tide of reaction was rising steadily in France. Decazes had fallen; Louis
XVIII. was surrendering to the ultra-royalist cabal. Aided by such
fortuitous events as the murder of the Duc de Berri, and supported by an
artificial majority in the Chamber, Villele was endeavouring to bring back
the _ancien regime_. Compensation for the _emigres_ was already mooted;
ecclesiastical control of education suggested. Direct criticism of the
ministry was rendered difficult, and even dangerous, by the censorship of
the press. Above all, the champions of reaction relied upon a certain
misrepresentation of the recent history of their country. The memory of
the Terror was still vivid; it was sedulously kept alive. The people were
encouraged to dread revolutionary violence, to forget the abuses by which
that violence had been evoked and which it had swept away. To all
complaints of executive tyranny, to all demands for greater political
liberty, the reactionaries made one answer. They declared that through
willingness to hear such complaints Louis XVI. had lost his throne and
life; that through the granting of such demands, the way had been prepared
for the bloody despotism of Robespierre. And they pointed the apparent
moral, that concessions to superficially mild and legitimate requests
would speedily reanimate the forces of anarchy. They insisted that by
strong government and by the sternest repression of the disaffected alone
could France be protected from a renewal of that nightmare of horror, at
the thought of which she still shuddered. And hence those who would
prevent the further progress of reaction had first of all to induce their
fellow-countrymen to realise that the Revolution was no mere orgy of
murder. They had to deliver liberty from those calumnies by which its
curtailment was rendered possible and even popular.

Understanding this, Mignet wrote. It would have been idle for him to have
denied that atrocities had been committed, nor had the day for a panegyric
on Danton, for a defence of Robespierre, yet dawned. Mignet did not