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mation. In the same way Bailly was constituted Mayor of Paris, in the place of Flesselles, the Provost of the Merchants, who had been shot the night before. The king announced to the Assembly that he would visit his good city of Paris. He would dismiss his ministers; he would recall Necker. On the morning of the 17th, when the king was on his way to Paris, attended by a large number of the deputies, the count d'Artois (the king's brother), the prince de Condé, and others of royal blood-with several of the recent ministry-were on their way to the frontiers. The most obnoxious of the ministers, Foulon, the Intendant of Marine, was reported to have died; for a sumptuous funeral had proceeded from his house. On the morning of the 22nd of July some peasants led into Paris an old man bound with ropes to the tail of a cart. On his back was a bundle of grass, and a collar of nettles was round his neck. It was Foulon, who had said the poor should eat grass if they could not get bread. He was dragged to the Hôtel de Ville to be judged. La Fayette tried in vain to save the trembling man of seventy-four. The crowd rushed upon their victim; dragged him out of the hall; and in a few minutes he was hanging to a lantern at the corner of the street. His head was cut off; a bundle of hay was stuffed into the mouth; and this trophy of mob vengeance was carried through the city. The same night Berthier, the son-inlaw of Foulon-Intendant of Paris, and hated as a tax-levier-was brought in a carriage to the Hôtel de Ville, surrounded by National Guards, sent by the municipals to protect him. The protection availed him not. The lantern had its prey; and another ghastly head, and a bleeding heart, were carried in horrible procession. Bailly and La Fayette indignantly resigned their offices; but they were won back again, when the municipality was re-organized, under the name of La Commune. The doings of Paris were not without successful imitations in the provinces. Châteaux were burnt or plundered, the seigneurs hunted down like wild beasts, their wives and daughters outraged.

:

The National Assembly, all things being tolerably quiet in Paris, proceeded with its self-appointed work of sweeping away all ancient things, for the purpose of building up a wholly new system for the government of twenty-five millions of people. A work which Dumont says, "would have demanded a year of care and deliberation, was proposed, voted, resolved, by general acclamation. I know not how many laws were decreed the abolition of feudal rights, the abolition of tithes, and the abolition of the privileges of provinces-three articles which in themselves embrace a whole system of jurisprudence and of policy-were decided, with ten or a dozen others, in less time than a Parliament of England would have taken for the first reading of a Bill of some importance." The barriers that stood between a people long misgoverned and oppressed, and all the ancient restraints of their servitude, being suddenly broken down, their excesses could scarcely be matter of wonder. The scarcity consequent upon a bad harvest was growing more fearful, especially in Paris. "The people," says Dumont, "attributed the scarcity to the aristocracy. caused the corn to be cut down whilst in the blade; the aristocrats had paid the bakers not to make bread; the aristocrats had thrown the grain into the rivers." A foolish display of loyalty amongst the troops at Ver

The aristocrats had

sailles turned the follies of the people into a new channel of rage against the Court. On the morning of the 5th of October, crowds of market women assembled in the streets of Paris, clamouring for "Bread." They soon filled the Hôtel de Ville. In four or five hours they were joined by a body of men, who obtained muskets and two pieces of cannon from the municipal stores. Maillard, an usher of the court, proposed to lead the women away on the road to Versailles, where they wanted to go, that the authorities might have time to collect their forces and stop the tumult. The National Guard, the French Guards, the rough men from the Faubourg St. Antoine-all gathered round La Fayette, demanding to go to Versailles. The Commune deliberated till four o'clock, and then ordered La Fayette to march. Meanwhile, Maillard, with his female host, had reached Versailles about three o'clock. The women demanded to enter the National Assembly. Fifteen were admitted, with a soldier, who had belonged to the French guards. Mounier, the president, could only get rid of the troublesome visitors, upon the condition that he should accompany the deputation to see the king. They were admitted to the presence of Louis, who spoke to them affectionately; and they quitted the kind-hearted king crying "Vive le Roi." The women outside grew more violent, but they were pacified for a time by a written paper, signed by the king, declaring that every care should be taken for the provisioning of Paris. A conflict then appeared imminent between the men of St. Antoine and the king's bodyguard. In this night of peril, Mounier pressed upon the king the acceptance of the articles of the constitution, which assent he had not previously given. The king yielded. When Mounier returned to the hall of the Assembly, it was filled with women, who interrupted the proceedings. At midnight, La Fayette, with fifteen thousand of the National Guard, arrived. He had made the men under his command swear fidelity to the law and the king. He received orders to assign to the National Guards the external posts of the palace; the body-guard and the Swiss remaining in the interior. At three in the morning the Assembly separated, and La Fayette went to rest. About six in the morning a mob of the Parisians, mingled with some of Versailles, got over the iron railing of the palace, forced their way into the interior, and directed their furious steps towards the queen's apartments. A faithful guard kept the passage from the hall against many men, whilst the queen jumped from her bed and made her way to the king. The mob were thundering at the door of an apartment called the Eil-de-Bœuf, when a detachment of the French guards arrived, who soon cleared the palace of those who thirsted after blood. Two of the guards had been killed on the staircase; and a ruffian cut off their heads, which were carried about on pikes. La Fayette arrived. The mob outside cried that the king must go to Paris. It was agreed that the king and the royal family should go to Paris; and the Assembly voting that they were inseparable from the king, a hundred deputies were selected to accompany him. At one o'clock, a most unregal procession was in motion-National Guards mingled with shouting and singing men of St. Antoine; cannon, with pikemen astride them; waggon-loads of corn, lent from the stores of Versailles; hackney-coaches; the royal carriage; carriages with deputies; La Fayette on horseback; and, swarming round the king and his family,

