disappear from the face of the earth; Cambon, who was at the head of the finances, solicited that the coin might no longer be polluted by the king's, effigy; the walls were covered with placards proscribing royalty; and no one dared to breathe a word, or to write a syllable, in favour of a form of government to which France had been subject for fourteen hundred years. Can any thing prove more clearly the boundless sway of the usurping municipality?

The hatchets of the first days of September were scarcely laid down, when the election of deputies commenced at Paris. The dreaded Commune, availing itself of the terror which its horrid massacres had inspired, easily managed to have those. monsters returned to the Convention who would best answer its purposes, and who afterward completely subjugated that assembly to its will. Centuries will hardly wipe off the guilt incurred by the city of Paris, when it suffered itself to be represented in the council of the nation by such wretches as Robespierre, Marat, Collot d'Herbois, Danton, Fabre d'Eglantine, and Egalité; who were the immediate authors of all those horrors which have deadened the sensibility of the present generation, of all the miseries which France underwent, and of all the calamities with which Europe has been visited. Dreadfully did the Parisians suffer for their disgraceful pusillanimity!

Having properly animadverted on the Duke of Brunswick's manifesto, which undoubtedly proved one of the chief means. of consolidating the Jacobin power, the author still ascribes that commander's final want of success to errors in his military conduct. If, says he, the Duke, instead of stopping at Verdun, and of making useless encampments in Champagne, had gone on straight forwards, there was nothing to hinder him from reaching Paris; and he would have met with no difficulty in getting provisions. All was lost because the Prussian Commander acted by the rules of ordinary wars; because he was not sensible that, in the contest in which he was engaged, rapidity was every thing. Had he but marched twenty leagues farther, the Jacobins would have grown distracted, and a change might have taken place which would have given a new face to affairs: but the Duke temporized, and exercised an unseasonable prudence, which gave time to collect regiments of the line, and to secure the important posts, the ilettes, and the defile of Argonne; while the combined army was shut up in a barren country, in which provisions were not to be obtained without the utmost difficulty.

M. DE B. animadverts with due severity on the ignominious compromise, by which the emigrants were not to be included in the cartel of prisoners of war, and justly extols the opposite

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spirited

spirited conduct of the Emperor Paul and General Suworow. How strange that the behaviour of these personages, contrasted with that of the Duke of Brunswick and the Prince of Cobourg, should in any one instance, on the score of humanity, be such as to suffuse the cheeks of the latter with blushes! Circumstances, it must be owned, were different; and perhaps the interests of humanity were not consulted so ill as is imagined by that seemingly blameable acquiescence. It is not easy to say how far reprisals might have been carried, before they would have wrought their due effect on the monsters who then tyrannized over France: but it does not appear that any attempts were made to shield the emigrant captives from republican butchery, -a remissness which cannot be reprobated in terms sufficiently strong.

While the question of bringing the King to trial was agitated in the Convention, the iron cupboard in the walls of the Thuilleries, the repository of the unhappy Monarch's private papers, was discovered; and great expectations were formed by his enemies, that something would be found which would inculpate him: but no document of the sort appeared; though many proofs were furnished of his extreme goodness, and his sincere regard for his subjects.

At the same period, a proposal was made by the Executive Council to the King of Prussia, to set Louis XVI. at liberty, and to place him under that monarch's protection; if the two powers, Austria and Prussia, would withdraw from the coalition. This projet was forwarded to Vienna, where it experienced delay, till it was no longer in the power of the Executive Council to rescue the ill-fated Prince from the fangs of his blood-thirsty enemies. What must a man, not hackneyed in politics, think of this cruel neglect on the part of a young monarch, which ended so fatally for the personage with whom he was so nearly connected? Let us not, however, hastily condemn Francis II.; he perhaps never heard of the proposal; or he might have been persuaded to think that no benefit could result to the unfortunate Louis from attending to it.

The account of what passed between the unhappy King and the Abbé Edgworth is sufficient to melt to sympathy the most callous bosom. The Monarch inquired of the Abbé respecting the Archbishop of Paris. "He wrote to me, (said he,) when I was at the Thuilleries: but I did not answer him. I was besieged...... He will pardon me. Assure him that I die in his communion, and that I consider him as my true Pastor." He also inquired after the banished priests. The Abbé informed him that many of them had sought an asylum in England, where they had been most kindly and honourably treated.

This intelligence gave Louis great satisfaction; and he bestowed eulogiums on the humane conduct of the English nation, and the kind heart of its King. He then turned the conversation to the subject of the misfortunes of his family, and the miseries of France. "The people," he said, "are naturally good, but they are misled and oppressed by a few cruel men.' He recited all that he had done for the nation, and among other things said, "I well know that the French will one day regret me. Yes, I am sure that they will do me justice when they shall be at liberty to be just; at present, they are in a very miserable state."

