Englishmen in the French Revolution/Conclusion
Conclusion.
This book, beginning with 1789 and ending with 1814, covers exactly twenty-five years of Englishmen's experiences in France. That quarter of a century was undoubtedly the most thrilling period of French history, and not a few of our countrymen witnessed the whole of it. Yet we can scarcely envy their lot, for perspective is necessary to appreciate the gravity of events, and the position of spectator had not merely inconveniences but dangers. To us, however, these spectators are interesting as a psychological study. They present as striking contrasts as the Frenchmen among whom they lived. We see generosity and selfishness, enthusiasm and mockery, patriotism and anti-patriotism, fanaticism and calculation, refinement and brutality, curiosity and apathy, jubilation and anguish, fraternal affection and fraternal hatred. We see servility and manliness, human nature at its best and at its worst, now touching the clouds, now grovelling in the mire. For individuals as for nations the Revolution was an ordeal drawing out the brightest and the darkest sides of human character. It was a forcing-house which stimulated the growth of the finest flowers and of the most noxious weeds. Men who in ordinary times would have been commonplace, neither very good nor very bad, were developed by it into heroes or demons. Englishmen, indeed, never played more than a secondary part, and had not the opportunity either of soaring to such heights or sinking to such depths as natives, yet the maxim noscitur à sociis is strikingly applicable. A French proverb says, "Tell me whom you like and I will tell you what you are like." What Englishmen might have been is evidenced by their hero-worship as well as to some extent by their acts. Grieve was not only the admirer but in his way the imitator of Marat, as Arthur was of Robespierre, as Helen Williams was of Madame Roland, minus her ambition and impatience of social superiority. The two O'Sullivans realised the calumnious legend of André Chénier's betrayal by his brother, and the two Badgers are a parallel to Frenchmen who eagerly perished by mistake for fathers or brothers. Pigott, however, with his reforms in food and costume, is perhaps sui generis. The Abbé Edgeworth, facing what he believed to be certain death, towers head and shoulders over his countrymen; but Money was ready to risk his life for the King and his Swiss, though the King was not his sovereign nor the Swiss his countrymen; Helen Williams sheltered a proscript, and scorned to bow the knee to Napoleon; even Paine, in voting against Louis's death, displayed a moral courage for which his antecedents would not have prepared us.
If Englishmen failed to gauge the character of Napoleon, and placed themselves in his power, it was excusable, seeing that Frenchmen were equally mistaken. If they applauded the rise of a tyranny more grinding and relentless than the old monarchy over whose fall they had exulted, almost the whole French nation did the like. The long detention at Verdun and elsewhere was in its way as much a touchstone of character as the prisons of the Terror. There, too, we see frivolity and earnestness, some killing time in a fashion not always even harmless, others diligently utilising it. We see some earning their release, others obtaining it by daring or stratagem.
We end, as we began, with jubilation. The fall of Napoleon was as much a cause of rejoicing to Englishmen, in France or at home, as the fall of the Bastille had been. If, indeed, we can fuse into one picture these hundreds of our countrymen, we are reminded of a biography or novel in which the hero sets out under the happiest auspices, encounters all sorts of vicissitudes and dangers, and finally emerges into tranquillity and comfort.