History of Modern Europe 1972-1878

ntier-Prussia enters the war-Brunswick invade

is XVI.-War with England, followed by war with the Mediterranean States-Condition of England-English Parties, how affected by the Revolution-The Gironde and the Mountain-Austria recovers the Netherlands-The Allies invade France-La Vendée-Revolutionary System of 1793-Errors of the Allies-New French Command

lemish frontie

des France, July, 1

parade, the suggestion of treason on the part of the Court was only too likely to be entertained. The internal difficulties of the country were increasing. The Assembly had determined to banish from France the priests who rejected the new ecclesiastical system, and the King had placed his veto upon their decree. He had refused to permit the formation of a camp of volunteers in the neighbourhood of Paris. He had dismissed the popular Ministry forced upon him by the Gironde. A tumult on the 20th of June, in which the mob forced their way into the Tuileries, showed the nature of the attack impending upon the monarchy if Louis continued to oppose himself to the demands of the nation; but the lesso

their king, the Sovereigns addressed themselves to the city of Paris and to the representatives of the French nation:-"The city of Paris and its inhabitants are warned to submit without delay to their King; to set that Prince at entire liberty, and to show to him and to all the Royal Family the inviolability and respect which the law of nature and of nations imposes on subjects towards their Sovereigns. Their Imperial and Royal Majesties will hold all the members of the National Assembly, of the Municipality, and of the

ion August

serious attempt to undo the social changes effected by the Revolution in France; but no one supposed that those thousands of self-exiled nobles who now returned behind the guns of Brunswick had returned in order to take their places peacefully in the new social order. In their own imagination, as much as in that of the people, they returned with fire and sword to repossess themselves of rights of which they had been despoiled, and to take vengeance upon the men who were responsible for the changes made in France since 1789.[18] In the midst of a panic little justified by the real military situation, Danton inflamed the nation with his own passionate courage and resolution; he unhappily also thought it necessary to a successful national defence that the reactionary party at Paris should be paralysed by a terrible example. The prisons were filled with persons suspected of hostility to the national cause, and in the first days of September many hundreds of these unfortunate persons were massacred by gangs of assassins paid by a committee of the Municipality. Danton did not disguise his approval of the act. He had made up his mind that the work of the Revolution could only be saved by striking terror into its enemies, and by preventing the Royalists from co-operating with the invader. But the multitudes w

ecked at Valm

t of Br

his first line of defence; but it was only to find the French posted in such strength on his flank that any further advance would imperil his own army. If the advance was to be continued, Dumouriez must be dislodged. Accordingly, on the 20th of September, Brunswick directed his artillery against the hills of Valmy, where the French left was encamped. The cannonade continued for some hours, but it was followed by no general attack. The firmness of the French under Brunswick's fire made it clear that they would not be displaced without an obstinate battle; and, disappointed of vict

eets. Proclaims R

mes a crusade

r the diffusion of religious doctrines. The moral differences that separated this party from the Gironde were at once conspicuous: the political creed of the two parties appeared at first to be much the same. Monarchy was abolished, and France declared a Republic (Sept. 21). Office continued in the hands of the Gironde; but the vehement, uncompromising spirit of their rivals, the so-called party of the Mountain, quickly made itself felt in all the relations of France to foreign Powers. The intention of conquest might still be disavowed, as it had been five months before; but were the converts to liberty to be denied the right of uniting themselves to the French people by their own free will? When the armies of the Republic had swept its assailants from the border-provinces that gave them entrance into France, were those provinces to be handed back to a government of priests and nobles? The scruples which had condemned all annexation of territory vanished in that orgy of patriotism which followed the expulsion of the invader an

ghbors o

at could be called a nation. On the north, what is now the kingdom of Belgium was in 1792 a collection of provinces subject to the House of Austria. The German population both of the districts west of the Rhine and of those opposite to Alsace was parcelled out among a number of petty principalities. Savoy, though west of the chain of the Alps and French in speech, formed part of the kingdom of Piedmont, which was itself severed by history and by national character from the other States of Northern Italy. Along the entire frontier, from Dunkirk to the Maritime Alps, France now