On

From the 5th volume, which brings us to the period of the fall of Robespierre, we learn that the first petition presented by the Commune to the Convention was 'one praying for the erection of an extraordinary tribunal; that which was afterward so well known by the name of the Revolutionary. It was strenuously but ineffectually opposed by the Girondists. a report from the Committee of Legislation, made by Cambacérès (the present second Consul), it was thus decreed;" There shall be formed at Paris an extraordinary criminal tribunal, which shall take cognizance of every counter-revolutionary enterprize, of all attempts against the liberty, equality, unity, and indivisibility of the Republic; of the internal and external safety of the state; and of all plots tending to restore royalty, or to establish any other authority adverse to the liberty, the equality, and sovereignty of the people, whether the accused be civil or military functionaries, or simple citizens." The Convention was ordered to name the five judges and the twelve jurymen, and the latter were to declare their separate opinions openly in court.

It was in consequence of a report from the diplomatic committee, made by Jean- Debry, that the horrible committees of Public Safety and of General Security were formed; their original province was to superintend strangers: but they soon ex-. ceeded this limit, and assumed all the prerogatives which characterize the most fierce despotism. Similar committees were ordered to be appointed in every district of the republic; and no noble, no ecclesiastic, no person who had holden any rank under the old government, could be admitted into them."

The author mentions an assembly which consisted of deputations from the several clubs, which met at the Mayoralty, and which was headed by the Mayor Pache. In this infernal conclave, he says, it was resolved to assassinate seven or eight thousand persons, and the horrid measure only failed because the plot was discovered.

M. DE

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M. DE BEAULIEU gives a short account of the origin of the term federalism; which continued for two or three years to be the most heinous crime that could be imputed to any one; and he says that he is convinced that more persons suffered death for this imaginary offence than for what was termed aristocracy. While it remained doubtful whether the royalists. might not finally triumph, some persons met at the house of Madame Roland, to devise what means they should take if such an event should happen; and they agreed to retire to the south of France, and to attempt to form those provinces into a republic. This was a mere scheme to save their lives, in case their enemies obtained the upper hand, and was never otherwise to be put in execution; yet this intended dismemberment was the offence for which the twenty-two deputies, and hosts besides, were led to the guillotine.

With regard to the situation of the Convention, in the course of the year 1793, the author depicts it as rent by incurable schisms; certain of its members were in arms against it, thirsting for revenge; royalist armies were on foot in la Vendée; those of the coalition were advancing on each frontier of the Republic; and all were crying out vengeance on the heads of the murderers of Louis XVI. Never were men more near to destruction; and the dread of this fate, it must be supposed, had considerable influence over the decrees and measures which proved so terrible, as well as so successful.

The Anarchist code of 1793, though it was never attempted to be put in action, was the weapon with which the Convention subjugated such departments as the proscribed deputies had excited to insurrection. When it had answered this purpose, the decree enacting the revolutionary government, which clothed the Convention with a dreadful omnipotence, was proposed and passed.

The missions of the Deputies to the Departments formed another of the shocking engines by which the Convention cemented its power at home, and concentrated the national force in order to oppose an adequate resistance to the pressure caused by the foreign coalition. The conduct and proceedings of these demons are here elaborately stated.

The following passage exhibits a very just picture of the situation of things in France, at a crisis which must be considered as one of the most memorable in all history:

Let us (says the author) examine what was the course of the revolutionary government. Its real existence goes back to the 31st of May 1793, and its formal establishment to the month of November

in the same year. It was vested wholly in the Committee of Public Safety. This Committee puts to death, and lays waste; no consideration, no impediment, obstructs it: all is in its power, the lives and the property of all the French; it agitates, overturns, dissects, and decomposes the body politic at its pleasure. The Convention is tits instrument. This Assembly sanctions whatever may be its high pleasure to ordain. The impulse which it gave to itself was such that it could not controul its own career, but it moved on in its destructive course with accelerated velocity.'

At the conclusion of his history of the law against the suspected, M. DE B. asks, but what were considered as the marks of incivism?' and he replies, hands not hardened by labour, hair decently combed, and shoes and stockings without holes; these marks caused men to be suspected by the ex-capuchin Chabot, and to be hunted down by his associates.' The ex-capuchin himself never wore any other clothes than pantaloons, and a jacket without a collar, with his neck bare and his bosom exposed; he denounced all persons who were decently dressed, as muscadins; and according to his system, the goods of muscadins ought to be confiscated, and their persons banished.

Having conducted us at length to the 9th of Thermidor (27th July 1794), the author tells us that, if the President had not been hostile, and had not drowned the voice of Robespierre, but if the latter had been allowed one minute's speech, his enemies would have failed in their attempt, and the tyrant would have triumphed. He also says that Henrict, who commanded the armed force of Paris, and who joined the Commune and Robespierre against the Convention, was drunk; a circumstance which very much facilitated the victory of the latter.

The 6th and last of the present volumes carries us down to the 18th of Brumaire (the yth of November 1800), the commencement of the consular regime.-M. De B. observes that, for a considerable time after the fall of Robespierre, Marat remained the idol of the multitude, and that the Modérés attacked him in vain. A curious stratagem at length dethroned this divinity, and abolished his worship. It seems that, in the course of the Revolution, before the idea of a republic was conceived, Marat had published a plan of a free royalist constitution; this was discovered by one of the journalists, who published it in his paper, and the article was copied on the next day into all the other journals. The Moderés availed themselves of the circumstance,' and cried out, "Vive la République! à bas Marat, c'est un royaliste!" The cry began from

* See an explanation of this term, Rev. Vol. xxxix. N. S. p. 95.

the