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Home The French Revolution and the Great War, 1789-1802 1789-1802; Part 2 |
1789-1802; Part 2The year 1790 was taken up with the task of reorganizing France - with removing abuses in Church and State, in taxation and in the law, in the army and navy. The king's attitude was uncertain, and sometimes he sided with the reformers and at other times he opposed them. Finally, however, in June, 1791, he escaped from Paris and fled towards the eastern frontier of France. But he was captured at Varennes and brought back, a discredited monarch, and power passed more and more into the hands of the extremists. In August, 1792, the Paris mob stormed the Tuileries palace, where Louis XVI lived, and soon afterwards, in the awful September massacres, killed hundreds of people who had been imprisoned because of their suspected hostility to the Revolution. A new assembly, called the Convention, was summoned, and met towards the close of September, This assembly declared Franco to be a Republic, and a few months later, after long debates, the king was condemned to death and was executed (January, I793) (Marie Antoinette was guillotined during the following October. Louis XVI's son, the Dauphin, died in January, 1705, at the age of fifteen, as ;i result of the horrible cruelty shown to him. For six months in the year previous to his death he was in a ground-floor room, without light, and often in winter without a lire, and in solitary confinement, his meals being passed to him through a grating; at the end of that time .someone visited him, and all he could murmur was "Je veux mourir".It may be convenient here to summarize the internal history of France after the execution of the king. After the extreme section in the Convention, the Jacobin or Mountain party, had overthrown the more moderate section, the " Reign of Terror" ensued (June, lygs-July, 1794), in the last seven weeks of which nearly fourteen hundred people were sent to the guillotine in Paris alone. The extremists then lost their power, and a more moderate government followed. At the end of 1795 the Convention Assembly was dissolved, and the government was put under the control of two Assemblies and of a committee called the Directory (1795-99). Finally, in October, 1799, Napoleon after his return from Egypt overthrew the Directory, and became supreme as First Consul, and in 1804 he was elected Emperor). The French Revolution, it is no exaggeration to say, affected profoundly the politics, both internal and external, of every state in Europe. Its ideas of "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity" were popular with all European peoples, whilst they aroused the apprehensions of all European monarchs. In Great Britain, at first, the Revolution was regarded with sympathy. Pitt, the son of the great Earl of Chatham and the prime minister from 1783 to 1801, watched it with no unkindly eye; he regarded it, in his own words, "as a spectator", and saw no reason why it should affect British policy. The poets, such as Wordsworth and Coleridge, saw in it the dawn of a new era of happiness and freedom; whilst Radical clergymen preached in its favour, and Radical politicians wrote frequently to its leaders and formed revolutionary societies. The Whigs thought it bore a resemblance to their own "glorious" Revolution of 1688; and Fox, the chief Whig leader, in particular gave the Revolution his enthusiastic approval, exclaiming of the capture of the Bastille, "How much the greatest event that has happened in the world, and how much the best!" |
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