a series of brutalities and massacres, paid for and quiry which afterwards ensued, and time, which directed by the Duke of Orleans in person-in the reveals all things, afford no trace of any concerted mob, led by women, and men in women's clothes, plan."

carrying off the royal family, in bloody triumph, What! though he himself had just told us that prisoners to Paris; the heads of the faithful gardes- the people had a plan of seizing the king, and the du-corps massacred in protecting them, being car-court another, of frightening, and the duke a third, ried in the van of the procession of murderers and of dethroning him? furies. Yet of these fatal horrors the king and queen themselves were, in M. Thiers' narrative, joint projectors and accomplices.

We pause with disgust and wonder at such audacious nonsense. The court having a premeditated share in the siege and sack of Versailles -the court! Of the poor and scanty remains of what could be called a court, some on that day sacrificed, with deliberate heroism, their own lives in order that, while the mob were butchering them, the queen might have time to escape half-naked from her bed. Others were massacred in various acts of duty. Every soul within the palace had reason to believe their last hour was come. This is beyond all question, and who state in general was the court which invited the mob to frighten terms what all the rest support by innumerable the king!" Next follows one of those admissions details. on which M. Thiers builds his reputation for candor and impartiality :

effectual step towards liberty would be made until | pinch of snuff from the porter, who was afraid to they had made a revolution at court, and that the refuse him."-Ib., i., 195. revolution must be the elevation of the Duke of Orleans to the regency;—that one of those present asking whether the Duke of Orleans would consent, M. de Mirabeau answered that the Duke of Orleans had said everything that was satisfactory on that point."—Ib. i., 19.

M. de Massé, captain-commandant of the regiment of Flanders, declares

"That he was at the head of the regiment when the women arrived that he and other officers used every exertion to prevent these women get ting amongst the men, but in vain-and that amongst these women there were several that from their voices, air, and manner, he supposed were men in disguise."-lb., 139.

He and other officers of the regiment deposed that money was distributed to debauch the soldiers from their duty, and adduced several in

stances.

Joseph Bernard, one of the Cent Suisses of the Royal Guard, attests that

It was also proved (and this M. Thiers could not venture to deny, because Mirabeau repeated it in the Assembly) that when Mirabeau quarreled with the Duke of Orleans for his pusillanimity in running away from this inquiry, he exclaimed, "The cowardly varlet does not deserve the trouble that we have taken for him," (ib., i., 91.) But M. Thiers, with his usual bad faith, conceals the equally proved fact that Mirabeau had said to Mounier, in reply to an expression he had used in some arguments about the constitution in favor of a king, "Eh, my God, good man that you are, who said that we were not to have a king? But what can it matter whether it be a Louis or a Philippe? Would you have that brat of a child [the Dauphin?"]-(ib., 1.. 19.)

It is in the face of these and hundreds of other concurring witnesses that M. Thiers has the effrontery to assert that this inquiry afforded "no trace of any concerted plan," nor of any "participation" on the part of the Duke of Orleans, and that there The iron gate of the château was opened at was not any concert on this occasion, between that four o'clock in the morning of the 6th, though the prince and Mirabeau! Mignet, without mentioncustom is that it is never opened till the king ing the Duke of Orleans, falls into the same rises; that it was by this gate that most of the scheme of general misrepresentations; but he falls populace entered-some entered by other gates-short of M. Thiers' bolder falsifications. but all directed themselves towards the queen's apartments, and seemed to be led by some one acquainted with the interior of the palace."-i., 65.

M. Groux, one of the king's guard, declares "That between six and seven o'clock in the morning of the 6th he saw the Duke of Orleans in a grey frock-coat unbuttoned, so as to show his star, followed by a great mob crying Vive le Roi d'Orleans!' and that HE pointed out to the people the great stairs of the château, and made a motion with his head to indicate that they should turn to the right."-i., 140.

-The queen's apartments being on the right of the great stairs, whither, in pursuance of this indication, the mob directed itself, and massacred the gardes-du-corps that attempted to defend her apart

mert.

