facturing city of the Rhone and the Saone, in 1793 contained a population amongst which were to be found all the extreme opinions engendered by the Revolution. The party of the Girondins was the most numerous; that of the Jacobins the most daring. There dwelt in Lyon a Piedmontese, named Chalier, who, upon the breaking out of the Revolution, went to Paris, and became associated with Robespierre. On his return to Lyon he and his brother clubbists sent for a guillotine from Paris; issued lists of the proscribed; and having obtained the control of the municipal authority, enforced their sweeping orders for the arrest and imprisonment of suspected persons. At length the terrorists, with their revolutionary tribunal, roused the citizens of Lyon to resistance. A battle between the partizans of Chalier and the sections of the city took place, which ended in the defeat of the municipal tyranny, and the triumph of the Girondins, at the very time when their leaders had fallen in Paris. Chalier was condemned to death, and died by his own guillotine. The city refused to accept the new Constitution decreed by the Convention; and in August was in open revolt, with republican armies gathering on every side. Kellermann had been ordered to leave the defence of the frontiers to meet this more pressing danger. The leader of the men of Lyon, the count De Précy, was a brave and skilful commander; and so directed the armed resistance of the Lyonnese that for two months they defended the beleaguered city amidst all the horrors of a bombardment. The fiercest assaults of the infuriated besiegers were met by the desperate sallies of the starving besieged. Shelter and sustenance were at an end; when De Précy and three thousand resolute followers went forth to cut their way through the republican lines, leaving Lyon to its fate. The greater number of this band perished. De Précy was one of the few who escaped. On the 8th of October the troops of the Convention entered the town. Kellermann, whose views were too merciful for the Jacobin rulers of France, had been superseded by Dubois-Crancé; and his authority was merged, after the surrender of the city, in the supreme power of Couthon and the other Commissioners of the authorities in Paris. The doom of Lyon, with its hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants, was pronounced by Barère, "Let the plough pass over Lyon. Let her name cease to exist. The rebels are conquered; but are they all exterminated? No weakness; no mercy. Let every one be smitten." The Convention issued its decree; Collot d'Herbois and Fouché went forth to execute it. The former of these Proconsuls wrote to the Convention, "We go on demolishing with the fire of artillery, and with the explosion of mines, as fast as possible. But you must be sensible that, with a population of 150,000, these processes find many obstacles. The popular axe cuts off twenty heads a day, and still the conspirators are not daunted. The prisons are choked with them. We have erected a Commission as prompt in its operations as the conscience of true republicans trying traitors can be. Sixty-four of these were shot yesterday on the spot where they had fired on the patriots. Two hundred and thirty are to fall this day in the ditches, where their execrable works had vomited death on the republican army."

Marseille had preceded Lyon in an insurrection against the Jacobin tyranny. But the revolt had been suppressed by general Carteaux; and

A.D. 1793. NAPOLEON AT TOULON, ARTILLERY OFFICER. 7117

those who had escaped the gaol and the scaffold had fled to Toulon." In that great sea-port there was deep discontent; and a monarchical spirit was rising into avowed hatred of the excesses of the republic.. In the middle of August, admiral lord Hood was off Toulon, with twenty-one sail of the line and several frigates and sloops. A Spanish fleet was on its passage from Cadiz to join lord Hood. The French fleet in Toulon consisted of seventeen sail of the line, with frigates: and corvettes, besides others fitting and repairing. Its commander, admiral Trogoff, was opposed to the course of the Revolution. On the 23rd of August two Commissioners from Toulon came off to Lord Hood's flag-ship, to propose the surrender of the port and shipping to the British, with a view to the restoration of peace, and the re-establishment of a monarchical government, under the son of Louis XVI. After some delay, occasioned by the opposition of the French admiral St. Julien, a staunch republican, who was supported by the crews of seven ships, the British marines, and the Spanish forces that had now arrived, took possession of the forts of Toulon. The French fleet removed into the inner harbour, and the British and Spanish fleets occupied the outer harbour. St. Julien and his adherents were permitted to leave the ships, and escape into the interior. The besieging army of Lyon was now free to march against the revolted sea-port; general Carteaux moved from the subdued Marseille with his troops; another force advanced from Nice. In a few weeks a great French army was gathered round the walls of Toulon, animated by one spirit and led by daring officers. The garrison of Toulon at the end of October was in number about seventeen thousand, consisting of a mixed force of French royalists, Piedmontese, Neapolitans, and Spaniards, with little more than two thousand British. Horatio Nelson,

a post-captain in the British fleet, was dispatched in his swift-sailing ship, the Agamemnon, to procure from Naples the aid of Neapolitan troops; four thousand of whom finally joined the Allied forces under the temporary command of lord Mulgrave.

