wful choice. They might
have led and controlled the Revolution; they chose to oppose it, and
were broken into shivers as a potter's vessel.

After the memorable cannonade at Valmy, a knot of defeated German
officers gathered in rain and wind moodily around the circle where
they durst not kindle the usual camp-fire. In the morning the army had
talked of nothing but spitting and devouring the whole French nation:
in the evening everyone went about alone; nobody looked at his
neighbour, or if he did, it was but to curse and swear. "At last,"
says Goethe, "I was called upon to speak, for I had been wont to
enliven and amuse the troop with short sayings. This time I said,
'From this day forth, and from this place, a new era begins in the
history of the world and you can all say that you were present at its
birth.'" This is not the place to write the story of the French
Revolution. Those who would read the tremendous drama may be referred
to the pages of Carlyle. As a formal history, that work of
transcendent genius is open to criticism, especially on the score of
accuracy in detail. Indeed to the present writer the magnificent and
solemn prosody seems to partake of the nature of a Greek chorus--the
comment of an idealised spectator, assuming that the hearer has the
drama unfolding before his eyes. Recent researches have supplemented
and modified our knowledge. It is no longer possible to accept the
more revolting representations of the misery[161] of the French
peasantry as true of the whole of France, for France before the
Revolution was an assemblage of many provinces of varying social
conditions, subjected to varying administrative laws. Nor can we
accept Carlyle's portraiture of Robespierre as history, after Louis
Blanc's great work. So far from Robespierre having been the
bloodthirsty protagonist of the later Terror, it was precisely his
determination to make an end of the more savage excesses of the
extreme Terrorists and to chastise their more furious pro-consuls,
such as Carrier and Fouche, that brought about his ruin. It was men
like Collot d'Herbois, Billaud Varenne and Barrere, the bloodiest of
the Terrorists, who, to save their own heads, united to cast the odium
of the later excesses on Robespierre, and to overthrow him.[162] The
Thermidorians had no intention of staying the Terror and the actual
consequences of their success were wholly unexpected by them. But
whatever defects there be in Carlyle, his readers