Le Vicomte de la Châtre, deputy to the National Assembly, deposes

We have been thus minute in our exposure of M. Thiers' dealing with the character of the Duke of Orleans, for it is the pivot on which the whole of this very important portion of his history turns; and our readers will judge whether they ever before read, even in the lowest party pamphlet, a more contemptible affectation of candor-more shameless partiality-more gross inconsistencymore thorough want of principle, and a more audacious defiance of common sense.

We must make room for his further endeavors to attenuate these horrors, and at the same time flatter old Lafayette, one of his patrons, whose conduct during this whole affair was at best contemptibly pusillanimous and blundering. The first movement on the morning of the 6th he thus describes :

"A quarrel (un rixe) took place with one of the gardes-du-corps, who fired from the windows."Vol. i., p. 195.

This is an utter falsehood, invented as far as our recollection serves us, by M. Thiers himself, to make the gardes-du-corps appear the aggressors. there was no rixe-no shot was fired from the windows-no shot was fired by a garde-du-corps anywhere. This our readers see is the old suggestio falsi; then comes the concomitant suppressio veri. The historian does not relate the horrid butchery of the gardes-du-corps; on the contrary, he says in general terms that Lafayette saved the gardesdu-corps from massacre," and it is only by an allusion in a subsequent page, introduced to do Lafayette an honor he did not deserve, that we discover that any of the gardes-du-corps had been murdered :

"I had been up all night in the tumultuous sitting of the Assembly, where the women and the mob of Paris had taken their places amongst us. At half-past three in the morning we adjourned, exhausted with fatigue. I attempted to get into the château, but found it closed and guarded all round. I then went to my own lodging, and lay down on my bed. I had hardly got to sleep when I was roused by the Comte de la Châtre, who lodged in a room of the same house, which overlooked the front court of the palace and the Place d'Armes, calling me to see that the mob had seized two of the gardes-du-corps, and were beheading them under our windows. While at the window I heard loud cries of Vive le Roi d'Orléans!' and looking out, I saw that prince coming along towards the spot where the gardes-du-corps had "Lafayette gave orders to disarm [strange been murdered. He passed close under the win- phrase!] the two ruffians who carried at the tops dow-followed by a great crowd-with a large of their pikes the heads of the gardes-du-corps. cockade in his hat, and a switch in his hand which This horrible trophy was forced from them; and it he flourished about, laughing heartily. Shortly is not true that it preceded the king's coach."after the appearance of the Duke of Orleans, the Vol. i., p. 199. man with the great beard who had cut off the heads of the gardes-du-corps-[the celebrated Coupetête]-passed our door with his hatchet on his shoulder, and with his bloody hands took a VOL. VII. 36

LXXXIV.

LIVING AGE.

This is a mixture of falsehood and equivocation. The ruffians were not disarmed of their horrid trophies; on the contrary, they carried them to Paris-not immediately indeed in front of the

king's carriage, but in the van of the procession, | resentations. We must content ourselves with which of course had marched before the king set having indicated them, and must revert to the out. The first detachment stopped half way at more important duty of examining his narrative of Sèvres, where they forced the village hair-dresser events; and in fulfilment of the principle which to dress the hair of the two bloody heads (Bertrand de Moleville, vol i., p. 144.) And finally, the imperial historian suppresses one of the noblest and most striking traits of the queen's character. When the officers of the châtelet wished to obtain her evidence on these transactions, she replied that "she would not appear as a witness against any of the king's subjects," adding nobly, “J'ai tout vu-tout su-et tout oublié !"'

we professed at the outset, we will not make what might be thought a selection to suit our own purpose; we shall accept the first marked events which the work presents-by them, we presume, M. Thiers would not himself object to be judged.

