Dauphiness of France

“ The leaders of the French revolution were electrified, and the next Assembly established a republic in France. The king was arraigned and guillotined. As the bleeding head tumbled into the basket the furious crowds shouted “Vive la Republique!” Europe was horrified, and a league, with England as its moving spirit, was formed to avenge the death of Louis. ”

“ Let us not forget that it was the Jacobin minority who in the heat and glow of their convictions saved the people of France. Led astray by their old guides, abandoned in a dark and trackless waste, their heads girt with horror, menaced by destruction on every side, the people groped, wandering hither and thither seeking an outlet in vain. ”

“ France, without a disciplined army; France, ruined, reduced to a paper currency, torn by factions, by the civil war which we priests will let loose in the west and south—France will be unable to resist all Europe. But, in order to exasperate the foreign rulers, to excite their hatred, their fury, they must be made to behold the head of Louis XVI rolling at their feet! ”

“ The people of Paris broke out into sedition, under a bold citizen named Etienne Marcel, and put the Dauphin himself in durance for a time. Last and worst of all, the peasantry of Central France, driven to despair by the general misery of the times, rose in rebellion against all constituted authority, slew every man of gentle blood that they could lay hands on, and roamed about in huge bands, burning castles and manors, and plundering towns and villages. ”

“ The French have shown themselves the ablest architects of ruin that have hitherto appeared in the world. In one short summer they have completely pulled down their monarchy, their church, their nobility, their law, their army, and their revenue. Were we absolute conquerors, with France prostrate at our feet, we should blush to impose on them terms so destructive to their national consequence, as the durance they have imposed on themselves. ”

“ When France shall again become a republic, or when she shall find a king mad or wicked enough to give in to her worst propensities, she will pour her legions across every frontier, sweep all opposition before her, revolutionize and emancipate Europe, and hoist the triumphant and blood-stained tricolor over the ashes of sovereignties, and the ruins of every old and time-honoured institution. ”

“ He fortified the capital and armed the citizens; the civic clergy made common cause with him; and when the Dauphin Charles convoked the three Estates at Paris, it was soon seen that the nobles had become completely discredited and powerless. It was a moment in which a new life might have begun for France; in vain did the noble order clamour for war and taxes,—they to do the war, with what skill and success all men now knew, and the others to pay the taxes. ”

“ ENGLISH AND FRENCH ARMIES.—At this time, when the power of France was so reduced, the king acquired Montpellier from James of Aragon, and the Dauphiné of Vienne by purchase from the last Dauphin, Humbert II., who entered a monastery. Dauphin became the title of the heir of the French crown. It was constantly evident how deep a root the royal power had struck into the soil of France. At times, when the kingdom was almost gone, the kingship survived. But, unhappily, there was no union of orders and classes. Chivalry looked with disdain upon the common people. ”

“ It is your province to display an energy which will hold our country up to the admiration of all future generations. Let it not be said of us: 'They sacrificed the first interests of their country; they submitted to the control which England has sought in vain for four centuries to impose on France.'
"My people need not fear that the policy of their Emperor will ever betray the glory of the nation; and on my part I have the conviction that the French people will ever prove worthy of themselves and of me." ”

“ This new triumph of the populace occasioned another change in the constitution by the national assembly: the king being compelled to accede to every thing which they chose to establish. But France was not yet tranquil. The king and the people—except the factionists—became again, in appearance, if not in reality, reconciled; but there was still an under-current of mischief at work, which finally involved the monarch in ruin, Paris in bloodshed, and all Europe in war! ”

“ In France at this moment everything is poor and paltry. We have a king ten years old, who doesn’t yet know what he wants; we have a queen blinded by a belated passion; we have a minister who governs France as he would govern a great farm--that is to say, intent only on turning out all the gold he can by the exercise of Italian cunning and invention; we have princes who set up a personal and egotistic opposition, who will draw from Mazarin’s hands only a few ingots of gold or some shreds of power granted as bribes. ”

“ They were uncongenial with, disastrous to, any hopeful enterprise. And we are to find in this fundamental quality of French dominion, with all the zeal and heroism engaged in it, the reason for the fact that France has no heritage here. ”

“ The King of France must be a great actor. He must appear to his people as in reality a king-stately, dignified, and beyond all other human beings in his remarkable presence.
When the Dauphin and Marie Antoinette came to the French court King Louis XV. kept up in the case the same semblance of austerity. He forbade these children to have their sleeping-apartments together. He tried to teach them that if they were to govern as well as to reign they must conform to the rigid etiquette of Paris and Versailles. ”

“ The spectacle that we have before our eyes is a profitable spectacle. What we see in France since the 2nd of December is the debauch of order.
Yes, the hand of Providence is in it. Reflect, too, upon this: for fifty years the Republic and the Empire have filled men's imaginations, the one with its souvenirs of terror, the other with its souvenirs of glory. Of the Republic men saw only 1793, that is to say, the terrible revolutionary necessity,—the furnace; of the Empire they saw only Austerlitz. Hence a prejudice against the Republic, and prestige for the Empire. ”

“ You may call this faction, which has eradicated the monarchy,—expelled the proprietary, persecuted religion, and trampled upon law,—you may call this France if you please: but of the ancient France nothing remains but its central geography; its iron frontier; its spirit of ambition; its audacity of enterprise; its perplexing intrigue. These, and these alone, remain: and they remain heightened in their principle and augmented in their means. All the former correctives, whether of virtue or of weakness, which existed in the old monarchy, are gone. ”

