"French Revolution" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... men still had the courage of their egoism. The world was a bad job to be made the best of, all hope lay in driving a good bargain with the conductors of life everlasting. By the end of the nineteenth century the life everlasting had grown cobwebby, the French Revolution had filled men up with extravagant hopes of the perfectibility of this world, humanitarianism had instilled an abnormal sensitiveness to pain,—to one's own pain, and to the pain of one's neighbors. Baroja's outcasts ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... man likely in such a matter to keep his word. James Drummond MacGregor and he, like Katherine and Petruchio, were well matched "for a couple of quiet ones." Allan Breck lived till the beginning of the French Revolution. About 1789, a friend of mine, then residing at Paris, was invited to see some procession which was supposed likely to interest him, from the windows of an apartment occupied by a Scottish Benedictine priest. ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... chaplains, but when it became his turn to preach before the royal family, the queen appointed another person to supply his place. It has been observed, that his sentiments in a later period of his life, took a colour less favourable to liberty. Whether alarmed at the march of the French revolution, or from the timidity of age, we know not. His friend Horace Walpole, charges him with flat apostacy:" The Heroic Epistle to Sir W. Chambers, and the Heroic Postscript, are now positively said to have been written by Mr. Mason. Mr. Thomas Warton observed, "they ...
— On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, • Samuel Felton
... Sponde was incapable of giving his niece the slightest aid in her matrimonial manoeuvres. The worthy soul, now seventy years of age, attributed the disasters of the French Revolution to the design of Providence, eager to punish a dissolute Church. He had therefore flung himself into the path, long since abandoned, which anchorites once followed in order to reach heaven: he led an ascetic ...
— An Old Maid • Honore de Balzac
... biggest brain and the smallest, the loftiest and the lowest of us, the purest and the foulest of us, we all come into the same order. It is a question of classification. 'The Scripture hath concluded all under sin,' that is to say, has shut all men up as in a prison. You remember in the French Revolution, all manner of people were huddled indiscriminately into the same dungeon of the Paris prisons. You would find a princess and some daughter of shame from the gutters; a boor from the country and a landlord, a count, a marquis, a savant, a philosopher ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... perhaps a trace or two of youthful jauntiness, not quite as yet outgrown. His illustrative poetical quotations are mostly from Shakespeare,—from Milton and Byron also in a passage or two,—and now and then one is reminded that he is not unfamiliar with Carlyle's "Sartor Resartus" and the "French Revolution" of the same unmistakable writer, more perhaps by the way in which phrases borrowed from other authorities are set in the text than by any more ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... himself—and I have always been his peculiar admirer—to live and be afraid of my valet! I believe it will develop cancer sooner or later in me. I feel singular pains already. Last night, after crowning champagne with ale, which produced a sort of French Revolution in my interior—by the way, that must have made me dream of Napoleon last night, with my lower members in revolt against my head, I had to sit and cogitate for hours on a hiding-place for these-call them what you will. Depend upon ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... was engaged at the same time as Mignet, his lifelong friend, upon a history of the French Revolution (1823-27). The same liberal principles were held in common by the young authors. Their methods differed widely: Mignet's orderly and compact narration was luminous through its skilful arrangement; Thiers' ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... a midget's participation in imperial intrigue. Richebourg, only twenty-three inches tall, was an attache of the royal family of Orleans, deeply involved in the French Revolution. Swaddled in baby garments, he was allowed to be carried through enemy lines by an ignorant maid, bearing vital messages to friends ...
— David Lannarck, Midget - An Adventure Story • George S. Harney
... of things, which prevailed throughout Europe as well as within the boundaries of France, is essential to the comprehension of what is about to follow, for no one who has seen and studied France only can ever, I affirm, understand anything of the French Revolution. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... in which the adventurous courage of the Suliotes (together with their menacing position) could not fail to involve them, were in all eleven. The first eight of these occurred in times before the French Revolution, and with Pachas who have left no memorials behind them of the terrific energy or hellish perfidy which marked the character of Ali Pacha. These Pachas, who brought armies at the lowest of five thousand, and at the most of twelve thousand ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... commenced the French Revolution, whose influence extended to the Low Countries, and in 1789 the Austrian garrison at Brussels was forced to surrender. But the people were not united, and their dissensions enabled the Austrians to regain their power. The French Directory sent an army to assist the Belgians, the ...
