John Goldworth Alger

“ If of some who underwent imprisonment or death we can hardly avoid thinking that they deserved their fate, there are others whom we must sincerely pity, men to whom the Revolution was a religion overriding all claims of country and kindred.
French historians have not taken, and could not be expected to take, much notice of aliens, even of those more or less actors in the Revolution. In their eyes they are but imperceptible specks in the great eddy. Their attention is absorbed by their own countrymen ”

“ What a contrast between the High Sheriff of Salop paying the honours to the judges of assize and the cap-headed man at the bar of the National Assembly!
In this same year 1790, Pigott sent or presented an address to the Assembly on Sieyes's press bill. He spoke in it of his loving France as warmly as if he had been a native, and of his having hastened over with a multitude of other foreigners to enjoy the rights of man in all their fulness. ”

“ The smoke and blazing of the flames were terrifying to all, so that the nuns had much to do to support their courage and compose the minds of their sick. The Assembly of the States then gave orders for the church-doors of the convents to be shut, and this, indeed, the religious found very agreeable. But then came the mobs, consisting of the worst sort of people, who surrounded the convent. The nuns, not knowing what to do, sent out to them in a kind manner to know if they wished for any refreshment and it should be given to them. ”

“ The garden, too, was always taken up by the soldiers and rabble. About this time the Convention frequently ordered the prisoners of war to be sent from one town to another, to show them to the people; when these companies passed through Compiègne, they were always lodged in our place of confinement, and nothing distressed us more than on such occasions to meet with brave Englishmen in want of the most common necessaries of life; and at the same time treated with the most inhuman scorn and contempt by the French Jacobins, who were quite elated to have an Englishman in their power. ”

“ The fall of Napoleon was as much a cause of rejoicing to Englishmen, in France or at home, as the fall of the Bastille had been. If, indeed, we can fuse into one picture these hundreds of our countrymen, we are reminded of a biography or novel in which the hero sets out under the happiest auspices, encounters all sorts of vicissitudes and dangers, and finally emerges into tranquillity and comfort. ”

“ After that event there was a general cry in favour of the prisoners, and many were daily set at liberty; by which means my habitation became so thinned of its inhabitants that they transferred us to another prison; but they forgot me in the scramble, and I remained there alone for some time, having the whole house to range in, and thirty men, who used to mount guard night and day, to watch my person. At length they found they had left me by myself, and that it was not absolutely necessary to harass such a number of men to guard a single harmless prisoner. ”

“ Thus, my Lord, the greatest revolution that we know anything of has been effected with, comparatively speaking—if the magnitude of the event is considered—the loss of very few lives. From this moment we may consider France as a free country, the King a very limited monarch, and the nobility as reduced to a level with the rest of the nation."
The Duke little foresaw that the fall of the Bastille would indirectly lead to his speedy recall. On the hasty flight of the Comte d'Artois, Dorset wrote to congratulate him on his escape. ”

“ It is true that the cap of liberty had been a symbol employed from the outset of the Revolution, but it was Pigott who made it an article of dress. He had probably quitted Paris by the summer, when it was revived, and this time undoubtedly worn outdoors, sometimes placed on the back of the head, like that of a Zouave of the present day, sometimes placed on the top of the head with the end slightly lapping over in front. Of Pigott nothing more is heard till his death at Toulouse, July 7, 1794, three weeks before Robespierre's fall. ”

“ The foreigners, like the natives, who fairly survived the Revolution, had very various fortunes. Some were thoroughly disillusioned, became vehement reactionaries, or abjured politics and were transformed into sober or enterprising men of business. Others crossed or recrossed the Atlantic, and lived to a green and honoured old age, or gave way to degrading vices. Some, remaining in France, hailed the rising star of Napoleon, and lived long enough to be disenchanted, but perhaps not long enough to see the restoration of the Bourbons. ”

“ We merely learn that "the consternation that has prevailed in Paris for the last two days is beyond all power of description. Few people have gone out of their doors, and all public amusements for the first time have been stopped." When Lord Lansdowne in 1819 argued that the Peterloo meeting was peaceable, it being attended by women and children, Liverpool replied that he saw many women busily employed in the attack on the Bastille. ”

“ This book, beginning with 1789 and ending with 1814, covers exactly twenty-five years of Englishmen's experiences in France. That quarter of a century was undoubtedly the most thrilling period of French history, and not a few of our countrymen witnessed the whole of it. Yet we can scarcely envy their lot, for perspective is necessary to appreciate the gravity of events, and the position of spectator had not merely inconveniences but dangers. To us, however, these spectators are interesting as a psychological study. They present as striking contrasts as the Frenchmen among whom they lived. ”

“ The Paris municipality in the following January presented him with a civic wreath and sword. The president bade him tell his countrymen that he had found on the banks of the Seine a brave, susceptible, and generous people, formerly frivolous, but now enjoying liberty, especially as it gave them opportunities of rewarding virtue. Nesham must have reflected that if he had received the first civic wreath ever awarded in France, he would scarcely in any other country have had to defend an innocent man against a bloodthirsty mob. ”

“ Edgeworth accepted the mission, and in a letter to a friend in England, dated 21st December 1792, explained that this was his reason for remaining in France. "I prepare myself," he added, "for death, for I am convinced that popular rage will not allow me to survive one hour after that tragic end." He fully expected, indeed, to be torn to pieces by the mob, and he made his will before leaving his mother and sister (the former ignorant of his danger) for the Temple. Rigidly searched at the gate, lest he should carry poison for the King, Edgeworth, bursting into tears, fell at Louis's feet. ”

