ing each of 25 members; the oath of inviolable fidelity to the sovereignty of the people, to the French republic one and indivisible, to equality, liberty, and the representative system, was taken by the consuls, after a speech from the president, in which, speaking in the name of posterity, he observ. ed, that if liberty was created in the Tennis-court of Versailles, it was consolidated in the Orangery of St. Cloud; the constituents of 1789 were the fathers of the revolution, but the legislators of the year 8 were the fathers and pacificators of the country."

Thus finished that memorable day of revolution, which, whatever be the opinions respecting the means by which it was effected, was yet received with general enthusiasm by all ranks, except that of the jacobin party. The rumours propagated at St. Cloud of a movement organised in the Fauxbourgs had been purely imaginary; the most profound tranquillity reigned throughout the ca pital, mingled with much anxiety, lest the measures, of which nothing was known but the intention of overthrowing the jacobins, might fail in the execution. Independent of the military dispositions which : had been taken, civil means for the preservation of the peace of the city were not neglected. The preceding evening the members of the twelve municipalities of Paris, composed for the most part of adherents to the violent party, had been suspended, and the central commissaries were put under the direction of the departmental administration, which, having been long before epurated, was in the secret of the revolution, and had issued during the day proclamations to tranquillise the minds of the citizens respecting the events that were about to take place. The

minister of police, who had been also sternly bent against his former jacobinical brethren and friends, and who was therefore best acquainted with their machinations, issued also notices, recommending the same confidence, and menacing the public disturbers. The dread of jacobinism had gained such firm possession of the public mind, that the contrary extreme was scarcely appre. hended; no government indeed would have been found unwelcome, provided that of the jacobins was excluded. The friends of Bonaparte had however taken care to assure the public respecting the intentions of that general; and papers in the form of dialogues and essays were industriously spread, the tendency of which was to expose the folly and impracticability of any personal attempts on the part of the general against the rights and liberty of the people.

The three consuls entered upon their public functions the following day, at the palace of the Luxem bourg. Among their first operations was that of a partial change in the ministry. The ministry of the interior, which since the revolution of the 30th Brumaire had been entrusted to Quinette, an honest ja❤ cobin, but an ignorant administra tor, was imposed on Laplace, an eminent astronomer and atheist, and as unfitted for place as his predecessor; the war deparment, unworthyly filled by Dubois de Crance, was entrusted to general Berthier; and Lindet, the minister of finance, more an object of dislike from the nefariousness of his revolutionary principles than his revolutionary acts, though a member of the terrorist committee of public safety, was succeeded by Gaudin, an administrator in that line under the monarchical regimen; the secretarship to the consulate was re

moved from Lagarde, who had contrived to fill the post through each succeeding directorial faction, to Maret, who had been employed in diplomatic commissions, and who was one of the commissaries for the negotiation at Lisle. The legislative commissions opened also their sittings at the same time. The first object which engaged their attention was the repeal of the law of the forced loan, and that known under the name of the law of hostages; the former of which had annihilated the little that remained of public credit, and the other kindled civil war. and excited all the discordant passions through the whole of France. Amongst the means of raising the former was that of putting a speedy stop to the latter. Nothing was more favourable to this end than the repeal of that law, which was no sooner promulgated in the insurgent departments than those who had taken arms in their own defence against it immediately proposed a suspension, which was acceded to by general Hedonville; while those who were guided by motives more hostile to the republic continued their depredations, avowing, by proclamations, that their view was the establishment of the throne and the altar, and that directors and consuls were alike traitors and usurpers.

A revolution so important in the great planet of the French nation could not fail of having a considerable influence on its satellites, the surrounding republics. The Batavian, just delivered from Russian and English protection, was on the point of falling into the hands of the jacobin faction, which, at a former period, under the diplomatic sanction of Lacroix, had for a short time usurped the government. Presuming on the revolutionary disposi

tions of the French general Brune, and on the misunderstanding which had taken place between him and the Batavian directory, after the evacuation of the English and Russians, the jacobin party had taken measures for the overthrow of the present government, of the success of which they seemed perfectly assured. The measures pursued by the jacobins in France, previous to their political suspension by the directory, were re-acted at the Hague. The executive, legislative, and other constituted authorities, had gone through the same course of calumny and insult. The day for the explosion seems to have been fixed for the 15th of November, and emissaries had been sent to Paris, to prove to the French government the necessity and excellence of the projected revolution. The events of the 18th Brumaire, which routed the jacobin party in France, prognosticated nothing favourable to those of Holland, who little thought the catastrophe so near which discomfited all their present projects, and left them but little hopes for the future.

