powers, not by any miracles of generalship or statesmanship on the part of the leaders in Paris. While the revolutionary armies were winning victory after victory in the field, the Jacobin chiefs were largely occupied in sending each other to the guillotine. Little more than a year after its inception the Jacobin regime practically committed suicide, when Robespierre followed most of his colleagues to the scaffold. The collapse of the radical government thus came about not through pressure from without or revolt from within, but solely as a consequence of factional internal quarrels growing out of personalities rather than out of principles. And with the fall of Robespierre and the reaction under the Directory, the possibility of establishing and maintaining a radical government with the support of the majority of the French people passed away. For one of the outstanding results of the Revolution was the breaking of the alliance between the Parisian workers and the peasants.
The peasant's attitude towards the Revolution was quite simple. He was determined to secure a fair share of the seigneur's land, free from the oppressive dues and burdens of feudalism. To the conflicting political theories of royalists, constitutional monarchists, Girondists, and Jacobins he was profoundly indifferent. He was willing to support any government that would protect him in his newly acquired land and would not tax him too heavily. Hence it is easy to understand at once the tenacity with which he resisted the return of the emigres, who wished to take back the land, and the apathy which he exhibited towards the most sweeping political changes which did not affect his economic status. The Jacobins gave way to the Directory; the Directory was supplanted by Napoleon; Napoleon was succeeded by the Bourbons; but the peasant retained his land.
The deposition of Charles X in 1830 scarcely assumed the proportions of a civil war. All classes of the French people were tired of the vain, stupid, tyrannical old man; and his removal and the substitution of Louis Philippe were accomplished with little violence, although the retention of the monarchy was a sore blow to many of the ardent republicans who had fought on the barricades. It was in 1848 that the new political orientation of the peasants made itself manifest. In the fighting which raged for several days between the workers and the bourgeois guards of the National Assembly in the streets of Paris the peasants openly sided with the