nters Main

a thought to the defence of Germany; and, although the King of Prussia had been warned of the defenceless state of Mainz, no steps had been taken beyond the payment of a sum of money for the repair of the fortifications, which money the Archbishop expended in the purchase of a wood belonging to himself and the erection of a timber patchwork. On news arriving of the capture of Spires, the Archbishop fled, leaving the administration to the Dean, the Chancellor, and the Commandant. The Chancellor made a speech, calling upon his "beloved brethren" the citizens to defend themselves to the last extremity, and daily announced the overthrow of Dumo

nvades the N

f Jemappe

a national party came into existence, proclaiming the sovereignty of the people, and imitating all the movements of the French Revolution. During the brief suspension of Austrian rule the popular and the reactionary parties attacked one another; and on the restoration of Leopold's authority in 1791 the democratic leaders, with a large body of their followers, took refuge beyond the frontier, looking forward to the outbreak of war between Austria and France. Their partisans formed a French connection in the interior of the

d Savoy

e of D

the population of Savoy having declared in favour of France and Sardinia. On the 15th of December the Convention proclaimed that social and political revolution was henceforth to accompany every movement of its armies on foreign soil. "In every country that shall be occupied by the armies of the French Republic"-such was the substance of the Decree of December 15th-"the generals shall announce the abolition of all existing authorities; of nobility, of serfage, of every feudal right and every monopoly; they shall proclaim the sovereignty of the people,

and a

Sch

Louis XVI.,

keeping with the ideas of that age, prohibited the navigation of the River Schelde, on which Antwerp is situated, in order that the commerce of the North Sea might flow exclusively into Dutch ports. On the conquest of Belgium the French Government gave orders to Dumouriez to send a flotilla down the river, and to declare Antwerp an open port in right of the law of nature, which treaties cannot abrogate. Whatever the folly of commercial restraints, the navigation of the Schelde was a question between the Antwerpers and the Dutch, and one in which France had no direct concern. The incident, though trivial, was viewed in England as one among many proofs of the intention of the French to interfere with the affairs of neighbouring States at their pleasure. In ordinary times it would not have been easy to excite much interest in England on behalf of a Dutch monopoly; but the feeling of this country towards the French Revolution had been converted into a passionate hatred by the massacres of September, and by the open alliance between the Convention and the Revolutionary societies in England itself. Pitt indeed, whom th

iterranean State

ngland, Feb

ation for war, the highest wisdom would yet have chosen peace. England's entry into the war converted it from an affair of two or three campaigns into a struggle of twenty years, resulting in more violent convulsions, more widespread misery, and more atrocious crimes, than in all probability would have resulted even from the temporary triumph of the revolutionary cause in 1793. But in both nations political passion welcomed impending calamity; and the declaration of war by the Convention on Febru

ink England inclin

imagined that the abuses of the parliamentary system under George III. had alienated the whole nation. What they had found in Belgium and in Savoy-a people thankful to receive the Rights of Man from the soldiers of the Revolution-they expected to find among the dissenting congregations of London and the factory-hands of Sheffield. The singular attraction exercised by each class in England upon the one below it, as well as the indifference of the nation generally to all ideals, was little understood in France, although the Rev

s not dem

condition o

volutionary movement, was there any real affinity between the English Whig party and that which now ruled in the Convention. The event which fixed the character of English liberty during the eighteenth century, the Revolution of 1688, had nothing democratic in its nature. That revolution was directed against a system of Roman Catholic despotism; it gave political power not to the mass of the nation, which had no desire and no capacity to exercise it, but to a group of noble families and their retainers, who, during the reigns of the first two Georges, added all the patronage and influence of the Crown to their social and constitutional weight in the country. The domestic history of England since the accession of George III. had turned chiefly upon the obstinate struggle of this monarch to deliver himself from all dependence upon party. The divisions of the Whigs, their jealousies, but, above all, their real a

inister

h Revolution on

created that new political antagonism in which, whether under the names of Whig and Tory, or of Liberal and Conservative, two great parties have contended, one for a series of beneficial changes, the other for the preservation of the existing order. The convulsions of France and the dread of revolutionary agitation in England transformed both Pitt and the Whigs by whom he was opposed. Pitt sacrificed his schemes of peaceful progress to foreign war and domestic repression, and set his face against the refo

