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spired together to the same end. Thus Catholicism made another attempt to subjugate the world.'

We shall watch with anxious expectation for the appearance of Mr. Ranke's successive volumes, fully convinced that nothing can proceed from his pen which will not deserve the attention of the European public. From his age (he is, we believe, still a young man) we may look for large accessions to our historical knowledge, and the style of the present volume is a safe pledge that his future works will be as agreeable in manner as valuable in matter.

ART. II.-Chronique de Cinquante Jours-du 20 Juin au 10 Août 1792, redigée sur Pièces authentiques. Par P. L. Roederer, Paris, 1832.

THIS work has been three years in print, but is not yet, we be

lieve, published. The copy before us was presented by the author to one of his friends, and we have not been able to procure another from the booksellers. The very name of Roederer excites a painful interest. In his long and useless life, there was one remarkable hour which confers upon him an eternal-and, if we are to believe himself, not dishonourable-celebrity. Pierre Louis Roederer, born about 1756, was, before the Revolution, a member of the Parliament of Metz, and elected in 1789 to the Constituent Assembly, where he became a violent Revolutionist. Being by the self-denying decree of non-election excluded from the second assembly, he-like Pétion, Robespierre, and other disinterested Constituants-took refuge in a good office, and became Procureur Syndic (legal adviser and leading member) of the Council General of the Department of Paris. It was in this character that, being stationed at the Tuileries on the 10th of August, 1792, for the defence of the king's person and residence, he advised and almost forced the royal family to abandon the palace and to take refuge in the National Assembly; a step which, however expedient it might appear to M. Roederer at the moment, did ultimately lead the royal victims to the jail and the scaffold. It is therefore not surprising that he almost the sole-surviving witness of these scenes and the individual most deeply responsible for the particular transaction-should be desirous of clearing away the doubts which have hitherto hung over his motives, and of showing that, whatever were the consequences of his advice, the advice itself was, under the circumstances, honest in its motive, and prudent in its object.

M. Roederer proposes to answer two contradictory charges which have been made against him-the one by the Mountain, of

being a royalist, and having saved the King; the other, by the royalists, of having betrayed him, and he seems to think that the mere accusation of having betrayed both sides is a sufficient proof that he did neither. Now, so far from getting rid of these apparently contradictory charges, M. Roederer has the ill-luck to persuade us of the truth of both. He was a royalist in the sense in which the Mountain employed the term-that is, he had no objection to a constitutional king, but would have preferred Egalité to Louis XVI.; and in either case desired that his party should be viceroys over him.' The Girondins (to whom Roederer, in some degree, attached himself) had the baseness, as we had lately occasion to show, to adopt the whole 10th of August-though it is notorious (and M. Roederer himself admits) that the results were widely different from their intentions or objects-their design being originally no more than to frighten the King into the recall of the Girondin ministers. The Mountain was therefore right in calling M. Roderer a royalist-which he was just as much as his friend Vergniaud-who was a staunch monarchist at daybreak of the 10th of August an equally staunch republican before midnight—a royalist one day-a regicide the next-and a renegade throughout! But it is not the charge of being a royalist, that most seriously -offends his Excellency, Count Roederer-Peer of France-Councillor of State-Great Cross of the Legion of Honour-ExMinister of Finance to the King of Naples-Ex-Administrator of the Grand Duchy of Berg-Ex-Governor of Strasburg-ExCommissary at Lyons, and lately-(for he is a practical professor of the bathos-or art of sinking in public life)--author of a pamphlet against revolutionary agitation, and in support of the legitimate monarchy of King Louis Philippe ;-it is not, we say, against the charge of royalism, that his complaints are most seriously directed-no, his great effort is to refute the allegation that he betrayed Louis XVI. The shaft that rankles deepest and sorest in his heart is a sarcasm of forty years' standing-which, assuredly, nothing but conscience could have kept festering all this time :

6

A miserable mountebank,' says his Excellency Count Roederer, of the name of Richer Serizy, with his partner Pelletier [Peltier], another hireling pamphleteer of the civil list-thought it very pleasant to burlesque me [in the character of Judas], by putting into my mouth the words-"Ego sum qui tradidi eum." [I am he who betrayed him.]'-p. 414.

These liberals are terribly illiberal in their attacks on others. Richer Serizy was no more a miserable mountebank than Roederer himself. M. Peltier was, in all circumstances, as respectable as Roederer could pretend to be, with a great deal more honesty and infinitely more talents; and it certainly little becomes M. Roederer

to

to call any man a hireling—he who was a notorious hireling of Buonaparte or to reproach a writer with being a pamphleteer -he who only the other day burst out from his long obscurity in a pamphlet in defence of the arbitrary measures of the new Court of the Tuileries. Nor do we understand why he should have waited till these days when no one is thinking about him, to make a defence which he did not attempt under the Directory-the Consulate-the Empire-the Restoration-when the charges against him were repeated, bitterly and forcibly, in fifty publications. Was he endeavouring to outlive contradiction?

