North the number of new citizens, who are not sufficiently 'informed, is relatively small.' We must confess that the enfranchisement of the educated black in the South is a question sufficiently difficult without complicating it by disfranchising the uneducated white. The bestowal of an educational franchise on all negroes in the States, and the drawing of no distinction between North and South, would ensure justice to the Southern black whilst causing the least irritation to the Southern white. The regulation of the elective franchise (so far as negroes are concerned) should no longer remain a State, but should become a Federal matter. In 1890 Senator Lodge (who was then a member of the House of Representatives) introduced a Bill into Congress making all matters relating to Federal elections subject to Federal control only. This Bill passed Congress, but was thrown out in the Senate.

To trench on State sovereignty is to a Southerner tantamount to touching the Ark of the Lord, but nothing short of this can secure justice to the coloured voters. The machinery of this educational franchise should be kept strictly in the hands of Federal officials, who should hold office for life, like English judges. One law on the negro franchise would then prevail in every State and Territory over which floats the Stars and Stripes.

ART. IV. THE FALL OF THE DIRECTORY.

1. L'Avènement de Buonaparte.

Par ALBERT VANDAL.

Vol. I. Paris: Plon-Nourrit. 1903.

2. L'Europe et la Révolution Française. Vol. V. Paris: Plon-Nourrit. 1903.

Par A. SOREL.

3. The Cambridge Modern History. Vol. VIII. Revolution.' Cambridge University Press.

The French 1904.

4. Mallet du Pan and the French Revolution. By BERNARD MALLET. London: Longmans, Green & Co. 1902.

5. Correspondance inédite de Mallet du Pan avec la Cour de Vienne, 1794-1798. By ANDRÉ MICHEL. Paris: PlonNourrit. 1884.

And other works.

IN

N spite of the portentous body of literature which has grown up around the French Revolution, the world is only beginning to apprehend the truth about its leading events. The career of Napoleon has suffered in equal measure with the drama that preceded his advent.

The

M. Chuquet, in his three admirable volumes, has recently interpreted for us the young Napoleon. The publication of Gourgaud's journal has revealed the earlier years of the captivity of St. Helena. M. Vandal is now engaged in painting the true picture of his rise to political power, thus doubling the debt we already owed him for his masterly exposition of the circumstances attending the Treaty of Tilsit, and the consequences that flowed from it. volume of the Cambridge History devoted to the French Revolution is in some respects admirable, but it demonstrates more clearly than its predecessors in the same series the difficulty of writing the history of the same epoch in sections, and assigning each section to a different hand. The events of the period of the Directory, for instance, are dealt with by three writers," a method which greatly impedes a comprehensive survey of the whole, and contrasts unfavourably with the masterly manner in which the two French historians marshal events and unroll the story. We also think that the practice of giving long lists of books at the end, and avoiding all particular

* Messrs. Fortescue, Fisher and Rose; several pages of ch. xiii. by Mr. Macdonald ought to be included, which give an account of the Constitution of the year III, and the insurrection of Vendémiaire.

references to original authorities in the text, is one to be deprecated.

M. Vandal's narrative in no way clashes with M. Sorel's fifth volume, in which he traces the progress of events on the Continent during the Directory, and shows the intimate connection between the foreign policy of that body and the growing dissatisfaction of France with the system it represented. The result of their labours, supplemented by the invaluable compilations of M. Aulard, enables us to form at last a correct judgement upon the events culminating in the coup d'état of the 18th Brumaire, and the men responsible for it.

The fascinating pursuit of playing with analogies has been the cause of many wrong verdicts in historical matters. The 18th Brumaire is an event which seemed to many at the time, and for long after, a reproduction of Cromwell's expulsion of the 'Long Parliament.' In both cases a successful general marched his troops into a parliamentary assembly and ejected the legislature. But there the analogy comes to an end. Both men might advance excellent reasons for their action, but their reasons were not the same. Whatever judgement we may pass upon Bonaparte's conduct, there can be no longer any doubt that he was not acting_merely as a military dictator strangling the liberties of France. He was, on the contrary, the representative and mandatory of the vast majority of thinking Frenchmen, and no historian can be found to-day to repeat Lanfrey's phrase about the despairing shriek uttered by Liberty in her agony,' as the last representatives of the Council of 500 fled before the grenadiers, crying • Vive la République !'

