"French Revolution" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of the wagon top, which obviously was where the occupant kept her rifle. There was a tiny stove by the door and a cupboard beside it, the shelves of which were crowded with books whose titles made the sheriff's eyes open. A Latin grammar, a Roman history, the "Story of the French Revolution," mythology, and many others that might as well have been Greek for all the meaning their titles conveyed ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... said, "you don't understand Joan. I am not sure that even I, who live with her, do. She reminds me sometimes of those women of the French revolution. There is a light in her eyes when she speaks of you, which makes me shiver. Stay in London if you must, but pray always that chance may ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... English criticism, like that of English literature, divides itself roughly into three periods. The first is the period of the Elizabethans and of Milton; the second is from the Restoration to the French Revolution; the third from the Revolution to the present day. The typical critic of the first period is Sidney; Dryden opens and Johnson closes the second; the third, a period of far more varied tendencies than either of the others, is perhaps most fitly ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... however many and brilliant the number of its recipients of "honorary degrees." I touched upon the ease with which even the least remarkable pupil in that school could repeat the Declaration of Independence and recount the "causes" of the French Revolution. Finally, I mentioned our examination days—six in January, six ...
— The American Child • Elizabeth McCracken
... to democrats; but Carlyle can justify loyalty, and show how obedience to the hero may be fidelity to myself. Every experience needs its interpreter, one who can show its derivation from an absolute centre. The mob of the French Revolution is a crowd of devils till their poet arrives and restores these maniacs to manhood. They are misguided brothers, doing what we should do in their place. Genius in every situation takes hold on reality, a tap-root going down to the source. Equilibrium appears in a staggering as ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... known that the French Revolution, apart from its political significance, was an attempt made by the French people, in 1793 and 1794, in three different directions more or less akin to Socialism. It was, first, the equalization of fortunes, by means of an income tax and succession duties, both heavily progressive, as also by ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... Russia should be left to manage her own affairs End Quote. Editorial disagreed with policy of French Government towards Russia and soviets. Calls attention to disastrous results of foreign intervention during French Revolution, Editorial further says: Quote Impossible to fight revolution in one place and be at peace elsewhere. If Allies mean to fight Hungary because it has set up a soviet form of government and allied itself to Russia they will have to fight Russia. If they fight Russia they will have to fight ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... his brow was bathed in sweat. There seemed to be some weird power in his words as in those of the prophets of old. The more than plebeian simplicity of his dress still further increased the pride of his gestures and the impressiveness of his voice. The French Revolution has shown since that in the ranks of the people there was no lack of eloquence or of pitiless logic; but what I saw at that moment was so novel, and made such an impression on me, that my unruly and unbridled imagination was carried away by the superstitious ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... rebellious colonies against England, and obtained advantageous terms at the peace. Within ten years the two countries had again entered upon a war, this time of vastly greater extent, and continuing almost unbroken for more than twenty years. This was a result of the outbreak of the French Revolution. In 1789 the Estates General of France, a body corresponding in its earlier history to the English Parliament, was called for the first time for almost two hundred years. This assembly and its successors undertook to reorganize French ...
— An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England • Edward Potts Cheyney
... moral and political conditions of the first centuries, seem to us natural—as natural in the history of the world as other great and surprising events and changes—as natural as the growth and the fall of the Roman Empire, or as the Reformation, or the French Revolution. He is well qualified to sound the depths of his undertaking and to meet its heavy exigencies. With a fuller knowledge of books, and a closer familiarity than most men with the thoughts and the events of the early ages, with a serious value for the ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... the aristocracy, or hereditary oligarchy, which ruled Great Britain in the eighteenth century. But each had been transformed by national changes since the Reform Bill. The Whigs had become Liberals, the Tories had become Conservatives. The Liberal party had absorbed part of the principles of the French Revolution. They stood now for individual liberty, laying especial stress on freedom of trade, freedom of contract, and freedom of competition. They had set themselves to break down the rule of the landowner and the ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... there comes this calm. It is always so in history. It was so before the Eastern War; it was so before the French Revolution. It was so before the Reformation. There is a kind of oily heaving; and everything is languid. So everything has been in America, too, for over eighty years.... Father Franklin, I think something is going ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... the French Revolution, all the belligerent powers began by discarding in practice, not only the principles of the armed neutrality, but even the generally received maxims of international law by which neutral commerce in time ...
— The Laws Of War, Affecting Commerce And Shipping • H. Byerley Thomson
... valiant taste of death but once. Stop my house's ears. His strong mind reeled under the blow. The compressed passions of a century exploded in the French Revolution. It was written at a white heat. He can scarcely keep the wolf from the door. Strike while the iron is hot. Murray's eloquence never blazed into sudden flashes, but its clear, placid, and ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... dark and gloomy. It is an error to think that the Civil War was a sudden outbreak, a short struggle on simple issues between two sharply divided parties, assured of their beliefs and interests. The French Revolution was that, or nearly that; but our revolutions are managed deliberately, and lead to conclusive and permanent results: the art of revolution belongs ...