— Dikes and Ditches - Young America in Holland and Belguim • Oliver Optic
... circumstances, the beliefs, the ideas, and the 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 ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... and recognized its own enlarged duties. Its symbols then came to have a wider meaning; but it also assumed the mask of Stone-masonry, and borrowed its working-tools, and so was supplied with new and apt symbols. It aided in bringing about the French Revolution, disappeared with the Girondists, was born again with the restoration of order, and sustained Napoleon, because, though Emperor, he acknowledged the right of the people to select its rulers, and was at the head of a nation refusing to receive back its old kings. ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... heroes were battling among themselves, or as long rather as it appeared that they had any strength to fight a battle, the British Government, ever anxious to see its enemies by the ears, by no means interfered in the contest. But the French Revolution broke out, and a host of starving sans-culottes appeared among the various Indian States, seeking for military service, and inflaming the minds of the various native princes against the British East India Company. A number of these entered ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... that false wisdom has failed, and the wisdom of this world, and the rulers of this world, came to nought in the terrible crisis of the French Revolution, eighty years ago, men have been taking up a new idolatry. For as science has spread, they have been trusting in science rather than in the living God, and giving up the old faith that God's judgments ...
— Discipline and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... was one of Rousseau's correspondents. At the time of the French Revolution he was elected Deputy from Corsica to the National Assembly. He was most violently attacked by Napoleon Buonaparte in a letter dated "From my closet at Milleli, 23rd January, Year 2." The letter thus begins:—"From Bonifacio to Cape Corso, from Ajaccio to Bastia, there ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell
... feel it my duty to say, had not acted fairly by this question. In their adversity they held out hopes to the working classes, but when they had a strong government they laughed their vows to scorn. In 1848 there was a French revolution, and a republic was established. No one can have forgotten what the effect was in this country. I remember the day when not a woman could leave her house in London, and when cannon were planted on Westminster Bridge. When Lord Derby became prime minister affairs had arrived at such ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... open their shaky lattices and call out over the house-tops so that men cannot but hear. You hounded wild Rousseau into the meanest garret of the Rue St. Jacques and jeered at his angry shrieks. But the thin, piping tones swelled a hundred years later into the sullen roar of the French Revolution, and civilization to this day is quivering to the reverberations ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... talk about Jesus Christ, in the first French Revolution, as 'the Good Sansculotte.' Perfectly true! But as the basis of that, and of all representations of Him, that will have power on the diseases of the community, we have to preach Him as the Saviour of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... M. Dunienville, about a mile distant, to be ready to set off on horseback early next morning. The gentleman who interpreted informed me on the way, that general Magallon was at Bourbon, having been lately superseded by general De Caen, an officer of the French revolution. M. Dunienville had been a lieutenant of the navy and knight of St. Louis under the old government, and was then major of the district of La Savanne; but the other officer, M. Etienne Bolger, had lately been appointed commandant over his ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis Volume 2 • Matthew Flinders
... have declared themselves. In the flush of anticipated success, PEEL at the Tamworth election denounced the French Revolution that escorted Charles the Tenth—with his foolish head still upon his shoulders—out of France, as the "triumph of might over right." It was the right—the divine right of Charles—(the sacred ampoule, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 12, 1841 • Various
... soon engaged the attention of young Taylor. I heard 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 friends, and to uphold ...
— Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell • Hugh Blair Grigsby
... Madame Roland embraces the most interesting events of the French Revolution, that most instructive tragedy which time has yet enacted. There is, perhaps, contained in the memoirs of no other woman so much to invigorate the mind with the desire for high intellectual culture, and so much to ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... landscape painting, were to be cherished and eloquently defended by Rousseau. Mrs. Behn, as a novelist, can only be studied with the authors of the middle of the eighteenth century; she carries us at once beyond the times of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, and takes us among the precursors of the French Revolution. With the change she foreshadows, philosophy and social science are perhaps more ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... that occurred. Mrs. George proved an honest, earnest, helpful wife. Her conservatism curbed the restless spirit of her husband and gave his mind time to ripen, for until his marriage the ideals of the French Revolution were strong in his heart. He saw the evils of life and was intent on changing them. The Catholic faith is an elastic one, both esoteric and exoteric, and those who are able can take the poetic view of dogma instead of the literal, if they prefer. Henry George and his wife took the spiritual or symbolic ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... answered to-day in quite the same fashion as formerly. It would surely have been highly dangerous to confide the destinies of the species to Plato or Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Shakespeare, or Montesquieu. At the very worst moments of the French Revolution the fate of the people was in the hands of philosophers of none too mean an order. It cannot be denied, however, that in our time the habits of the thinker have undergone a great change. He has ceased to be speculative or Utopian; he is no longer exclusively intuitive. In politics ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... have been easily settled by simple justice and common sense. In this Utopia we find for the first time, as the foundations of civilized society, the three great words, Liberty, Fraternity, Equality, which retained their inspiration through all the violence of the French Revolution and which are still the unrealized ideal of every free government. As he hears of this wonderful country More wonders why, after fifteen centuries of Christianity, his own land is so little civilized; and as we read the book to-day ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... A chain of fine gold studded with opals and diamonds reached almost to her knees. She wore few rings indeed, but they were such rings as he had never seen before he had come as a guest to Enton. And there were thousands like her. A momentary flash of thought carried him back to the days of the French Revolution. There was a print hanging in his room of a girl as fair and as proud as this one, surrounded by a fierce rabble mad with hunger and the pent-up rage of generations, tearing the jewels from her fingers, tearing even, he thought, the trimming ...
— A Prince of Sinners • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... countries in general which have adopted it have flourished; that our laws, 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
... in advancing the cause of philosophy, and too often engaged in theological disputes, he became the victim of popular fury; and the conduct of some of his neighbors in celebrating the anniversary of the French revolution, in 1791, with more intemperance than became Englishmen and loyal subjects, excited a dreadful riot. Not only the meeting-houses were destroyed on this melancholy occasion, but, among others, Dr. Priestley's house, library, manuscripts, and philosophical apparatus, ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... and ungovernable direction that the French revolution took originated chiefly in the creation of assignats, which not only exempted the people from taxes at first, but had the effect of producing an artificial and temporary degree of wealth, that [end of page 41] enabled vast numbers, either in the pay of others, or ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... the plot is phenomenal in its strength, merit and ingeniousness. The superb book deals with the exciting career of Edmond Dantes, who first figures as the Count of Monte-Cristo, and then as the Deputy from Marseilles takes an active part in the French Revolution of 1848. Dramatic and graphic scenes abound, the reader finding startling surprises at every turn. Love, philanthropy, politics and bloodshed form the staple of the novel and are handled with extraordinary skill. Besides the hero, Haydee, Mercedes, Valentine de Villefort, ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg
... may be said to have begun in the Eighteenth century. The Labour movement arose out of the Industrial Revolution with its resultant tendency to over-population, to unrestricted competition, to social misery and disorder. The Woman movement appeared as an at first neglected by-product of the French Revolution with its impulses of general human expansion, ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... man tells the author that he is taking him to see an old friend of his, who had formerly been chaplain to a Highland regiment—had lost a beloved wife—been roused from his dejection by the first euthusiasm [Transcriber's note: sic] of the French Revolution—had emigrated on its miscarriage to America—and returned disgusted to hide himself in the retreat to which they were now ascending. That retreat is then most tediously described—a smooth green valley in the heart of the mountain, without trees, and with only one ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... The French revolution of 1830 precipitated a similar one in Poland. The rule of Russia in that country had been one of outrage and oppression. In the words of the Poles, "personal liberty, which had been solemnly guaranteed, was violated; the prisons were crowded; courts-martial were appointed ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... about a contract which seemed a little disturbing but which she hoped (in the dream) would not interfere with her vacation. Maury, an early student of this topic, was awakened from a feverish dream of the French Revolution by something falling on his neck; this, under the circumstances, he took ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... common sense and their freedom from all the tricks of affectation, a delightful contrast to so many of the eminent authors of our own time. Those troublesome doubts, doubts of all kinds, which since the great upheaval of the French Revolution have harassed mankind, had scarcely begun to ruffle the waters of their life. Even Johnson's troubled mind enjoyed vast levels of repose. The unknown world alone was wrapped in stormy gloom; of this ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... The French Revolution, it will be understood, was at its height. The more moderate and constitutional Republicans—the Girondins, as they were called—worsted in Paris by the Jacobins and the mob, had lately tried to raise the provinces against the capital, and to this end had drawn ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... easily have been mistaken for a mob of vagrants which had pillaged a seventeenth-century arsenal. With a few slight changes in costuming for the sake of historical fidelity, we would have served as a citizen army for a realistic motion-picture drama depicting an episode in the French Revolution. ...