eflections,

gs support Pitt

re formidable to freedom than the tyranny of any Crown. He proved that the politicians and societies of England who had given it their sympathy had given their sympathy to measures and to theories opposed to every principle of 1688. Above all, he laid bare that agency of riot and destructiveness which, even within the first few months of the Revolution, filled him with presentiment of the calamities about to fall upon France. Burke's treatise was no dispassionate inquiry into the condition of a neighbouring state: it was a denunciation of Jacobinism as fierce and as little qualified by political charity as were the maledictions of the Hebrew prophets upon their idolatrous neighbours; and it was intended, like these, to excite

the Mountain in

and the Commu

they owed office to an insurrection, expected to reduce the capital to submission. They commanded an overwhelming majority in the new chamber; they were supported by the middle class in all the great cities of France. The party of the Mountain embraced at first only the deputies of Paris, and a group of determined men who admitted no criticism on the measures which the democracy of Paris had thought necessary for the Revolution. In the Convention they were the assailed, not the assailants. Without waiting to secure themselves by an armed force, the orators of the Gironde attempted to crush both the Municipality and the deputies who ruled at the Clubs. They reproached the Municipality with the murders of September; they accused Robespierre of aiming at the Dictatorship. It was under the pressure of these attacks that the party of the Mountain gathered its strength within the Convention, and that the populace of Paris transferred to the Gironde the passionate hatred which it had hitherto borne to the King and the aristocracy. The gulf that lay between the people and those who had imagined themselves to be its leaders burst into view. The Girondins saw with dismay that the thousands of hungry workmen whose victory had placed them in power had fought for something more tangible than Republican phrases from Tacitus and Plu

ople. It was in the trial of the King that the Gironde first confessed its submission to the democracy of Paris. The Girondins in their hearts desired to save the King; they voted for his death with the hope of maintaining their influence in Paris, and of clearing themselves from the charge of lukewarmness in the cause of the Revolution. But the sacrifice was as vain as it was dishonourable. The populace and the party o

ason of Dumouri

d a repulse inconsiderable in itself, but sufficient to demoralise an army composed in great part of recruits and National Guards. [26] His defeat laid Flanders open to the Austrians; but Dumouriez intended that it should inflict upon the Republic a far heavier blow. Since the execution of the King, he had been at open enmity with the Jacobins. He now proposed to the Austrian commander to unite with him in an attack upon the Convention, and in re-establishing monarchy in France. The first pledge of Dumouri

and East. Revolt of La

rushes the Gir

ention in February, 1793, threw into revolt the simple Vendeans, who cared for nothing outside their own parishes, and preferred to fight against their countrymen rather than to quit their homes. The priests and the Royalists fanned these village outbreaks into a religious war of the most serious character. Though poorly armed, and accustomed to return to their homes as soon as fighting was over, the Vendean peasantry proved themselves a formidable soldiery in the moment of attack, and cut to pieces the half-disciplined battalions which the Government sent against them. On the north, France was now assailed by the English as well as by the Austrians. The Allies laid siege to Condé and Valenciennes, and drove the French army back in disorder at Famars. Each defeat was a blow dealt to the Government of the Gironde at Paris. With fo

e Committee of

nciple that the representatives of the people were to control the Government, but were not to assume executive powers themselves. After the overthrow of Monarchy on the 10th August, the Ministers, though still nominally possessed of powers distinct from the representative body, began to be checked by Committees of the Convention appointed for various branches of the public service; and in March, 1793, in order to meet the increasing difficulties of the war, a Committee of Public Safety was appointed, charged with the duty of exercising a general surveillance over the administration. In this Committee, however, as in all the others, the Gironde were in the majority; and the twenty-four members who composed it were too numerous a body to act with effect. The g

ers of the

radually extended over the whole range of administration. Their will was absolute, their authority supreme. Where the councillors of the Departments or the municipal officers were good Jacobins, the Commissioners availed themselves of local machinery; where they suspected their principles, they sent them to the scaffold, and enforced their own orders by whatever means were readiest. They censured and dismis

utionary sys

s of arrest and imprisonment. Popular excitement was sustained by clubs, where the peasants and labourers assembled at the close of their day's work, and applauded the victories or denounced the enemies of the Revolution. A Tribunal with swift procedure and powers of life and death sat in each of the largest towns, and judged the prisoners who were sent to it by the committees of the neighbouring district. Such was the government of 1793-an executive of uncontrolled power drawn from the members of a single Assembly, and itself brought into immediate contact with th