— The Life and Times of John Wilkins • Patrick A. Wright-Henderson
... natural sense of right prevails, sometimes communicated from the lower to the higher, sometimes from the higher to the lower, which is too strong for class interests. There have been crises in the history of nations, as at the time of the Crusades or the Reformation, or the French Revolution, when the same inspiration has taken hold of whole peoples, and permanently raised the sense of freedom and ...
— Statesman • Plato
... the first rigor of the reformation brought about by that illustrious woman. Extraordinary as this may seem, it is none the less true. Almost every religious house in the Peninsula, or in Europe for that matter, was either destroyed or disorganized by the outbreak of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars; but as this island was protected through those times by the English fleet, its wealthy convent and peaceable inhabitants were secure from the general trouble and spoliation. The storms ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... surface under the flowered paper which covered it, and when this was torn away, there stood revealed a picture of Jacob and Rebecca at the Well, by Paul Veronese; doubtless thus concealed with a view to its secret removal during the first French Revolution. The missing Charles First of Velasquez was lately exhibited in this country, and the account its possessor gives of the mode of its discovery and the obstacles which attended the establishment of its legal ownership in England is a remarkable ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... the ship cruised among the West Indies, visiting, among other ports, Cape Haytien, the old capital of the island of Hayti, to inquire into the imprisonment of an American merchant captain. This place, before the French Revolution, had been a city of great magnificence and beauty—the Paris of the Isles; and the old French nobility, possessing enormous landed estates and large numbers of slaves, lived in a state of almost ...
— The Bay State Monthly - Volume 1, Issue 4 - April, 1884 • Various
... Malcolm, of Loch Ore, an eccentric baronet, pronounced this oracular couplet in his old age, when troubled with the talk of the French Revolution. As a picture of meditative serenity and neutrality, it seems worthy ...
— The Proverbs of Scotland • Alexander Hislop
... Far East would be twisted out of shape. Japanese statesmen had desired a weak China, a China which would ultimately turn to them for assistance because they were a kindred race, but not a China that looked to the French Revolution for its inspiration. To a people as slow to adjust themselves to violent surprises as are the Japanese, there was an air of desperation about the whole business which greatly alarmed them, and made them determined at the earliest ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... close of the last century the Doctor's grandfather was minister of the High Kirk, Muirtown, where he built up the people in loyalty to Kirk and State, and himself recruited for the Perthshire Fencibles. He also delivered a sermon entitled "The French Revolution the just judgment of the Almighty on the spirit of insubordination," for which he received a vote of thanks from the Lord Provost and Bailies of Muirtown in council assembled, as well as a jewel from ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... control and that detachment from Europe which has been their most prominent characteristic. Even the mild sway of the Dutch Company had caused them to revolt. The local rising, however, was hardly noticed in the universal cataclysm which followed the French Revolution. After twenty years, during which the world was shaken by the Titanic struggle in the final counting up of the game and paying of the stakes, the Cape Colony was added in ...
— The War in South Africa - Its Cause and Conduct • Arthur Conan Doyle
... many years ago, that when he came to the bar, and some time afterwards, he sided with his college mates Tazewell, Randolph, Cabell, Thompson, and James Barbour, and hailed with rapture the progress of the French revolution; but, shocked by the barbarities which disgraced the later stages of that moral and political maelstrom, and indignant at the unprecedented conduct of the diplomatic agents of France in our own country, he determined to separate from his early ...
— Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell • Hugh Blair Grigsby
... traditions. She had even just given one more proof of her sea power by her defeat of the pirates of Algiers. But her position in Europe had disappeared and a terrible glow was beginning to tinge the northern sky—none other than that of the French Revolution, from which was to emerge a Man of Destiny whose short sharp way with the map of Europe must disturb the life of frivolity and ease which the ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... floors of byres, stables, and farmyards were particularly rich in nitre, and when mixed with wood-ashes formed an important source of it, the right to remove these in France was vested in the Government under the Saltpetre Laws, which obtained till the French Revolution. This great scarcity soon led, however, to a careful investigation being made into the conditions under which potassium nitrate was formed in nitre soils.[101] These conditions, which included the presence of rich nitrogenous matter, warmth, free aeration of the soil, and a certain ...
— Manures and the principles of manuring • Charles Morton Aikman
... into Andrew Lang." I said, "Dear me, that must be a very good game." It was something about an edition of Scott, but I was told that Andrew "took" the painful operation "very well." We sat up horribly late together talking about Browning, Afghans, Notes, the Yellow Book, the French Revolution, William Morris, Norsemen and Mr. Richard le Gallienne. "I don't despair for anyone," he said suddenly. "Hang it all, that's what you mean by humanity." This appears to be a rather good editor of the Academy. And my joy in having begun my life is very great. "I am tired," I said to ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... of the French Revolution have paused in their chronicle of blood and flame to tell the episode of the peasant Royalist, Charlotte Corday; but in telling it they have often omitted the one part of the story that is personal and not political. The tragic record of this French ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... of Anne, had their emancipated and learned ladies. Early Greece had Sappho, Corinna, and Erinna, the first the chief of lyric poets, even in her fragments, the two others applauded by all Hellas. The French Revolution had begotten Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and her Vindication of the Rights of Women, and in France George Sand was prominent and emancipated enough while the poet wrote. But, the question of love apart, George Sand was "very, very woman," shining as a domestic character and fond of needlework. ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... phenomena totally incomprehensible without it. I shall have occasion to show that the reason why the most remarkable of modern historians, Taine, has at times so imperfectly understood the events of the great French Revolution is, that it never occurred to him to study the genius of crowds. He took as his guide in the study of this complicated period the descriptive method resorted to by naturalists; but the moral forces are almost absent in the ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... steadiness than at the old sixty paces, for with the rapidity of fire the new weapon is more terrible at four hundred paces, for me as well as for the enemy, than was the musket at sixty paces. And is there even more fire accuracy? No. Rifles were used before the French revolution, and yet this perfectly well known weapon was very rarely seen in war, and its efficacy, as shown in those rare cases, was unsatisfactory. Accurate fire with it at combat distances of from two hundred to four ...