In the French army was an officer of artillery, Napoleon Bonaparte. He was twenty-four years of age; had been educated at the military school at Paris; had been a lieutenant of artillery in his seventeenth year; early in 1793 had fought for the Convention against Paoli in his native Corsica; had left the island in May of that year; had spent a short time at Marseille, where he had written a pamphlet exhorting the revolted Marseillese to obey the Convention; and in September had attained the rank of lieutenant-colonel of artillery, and had joined the besieging army before Toulon. He had a plan for conducting the attack upon Toulon, which he finally submitted to a Council of War, when general Carteaux had been replaced by a more able commander, Dugommier. This plan had for its basis to attack the outer works which commanded the harbour, instead of making a general assault upon the town. The engineering operations of the French appear not to have at first impressed lord Hood and lord Mulgrave with an adequate sense of their possible consequences. The garrison made an ineffectual sortie, on the 30th of November, with two thousand three hundred troops of various nations, of which three hundred only were British. General O'Hara, the commander of the garrison, was

wounded and taken prisoner. On the 17th of December, after a continued bombardment during twenty-four hours, the French forced the line of defence in two of its most essential points; and now, to use lord Hood's words, "the enemy commanded the town and ships by their shot and shells." In a conncil of war held the same day it was determined to evacuate the town; and it was also resolved that the French ships which were fitted for sea should sail out with the English fleet, and that those which remained in the harbour, as well as the magazines and arsenal, should be destroyed. Sir Sidney Smith volunteered to conduct the terrible work of destruction. On the evening of the 18th the Vulcan fire-ship was towed into the inner harbour, and placed across the tier of the men-of-war. Preparations had previously been made for burning the arsenal and the storehouses. At ten o'clock a rocket flew up; and then the trains were fired that consigned the stores of this great naval depôt to the flames; and the fireship went amongst the men-of-war and the frigates at their anchorage, and they were quickly burning to the water's edge, amidst the explosion of powder magazines which threatened to involve the destroyers themselves in the general havoc. Many of the more prominent of the monarchical party had been previously received on board the British and Spanish ships which were about to move into the roads off Toulon ; but there was a helpless band of fugitives left behind, who crowded the quays of Toulon, earnestly imploring a refuge in the Allied fleet from the dreaded vengeance of the triumphant republicans. Sir Sidney Smith lingered in the harbour-amidst the bewildering glare and smoke, the tempest of scorching ashes, even the fire of the republican batteries upon the fort,till his own retreat had become difficult, in the endeavour to rescue all who cried to him for succour. Lord Hood, in his despatch of the 20th December, writes, "It is a very comfortable satisfaction to me, that several thousands of the meritorious inhabitants of Toulon were sheltered in his majesty's ships." Those were sedulously cared for who claimed protection as being most compromised. The refugees of Toulon, according to Lamartine, were conveyed to Leghorn, and established themselves in Tuscany. Barère expressed the temper of the French Convention towards Toulon: "The conquest won by the Mountain over the Brissotines must be commemorated by a mark set on the place where Toulon once stood. The national thunder must crush the house of every trader in that town.” The Committee of Public Safety had sent thither its commissioners, Barras, Fréron, and the younger Robespierre. On the 24th of December, five days after Toulon had been evacuated by the Allies, Fréron wrote to the Committee in Paris, that he had secured twelve thousand labourers to raze to the ground the buildings of the town; and he added, "Each day I accomplish the fall of two hundred heads; and already eight hundred Toulonese have been shot."

La Vendée,--a tract of about a hundred and fifty miles square, on the southern bank, and at the mouth of the Loire,-was a pastoral district, where the resident proprietors lived without pomp or luxury, keeping up an affectionate intercourse with the peasantry; where the curés and their flocks had no differences of opinion, and the philosophy of the Revolution had not come to disturb the old piety and its traditional superstitions. This

A.D. 1793.

THE INSURRECTION IN LA VENDÉE.