6

M. Vandal puts the right interpretation upon historical analogies when he tells us that we must ask of history 'instruction and examples, but never a model.' †

When the Directory had come to an end the Revolution had been in progress for ten years, but the enthusiasms of 1789 must have looked strange enough in the eyes of any judicial observer (if such could be found), when viewed in the light thrown on them by the events of the succeeding decade. So far as impartial observation was possible to man under the circumstances, it was found in Mallet du Pan, whose criticisms and warnings when read to-day seem

Histoire de Napoléon Premier, vol. i. p. 475.
Op. cit. Avant-Propos, p. 3.

at times more like the verdict of posterity than the observations of a contemporary.

Of all the criticisms passed by him upon the events of his time, none are so valuable as those embodied in his correspondence with the Court of Vienna, which extends from 1794 to 1798. His own life came to an end very shortly after the establishment of the Consulate, but he lived long enough to recognise the work of regeneration that had already been accomplished by Bonaparte. He gauged the state of feeling in France rightly then, as he gauged it rightly during the troubled years of the Directory. He saw that the majority of Frenchmen were thoroughly sick of Jacobinism and all its works, that they wished to rid themselves, not of the Revolution, but of the monstrous régime to which it had given birth, though they had no desire to return to the old one with all its abuses. They longed for quiet, order, and a cessation of proscription at home and of war abroad. In order to obtain this an honourable peace was necessary, and such a peace could only be won by a victorious general, who should, by some decisive stroke, consolidate the conquests of the past, and establish France once for all within those natural frontiers' which were claimed by the nation as necessary to her free developement. This was, of course, merely a return to the policy of Louis XIV. The revolutionary authority was, in fact, reproducing the aims of the legitimate despot, but Mallet du Pan warned his Royalist readers that to anticipate the return of legitimacy in the near future was an absurdity. Whatever chance there might have been of a restoration had been wrecked by the imbecility of the Royalists and their supporters abroad. He endeavoured to make clear to the Court of Vienna the ridiculous nature of the methods by which Europe was hoping to overthrow the existing régime in France; he stigmatised

'the obstinate notion of recovering France by miserable attacks in detail, by theatrical plots, by means of the Chouans, who are permitted to attack all who have not assumed the livery of Coblentz-the absence of all object, of all leadership, of any principle of concentration, the absurd idea that the nation will rise against its representatives to set up the old régime, the total ignorance of what is to be hoped or feared from the war, the constant neglect of all means of persuasion or of policy, the contrast so often experienced between operations from the exterior and events in the interior.'

As Mr. Bernard Mallet in his brilliant but judicious

monograph points out, Mallet du Pan and Burke took diametrically opposite views as to the tendency of French public opinion and the possibility of a restoration. He says truly enough that a born republican like the former would not be likely to found an argument upon the danger of a republic as a neighbour, and further that Burke was wrong both before and after the Revolution as to French public opinion. He was blinded by his passion for legitimacy, and that passion also to a great extent affected the views of the British Government. The mistaken view entertained by the Directory and Napoleon afterwards, of the possibility of treating England and its Government as two separate entities, and of rousing the public opinion of the former against the latter, was as great as Burke's with regard to France. It was even more disastrous in its results, for Napoleon always failed to recognise that the war was a national one on our part. Whether or no it would have been possible to make peace with France in the early days of Bonaparte's rule may be a moot point. It was clearly not possible to effect a lasting peace, unless the Revolution with its consequences was to be frankly accepted, and that meant much more than a recognition of popular institutions in France-it also involved a complete change in the old boundaries of Continental States.

In declining at first to make peace on these terms England was affected by much the same considerations as those that had led her into war. There is no doubt that on the establishment of the Directory by the Constitution of September, 1795 (year III of the Republic), Pitt was prepared to make considerable sacrifices to obtain peace, but the incorporation of Belgium into the French Republic stood in the way, and when Malmesbury's demand for its restoration to Austria was rejected, his first abortive mission came to an end. The second in the following year failed because England refused to restore the Cape of Good Hope to Holland, which meant of course to France, the predominant partner in that alliance. Thus, though England no longer contested the right of France to select her own political system, the differences as to territorial readjustments kept the governments apart. Mr. Fortescue in his excellent chapter on the Directory in the Cambridge History rightly refers the failure of the attempt to make peace to the victory of the Jacobins over the Constitutionalists