— Battle Studies • Colonel Charles-Jean-Jacques-Joseph Ardant du Picq
... views. But there have been other unfortunates among men of science, whose genius has been unable to save them from the fury of their enemies. Thus Bailly, the celebrated French astronomer (who had been mayor of Paris) and Lavoisier, the great chemist, were both guillotined in the first French Revolution. When the latter, after being sentenced to death by the Commune, asked for a few days' respite to enable him to ascertain the result of some experiments he had made during his confinement, the tribunal refused his appeal, and ordered him for immediate execution, ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... piercing of human cries and lamentations? We are perhaps indebted for the fine geniuses who have honored humanity to beds which are solidly constructed; and the turbulent population which caused the French Revolution were conceived perhaps upon a multitude of tottering couches, with twisted and unstable legs; while the Orientals, who are such a beautiful race, have a unique method of making their beds. I vote for ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... character of Posa been drawn ten years later, it would have been imputed, as all things are, to the 'French Revolution;' and Schiller himself perhaps might have been called a Jacobin. Happily, as matters stand, there is room for no such imputation. It is pleasing to behold in Posa the deliberate expression of a great ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... Chevalier, of the French navy, who had produced from French documents a history of the maritime war connected with the American struggle for independence. This he followed with a less exhaustive account of the wars of the French Revolution and Empire, which also appeared in time for me to use. These were marked by running comment, rather than by a studied criticism such as that of Jomini or Napier. In Great Britain, James held, and I think still holds, the field for exhaustive collection of information, ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... The French revolution arrested this impetus, but the entrance of the Canton of Geneva into the Confederation in 1814, rendered commerce, the arts, and the industries somewhat active, and watch-making soon saw a new ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 481, March 21, 1885 • Various
... happiness of the people were advanced a full half-inch. Revolutions are usually accompanied by a considerable effusion of blood, but are accounted worth it—this appraisement being made by beneficiaries whose blood had not the mischance to be shed. The French revolution is of incalculable value to the Socialist of to-day; when he pulls the string actuating its bones its gestures are inexpressibly terrifying to gory tyrants suspected ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... still more ancient field where English archers fought a famous battle six hundred years ago. A candle stands on a bracket beneath a portrait of a lady. The lady is in the dress of the days of the French Revolution. She is young and vivid, and looks down at me under lowered eyelids in amused and enticing scrutiny. Her little mouth has the faintest trace of a contemplative smile; and as I look at her I could swear the corners of her mouth twitch, as if in the restraint ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... shall put her on her Republican tack, and she will now show by the beauty of her motion the skill of her builders." In him as in his two intimates, Gallatin and Madison, there was a touch of that philosophy which colored the thought of reformers on the eve of the French Revolution, a naive confidence in the perfectability of man and the essential worthiness of his aspirations. Strike from man the shackles of despotism and superstition and accord to him a free government, and he would rise to unsuspected felicity. Republican government was the strongest ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... on about his son, then about his shooting—about Beaufort Court and its splendours—about parliament and its fatigues—about the last French Revolution, and the last English election—about Mrs. Beaufort and her good qualities and bad health—about, in short, everything relating to himself, some things relating to the public, and nothing that related to the persons to whom his conversation was directed, Mr. Robert Beaufort ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 4 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Machiavelli to Macaulay), at all events in a greater familiarity with the various kinds of character expressed in historical events and in the way of looking at them; for even if we cannot learn to guide and employ such multifold forces as make, for instance, a French revolution, we may learn to use for the best the individual minds and temperaments of those who describe them: a Carlyle, a Michelet, a Taine, are natural forces also, which may serve ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... decadent Greece and made it into the Roman province of Achaia; later the chaste Germans swarmed over the decadent Roman Empire and then slowly rebuilt modern Europe; the ascetic Puritans destroyed the Stuarts; while the French Revolution was the deluge that swept away Louis XVI and put the virtuous, if ...