718

state of tranquillity was interrupted by the harsh measures of the republican authorities before the death of the king. At La Florent in Anjou, the young men made a forcible resistance to the Commissioners who were superintending the ballot for the levy of troops. Jaques Cathelineau, a hawker of woollens, put himself at the head of a band, whose numbers soon amounted to a thousand. After several successful encounters with the republican troops, they suddenly dispersed to keep the festival of Easter, but they were soon again in the field, many under the command of M. de Charette, who became the principal chief of the district of Bas Poitou. Another leader, the most popular of the insurgents, was young Henri de la Rochejaquelein. There were other chiefs who held commands, some of whom had served in the army. But the discipline of the insurgents was very imperfect, and their organization still more loose. After various successes against the republicans, the contest assumed the most formidable dimensions. Cathelineau was appointed to the chief command of the insurgents; but was soon after killed. General Westermann was dispatched by the Convention, with orders to lay waste and burn the whole district. The royalists attacked Westermann at Chatillon; and his defeat was followed by fearful massacres of the republicans in revenge of their vindictive acts. The whole country was in the agonies of an internecine conflict. During the summer the English government offered assistance through an emigrant from Brittany, M. de Tinteniac. The Vendean chiefs proposed a place of landing for a British force, and promised to join with fifty thousand men. For months the Vendeans thought that the promised help would come, but the war went on without any assistance from the ministry of Mr. Pitt. The Convention sent two hundred thousand men into La Vendée, with orders that the whole inhabitants should be exterminated without regard to age or sex, the woods in which they sheltered cut down, the habitations given to the flames. The Vendeans obtained a victory over Kleber, at Chollet, in September; but another battle was fought on the same ground, when the overwhelming forces of the republic drove the insurgents to the low country on the bank of the Loire. The people of Brittany invited the fugitives to come over the Loire, and join their fates to theirs. There were five thousand republican prisoners with the Vendean army. It was proposed to shoot them. De Lescure, one of the most beloved chiefs, interfered, and they were spared. De Lescure had previously been wounded. Almost in his dying hours this devoted royalist heard of the queen's death. He cried out, "Ah! the monsters have killed her! I fought to deliver her! If I live it will be to revenge her. No more quarter." De Lescure died: but his words were not forgotten. Then came a series of battles in which no quarter was given on either side. The harassed fugitives again tried to repass the Loire, reduced in number to ten thousand survivors. The final destruction of the "Catholic army" soon closed the first great struggle of the Vendeans. The brave Henri de la Rochejaquelein was killed. The horrible proceedings of the Jacobin Proconsul Carrier at Nantes-his noyades, in which boat-loads of victims were sunk daily by this exulting ruffian, these formed the climax of the horrors of the royalist war. At the moment when the Vendeans had re-crossed the Loire, unable to

maintain their position in Brittany, an expedition under the command of lord Moira, with eight English battalions and ten thousand Hanoverians and emigrants, was dispatched to their assistance. There was no signal from the shore. The help had come too late.

From her prison in the Temple, where she had been brutally separated from her son, queen Marie Antoinette was removed to the dens of the Conciergerie. After a mock trial before the Revolutionary Tribunal, she was dragged to the scaffold, on the 10th of October-dying with the same mixture of pious fortitude and lofty contempt of her persecutors which she had shown through all her sufferings. Vergniaud, the young and eloquent, and twenty-one other Girondin deputies, were put to death on the 31st of October. The enthusiastic Madame Roland; Bailly, once so venerated as a patriot; and the duke of Orleans, whose fate nobody deplored, were executed early in November. Jourdan drove the prince of Cobourg over the Sambre on the 16th of October. Success threw a veil over the crimes of the Jacobin government.

CHAPTER LIV.

Ar this season, when Englishmen were hearing and reading of the atrocities of the Reign of Terror, and were seeing obscure corners of London filled with emigrant nobility and clergy, the government chose to fancy that revolutionary principles had an especial attraction for some portion of the people of this country. According to the belief of the great parliamentary majority, the advocates of Reform were the high-priests of anarchy. Thomas Muir, a young advocate at the Scotch bar, and Thomas Fysshe Palmer, an English clergyman, were agitators for Reform in the representation of the people. They were prosecuted under the Scotch law. The lord justice clerk Braxfield summed up violently against Muir, and he was sentenced to fourteen years' transportation. Seven years' transportation was the punishment inflicted upon Palmer. These arbitrary proceedings formed the subject of several debates in the House of Commons; and Mr. Pitt had on this occasion, as in many other instances, to endure the reproach of departing from the principles he once professed, in now sanctioning the execution of the sentences upon these men.

On the 12th of May a Message from the king was delivered to the House of Commons by Mr. Secretary Dundas, in which it was stated that upon information of seditious practices carried on by "The Society for Constitutional Information," and "The London Corresponding Society," their books and papers had been seized; and that his majesty had ordered them to be laid before the House. A Committee of Secresy was appointed by ballot to examine these papers, and on the 16th they presented their first Report. Mr. Pitt then moved the Suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act. This measure was opposed strenuously by the usual small minority, but was rapidly carried through the Commons; and was passed at three