— Kitchener's Mob - Adventures of an American in the British Army • James Norman Hall
... who, in the great French revolution, and under the leadership of Danton and of the municipality of Paris, massacred the political prisoners in September, 1792, are recorded in history under the name of Septembriseurs. Louis Napoleon may no less ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... ages. Inspirited by the success attending the struggle in the British colonies, the French people, long crushed beneath a grinding despotism, resolved to burst their shackles and strike for Freedom. It was a noble resolution, but consummated, alas amid devastation and the wildest anarchy. The French Revolution filled the world with horror. It was the work of a blind giant, urged to fury by the remembrance of wrongs endured for generations. The Altar of Liberty was reared amid seas of blood, and stained with ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... social matters generally were in something like what political economists call "the stationary state" till (as rather frequently happens with such apparently stationary states) the smoothness changed to the Niagara of the French Revolution, and the rapids of the quarter-century War. There were no great poets:[9] and even verse-writers were rarely grand: but there was a greater diffusion of competent writing faculty than had been seen before or perhaps—for all the time, talk, trouble, ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... utter, to enact humbugs, these French people, from Majesty downwards, beat all the 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 ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... talking. She was quite absorbed by him, couldn't talk to her neighbours. They wanted very much to go to the Conciergerie to see the prison where the unfortunate Marie Antoinette passed the last days of her unhappy life, and Mr. Gladstone, inspired by the subject, made us a sort of conference on the French Revolution and the causes which led up to it, culminating in the Terror and the execution of the King and Queen. He spoke in English (we were a little group standing at the door—they were just going), in beautiful academic language, and it was most interesting, graphic, and exact. ...
— My First Years As A Frenchwoman, 1876-1879 • Mary King Waddington
... carry down into the new era and transmit to the new masters of society the grace, elegance, breeding, and culture of the past, society would certainly gain by that course of things, as compared with any such rupture between past and present as occurred in the French Revolution. The dogmatic radicals who assail "on principle" the inherited social notions and distinctions are not serving civilization. Society can do without patricians, but it cannot do without ...
— What Social Classes Owe to Each Other • William Graham Sumner
... regulations was to encourage industry by making it the means of freedom. This new kind of stimulus had a most favorable effect on the slaves, and gave promise of complete success. But the judicious agent died in consequence of the climate, and the French Revolution threw every thing into a state of convulsion at home and abroad. The new republic of France bestowed unconditional emancipation upon the slaves in her colonies; and had she persevered in her promises with good faith and discretion, the horrors of St. Domingo ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... all of which they speak a language peculiar to themselves. On the continent of America alone are there none of them found. Grellman informs us that there were great numbers in Lorraine, and that they dwelt in its forests, before the French Revolution of 1790. He supposes that there are no less than 700,000 in the world, and that the greatest numbers are found in Europe. Throughout the countries they inhabit, they have kept themselves a distinct race of people in ...
— The Gipsies' Advocate - or, Observations on the Origin, Character, Manners, and Habits of - The English Gipsies • James Crabb
... 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. ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... all the enlightenment of modern times with the French Revolution (that terrible farce, quite superfluous when judged close at hand, into which, however, the noble and visionary spectators of all Europe have interpreted from a distance their own indignation and enthusiasm so long and passionately, UNTIL THE TEXT HAS DISAPPEARED UNDER THE INTERPRETATION), ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... intimate connection. Rousseau's philosophy, in fact, is taken bodily from the teaching of his English predecessors. His celebrated profession of faith through the lips of the Vicaire Savoyard, which delighted Voltaire and profoundly influenced the leaders of the French Revolution, is in fact the expression of a deism identical with that of Pope's essay.[18] The political theories of the Social Contract are founded upon the same base which served Locke and the English political ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... policy of the Union in its relations with Europe constituted the principal basis of our political divisions and the most arduous part of the action of our Federal Government. With the catastrophe in which the wars of the French Revolution terminated, and our own subsequent peace with Great Britain, this baneful weed of party strife was uprooted. From that time no difference of principle, connected either with the theory of government or with our intercourse with foreign nations, has existed or been ...
