learnt something," said Napoleon in the bitterness of his heart, as he saw the columns of Blücher manoeuvring out of his grasp. Ney's report of his own overthrow at Dennewitz sounded like an omen of the ruin of Waterloo. "I have been totally defeated," he wrote, "and do not yet know whether my army has re-assembled. The spirit of the generals and officers is shattered. ”

“ It may be truly said of Charles Albert that nothing in his reign became him like the ending of it. Hopeless as the conflict of 1849 might well appear, it proved that there was one sovereign in Italy who was willing to stake his throne, his life, the whole sum of his personal interests, for the national cause; one dynasty whose sons knew no fear save that others should encounter death before them on Italy's behalf. ”

“ It is to him that Hungary owes the bridge uniting its double capital at Pesth, and that Europe owes the unimpeded navigation of the Danube, which he first rendered possible by the destruction of the rocks known as the Iron Gates at Orsova. Sanguine, lavishly generous, an ardent patriot, Széchenyi endeavoured to arouse men of his own rank, the great and the powerful in Hungary, to the sense of what was due from them to their country as leaders in its industrial development. He was no revolutionist, nor was he an enemy to Austria. ”

“ On every side the Republic seemed to be sinking before its enemies. Its frontier defences had fallen before the victorious Austrians and English; Brunswick was ready to advance upon Alsace from conquered Mainz; Lyons and Toulon were in revolt; La Vendée had proved the grave of the forces sent to subdue it. It was in this crisis of misfortune that the Convention placed the entire male population of France between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five at the disposal of the Government, and turned the whole country into one great camp and arsenal of war. ”

“ The burden of taxation imposed by the support of an army relatively three times as great as that of any other Power was wonderfully lightened by Frederick's economy: far more serious than the tobacco-monopoly and the forage-requisitions, at which Frederick's subjects grumbled during his life-time, was the danger that a nation which had only attained political greatness by its obedience to a rigorous administration should fall into political helplessness, when the clear purpose and all-controlling care of its ruler no longer animated a system which, without him, was only a pedantic routine. ”

“ Revolution is universal; it scarcely meets with resistance; its views seem on the point of being achieved; the baffled aspirations of the last half-century seem on the point of being fulfilled. There exists no longer in Central Europe such a thing as an autocratic Government; and, while the French Republic maintains an unexpected attitude of peace, Germany and Italy, under the leadership of old dynasties now penetrated with a new spirit, appear to be on the point of achieving each its own work of Federal union and of the expulsion of the foreigner from its national soil. ”

“ In the larger States, or groups of States, which had hitherto been the spoil of France, the sense of nationality scarcely existed. Italy had felt it no disgrace to pass under the rule of Napoleon. The Germans on both sides of the Rhine knew of a fatherland only as an arena of the keenest jealousies. In Prussia and in Austria the bond of citizenship was far less the love of country than the habit of obedience to government. England and Russia, where patriotism existed in the sense in which it existed in Spain, had as yet been untouched by French armies. ”

“ It was to Prussia, as the representative of nationality in Germany, that Cavour looked as the natural ally of Italy in the vindication of that part of the national inheritance which still lay under the dominion of the Hapsburg. Rome, unlike Venice, was not only defended by foreign arms, it was the seat of a Power whose empire over the mind of man was not the sport of military or political vicissitudes. Circumstances might cause France to relax its grasp on Rome, but it was not to such an accident that Cavour looked for the incorporation of Rome with Italy. ”

“ The enactments of the Conference of Paris relating to commerce in time of hostilities have not yet been subjected to the strain of a war between England and any European State; its conclusions on all other subjects were but too soon put to the test, and have one after another been found wanting. If the Power which calls man into his moment of life could smile at the efforts and the assumptions of its creature, such smile might have been moved by the assembly of statesmen who, at the close of the Crimean War, affected to shape the future of Eastern Europe. ”

“ When the army of France, led by men who had worked with their fathers in the fields, hunted a King of Prussia amidst his capitulating grandees from the centre to the verge of his dominions, it was seen what was the permanent value of a system which recognised in the nature of the poor no capacity but one for hereditary subjection. The French peasant, plundered as he was by the State, and vexed as he was with feudal services, knew no such bondage as that of the Prussian serf, who might not leave the spot where he was born ”

“ Since the expedition of Napoleon to Egypt in 1798, which was itself the execution of a design formed in the reign of Louis XVI., Egypt had largely retained its hold on the imagination of the leading classes in France. Its monuments, its relics of a mighty past, touched a livelier chord among French men of letters and science than India has at any time found among ourselves; and although the hope of national conquest vanished with Napoleon's overthrow, Egypt continued to afford a field of enterprise to many a civil and military adventurer. ”

“ Within the Empire itself the Code Napoléon, conferring upon the subjects of France the benefits which the French had already won for themselves, had superseded a society resting on class-privilege, on feudal service, and on the despotism of custom, by a society resting on equality before the law, on freedom of contract, and on the unshackled ownership and enjoyment of land, whether the holder possessed an acre or a league. ”

“ To be a Monarchist in 1795, among the shopkeepers of Paris or the farmers of Normandy, meant no more than to wish for a political system capable of subsisting for twelve months together, and resting on some other basis than forced loans and compulsory sales of property. But among the men of the Convention, who had abolished monarchy and passed sentence of death upon the King, the restoration of the Crown seemed the bitterest condemnation of all that the Convention had done for France, and a sentence of outlawry against themselves. ”