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FRENCH AND ENGLISH REVOLUTIONS.

BY THE REV. J. GUINNESS ROGERS, B.A.

THE Times a short time ago, in an article of some power and interest, instituted a comparison between the political changes in France and those which have passed over our own country. Between the two there is so much of outward resemblance that it is not difficult to run a close parallel between them. In the length of time over which they have extended, in the phases through which they passed, in some characteristics of the principal parties engaged in the struggle, and even in some of the incidents of the strife, there is a remarkable likeness between them. In both there was the sacrifice, or, as the advocates of the Divine right of kings would say, the martyrdom of a monarch, though, except in their fate, there were few kings less alike than Charles I. and Louis XVI.; for Charles had really grasped at despotic power, and his death was the punishment of his own ambition and double-dealing; whereas Louis was willing to make any concession for the sake of peace, and suffered for the follies of others rather than for any criminal designs of his own. In both the monarchy was succeeded by a republic, which speedily prepared the way for a military despotism. But here, again, Cromwell and Napoleon, though standing in the same relation to the country and its government, had little resemblance to each other. Both were masters of the art of war, but their skill was proved in fields so entirely different from each other that it is impossible to compare them, and in every other respect they were altogether opposite. Cromwell had no love of war for its own sake and no thirst for military glory; whereas the one thought of Napoleon was to make France the first military power in the world, and himself her absolute master. Cromwell's desire was to rule by constitutional means; he had not sufficient respect for parliamentary forms and usages to lead him to sacrifice what he saw to be necessary for the good of the nation to preserve them; but his honest aim was to establish a free government, with himself at its head. Napoleon, on the other hand, had no respect for any right; his own will was his law, and he wanted to make it the law for the world; and whatever or whoever stood in the way of that, he was prepared remorselessly to cut down. Still, both established military absolutism on the ruins of a republic. In both countries, too, was a restoration of the ancient monarchy to be followed in both cases in the reign of the second sovereign by a fresh revolu tion, not as before leading to a republic, but to the re-establishment

of the monarchy under the representative of another branch of the Royal family. But there the parallel ceases. In less than eighty years, reckoning from the accession of Charles I. to the suppression of the rebellion of 1715, or little more than one hundred if we extend the time to the collapse of the last attempt that was made to disturb the Hanoverian family in 1745, England had passed through the revolutionary stage. She has made great changes since, greater, in fact, than any which are involved in a change of dynasty, but they have all been made peacefully, and in the same path we hope she is destined still to progress. Eighty years of French revolution have already passed; but she has no more, if, indeed, she has not less, prospect of settlement now than at any former period. Since the fall of Louis Philippe, who filled for her the same position that William III. had amongst us, though in many respects with greater advantages in his favour and fewer difficulties to surmount, she has had another republic, another military despotism, a third republic called upon to maintain its own existence against an outburst of socialism. And now it might almost seem as if she was preparing to go through the old round, and commence a course of greater perplexity than ever by recalling the representative of principles that belong to a hundred years ago, and not to the free, active, energetic, and progressive life of this century. The resemblance, then, it is manifest, is more superficial than real, and underneath it we find differences far more marked and significant than any outward features of likeness.

Our Revolution was not free from its crime and disorder, but, happily, we have no such memories as those which are written in blood in the annals of our neighbours. We had strong-minded, self-willed, hard-hearted, and rough-handed men on both sides in our civil wars, and no doubt there were deeds done in times of conflict, and the fierce exasperation which it is apt to produce, which would not bear the light of day. But there happily rose up no men in our Revolution like Robespierre and Danton, to say nothing of Marat, Billaud Varennes, Collot d'Herbois, and a number of others who had no principle but hatred to all possessed of any kind of superiority, and no belief in any power except that of wholesale murder. We have no Reign of Terror, no September massacres, no noyades, no guillotine to be a standing monument of the fierce passions which had animated one class against another, to interpose a lasting barrier to their perfect reconciliation, and to prepare, as we have recently seen, the way for fresh atrocities. To what is the wonderful difference to be ascribed?

Something, we shall be undoubtedly told, is due to the difference of race. The impulsive, excitable, passionate Celt, who finds it hard, if not impossible, to learn the moderation and self-control

necessary for political life, who obeys his feelings rather than his reason, who thinks rapidly and talks brilliantly but lacks that practical judgment which, for lack of a better name, we call common sense, acts after his kind. And the slow, phlegmatic, undemonstrative, thoughtful Saxon, who is patient but determined, often blundering and hesitating in speech, but stern and resolute in action, who has little of mere sentiment, but deep-rooted convictions-prejudices, as his enemies would call them-which he is slow to compromise, acts after his kind. No doubt this explains something, if it does not explain all. The remarkable ferocity which has disgraced every French contest, may surely, in part, be traceable to it. It burst forth during the struggle of the Reformation times, culminating in the horrors of the Bartholomew massacre, which inflicted indelible disgrace on the nation, and set the example of similar deeds of wholesale slaughter by which they have been followed. It marked the Revolutionary period, and turned what with a people of less passionate and vindictive spirit would have been a conflict of principles or parties into a fierce internecine warfare. It was seen not in sudden and temporary outbreaks of savage violence such as might be caused by exceptional influences, some extreme provocation or frenzied excitement, but in carefullyorganised schemes of murder, based on deliberate calculation of the effect to be produced by thus striking terror into the hearts of political opponents or social superiors. It was the result of a fierce determination to brook no opposition, of a cold-blooded and cruel indifference to the sufferings of any who might happen to stand in the way of its aims, of a furious hatred of all superiority, whether in rank, or wealth, or culture, which grew by that on which it fed. How much its deeds hindered the progress of rational freedom we may learn not only from the history of France itself, the great body of whose people have never recovered from the dread of the Rouge spectre, and seem prepared to condone any offence that may be committed against liberty or right by one who is strong enough to deliver their country from this enemy of all order, but from the evidences of the long and violent reaction in almost every nation in Europe, and notably in our own. Yet in 1848 there was a similar display, not attended with the same disastrous consequences, because there was a stronger hand at the helm, and force was promptly and successfully employed to repress the attempts to renew the scenes of 1792. And now, after another interval of tranquillity, again the uncontrollable revolutionary passion of Paris has made the name of that fair city a byeword and hissing among the nations. Her own sons have fired the torches to kindle conflagrations that have destroyed some of her most glorious monuments, and by an act of vengeance as senseless