— A Compilation of Messages and Letters of the Presidents - 2nd section (of 3) of Volume 2: John Quincy Adams • Editor: James D. Richardson
... Could anything be more laudable—or less 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 ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... grandeur of the actors who fill the scene. This is not the official version of your origin. The official version makes you the children of the revolutionary spirit which was abroad in the eighteenth century and culminated in the French Revolution. But this robs you of a century and a half of antiquity, and of more than a century and a half of greatness. Since 1783 you have had a marvellous growth of population and of wealth,—things not to be spoken of, as cynics have spoken of them, without thankfulness, since the added myriads have ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... peoples settled down, in 1815, after the long wars of the French Revolution, they found themselves faced by many problems, but there were few Europeans who would have included among these problems the extension of Western civilisation over the as yet unsubjugated portions of the world. Men's hearts were set upon the organisation of permanent peace: that seemed ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir
... part in the founding of the Sorbonne, the most famous theological college of Europe from the days of St. Louis down to the time of the French Revolution. ...
— Famous Men of the Middle Ages • John H. Haaren
... was well for appreciative people to have been born. Such people should of course have belonged to the fortunate few, and not to the miserable many; for the prime condition of a society being good is that it be not too large. The sixty years that preceded the French Revolution were the golden age of fireside talk and of those pleasures which proceed from the presence of women in whom the social art is both instinctive and acquired. The women of that period were, above all, good company; the fact is attested by a thousand documents. ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... in its flippant or pompous, becomes terrible in its malignant, expression. Thus, the headstrong young men who pushed the French Revolution of 1789 into the excesses of the Reign of Terror were well-intentioned reformers, driven into crime by the fanaticism of mental conceit. This is especially true of Robespierre and St. Just. Their hearts were hardened through their heads. The abstract notions of freedom and philanthropy ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... hand-to-hand fighting, so it is quite in keeping that it should take so important a part in the present conflict. It was here Monte Cristo was hurled from the Chateau d'If in the sack from which he cut his escape. Francis the First besieged it in vain, and it prospered under King Rene. In the French Revolution it figured so conspicuously as to give the title to the national hymn ...
— A Soldier's Sketches Under Fire • Harold Harvey
... explored prior to Flinders' time, partly by Captain George Vancouver, one of Cook's men, in 1791, and partly in 1792 by the French commander, Bruni Dentrecasteaux, who was despatched in search of the gallant La Perouse—"vanished trackless into blue immensity."* (* Carlyle, French Revolution book 2 cap 5.) Flinders carefully revised what they had done, commencing his elaborate, independent survey immediately after the Investigator made the Leeuwin, on December 6, 1801. He had therefore been just four months in this region, when ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... rebels have been very little rebels," said the man with the red scarf. "They have been like fourth-form boys who sometimes venture to hit a fifth-form boy. That was all the worth of their French Revolution and regicide. The boys never really ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... independent men of the younger generation there were few who had not been won over to Grattan's view of the matter. In England, too, circumstances were beginning to push many, even of those hitherto bitterly hostile to concession, in the same direction. The growing terror of the French Revolution had loosened the bonds of the party, and the hatred which existed between the Jacobins and the Catholic clerical party, inclined the Government to extend the olive branch to the latter in hopes of thereby securing their support. Pitt was personally ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... of a nation are supposed to bind their constituents and their descendants to be the subjects of a certain prince and of his descendants to perpetuity. This singular doctrine is developed with perspicuity, but ill supported by argument, in Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution. ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... as the reader will remember, was the furious demagogue with the foul tongue and poisoned pen who edited the Pere Duchesne at the time of the first French Revolution. We had a revival of his politics and his journal in Paris during ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... particular to two revolutions, one in the past, the other in the future. The revolution in the past is that of the bourgeoisie against feudalism, which finds its expression, according to him, particularly in the French Revolution. The one in the future is the revolution of the wage- earners, or proletariat, against the bourgeoisie, which is to establish the Socialist Commonwealth. The whole movement of history is viewed by him as necessary, as the effect of material causes operating upon human ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... Acadia and the adjacent colonies. He also supplied the Micmacs with scalping-knives and tomahawks for use against his own countrymen. He died, a very rich man, in England, leaving his fortune to his daughter, who, with her spendthrift husband, the Duc de Bouillon, was guillotined during the French Revolution. ...
