The Place de la Concorde in Paris. It was here, when it was named the Place de la Revolution, that King Louis XVI of France was executed by guillotine on Monday January 21st, 1793 in a bloodthirsty ‘reign of terror’, followed by a series of bruising European wars as the revolutionaries sought to export their untried and Utopian doctrines across Europe and the New World – including a rather farcical attempt to invade Britain.
IT was difficult, indeed, for an unprejudiced Englishman and a passionate admirer of the British Constitution, not to sympathize with an effort, so largely inspired in origin by the example of British history and the doctrines of British writers, to free the French people from the bonds of feudal tyranny, to set limits to the absolute despotism of the Bourbon kings, and to establish a constitutional system of government.
But it was impossible for the French people, bound down for ages past under the despotism of the ancien regime to attain at one sudden stroke to the enjoyment of such political liberty as Englishmen enjoyed after centuries of gradual development and slow habituation to the practice of self-government.
The attempt, indeed, inspired by Utopian ideals, to compress the work of centuries into a hasty series of legislative measures was the fundamental cause of the tragedy which presently involved all Europe; to the inevitable breakdown of that attempt the disastrous change in the character and aims of the revolutionary movement was mainly due.
