the Revolution and to judge it rightly. They had no weakness for the
ancient monarchy, none for the republic; and they accepted the results
rather than the motives. They rejoiced in the reign of reason, but
they required the monarchy duly limited, and the church as established
by the Concordat, in order to resume the chain of history and the
reposing influence of custom. They were the most intellectual group of
statesmen in the country; but, like the Peelites, they were leaders
without followers, and it was said of them that they were only four,
but pretended to be five, to strike terror by their number. Guizot,
the greatest writer among them, composed, in his old age, a history of
France for his grandchildren. It was left incomplete, but his
discourses on the Revolution, the topic he had thought about all his
life, were edited by his family. These tales of a grandfather are not
properly his work, and, like the kindred and coequal lectures of
Niebuhr, give approximately the views of a man so great that it is a
grief not to possess them in authentic form.

Instead of Guizot, our Doctrinaire historian is Barante. He had the
distinction and the dignity of his friends, their book learning, and
their experience of public affairs; and his work on the dukes of
Burgundy was praised, in the infancy of those studies, beyond its
merit in early life he had assisted Madame de la Rochejaquelein to
bring out her _Memoirs_. His short biography of Saint Priest,
Minister of the Interior in the first revolutionary year, is a
singularly just and weighty narrative. After 1848 he published nine
volumes on the Convention and the Directory. Like the rest of his
party, Barante had always acknowledged the original spirit of the
Revolution as the root of French institutions. But the movement of
1848, directed as it was against the Doctrinaires, against their
monarchy and their ministry, had much developed the conservative
element which was always strong within them.

In those days Montalembert succeeded Droz at the Academy, and took the
opportunity to attack, as he said, not 1793 but 1789. He said that
Guizot, the most eloquent of the immortals, had not found a word to
urge in reply. On this level, and in opposition to the revival of
Jacobin ideas and the rehabilitation of Jacobin character, Barante
composed his work. It was a great occasion, as the tide had been
running strongly the other way; but the book, coming from such a man,
is a disappo