French Revolutionary Wars

“ 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. ”

“ And France had to promote these designs, be drained of men under the First Empire, and be revolutionized under the Second, in order that the revolutionary contagion might be spread throughout Europe. War, coming to the aid of this work, led to the third invasion—the crowning achievement of the Third Empire.
The sole prejudice the French manifest in favor of the empire is that it maintained the honor of our army, and restored order. This is only true with respect to the Revolution. For the Revolution was absolute disorder. ”

“ The King shall fly to some fortified place on the frontiers. There, surrounded by devoted troops under the command of a royalist general (the Marquis of Bouillé) , Louis XVI shall protest solemnly to all Europe against the usurpatory acts of the National Assembly, shall strongly invoke against the French Revolution the spirit of solidarity which ought to bind all sovereigns, and stamp out the revolt under the heel of the foreign armies. ”

“ At the first outbreak of this revolution, the privileged classes of other countries, upholding crumbling institutions and rotten dynasties, rushed forth against the maddened hordes of French democracy. ”

“ From a still more serious point of view, and one which it is also proper to insist upon here, this war, which wounded the military spirit of France, enraged the democratic spirit. It was an enterprise of inthralment. In that campaign, the object of the French soldier, the son of democracy, was the conquest of a yoke for others. A hideous contradiction. France is made to arouse the soul of nations, not to stifle it. All the revolutions of Europe since 1792 are the French Revolution: liberty darts rays from France. That is a solar fact. Blind is he who will not see! ”

“ In the French revolution the people have been perpetually handcuffed, outraged, betrayed, and torn to pieces by factions; and factions themselves, at the mercy of each other, have only risen to take their turn in being dashed to atoms. To know in what the revolution will probably end, find first in what points all the revolutionary factions are agreed. ”

“ Next came the French Revolution, when nations had no faith in the integrity of rival governments, nor had governments much confidence in their people. The world went backward in civilization, and the long wars of the republic, of the consulate, of the empire, ensued; not only the French, but every foreign soil on the Continent, was drenched in blood. At last, the moral atmosphere became so foul that the idea of assassination was entertained and talked about in every court at war with Napoleon. ”

“ No settled system of government, that shall endure from generation to generation, that shall be proof against corruption and popular violence, seems capable of taking root among the French. And every revolutionary movement in Paris thrills throughout the rest of the world. Even the successes which the powers allied against France gained in 1814 and 1815, important as they were, could not annul the effects of the preceding twenty-three years of general convulsion and war. ”

“ The dîme, the corvée, and almost all the droits seigneuriaux were falling or had fallen even before the actual revolution began, and every other abuse would have gradually yielded to the power of time and the increase of knowledge. But the French were not contented to wait; they slew a good king, deluged their fields in blood, and stained their annals with crime, to obtain what a few years would have peaceably brought about.
France has never yet perfectly recovered the revolution; the character of the people has been injured by it, and all the foundations of society have been shaken. ”

“ The dangerous position of France, however, made it necessary that the government remain in the hands of a few strong men, until the many enemies of the revolution should have been driven from the soil of the French fatherland. While the half-clad and half-starved revolutionary armies fought their desperate battles of the Rhine and Italy and Belgium and Egypt, and defeated every one of the enemies of the Great Revolution, five Directors were appointed, and they ruled France for four years. ”

“ If France failed where other nations have succeeded, and if the passage from the feudal and aristocratic forms of society to the industrial and democratic was attended by convulsions, the cause was not in the men of that day, but in the ground on which they stood. As long as the despotic kings were victorious abroad, they were accepted at home. The first signals of revolutionary thinking lurk dimly among the oppressed minorities during intervals of disaster. ”

“ The French Revolution, which burst with such irresistible violence over the Continent, was to find the ramparts of public principle and legislative wisdom repaired and strengthened in England, and those ramparts manned with defenders who had learned the use of their weapons in the mock conflicts of peace, and, when the day of danger came, showed themselves invincible. ”

“ In the symbolic language of Revelation, the French Revolution was indeed a ‘great earthquake’—a social shock so great that all ‘Christendom’ trembled until it was over; and that terrible and sudden outburst of a single nation's wrath, only a century ago, may give some idea of the fury of the coming storm, when the wrath of all the angry nations will burst the bands of law and order and cause a reign of universal anarchy. ”

“ The Place Louis Quinze was soon to be the Place de la Revolution. The bronze statue was to be melted into bullets by a maddened populace, and standing on that very spot was to be the guillotine which would destroy king, queen, the king's sister, and a great part of the nobility of France.
It is said that the three great events of modern times are the Reformation, the American War of Independence, and the French Revolution. Events such as these have a lurid background, a long vista of causes behind them! A French Revolution is not the work of a day, nor of a single man. ”

“ But, supposing the confederacy of Europe prematurely dissolved: supposing our armies disbanded, our fleets laid up in our harbours, our exertions relaxed, and our means of precaution and defence relinquished; do we believe that the revolutionary power, with this rest and breathing-time given it to recover from the pressure under which it is now sinking, possessing still the means of calling suddenly and violently into action whatever is the remaining physical force of France, under the guidance of military despotism ”

“ Almost every decade saw popular uprisings in some of the European states. About 1820 insurrections occurred in Greece, in Spain, and in southern Italy; and the Spanish American colonies revolted from the mother country. In 1830 popular uprisings took place in France, Belgium, Germany, Poland, and other places. In 1848 a far more serious movement occurred, which overthrew the French monarchy and established a republic. From France the flame of liberty lighted fires of insurrection in Germany, Austria, Poland, and Italy. ”