We begin with the first bloodshed of the Revolution, the émeute of the 27th of April, 1789, in which, without any visible cause or conjectured object, and while Paris, as well as the rest of All his other characters are treated in the same France, was still in the tranquillity and legal order style every royalist is depreciated and libelled of the old régime-when nothing like a revolution directly and indirectly, by misrepresentation, by was thought of a ferocious moh of persons, unsneer, by calumny; and not a crime or horror is known in the neighborhood and evidently directed mentioned without, sometimes, an insidious sug- by some unseen agency, attacked and destroyed gestion, but generally a downright assertion, that the residence and manufactories of M. Reveillon, the king, the court, or the royalists were them- an extensive paper-maker in the Faubourg St. selves the cause of it; while, on the other Antoine; one of the most blameless and respectahand, every revolutionist is a patriot, a sage, or able citizens of Paris, esteemed by all his neighbors hero; and from the equivocating imbecility of La- and particularly popular with the working classes, fayette up to the bloody audacity of Danton, every of whom he employed a great number, and in the shade of worthlessness and crime finds in M. famine of the preceding year had been a large benThiers an admirer and apologist.* Marat, we efactor. The affair grew so obstinate and serious, think, and, in some degree, Robespierre, are the that the troops were at length called out, but too exceptions. Doomed as they already were to the late to prevent the destruction of M. Reveillon's part of scapegoats of all the sins of the early Rev-establishment, or that of M. Henriot, an extensive olution, M. Thiers finds it convenient to continue manufacturer of saltpetre in the same neighborthem in that character. As his narrative approach-hood. M. Thiers, like the other Jacobin histoes later times, it is curious to observe with what rians, takes no notice of M. Henriot-and pour cause evident, and sometimes gross personal flattery or as we shall see. The mob were so intoxicated personal injustice, he treats the objects of (as the with the plunder of the cellars, and so inflamed by case may be) his own political bias or antipathy. their first successes and continued impunity, that But it would take a biographical dictionary to fol- they made a desperate resistance, and the riot was low him into all the details of his personal misrep-not eventually quelled but with a loss to the troops

*There is another species of partiality which he constantly employs, and which, petty and paltry as it is, produces a certain general effect. The young historian, addressing himself to the passions of La Jeune France, exaggerates on every occasion the youth and beauty of his revolutionary heroes and heroines. For instance "About this time there was at Paris a young Marseillais, full of ardor, courage, and republican illusions, who was surnamed Antinous for his beauty-qu'on nomma ANTINOUS, tant il était beau," (vol. i., p. 303.) A mere fiction; he never was so named. The assertion is a misrepresentation of a phrase of Madame Roland's; who, however, says no more than that a "painter would not have disdained to have copied his features for a head of Antinous." A natural remark from an artist's daughter, and who was herself supposed to have a penchant for Barbaroux; but it is far from the assertion that he was "nommé Antinous tant il était beau!"-for even Madame Roland does not so call him. The truth is, that, whatever his face may have been, Barbaroux's figure was so clumsy, that when the Girondins were endeavoring to escape after their luckless insurrection in Normandy, his size was a serious embarrassment. "Buzot," says Louvet, one of the party, "débarrassé de ses armes, était encore trop pesant: non moins lourd, mais plus courageux, Barbaroux, à vingt-huit ans, était gros et gras comme un homme de quarante "-as bulky, fat, and heavy as a man of forty! What an Antinous! Of Madame Roland herself, M. Thiers says, "Elle était jeune et belle." She was neither: her countenance, though very agreeable, never had been, as she herself tells us, what is called belle; and she was

of nearly 100 killed and wounded, and between
400 and 500 of the mob. For this lamentable, and
apparently unaccountable affair, M. Thiers assigns
no motive and affords no explanation, except by re-
peating one of the many absurd rumors by which
the revolutionary writers of the day attempted to
account for it-that Reveillon was accused of pro-
posing to reduce the wages of his workmen-for
which there was not the slightest foundation, nor
even color; for we have evidence of all kinds, and,
if it were worth anything, M. Thiers' own, that
the mob were not workmen, but altogether stran-
gers to that neighborhood; and besides, how should
Reveillon's unpopularity, even if it were true, have
extended to Henriot? This embarrassing question
is one reason why Henriot's name is not mention-
ed. Now, that M. Thiers was well aware of the
truth of the case, we are convinced by the art with
which he contrives to evade it. He relates the
facts chronologically after his account of the elec-
tions of the deputies of Paris to the States General,
though it happened before them; and his narrative is
thus constructed: he says that
"the elections were tumultuous in some provinces
active everywhere-and very quiet in Paris,
where great unanimity prevailed. Lists were dis-
tributed, and people strove to promote concord and
good understanding."-i., 41.

