fter the Bourbon restoration of 1815. {2} Her
_Considerations sur la Revolution francaise_, published in 1818, one
year after her death, was a bold though temperate plea for the cause of
political liberty. At a moment of reaction when the Holy Alliance
proclaimed the fraternity not of men but of monarchs, and the direct
delegation by Divine Providence of its essential virtues to Alexander,
Frederick William and Francis,--at a moment when the men of the
Convention were proscribed as regicides, when the word Jacobin sent a
thrill of horror down every respectable spinal chord, the daughter of
Necker raised her voice to say that if, during the stormy years just
passed, the people of France had done nothing but stumble from crime to
folly and from folly to crime, the fault did not, after all, lie with
them, but with the old regime. If Frenchmen had failed to show the
virtues of freemen, it was because they had for so many centuries been
treated as slaves. This was in 1818, three years after Waterloo.

Madame de Stael was a pamphleteer; the historians soon followed.
Thiers in 1823, Mignet in 1824, produced the first important histories
of the Revolution; the former more eloquent, more popular; the latter
more ballasted with documentary evidence, more {3} accurate, more
pedestrian, in fact, to this day, in its negative manner, one of the
best general histories of the matter. Both of these writers were too
near their subject and too hampered by the reactionary surroundings of
the moment to be successful when dealing with the larger questions the
French Revolution involved. Thiers, going a step beyond Madame de
Stael, fastened eagerly on the heroic aspects of his subject. It was
with this emphasis that later, under the more liberal regime of Louis
Philippe, he continued his work through the epoch of Napoleon and
produced his immensely popular but extremely unsound history of the
Consulate and the Empire. In 1840 the remains of Napoleon were
transferred from St. Helena to Paris, and were processionally drawn to
the Invalides surrounded by the striking figures and uniforms of a
handful of surviving veterans, acclaimed by the ringing rhetoric of
Victor Hugo, who in prose and in verse vividly formulated the
Napoleonic legend. And just before and just after this event, so made
to strike the imagination and to prepare changes of opinion, came a
series of notable books. They were all similar in that they bore the
stamp of the