— Woman in Modern Society • Earl Barnes
... my preface over with some pain—I did not like it. I wrote it when I was a little enthusiastic, like you, about the French Revolution. I wish I had written it in a cool moment; I should have said the same things, but in a different manner. One may be as enthusiastic as one likes about an author who has been dead a century or two, but I see it is a fault to bore the public with enthusiasm ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... be a theory of 'the Social Compact.' It was a prominent theory in the French Revolution, It was vastly older, however, than that event. It was originally a theory of the Epicureans. Ovid has something to say about it. Horace advocates it. It has not perished. It exists in a fragmentary way in some books taught in colleges. It has more or less ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... appointments in the names of prominent persons who would later suffer even to the shedding of their life's blood through his mania for writing history in advance; spelling out Spanish tales of the French Revolution; babbling of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity; hinting darkly to his confidants that the President of France had begun life as a blacksmith. Only a few days after Rizal was so summarily hustled away, Bonifacio gathered together a crowd of malcontents and ignorant dupes, some ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... last, however, and it was a rude one. The liberal principles of the French Revolution, checked at first in the terrors of reaction, began to make their way into England. Rationalists lifted up their heads; Bentham and the Mills propounded Utilitarianism; the Reform Bill was passed; and there ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... in the history of France, and especially in the history of the French Revolution, know, in part, how terrible this cry was. By the Court, and by the great privileged classes of France, this great assembly of the three estates of the realm was looked upon as the last resort amid direst calamities. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... a weakness for the operatic can peruse Rousseau's Social Contract and the Declaration of the Rights of Man published in the great French Revolution. As an antidote, I suggest Bentham's essay on ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... page of the French Revolution and the days of terror, when the click of the guillotine and the rush of blood through the streets of Paris demonstrated to what extremities the ferocity of human nature can be driven by political passion. Who led those bloodthirsty ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various
... identification with the implements of prehistoric man Remains of man found in caverns Unfavourable influence on scientific activity of the political conditions of the early part of the nineteenth century Change effected by the French Revolution of to {??} Rallying of the reactionary ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... or our internal administration, or our constitution, are excellent for a similar reason; and the eternal arguments from historical examples, from Athens or Rome, from the fires in Smithfield or the French Revolution. ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... "His"—continued the same speaker—"was the eloquence of Mirabeau, which in the Tiers Etat and in the National Assembly made to totter the throne of France; it was the eloquence of Danton, who made all France to tremble from his tempestuous utterances in the National Convention. Like those apostles of the French Revolution, his eloquence could stir from the lowest depths all the passions of Man; but unlike them, he was as good and as pure as he was eloquent and brave, a noble minded Christian man, a lover of the whole human Race, and of universal Liberty ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... following that phantom and misleading the people, and I recommend it to another individual, a friend of mine, who gave a most learned disquisition on the writ of habeas corpus and against the power of the President to imprison men. He will find that answered. I am not surprised at this. The French Revolution discovered great political minds in some of the French women, and I am happy to see a like ...
— A Military Genius - Life of Anna Ella Carroll of Maryland • Sarah Ellen Blackwell
... in Britain now, as far as I can see, no one of those evils which brought about the French Revolution. There is no widespread misery, and therefore no widespread discontent, among the classes who live by hand-labour. The legislation of the last generation has been steadily in favour of the poor, as against the rich; and it is even more true now ...
— The Ancien Regime • Charles Kingsley
... talents of Mr Carlyle. We shall never forget the surprise and pleasure with which we read the "Sartor Resartus," as it one day burst suddenly and accidentally upon us; and no one who has once read his graphic and passionate history of the French Revolution, can ever forget the vivid pictures that were there presented to him. We opened this book, therefore, with a sort of anticipatory relish. But we found very little of his genius, and very much of his extravagance; less of the one and more of the other, than we thought ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... system of measurement originated at the time of the French Revolution, in the latter part of the 18th century; its divisions are decimal, just the same as the system of currency we use ...