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vociferous women, crying "We shall no more want bread; we are coming with the baker, the bakeress, and the baker's boy." As the darkness deepened, the multitudinous array reached the barrier. Mayor Bailly harangued the king; and then, at the Hôtel de Ville, there were more harangues. Finally, the king had to be shown to the people from a balcony by torchlight, wearing the tricolor cockade. There was an interval of tranquillity after the royal family arrived in Paris. An Englishman writes, on the 18th of October, "This morning I saw his majesty walking in the Champs Elysées, without guards. He seemed easy and cheerful."

CHAPTER LII.

THE history of the French Revolution is essentially connected with the history of England, almost from the first day of the meeting of the StatesGeneral. The momentous events in France so materially affected the state of public opinion amongst the British people, that they gradually exercised upon our external policy and our internal condition even a far greater influence than the American Revolution, which was the precursor of that of France. "The English," says Tocqueville, "taught by their own history, and enlightened by the long practice of political freedom, perceived dimly, as through a thick veil, the approaching spectre of a great revolution. But they were unable to distinguish its real shape; and the influence it was so soon to exercise upon the destinies of the world, and upon their own, was unforeseen." "Between the spring of 1789 and the close of 1792," says Macaulay, "the public mind of England underwent a great change." To young and ardent minds, 1789 was a season of hope and promise. The destruction of the Bastille was the type of the fall of tyranny to many Englishmen. Dumont says that in England, the most free and the most noble of the nations, the destruction of the Bastille had caused a general joy. Samuel Romilly, who had written to this effect to Dumont on the 28th of July, wrote to him in October, "I find the favour with which the popular cause in France is considered here, much less than it was the truth is, that you taught us to expect too much, and that we are disappointed and chagrined at not seeing those expectations fulfilled."

On the 4th of February, 1790, Louis XVI. went to the National Assembly, which held its sitting in the Salle du Manége, near the Tuileries, and addressed the deputies in very remarkable words, indicative not only of his acquiescence in the great changes which the Assembly had decreed, but of his earnest desire to unite with them in building up a solid and enduring fabric of public liberty. "In concert with the queen, who partakes all my sentiments, I will at the proper time prepare the mind and the heart of my son for the new order of things that circumstances have brought about." The most important of these changes was that of a new

territorial division of the kingdom. The old boundaries of provinces, with their various and conflicting systems of administration, were swept away; and France was distributed into eighty-three departments, with each its subdivision of districts and cantons. Throughout France one system of administration, under municipal functionaries to be chosen by the people, was established. Another important reform had been made with regard to the church property, which in France was of enormous amount. On the 2nd of November, it was carried by a large majority that all ecclesiastical property is at the disposal of the nation, but charged with a suitable provision for the expenses of religious worship, for the support of the ministers of religion, and for the relief of the poor. A better income than previously existed was to be provided for the inferior clergy. The religious houses were also suppressed, but provision was to be made for their inmates, whose vows were declared no longer binding. The king's address to the Assembly, expressing his ready adoption of these changes, worked up the excitable Parisians to a fever-fit of constitutional loyalty, manifested in universal oath-taking and illuminations.