“ Under all the circumstances of his personal character, and his newly acquired power, what other security has he for retaining that power, but the sword? His hold upon France is the sword, and he has no other. Is he connected with the soil, or with the habits, the affections, or the prejudices of the country? He is a stranger, a foreigner, and an usurper; he unites in his own person everything that a pure Republican must detest; everything that an enraged Jacobin has abjured; everything that a sincere and faithful Royalist must feel as an insult. ”

“ Since that time, France has been twice a Republic, and changed its constitutions thirteen times; and, though thirty-six millions strong, it has lost every foot of land on the continent of America, and at home it lies prostrated beneath the feet of the most inglorious usurper that ever dared to raise ambition's bloody seat upon the ruins of liberty. ”

“ It was at this period, none the less, when France, supported on Austria, Spain and Italy, was to enter on a new and desired reign that we determined—not that she should be the chief of kingdoms but that the French should be the first people free. ”

“ The act was popular, for both he and his people believed, no doubt rightly, that the Electoral Prince had a better chance than any other candidate of uniting the whole of the Spanish dominions under himself. But on the death of the prince it became very difficult to decide between the representatives of the Dauphin and of the Emperor. If the Emperor was the weaker, he was the nearer by the traditional ties of policy and of race. But was not France the only power in Europe strong enough to seize and keep the whole inheritance from the hand of the spoiler? ”

“ France, rushing ill-prepared, though with overweening confidence, on the great problems of the eighteenth century, shattered not her own hopes alone, but nearly at the same moment the Puritan Republic, breaking the last slight link that bound it to feudal Europe, and placing modern society firmly and tranquilly on its new foundation. ”

“ With Etienne Marcel's death all hope of a constitutional life died out from France; the Dauphin entered Paris and set his foot on the conquered liberties of his country. Paris had stood almost alone; civic strength is wanting in France; the towns but feebly supported Marcel; they compelled the movement to lose its popular and general character, and to become a first attempt to govern France from Paris alone. ”

“ It is this paradox, which we must always keep in mind when we are discussing any question relative to the effects of the French revolution. Groaning under every degree of misery, the victim of its own crimes, and, as I once before expressed it in this House, asking pardon of God and of man for the miseries which it has brought upon itself and others, France still retains (while it has neither left means of comfort nor almost of subsistence to its own inhabitants) new and unexampled means of annoyance and destruction against all the other Powers of Europe. ”

“ Some people, reading the annals of forty-four years since the Franco-Prussian War, have been disposed to sneer at France. Some have called the country degenerate because of its small birth-rate, its fiction sometimes brutal, sometimes neurotic, its inefficient Parliament, its vindictive political and religious contests. Such critics should remember that the French Government is the result of tactical compromise in presence of the Monarchical Party. Nobody denies that it might be improved. ”

“ The old duke, being without an heir, offered to sell this bit of territory to the King of France upon the condition that it should be kept as the personal possession of the eldest sons of the kings of France. Thenceforth the title of Dauphin was worn by the heir to the throne, until it became extinct with the son of Louis XVI. And when the feeble Philip VI. died in 1350, his son John, the first dauphin, assumed the crown of France.
John, this second Valois king, was an anachronism. A man intended for the eleventh century had been set down in the fourteenth. ”

“ In mercy to what was now to happen to France, let it be said that, cast upon her own resources, the armies of other people advancing upon her by land, and by sea, despairing of help from the United States, which had not yet recovered the blood spilt in obtaining her independence, France was panic-stricken at the fear of civil war, and rashly sought, by the most unpardonable acts, to exterminate this probability by the extermination of all those who were suspected of favoring Royalism. ”

“ The civilisation of Europe, he held, was most intelligibly exhibited in that of France, where, more than in other countries, intellectual and social development have moved hand in hand, where general ideas and doctrines have always accompanied great events and public revolutions. The key to the meaning of French history he found in the tendency towards national and political unity. From the tenth to the fourteenth century four great forces met in co-operation or in conflict—royalty, the feudal system, the communes, the Church. Feudalism fell; a great monarchy arose upon its ruins. ”

“ Not alone the rulers, but the nation itself, was in doubt as to the sort of government it wanted, or how to attain it after it knew. It was experimenting with that most difficult of arts, the art of governing. An art which England had been centuries in learning, how could France be expected to master in a decade? And when we consider the conditions and the elements with which this inexperience was dealing, the dangerous element at the top and the other dangerous element beneath the surface, the ambitions of the princes, and the volcanic fires in the lowest class ”

“ That is all there is to see at Domrémy; three starveling, stone-paved rooms, a crumbling church, a garden full of dead leaves, an old dog growing mangy in his kennel and the wind-swept cathedral of the woodlands. The soul of France was born there in the humble body of a peasant-girl; yes, and more than the soul of France—the gallantry of all womanhood. God must be fond of His peasants ”

“ Madame Dufief, a native of Nantes, was another heroine of this war; and, in reward she received at the Restoration the Ribbon of the Order of St. Louis.
The French Revolution, it must be confessed, aroused throughout the land a feeling of earnest, self-sacrificing patriotism, which no monarchical government, however popular, had ever called forth. A wild, enthusiastic desire spread through France to drive the enemies of the Republic from its sacred soil or perish in the attempt. Young and old were alike infected with the eager longing to die for the Republic. ”