— The Great Fortress - A Chronicle of Louisbourg 1720-1760 • William Wood
... says," she observed, absently, "it will all end in something like the French Revolution. Heavens! ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... Guienne, offered them money; but they would only accept the permission granted them by the king, of cutting in the royal woods such trees as they might choose for the planting of the May—a privilege which existed at the commencement of the French Revolution." In Cornwall, too, it seems to have been the custom to plant "stumps of trees" before the houses, as well as to decorate them with boughs and blossoms. And Mr. Aubrey (1686) says, "At Woodstock in Oxon they every May-eve ...
— Miscellanea • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... fires, the sap having been gathered and the wood cut before dark. During the day we would always lay in a good stock of 'fat-pine,' by the light of which, blazing bright before the sugar-house, I passed many a delightful night in reading. I remember in this way to have a history of the French Revolution, and to have obtained a better and more enduring knowledge of its events and horrors and of the actors in that great national tragedy than I have received from all subsequent reading. I remember, also, how happy I was in being able to borrow the books of a Mr. ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... are the great ages of the world. They could be counted, perhaps, on one hand. The age of Pericles in Athens; the less defined age, when Europe passed, spiritually and artistically, from what we call the Dark, to what we call the Middle Ages; the Renaissance; the period of the French Revolution. Two of them, so far as English literature is concerned, fall within the compass of this book, and it is with one of them—the ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... banks of the Seine. Let no man deceive himself! These are fearful times. Thousands of our population, by the sudden stoppage of business, are thrown out of employment. When gaunt famine intrudes upon their household, it is but natural that they should inquire the cause. Hunger began the French Revolution. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... number of uneducated women-voters to the number of uneducated men-voters will be only to make the danger worse, the answer is:—That women will be always less brutal than men, and will exercise on them (unless they are maddened, as in the first French Revolution, by the hunger and misery of their children) the same softening influence in public life which they now exercise in private; and, moreover, that as things stand now, the average woman is more educated, in every ...
— Women and Politics • Charles Kingsley
... the marquis's credit that he evidently, to judge from the sixth article of his 'Century,' had discovered the telegraph, an invention not much used in Europe until the commencement of the French Revolution. It had indeed been understood in a rude form by the ancients. 'Polybius describes a method of communication which was invented by Cleoxenus, which answered both by day and night,' but that of Worcester's is thought to have been far superior to anything known before his time. The ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... gigantic struggle of the first French Revolution associated the name of FRANCE so much with the cause of freedom in Europe, that all the world got accustomed to see it take the lead in the struggle for European liberty; and to look to it as a power entrusted by Providence with ...
— Select Speeches of Kossuth • Kossuth
... Revolutionary War under Bouillie. After the peace of 1783 he devoted two years to the study of our people and institutions, and then returned to France. Hardly had he returned before he found himself in the midst of the French Revolution, which he regarded as the practical application of the principles or theories adopted by the reformers of the sixteenth century and popularized by the philosophers of the eighteenth. He looked upon that revolution, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... Von Baer, Robert Chambers, Matthew, and Herbert Spencer. Depend upon it, no one man ever yet of himself discovered anything. As well say that Luther made the German Reformation, that Lionardo made the Italian Renaissance, or that Robespierre made the French Revolution, as say that Charles Darwin, and Charles Darwin alone, made the evolutionary movement, even in the restricted field of life only. A thousand predecessors worked up towards him; a thousand contemporaries helped to diffuse and to confirm his ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... Reason, for the collector of the books had been a man of catholic taste as well as of inquiring mind, and no one who could have criticised his reading ever penetrated behind the cedar hedge. A history of the French Revolution consorted amiably with a homespun chronicle of North Carolina, rich in biographical notices of distinguished citizens and inscriptions from their tombstones, upon reading which one might well wonder why ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... they don't know what they're doing. The French Revolution was nursed in the salons of the French nobility. When the true meaning of the woman's movement is understood we shall have to get ...