“ There are few operatives in Britain who are not suffering at this moment under the effects of the French revolution. Who ever heard of a war which, in two months, destroyed two-thirds of the capital of a nation, and subjected thirty-four millions of men to the despotism of two hundred thousand armed janizaries in the capital, as the recent revolution has done in France? ”

“ One thing we do know,--that the Revolution was a national uprising against injustice and oppression. When the torch is applied to a venerable edifice, we cannot determine the extent of the conflagration, or the course which it will take. The French Revolution was plainly one of the developments of a nation's progress. To conservative and reverential minds it was a horrid form for progress to take, since it was visionary and infidel. But all nations are in the hands of God, who is above all second causes. ”

“ It may be of use to demolish, but I distrust a demolition complicated with wrath.”
“Right has its wrath, Bishop; and the wrath of right is an element of progress. In any case, and in spite of whatever may be said, the French Revolution is the most important step of the human race since the advent of Christ. Incomplete, it may be, but sublime. It set free all the unknown social quantities; it softened spirits, it calmed, appeased, enlightened; it caused the waves of civilization to flow over the earth. It was a good thing. The French Revolution is the consecration of humanity.” ”

“ The French Revolution, by the novelty of its doctrines, by the fierceness and rapidity of its action, and by that military character in it which was instinctively divined upon the part of its opponents, challenged, shortly after its inception, the armed interference of those ancient traditional governments, external to and neighbouring upon French territory, which felt themselves threatened by the rapid advance of democracy. ”

“ The jealousies and rivalries among the sovereigns had thrown all Europe into tumult. The French Revolution had been productive of consequences which created a flame of intense excitement, reaching the outer circumference of the Continent. Society was thrown into an agitated and perturbed condition, and the foundations of the strongest Governments were threatened. ”

“ The French Revolution, with its dramatic overthrow of tyranny and its splendid watchword, ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,’ made its own appeal to the hope as well as the imagination of the English people, although the sanguinary incidents which marked it retarded the movement for Reform in England, and as a matter of fact sent the Reformers into the wilderness for the space of forty years. ”

“ Fraternity of Peoples, Revolutionary Propagandism; Atheism, Regicide; total destruction of social order in this world! All Kings, and lovers of Kings, and haters of Anarchy, rank in coalition; as in a war for life." T. Carlyle, The French Revolution, volume 3, book 2, chapter 8. FRANCE: A. D. 1793 (February-April) . Increasing anarchy. Degradation of manners. Formation of the terrible Revolutionary Tribunal. Treacherous designs of Dumouriez. His invasion of Holland. His defeat at Neerwinden and retreat. ”

“ It is preposterous to assume that for centuries in Europe there would have been any possibility of a people en masse, (with their own leaders, and not with the leaders of their duly constituted State) , rising up and overflowing their borders in a war raid upon a neighboring people. The wars of the Revolutionary armies of France were clearly in defense of an imperiled freedom, and, moreover, they were clearly directed not against other peoples, but against the autocratic governments that were combining to crush the Revolution. There is no instance in history of a genuinely national war. ”

“ A revolution cannot be effected without the assistance or at least the neutrality of the army, but it often happens that the movement commences without it. This was the case with the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, and that of 1870, which overthrew the Empire after the humiliation of France by the surrender of Sedan.
The majority of revolutions take place in the capitals, and by means of contagion spread through the country; but this is not a constant rule. We know that during the French Revolution La Vendee, Brittany, and the Midi revolted spontaneously against Paris. ”

“ Napoleonism becomes a political necessity when revolutions and disorders are imminent; and not sympathy of the people but their terror is the object aimed at by the rulers. So also "Special Tribunals" and "Councils of Disorder," martial laws, and a thousand other engines of repression have always to be resorted to by successful revolutionists in order to crush the old order of sovereigns. The history of the French Revolution is a record of coercions and counter-coercions, by the successively rising governments, of the parties just overthrown. ”

“ Every war brings virulent germs of revolution in the vanquished countries. The war of 1870 gave France the impulsive manifestations of La Commune in exactly the same manner as war gave rise in Germany during the first months after the armistice to a violent revolutionary crisis, overcome not without difficulty and still representing a grave menace. ”

“ But in every case in which the reforming movement was not supported by the presence of French armies, the terrors which succeeded the first sanguine hopes of the Revolution struck the leaders of these movements with revulsion and despair, and converted even the better Governments into engines of reaction. In France itself it was seen that the desire for liberty among an enlightened class could not suddenly transform the habits of a nation accustomed to accept everything from authority. ”

“ The French revolution exploding like a volcano in the heart of Europe, followed by a republic whose foundation stones were laid in the proudest blood of France—the extinction of the Bourbon dynasty, and the loud declaration of rights which startled every despot from the Archangel to the Mediterranean like a peal of thunder, had covered the continent with hostile armies. ”

“ It is hard when considering the extraordinary features of the reign of terror, to realize that in some directions it was accomplishing a useful purpose. If the Revolution had been maintained so long, in the face of anarchy, of reaction and of foreign pressure, it was only by a policy of devouring flames and demented angels. And meanwhile, whatever might be the value or the fate of republican institutions, unconsciously the great social revolution had become an accomplished fact. ”