f the

ppressors and the oppressed." It is in vain that the attempt has been made to extenuate the atrocious and senseless cruelties of this time by extolling the great legislative projects of the Convention, or pleading the dire necessity of a land attacked on every side by the foreigner, and rent with civil war. The more that is known of the Reign of Terror, the more hateful, the meaner and more disgusting is the picture unveiled. France was saved not by the brutali

sters, March

rmy besieging Mainz totally failed; and on the 23rd of July this great fortress, which had been besieged since the middle of April, passed back into the hands of the Germans. On every side the Republic seemed to be sinking before its enemies. Its frontier defences had fallen before the victorious Austrians and English; Brunswick was ready to advance upon Alsace from conquered Mainz; Lyons and Toulon were in revolt; La Vendée had proved the grave of the forces sent to subdue it. It was in this crisis of misfortune that the Convention

ek each their

pursuit and overthrow of the Republican forces. The war was openly converted from a war of defence into a war of spoliation. It was a change which mocked the disinterested professions with which the Allies had taken up arms; in its military results it was absolutely ruinous. In face of the immense levies which promised the French certain victory in a long war, the only hope for the Allies lay in a rapid march to Paris; they preferred the extreme of division and delay. No sooner had the advance of their united armies driven Custine from his stronghold at Famars, than the English commander led off his forces to besiege Dunkirk, while the Austrians, under Prince Coburg, proceeded to invest Cambray and Le Quesnoy. The line of the invaders thus extended from the Channel to Brunswick's posts at Landau, on

n from Dunk

the Prussians in order to deal a decisive stroke in the north. Before the movement was noticed by the enemy, Carnot had transported 30,000 men from Metz to the English Channel; and in the first week of September the German corps covering York was assailed by General Houchard with numbers double its own. The Germans were driven back upon Dunkirk; Yo

ven to men o

tory at Wattig

ic Safety were soldiers who had served in the ranks. In the levies of 1792 and 1793 the officers of the newly-formed battalions were chosen by the recruits themselves. Patriotism, energy of character, acquaintance with warfare, instantly brought men into prominence. Soldiers of the old army, like Massena, who had reached middle life with their knapsacks on their backs; lawyers, like the Breton Moreau; waiters at inns, like Murat, found themselves at the head of their battalions, and knew that Carnot was ever watching for genius and ability to call it to the highest commands. With a million of men under arms, there were many in whom great natural gifts supplied the want of professional training. It was also inevitable that at the outset command should sometimes fall into the hands of mere busy politicians; but the character of the generals steadily rose as the Committee gained the ascendancy over a knot of demagogues who held the War Ministry during the summer of 1793; and by the end

a Vendée, conquer

produced no effect until Napoleon Bonaparte, captain of artillery, planned the capture of a ridge from which the cannon of the besiegers would command the English fleet in the harbour. Hood, the British admiral, now found his position hopeless. He took several thousands of the inhabitants on board his ships, and put out to sea, blowing up the Fren

the Royalists in other parts of France that they failed to receive the assistance of England. Help was promised to the Vendeans, but it arrived too late. The appearance of Kleber at the head of the army which had defended Mainz had already turned the scale.

from the war on accou

eatening an attitude that the Prussians thought it necessary to fortify the territory that they had seized. [32] The Ministers who had been outwitted by the Court of Berlin were dismissed; Baron Thugut, who from the first had prophesied nothing but evil of the Prussian alliance, was called to power. The history of this statesman, who for the next eight years directed the war-policy of Austria, and filled a part in Europe subordinate only to those of Pitt and Bonaparte, has until a recent date been drawn chiefly from the representations of his enemies. Humbly born, scornful and inaccessible, Thugut was detested by the Viennese aristocracy; the French emigrants hated and maligned him on account of his indifference to their cause; the public opinion of Austria held him responsible for unparalleled military disasters; Prussian generals and ambassadors, whose reports have formed the basis of Prussian histories, pictured him as a Satanic antagonist. It was long believed of Thugut that while ambassador at Constantinople he had sold the Austrian cypher to the French; that in 1794 he prevented his master's armies from winning victories because he had speculated in the French funds; and that in 1799 he occasioned the murder of the French envoys at Rastadt, in order to recover documents incriminating himself. Better sources of information are now opened, and a state

