Page:English Historical Review Volume 37.djvu/139

 1922 REVIEWS OF BOOKS 131 to intervene in favour of Genevan independence. When French, Sardinian, and Bernese troops entered the city, and restored for a time the aristocratic party, D'lvernois was exiled and came to England to further the now forgotten project of a Genevan colony in Ireland. The viceroy, Temple, was favourable, the duke of Leinster and the earl of Ely offered lands, the Irish volunteers approved, and the government promised 50,000 towards the building of a new town near Waterford. Lack of emigrants soon led to the abandonment of ' New Geneva ', but D'lvernois received an annual pension of 300 secured in Irish funds from 1789. He returned to Geneva after the ' moderate ' revolution of that year, but when the revolutionary armies of France invaded Savoy he left the democratic party, was entrusted with the secret negotiations with the French general Montesquiou, and aided the general to escape when he was ' accused ' in the convention. Montesquiou was an Orleanist, and through him D'lver- nois went to London in 1793 on a mission connected with the fortune of Louis-Philippe, which was secretly deposited in England. This mission had little success. Soulavie in his Memoirs accuses D'lvernois of acting for the British government as an agent provocateur in France, but M. Kar- min dismisses this accusation as inherently improbable, though he suggests that D'lvernois may have been concerned in Orleanist anti-revolutionary schemes, and may have acted as a British agent in connexion with them. Unfortunately his correspondence during this period has been destroyed, and M. Karmin can throw no light on either Orleanist schemes or British participation in them. From 1794 D'lvernois became the pamphleteer of Pitt and the British ministers. In June 1795 he was denounced by Thibault in the convention, and shortly afterwards Sheridan in the house of commons sneered at him as a ' pensioner of ministers '. He was what would be called to-day a propagandist and was well paid for his work, receiving a knighthood in 1796 and 10,000 in commutation of his various pensions at the end of the war. His writings were chiefly periodical examinations of the finances of France under the Eevolution and Empire, and studies of the continental blockade. They still have some value as illustrating contemporary opinion, but are vitiated by their propagandist bias. He constantly reiterated that France was ruined and could only continue to exist by war and the plunder of foreign countries. He tired out even his admirers by harping on this theme. Gentz told him that he had agreed at first with his calculations, ' mais ici 1'experience a, pour ainsi dire, ecrase les prin- cipes '. John Quincy Adams wrote in 1801 : ' as to calculating the resources of a great nation, I am done with it as much as Sir F. D'lvernois ought to be with his algebra against French resources.' Malthus would not admit the conclusion that the Revolution had prevented millions of children being born in France. If the two and a half million French whom the Revolution had carried off had remained alive, a proportionate number of children born to surviving French parents would not have been brought into existence. D'lvernois wrote to Perceval a paper on the report of the bullion committee. He was angry that this report publicly admitted the evil effects of Napoleon's blockade on the value of English bank-notes, and declared that the report had led Napoleon to K2