“ The history of the French Revolution has been written with greater fullness and from a greater variety of standpoints than any other event on the globe, yet this book takes up untrodden ground. It is well known, indeed, that the Revolution attracted to Paris men from all parts of the world, and of almost all categories—enthusiasts, adventurers, sensation-hunters; some of the best specimens of humanity and some of the worst ”

“ Through the whole dismal journey of five days they contributed all in their power to soften and alleviate the hardships they saw us exposed to; but it was not in their ability to prevent the populace treating us with the most insulting language through whatever towns and villages we passed, and when we arrived at any place to spend the night we were guarded by the soldiers who kept the prison in which we happened to be lodged, amongst whom we sometimes met with a variety of hardships and scenes of brutality, insomuch that we always dreaded the approach of night. ”

“ We see servility and manliness, human nature at its best and at its worst, now touching the clouds, now grovelling in the mire. For individuals as for nations the Revolution was an ordeal drawing out the brightest and the darkest sides of human character. ”

“ When asked how she could fight against her country, she replied that she was defending the country. Strange destiny for an English officer to pass unscathed while fighting under his own flag, and to perish in a stand for Moderate Liberalism, as we should now call it, in France!
If at Lyons one brother sacrificed his life to save the other, at Angers there were two brothers of Irish extraction, one of whom betrayed the other. ”

“ There was a future poet laureate, enraptured with the Revolution, but eventually to become an ultra-Conservative. There were versifiers who chanted the triumphs of the Revolution, philosophers who early discerned the clouds on its horizon, materialists who were stupefied at the results of their theories, inventors who counted on prompt appreciation of their merits, clubbists whose congratulations to the Convention did not avert imprisonment. ”

“ There should at least be permission to sell out and withdraw to England. But the respite was very short, and there came a series of tribulations. The nuns in Paris might have given us interesting accounts of their own experiences; but domiciliary visits rendered it unsafe to keep diaries, and only one convent out of three subsequently drew up a record of its sufferings. We know from the minutes of Jacobin commissaries that, unlike some of their French sisters, the English nuns unanimously declined to re-enter the world, and they felt the full force of the revolutionary hurricane. ”

“ English connoisseurs give us their opinion of the panorama, but not of the actual scene which it represents. To vary the metaphor, or rather to state a fact, they work up the materials collected by French authors; they do not go in search of materials for themselves. Not a single English book on the Revolution tells us who represented our own country in Cloots's deputation of the human race, explains who was the hero of the Jacobin Club in December 1791, gives an accurate account of Paine's experiences, or states the number, much less the names, of the British victims to the guillotine. ”

“ Paine—Vaughan—Muir—Perry—British Club.
The French Revolution, like a new religion, effaced the feeling of nationality, and led men, partly from a sense of duty to the world, partly from inordinate vanity, to expatriate themselves, or even to plot their country's downfall. Prominent among these was Thomas Paine—in France he spelt his name Payne—who was the only foreigner besides Cloots who sat in the Convention, and who, more fortunate than Cloots, suffered nothing worse than imprisonment. He had twice visited Paris prior to the Revolution, but his previous career need not be related. ”

“ Soon after this the very man who had with club in hand turned us out of our convent, was sent after us to the same prison, but was shortly after removed to Paris, where he ended a wretched life on the guillotine, which was the fate of many who had been particularly active in the Revolution. For a time the allowance was one pound of bread to each person per day, besides one good meal, the expense of which was to be defrayed by the prisoners conjointly, the rich paying for the poor, and strict orders were given that equality should be observed according to the new republican law. ”

“ How, indeed, could young men just of age be expected to foresee the total eclipse of law and order? Wordsworth, who made the acquaintance of Watt in Paris in November 1791, accompanied him to the Assembly and the Jacobin Club—
and took away with him a fragment of the Bastille as a relic. ”

“ Do you not see I am a bit of a pirate like yourselves?" But although the measure was justified by one at least of Bonaparte's victims, Lord Yarmouth, it was certainly impolitic as well as lawless. I have not, indeed, discovered in the newspapers of the time such an outburst of indignation as might have been expected, but according to the Duke of Buckingham, Napoleon, who till then had had admirers in England, became thoroughly execrated. Some of the captives were studying at universities, others copying at the Louvre, then full of foreign spoils, others in search of health in Southern France. ”

“ Indeed, a scandal in which an outsider and a female prisoner were concerned occasioned an order for the separation of the sexes, and, while the men remained at the Luxembourg, forty Englishwomen were sent to the English Conceptionist Convent. The Blue Nuns, themselves prisoners in their own house, and compelled to convert their flowing robes into gowns and their veils into bonnets, were very kind to their distressed countrywomen, and Sister Thérèse struck Helen as the nearest approach to angelic purity she had ever seen. ”

“ One of Fersen's confederates also quitted France in time—Quintin Craufurd, the nabob from Manilla, whose maxim was, "Make your fortune where you like, but enjoy it at Paris." A confidant of Marie Antoinette, he provided, or at least housed, the famous carriage which the royal family overtook and entered at Bondy, it having already started when Fersen drove them to Craufurd's. Craufurd himself had gone to London and Brussels, perhaps to avoid suspicion, leaving his valet, Tom Sayer, to make all the arrangements. ”

“ In January 1791, moreover, Richard Burke wrote to his father from Coblenz, "Only think of Lord Palmerston being a convert" (to the Revolution) , but Palmerston's diary of his visit to Paris in July 1791 is not that of a convert. It is true that he shows no sympathy for the royal family, then virtual prisoners in the Tuileries, but he was disgusted at the plaudits with which the Jacobin Club greeted Brissot's arguments for putting the king on his trial, and he predicts the dispersion of the Assembly by the mob, followed by anarchy and an eventual despotism. ”