now thirty-eight years old. We even read at this same epoch that it was a matter of surprise that Dulaure should have quitté les charmes de la citoyenne Lejay [the handNow, M. Thiers must have known that the some wife of a bookseller] pour s'attacher à ceux de la facts were the very reverse of everything here vieille Roland. (Mém. de Dulaure.-Rev. Ret., iii., 3, 11.) And she herself, with more good humor than is stated. The elections of Paris were by no means usual with her, owns that "Camille Desmoulins a eu that smooth and unanimous proceeding which he raison de s'étonner qu'à son âge, et avec si peu de beauté represents. The lists that he says were distribelle avait ce qu'il appelle des adorateurs." (Appel à la Posuted were adverse lists-a strange form of unatérilé, iii. 61.)

These are trifles in themselves, but they serve to illustrate the general system of deception-retail as well as wholesale-on which M. Thiers proceeds.

nimity. "All parties," he says, "concurred;"in fact, all parties differed, and so widely, that all the other elections of the kingdom were termi

But even while M. Thiers admits that the duke was accused by his enemies of having had a secret hand in this riot, he does not afford us the slightest indication that it could possibly have any relation to "the quiet and unanimous elections" recorded in the preceding pages. All this complicated management is clearly employed on the part of M. Thiers to forward the double object of his whole "history"-to throw as much doubt as he could venture to raise over the infamy of the Duke of Orleans, and to conceal-and where it could not be concealed, to excuse the system of violence and terror which, from the first moment to the last, was the primum mobile of his darling revolution.

nated, and the assembly had actually met, before | might be embarrassed and neutralized by their the Paris electors could agree on their members. reluctance to use violence towards anything in the The elective body, which was a kind of committee semblance of a woman. of the whole constituency, was very much divided, and the moderate party, consisting of the most respectable citizens-amongst whom were Reveillon and Henriot-were anxious to prevent the election of the Orleans faction; and, with this view, they put forward a list of candidates, at the head of which stood the popular and respectable name of REVEILLON. Our readers have now the key of the whole enigma. Reveillon was to be got rid of-Henriot was to be enveloped in the same ruin the electors were to be intimidatedand the Orleanist candidates returned; and so it was; and then, to be sure, "the elections for Paris" became "quiet" enough, and exhibited the same general unanimity and good understanding that the massacres of September, 1792, afterwards produced on the elections for the convention. And who conducted this atrocious plot, which cost hundreds of lives at the moment, and hundreds of thousands in its consequences? M. Thiers' candor can go no further than to admit that

"the money found in the pockets of some of the rioters who were killed, and some expressions which dropped from others, led to the conjecture that they had been urged on by a secret hand. The enemies of the popular party accused the Duke of Orleans of a wish to try the efficacy of the revolutionary mob.”—i. 43.

were simultaneous with and accessary to the struggle of the elections to the convention. On the contrary, he attributes the massacres to the old hackneyed excuse of the terror occasioned by the advance of the Prussians, and endeavors, by what no doubt he thinks a philosophical reflection, to palliate those atrocities as the result of an accidental and not wholly irrational panic

"Sad lesson for nations! People live in dangers; they persuade themselves that they ought to repel them; they repeat this; they work themselves up into a frenzy, and while some proclaim with levity that a blow must be struck, others strike with sanguinary audacity.”—iii., 62.

