CHAPTER XIX
THE SURVIVAL OF THE REVOLUTION
IN FRANCEThe theory of revolutionary government is as new as the revolution that has pro-
duced it. It cannot be found in the books of political writers, by whom this revolu-
tion was not foreseen....
The aim of constitutional government is to preserve the commonwealth; of
revolutionary government, to found it....
Under the constitutional regime it is almost enough to protect the individual
against the abuse of public authority. Under the revolutionary regime the public
authority must defend itself against factions that attack it.
Revolutionary government owes good citizens the whole protection of the na-
tion. To enemies of the people it owes nothing but death.
—MAXIMILIEN ROBESPIERRE, DECEMBER 1793
Everything now depended on what happened in France. The revolution in Poland
had been stopped. Belgian democrats had again scurried out of their country,
where the Statists came to terms with the Austrians. The Dutch émigrés had their
expectations suddenly dashed, and the Dutch patriots at home, sadly disappointed,
were reduced to passively awaiting a change in the fortunes of war which would
bring in the French as liberators. In Ireland, Wolfe Tone privately remarked in
March 1793 that ten thousand French troops in Ireland would effect Irish deliver-
ance from Great Britain. In Britain the radical feeling was less subversive, but re-
formist and radical groups, of various descriptions, were dismayed and outraged by
the war in which the British government was now engaged. In every country
where the government was at war with the French Republic in 1793—in Britain
and Ireland, in the United Provinces and in Belgium restored to the Emperor, in
the Austrian Monarchy, the small German states and the Prussian kingdom, in the
Italian kingdom of Sardinia (the one exception may be Spain)—there were groups