and impolitic as it was savage and relentless, excited the mingled horror and astonishment of Europe. If the Commune of 1871 have not inflicted the same injury upon the cause of liberty, and helped on the work of reaction to the same extent as their predecessors of 1792, it has been because the supporters of "order" have shown that they were not to be outdone in passion and violence by their enemies. The "White Terror" flaunts a different colour, but it is animated by the same spirit, and disgraced by a cruelty as vindictive and undiscriminating as that which marks the worst doings of the Reds. There is, indeed, nothing in the history of civilised nations worse than the murder of the Archbishop of Paris and his associates, who were not even hostages left by a hostile party, and to some extent responsible for its unjustifiable deeds, but innocent men who had not identified themselves with party, who had no connection of any kind with the struggle of which they were the victims, whose seizure was an act of arbitrary and tyrannous violence, whose murder was a deed of diabolic fury alike without an object or the shadow of an excuse. But in brutality and baseness it is only a shade less infamous, if, indeed, it is less infamous, than the conduct of the Versailles troops, especially towards women, and may be matched by that hideous story of the wholesale slaughter of a bevy of young girls taken from one workshop. Raoul Rignault, Delescluze, and other leaders of the Commune well deserve to be branded with eternal infamy, but the Marquis de Gallifet must be placed in the same pillory with them, and accept a punishment not less extreme and damnatory than that which falls upon them.

Republicanism might thus be relieved from a special responsibility for such crimes, especially with such noble protests against them on the part of Mazzini, if only the representatives of the "International" among ourselves would not go out of their way to palliate and even glorify them. But if the excesses of all French parties forbid us to fasten the criminality on one in particular, it is only to make it rest all the heavier upon the nation, and it is hardly possible to escape the conviction that there is something in the character of the race which has produced the spirit we deplore and condemn. This is strengthened when we see some of the same qualities-extreme impulsiveness, uncontrollable passion, and reckless indifference to human life-in other members of the Celtic family. But if we should err, did we leave the consideration of race altogether out of account, we should fall into a mistake equally great if we attributed everything to it, for the religious and political training of the two peoples has unquestionably had at least as much to do with the differences so marked in the course and character of our French and English revolutions.

The "stamping out"-for it was nothing less-of the Huguenot party was one of the greatest calamities that ever fell upon a nation, bad enough in itself, but worse still because of the mode in which it was accomplished. It deprived France of the finest elements for political life and freedom of which she could boast; it robbed her of the intellect, the enterprise, the courage, and the energy of her noblest sons; it quenched, not only the light of pure religious truth, that of liberty and progress as well; it established the rule of an ambitious priesthood, and paved the way for the tyranny and frivolity of the ancien régime, with the fierce reaction which it ultimately provoked. Everywhere it emasculated the strength and arrested the growth of the nation. She had promised to be a great colonial power, but suddenly a paralysis seemed to fall upon her energy and to hinder her advance. She possessed the materials out of which a manufacturing and commercial greatness might have been developed; but many of the communities in which these elements of prosperity were found were broken up, and their members carried their genius and industry to other lands, where they helped to build up the power of rival nations. How much the nation lost by this abstraction of many of her best workers, by the closing up of the channels into which her talent and enterprise were flowing, by the crushing out of freedom by the iron heel of absolute power, by the destruction of all institutions which train men in the habits of political life, it is impossible to calculate.

But in France the evil was immensely aggravated by the means employed to bring about this triumph of priestism and tyranny. Fraud of the most shameless character, such as that which lured the Huguenot leaders to Paris, where they were to be present at a Royal wedding which was to heal past dissensions, and found themselves the victims of a royal and priestly battueassassinations planned in cold blood and carried out without a feeling of remorse or humiliation-thousands upon thousands of innocent men and women offered to glut the rage of a sanguinary party, who seemed to think their triumph incomplete if any of their enemies were left alive-legions of spies sent into quiet and unoffending districts to hunt out those who still dared to preserve their loyalty to conscience-French dragoons employed in the noble task of cutting down unarmed peasants, guilty of the one sin of loving their Bible and worshipping God according to their view of its teachings, and the whole sanctified and approved, if not directly instigated, by the Church and its ministers-these were the means by which the life of French Protestantism was ruthlessly trampled out.

Who can wonder, with the history of the Huguenots before him,

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