— An Analysis of the Lever Escapement • H. R. Playtner
... the numerous books which he read, he expressed the highest admiration for Sheridan's 'Life of Swift.' But his Langholm friend, who was a great politician, having invited his attention to politics, Telford's reading gradually extended in that direction. Indeed the exciting events of the French Revolution then tended to make all men more or less politicians. The capture of the Bastille by the people of Paris in 1789 passed like an electric thrill through Europe. Then followed the Declaration of Rights; after which, in the course of six months, all the institutions which ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... and Rewbell, the three Directors who carried out the 'coup d'etat' of the 18th Fructidor against their colleagues Carnot and Bartholemy. (See Thiers' "French Revolution", vol. ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... are its victims. Thus it is that the Present, in papal Europe, and especially in Italy, rises stamped with the likeness of the Past. The Siecle of Paris, while the Siecle was yet free, brought out this fact admirably, when it reminded the champions of Popery that the horrors of the first French Revolution were not new things, but old, which the Jacobins inherited from the Papists; and went on to ask them "if they have forgotten that the Convention found all the laws of the Terror written upon the past? The Committee of ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... the House Beautiful the saints too have their place; and the student of the Renaissance has this advantage over the student of the emancipation of the human mind in the Reformation, or the French Revolution, that in tracing the footsteps of humanity to higher levels, he is not beset at every turn by the inflexibilities and antagonisms of some well-recognised controversy, with rigidly defined opposites, exhausting the intelligence and limiting one's sympathies. The opposition ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... discussing the fate of the East India Company and of the vast empire of India too, and at the same time the private interests of those who hoped to be Members of the new India Council, and those who despaired of that distinction. I was the first to bring the news of the French Revolution in February to London, and presented a bullet that had smashed the windows of my room at Paris, to Bunsen, who took it in the evening to Lord Palmerston. After I had seen the Revolution in Paris and the flight of the King and the Duchesse d'Orleans, I was in time to see in ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... that "all great revolutions were owing to women." The French Revolution, the last great and stirring event upon which the world looks back, arose, as Burke ill-naturedly expresses it, "amidst the yells and violence of women." We accept the compliment which Burke here pays to the power of woman, and attribute the coarseness of his language to the bitter repugnance ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... until then, any attempt to force an instantaneous acceptance of new truths or an immediate inauguration of new methods upon the mass of the people will only serve, if successful, to overthrow order in Society, and introduce Social anarchy in its stead. From such an attempt came the chaos of the French Revolution;—from an endeavor to inaugurate ideas essentially correct among a people noway ready to comprehend them rightly. The Conservative Element is as essential to the well-being of society as the Progressive. To eliminate either is to destroy its balanced action; and to give ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... of all the memories which Canadians have of that region which was so long their war-home. As far as I could learn, Mont St. Eloi had been the site of an old monastery which had been destroyed in the French Revolution, the towers and the walls of the church alone surviving. The farms of the monastery had passed to secular ownership, but were rich and well cultivated. A spiral stone staircase led up to an observation post at the top of one of the towers. The place was visible from the German ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... an admirer of German literature and a defender of the French Revolution. He is credited with having first inspired his friend Southey with a liking for poetry. He travelled much abroad, met Goethe, attended the National Assembly debates in 1790, translated from the German and contributed to a ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... a great difficulty," answered Charles; "I do not see, when the dogmatic structure is once broken down, how it is ever to be built up again. I fancy there is a passage somewhere in Carlyle's 'French Revolution' on the subject, in which the author laments over the madness of men's destroying what they could not replace, what it would take centuries and a strange combination of fortunate circumstances to reproduce, an external received creed. I am not denying, God forbid! the objectivity of ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... the entire Mexican movement may be regarded as another great, though confused, step in the world-wide progress of Democracy. The upheaval has been repeatedly compared to the French Revolution. The rule of Diaz was really like that of King Louis XVI in France, a government by a narrow and wealthy aristocracy who had reduced the ignorant Mexican peasants or "peons" to a state of slavery. The bloody battles of all the recent warfare have been fought by these peons in ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... of whom Hume and Smith were but the most eminent. Nor are later developments less obvious. Of the following generation, we have the neo-classic architecture which everywhere dominated Europe after the French Revolution and during the First Empire, while of the next generation's reaction against all this in the romantic movement, the neo-Gothic monument of Scott is the most characteristic possible representative. Again, just as in the Oxford movement ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes
... are told, "it presses too heavily upon the land-owning classes." I have heard it said that in the French Revolution, if the French nobility, instead of going to the scaffold with such dignity and fortitude, had struggled and cried and begged for mercy, even the hard hearts of the Paris crowd would have been melted, and the Reign of Terror would have come ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... sure," was the reply, "but it seems that way. Famines have a tremendous effect on the world's history. The great French Revolution, one of the greatest events in modern history, was brought to a head by a famine. This was the ...
— The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men • Francis William Rolt-Wheeler
... seems strange that out of the immense stir of the French Revolution and its age should not have come a crop of works of genius equal to that which came out of the stir of the great productive time of Greece, or out of that of the Renascence, with its powerful episode the Reformation. But the truth is that the stir ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... a type of his nation; "he impersonated with singular exactness the idea which our forefathers had in their minds when they spoke of what they called 'a Frenchman;' for although (by cowing the rich and by filling the poor with envy), the great French Revolution had thrown a lasting gloom on the national character, it left this one man untouched. He was bold, gay, reckless, vain; but beneath the mere glitter of the surface there was a great capacity for administrative business, and a more than common ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... expense of the Marseilles Chamber of Commerce and presented to Louis XVI for the fleet sent by the French Government to fight for American independence. Marseilles, later on, became prominent in the French Revolution and gave its name to the French ...
— A Journey Through France in War Time • Joseph G. Butler, Jr.
... lovable? He abandons his girl at the order of his father, and sums it up that he "sighs as a lover but obeys as a son." The father dies, and he records the fact with the remark that "the tears of a son are seldom lasting." The terrible spectacle of the French Revolution excited in his mind only a feeling of self-pity because his retreat in Switzerland was invaded by the unhappy refugees, just as a grumpy country gentleman in England might complain that he was annoyed by the trippers. There is a touch of dislike in all the allusions which Boswell makes to Gibbon—often ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... history of art, as in the history of politics and in the history of economics, our modern epoch is marked off from all preceding epochs by one great event, the French Revolution. Fragonard, who survived that Revolution to lose himself in a new and strange world, is the last at the old masters; David, some sixteen years his junior, is the first of the moderns. Now if we look for the ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... of 1830 is in fact the sole and legitimate heir of all the recollections in which France prides itself. It has remained for this monarchy, which was the first to rally all the strength and conciliate all the wishes of the French Revolution, to erect and to honour without fear the statue and the tomb of a popular hero; for there is one thing, and one thing alone, which does not dread a comparison with glory, and ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... Harris," said Faith, as she glanced in at the nursery door, which opened from her room, "don't let Hendie get up a French Revolution here while ...
