regilt, and recommence the agreeable conversation interrupted for the moment by an accident-a street-tumult. Clear-sighted in society, their eyes were dim in politics. They saw everything admirably by the artificial light of wax-candles, but natural daylight confused and dazzled them. Their visual organs, applied so long to the delicate details of polished life, had no clear apprehension of popular life-the life of the masses; and in the new element in which they found themselves suddenly plunged, the very fineness of microscopic perception they possessed destroyed their insight.

'It was necessary however to act, for danger was at their door, at their throats. But the danger was a danger of an ignoble description, and their education afforded them no appropriate arms against it. They had learned fencing, but not boxing. To engage in conflicts with porters and poissardes, to take their antagonist at the club by the collar, to harangue at street corners, to bring fists and cudgels to bear on the brutes and madmen who employed no other argument than that of physical force (as the jeunesse dorée did with good effect at a later epoch), to take up the truncheon of special constable, to spare neither their own skin nor the skins of others, to confront the common people in the guise of common people-these were simple and effective modes of proceeding. But to have recourse to them did not even enter into the heads of well-bred persons; they neither knew how nor chose to make use of their hands for such work. Such a thing was never seen as for a gentleman arrested in his own house to break the head of the Jacobin clubbist who arrested him. To make a disturbance or scene of any kind would have been bad taste. For them the first consideration was to remain what they were, gens de bonne compagnie. In prison, men and women dressed with care, paid and received visits, held salons at the end of the corridor by the light of four candles. No matter; they could exchange pleasantries, devise madrigals, sing songs, pique themselves on being as gay and gallant as ever. Must one become morose and ill-bred merely because one finds oneself accidentally lodged in a bad inn? Before their revolutionary judges on the cart to the guillotine-they retained their smile and dignity. Women in particular went to the scaffold with as much ease and serenity as though they were going to a soirée.

When the sword of France fell from the feeble hand of Louis XVI. the question for the future was, What firmer hand should finally grasp it? When Authority ceases to command traditional respect, Force alone can compel obedience. Force, indeed, is the ultima ratio of all authority; but where the legitimacy of the established powers of the

State has not been called in question-where the continuity of the national existence has not been broken-force never nakedly occupies the foreground of the political scene. The value of the sanction of time and usage to authority is not felt till it is lost. It was lost to the old monarchy of France in July 1789, and its armed substitute was not effectively established till November 1799-the epoch of the 18th Brumaire. Within those ten years the wheel of Revolution had run full circle-the advocate's tongue and the popular journalist's pen had finally given place to the Soldier of Fortune's sword.

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VII.

THE REIGN OF TERROR AND ITS SECRET POLICE.

1. Histoire de la Terreur, 1792-1794, d'après des Documents Authentiques et Inédits. Par Mortimer-Ternaux, Membre de l'Institut. Vols. I-VII. Paris, 1869.

2. Tableaux de la Révolution Française: publiés sur les Papiers Inédits du Département et de la Police Secrète de Paris. Par Adolphe Schmidt, Professeur d'Histoire à l'Université de Jéna. 3 vols. Leipzic, 1867-1870. 3. La Démagogie en 1793 à Paris; ou Histoire, jour par jour, de l'Année 1793, accompagnée de Documents contemporains rares ou inédits, recueillis, mis en ordre, et commentés. Par C. A. Dauban. Ouvrage enrichi de seize gravures, &c. Paris, 1868.

4. Paris en 1794 et en 1795: Histoire de la Rue, du Club, de la Famine; composée d'après des Documents inédits, particulièrement les Rapports de Police et les Registres du Comité de Salut Public. Avec une Introduction par C. A. Dauban. Ouvrage enrichi de gravures du temps et d'un facsimile.