Of the same kind, and for the same purpose, is one of, we suppose, the most audacious suppressions of an historical fact that any writer has ever ventured to make, which, from its resemblance to the fraud just exposed, we shall notice here, though out of its chronological order. In M. Thiers' long and labored account of the massacres of September, 1792-in his details of the state of parties and persons, and in his description of the aspect and feelings of the capital during those awful days-days of such mysterious and unaccountable slaughter as the world never before saw, and probably never will again-M. Thiers does And there the historian closes the subject-leav-not notice nor even seem to know that they too ing us in doubt whether the accusation was not a mere party calumny, resting on such very slight circumstances as those mentioned. He does not choose to state that this riot took place on a day when the Duke of Orleans had collected the populace of Paris at a horse-race-then a great novelty ―at Vincennes, on the high road to which stood Reveillon's house;-that he passed through the mob before the violence began, and addressed to them some familiar and flattering phrases; and so passed through the crowd amidst shouts of "Vive le Duc d'Orléans!" Later in the day, when the troops had been called out, and were just about to act against the mob, the Duchess of Orleans drove in her coach into the street in which the parties What "lesson" nations are to learn from this were hostilely arrayed; and, while the troops galimatias about "terror,' "frenzy, 99 66 levity," endeavored to persuade her to take another and and "sanguinary audacity"-as if they were all less perilous route, her servants persisted in pass-the same thing, and all good excuses for massacre ing through, and the mob, affecting to make way -we know not; and the whole phrase, like many for her carriage, broke with impunity the line of other of those exclamatory apophthegms with the troops, who of course could not offer violence which M. Thiers gems his pages, appears to us no to a lady-and that lady the Duchess of Orleans. better than detestable principles swaddled up in This incident gave the mob additional confidence; contemptible verbiage. He closes the chapter they attacked the troops, and the result was as we with the execrable, or, as he calls it, "monuhave stated. This exhibition of the Duchess of mental" letter of the murderous Commune of Orleans in such critical circumstances has been Paris, inviting the rest of France to imitate the adduced by other writers as a proof of the duke's massacres-and concludes by observing: innocence of the riot. M. Thiers, more prudent, does not notice any of the circumstances, well aware that it is just the reverse; for the duke, having himself seen and harangued the mob in the morning, knew the danger, and therefore, had he been innocent, would have prevented the duchess taking that route. There can be no doubt that the whole affair was concerted, and that the amiable and universally respected duchess was thus brought We must here pause a moment to observe that forward by her profligate husband to encourage this is an instance of one of M. Thiers' most freand protect his hired mob, just as in the subsequent tricks-he relates with an affectation of canquent attack of Versailles the first line of assail-dor, and some vague and dubious epithet, (such as ants were women, and men dressed in women's" monumental,") an atrocity which he could not clothes, that the courage and fidelity of the troops | conceal, and then he subjoins some explanation or

"From this document the reader may form some conception of the degree of fanaticism which the approach of public danger had excited in men's minds."―iii., 91.

As if that "monumental" atrocity had even the paltry excuse of being the product of real fanaticism, or any sincere apprehension of public danger!

reflection calculated to attenuate the horror. This | man amidst the confusion, and cleared the garden. Jesuitism is one of the most prominent and remark-Terror now becomes unbounded, and changes into able features of the whole work. fury."-i., 97. Having thus finally disposed of the massacres Now it is hardly possible to imagine a grosser by the plea of fanaticism and fatality, he dedicates series of misrepresentations than is contained in a long and very elaborate chapter to military the passage we have quoted, which is compiled affairs; after which he reverts to Paris, and then without discrimination or consistency from the first mentions the elections, to tell us that they herd of Jacobin libellers. Who would not think were severely contested throughout France be- that all this movement on the part of the people tween the Girondins and the Mountain, and that was a sudden impulse excited by the dismissal of in Paris the latter were predominant, and elected M. Necker, and confined to the parading two "that celebrated deputation,” in the enumeration busts? But we have direct and positive evidence of which he slurs over the despicable cowardice that these commotions were announced, and indeed and apostacy of the Duke of Orleans, which he had actually commenced, as early as the 7th or could not, like Mignet, wholly omit, by including 8th-and even sooner-that the attack of the Basin his list tille had been for some days a topic of public discussion, and that the dismissal of M. Necker only accelerated by two days the insurrection which was already in preparation. (Procèdure du Châtelet, i., 182-191.)

"the Duke of Orleans, who had abdicated his titles and called himself Philippe Egalité."iii., 144.