The session of the English parliament was opened by George III. on the 21st of January. On the 5th of February, when the army estimates were moved, Mr. Pitt held that it was necessary, on account of the turbulent situation of the greater part of the continent, that we should be prepared for war, though he trusted the system uniformly pursued by ministers would lead to a long continuance of peace. Mr. Fox opposed the estimates on the ground of economy. On the 9th, when the Report on the Army Estimates was brought up, Mr. Burke opposed an increase of our military force. He held that France, in a political light, was to be considered as expunged out of the system of Europe. "The French had shown themselves the ablest architects of ruin that had hitherto existed in the world. . . They had done their business for us, as rivals, in a way in which twenty Ramilies and Blenheims could never have done. Our present

danger, from the example of a people whose character knows no medium, is, with regard to government, a danger from anarchy." He went on to say, that, "in his opinion, the very worst part of the example set is in the late assumption of citizenship by the army,"-an act of which Fox had spoken in terms of commendation. The respect which each of the two great orators felt for the understanding of the other, prevented, at that time, any strong expression of the thoughts that were tearing them asunder. Sheridan elaborately defended the proceedings of the National Assembly, apologized for the excesses of the French populace, and charged Burke with being the advocate of despotism. Burke rose, and declared, as an inevitable necessity, that henceforth his honourable friend and he were separated in politics.

The influence of the French Revolution upon great questions of our domestic policy was very soon manifested in the proceedings of Parliament. In 1789, a bill for the relief of Protestant Dissenters was rejected by a very small majority. On the 2nd of March, 1790, Mr. Fox proposed the abolition of the Corporation and Test Acts. Mr. Pitt opposed the motion. Mr. Burke, in also resisting the claims of the dissenters, declared that had the repeal been moved for ten years before, he should probably have joined

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Mr. Fox in supporting it. The motion was rejected by a very large majority. Two days after, a proposition made by Mr. Flood, to amend the representation of the people in parliament, was withdrawn ; the minister, who had three times advocated Reform, now holding that the cause of reform might lose ground from being agitated at an improper moment.

There was a warlike episode in May of this year, which indicated, perhaps advantageously to European powers, that Great Britain was not prepared to endure insults to her flag. In the previous year two English vessels had been seized by a Spanish frigate in Nootka Sound, a harbour of Vancouver Island, and the buildings for a settlement on that coast by English traders had been pulled down, by direction of the Spanish government, which claimed all the lands from Cape Horn to the 60th degree of latitude. His Catholic Majesty long refused to make reparation. War was the tone of a royal message to Parliament. A million was voted. But Spain yielded; and Pitt had the merit of obtaining by resolute negotiation, concessions which rendered a future dispute improbable. The possibility of a war between Great Britain and Spain raised the important question in the French Assembly as to the power of making peace or war. It was resolved that war could only be decided on by a decree of the legislative body, passed on the formal proposal of the king, and sanctioned by him. A resolution was carried by acclamation that the French nation renounced for ever all ideas of conquest, and confined itself entirely to defensive

war.

The anniversary of the taking of the Bastille was to be honoured by a magnificent festival in the Champ de Mars-a grand Federation to which deputies should come from every one of the eighty-three departments of France. All Paris went forth to dig and to move earth-all classes, men and women, coming in the early morning from their sections, and returning home by torchlight-to prepare for the pompous spectacle of the 14th of July. Mass was celebrated by the bishop of Autun, attended by three hundred priests, at an altar placed in the centre of an immense amphitheatre. La Fayette then ascended to the altar, and swore, in the name of the troops and the federates, to be faithful to the nation, the law, and the king. The president of the National Assembly, and each of the deputies, took the same oath. Then Louis, standing in front of his throne, which was erected beneath an awning ornamented with fleurs de lis, swore "to maintain the Constitution decreed by the National Assembly, and accepted by me, and to cause the laws to be executed." The queen took the Dauphin in her arms, and presented him to the multitude. The cannon boomed, and one universal shout went up as if to proclaim that France had attained the consummation of its felicity. Whilst Paris presented this semblance of a happy people celebrating the triumphs of liberty and equa lity, there was the reality of disturbances in the army on the eastern frontier, with much bloodshed at Nanci, and a general resistance amongst the higher clergy to the adhesion required of them to the new order of ecclesiastical affairs.

In January, 1791, Mirabeau was named President of the National Assembly. During the previous year he had pursued a systematic course of opposition to the measures of the extremne democratic party. He main