Pichegru at W?rth and We

Austrian general, Wurmser, who advanced upon Alsace without consulting the King, was construed as a studied insult. On the 29th of September, after informing the allied Courts that Prussia would henceforth take only a subordinate part in the war, King Frederick William quitted the army, leaving orders with the Duke of Brunswick to fight no great battle. It was in vain that Wurmser stormed the lines of Weissenburg (Oct. 13), and victoriously pushed forward into Alsace. The hopes of a Royalist insurrection in Strasburg proved illusory. The German sympathies shown by a portion of the upper and middle classes of Alsace only brought down upon them a bloody vengeance at the hands of St. Just, commissioner of the Convention. The peasantry, partly from hatred of the feudal burdens of the old régime, partly from fear of St. Just and the guillotine, thronged to the French camp.

n with Prussia

Kosciusko.

efuses to hel

for the defence of Belgium: the Prussian Ministry, availing themselves of an ambiguous expression in the treaty, insisted on keeping them inactive upon the Upper Rhine. M?llendorf wished to guard Mainz: other men of influence longed to abandon the alliance with Austria, and to employ the whole of Prussia's force in Poland. At the moment when Haugwitz was contracting to place M?llendorf's army at Pitt's disposal, Poland had risen in revolt under Kosciusko, and the Russian garrison which occupied Warsaw had been overpowered and cut to pieces. Catherine called upon the King of Prussia for assistance; but it was not so much a desire to rescue the Empress from a momentary danger that excited the Prussian Cabinet as the belief that her vengeance would now make an absolute end of what remained of the Polish kingdom. The prey was doomed; the wisdom of Prussia was to be the first to seize and drag it to the ground. So large a prospect offered itself to the Power that should crush Poland during the brief paralysis of the Russian arms, that, on the first news of the outbreak, the King's advisers urged him instantly to make peace with France and to thr

he Sambre, Ma

on the Sambre to fight a series of battles, in which the French repeatedly succeeded in crossing the Sambre, and were repeatedly driven back again. The fate of the Netherlands depended, however, on something beside victory or defeat on the Sambre. The Emperor had come with Baron Thugut to Belgium in the hope of imparting greater unity and energy to the allied forces, but his presence proved useless. Among the Austrian generals and diplomatists there were several who desired to withdraw from the contest in the Netherlands, and to follow the example of Prussia in Poland. The action of the army was paralysed by intrigues. "Every one," wrote Thugut, "does exactly as he pleases: there is absolute anarchy and disorder." [37] At the beginning of June the Emperor quitted the army; the combats on the Sambre were taken up by Jo

appointed by

osition of a man who sets out to attack a highway robber, and offers each of his arms to a pickpocket. The motives and conduct of these politicians were justly enough described by the English statesmen and generals who were brought into closest contact with them. In the councils of Prussia, Malmesbury declared that he could find no quality but "great and shabby art and cunning; ill-will, jealousy, and every sort of dirty passion." From the head quarters of M?llendorf he wrote to a member of Pitt's C

h the Rhine,

quers Holland

by the retreat of the Prussians into Mainz. It only remained for Great Britain to attempt to keep the French out of Holland. The defence of the Dutch, after everything south of the river Waal had been lost, Pitt determined to entrust to abler hands than those of the Duke of York; but the presence of one high-born blunderer more or less made little difference in a series of operations conceived in indifference and perversity. Clerfayt would not, or could not, obey the Emperor's orders and succour his ally. City after city in Holland welcomed the French

h Prussia, April 5, an

exceeded those which she herself sustained. England, which had captured most of the French West Indian Islands, was the only Power that had wrested anything from the Republic. The dream of suppressing the Revolution by force of arms had vanished away; and the States which had entered upon the contest in levity, in fanaticism, or at the bidding of more powerful allies, found it necessary to make peace upon such terms as they could obtain. Holland, in which a strong Republican party had always maintained connection with France, abolished the rule of its Stadtholder, and placed its resources at the disposal of its conquerors. Sardinia entered u

gland continue

a great free State, such as the growth of the military spirit made impossible after the first of Napoleon's campaigns. But the dark future was withdrawn from the view of those British statesmen who most keenly felt the evils of the present; and England, resolutely set against the course of French aggression, still found in Austria an ally willing to continue the struggle. The financial help of Great Britain, the Russian offer of a large share in the spoils of Poland, stimulated the flagging energy of the Emperor's govern