— Faith Gartney's Girlhood • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... of the king and the restoration of his son. Seven years have already elapsed in France since the death of Louis XVI. Will you tell me that the English revolution was a religious one, whereas the French revolution was a political one? To that I reply that a charter is as easy to make as ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... ever signed by the United States was the treaty of alliance with France, negotiated and ratified in 1778. The aid which France extended under this treaty to our revolutionary ancestors in men, money, and ships enabled them to establish the independence of our country. A few years later came the French Revolution, the establishment of the French Republic followed by the execution of Louis XVI, and in 1793 the war between England and France. With the arrival in this country of Genet, the minister of the newly established ...
— From Isolation to Leadership, Revised - A Review of American Foreign Policy • John Holladay Latane
... points of this symbol, those horrible principles of infidelity, atheism, and licentiousness, which were spread so extensively over Europe during the latter half of the eighteenth century, and which were the most efficient causes in bringing about the fearful convulsions which followed in the French Revolution. That all may understand this matter in its proper light, however, it will be necessary to state some of the facts respecting this "noisome and grievous sore" that fell at that time upon the inhabitants of Europe. In writing ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... other nations of this earth. In looking at these men, their manners, dresses, opinions, politics, actions, history, it is impossible to preserve a grave countenance; instead of having Carlyle to write a History of the French Revolution, I often think it should be handed over to Dickens or Theodore Hook: and oh! where is the Rabelais to be the faithful historian of the last phase of the Revolution—the last glorious nine years of which we are now commemorating the last glorious ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... was sincerely neutral during the great French Revolution; but England, by a very questionable act, seized two Danish frigates—under search-warrants—and towed them to British ports. This arbitrary insult appears to have induced both Denmark and Sweden to join the 'Northern Armed ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 457 - Volume 18, New Series, October 2, 1852 • Various
... with authority went on fermenting in the nations till its last great outburst at the French Revolution; and Schiller was born at this convulsive period, and bears strong traces of his ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... Thought," discusses the attitude of public opinion of the time of Spinoza. "He was the arch-atheist, the materialist, the subverter of all that was held most dear by the reigning powers. It was only after the French Revolution that he came into his own when certain Germans, captivated by Neo-Platonism, emphasized the pantheistic element in him. But by then Christianity had ceased to be a dominant intellectual force and had become what it is today, a folk belief." In the "Tractus Theologico-Politicus," ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... on occasions. 'Once in destroying the False,' says he, 'there was a certain inspiration.' And always there is, to be sure, my Master. For the world is not Europe, and the final decision on Who Is and What Is To Rule, was not delivered by the French Revolution. The Orient, the land of origination and prophecy, must yet solve for itself this eternal problem of the Old and New, the False and True. And whether by Revolutions, Speculations, or Constitutions, ancient Revelation ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... "The French Revolution of 1848 saved the English middle-class. The Socialistic pronunciamentos of the victorious French workmen frightened the small middle-class of England and disorganised the narrower, but more matter-of-fact movement of the English working-class. At the very moment when ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... which the French Revolution may be considered. We may look at the great events which astonished and horrified Europe and America: the storming of the Bastille, the march on Versailles, the massacres of September, the Terror, and the restoration of order by Napoleon. The study of these events ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... Mr. Dysart. "One would think we were having a French Revolution all over again in England. Don't you think," glancing severely at Joyce, who is giving way to unrestrained mirth, "that it is not only wrong, but dangerous, to implant such ideas about the English in the breasts of Irish children? There isn't a word of ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... to the school of writers who treat the course of history as a great high road, following a firmly traced line, and set with plain and ineffaceable landmarks. The French Revolution has nearly always been handled in this way, alike by those who think it fruitful in blessings, and by their adversaries, who pronounce it a curse inflicted by the wrath of Heaven. Historians have looked at the Revolution as a plain landsman ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... repeated: it is said that the loss caused the philosopher such profound grief that it seriously injured his health, and impaired his understanding. An accident of a somewhat similar kind happened to the MS. of Mr. Carlyle's first volume of his 'French Revolution.' He had lent the MS. to a literary neighbour to peruse. By some mischance, it had been left lying on the parlour floor, and become forgotten. Weeks ran on, and the historian sent for his work, the printers being loud for "copy." Inquiries were made, and it was found that the maid-of-all-work, ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... majority feel something big and vague and powerful stirring inside them. They don't know exactly what it is, perhaps, but it is there. Mexico has outgrown her dictators. They have been overthrown by the same causes that brought on the French Revolution." ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... is from the old people of our generation. An old man in the year 200 could certainly remember many who had themselves been witnesses of the Apostolic age, just as an old man today remembers well men who saw the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. The old people who had surrounded his childhood would be to St. Paul, St. Peter and St. John what the old people who survived, say, to 1845, would have been to Jefferson, to Lafayette, ...
