Letters on a Regicide Peace: Volume 3

Introduction

BurkeV3_001-050.indd 3 5/2/12 9:10 AM INTRODUCTION BY E. J. PAYNE THE AUTUMN OF 1795 OPENED A NEW SCENE in the great drama of French affairs. It witnessed the establishment of the Directory. Five years had now passed since Burke had published his famous denunciation ofthe French Revolution. Those five years had witnessed portents and convulsions transcending all living experience. The Revolution still existed: but it had passed through strange transformations. The monarchy had perished in attempting to compromise with the Revolution. The dethroned King had been tried and executed as a traitor. The Queen and the Princess Elizabeth had met the same fate. The Dauphin, a mere boy, had been slowly murdered in a prison. The King's brothers, with the remnant of the anti-Revolutionary party, had fled from French soil to spread terror and indignation through Europe. Meanwhile , the destinies of France had been shaped by successive groups of eager and unscrupulous politicians. Those whom Burke had early denounced had long disappeared. Necker was in exile: Mirabeau was dead: Lafayette was in an Austrian dungeon: Barnave and Bailly had perished on the scaffold. To their idle schemes of constitutional monarchy had succeeded the unmixed democracy of the Convention: and to themselves that fierce and desperate race in whom the spirit of the Revolution dwelt in all its fulness, and in whom posterity will ever regard it as personified- the Dantons, the Heberts, the Marats, the Talliens, the Saint-Justs, the Santerres , and the Robespierres. The terrible story of the Convention is summed up in a few words. The Gironde and the 3 BurkeV3_001-050.indd 4 5/2/12 9:10 AM INTRODUCTION Mountain had wrestled fiercely for power: and the victory had fallen to the least moderate of the two. The ascendancy [vi] of the Mountain in the Convention had produced the domination of Robespierre. The fall of Robespierre had been followed by the Thermidorian reaction, and the White Terror : and the Convention, rapidly becoming more and more odious to the people, had at length dissolved, bequeathing to France as the result of its labours the constitution of the Directory. In the midst of all these changes France had been assailed by all Europe in arms. Yet she had shown no signal of distress. Neither the ferocious contests of her leaders, nor their deadly revenges, nor their gross follies, nor their reckless policy, had wasted her elastic powers. On the contrary, France was animated with a new life. That liberty which she had purchased with so many crimes and sacrifices she had proved herself able to defend. Nor was this all. In vindicating that liberty, she had wrested from her assailants trophies which threw into the shade the conquests of the Grand Monarque himself. In less than three years she had become actual mistress ofnearly all that lay between the Rhine, the Alps, the Pyrenees, and the ocean, and potentially mistress of all the rest. She had attained a position, which, ifmaintained, would prove the destruction of the old balance of power in Europe. In the eyes of outsiders, the establishment of the Directory was the most important incident since the abolition of the monarchy. It confirmed the republican form of government : and its filiation with the Conventionjustified the transfer to it of the epithet Regicide. The execution of Louis XVI, though ofsmall importance in the internal politics of France, had been the turning point in the relations of the Republic to the European world. But European intervention, in a feeble and undecided form, had commenced long before the tragedy of January 1793. The King's treason had been the breach of his sworn fidelity to the new order of things, followed by an attempted flight to the camp of a general who BurkeV3_001-050.indd 5 5/2/12 9:10 AM INTRODUCTION was plotting the destruction of the Revolution by arms. Two months after that attempt, the Emperor and the King of Prussia had held the meeting of Pilnitz: in the following year the forces of the Armed Coalition were on the soil of France. The capture of Longwy struck terror into none save those who were profoundly ignorant of the state of the opposing elements . The invasion of Champagne, if such it can be called, acted on France like an electric stroke. [vii] Longwy was taken on the 23rd of August, 1792. Before the end of the...