The Underground War Against Revolutionary France, The Missions of William Wickham 1794–1800 by Harvey Mitchell, and David Hume, Prophet of the Counter-Revolution by Laurence L. Bongie, and Bayonets at St. Cloud, the Story of the 18th Brumaire by D. J. Goodspeed (review)

HUMANITIES 433 author has assiduously collected and systematized Herder's social and political ideas, not an easy task if their wide dispersion amongst his works is taken into account. Some comments on the inBuence of Hamann, Goethe, and Rousseau upon Herder would not have been out of order but in every other respect this book has accomplished its original purpose. (G. HEIMAN) The three books under review here ( Harvey Mitchell, The Underground Werr Against Revolutionary France, The Missions of William Wickham 1794-1800 [Oxford, pp. 286, $5.60]; Laurence L. Bongie, David Hume, Prophet of the Counter-Revolution [Oxford, pp. 182, $5.60]; D. J. Goodspeed, Bayonets at St. Cloud, the Story of the 18th Brumaire [Macmillan, pp. 192, $6.00]), all by Canadians, deal with various aspects of the opposition to the French revolution. Professor Mitchell has written with skill and authority on the role of the British government in counter-revolutionary organization and politics. During the revolution and in later historical accounts of it, English gold and the activities of English agents were often blamed for conservative resistance, for popular uprisings, and for acts of treachery, but until now there has been little accurate infonnation about these things. Professor Mitchell has discovered exactly how much money was sent from England and how it was spent; and he leads us into the complicated struggle to establish a secret council for co-ordinating the resistance of all counter-revolutionary forces. The greatest obstacle, he reveals, was the antagonism of the royalists and the constitutionalists. The story of their quarrel, valuable for what it reveals of counter-revolutionary weakness, is also interesting in that we may read it as the first chapter of Restoration polities, the story of a struggle which began twenty years before the counter-revolutionary forces were able to restore the monarchy after the allied victories over Napoleon, and which continued until 1830. Mitchell is able to inform us only after intelligent use of a great volume of different sources. He has been blamed in some quarters for not using ti,e Wickham papers, but these could have made nO important difference, as a reading of Republic or Restoration? (Manchester, 1965) by W. R. Fryer, who did use them, will show. Professor Mitchell has done this book gracefully and expertly; but it is perhaps only fair to warn the general reader that it is a close-grained and detailed historical study written, like advanced scholarly treatises in any field, for the reader with some knowledge of the subject. The same must be said of Professor Bongie's book, all the more because he has chosen to leave all of his extensive quotations in French. Also intended, then, for the prepared reader, this is a brief study of counterrevolutionary thought, original in that it throws into relief the influence of David Hume whose History of the Stuarts (lirst French edition, 1760) Bongie holds to have been a greater source of French conservative ideas than "Burke's shouting, cranky pamphlet on the Revolution...." Hume's histories were widely admired during the second half of the eighteenth century for their fairness or objectivity as well as for their literary quality. After 1789, Frenchmen who opposed the revolution turned mainly to Hume for a ready made historical parallel with the English revolution against the Stuarts. Such conservative or counter-revolutionary ligures as the abbe Maury, Lally-Tollendal, Calonne, de Montjoie, the comte d'Antraigues, the editors of the ultra-royalist journal Les Actes des ApDtres, Clermont-Tonnerre, Joseph de Maistre and Louis de Bonald all read and discussed Hume on Stuart history in an effort to understand the French revolution and many pressed the parallel so far as to predict a Bourbon restoration like that of the Stuarts-"waiting for General Monk," as Bongie describes it. We might almost have guessed, in view of all this, that Louis XVI would spend some of the days before his execution reading Hume on the death of Charles 1. Men of letters certainly had less influence on the great revolution than was once believed; but perhaps they had more influence than we thought On the counter-revolution. Bayonets at St. Cloud, as the title suggests...