— The Master of Mrs. Chilvers • Jerome K. Jerome
... appears to have wished to play the leading part in the history of his native island, showing the first signs of his ambitious and energetic character. During the critical times following the first French Revolution, he at first joined the moderate party of Paoli; but, trying for military power, though by untiring activity and reckless audacity he succeeded in being elected lieutenant-colonel of the National Volunteers of Ajaccio, he failed in an attempt to seize that town and ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 2 of 8 • Various
... regarding them Their 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 clerical ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... generally dines in company with some of his own countrymen, and they have what is called a "comfortable sitting" after dinner, in the English fashion, drinking wine, discussing the news of the London papers, and canvassing the French character, the French metropolis, and the French revolution, ending with a unanimous admission of English courage, English morality, English cookery, English wealth, the magnitude of London, and the ingratitude ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... that the destruction of Jerusalem remains, as one of the most terrible cases of wholesale ruin and horror recorded in history; and—as I believe—a key to many a calamity before and since. Like the taking of Babylon, the fall of Rome, and the French Revolution, it stands out in lurid splendour, as of the nether pit itself, forcing all who believe to say in fear and trembling—Verily there is a God that judgeth the earth—and a warning to every man, class, institution, ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... right for you. Now you just let me talk for a few minutes, will you? I've an accumulated lot to say! We are all of us living through the end of an epoch, just as much as the people of the old regime lived through the last of an epoch in the years before the French Revolution. I don't believe it's going to come with guillotines or any of those picturesque trimmings. We don't do things that way any more. In my opinion it will come gradually, and finally arrive about two or three generations from now. ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... gold-leaf on the graven image, the bright foam on the bosom of a bottomless sea, a verdant crust cast over a chaos of fierce despair,—which will some day rip it into a million ribbons, enact an all-embracing French Revolution that will sweep our boasted "Car of Progress" back a thousand years on the crimson crest of a wave of blood and fire! If Sir Edwin had explored the infernal vortex beneath his feet he would not talk so complacently of the "trend of human events." For ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... business coming alternately with the dreamers. The second brother, Gib, was a weaver by trade, had gone out early into the world to Edinburgh, and come home again with his wings singed. There was an exaltation in his nature which had led him to embrace with enthusiasm the principles of the French Revolution, and had ended by bringing him under the hawse of my Lord Hermiston in that furious onslaught of his upon the Liberals, which sent Muir and Palmer into exile and dashed the party into chaff. It was whispered that my lord, in his great scorn for the movement, and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... He died on March 29, 1848, aged eighty-four years, four months; and almost as he died, the jubilant shouts of the enthusiastic workingmen's processions throughout the city resounded high and often. They were celebrating the French Revolution of 1848, intelligence of which had just arrived;—a Revolution brought about by the blood of the Parisian workingmen, only to be subsequently stifled by the stratagems of the bourgeoisie and turned into the corrupt despotism of ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... explained as reminiscences of the exploits of an aboriginal race, the Cuthites, which never existed. The allegorist school gradually rallied round the idea of the cult of the heavenly bodies as the origin of the pagan religions; as late as the days of the French Revolution, Dupuis, in a voluminous work, tried to trace the whole of ancient religion and mythology back to astronomy. On the whole the movement diverged more and more from Euhemerism towards the conception of Greek religion as a kind of cult of nature; when the sudden awakening to a ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann
... they will," Hannaway Wells pronounced, "but if I should be wrong—if they shouldn't—the French Revolution would be a picnic compared with the German one. It takes a great deal to drive a national idea out of the German mind, but if ever they should understand precisely and exactly how they have been duped for the glorification of their masters—well, I ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... like those which the Vendeans have sustained in support of the Bourbons, and those France has sustained against the allies, as also those of propagandism, waged against the smaller European states by the republican hordes of the French Revolution. To this class ...
