sidered rather as matter of praise; and we have heard him lauded, because, after the fall of Robespierre, which he aided to accomplish so soon as he saw that the fate of Danton impended over his own head, he had exerted himself with the successful party to prevent re-action, a cant expression, which, in that case, meant to secure from condign punishment some of the most blood-thirsty wretches who ever polluted the face of a land. Carnot was condemned to transportation on the ephemeral supremacy obtained by the Directory on the revolution of the 18th Fructidor, and restored by that of the 18th Brumaire. He was then created minister of war, and tribune; and let us not refuse him the praise, that when he perceived the ambitious views of Buonaparte, he resigned his offices, inscribed his vote against the Corsican's being created consul for life, and against his subsequent assumption of the imperial dignity, and retired to a voluntary exile at a time when Napoleon would have doubtless been glad to purchase his acknowledged talents at no low rate. From this period he led the life of a private citizen until the campaign of 1814, when, not without an insult which the times rendered perfectly safe, he offered Buonaparte his services for the defence of Antwerp, the events of which we have mentioned in our last volume. He gave in his adhe sion late and reluctantly to the Bourbon dynasty, and was restored to, or confirmed in, the rank of inspector-ge neral of the engineers.

He who declares his solemn submission to a form of government, more especially who accepts rank of any kind from its favour, must, in honour and good faith, be considered as binuing himself at least to abstain from conspiring its downfall; but it

was soon evident that Carnot had apprehensions for freedom during the mild and even feeble government of Louis XVIII., which had never stir. red him into action under that of Buonaparte, under whom he lived a peaceful, if a reluctant subject. To ulcerate the wounds of the state, to inflame the giddy and headlong passions of the factious, which might otherwise have become gradually less violent, was a work worthy of the colleague of Robespierre, who, if hist secret motives might be guessed, would have submitted to any species of government in preference to beholding on the throne of France a family whom he had most cruelly wronged, and under whose government decency forbade him to hope for more than safety and protection. It is thus that, in the commencement of civil commotion, men take up arms for principles, but seldom have long stood in opposition to each other, ere private interests and personal préjudices are substituted for the public reasons of quarrel, and partizans turn their back without hesitation on the cause they have espoused, that they may still point their swords against the throats of those whom they consider as their personal antagonists.

The name of Carnot, and his high talents, well shewn in the management of the wars of the republic, combined with the character he had acquired for independence. by deserting Buonaparte in his rising, and adhering to him in his falling state, gave great weight to the opinions he expressed upon the state of public affairs under the Bourbons. They were embodied in a Memorial made public in the month of December, 1814, in which every fault committed by the restored family is exaggerated; and they, with the nobies, their personal adherents,

people are only regarded," says Monsieur Carnot," as the victims of their chiefs; we witness nothing but the contest of subjects for the private interest of their princes,-kings, who are themselves regicides and parricides, and priests who incite mankind to mutual slaughter. "The eye can but repose on the generous efforts of some brave men who consecrate themselves to the deliverance of their fellow countrymen; if they succeed, they are called heroes,-if they fail, they are traitors and demagogues." In this, and other passages, the author plainly intimated what spirits were at work, and what was the object of their machinations. The whole pamphlet was designed as a manifesto to the French public, darkly, yet distinctly, announcing the existence of a formidable conspiracy, the principles on which its members proceeded, and their grounds for expecting success.

Carnot himself affected to say, that the Memorial was only designed for circulation among his private connec tions. But it would not have answered the intended purpose had it not been printed and dispersed with the most uncommon assiduity. Small carts traversed the boulevards, from which it was hawked about among the people, in order to avoid the penalties which booksellers and stationers might have incurred by dealing in an article so inflammatory. Notwithstanding these evasions, the printers and retailers of this diatribe were prosecuted by government, but the Cour d'Instruction Criminelle refused to confirm the bill of indictment, and this failure served to encourage the jacobin faction. The official proceedings, by which the ministers endeavoured to suppress the publication, irritated rather than intimidated those who took interest in it. It argued, they said, at once a timorous and a vindic

tive spirit to oppress the inferioragents in an alleged libel, while the ministers dared not bring to trial the avowed author. In this unquestionably they argued justly; for the measures corresponded with the paltry policy, which would rather assail the liberty of the press, than bring to fair trial and open punishment those by whom it is misused.

If Carnot aspired to influence the jacobin faction, and the converts whom they daily acquired by his reputation for military science and for republican spirit, Fouché was not less distinguished for the civil endowments which their cause required. To his share in the cruelties of the revolution, and especially of the reign of terror, no doubt attaches. The name of Fouché of Nantes is written in bloody letters in these dreadful pages; and his own dispatches to the committee of public safety, as well as the laudatory comments of Chaumette, Robespierre, and other heroes of that period, are on record to prove, that at Nevers and at Lyons, he was the willing agent of their most sanguinary decrees, and reported their execution with the Sardonic sneer of one delighted by the exercise of his bloody vocation. He presided at, and he reported, the dreadful wholesale executions which took place in the square at Lyons, and associated with the horrible Collot D'Herbois. He regretted the slow means which their zeal employed in the destruction of that beautiful city. "Indulgence," said his official dispatch, "would be a criminal weakness-demolition proceeds too slowly: There must be more rapid means for the gratification of republican impatience ;the explosion of the mine,--the devouring activity of fire, can alone express the power of the people. Their will is incapable of being checked like that of tyrants;-it ought to have the speed and the force of thunder.” *