In the Ligurian republic the re. volution of the 18th and 19th Brumaire was imitated very successfully (December 7). A corps of French troops it seems had co-operated in this measure. The council of sixty met at the usual hour, and formed themselves into a secret committee. The deputy Montebruno presented a project, similar to that of the 19th Brumaire, for the reform of the French government. This project differed however froin that of the French, insomuch as the whole of the legislative, as well as the executive power, was entrusted to ten citizens, who were enjoined to present a plan of constitution as near as possible to that which should be adopted by the French. The Li

gurian

portion as these two factions felt the effect of the mutual wound given to their hopes, the convulsions of their last agonies increased. The Chouans, under the leaders of this description, grew more desparate in their attempts, and made incursions to within twenty leagues of Paris: the jacobins, in the south more particularly, had it not been for the energetic measures taken by the government, would have broken out into open rebellion: the moderate royalists at Paris, whose hopes are awakened by every change, and who turned every instance, however adverse, in favour of the restoration of the monarchical regimen, were equally loud, though from different motives, with the republican party, in their approbation, which was carried to such a height, especially at the theatres, where the transactions of St. Cloud were brought on the scene, that the government thought it prudent to suppress this anti-jacobinical ardour. But while the ex-. ecutive power were thus anxious to give lessons of political toleration to others, it committed the inconceivable fault which formed one of the leading features of the tyranny of the Fructidorian directory. An arrèté of the consuls, eight days after the revolution, condemned 59 jacobins to banishment, 37 to Guiana, and the rest to the neighbourhood of the Isle of Oleron, without any other motive than the power conferred on the consuls by an article in the law enacted at St. Cloud, which charged them specially with the re establishment of the public tranquillity. The dispositions of this arrêté were nearly the same as those of the 18th Fructidor. Arrests of the leading jacobins also took place. No sooner was the arrêté published than a general cry of indignation rose throughout Paris; not but the

individuals consigned in this decree were for the most part monsters covered with crimes, and to whom France might justly attribute a great part of the horrors it had suffered and the dangers it had undergone, but because; where no legal sentence had convicted, the infliction of punishment was a manifest violation of liberty; and arbitrary power in the infancy of a government, let loose against even atrocious men, was no guarantee that political opinions less obnoxious might not find in it at some future day a fatal precedent. Whatever might have been the resentful dispositions of part of the members of government to carry it into rigorous execution, the public voice was too loud not to be instantlý obeyed, and the decree of banishment was forthwith changed into an arrêté, placing the same individuals under the inspection of the minister of police, and was shortly after altogether repealed.

That arbitrary act of the government was the more extraordinary, as one of the principal occupations of the legislative commissions was the repeal of those decrees of tyranny, of which the late directory had been so lavish. None had been the victims of those atrocious measures more than the priesthood; not only had the turbulent and refractory part of this order been the objects of directorial inquisition, but also numbers of peaceable and even constitutional religious functionaries, who had the misfortune to fall under the displeasure of intolerant civil administrators in Paris and the departments, This tyranny had been more particularly exercised from the epocha of the infamous 18th of Fructidor, when the legislature pushed its complaisance so far as to extend the penal clauses enacted against certain descriptions of priests, and generalise

the

the law into banishment of whoever of that order became public disturbers. The laws respecting priests were incoherent, and often contradictory, arising from the spirit of the successive parties which gained the ascendency at various epochas of the revo Jution. The violent exercise in the Low Countries of the power granted by the 28th article of the law of the 19th Fidor to the directory, had formed specious and, in some cases, just causes for the insurrection which had taken place in those departments; but after this event, the council of five hundred deening it expedient to settle the legislation on this point, named a commission, who gave in its report at the close of the same year, and proposed additional articles, compared with which the laws already enacted were charters of indulgence and mercy. Such, for instance, was the proposal for as similating to the fate of emigrants, and consequently to the pain of death, priests liable to banishment; the perpetual imprisonment of such as were above sixty years of age; and the confiscation of the house where a priest liable to bani-hment should be concealed. Although these propositions no way concerned such ecclesiastics as had taken the requisite oaths, yet it was not without indignation that the priests of this class beheld the prevailing spirit of persecution which actuated the government, which, unless some interference took place, might go on, and at length comprehend such whose principles and conduct had been hitherto opposed to those who were now to become objects of legislative extermination. The bishops residing in Paris presented therefore a petition to the legislature, in which they represented that the law of the 19th Fructidor, enacted against nonjuring and refractory priests, had, by a false

interpretation, been applied to nambers who had fulfilled the conditions of every law, and give undoubted proofs of attachment to be republic. After recapitating the various sacrifices which they had made for liberty and their country, and that they had been fa thful to their engagement whilst the government had been in the habit of continually violating theirs, they inquired whether it was not sufficient that they had been left exposed to the insults and outrages of the royalist party, without a possibility of escaping from those scourges, but they must behold themselves, under a republican regimen, exposed to the sword of persecution, and find no other consolation at the close of each day than that of having made one step further towards their tomb? They observed, that by the law of the 19th Fructidor they were virtually in a state of outlawry, since the name of public disturber might be applied to the most peaceable and innocent; that assassins and robbers were in a state of greater protection, since they had a right to be heard, but that a priest, however blameless his life, or patriotic his conduct, might be sent to banishment without knowing his accuser, and, according to the new propositions, undergo the punishment of death, on the calumnious denunciation of an enemy, possibly a sworn enemy to the republic. They represented, that had this power been concentrated in the hands of the di rectory alone, there might be some repose for innocence: but that this power was to be committed to central administrations :-already had this power been unlawfully exercised by the department of Yonne, where every priest, without distinction, was either banished, denounced, or obliged to seek safety in flight; adding, that there were few countries in the

republic