will at least
understand the significance of the Revolution, and why it is that the
terrible, but temporary excesses which stained its progress have been
so unduly magnified by reactionary politicians, while the cruelties of
the White Terror[163] are passed by.

[Footnote 161: It is difficult, however, to read the sober and
irrefutable picture of their miserable condition, given in the famous
Books II. and V. of Taine's _Ancien Regime_, without deep emotion.]

[Footnote 162: See also Bodley's _France_, where the author favours
the view that Robespierre was not a democrat with a thirst for blood,
but rather a man of government, destroyed as a reactionary by
surviving Revolutionists who saw their end coming.]

[Footnote 163: After the Thermidorian reaction in 1795, ninety-seven
Jacobins were massacred by the royalists at Lyons on 5th May; thirty
at Aix on 11th May. Similar horrors were enacted at Avignon, Arles,
and Marseilles, and at other places in the south.]

Camille Desmoulins has described in his Memoirs how on 11th July he
was lifted on the famous table, known as the tripod of the Revolution,
in front of the Cafe Foy, in the garden of the Palais Royal, and
delivered that short but pregnant oration which preceded the capture
of the Bastille on the 14th, warning the people that a St. Bartholomew
of patriots was contemplated, and that the Swiss and German troops in
the Champ de Mars were ready for the butchery. As the crowd rushed to
the Hotel de Ville, shouting "To arms!" they were charged by the
Prince de Lambesc at the head of a German regiment, and the first
blood of the Revolution in Paris was shed.

The Bastille, like the monarchy, was the victim of its past sins. That
grisly fortress, long useless as a defence of Paris, with the jaws of
its rusty cannon opening on the most populous quarter of the city to
overawe sedition, and its sinister memories of the Man in the Iron
Mask,[164] symbolised in the popular mind all that was hateful in the
old _regime_, though it had long ceased to be more than occasionally
used as a state prison. If we would restore its aspect we must imagine
the houses at the ends of the Rue St. Antoine and the Boulevard Henri
IV. away and the huge mass erect on their site and on the lines
marked in white stone on the present Place de la Bastille. A great
portal, always open by day, yawned on the Rue St. Antoine opposite the
Rue des Tournelles and gave access to the first quadrangle which