Paris, 1869.1

FRENCH Revolution history (it was high time !) is being rewritten. Professor Von Sybel, in Germany, is bringing to completion his comprehensive survey of the history of the Revolution Era in France, and the contre-coup of that tremendous explosion in Europe. The valuable work of M. Mortimer-Ternaux has been interrupted by his untimely death; but where it breaks off at the fall of the Girondethe publications of Professor A. Schmidt, of Jena, and of M. Dauban take up the thread of the history of the Terror, and effectively contribute, each in his way, to the picture of a great capital and a civilised country subjected to what M. Thiers has called the sombre and ragged rule of the multitude.

Professor Schmidt and M. Dauban are both literary investigators of that useful class who make it their business to

From the Quarterly Review, July 1872.

6

'attend to the neglected and remember the forgotten.' The former takes precedence (at least in date and singleness of scope) in a field of research in which both have been employing their time and pains very serviceably to future historians of the French Revolution, viz., in bringing under the light of publicity, for the first time, the reports of the police observateurs' (Anglicè, spies) kept in pay by the ephemeral holders of power, or at least of office, during its successive phases. Professor Schmidt's protracted labours in the reproduction of the police records of that period-which had lain undisturbed ever since the epoch at which they were penned, in their dusty official cartons in the central Archives of France, formerly entitled Archives of the Kingdom,' afterwards ' Archives of the Republic,' to-day (1867) Archives of the Empire,' and on the morrow, we may add, of that day (1871) again Archives of the Republic' (who knows what new name to bear on the morrow of that morrow?)-will furnish materials of very substantial value to the future historian of the Revolution, and have already, we are told by Professor Schmidt, in the preface to his third volume, been characterised, to his lively gratification, as 'precious' by M. Mortimer-Ternaux, 'the truly critical author of the " Histoire de la Terreur."

The two very curious and interesting volumes published by M. Dauban, entitled respectively 'La Démagogie en 1793 à Paris,' and Paris en 1794 et en 1795,' &c., are drawn, in like manner, from documents of the time, but of more miscellaneous character, and owe much of their entertaining quality to the somewhat indiscriminate variety of their sources. For our present purpose we shall chiefly concern ourselves with those portions of them which, like the bulk of the contents of Professor Schmidt's volumes, consist of the secret communications which paid 'observateurs' then, as at more remote and more recent periods, were in the habit of making to their patrons and employers in office of all they could collect, by poking about in all quarters of Paris, of the state of popular opinion and feeling on men and things generally, and with special reference to the question which

Revolution placed most in jeopardy-the daily question of daily bread.

The twofold character of French Revolutionism, from its birth-hour to the present day-that which renders its movements apparently endless in their recurrence as fruitless in their results-is one which seems, at first sight, self-contradictory-combining the most outrageous contempt for law with the most implicit submission to any and every ephemeral usurping public power that does but assume the insignia, no matter how conferred, of legal authority. But the contradiction vanishes when it is remembered that contempt for law was for ages a royal prerogative, and submission to the delegates of the lawless power of the Crown the habit of the people. Law, for ages in France, had neither supplied the sanction nor prescribed the limits of obedience; royal functionaries had acted as the delegated depositaries of absolute power; and when these became revolutionary, they did not lose their habit of lawless absolutism, nor did the subject masses shake off theirs of servile and implicit obedience. The well-meant effort of the Constituent Assembly to decentralise and distribute public powers through every grade of official hierarchy, and every field of local action, only produced a multiplication of petty potentates, each doing what seemed good in his own eyes, and exerting himself, to the extent of his influence or impudence, to make all around him do what seemed good in his eyes likewise. Every petty municipal, newly entitled to tie a scarf on his shoulder, held himself therewith entitled to wield unlimited and irresponsible powers, so far as he could get unscarved citizens to obey them. And this habit of French functionarism of exerting a vigour beyond the law survives down to our day.

The two years' terror of 1792-4, like the two months' terror of 1871, was the work of a set of men who themselves acknowledged that they did not represent France, and of whom it may be affirmed, with equal certainty, that they did not represent Paris. Having seized power by surprise, they

The Jacobins,' says Von Sybel, in his History of the Revolution Time, vol. iv. c. 5, could not conceal this fact from themselves. "All France is