The actions of these representatives of the people kept pace with their emphatic language. Upwards of four hundred of the most respectable citizens of Lyons were executed by the guillotine and by discharges of musketry.* Menaced with the vengeance which overtook some of his colleagues, Fouché sheltered himself under the protection of Tallien, and afterwards under that of Barras, and totally changed his opinions in politics. He was the foremost to denounce the club of jacobins, in which he had so often presided; and in the revolution of 18th Brumaire, (8th November, 1799,) when the vision of Liberty and Equality vanished before a military government, Fouché was the first to hail the rising sun. He kept pace with Napoleon in promotion, and as his master became Consul for ten years, for life, and finally Emperor, Fouclé became Senator, Grand Eagle of the Legion of Honour, Duke, and Peer of France. But these were only honorary distinctions. As an apostate priest, Fouché was without religion; as a Septembrizer, he was devoid of mercy; unfettered by the scruples of Carnot, he made few pretensions to political consistency, and was therefore, in every point of view, suited for the office of minister of police, which, for nearly ten years, he held under Napoleon. During this all-seeing and all-scrutinizing occupation, Fouché, doubtless, became the master of many a dark and dangerous secret, and the agent of much hidden oppression, The journals, the theatres, the management of domestic spies, the charge of watching the intrigues of the clergy, the emigrants, the Chouins, the Vendeans-all fell under his charge; and the well-known kidnapping of Sir Thomas Rumbold, Mr Drake, Georges, Pichegru, Moreau, and the Duke D'Enghien, attested his

VOL. VIII. PART 1.

capacity for this important office. It is certain that he lost for a season the confidence of the jacobin faction while acting under the imperial government; but he regained it in some measure by his disgrace with Buonaparte. The occasion was never distinctly known, but it has been supposed that Buonaparte suspected Fouché of a desire to form an interest separate from his own, by means of the immense influence and extensive information vested in him by virtue of his office. The pretext of the government of Rome removed this dangerous servant into an honourable exile, and the breach between the emperor and his minister of police, restored to the latter the confidence of his republican friends. But Fouché did not belong to that class of statesmen who make a point of becoming the victims of their principles. By means which may easily be conceived, he had acquired immense wealth, and was in no hurry to lose it by engaging in any hazardous adventure, until he had examined the probable stability of the new royal government, and ascertained whether his services would be acceptable to Louis XVIII. He solicited and obtained an audience of the king soon after acknowledging his sovereignty. While he attended in the anti-chamber to be introduced, he observed a sneer on the countenance of some royalists who were in waiting, and gave them a lesson that a minister of police, even when he has lost his office, is not a person to be jested with. "You, sir," said he, to a gentleman, "seem proud of the lilies with which you are adorned. Do you recollect the language you held respecting the Bourbon family some time since in such a company?—And you, madam," (he continue, addressing a lady,)" to whom

I gave a passport to England, may, perhaps, wish to be reminded of what then passed betwixt us on the subject of Louis XVIII." The laughers were conscience-struck, and Fouché was in troduced into the cabinet. What pass ed betwixt Louis and this person cannot be known; but it may be presumed that Fouché's motives were to offer his services to the king, and it is said that he recommended the organization of a police, which should be effectual for the security of the government, without being odious or oppressive to the people. It would certainly have been of the last consequence to Louis to have secured the attachment of this sagacious, though unprincipled statesman, and through him a complete acquaintance with the secrets of Napoleon's government. Accordingly, Louis is said to have received him with courtesy, and even favour. But Fouché's vote on the late king's death could scarce be forgiven by his brother, even if the memory of that and his other crimes had not been thundered into the ears of Louis by the royalists around him. Fouché soon saw all hopes from the royal favour were vain, and placed himself once more at the head of the jacobin, or, as they called themselves, the patriotic party, whom he had deserted and betrayed under the reign of Napoleon, and whom he was destined, in the course of this marvellous year, once more to desert and betray.

Headed by the audacious Carnot and the wily Fouché, the ancient assertors of the republican cause, as well as the later agents of Buonaparte's tyranny, with many who had played both parts in this changeful drama, began to reappear on the public stage with new courage and confidence. The members of Buonaparte's senate, who had been dismissed from the House of Peers in the most gentle manner, by receiving, namely, no intimation or letter from the king com

manding their attendance, lived in the greatest security. Cambaceres continued to maintain the same style of luxury at his table, and was quitted for the self-imposed fine of two hundred francs, (81. 6s. Ed.) subscribed towards erecting a new statue of Henri Quatre. The folding doors of the Tuilleries still opened to receive Lebrun, (late Duke of Placentia) in his capacity of arch-treasurer, of the empire. Savary, so long the manager of Buonaparte's high police, with his subaltern agents of oppression, walked the streets without notice or insult. Carnot, David, and other men of letters, who had mingled in the revolution, now figured in the institute, as if literary employment was to be henceforward the business of their lives. Under all this apparent peace and security, the bonds of jacobinical fraternity were in secret renewed, and the members of the confederacy might be distinguished by the well-disciplined unanimity with which they praised or blamed, censured or approved, individuals or opinions.

But it was chiefly their business to insist upon the faults of the royal family, and their prejudices against the men and measures of that period when France was successful in foreign war, against the statesmen who directed, and the soldiers who achieved her gigantic enterprizes.-The king, they said, had suffered misfortune without having learned wisdom;-he was incapable of stepping beyond the circle of his Gothic prejudices ;-France had received him from the hand of foreign conquerors, surrounded by an emaciated groupe of mendicant nobles, whose pretensions were as antiquated and absurd as their decorations and manners. His government went to divide, they alleged, the French into two classes, opposed to each other in merits as in interests-the emigrants, who alone were regarded as faithful and willing subjects, and the rest of the