— Europe and the Faith - "Sine auctoritate nulla vita" • Hilaire Belloc
... sent his great-grandson from the throne to the guillotine. Napoleon tried it 100 years ago. He was more dangerous, because he had prodigious personal ability and technical military skill; and he started with the magnificent credential of the French Revolution. All that carried him farther than the Spanish bigot or the French fop; but he, too, accreted fools and knaves, and ended defeated in St. Helena after pandering for twenty years to the appetite of idiots for glory ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... truth behind them, and it would not be difficult to quote instances in proof of them. Sometimes even a song has moved a whole nation, and made what seemed impossible, an accomplished fact. What influence had the Marseillaise on the French Revolution? Let ...
— All for a Scrap of Paper - A Romance of the Present War • Joseph Hocking
... gentlemen met a strange and sad fate, years later, in the terrible days of the French Revolution. The Duke de Lauzun was beheaded in Paris in 1793, his long and adventurous life "ended with a little spurt of blood under the knife of the guillotine"; and Lafayette spent five years in an ...
— Once Upon A Time In Connecticut • Caroline Clifford Newton
... illustrations of the nobler type, and modern men and women have quailed before royal eyes whose possessors ruled all spirits but their own. Born in Athens, and endowed with a finer intellect, Ottila might have been an Aspasia; or cast in that great tragedy the French Revolution, have played a brave part and died heroically like Roland and Corday. But set down in uneventful times, the courage, wit, and passion that might have served high ends dwindled to their baser counterparts, and made her what she ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... of them. She could never understand why it was that M. de Voltaire would persist in wasting his talent for writing over such a dreary subject as religion. Turgot, she confessed, was an honest man, but he was also a 'sot animal.' His dismissal from office—that fatal act, which made the French Revolution inevitable—delighted her: she concealed her feelings from Walpole, who admired him, but she was outspoken enough to the Duchesse de Choiseul. 'Le renvoi du Turgot me plait extremement,' she wrote; 'tout me parait en bon ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... on a festive air, and where smartly-dressed servants were lending their smiles to a day which they all felt to be the end of a peaceful and comfortable era, and the beginning of an age of uncertainty. It was like that day at Versailles when the Third Estate adjourned to the Tennis Court, and the French Revolution began. People smiled, and were pleased at the new movement and expectancy in their lives, knowing not what ...
— Vixen, Volume II. • M. E. Braddon
... [Certainly, the French Revolution may date its epoch as far back as the taking of the Bastille; from that moment the troubles progressively continued, till the final extirpation of its illustrious victims. I was just returning from a mission to England when ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... time of day. He had made the grand tour; he had bought pictures and statues; he spoke and wrote well in the modern languages; and being rich, hospitable, social, and not averse from the reputation of a patron, he had opened his house freely to the host of emigrants whom the French Revolution had driven to our coasts. Olivier Dalibard, a man of considerable learning and rare scientific attainments, had been tutor in the house of the Marquis de G——, a French nobleman known many years before to the old baronet. The marquis and his family had been among the ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... a century ago, on the eve of the French Revolution, Great Britain last year indulged too long her dream of peace, and awaked from it too late for timely preparation. Like a man who starts behindhand with his day, the catching up meant double worry, if not double work. Hildyard's brigade, which sailed October 20, had, thirty ...
— Story of the War in South Africa - 1899-1900 • Alfred T. Mahan
... spectacles and neat black cap, and smooth, braided hair, is seated in her old arm-chair, with the old sock, apparently—though it must have been the latest born of many hundreds of socks—on the needles, and the unfailing cat at her elbow. The aspect of the pair gives the impression that if a French Revolution or a Chili earthquake were to visit England they would click-and-gaze on with imperturbable ...
— The Island Queen • R.M. Ballantyne
... refuge in South Germany, and among whom was a girl who became the bride of the son of a rich burgher. The occasion of the girl's exile was changed by Goethe to more recent times, and in the poem she is represented as a German from the west bank of the Rhine fleeing from the turmoil caused by the French Revolution. The political element is not a mere background, but is woven into the plot with consummate skill, being used, at one point, for example, in the characterization of Dorothea, who before the time of her appearance in the poem has been deprived of her first ...
— Hermann and Dorothea • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... of sanctity to this day, while unconsciously proving upon almost every page they write that the only calamitous instinct which her husband lacked, she supplied—the instinct to root out and get rid of an honest, able, and loyal official, wherever she found him. The hideous but beneficent French Revolution would have been deferred, or would have fallen short of completeness, or even might not have happened at all, if Marie Antoinette had made the unwise mistake of not being born. The world owes a great deal ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... "was a remarkable man. In his youth he spent a great deal of time in France. He was there at the time of the French Revolution, and, as it happened, was present at the execution of the unfortunate Queen Marie Antoinette. This of course was not intentional. It chanced thus. My grandfather was in a barber's shop, having his hair cut. He saw ...
