be consulted with profit. The French literature of the subject would, of course, fill libraries. Works such as Bougeart's "Marat," Avenel's "Anacharsis Clootz," are monuments of industry in research. In spite of the efforts of French scholars, however, there is much room left for original investigation. The British Museum alone contains, I believe, upwards of 100,000 newspapers, pamphlets, manifestoes, and other documents, many of them as yet unarranged and uncatalogued. The amount of material in Paris, and in France generally, which has not yet been worked is probably incalculable.
Offense has been given in some quarters at the view taken of Robespierre in the following pages. The writer can only say that he cannot regard the mere negative qualification that Robespierre has been in general attacked by the Reaction in conjunction with other leaders as of itself entitling him to the esteem of modern Democrats or Socialists in the teeth of the undeniable facts of the case. The treacherous surrender of the Dantonists, the judicial murder of the Hébertists, the law of Prairial, are these things not written in history? The fact is, Robespierre was a petit bourgeois, a Philistine to the backbone, who desired a Republic of petit bourgeois virtues, with himself at the head, and was prepared to wade through a sea of blood for the accomplishment of his end. Napoleon had a truer sense of the case than other Reactionists, when, as is reported, he was inclined to hail Robespierre as an unsuccessful predecessor in the work of "restoring order" and "saving society" — in the interest, of course, of the middle-classes. With these few words of preface the volume is left to the consideration of the reader, in the hope that it may afford him at least some light on the general bearings of the history of the French Revolution.