Quiberon, Ju

ce in

rance; but the peasant, with all his superstition and all his desire for order, was perfectly free from any delusions about the good old times. He liked to see his children baptised; but he had no desire to see the priest's tithe-collector back in his barn: he shuddered at the summary marketing of Conventional Commissioners; but he had no wish to resume his labours on the fields of his late seigneur. To be a Monarchist in 1795, among the shopkeepers of Paris or the farmers of Normandy, meant no more than to wish for a political system capable of subsisting for twelve months together, and resting on some other basis than forced loans and compulsory sales of property. But among the men of the Convention, who had abolished monarchy and passed sentence of death upon the King, the restoration of the Crown seemed the bitterest condemnation of all that the Convention had done for France, and a sentence of outlawry against themselves. If the will of the nation was for the moment in favour of a restored monarchy, the Convention determined that its will must be overpowered by force or thwarted by constitutional forms. Threatened alternately by the Jacobin mob of Paris and by the Royalist mid

f Constitu

ntion had established the Revolutionary Tribunal, proscribed the Girondins, and placed France at the mercy of eighty individuals selected by the Convention from itself. The legislators of 1795 desired a guarantee that no party, however determined, should thus destroy its enemies by a single law, and unite supreme legislative and executive power in its own hands. With the object of dividing authority, the executive was, in the new draft-constitution, made independent of the legislature, and the legislature itself was

5. Insurrection of V

tion gained courage to add a clause providing that two-thirds of the new deputies should be appointed from among its own members, thus rendering a Royalist majority in the Chambers impossible. With this condition attached to it, the Constitution was laid before the country. The provinces accepted it; the Royalist middle class of Paris rose in insurrection, and marched against the Convention in the Tuileries. Their revolt was

ctory, Oc

of the late Committee of Public Safety who was placed in power. In spite of the striking homage paid to the great act of regicide in the election of the five Directors, the establishment of the Directory was accepted by Europe as the close of revolutionary disorder. The return of constitutional rule in France was marked by a declaration on the part of the King of England of his willingness to treat for peace. A gentler spirit seemed to have arisen in the Republic. Alt

to Europe in t

ts of 18th century

had been initiated by Governments, and forced upon an unwilling people. Innovation sprang from the Crown; its agents were the servants of the State. A distinct class of improvements, many of them identical with the changes made by the Revolution in France, attracted the attention in a greater or less degree of almost all the Western Courts of the eighteenth century. The creation of a simple and regular administrative system; the reform of the clergy; the emancipation of the Church from the jurisdiction of the Pope, and of all orders in the State from the jurisdiction of the Church; the amelioration of the lot of the peasant; the introduction of codes of law abolishing both the cruelties and the confusion of ancient practice,-all these were purposes more or less familiar to the absolute sovereigns of the eighteenth century, whom the French so summa

the nation i

a numerous and energetic middle class, enriched by commerce, and keenly interested in all the speculation and literary activity of the age. This was a class that both understood the wrongs which the other classes inflicted or suffered, and felt itself capable of redressing them. For the flogged and over-driven peasant in Naples or Hungary no ally existed but the Crown. In most of those poor and backward States which made up monarchical Europe, the fraction of the inhabitants which neither enjoyed privilege nor stood in bondage to it was too small to think of forcing itself into power. The nobles sought to preserve their feudal rights: the Crown s

nst governments

ocratic parliamentary system; in Hungary, it was an agitation of the nobles against the Crown; on the Rhine it was an agitation of the commercial classes against ecclesiastical rule. 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 enlighten

act

who opposed all legislation upon the slave-trade because slaves had been freed by the Jacobins of the Convention. State trials and imprisonments became the order of the day; but the reaction in England at least stopped short of the scaffold. At Vienna and Naples fear was more cruel. The men who either were, or affected to be, in such fear of revolution that they discovered a Jacobinical allegory in Mozart's last opera, [45] did not spare life when the threads of anyt

entifying the work of authority with resistance to every kind of reform. There were States in which this change, the first effect of the Revolution, was also its only one; States whose history, as in the case of England, is for a whole generation the history of political progress unnaturally checked and thrown out of its course. The