— What Katy Did At School • Susan Coolidge
... Independence); an account of my early reading; my college life at Princeton; three years in Europe passed at the Universities of Heidelberg, Munich, and Paris, in what was emphatically the prime of their quaint student-days; an account of my barricade experiences of the French Revolution of Forty-Eight, of which I missed no chief scene; my subsequent life in America as lawyer, man of letters, and journalist; my experiences in connection with the Civil War, and my work in the advancement of the signing the Emancipation by Abraham Lincoln; ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... toward the earth. Flashing through the void at, let us say, a million miles a second, he would (if we can overlook the dispersion of the rays of light) overtake in succession the light that fell on the French Revolution, the Reformation, the Norman Conquest, and the faces of the ancient empires. He would read, in reverse order, the living history of man and whatever lay before the coming ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... the drum is awful," I said. "Do you remember in the French Revolution how they Drowned the victims' voices in a thunder ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck
... by the feet." So our reason, at least, would lead us to conclude, if the theologians did not assure us of the contrary; such, too, was the opinion of Locke, but he did not venture to announce it. The French Revolution came, England grew to abhor France, and was cut off from the Continent, did great things, gained much, but not in lucidity. The Continent was reopened, the century advanced, time and experience brought their lessons, lovers of free and clear thought, such as the late John Stuart ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 360, November 25, 1882 • Various
... Carlyle said of the French Revolution, of which he was himself the great portrayer: "I often call that a celestial infernal phenomenon, the most memorable in our world for a thousand years; on the whole, a transcendent revolt against the devil and his works, (since shams are all and sundry of the devil, ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... of the War of Independence commissioners were appointed by the Congress of the Confederation authorized to conclude treaties with every nation of Europe disposed to adopt them. Before the wars of the French Revolution such treaties had been consummated with the United Netherlands, Sweden, and Prussia. During those wars treaties with Great Britain and Spain had been effected, and those with Prussia and France renewed. In all these some concessions to the liberal principles ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... have been enjoyable. I was thinking how, in the French Revolution, the women of the people must have enjoyed throwing mud at the women of the aristocrats; how they must have liked scratching the paint and the skin from their faces, and tearing their hair down, and their ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... they are wild fellows enough, dissipated and reckless! It is only a passing phase. Ten years more, and they will be thinking less of the girls and more of going to Mass. The Carnival is a matter of a few days, and even this mad one of your French Revolution will not last for long. The Church ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... and France, wrested her political independence from the grasp of the Sultan (1827), the forty years that succeeded Waterloo were broken by no important war; but they were marked by oft-recurring unrest and sedition. Thus, when the French Revolution of 1830 overthrew the reactionary dynasty of the elder Bourbons, the universal excitement caused by this event endowed the Belgians with strength sufficient to shake off the heavy yoke of the Dutch; ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... storm. When I see wives and mothers going in for business government I not only regard it as a bad business but as a bankrupt business. It seems to me very much as if the peasant women, just before the French Revolution, had insisted on being made duchesses or (as is quite as logical and likely) on ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... went to Jesus College, Cambridge, where he soon won a gold medal for a Greek ode on the Slave Trade, but through indolence he slipped into a hundred pounds of debt. The stir of the French Revolution was then quickening young minds into bold freedom of speculation, resentment against tyranny of custom, and yearning for a higher life in this world. Old opinions that familiarity had made to the multitude conventional were for that reason distrusted ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... thanks Heaven if nobody beats him. And so we have left off beating the eighteenth century. It was not so, however, in our lusty prime. Carlyle, historian though he was of Frederick the Great and the French Revolution, revenged himself for the trouble it gave him by loading it with all vile epithets. If it had been a cock or a cook he could not have called it harder names. It was century spendthrift, fraudulent, bankrupt, a swindler century, which did but one true ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... The French Revolution was at root a thoroughly optimistic thing. It may seem strange to attribute optimism to anything so destructive; but, in truth, this particular kind of optimism is inevitably, and by its nature, destructive. The great dominant idea of the whole of that period, the period before, during, and long ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... is a real character—his real name was Ryan, and he had been respectably reared, but gave himself up to the intoxicating excitement of the French Revolution—he also fought in '98, and subsequently, for his intelligence and daring spirit, became the leader of all the lawless and disaffected parties in his native County of Limerick, and, ...
— The Tithe-Proctor - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... The French Revolution was the revolt of the people of France against one of the most cruel and tyrannical aristocracies that ever reigned; and continued, with brief interruptions, till the people of both France and Italy had vindicated the right to choose their ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... grow rich and powerful by giving as they receive, and that the good of one is the good of all. The world had not yet seen that fierce conflict between antagonistic principles which she was soon to see in the French Revolution; nor had political science yet recorded those daring experiments in remoulding society, those constitutions framed in closets, discussed in clubs, accepted and overthrown with equal demonstrations of popular zeal, and which, expressing in their ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... so much as the loss of moral fiber, the scattering of energies, the waste and futility that are frequently the net result of casual driftings with every wind that blows. No one has more eloquently expressed this view than Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the French Revolution: ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman |