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But passing over these personal contests, in which M. Roederer would certainly not have the best of it, we shall observe on the main question that the charge against Roederer of having betrayed the King rests on two grounds: first, on the admitted facts of his own conduct during the 9th and 10th August; and secondly, on the statement which he published in a pamphlet, and re-published in the Moniteur' of the 24th August, 1792-in which, seeing the sudden and unexpected turn' which things had taken, he endeavours to exculpate himself from any share in the resistance to the mob, and especially from having ordered the Swiss guards to repel force by force. Unluckily, this defence contains, besides several confessedly false charges against the Swiss, many insinuations against the King, and particularly an avowal that Roederer's object was to secure the King as an HOSTAGE,' which were calculated to excite at the time an opinion that Roederer was rather an accomplice than an opponent of the attack on the palace, which he was bound to defend. In the present work he endeavours to explain away some of these unfortunate phrases-others he excuses on the score of the 'general error' of the moment, as to the treachery of the Swiss, and he labours to give a colour of probability to an impudent fable which we shall notice more particularly by-and-by, that there was a design on the part of the court to attack the National Assembly. As to the unlucky phrase about securing the King as an hostage,'-which is really the gist of the whole case-his defence is a strange one-he can neither deny the words nor explain them away,-what then? he pleads that they were a falsehood-a mere invention and afterthought, which he uttered only to conciliate 'ce tribunal d'égorgeurs'-the revolutionary tribunal! Upon this we must observe, first, that M. Roederer seems to suppose that terror would be a sufficient excuse for any baseness-which is not our opinion; but, secondly-if it were--the terror of the revolutionary tribunal was not yet fully developed-it was still a young unblooded tiger, and had not tried a single person at the time when Roederer wrote his letter. Its first victim was condemned, we believe, the very day that letter was published, and the tribunal, afterwards so vigorous and rapid,"

was,

was, at this time, so moderate as to have executed but three persons -and those after some semblance of a trial-in the first month, But admitting, as we are ready to do, that Roederer was terribly frightened, what can we think of such a defence as this-that, in his own prospective terror of the tribunal, he published a falsehood which could not fail to be injurious to other parties whose fate was actually in issue? But we really do not believe M. Roederer to have been altogether so bad as he represents himself. His use of the word 'hostage was rather an ambiguity than a falsehood. He undoubtedly was desirous of saving the King's life,-partly, we hope, from humanity, and partly, we believe, for the purpose of making him an instrument in the hands of his party.

On the main point, as to his having really betrayed the King, our difficulty is as to the precise sense in which the word betray' may be employed. We do not believe that M. Roederer was guilty of anything which can be called personal treachery-he had no private ties to the King-he enjoyed no special confidence he did not appear at the palace as the King's friend-he had been placed by his party in a prominent office, and he was probably disposed as much by personal conviction as by political connexion to forward the secret intentions of that party. But, on the other hand, we cannot acquit him of having-from whatever motive-given the king false impressions and insidious advice, and of having notoriously betrayed his ostensible public trust. It was his duty to keep the peace, to vindicate the law, to maintain the King's authority, as well as to defend his palace and his person-it was his duty not merely to repel force by force, but to anticipate and arrest, while yet scattered and at a distance, the hostile movement: and when at last the insurgents came within reach, and their intentions admitted of no doubt, he ought to have attacked and dispersed them. This duty he assuredly betrayed. He paralyzed the resistance which but for him would certainly have been made, and would probably have been successful; and, what is worse, we believe he went to and remained at the palace for the sole purpose of paralyzing that resistance.

After this general view of the question, we proceed to M, Roederer's explanation, which is more meagre and inconclusive, and possesses much less of novelty than we expected. Twothirds of the volume are extracts from the Moniteur and Journal des Débats of speeches and reports, already familiar to every one who has looked into any of the details of the French Revolution; nor do we discover one new fact, and hardly a new view in the whole of his Chronicle;' but we must add that his extracts are made with tolerable impartiality, and his narrative produces, very clearly and intelligibly, the series of events which led from the indecisive

indecisive outrages of the 20th of June on to the crowning atrocities of the 10th of August.

It is not our intention to follow M. Roederer through the details of his work which, as we have said, afford little noveltyand of which he is certainly not the best evidence; but we shall extract, or rather translate in extenso, the whole chapter which contains that information which is nowhere else to be found, and which constitutes the chief value, such as it is, of the book-we mean his own personal narrative of what passed during his stay at the Tuileries, from the night of the 9th to the morning of the 10th August. We shall introduce this chapter by a few words on the antecedent state of affairs, and also intersperse such observations as may the better enable our readers to judge how far M. Roederer's facts corroborate his defence.

Our readers recollect that on the 20th June the Palace of the Tuileries (always at this period called Le Château) was invaded and forcibly entered by an armed mob, which committed the most indecent and disgusting violences against the royal family. The precise object of that insurrection is still a question. We believe it to have been-as it was subsequently on the 10th of Augusttwofold. The Jacobins hoped that, in the scuffle, the king might be murdered-the Girondins intended only to intimidate him into the recall of Roland and the Girondin Ministry. The attempt on the king's life was prevented by a combination of accidents ; and the general horror which the brutalities of the mob excited throughout France, and, above all, in the armies, defeated the Girondin object: so that the 20th of June turned out to be no more than a rehearsal for the 10th of August,-when we shall see the same actors playing over again the same parts on the same stage, but with, unhappily, a different result.

In this June affair the greatest share of blame was imputed to Pétion, the mayor, who, though he eventually suffered death as a Girondin, was at this time so popular with the Jacobins that it seems even to this hour hard to determine whether, on the 20th of June, he acted in concert with the party that intended murder, or the party that meant only intimidation. His conduct, however, was blamed by all honest men. The Council General of the Department of which Roederer was, by his office, a leading member suspended Pétion from his functions; and a violent struggle began, in which the whole Jacobin party-Mountain and Gironde-united in defence of Pétion against Lafayette, the Department, and the Constitutionalists. In this contest Roederer abandoned the Constitutionalists and took the part of Pétion, and, while he admits the atrocity of the insurrection, endeavours to exculpate the mayor from the charge of not having done his duty in suppressing it. Amongst other things, he says,

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