e. Engraved by
G. Fiesinger.

Buonaparte.

Drawn by S. Guerin. Deposited in the National Library on the
29th Vendemiaire of the year 7 of the French Republic.]

No people ever made such sacrifices for liberty as the French had
made. Through years of famine they had starved with grim
determination, and the leanness of their race was a byword for more
than a generation. They had been for over a century the victims of a
system abhorrent to both their intelligence and their character--a
system of absolutism which had subsisted on foreign wars and on
successful appeals to the national vainglory. Now at last they were to
all appearance exhausted, their treasury was bankrupt, their paper
money was worthless, their agriculture and industries were paralyzed,
their foreign commerce was ruined; but they cherished the delusion
that their liberties were secure. Their soldiers were badly fed, badly
armed, and badly clothed; but they were freemen under such discipline
as is possible only among freemen. Why should not their success in the
arts of peace be as great as in the glorious and successful wars they
had carried on? There was, therefore, both in the country and in the
government, as in the army, a considerable and ever growing party
which demanded a general peace, but only with the "natural" frontier,
and a small one which felt peace to be imperative even if the nation
should be confined within its old boundaries.

But such a reasonable and moderate policy was impossible on two
accounts. In consequence of the thirteenth of Vendemiaire, the radical
party still survived and controlled the machinery of government; and,
in spite of the seeming supremacy of moderate ideas, the royalists
were still irreconcilable. In particular there was the religious
question, which in itself comprehended a political, social, and
economic revolution which men like those who sat in the Directory
refused to understand because they chose to treat it on the basis of
pure theory.[65] The great western district of France was Roman,
royalist, and agricultural. There was a unity in their life and faith
so complete that any disturbance of the equilibrium produced frenzy
and chaos, an embattled strife for life itself. It was a discovery to
Hoche, that to pacify the Vendee brute force was quite insufficient.
The peasantry were beggared and savage but undismayed. While he used
force with nobles, strangers, and madmen, his conquest was in the main
moral bec