But why the bust of the Duke of Orleans? Why was he coupled with M. Necker on this occasion? Because "it was said he was threatened with exile." A ridiculous pretence !-the truth is, the mob was his, and the exhibition of his bust was the signal of the intended change of dynasty. But we are further told that "this procession, peaceably carrying the busts from the Palais Royal along the

But in these details concerning the elections he does not make the slightest retrospect to the massacres; and by placing those events at such a distance from each other in his narrative, and by carefully omitting the date of the elections, he contrives to conceal that they were coincident even in time, and thus relieves his admired convention from the opprobrium of having been the child of the massacres. To be sure the resemblance of the child to the parent deprives M. Thiers' treachery of any seri-Rue St. Honoré towards the Place Louis XV., ous effect.

:

this account (published at the moment) of what he
himself saw of the affair:-
:-

"I heard that there was some commotion. I directed my steps to the Boulevard du Temple [on the opposite side of the town from the Place Louis XV. ;] there I saw about five or six thousand men marching rather quick and in no very regular order but all armed-some with guns, some with sabres, some with pikes, some with forks, carrying wax busts of the Duke of Orleans and M. Necker, which they had borrowed from M. Curtius [a sculptor, who had an exhibition of wax figures on the Boulevard du Temple.] This little army, as it passed along the Boulevard, ordered all the theatres to be closed that evening, on pain of being burned. This armed troop received reinforcements at every street that it passed [towards the Place Louis XV."-Histoire de France pendant Trois Mois de 1789.

was rushed upon by the Royal Allemand." M. The similarity of the cases has induced us to Thiers knows or might have known that this proproduce the latter out of its chronological order; cession was not this accidental and unarmed moveand we now return to see how M. Thiers treats ment that he chooses to describe it: we have the second great émeute of the revolution-which abundant evidence that this intended procession was still more important than the affaire-Reveillon, was a preconcerted insurrection, organized and as it produced immediately the attack and capture of launched from that officina motuum, the Faubourg the Bastille, whence may be dated the lawless por- St. Antoine. Beffroy de Rigny, for instance, a tion of the revolution. We mean the insurrection patriotic writer of considerable note in his day, and of the 12th July, of which the dismissal of M. who was an enthusiastic admirer if not an assoNecker was not, as M. Thiers with all the Jaco-ciate of the insurrectionary proceedings, gives us bin historians would have us believe, the cause, but-the opportunity: "On Sunday, July 12, a report was spread that M. Necker had been dismissed, as well as the other ministers, and that the gentlemen mentioned as their successors were almost all known for their opposition to the popular cause. The alarm spread throughout Paris-the people hurried to the Palais Royal. A young man, since celebrated for his republican enthusiasm, endowed with a tender heart, but an impetuous spirit, Camille Desmoulins, mounted a table, held up a pair of pistols, and shouting To arms! plucked a leaf from a tree, of which he made a cockade, and exhorted the crowd to follow his example; the trees were instantly stripped. The people then repaired to a museum containing busts in wax. They seized those of Necker and the Duke of Orleans, who was threatened, it was said, with exile, and they spread themselves in the various quarters of Paris. This mob was passing through the Rue St. Honoré when it was met near the Place Vendôme by a detachment of the royal German regiment, which rushed upon it, and wounded several persons, among whom was a soldier of the French guards. The latter, predisposed in favor of the people and against the royal Germans, with whom they but a few days before had a quarrel, were in barracks near the Place Louis XV. They fired upon the royal Germans. The Prince de Lambesc, who commanded this regiment, instantly fell back on the garden of the Tuileries, charged the people who were quietly walking there, killed an old

It was not, therefore, the Royal Allemand that wantonly charged an unarmed crowd, which in a sudden effervescence had seized and paraded two busts-it was an "army" of five or six thousand armed men, (increasing in numbers as they proceeded,) which had premeditatedly borrowed the two busts, (which were returned to the owner "safe and sound,") and "marched" from the Faubourg St. Antoine to brave, if not to attack, the troops posted in the neighborhood of the Place Louis XV. for the protection of the public.

M. Thiers in his first edition described the young man "with the tender heart," Camille Desmoulins, who made the motion in the Palais