— Elements of Military Art and Science • Henry Wager Halleck
... is a self-directing agent, whose faculties receive their principal impulse from within, and who stamps his own genius on every object of his mental activity. Schiller, after writing the history of the most remarkable period preceding the French Revolution, "the thirty years' war," (for liberty of conscience,) and "the separation of the Netherlands from the crown of Spain," felt that his energies were not yet exhausted on the subject; but his creative genius found no theatre of action such as was open ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... failed with the Deacon, and at the Vintner's of his frequentation he encountered accomplices proper for his schemes. Never was so outrageous a protest offered against domesticity. Yet Brodie's resolution was romantic after its fashion, and was far more respectable than the blackguardism of the French Revolution, which distracted housewifely discontent a year after the Deacon swung. Moreover, it gave occasion for his dandyism and his love of display. If in one incarnation he was the complete gentleman, in another he dressed ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... is simply power in its crude form—breaking out, that is, as brute force. When science, isolated and glorified, has produced a contempt, not only for vulgar errors, but for the truths which are incapable of scientific proof, then, as we see in the French Revolution, the wild beast in man breaks from its den, and chaos returns. But all the noblest minds in Europe looked for grand things in the aurora of this uprising of the people. To the terrible disappointment that followed, ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... enjoyed the lurid lights of the French Revolution with Scaramouche, or the brilliant buccaneering days of Peter Blood, or the adventures of the Sea-Hawk, the corsair, will now welcome with delight a turn in Restoration London with the always masterful Col. ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... delicious flower-gardens. On the opposite side of the gardens are walls hung with fruit, and plantations of kitchen vegetables. This charming place was fixed upon by the Jesuits for their college in 1794, when driven from Liege by the proscriptions of the French Revolution. The old building and the additions then erected enclose a large quadrangular court. In the front of the college, at the southern angle, is a fine little Gothic church, built fifty years ago. The college refectory is a splendid ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... The first French Revolution probably affords as striking examples of change in worldly condition as any other period, and among those whom it affected for the time, few were more remarkable than two persons whom it sent to our own shores, Talleyrand and Chateaubriand. During the residence of the former in Philadelphia, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... the wives of merchants of Nismes, or of men of property in the district. When the prisoners died off, the dungeon was at once filled up again with more victims, and it was rarely, if ever, empty, down to a period within only a few years before the outbreak of the French Revolution. ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... 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 ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... Turkey their support, though France and Spain proposed a combination to resist. Then came Pitt. The statesman whose qualities of greatness so profoundly impressed his contemporaries has usually been praised as a minister devoted to peace, and only driven by the French Revolution into the long war. His preparations in 1791 for a war with Russia on behalf of the Turk are a serious deduction from this estimate. Happily the alarms of the Baltic trade, and the vigorous reasoning of Fox, produced such an effect upon opinion, ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... great questions, roughly successive in time, of what may be called England's foreign policy, namely the treatment of the English colonies in America, the treatment of the native population of the English empire in India, and the attitude of England toward the French Revolution. In dealing with the first two of these questions Burke spoke with noble ardor for liberty and the rights of man, which he felt the English government to be disregarding. Equally notable with his zeal for justice, however, was his intellectual mastery of the facts. ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... in feeling and conviction; she was never afraid to speak her mind, and when the French Revolution first began, she, in common with many others, hoped that it was but the dawning of happier times. She was always keen about public events; she wrote an address on the opposition to the repeal of the Test Act in 1791, and she published her poem to Wilberforce on the rejection ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)
... that, during the French Revolution, a young peasant-girl, by means of such an instrument, had set at large her lover, or her brother, in La Vendee; having taken with soft wax the outline of the wards of the lock, in a ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... National Convention of France, in which will be found some rather strong language. When one considers the place where these views appear to have been adopted, and recollects the horrible scenes of the French Revolution, which were even then being enacted, one wonders whether the French authorities valued human life as ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 1: Curiosities of the Old Lottery • Henry M. Brooks
... 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 ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... admiration, while she read his books with much delight during her captivity in the Castle of Blaye. He wrote to M. de Hanski that he considered the exile of Madame and the Comte de Chambord the great blot on France in the nineteenth century, as the French Revolution had been ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... 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 |
