Of this I am so deeply convinced that I have thought it right to interweave, when occasion offered, with my account of things as they are in France, what I believe to be the historic truth as to things as they were in France at and before the period of the Revolution. To judge the France of 1890 fairly, and forecast its future intelligently, we must thoroughly rid ourselves of the notion that the masses of the French people had anything more to do with the dethronement and the murder of Louis XVI. than the masses of the English people had to do with the dethronement and the murder of Charles I. Neither crime was perpetrated to enlarge the liberties or to protect the interests of the people. We long ago got at the truth about the great English rebellion. 'Pride's Purge,' the 'elective kingship without a veto of the 'New Model,' and the merciless mystification of Bradshaw, tell their own story. Steering to avoid the Scylla of Strafford, the luckless Parliamentarians ran the ship of State full into the Charybdis of Cromwell.
It is only within very recent times that the daylight of facts has begun to dissipate the mists of the French legend of 1789. Even Republican writers of repute now disdain to concern themselves more seriously with the so-called histories of Thiers, of Mignet, and of Lamartine than with the _Chevalier de Maison-Rouge_ of Alexandre Dumas and the _Charlotte Corday_ of M. Ponsard.
Of course the legend dies hard--all legends do. Even the whipping of Titus Oates at the cart's tail through London did not kill the legend of Sir Edmondsbury Godfrey and the Popish Plot. The Republicans of the Third Republic have not scrupled to set up a statue to Danton. People who might easily learn the truth still speak, and not in France only, about Robespierre and Madame Roland in terms which really justify M. Biré in anticipating a time when Raoul-Rigault maybe celebrated as a patriot and Louise Michel as a heroine. No longer ago than in 1888 certain people, perhaps relying on the fact that M. Casimir Périer, the actual owner of the château at Vizille in which the famous meeting of the Estates of Dauphiny was held in 1788, is a Republican, actually undertook to 'ring up the curtain' on the Centennial of 1789 by representing Barnave and Mounier as clamouring in 1788 for a republic at Vizille! Of all which let us say with Mr. Carlyle, 'What should Falsehood do but decease, being ripe, decompose itself, and return to the Father of it?' To whom, alas! I fear, under this inexorable law must in due time revert too many of the fuliginous word-pictures of Mr. Carlyle's own dithyrambic prose concerning the 'French Revolution'!