The French Revolution: A History

President Hénault, remarking on royal Surnames of Honour how difficult it often is to ascertain not only why, but even when, they were…

A paradoxical philosopher, carrying to the uttermost length that aphorism of Montesquieu’s, ‘Happy the people whose annals are tiresome,’…

While the unspeakable confusion is everywhere weltering within, and through so many cracks in the surface sulphur-smoke is issuing, the…

The universal prayer, therefore, is to be fulfilled! Always in days of national perplexity, when wrong abounded and help was not, this…

That exasperated France, in this same National Assembly of hers, has got something, nay something great, momentous, indispensable, cannot…

Here perhaps is the place to fix, a little more precisely, what these two words, French Revolution, shall mean; for, strictly considered,…

No, Friends, this Revolution is not of the consolidating kind. Do not fires, fevers, sown seeds, chemical mixtures, men, events,—all…

The victim having once got his stroke-of-grace, the catastrophe can be considered as almost come. There is small interest now in watching…

Dimly visible, at Metz on the North-Eastern frontier, a certain brave Bouillé, last refuge of Royalty in all straits and meditations of…

How true, that there is nothing dead in this Universe; that what we call dead is only changed, its forces working in inverse order! ‘The…

The French Monarchy may now therefore be considered as, in all human probability, lost; as struggling henceforth in blindness as well as…

In the last nights of September, when the autumnal equinox is past, and grey September fades into brown October, why are the Champs Elysées…

How could your paralytic National Executive be put ‘in action,’ in any measure, by such a Twentieth of June as this? Quite contrariwise: a…

Ye have roused her, then, ye Emigrants and Despots of the world; France is roused! Long have ye been lecturing and tutoring this poor…

France therefore has done two things very completely: she has hurled back her Cimmerian Invaders far over the marches; and likewise she has…

This huge Insurrectionary Movement, which we liken to a breaking-out of Tophet and the Abyss, has swept away Royalty, Aristocracy, and a…

In the leafy months of June and July, several French Departments germinate a set of rebellious paper-leaves, named Proclamations,…

We are now, therefore, got to that black precipitous Abyss; whither all things have long been tending; where, having now arrived on the…

What, then, is this Thing called La Révolution, which, like an Angel of Death, hangs over France, noyading, fusillading, fighting,…

How little did anyone suppose that here was the end not of Robespierre only, but of the Revolution System itself! Least of all did the…