XXIV. CHAP. use which the government made of their victory. He easily perceived that the excessive severity which they 1797. employed, and the indulgence of private spleen which appeared in the choice of their victims, would alienate 1 Bour. i. public opinion, and run an imminent risk of bringing back the odious Jacobin rule.1 234, 236. disgusted with the severe use of their victory. He has expressed in his Memoirs the strongest But he is opinion on this subject. "It might have been right," says he, "to deprive Carnot, Barthelemy, and the they make fifty deputies, of their appointment, and put them under surveillance in some cities in the interior; Pichegru, Willot, Imbert, Colonne, and one or two others, might justly have expiated their treason on the scaffold; but to see men of great talent, such as Portalis, Troncon-Ducondray, Fontanes; tried patriots, such as Boissy d'Anglas, Dumolard, Murinais; supreme magistrates, such as Carnot and Barthelemy, condemned, without either trial or accusation, to perish in the marshes of Sinimari, was frightful. What! to punish with transportation a number of writers of pamphlets, who deserved only contempt and a trifling correction, was to renew the proscriptions of the Roman triumvirs; it was to act more cruelly than Fouquier Tinville, since he at least put the accused on their trial, and condemned them only to death. All the armies, all the people, were for a Republic; state necessity could not be alleged in favour of so revolting. an injustice, so flagrant a violation of the laws and rights of the citizens." 1 Nap. iv. 233, 234. Bour. i. 235. tion of the Republic." Finally, on the 23d September 1797, Napoleon wrote in the following terms to Augereau: "The whole army applauds the wisdom and energy which you have displayed in this crisis, and has rejoiced sincerely at the success of the patriots. It is only to be hoped now that moderation and wisdom will guide your steps: that is the most ardent wish of my heart."-BOURRIENNE, i. 235, 250, 266, and HARD, iv. 508, 518. XXIV. fect in the 1795. la Révolu 232. Mad. Independently of the instability of any government CHAP. which succeeds to so stormy a period as that of the Revolution, the constitution of France under the 1797. Directory contained an inherent defect, which must Fatal desooner or later have occasioned its fall. This was constituably pointed out from its very commencement by tion of Neckar,' and consisted in the complete separation of 1 Neckar, the executive from the legislative power. In consti- Histoire de tutional monarchies, when a difference of opinion on tion, iv. any vital subject arises between the executive and the de Staël, ii. legislature, the obvious mode of arranging it is by a 170, 173, dissolution of the latter, and a new appeal to the people; and whichever party the electors incline to, becomes victorious in the strife. But the French Councils, being altogether independent of the Directory, and undergoing a change every two years of a third of their members, become shortly at variance with the executive; and the latter, being composed of ambitious men, unwilling to resign the power they had acquired, had no alternative but to invoke military violence for its support. This is a matter of vital importance, and lying at the very foundation of a mixed government: unless the executive possesses the power of dissolving, by legal means, the legislature, the time must inevitably come, when it will disperse them by force. This is, in an especial manner, to be looked for when a nation is emerging from revolutionary convulsions; as so many individuals are there implicated by their crimes in supporting the revolutionary régime, and a return to moderate or legal measures is so much dreaded, from the retribution which they may occasion to past delinquents. Though France suffered extremely from the usurpation which overthrew its electoral government, and Ff VOL. III. XXIV. A more govern then im France. CHAP. substituted the empire of force for the chimeras of democracy, there seems no reason to believe that a 1797. more just or equitable government could at that period have been substituted in its room. The party of the equitable Councils, though formidable from its union and its ment was abilities, was composed of such heterogeneous matepossible in rials, that it could not by possibility have held together if the external danger of the Directory had been removed. Pichegru, Imbert, Brottier, and others, were in constant correspondence with the exiled princes, and aimed at the restoration of a constitutional 1 See Bour, throne.1 Carnot, Rovere, Bourdon de L'Oise, and i. Append. the majority of the Club of Clichy, were sincerely attached to Republican institutions. Dissension was inevitable between parties of such opposite principles, when they had once prevailed over their immediate enemies. The nation was not then in the state to settle down under a constitutional monarchy; it required to be drained of its fiery spirits by bloody wars, and humbled in its pride by national disaster, before it could submit to the coercion of passion, and follow the regular occupations essential to the duration of real freedom. true com mencement despotism The 18th Fructidor is the true era of the commenceThis is the ment of military despotism in France, and as such, it is singularly instructive as to the natural tendency and of military just punishment of revolutionary passions. The subin France. sequent government of the country was but a succession of illegal usurpations on the part of the depositaries of power, in which the people had no share, and by which their rights were equally invaded, until tranquillity was restored by the vigorous hand of Napoleon. The French have not the excuse, in the loss even of the name of freedom to their country, that they yielded to the ascendency of an extraordinary XXIV. man, and bent beneath the car which banded Europe CHAP. was unable to arrest. They were subjected to tyranny in its worst and most degrading form; they yielded, 1797. not to the genius of Napoleon, but to the violence of Augereau; they submitted in silence to proscriptions as odious and arbitrary as those of the Roman triumvirate; they bowed for years to the despotism of men so ignoble that history has hardly preserved their names. Such is the consequence, and the never-failing consequence, of the undue ascendency of democratic power. The French people did not fall under this penalty from any peculiar fickleness or inconstancy of their own; all other nations who have adopted the same principles have suffered the same penalties; they incurred it in consequence of the general law of Providence, that guilty passion brings upon itself its own punishment. They fell under the edge of the sword, from the same cause which subjected Rome to the arms of Cæsar, and England to those of Cromwell. "Legal government," says the Republican historian, "is a chimera, at the conclusion of a revolution such as that of France. It is not under shelter of legal authority that parties whose passions have been so violently excited can arrange themselves and repose; a more vigorous power is required to re-1 Th. ix. strain them, to fuse their still burning elements, and Staël, ii. protect them against foreign violence. That power is iv. 235. the empire of the sword." 1 308. De 221. Nap. retribution A long and terrible retribution awaited the sins of this great and guilty country. Its own passions were Terrible made the ministers of the justice of Heaven; its own which desires the means of bringing upon itself a righteous awaited punishment. Contemporaneous with the military despotism established by the victory of Augereau, sprang up the foreign conquests of Napoleon :—His triumph France. CHAP. ant car rolled over the world, crushing generations beXXIV. neath its wheels; ploughing, like the chariot of Jug1797. gernaut, through human flesh; exhausting, in the pursuit of glory, the energies of Republican ambition. |