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Untitled Article
all that they did . But as soon as they did any thing disagreeable to the king's courtiers , ( at that time they had not even begun to make any alterations in the fundamental institutions of the country , ) the king and his advisers took steps for appealing to the bayonet . Then , and not till then ^ the adverse force of an armed
people stood forth in defence of the highest constituted authoritythe legislature of their country—menaced with illegal violence . The Bastille fell ; the popular party became the stronger ; and success , which so often is said to be a justification , has here proved the reverse : men who would have ranked with Hampden and Sidney , if they had quietly waited to have their throats cut , become odious monsters because they have been victorious .
We have not now time nor space to discuss the quantum of the guilt which attaches , not to the authors of the Revolution , but to the subsequent , to the various revolutionary governments , for the crimes of the revolution . Much was done which could not have been done except by bad men . But whoever examines faithfully and diligently the records of those times , whoever can conceive the circumstances and look into the minds of the men who planned
and who perpetrated those enormities , will be the more fully convinced , the more he considers the facts , that all which was done had one sole object . That object was , according to the phraseology of the time , to save the Revolution ; to save it , no matter by what means ; to defend it against its irreconcilable enemies , within and without ; to prevent the undoing of the whole work , the restoration of all which had been demolished , and the extermination of all who had been active in demolishing ; to keep down the royalists , and drive back the foreign invaders ; as the means to these ends to erect all France into a camp , subject the whole French people to the obligations and the arbitrary discipline of a besieged city ; and to inflict death , or suffer it with equal readiness—death or any other evil—for the sake of succeeding in the object .
But nothing of all this is dreamed of in Mr . Alison ' s philosophy : he knows not enough , neither of his professed subject , nor of the universal subject , the nature of man , to have got even thus far , to have made this first step towards understanding what the French Revolution was . In this he is without excuse , for had he been even moderately read in the French literature , subsequent to the Revolution , he would have found this view of the details of its history familiar to every writer and to every reader-It was scarcely worth while to touch upon the French Revolution for the sake of saying no more about it than we have now said ; yet it is as much , perhaps , as the occasion warrants- Observations entering more deeply into the suhject will find a fitter opportunity when it shall not be necessary to mix them up with strictures upon an insignificant book .
Untitled Article
r > 16 The French Revolution .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Aug. 2, 1833, page 516, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2620/page/4/
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